Adam Clulow, Author at Not Even Past

Unidos Marcharemos Adelante

Encouraged by the conference theme, “We Shall March Forward Together,” over 100 affiliated Texas school districts and four-hundred people registered for the 23rd annual meeting of the Mexican American School Boards Association (MASBA) in San Antonio that took place on September 9-12, 2021. Hundreds more enjoyed the collegial fellowship and a robust program of vendor exhibitions, a Board of Directors meeting, school visits, keynote presentations, panel speakers, and discussions, a Mariachi demonstration and performances, 9-11 observances, a dance, scholarship announcement, recognitions and awards ceremonies. Coming out in bold, yet cautious, defiance of COVID-inspired fears that inhibit gatherings in the midst of a pandemic, MASBA has travelled a long and often challenging road since 1970 when Dr. José Cárdenas, the intrepid educator, school administrator, and founder of the Intercultural Development Research Association (IDRA), proposed the idea of such an organization and became a founding member of MASBA, along with Blandina “Bambi” Cardenas (Austin), José Angel Gutiérrez (Dallas), Rubén Hinojosa (McAllen), Gus García (Austin), Chris Escamilla (San Antonio), Amancio Chapa (La Joya), and Ciro Rodriguez (San Antonio).

At the time of its founding, Mexican American youth attended some of the poorest and most segregated schools in the state and, partly as a consequence, registered strikingly low attainment levels, high retention and dropout rates and few prospects for advancement into colleges and universities. They also had few adults in positions of influence that could speak on their behalf. Around 400, or 4 percent of school board members in the 1,400 Texas school districts, were Mexican Americans. Encouraged by the Mexican American social movement for dignity and equal rights, including numerous student walkouts demanding an end to discrimination and a more relevant and effective learning environment, a growing number of Mexican Americans began to vie for positions in local school boards. Successful redistricting and school desegregation suits by the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, also encouraged Mexican American participation in improving the educational experience of their youth. The Justice Department also entered the picture by filing a suit against Texas that generated several desegregation cases involving Mexican Americans as an ethnic group and language minority.

*Annual Conference of the Mexican American School Boards Association, 2021, San Antonio, Texas. Source: MASBA*

More than fifty-five years after the founding of MASBA, Mexican American youth have made significant improvements in their educational standing. Their educational position relative to other groups, however, remains relatively unchanged in 2020. This includes the persistent problems of attending some of the most poorly funded schools and registering some of the highest dropout rates and lower graduation percentages, as well as relatively lower college enrollment figures and college completion rates. These problems are magnified by the high growth rate of the Mexican American school age population and their inability to close the educational attainment gap with their higher achieving peers from other groups. Although they constitute more than 50% of the public school population, they only make up less than 37% of students enrolled in higher education institutions. The attainment deficit, relative to other groups, has mostly remained unchanged in the last ten years and may continue into the foreseeable future.

The current state of Mexican American education—improved group standing alongside a poorer record of achievement relative to Anglo youth—speaks to the continued need for an active and effective MASBA and explains the resolve of its membership and leadership to continue advocating for much needed change. Judging from the stirring keynote speeches, inspirational performances, engaging presentations and the animated response from the membership in attendance, the generational hope that an educated and self-conscious youth can lead Mexican American communities into a better future endures as a historical motivation in MASBA. My observations on the conference activities focus on the events that I attended and observed.

Mariachi performances were a highlight of the conference. This should not surprise anyone who knows that MASBA was instrumental in convincing the University Interscholastic League to incorporate the Mexican musical form and ensemble of the Mariachi into its statewide program of student recognition. High school mariachi groups—the Mariachi Espuelas de Plata from North Side, Fort Worth ISD, and the Mariachi Diamantes Estelares of Judson ISD—regaled the audience during the Friday and Saturday morning breakfasts. Dr. Richard A. Carranza, the former superintendent of Houston ISD and the New York City Schools Chancellor—as well as a Mariachi music performer himself—later led a performance and demonstration of mariachi music with the accompaniment of the famous Mariachi Campanas de America, the pride of San Antonio. They featured the various instruments in the ensemble and the different kinds of music that Mariachis perform during the Saturday lunch. Dr. Carranza and the Mariachi concluded their special event with a presentation and serenading of Dr. Angela Valenzuela, upon her recipient of the coveted Campana Award for public service.

Mariachi Campanas de America — *Source: MASBA*

Louis Q. Reyes, a past President, former Executive Director, and now Ambassador of MASBA received the grand Golden Molcajete Award, a recognition of exemplary service to the organization. Though not accorded the fanfare given to the Campana Award recipient, his acknowledgment was equally significant.

The heart of the conference, twenty-three panels—provided conference participants with opportunities to hear presentations and participate in conversations on current issues of importance. The themes and topics were as follows with the number of panels listed in brackets: Ethnic Studies (6), Educational Programs (4), Professional Development for Teachers and Board Members (4), Advocacy (1), Critical Race Theory (1), Energy Conservation in the Schools (1), Equity (1), Health Concerns (1), Legislation (1), School Taxes (1), School Infrastructure Issues (1), and The Digital Divide (1).

Conference poster featuring mariachi singer — *Conference Workshops. Source: MASBA*

MASBA conference planners most probably gave preference to Ethnic Studies because the organization has long supported expanding the state’s curriculum to include the history and culture of under-represented groups, particularly Mexican Americans. The large number of groups involved in sponsoring teacher development workshops, curriculum writing projects, and Ethnic Studies advocacy efforts before the State Board of Education and the Texas Legislature may have also submitted the largest number of panel proposals. The recent attention that the Texas Legislature gave to a failed Ethnic Studies bill (House Bill 1504), as well as to the controversial Senate Bill 3 passed during the second special session of the Texas State Legislature that discourages the teaching of race and that the governor signed into law, may also explain the focus on Ethnic Studies.

One session on Ethnic Studies stood out in particular. Representatives of the IDRA, the Teachers’ Academy from the University of Texas at San Antonio and an officer of the Pre K-12 Committee of the NACCS Tejas Foco (or chapter affiliate of the National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies) described their work in a statewide campaign of well over 30 collaborating organizations and institutions. Their purpose is to expand the curriculum and prepare teachers to teach Ethnic Studies, including Mexican American Studies, and to justify these research-based initiatives as successful models for academic success for youth of all racial and ethnic groups, albeit especially for Mexican American public school students in Texas whose numbers represent over half of the state’s K-12 demographic.

Panelists Dr. Christopher Carmona, UTRGV, Dr. Liliana P. Saldaña, UTSA, Aurelio Mondemayor, Intercultural Development Research Associates, and Dr. Gloria Gonzales, UTSA, Panel: Creating MAS Solidarities in the Movement for Mexican American Studies in Texas K-12 Public Schools. Source: Emilio Zamora

One of the best-attended sessions addressed the difficulties that school districts are facing amid accusations that their teachers are advancing a pernicious form of teaching that blames Anglos for racial inequality and singles out Anglo children for something akin to the racial sins of their fathers. According to the presenters, conspiracy theorists as well as the publicity surrounding Senate Bill 3 have reportedly influenced parents and other members of the community to disrupt school board meetings with unfounded accusations of teaching Critical Race Theory. Teachers, administrators and staff have also reportedly received death threats.

The session, titled “CRT Defined,” included representatives of the Fort Worth, Crowley, and Ysleta school districts. They described their difficulties, explained their origins, and offered a novel way for school officials to respond. Adhering to the debating principle that whomever controls the rules of engagement wins the dispute, they proposed that the discourse over race (e.g., Critical Race Theory) should incorporate the notion of equity in the entire school environment, including the notion of equitable learning opportunities for all students, not just Anglos. Specifically, they turned the issue of discriminating against white children in the curriculum on its head and maintained that this, too, is an equity issue about which all should be concerned. Attending sessions like these illuminate the kind of wisdom and knowledge that comes from our leadership, underscoring the importance of organizations like MASBA to create spaces where grassroots struggles may acquire strength and visibility while reinforcing values and motivating civic action.

The conference participants heard four major keynote addresses. The talented David “Olmeca” Barragán, a Hip-Hop performer and Instructor with the Interdisciplinary Gender and Ethnic Studies Department at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, gave the opening keynote talk titled, “Browning of America.” His uplifting message called on Latino people to assume confidence and pride in themselves and in a bright future that awaits us. We should be able to speak openly and with the knowledge that we have much to offer the world. His self-affirming statement in the poetic form of Spoken Word invoked and modelled the confident voice with which we should always speak.

Mariachi Espuelas de Plata, Fort Worth ISD, with David “Olmeca” Barragán, a Hip-Hop performer and Instructor with the Interdisciplinary Gender and Ethnic Studies Department at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, Keynote Speaker. Source: MASBA

The second keynote presentation was delivered by Dr. José Angel Gutiérrez, a founder of the Mexican American Youth Organization and the Raza Unida Party and Professor Emeritus from the University of Texas at Arlington. In the first part of his talk, he examined Mexican American history with the use of key publications. His message was that we have a vast historical and literary tradition and that we should strive to become sufficiently literate to advance our social movement for dignity and equal rights. Dr. Gutiérrez followed by exhorting us to action, frequently asking what are you going to do in light of continuing problems that Mexican Americans are facing. He pointed to the dismal education gap that the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board promised to fill but failed. They have now devised a new plan that will most probably also fail. We cannot depend on conventional institutions to solve our problems, he suggested, we need to take action on our own behalves.

Dr. Angela Valenzuela, Professor in the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy at the University of Texas at Austin titled her keynote address “Unmasking the Attack on Critical Race Theory as an Agenda to Deprive Our Access to the Inconvenient Truths of History.” Her principal argument was that the opposition to Ethnic Studies, Mexican American Studies in particular, does not have the moral or the philosophical wherewithal to deny us our historical destiny as an emancipated people. They depend on false conspiratorial arguments and outright misinterpretations of classroom learning to argue that we cannot be trusted to teach the youth, that we use race as a weapon to promote disdain against Anglos and blame their children for racial inequality. Fortunately, she expressed, we have both the First and the Fourteenth amendments to the Constitution and have learned from history the values of mutual respect, understanding and fairness towards all people. Through song and speech, her lyrical narration braided several strands of the political, intellectual, and spiritual in the context of a solemn Saturday-morning acknowledgement of lives lost on the morning of September 11, 2001.

Dr. Angela Valenzuela, UT Austin, Recipient of the Campana Award and Conference Keynote Speaker, “Unmasking the Attack on “Critical Race Theory as an Agenda to Deprive Our Access to the Inconvenient Truths of History.” Source: Emilio Zamora

April Hernández Castillo, an actress, writer and motivational speaker, shared the difficult experiences she encountered her life in a talk entitled “Your Voice, Your Choice.” She persevered despite self-destructive influences, an abusive relationship and thoughts of suicide, as if to say that we can and must persevere in life and that we must discover from within ourselves the resilient and self-protective spirit that can help us do this. Her life of near-tragic proportions invoked the idea that minoritized groups like us also face difficulties but we too can discover the resilient force within ourselves. Hernández Castillo was believable with her lovely persona of confident grace and honesty.

MASBA’s advocacy declaration, which appears prominently in conference materials as its self-defining statement, may be the most appropriate way to close as it best reflects the organization’s compassion and care for the education and general well-being of youth, especially Mexican American students:

Closing the Gaps

MASBA advocates for programs and practices that more quickly close the achievement gap for all Texas students, especially for the Hispanic students and English Language learners in our Texas public schools.

MASBA stands against all programs and practices that perpetuate and/or widen gaps in student performance.

Ensuring High-Quality Curriculum

MASBA advocates for high-quality curriculum for Texas public school students, particularly with respect to issues of equity, diversity and inclusion. MASBA supports ethnic studies for all students and high quality dual-language programs that promote bilingualism and biliteracy

MASBA stands against all curricula that do not reflect equity, diversity and inclusion, or that negatively portray the history or contributions of the diverse cultures represented by our students.

Solidarity

MASBA stands in solidarity with the students of our Texas public schools—particularly with our Hispanic students and English Language Learners—with their families, and with all persons who support them in achieving their dreams.

MASBA advocates for comprehensive immigration reform, for equitable treatment of all students irrespective of their immigration status and for all students who were brought to the United States as children and who have been educated in our public schools.

MASBA stands against racial profiling, discrimination based on immigration status, and all attempts to unfairly target persons based on race or appearance, and against all actions that instill fear and create instability in the lives of our students.

Diversity and Inclusion

MASBA advocates for racial justice and for policies and practices that help to ensure that the faculty, staff members, administrators and trustees of our public schools reflect the diversity and demographics of the students in our public schools.

MASBA stands against all attempts to inhibit equity, diversity or inclusion, and against all attempts that hinder a person from realizing his/her highest potential

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.

Primary Source: Notes for a Napoleonic Scandal

This and other articles in Primary Source: History from the Ransom Center Stacks represent an ongoing partnership between Not Even Past and the Harry Ransom Center, a world-renowned humanities research library and museum at The University of Texas at Austin. Visit the Center’s website to learn more about its collections and get involved.

In 1815, William Warden was surgeon of HMS Northumberland as it transported Napoleon Bonaparte to his second (and hopefully final) exile. Well aware that folks back home—or even, possibly, history itself—would be interested, Warden took notes in an old surgeon’s log. This journal now resides at the Harry Ransom Center.¹ It includes his daily observations of and direct conversation with the Corsican Ogre, the Great, the Nightmare of Europe, Napoleon Bonaparte himself. Supposedly.

On return to England from St. Helena, Warden found himself so pressed by his friends for stories of Napoleon that “I may be said to have been in a state of persecution from the curiosity which prevails respecting that extraordinary character.”² Stories, taken from the notes in his journal, filled the letters sent to his future wife, Elizabeth Hutt. Having no experience in publishing himself, and expecting to soon be sent away on active duty, Warden collected the letters and put them in the hands of a “literary gentleman” for publication. Once in print, his stories about Napoleon set a scandal in motion.

*Dr William Warden, 1777–1849* (MNT0058), National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London, reproduced with permission.

The introduction of Warden’s book, Letters from St. Helena, assures his readers “That every fact related in them is true; and the purport of every conversation correct.—It will not, I trust, be thought necessary for me to say more;—and the justice I owe to myself will not allow me to say less.”³ It claims authenticity and first-hand experience as a selling point. And the claim worked. The book, “owing to the intrinsic interest of the subject, ran through five editions in as many months.”⁴

The Quarterly Review, though, was not a fan, savaging both Warden and his book: it was “founded in falsehood” and had the potential to “poison the sources of history.”⁵ The book’s “falsehoods and flatteries” of Napoleon threatened to “obliterate from the minds of Englishmen the atrocities with which he had for twenty years ensanguined and desolated the civilized world.”⁶ The review describes several factual errors, which range from narrative quibbles and the naïve repetition of the lies of others to severe factual errors. The Quarterly’s first accusation, sure to “astound our readers, and, perhaps, decide the affair,” notes that in the book the “letters” are undated and without longitude and latitude. This, the review assumes, is to disguise the impossibility of some of the events, most notably the repetition by Napoleon of “an infamous imputation” against Sir Robert Wilson contained details impossible for Napoloen (or Warden) to have learned about at the time the letter was supposedly written.⁷ At best, the Review saw Warden as a dupe who “brought to England a few sheets of notes gleaned for the most part from the conversation of his better-informed fellow-officers, and that he applied to some manufacturer of correspondence in London to spin them out into” his book.⁸

The Edinburgh Review, on the other hand, admired Warden’s impartiality. It asserted the book was “one of the few works on Napoleon, that is neither sullied by adulation nor disgraced by scurrility; neither disfigured by blind admiration of his defects, nor polluted by a base and malignant anxiety to blacken and defame a fallen man.”⁹ Faults in the narrative were blamed on both Warden’s unpracticed French and the inexactitude of working from memory.¹⁰

News of the book traveled all the way to St. Helena. In a letter to the Secretary of War, the man who oversaw Napoleon’s exile reported that Napoleon denied saying anything like what Warden had recorded. The letter also noted that Warden’s publication of commentary on the conduct and character of fellow officers constituted a breach of discipline.¹¹ Such a breach warranted striking him from the list of surgeons.

*Napoléon at Fontainebleau, 31 March 1814*, painted in 1840 by Paul Delaroche, public domain, Wikimedia commons.

So, Warden lost his job. Temporarily, at least.

The case against Warden was not very clear. How much of the book, after all, was actually Warden’s work? Much of the blame fell on the mysterious “literary gentleman” into whose hands Warden placed the letters. Another figure held responsible was the Count de las Cases, a member of Napoleon’s suite, later author of a fawning and untrustworthy biography of Napoleon, and Warden’s frequent interlocutor and presumed interpreter. Las Cases had, at best, limited English—to match Warden’s apparently limited French.¹² Warden’s powerful patron, Sir George Cockburn, also certainly factored into his ultimate return to the Admiralty’s good graces.

Yet the lack of certainty about Warden’s responsibility for the book both pardoned and condemned him. The scandal dominates—and appears to justify—Warden’s entry in the Dictionary of National Biography, only to ultimately be dismissed by its author: “There is no reason to doubt Warden’s good faith, but his work has small historical value, for it is merely the ‘literary gentleman’s’ version of Warden’s recollection of what an ignorant and dishonest interpreter described Bonaparte as saying.”¹³

The journal at the Ransom Center offers tantalizing clues to Warden and his book, shedding some light on the question of how much of the content was Warden’s. Despite the fact that letters intervene between book and journal, much of the published book’s text is remarkably faithful to what we find in the journal. But since the journal is not complete, no full assessment of what might have been altered by the “literary gentleman” can be made. What the printed work does lack, though, are some of the journal’s harsher critiques of Napoleon and some details perhaps too lurid to write in letters to one’s future wife.

Example from Warden’s journal. Here, on August 16th, 1815, Warden writes about the speculation in Britain that Napoleon would kill himself before he was captured. He notes Napoleon’s insistence that the “was not yet such a Roman as to destroy himself.” Harry Ransom Center, House of Bonaparte Collection, osf 2, fol. 6r.

In one instance, the book greatly softens an anecdote in which Napoleon and his suite observed a group of well-dressed women surrounding the Bellerophon (to catch a glimpse of Napoleon) while they remained at Plymouth. The daughter of General Brown “is said to have fixed his exclusive attention, while she was in a situation to remain an object whose features could be distinguished.”¹⁴

In the journal, the anecdote is considerably longer—and less romantic. Napoleon asks if the people surrounding the ship are shopkeepers. (The journal recalls that Napoleon “often called us a nation of shopkeepers.”)¹⁵ Later, it goes on:

Bony [i.e. Bonaparte] remarked one young lady in a most particular manner, a daughter of General Brown—he kept his eyes fixed on her for half an hour […] Bony remarked that he never beheld women with such beautiful bosoms—This he most particularly admired and I firmly believe he would anxiously have kissed many who were there…¹⁶

More generally, the Quarterly Review’s objection that the book is too fawning does not hold for the journal. At one point, Warden offers the observation that “no woman will fall in love with Napoleon while his hat is off—he has very little the appearance of a gentleman when uncovered.”¹⁷ In the journal, Warden also condemns the French character as “insufferably vain” and says of the French officers aboard: “Their Gasconadry is a tissue of arrogance and falsehood—but I really think they talk in this childish manner that they actually /often a time/ [slashes original] believe their story to be truth.”¹⁸ If there is naiveté to be found in Warden, as suggested by the Quarterly Review, it seems to lie primarily in the act of publishing in a contentious political atmosphere.

*War. The Exile and the Rock Limpet,* exhibited in 1842 and painted by Joseph Mallord William Turner. Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856. http://www.tate.org.uk/art/work/N00529

As for observations of the character of his fellow officers, little exists in the journal except praise of Admiral Cockburn’s virtuous exploits. Not unlike Las Cases, Warden would later go on to attempt to write a biography of his powerful patron. This became his second, much safer, foray into publishing.

As Stuart Semmel has argued, the predominant sentiment in the British press at the time was one of opposition to and demonization of the current leader of the nation with which they had been so long at war. Napoleon, however, defied easy categorization, and therefore became both a “lens through which to scrutinize the failing of the British government—and a cudgel with which to beat it.”¹⁹ The mixed reception to Warden’s book reflects this conflict. The fact that he was struck from the lists indicates the perils inherent in wading into that battlefield unprepared.

The mode of Warden’s book was a popular one and was perceived to be an important means of understanding and learning from the past, as, “Anecdotes of the private life of remarkable persons are one of the most amusing and not least valuable departments of history.”²⁰ Napoleon and the wars that sometimes bear his name were more than political or martial events. Historian David Bell has argued that the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars were the inception of “total war”—the attempt to involve every resource and every person in the realization of a military goal—which heightened their social and cultural impact.²¹ Napoleonic battles were spectacles, consumed in newspapers, literature, and as picnic diversions.²² Many of the major figures of these conflicts became larger-than-life—or, like naval hero Lord Nelson, apotheosized in death.

Warden’s attempt to shed light on the Man of Destiny reflects the complicated relationship of power, popularity, and politics that put Napoleon at the fore of popular culture as both the epitome and antithesis of the spirit of the age.

If the question we ask of Warden’s journal is what new details we can learn about Napoleon, then the answer may be less than we hoped for. The trouble of historical times is precisely the participants’ awareness that the times are historical. This perception complicates the sources produced to record ‘historical times’ both at the time of writing, and in later interpretations, whether those interpretations are concerned with the basic facts in the text, the text itself, its permutations through publication and diffusion, or the author and their intentions. Works like Warden’s were written under the weight of the complicated politics and cultures of their present circumstances, and in anticipation of the future’s certain interest in those circumstances – not to mention the more immediate anticipation of the chance for fame and fortune. None of these factors can be easily dismissed in approaching the text as a historical source.

Perhaps the introduction to Warden’s book was too optimistic in asserting its total truth; perhaps, retrospectively, Warden might feel he ought to have said less.

Julia Stryker is a PhD candidate in History at the University of Texas at Austin, studying women working at sea in the British Empire. Her interests include gender, labor, seapower, and empire, as well as migration and maritime law, which she is pursuing as a member of the COST network Women on the Move (CA19112). More, including upcoming talks and publications, may be found here: https://jconnellstryker.squarespace.com.

¹ With special thanks to Ransom Center librarian Elizabeth Garver, who directed me towards the Warden journal.

² William Warden, Letters Written on Board his Majesty’s Ship the Northumberland and at Saint Helena; in which the Conduct and Conversations of Napoleon Buonaparte, and His Suite, During the Voyage and the First Months of His Residence in that Island, are Faithfully Described and Related, 2^nd edition (London: R. Ackermann, 1816), v.

³ Warden, Letters Written, vii.

⁴ J. K. Laughton, “Warden, William (1777–1849),” revised by Andrew Lambert, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). http://www.oxforddnb.com.ezproxy.lib.utexas.edu/view/article/28719, accessed 3 April 2021.

⁵ Emphasis original. Croker, “Warden’s Conversations,” 209 and 224.

⁶ Ibid., 224.

⁷ Ibid., 209-210.

⁸ Ibid., 211.

⁹ “Letters from St. Helena, by William Warden,” The Edinburgh Review Vol 27 (Dec. 1816): 460-461.

¹⁰ “Letters,” 461.

¹¹ Laughton, “Warden, William.”

¹² Ibid.

¹³ Ibid.

¹⁴ Warden, Letters, 70.

¹⁵ This is, in itself an interesting case of potential misattribution. At the time, the British press did report that Napoleon called Britain a ‘nation of shopkeepers, but nothing in the French press or other sources close to Napoleon record him as having used the phrase. The 1822 publication of Napoleon in Exile, or a Voice from St. Helena, by another surgeon, Barry Edward O’Meara, records Napoleon as having attributed the phrase to himself, though some doubt the complete veracity of O’Meara’s bool, as well. Regardless, the phrase itself was well known at the time and may have originated in print in Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, published in 1776.

¹⁶ William Warden, Handwritten diary, Harry Ransom Center, House of Bonaparte Collection, osf 2.

¹⁷ Ibid.

¹⁸ Ibid.

¹⁹ Stuart Semmel, “British Uses for Napoleon,” MLN 12:4 (2005): 735.

²⁰ John Wilson Croker, “Warden’s Conversations with Buonaparte,” The Quarterly Review 16: 31, Article 10 (October 1816): 208. Attribution information via Romantic Circles: https://romantic-circles.org/reference/qr/index/31.html.

²¹ David Bell, The First Total War: Napoleon’s Europe and the Birth of Warfare as We Know It (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2007), 9.

²² Jan Mieszkowski, “Watching War,” PMLA 124:5 (Oct. 2009): 1656.

IHS Podcast: Colonial Peru’s Fractional Freedoms meet Morgan’s Thesis: American Freedom, American Slavery

IHS podcasts are a new podcast series initiated by the Institute for Historical Studies’ Director, Dr Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra. They are paired with weekly workshops and are designed to foster discussion between graduate students and distinguished scholars in the field. Along with graduate students and guests, each episode features Dr Cañizares-Esguerra and Ashley Garcia, a PhD Candidate in History at UT Austin. This podcast is recorded in connection with a roundtable, Singing in the Coat of the Rebels: Pardo Republics Gender Politics and the Making of Mexican Citizenship, presented by Gary Leo Dunbar, University of Texas at Austin, on 27 September. Details can be found at https://bit.ly/3lFTOx8.

Introduction

Fragments of Freedom confronts us with the most basic question of US historiography: American Slavery made American Freedom possible. Dr. McKinley shifts the ground to concepts of freedom in slavery that were more typical in societies other than colonial and national Anglo America. Using ecclesiastical archives in Lima, Peru, in the 17^th century, Dr. McKinley shows that enslaved peoples negotiated the limits of domestic sexual violence and the limits of enslavers’ control over individual families. American exceptionalism notwithstanding, from Iraq to India to Peru, the religious and lay state regulated the power of the enslaver. And in the case of Peru, the Church could ritually humiliate enslavers via moral subpoenas through the pulpit. Enslavers reluctantly offered testimony to counter charges by enslaved peoples against their will because the church made their names public in sermons and on broadsides posted on the walls of parishes. The result of this muscular involvement by clerical courts in the lives of both enslavers and enslaved peoples is that domestic slavery was characterized by a full gamut of fractional freedoms. Slavery did not move teleologically toward cathartic forms of “liberation” via manumission or enslaved self-purchase. ‘Freedom” was another option within ever shifting structures of domestic subordination and negotiation ~ Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra

Guests

Gary Dunbar is a doctoral candidate in Latin American history. His teaching and research interests include Atlantic and Pacific World histories. His dissertation examines the history of slavery, abolitionism, and citizenship in the Americas with a specific focus on Pacific Mexico. Gary holds a bachelor’s degree in anthropology from the University of Oregon and completed his master’s work at Central Michigan University (CMU) in the U.S. and Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla (BUAP) in Mexico.

Dr. Michelle McKinley is the Bernard B. Kliks Professor of Law at the University of Oregon Law School and director for the Center for the Study of Women in Society. She teaches in the areas of Public International Law and feminist studies. McKinley has extensively published work on public international law, Latin American legal history, and the law of slavery. Her monograph, Fractional Freedoms: Slavery, Intimacy and Legal Mobilization in Colonial Lima, 1600-1700 was published by Cambridge University Press in 2016. She has received fellowships for her research from the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Science Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Philosophical Society, and the Newberry Library. Prior to joining the academy, Professor McKinley was the former Managing Director of Cultural Survival, an advocacy and research organization dedicated to indigenous peoples. She is also the founder, and former director, of the Amazonian Peoples’ Resources Initiative, a community based reproductive rights organization in Peru, where she worked for nine years as an advocate for global health and human rights.

Hosts

Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra is Alice Drysdale Sheffield Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin and the Director of the Institute for Historical Studies.

Ashley Garcia is a PhD candidate at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research includes 19^th century political history, American communitarianism, and American political thought. Her dissertation, “An American Socialism: The Associationist Movement and Nineteenth Century Political Culture,” explores America’s most popular utopian socialist program: the Associationist movement of the 19^th-century. Ashley has also completed a Portfolio in Museum Studies as her secondary PhD field.

Teaching Global Environmental History

The latest interview in our NEP Conversations series focuses on Global Environmental History, a highly innovative, exciting and challenging course taught by Dr. Megan Raby. The course description is as follow:

Global Environmental History explores how human societies and natural environments have shaped each other in world history. This semester, the course will focus on the theme of climate change. The planet is currently warming at a rate unprecedented in human history. How can historical perspectives help us face this present-day problem? This course will examine how a variety of human cultures have understood and responded to changing climates in the recent and deep past. By exploring topics from the “Little Ice Age” to melting Andean glaciers, we will consider how both natural and anthropogenic climate variability has historically shaped migration, colonialism, conflict, technology, perceptions of nature, and cultural values. We will also analyze how historical shifts in practices of land use, industrialization, and capitalism have led to the global warming we are experiencing today. Finally, we will trace how researchers have pieced together our contemporary understanding of climate science and how politics and culture have shaped societies’ responses.

In this conversation Dr. Raby describes the origins of the course and how it connects to the Institute for Historical Studies theme for 2021-21, Climate in Context. For more on Climate in Context, see here. In this conversation, Dr Raby is speaking with the Editor of Not Even Past, Adam Clulow.

It’s really striking to me how much you cover in this course. What kind of models (if any) did you have in mind when you designed this course?

There are a lot of people who teach global environmental history courses. And in fact, there have been panel discussions at the American Society for Environmental History, for example, about how to teach global environmental history, because at least in the United States, a lot of environmental history courses were essentially American environmental history, which is a manageable topic.

American environmental history has some standard narratives involved. But with global environmental history, you run into that feeling of, oh my God, I have to cover all these things, but actually letting go of coverage is the first thing you do. You’re not trying to cover everything that happened. And that’s the problem with any kind of world history course. You have to decide what the course is actually about and then make thematic selections.

That’s how I decided teach this global environmental history course, that is by having different themes and different weeks. The main idea was to introduce students to the methods and some big ideas in environmental history as a subfield of history by looking at different themes each week from the Columbian Exchange to animal histories and so on. It was a great class in that way. But after teaching it a few years, I just wanted to change it up a little bit and thought, you know, it also would probably be easier to focus on one theme.

And then I felt some urgency to deal more with climate change. Instead of having a day or a week at the end of a class to deal with something that’s supposedly contemporary, I felt like, why not take this on as an actual through-going historical problem? Basically, I thought next time I teach this class, I’m going to teach it, focusing around climate change and really focusing around a specific question like: how can historical perspectives help us face this present day problem? I wanted answers to this question, so I thought it would give me an excuse to read a lot more in depth and widely in any kind of history that seemed relevant for thinking about climate change and then try to find a way to shape that into the course, which is what I did. And then because it’s an upper division seminar, it’s a smaller class. It’s totally discussion based and it’s writing intensive.

Basically, the students and I work through that material together and try to come up with answers to that question of how historical perspectives can help us face climate change. And there’s many different ways to answer that question. But that’s basically where the idea for the class came from. And so global environmental history is a course that many different environmental historians teach, but I don’t think anybody teaches this topic in particular the way I do, and I like the way that I went about it.

How do you introduce the course to someone who is not familiar with it?

We think of climate change as a present day and maybe a future problem. But I think if we’re going to tackle this, it’s also not just a scientific problem. It’s something we need deeper, humanistic and specifically historical perspective on. That’s why in the class, one of the things that we do––one of the units of the class––is to look at human cultures and how they have understood and responded to past experiences of natural climate change.

The rate and intensity of change in the Medieval Warm Period, for example, or the Little Ice Age, might be less than what we’re about to face, or starting to face, here with climate change. But can we learn something about the resilience or the fragility of societies in the past? And so that portion of the course ends up being comparative world history with a few different cases.

It also gets students, some of which are history majors and some of which are not and haven’t had that much history, to think about how people in the past have very different values than themselves. Or also how they can empathize with people in the past and might see similarities. Things like: during past major climate shifts, what groups of people within societies were more vulnerable to these changes?

When you take this deeper time perspective, there’s opportunity for both seeing the differences and similarities with people from the past.

You have a very long time frame for this course, namely hundreds of thousands of years. This translates into your three assignments. You start with the deep past. Then the past 200 years. And then you have the imagined environmental histories of the future, which are 50 years, 100 years, 150 years, 200 years ahead. Can you talk a bit about those three time frames and how students engage with them?

I think that the way that we deal with this long span of time is by not trying to be comprehensive, but we actually highlight questions about temporality directly. So I think it’s actually really useful for thinking about historical methods. In one of the first units of the class, we’re thinking more comparatively about how different cultures responded or experienced different climate periods in world history.

But we approach temporality differently in the section that follows. We are not only looking at the past couple of centuries, including the actual period in which anthropogenic warming occurs. It’s not just a chronological move forward, but we’re also trying to think how the questions change during that section of the course. We’re focused on: What are the root causes of global warming? And what’s happening now? Also, how did people come to understand that climate change was happening? Thinking about the history of ideas––from the idea that “rain follows the plow” to the Keeling curve.

Charles Keeling faces a wall with copies of the Keeling Curve — Charles Keeling started monitoring the accumulation of carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere based on continuous measurements taken at the Mauna Loa Observatory on the island of Hawaii in 1958. The Keeling Curve is named for him. Source: SIO Photographic Laboratory records, Special Collections & Archives at UC San Diego

So we’re actually highlighting how the historical questions that we’re asking are changing. I think that that’s one way that that we deal directly with the temporal questions. What temporal span matters actually depends on what historical questions you’re asking. By addressing that directly, I think that gave it structure and also got us really at historical methods, which I think was one of the most fun aspects of the class and––although it threatened to be unwieldy––kept it from being unwieldy.

Then there’s that final unit, which was a short unit in which I asked them to think about future histories and even write their own future history. That was inspired by a book, a dark satire, called The Collapse of Western Civilization by Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway. They are both historians, historians of science, who’ve written about the phenomenon of climate change denial. But they decided to write a second book together, this fiction book.

They write as if they are historians in the year 2393 living in the Second People’s Republic of China. The book starts in our past and our present, and then becomes, as it goes on, the future––which is the past for these imagined authors. It’s a really interesting thought experiment. So I ask students to do something similar. They imagine a future history based on extrapolating from histories that we’ve read in class. That allowed them to explore their own hopes and fears about the future. It allowed them to make their reflections on the whole semester, basically as personal as they wanted to.

I recognize it’s a bit risky, because we don’t usually write fiction in history classes. It’s not something I feel comfortable doing either! We don’t like to make predictions as historians. I don’t think most of us like to talk about the future, but actually, in an odd way, by writing fiction, it allowed them to show me even more clearly how they had come to think like a historian. Because they had to use not only some climate scientists’ predictions for the future as their evidence in the paper, but also had to imagine what kind of historical evidence we’re going to leave behind.

One student wrote about an archeology dig around the UT tower and what might be left for people in the future. Another, imagined being an oral historian, talking to someone who was alive today and asking them what they understood was going on around them. Another wrote about being a memory safe keeper and basically an archivist in the future. So they showed me that they understood what historical sources are, and could be––as well as recognizing that history isn’t just about reconstructing what happened, but also about how future people will understand and explain our actions––or inactions. And how might they judge us. Things like that. To do the kinds of things we have been doing for people in the past and do this thought experiment into the future helps tie the course together at the end and give us some closure for something that is actually quite difficult to talk about a lot of the time.

That ties perfectly into the next question, which is what do you hope students take away from this course? Because it seems to me that, you want to reflect on how historical perspectives can inform our responses to present-day climate change, which is kind of obvious to historians, but not necessarily obvious in the public discussion about climate change and not always necessarily obvious when you talk to climate scientists, for example.

I hope that they take away an understanding that history does matter for how we confront climate change, and other present-day issues. Climate change is often framed as solely a scientific problem––or, more and more students do understand it as a political problem. But it feels very intractable to them. When we look at the past, we understand that people didn’t face exactly the same issues that we face now, but faced things that may help inform how we approach what we’re doing.

Also understanding the root causes of what’s happening now may give us ideas about how to undo, or mitigate, or respond to what’s been done in the past. I certainly think that different students came away with different ideas about what history told them should be done. Some of them looked towards some degree of technological solution, but I think that they maybe recognize that technology is not going to simply come in and save us. Looking at past examples of, for example, ideas about controlling the weather––which the US military was involved in––some degree of humility about technological innovations came out of it. A greater understanding of how people who are already vulnerable, disadvantaged and disempowered in societies in the past, even the deep past, seem to be more affected by big climate shifts––that resonated well with what we’re seeing now today. But also some understanding that even elites and wealthy societies in the past were not immune to major environmental shifts and changes. Those are some things that generally came out.

But, definitely, students in the class had different takes on these things and came to different perspectives on their own. If they can just see that they can be empowered to envision a future that they want to see and that they can see they’re not doing this alone, but that they can draw on the knowledge and wisdom of people in the past, possibly, or an understanding of the follies of people in the past, too. That’s what I hoped would come out of it. It felt like that did happen when I taught it last.

At the end of the semester the students wrote future imagined environmental histories. The ones that I read were quite evenly split between positive and negative, as to whether there was hope or not. Going through this long history, what did you find students took away? A sense of optimism that these issues could be confronted or a sense that we confront these problems and they’re never solved?

The different future histories that the students wrote––I was excited by, and we discussed as a class, how interesting it was that students approached that question in very different ways. Now, you brought up how tonally and in terms of the relative optimism or pessimism, there’s a wide array, right? Some of them are pure dystopias. Some of them are quite optimistic and imagine some kind of way forward, in which either society changes greatly or incremental changes are made. They had that range of positive and negative responses.

Interestingly, in talking with them, I’m not sure that the tone of what they wrote necessarily correlates to their feelings about what will really happen. I think, for some of them, writing the darkest fears version of it… I told them, “Feel free to explore your greatest hopes, your darkest fears, or try to make it as realistic as you possibly can. Any of those is an option as long as you show me that you understand what a historian does, and you draw on the sources that we read in the class.” …So I think some of them exorcised some of those feelings by writing in that way.

The other thing, though, that I think is interesting about the range of ways that they responded to that prompt was that the scale of what they wrote also differed quite a lot. One of them, for example, is a weather report for a storm that’s coming in. It discusses the idea that there might be category six or seven hurricanes, but also includes interviews with local people and what they remember the climate being like on the Gulf Coast during our present day (their past). That is a micro-scale approach to it, whereas others were more in the vein of Oreskes and Conway, writing in a far future year that has a totally different denomination, such as 100 A.C.––“After Catastrophe.”

Some of the students wrote on very big scales, similar to some of the things that we read in the class. They were also showing me that they understood different scales of history. Some of them were very personal… What I think is important is that we talk directly about the fact that a topic like climate change, while the science isn’t controversial anymore, involves emotions. Their feelings get raised, whether they discuss the politics of how to deal with climate change, or about how we imagine our own life in the future, and the course of humanity.

These things all raise anxieties, so we need to actually discuss them rather than avoiding the topic. I wasn’t too worried that some of them wrote dark pieces. I was happy to see the full range of emotional and intellectual responses in their essays.

This is why I find the course so exciting, because it empowers students to deal with climate change. I talk to many students who are genuinely in desperation about it. They don’t know what to do and they feel the system has betrayed, particularly their generation that’s going to have to deal with these huge changes. So I think this course is so exciting because it gives them the tools to grapple with the future. Is this how you planned the course?

I’m glad that that’s what you noticed about the class, because I do envision this as giving students the historical tools that they need to find how they can take some kind of action on climate change. There are many different ways that they can. And of course, historical tools are not the only tools. Historians need to partner with scientists, with policymakers, with artists, to really have the bigger transformation that we need to confront this.

Having that interdisciplinary historical spirit was what was also empowering, I think, in the class. Because not all of them wanted to be historians themselves, but they could all see how history was relevant to what they did want to do. There were two journalism majors in the course, for example, and it was very clear to them that journalism needed to be more historical and stop acting like this is new. We’ve been hearing these stories over and over again.

Some of them were science majors, some of them political science, and some of them were historians for whom dealing with scientific evidence, like tree ring data and ice cores, and incorporating that kind of scientific perspective was a new thing. They were coming from different perspectives there. I think that, in and of itself, having those tools is what did make the course empowering.

Many of them were quite aware that they’re are going to face a climate regime that has not been seen in human history within their own lifetime––by 2100, where most of the climate models end, is how long they can expect to live. The climate models tend to end when their own children and grandchildren will be alive! We don’t we don’t tend to predict out that far, at least in public.

I know personally that it can feel insurmountable, but actually they had a lot more hope and energy to confront this than I felt going in! I was energized by getting to deal with this in an intellectual way and getting to read new things. Even though I do history of science and environmental history, I don’t work specifically on climate. This gave me an excuse to read a bunch of stuff I’ve been interested in reading.

I was energized by dealing with those interesting historical questions about temporality, and sources. But I don’t think they feel like they can afford to despair. This is their lifetime they’re talking about. It’s not somewhere down the line. It’s now and in their own lifetime. Indeed, some of them expressed openly that they personally felt climate anxiety. But at the same time they expressed so much more hope and a “don’t have time to be depressed” kind of spirit about it. Some of the students joined the class in order to get a Writing Flag credit, and they didn’t necessarily initially know some of this stuff at all.

For them, a lot of this was new. There’s also a range in what kind of background the different students had. By the end, even though their academic disciplines, their politics, their life experiences were all very different, they all really formed a community where they were really interested to hear each other’s perspectives and ideas, and interpretations of the past, and ideas about the future.

I was really happy that in that microcosm of the class they formed the kind of community and interdisciplinarity that I think is needed in broader society to confront some of this stuff. That was what I enjoyed most about the class, actually.

I know your entire career sits at the intersection between science and history, but many students perhaps don’t expect to read relatively dense scientific works in class. Can you say something about how the course works to break down traditional silos between the humanities and the sciences?

The way that science and history come together in this course and in the fields that I work in, environmental history and history of science, they come together in in different ways. I tried to really signpost that clearly to the students. To take that course and to be successful in that course: no one needs to be a scientist. Really, what we did early on in the course, in the first unit was have a couple of days of basically a climate science primer. Like, look, here’s where the current science stands, just so you can understand generally how scientists know what they know currently, and what they understand currently about the climate science.

But we got more nuanced and subtle with it, more sophisticated with it, as the course went on. And so we dealt with science in a couple of different ways. When we were talking about that more comparative deep history work early on in the course, we were working with historians who call themselves “climate historians,” who are not themselves, going out and gathering ice cores or something, but are really reading and understanding the current climate models of the past that scientists are producing and using that kind of evidence in their work.

It actually gave us a chance to be better historians by understanding that, for most historians, a primary source is an archival document. It’s a document. But there are other kinds of sources out there, physical sources like a tree rings, that can tell us things about the past. And that doesn’t make someone who studies ice cores themselves a historian, but they can tell us something about what temperatures were at a certain period of time.

Andrew Ellicott Douglass working at his desk in the Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research — Astronomer Andrew Ellicott Douglass works at his desk in the Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research at the University of Arizona, which he founded in 1937. Source: University of Arizona Library Special Collections

What a historian is going to do is make meaning out of that and give us a narrative. Those things aren’t incompatible with each other either. We can do interdisciplinary work that draws on new findings from various kind of climate science, but that can also bring in the kind of interpretive work from documents, or oral histories, or art that historians are more used to using. It got us to really talk about primary sources. So that’s one way in which we brought in science.

I didn’t have them go back and read and original papers of climate scientists so much, but we did at least read enough to understand what that work looks like and the kind of work you need to do if you going to reliably integrate findings from science––knowing that the science is constantly changing. Of course, historical interpretations are also constantly changing and moving forward! So that was one way in which we used science. The other way in which we used science is the way I mostly do in my own my own research, which is––as a historian of science––thinking about the social, cultural, economic and patronage context of the science that gets made.

So how do we even know that CO2 is increasing in our atmosphere? Well, we can learn about Charles Keeling and his observatory at Mauna Loa and how he managed to get funding for this and how this comes out of a Cold War context. And why were US and Soviet scientists interested in the atmosphere in the 1950s? But, also, the history of science helps us see that the idea of human impacts on the environment, even human caused climate change, is not as new as most people think.

*Mauna Loa Observatory is a solar observatory on the island of Hawaii. Source: Christopher Michel*

The actual science of global warming as we know it now goes back to the 19th century. We understood that CO2 is a greenhouse gas in the nineteenth century and people thought “We’re emitting a lot of CO2 now that we have industrialization.” So the possibility was known, but its meaning was different then. Warming seemed very distant in the future, if it might even happen. And if things got a little warmer and we held off an ice age, what’s the problem? In the 19^th century, the emerging fear was more that Ice Age would return… But even in the 18th century, people had a feeling that human actions might change the climate. Rain follows the plow or that deforestation could cause desiccation. A variety of different kinds of ideas about human impacts on the environment––and how they might come back to bite us––actually are things that people were thinking about for a very long time.

That kind of environmental reflexivity is something we also talked about in the class. That’s a different way that we looked at science, historically. So, not just using science as a primary source, but also historically contextualizing climate science itself. Because it’s a cultural and social product. Actually, that’s why we can take it as reliable! We’re seeing all these different scientists with different interests actually come together, converging on the same kind of answers. So it can really help us understand why we can rely on science, help us to be more scientifically literate without feeling that we have to be scientists ourselves…

How did this course feed into the wider IHS theme for 2020-21, Climate in context? Is the course part of the origin story for this theme?

Actually I have to give Erika Bsumek the main credit for wanting to do an institute theme. She has her own ways in which it came out of her pedagogical work lately, but we met to talk and thought: you know, if we do an environmental history theme, it really should be climate focused in some way. And I was in the midst of teaching this class.

I think the core question––the very wide open question––of, “How can history inform our response to climate change?” was at the center of both the course and the IHS theme. In what ways does this supposedly unprecedented situation, in certain ways, have useful precedents in human history? In what ways can history nevertheless be useful? It seems to put history in a place of not being useful. If we have never faced this before, how can history possibly inform us?

And yet, if we really do our jobs as historians, I think we can see that there are many ways in which history gives us vital tools to confront climate change. Erika and I talked about aspects of this class, and they made it into our proposal. The course was definitely central to why I said yes as soon as she approached me!

Thank you for speaking with us today and for telling us more about this fantastic course.

IHS Podcast: Hungry for Revolution

This podcast previews a roundtable to be held on 22 Sepember focused on a new book, Hungry for Revolution: The Politics of Food and the Making of Modern Chile, by Joshua Frens-String. Details of the roundtable can be seen below.

Hungry for Revolution (University of California Press, June 2021) tells the story of how struggles over food fueled the rise and fall of Chile’s Popular Unity coalition and one of Latin America’s most expansive social welfare states. Reconstructing ties among workers, consumers, scientists, and the state, Joshua Frens-String explores how Chileans across generations sought to center food security as a right of citizenship. In so doing, he deftly untangles the relationship between two of twentieth-century Chile’s most significant political and economic processes: the fight of an emergent urban working class to gain reliable access to nutrient-rich foodstuffs and the state’s efforts to modernize its underproducing agricultural countryside.

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. This podcast seeks to identify what are the most important contributions of Professor Frens-String’s book to Chile’s and Latin America’s historiographies. ~ Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra

Tasting Empanadas and Red Wine in Chile’s Popular Unity Revolution

Fifty-one years ago this month, a momentous political event began in the South American country of Chile. For the first time in the Americas, and arguably the world, voters went to the ballot box and elected a government that was committed to forging a democratic path toward socialism.

The Popular Unity (UP) coalition was comprised of Chile’s Socialist Party, Communist Party, progressive Catholics, and handful of other reform-minded movements. A bespectacled socialist named Salvador Allende led the broad-front coalition. A medical doctor by training, Allende was a familiar face to most Chileans. In the late 1930s, he had served as the country’s Minister of Health. He remained active in national political life as an elected member of its national legislature for most of the interceding three decades. In fact, Allende’s 1970 presidential bid was the socialist’s third such campaign, having run unsuccessfully multiple times before.

But 1970 proved to be different. This time Allende promised that Chile would chart a path between the narrow straits of the global Cold War that divided the U.S., on one side, and the Soviet Union (as well as the USSR’s close ally in Latin America, Cuba), on the other. In describing the unique national character of their political project, as well as the material benefits that would accrue to the most marginalized in Chilean society as a result, Allende and his coalition maintained from the start that Chile’s revolution would have the “flavor of empanadas (meat hand pies) and red wine.”

Almost a decade ago, when I began research for my new book, Hungry for Revolution: The Politics of Food and the Making of Modern Chile (University of California Press, 2021), this slogan about the taste of empanadas and red wine immediately captured my attention. Beyond a few passing mentions of the mantra in political accounts of the UP era, I was struck by how few scholars had explored how and why these two quintessentially “Chilean” culinary items had come to stand in for the supposedly distinctive goals and nature of Allende’s democratic road to socialism.

Salvador Allende reaches for the lid of a large soup pot at a community potluck during the UP. — *Salvador Allende at a community potluck during the UP. Credit: Fundación Salvador Allende*

That initial query would lead me on an archival journey through more than a half-century of social, cultural, political, economic, scientific, agricultural, and urban history. Through an engagement with Chilean state economic records, a wide array of print media, medical bulletins and journals, land reform documentation, and more, I began to ask, how would a history of the UP experience (1970-1973) that was centered around food alter our understanding of Chile’s 1000-day revolution, as well as the history of Chilean popular politics and state formation throughout the twentieth century?

The research that eventually resulted in Hungry of Revolution became an attempt to reconstruct how decades of struggle over food fueled the rise, and eventual fall, of what was once one of Latin America’s most expansive social welfare states. Through a reconstruction of ties between workers, consumers, scientists, and the state, the book links two of the most significant storylines of twentieth-century Chilean history: the political fight of an increasingly organized urban working class to gain reliable access to cheap, nutrient-rich foodstuffs, on the one hand, and the struggle of the state (and to a certain extent rural peasants) to modernize Chile’s underproducing agricultural countryside, on the other.

A 1918 hunger march in downtown Santiago de Chile, organized by the Asamblea Obrera de Alimentación Nacional (Workers’ Assembly for National Nutrition) Source: International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam

By placing the history of food at the center of my research, I came to see that, across multiple decades, Chileans had sought to make food security a right of citizenship and a cornerstone of a more inclusive economic democracy. As a result, my research also revealed how one of the most pressing concerns in contemporary Chile—the problem of inequality—manifested and reproduced itself through the country’s system of food production, distribution, and consumption.

The book offers a reappraisal of some of the key social, political, and economic narratives in modern Chile history. For one, it challenges the common tendency to view food or consumer politics as a something that emerged as the Latin American social welfare or developmental state retreated in the face of an onslaught of market reforms in the late 1970s and 1980s. During that latter period, right-wing governments, many of them military dictatorships, violently suppressed left-wing parties and the labor movement. The dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet in Chile (1973-1990) was among the most infamous of these regimes. According to some scholars, it was during his rule that the consumer marketplace replaced mass politics and the shop floor as a site of permissible citizen political participation. The emblematic account of a modern consumer society during this era remains a 1988 book by the conservative Pinochet supporter Joaquín Lavín, entitled The Revolución Silenciosa (The Quiet Revolution). In the book, Lavín, who remains an important figure in Chilean conservative politics today, suggested that mass consumption was defining of a capitalist society’s success. But free-market forces needed to operate without government restraints if consumer well-being was to be ensured.

As I show in Hungry for Revolution, this articulation of consumption as a key metric of social and economic “health” or prosperity was not especially new to Chile under Pinochet’s reactionary regime. Rather, for almost the entire mid-twentieth century, consumption, particularly of basic food staples, was at the center of how everyday citizens and the political left understood the concept of citizenship and purpose of national economic development. This is a point that historians of Chile like Heidi Tinsman have articulated especially well. As other recent scholarship has demonstrated, the linking of consumption to what we might call social-democratic of even socialist political horizons extends to other parts of Latin America and beyond during this same period. The key difference, however, was that for much of the twentieth-century, progressive movements and social reformers agreed that the state had a critical role to play in promoting and protecting consumption. A strong state needed to tame the unfettered power of the open marketplace to guarantee access to what Latin American governments often referred to as “primary necessity goods.” To paraphrase what the US historian Meg Jacobs has written about the New Deal, as an interventionist state created consumer agencies and enacted new consumer regulations, many poor and working-class people across the Americas organized themselves to demand ever more robust forms of regulation, without which democratic participation in a nation’s social and economic life was seen as impossible.

Put simply, the politics surrounding food and other forms of basic consumption were central to progressive visions of economic and social democracy before consumer politics became a hallmark of a more market-based or neoliberal understanding of citizenship in the late 1970s and 1980s.

At the same time, by centering food in my historical analysis of twentieth-century Chile, something else even more interesting revealed itself: the struggle for cheap and abundant food became as much a fight over consumption as it became a site to build a different sort of food system – that is to say, a distinct architecture for determining what sort of food was produced in Chile (and how) and also to organize the channels through which that food was ultimately distributed. To the extent that the notion of economic equality was a central tenet of the twentieth-century Chilean left, social reformers’ fixation on resolving food-based inequities was paramount to achieving this goal.

The project of agrarian reform (which I consider in detail in the fourth chapter of the book) was in many ways the axis around which visions of a more equitable food system turned in the middle of twentieth century. Between 1964 and 1973, the Chilean state broke up large agricultural estates and began redistributing those rural properties to landless peasants. At the same time, the state promoted the unionization of rural workers and offered technical assistance, cheap credit, and supplies to this new class of agricultural producers. While concerns about land tenure and rural working conditions helped drive agrarian reform in Chile, just as they did in many other parts of Latin America, Hungry for Revolution demonstrates that the content of agrarian production—and then the distribution of the new agricultural bounty that was produced on new land reform settlements—were also pressing national concerns during the 1960s and early 1970s. For example, by promoting the production of new sources of protein (such as chicken, pork, and even fish), food experts involved in agrarian reform sought to break Chile’s costly dependence on foreign imports of beef. And by planning agricultural development projects in areas that would streamline urban distribution efforts, those same agrarian experts and engineers sought to move Chile toward a position of greater national food self-sufficiency. The history of agrarian reform in Latin America, I contend, is very much a history of food.

*UP officials deliver a modern combine harvester to a rural community as part of the country’s agrarian reform. Credit: Fundación Salvador Allende*

The mobilization of food consumers and the state’s response to those mobilizations—whether through the enforcement of price controls, the creation of new food and nutrition agencies, or the promotion of agrarian reform—were defining features of Chile’s socialist landscape in the mid-twentieth century. But the quest for a society in which empanadas and red wine were abundant and accessible to all did not necessarily end in triumph. While the year 1971, the first year of the UP revolution, was one of unprecedented consumer bounty, the last year or two of the revolution were filled with intense social and economic challenges.

The return of food-based insecurity would become an issue that many Chileans associated with the UP government’s shortcomings. By continuing to advocate a vision of “proper” food consumption that was rooted in calculations of calories and vitamins, revolutionary leaders often minimized the social and cultural meaning that certain foods had to Chilean consumers. In presenting women as both the cause of decades of poor nutrition and the solution, the state reproduced a highly gendered notion of femininity that ultimately impeded women’s political action outside the household. And by too often emphasizing technical solutions to food production problems, agrarian experts did not do enough to tackle the deep-seated political power that Chile’s large landowner class continued to exercise in the early 1970s.

As a counterrevolution against the UP took hold in Chile, few images would become more iconic than those of middle and upper-class women banging empty cooking pots to demand the removal of Allende’s government from office or private food distributors parking their trucks alongside major highways to halt the distribution of essential consumer goods in the country. Such actions helped transform food into a market-based commodity, rather than a social and economic right of citizenship.

*Anti-Allende protestors bang empty pots and pans in opposition to the UP government. Source: Memoria Chilena*

The history of food that I present in Hungry for Revolution is a story of how Chileans came to understand the everyday meaning of concepts like social welfare, economic justice, economic democracy, and citizenship in the twentieth century. But it is also a story about whose interests the Chilean state and economy, both past and present, have been set up to serve.

Joshua Frens-String is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin and an associate of the Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies (LLILAS). He is the author of Hungry for Revolution: The Politics of Food and the Making of Modern Chile (UC Press, 2021).

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Cotton, Coal, and Capitalism: Review of Aaron Jakes’ Egypt’s Occupation and On Barak’s Powering Empire

Scholars of the modern Middle East have long identified the region’s integration into the global economy as one of the most dramatic processes of the nineteenth century. Two recent studies – Aaron Jakes’ Egypt’s Occupation: Colonial Economism and the Crises of Capitalism and On Barak’s Powering Empire: how Coal Made the Middle East and Sparked Global Carbonization, draw on this tradition and push us beyond the traditional economic narrative to consider some wider cultural contexts. While different in scope, scale, and methodological choices, combining the two books together prompts readers to think more broadly about both the Middle East and the historical moment of the nineteenth century.

Egypt’s Occupation: Colonial Economism and the Crises of Capitalism

Powering Empire: how Coal Made the Middle East and Sparked Global Carbonization

Aaron Jakes’ Egypt’s Occupation is a detailed study of the materiality of British colonialism in Egypt between 1882 and 1914. The book frames the British colonial project as one driven by economism – the assumption that certain societies are predestined to operate according to distinctive economic logic. Contrary to past narratives of modern Egypt that centered around large landowners, Jakes places the Egyptian peasant (fellah) as the main protagonist of the colonial story. British officials imagined the fellah as an economic actor that, while motivated by the pursuit of greater profits, remained inherently incapable of grasping the logic of the modern liberal economy. Materially, the logic of colonial economism unfolded in the creation of various financial institutions designed to support the individual fellah. This logic not only limited Egypt’s economic growth but also served as proof to the British that Egypt needed the occupation to move toward modernity. Needless to say, in the eyes of British officials, Egyptian modernity was ambiguously defined as it was inherently unreachable.

Jakes narrative concentrates on the Egyptian case to make a broader argument about capitalism. Unlike Jakes, On Barak’s Powering Empire stretches across and beyond the region and begins with an intriguing proposition: to understand our hyper-carbonized moment and begin imagining a carbon-neutral future, Barak suggests studying how fossil fuels – and especially coal – became a global commodity. Contrary to common narratives that focus on Europe, and especially Britain, as the epicenter of the rapid carbonization of the nineteenth century, Barak suggests the Ottoman empire as the space in which coal became widely consumed, traded, and utilized to various needs. Barak urges the readers to think about coal, and fossil energy more broadly, as one crucial element in a complex historical and cultural context. Coal was the driving force behind vast social changes. It allowed cooling systems that enabled better storage of meat and raised meat consumption popularity; it made trains faster and more common, changing in the process how people in the region moved; and it helped pump water and allowed new irrigation methods that transformed local agricultural techniques. Coal, in short, became popular because it was mobile, cheap, and efficient. Unfortunately, we all breath the results of this efficiency to this day.

While different in geographical focus, these two thought-provoking works complement each other while opening up important debates. One such contribution is their emphasis on the importance of the Middle East region to some of the global processes of the nineteenth century. Barak, for example, draws on Kenneth Pomeranz’s The Great Divergence to argue for the region’s importance as a bridge between Europe and Asia (p. 9-10). Jakes, for his part, suggests Egypt’s cotton market as another case study with which to rethink the spread and perseverance of capitalism. Bringing together the rich historiography that evolved around cotton production in Egypt with new studies of capitalism and nature, Jakes uses hyper-local developments such as irrigation systems and credit institutions to support Jason Moore’s call to see capitalism as a “way of organizing nature” (p. 12-13).

Men, moving from smaller boats, add coal to a steamship in Port Said, Egypt — *Men add coal to a steamship in Port Said, Egypt, circa 1900. Source: Library of Congress*

Emphasizing the significance of the region to the global transformation of the nineteenth century, both scholars contribute to the decolonization of two contemporary conversations. Jakes’ work is highly influenced by the new history of capitalism – a relatively fresh interpretational framework that asks to rethink capitalism beyond traditional Marxist traditions. This new field usually revolves around the American capitalist experience, and as such is organized around challenging old perceptions regarding, among else, capitalism’s connection to slavery, American exceptionalism, and westward expansion. Jakes, for his part, uses the field’s preoccupation with financial institutions and commodities to place the Egyptian case not in comparison to the US but rather to India, where many of his colonial protagonists began their careers. This is a promising move that will potentially contribute not only to the inclusion of nonwestern case studies in this new tradition but also bring the latter into conversation with Middle East studies.

Similar to Jakes’ aspirational project, Barak clearly states that one of the main goals of his book is to rethink the European origins of energy history, or, in his words, to “provincialize thermodynamics” (p. 229). To do so, Barak offers some impressive geographical maneuvers: first, he situates Europe not at the center of his argument, but rather almost at the periphery of the greater drama of energy production and consumption that took over the Middle East. He elegantly intertwines large scale spatial changes in trade and commerce roots with micro-changes in urban development and coal-mine structures. In doing so, he reveals an interconnected world that exists outside of and independently from Europe. This is not to say that Barak neglects the global in favor of the local. On the contrary, transregional connections enable his narrative to move forward. For example, he takes on Timothy Mitchell’s now-famous argument about the positive correlation between fossil energy and democratic organizations, what Mitchell calls “carbon democracy.” Barak, on the other hand, stress how workers’ rights in Europe were achieved “on the backs of colonial workers” (p. 115), thus proving that carbon democracy in one place remains desperately dependent on the existence of carbon autocracy elsewhere.

Finally, both works’ unconventional intervention in commodity history makes them appealing to readers outside the narrow field of Middle East scholars. While both examine two of the most “popular” commodities of the region – cotton and fossil fuel – they successfully created narratives that places these two commodities in a deep cultural context rather than the “traditional” economic-oriented analysis. Some may argue that the authors often overlook the material qualities of these commodities. However, I see their attitudes as an opportunity for scholars to rethink their commodity-driven narratives. Barak, traces how the expansion of the coal trade and increased consumption habits altered the everyday lives of local communities. In his discussion of meat consumption and meat’s political role (chapter 2), he urges the readers to think about meat not only as a commodity or a cultural artifact but also as an energy source. Through this intervention, he helps bring food history and energy history to the same table in what is a promising conceptual novelty.

A man stands in a cotton field. — *Field of Egyptian cotton ready for harvest. Source: Library of Congress*

Similarly, Jakes leans on a rich historiographical tradition that underlines the importance of cotton cultivation to economic growth in nineteenth-century Egypt and links it with new conversations. His elaborate discussion about cotton (chapters 3 and 7) explores the commodification of land and the fight against the cotton-leaf worm and connects the debate about cotton to larger conversations about legal reforms, agronomy, expertise, and environment. While some environmental historians might criticize him for not delving more deeply into the complexities of the nature/culture dichotomy and the environmental consequences of expanding cotton production, other works address this issue. I direct readers especially to Jenifer Derr’s The Live Nile (2019), which can be read as a complementary work. In any case, they (and others) will appreciate Jakes’ impressive empirical achievements in documenting changing land tenures and credit systems.

What makes these works noteworthy is their ability to talk to a wide range of readers and be interesting and deep at the same time. Scholars of the modern Middle East will surely benefit from their empirical richness and from their unique contribution to rethinking the geography of the region. At the same time, readers from outside of the field will find two fascinating, accessible, and inspiring works. Their conceptual innovation and contribution will make them staple readings for environmental historians, historians of science and technology, and curious readers.

IHS Podcast: Faith in Science? COVID, Antivaxxers, the State, and Epistemological Power

This podcast previews a roundtable discussion that will be held on Monday, August 30 at 12 pm. It features Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, Sean F. McEnroe (Southern Oregon University), Stephan Palmie (University of Chicago), and J. Brent Crosson (UT Austin). More information on the roundtable can be found here.

This podcast reflects on the current politicization of COVID (masks and vaccination). The conversation avoids the patronizing dualism pitting a liberal party of science against a “superstitious” reactionary right wing libertarian movement. Our guests take on this duality by exploring the contributions of Anthropology of Belief and the Sociology of Knowledge. These literatures have shown that there is really not such a thing as a conflict between “science and ignorance” or “belief and doubt”. There is a struggle over whose rationality matters. The conversation explores the centrality of “propaganda” and institutional authority in the transformation of knowledge into science. Anti-vaxxers and anti-maskers have also mobilized science to make their case. Moreover, conspiracy theories are often more than creatures of feverish imaginations. Sometimes they do point to the abuses of pharmaceuticals and scientific institutions (the Tuskegee experiment). How to end the current politicization of the science of COVID? Our guests offer ethical and political guidelines for both the agnostics and the believers.

~ Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra

Guests

Sean F. McEnroe is a professor of history at Southern Oregon University, specializing in comparative colonial studies, religion, and state formation. He received his Ph.D. from UC Berkeley and is the author of From Colony to Nationhood in Mexico (Cambridge, 2012) and A Troubled Marriage: Indigenous Elites of the Colonial Americas (University of New Mexico, 2020). A contributor to Borderlands of the Iberian World (Oxford, 2019) and Imagining Histories of Colonial Latin America (University of New Mexico, 2017), and a past contributing editor to the Handbook of Latin American Studies and Oxford Bibliographies Online, his articles appear in Ethnohistory, The Americas, The Journal of Colonialism and Colonial Studies, and Oregon Historical Quarterly. His current book project explores the circulation of ideas about empiricism and spiritual forces among English and Spanish-speaking intellectual communities in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Stephan Palmie is the Norman & Edna Freehling Professor of Anthropology and of Social Sciences in the College at the University of Chicago. He conducts ethnographic and historical research on Afro-Caribbean cultures, with an emphasis on Afro-Cuban religious formations and their relations to the history and cultures of a wider Atlantic world. His other interests include practices of historical representation and knowledge production, systems of slavery and unfree labor, constructions of race and ethnicity, conceptions of embodiment and moral personhood, and the anthropology of food and cuisine. He is the author of Das Exil der Götter: Geschichte und Vorstellungswelt einer afrokubanischen Religion (1991), Wizards and Scientists: Explorations in Afro-Cuban Modernity and Tradition (2002), and The Cooking of History: How Not to Study Afro-Cuban Religion (2013), as well as the editor of several volumes on Caribbean and Afro-Atlantic anthropology and history. He is currently completing a book entitled “Thinking with Ngangas: What Afro-Cuban Ritual Can Tell Us About Western Scientific Practice – And Vice Versa”.

J. Brent Crosson is an anthropologist of religion and secularism who works in the Caribbean and Latin America. His research has focused on contestations over the limits of legal power, science, and religion in the Americas. His first book is Experiments with Power: Obeah and the Remaking of Religion (University of Chicago Press 2020, winner of the 2021 Clifford Geertz Prize). His research on Caribbean practices of healing and legal intervention–known as obeah, spiritual work, or science–has been published in a number of journals, including Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, Ethnos, The Journal of Africana Religions, and Cosmologics. His special issue in the journal Ethnos–“What Possessed You?”–explores the relationship between spirit possession, material possessions, and conceptions of self. His work on race relations and solidarity has appeared in Anthropological Quarterly and the Duke University Press journal Small Axe. His current research focuses on climate change, religion, and conceptions of energy, with chapters on these issues forthcoming in the edited volumes Mediality on Trial (De Gruyter Press), Climate Politics and the Power of Religion (Indiana Univ. Press), and Critical Approaches to Science and Religion (Columbia Univ. Press).

Hosts

Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra is Alice Drysdale Sheffield Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin and the Director of the Institute for Historical Studies.

Ashley Garcia is a PhD candidate at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research includes 19th century political history, American communitarianism, and American political thought. Her dissertation, “An American Socialism: The Associationist Movement and Nineteenth Century Political Culture,” explores America’s most popular utopian socialist program: the Associationist movement of the 19th-century. Ashley has also completed a Portfolio in Museum Studies as her secondary PhD field.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Sheena Cox

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

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

By Gary Leo Dunbar

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

“Reimagining Borders: Triangular Transnationalism and Chinese Mexicans”

By Jian Gao 高堅

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

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

By Rafael Nieto-Bello

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

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

By Jesse Ritner

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

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

By Rodrigo Salido Moulinié

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

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

By Haley Schroer

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

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

By Alina Scott

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

Learning from U.S. History: A Fifth Grade Social Studies Curriculum

From the editors: As we approach the beginning of a new academic year, Not Even Past is delighted to introduce an important new resource for the teaching of History. Learning from US History: A Fifth Grade Social Studies Curriculum was designed and developed by two UT Professors, Dr. Daina Ramey Berry and Dr. Jennifer Keys Adair, and a doctoral student: Erin Green, MA.

This fifth grade U.S. history curriculum is built upon primary sources and is an alternative to textbooks that are often one-sided or politicized. This curriculum is one example of how historians and educators can work together to de-center a singular perspective and to offer elementary social studies with greater historical accuracy. This is a work-in-progress curriculum that will change as new primary sources emerge and historical interpretations shift.

The full curriculum can be accessed here.

Unit One: Native American and Indigenous Conceptions and Care for the Land now known as the United States of America (4 Weeks)

Unit Two: Native American Nation/Community Research Project (2 Weeks)

Unit Three: Freedom in Central and West Africa and the entrance of White Supremacy (2 Weeks)

Unit Four: American Colonies Past and Present (2 weeks)

Unit Five: The Transatlantic Slave Trade (3 weeks)

Unit Six: The American Revolution (3 weeks)

Unit Seven: The Constitution (3 weeks)

Unit Eight: Resistance to Enslavement (3 weeks)

Unit Nine: The Civil War (3 weeks)

Unit Ten: Moving People and Shifting Boundaries (5 weeks)

Unit Eleven: Im/migration (4 Weeks)

Special Unit: Elections (1 week)

Special Unit: Thanksgiving

Lesson Plan Example

*Screenshot from Learning from US History*

Authors/Curators

Daina Ramey Berry, PhD • Oliver H. Radkey Regents Professor • Chair, Department of History (UT Austin). Professor Berry is one of the most sought-after speakers and consultants for public-facing projects offered by museums, historical sites, K-12 educational initiatives, news media, and television including NBC, PBS News Hour, NPR, New York Times and The Atlantic. She has authored many award-winning books including, The Price for Their Pound of Flesh (Beacon, 2017) and A Black Women’s History of the United States co-authored with Kali Nicole Gross (Beacon, 2020).

Jennifer Keys Adair, PhD • Assoc. Prof. of Curriculum and Instruction • Director, AYCRC (UT Austin). Dr. Adair’s teaching and research is focused on improving children’s learning experiences at school. Her work has been published and cited in a wide range of journals including Harvard Educational Review and Teachers College Record as well as 40+ media outlets including NPR, Washington Post and CNN. She is the co-author with Kiyomi Sánchez-Suzuki Colegrove of Segregation by Experience: Agency, Racism and Early Learning (University of Chicago Press, 2021).

Erin Green, M.A. • Erin Green is a doctoral researcher in Curriculum and Instruction, focusing on Social Studies Education. Her growing research interests include critical elementary social studies, critical literacy, and civic education. She is a former fifth grade teacher and is passionate about critical, anti-racist social studies education for young learners.

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