Climate in Context Conference Report

Climate in Context: Historical Precedents and the Unprecedented Conference Report

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

Session I: Emerging Perspectives: A Graduate Student Roundtable

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Session II: Historicizing Climate

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

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

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

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

Session III: Contextualizing the Climate Crisis

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

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

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

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

Session IV: Practicing What We Preach: A Roundtable

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

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

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

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

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

Session V: Going Public with Climate History: A Roundtable

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Climate in Context: Historical Precedents and the Unprecedented Virtual Conference

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

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

To consult specific conference sessions, use the links below:

THURSDAY, APRIL 22

Opening Remarks

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

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

Land Acknowledgement

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

Conference Theme Introduction

Erika Bsumek
Associate Professor of History
University of Texas at Austin

Megan Raby
Associate Professor of History
University of Texas at Austin

Session I. Emerging Perspectives: A Graduate Student Roundtable

Mary E. Mendoza (Commentator), Pennsylvania State University

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Opening Keynote Address: Bathsheba Demuth, Brown University

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

Introducing the keynote speakers for Climate in Context – Bathsheba Demuth

Session II. Historicizing Climate

Megan Raby (Chair), University of Texas at Austin

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FRIDAY, APRIL 23

Opening Remarks

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

Session III. Contextualizing the Climate Crisis

Tracie Matysik (Chair), University of Texas at Austin

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

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

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

“States of Second Nature”
Victor Seow, Harvard University

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

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

Session IV. Practicing What We Preach: A Roundtable

Erika Bsumek (Chair), University of Texas at Austin

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Session V. Going Public with Climate History: A Roundtable

Joan Neuberger (Chair), University of Texas at Austin

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

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

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

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

“Indian Ocean Current”
Prasannan Parthasarathi, Boston College

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

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

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

Concluding Remarks

Erika Bsumek
Associate Professor of History
University of Texas at Austin

Megan Raby
Associate Professor of History
University of Texas at Austin

Closing Keynote Address: Naomi Oreskes, Harvard University

Introducing the keynote speakers for Climate in Context – Naomi Oreskes

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

Generously co-sponsored by:

Fighting against Oblivion and Obscurity: Asian American Studies and its Place in U.S. Education

After receiving my two doses of Pfizer, I decided that it was time to depart a bit from my hermetic lifestyle, re-socialize, and gradually reinsert myself back into the society. While meeting new people, I always introduce myself as a graduate student at UT Austin studying the history of Chinese in Mexico. Upon hearing my dissertation topic, people often react with a mix of bewilderment, fascination, and surprise as they have not heard of the existence of a Chinese population in Mexico. Intrigued, people always ask more about my research. Unsurprisingly, one of the most frequent questions is “Why and how did the Chinese end up in Mexico?”

In response, I explain that most of the early Chinese in Mexico came from the United States. In fact, the history of Chinese Mexicans is an offshoot of the broader history of Chinese Americans. Perceiving the inquisitive eyes of my audience, I explain that during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, Chinese Americans frequently encountered racial violence and systemic discrimination, rendering their lives extremely challenging. In particularly, the Page Act of 1875, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, and the subsequent exclusionary laws against Asian Americans restricted the mobility of the Chinese save for a few who belonged to exempt classes. The laws criminalized and deported Chinese Americans who did not have the required paperwork, effectively making the Chinese the first “illegal aliens” in the United States.[1] Under these harrowing conditions, many Chinese entered Mexico to seek refuge and start new lives.

Before I’m able to proceed and talk more about the Chinese in Mexico, however, people often stop me as they are surprised to hear that the United States, branded as the “nation of immigrants,” at one point had a law called “the Chinese Exclusion Act.” Indeed, so far, none of the people I have talked with, including those from California, have ever heard of such law—a law that fundamentally transformed U.S. immigration policy and regulation, the effects of which are still being felt by tens of millions of people today.[2] Many initially thought I was joking, and others went away with disbelief. Presumably, the humanities education they received in high school and college glossed over the history of Asian Americans, if such history was mentioned at all.

Toy Vendors in San Francisco's Chinatown — *Toy Vendors in San Francisco’s Chinatown” [ca. 190-] by Arnold Genthe. Source: The Library of Congress*

Am I surprised that most Americans have never heard of the Chinese Exclusion Act? Perhaps but the oblivion and the obscurity of Asian American history in U.S. education is no coincidence. In her superbly researched book, Beth Lew-William shows that unlike African Americans who suffered from extralegal violence and Native Americans dispossession, the Chinese mainly suffered from exclusion, or what she termed “violent racial politics.”[3] By shutting the Chinese outside of the borders of the United States and assigning foreignness onto their racial features, white supremacists successfully rendered Asian Americans invisible and made them into perpetual outsiders. The exclusion of Asian Americans directly impacted how their history has been written and taught.

Back when I was in high school, the six-hundred-page textbook we used for our AP U.S. history class, entitled The History of the American People,[4]only contained one or two pages on Asian Americans, a phenomenon that many students across the country have encountered.[5] And even those pages that mentioned Asian Americans privileged the perspectives of white supremacists whose descriptions and caricatures of the Chinese reified and reinforced the notion that Asians did not belong in the United States. Given the peripheral and obscure place of Asian Americans in history textbooks, it is not surprising that the vast majority of people outside the history profession have never heard of the Chinese Exclusion Act.

The erasure and obscuring of Asian American history in the textbooks reflects structural problems of knowledge production and dissemination at the university-level. Since universities train secondary school teachers and professional historians often write or contribute to history textbooks, the lack of Asian American history in K-12 education is rooted in the deficient representation of Asian American studies at the tertiary level. Numerous reports show that institutions of higher education have been slow to support disciplines related to Asian American Studies, further smothering the development of the field and the nurturing of the next-generation of scholars. For instance, with Asian Americans comprising more than twenty percent of its student body, Harvard University has not done nearly enough to support Asian American Studies.[6] It does not have an Asian American Studies department, and faculty whose research focuses on Asian Americans are rare.[7] Amid student protests, the administration hesitantly agreed to do more but no substantial action has been taken so far.[8]

Recent surveys have also found that Asian American students are underrepresented in the humanities,[9] including history, and their numbers have declined rapidly over the past decade.[10] Ironically, around the same time that this decline was happening, the Asian population in the United States and the number of Asian American college students soared.[11] One important factor that led Asian Americans away from the humanities is likely that many of these students found themselves and their history unincluded in the discipline.[12]

Figure 1: Change in History Majors, 2011-17. The decline in history majors occurred among all racial and ethnic groups in the past decade. However, such decline was the steepest among Asian Americans. Source: American Historical Association

All of these data raises a central question: Why are institutions like Harvard with substantial Asian American populations reluctant to establish and support programs that can potentially appeal to at least a quarter of their students, especially when the students themselves perennially ask for these educational opportunities? I believe that the idea that Asian Americans and Asian American history are peripheral, obscure, and unimportant coupled with the model minority myth has contributed to the reluctance of universities to provide educational resources for studies related to Asian Americans.[13]

The consequences of thrusting Asian American history into oblivion and assigning it a marginal place both inside the textbooks and in the broader educational system are severe and disheartening. If rising anti-Asian violence nationwide in the past year, including the horrific Atlanta spa shootings, is any indication, it is clear that many still perceive Asian Americans as peripheral, dispensable, perpetually foreign, and extraneous to the U.S. society. The marginal place of Asian American history in U.S. education and the underrepresentation of Asian Americans in the humanities surely contributed to the misrepresentation of the wider Asian population in the United States.

Fortunately, over the past few years, several universities have begun to develop Asian American Studies programs following persistent demands from students and the rising anti-Asian incidents in the recent past. In August 2018, Princeton University created a certificate program for Asian American Studies, which increased its course offerings on Asian American studies from one to three classes per semester to five in the spring of that year.[14] At Duke University, after more than twenty years of persistent student protests, the administration finally established an Asian American Studies Program in 2019.[15] In late April of this year, the University of Arizona announced the establishment of an Asian Pacific American Studies Minor as “the result of more than two decades of work and comes at a time of highly visible anti-Asian racism and violence in the United States.”[16]

Figure 2: Asian American Studies across the United States. Blue pins signify standalone centers or departments of Asian American Studies while red signifies that Asian American Studies are incorporated in the broader ethnic studies programs. Conspicuously, UT Austin remains one of the few institutions with an Asian American Studies program in southern United States. Courtesy of the Center for Asian American Studies at UT Austin. Made with Google Maps.

However, as noted by many students and faculty, establishing these programs is just the first step. Often, universities created these programs without adequately supporting them in the long term. Without hiring enough faculty and investing resources, the establishment of new ethnic studies programs frequently means that the existing faculty have to take on additional burdens, which leads to high rates of attrition and burnout.[17] Indeed, some programs are comprised of just one or a handful of tenured or tenure-track faculty members and offer a very limited range and number of courses.[18] Given these data, the future of these inchoate Asian American studies programs at Princeton, Duke, and Arizona is still unknown.

Despite these challenges, many students, especially Asian Americans, were thrilled to see that classes related to Asian American studies were being offered for the first time. Some were also surprised to learn that there is so much intellectual breadth and depth in Asian American Studies as textbooks in secondary schools rarely provide such information.[19] Like other ethnic studies programs, however, Asian American Studies are not just for Asian American students. The discipline speaks to all who want to have a deeper understanding of the racial and ethnic diversity of the United States and learn about American history through a different perspective. It can enhance interethnic understandings and solidarity as well as provide an ideal platform for global studies and migration policy studies. Ultimately, such knowledge would be useful for anyone working in any field.[20]

Asian American Studies programs are conspicuously rare in the southern United States with only a handful of universities offering formal programs. In an expansive geographical space stretching from the coasts of South Carolina and Florida to New Mexico, it appears that the University of Texas at Austin is the only institution that offers a program in Asian American studies (see figure 2).[21] Currently, the Center for Asian American Studies at UT Austin offers both a major and a minor in Asian American Studies as well as a graduate portfolio program.[22] As the Asian American population continues to grow at both the state and national level and as contacts between Asia and the United States become increasingly common in a globalizing world,[23] I have no doubt that the demand for Asian American studies will rise accordingly. I am certain that the Center for Asian American Studies at UT Austin will increase in its importance as an academic unit for students of diverse backgrounds in the years to come.

[1] Mae Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 2004).

[2] Erika Lee, At America’s Gates: Chinese Immigration During the Exclusion Era, 1882-1943 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2003).

[3] Beth Lew-Williams, The Chinese Must Go: Violence, Exclusion, and the Making of the Alien in America (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2018), 7.

[4] “Out of Many: The History of the American People,” Amazon, accessed May 10, 2021, https://www.amazon.com/Out-Many-American-Faragher-2005-06-16/dp/B01K2O6E12/ref=sr_1_13?dchild=1&keywords=Out+Of+Many%3A+A+History+of+the+American+People&qid=1620665175&s=books&sr=1-13

[5] “Why Are Asian Americans Missing from Our Textbooks?” Pacific Standard, March 16, 2017, accessed May 10, 2021, https://psmag.com/news/why-are-asian-americans-missing-from-our-textbooks

[6] “Faculty Page of the Department of History,” Harvard University, accessed May 17, 2021, https://history.fas.harvard.edu/faculty_alpha

[7] As of May 17, 2019, Ju Yon Kim, a professor of English, remains the only Harvard faculty on Asian American studies. See “Ju Yon Kim is Building from the Inside,” The Harvard Crimson, May 17, 2019,accessed May 18, 2021, https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2019/5/17/harvards-only-asian-american-studies-professor/#:~:text=When%20Kim%20took%20her%20job,Asian%20American%20Studies%20faculty%20member.&text=That%20changed%20when%2C%20during%20her,Asian%20American%20and%20feminist%20literature; See also; “Students and Alumni Call For Ethnic Studies Department in Wake of Professors’ Departures,” The Harvard Crimson, February 4, 2019, accessed May 18, 2021, https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2019/2/4/ethnic-studies-professors-departures; “Search for Harvard Ethnic Studies Faculty Suspended Indefinitely Due to Pandemic,” The Harvard Crimson, April 16, 2020, accessed May 18, 2021, https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2020/4/16/ethnic-studies-search-suspended/

[8] “Will Harvard continue to fail Asian Americans—or will it learn from the past?,” The Washington Post, February 12, 2019, accessed May 10, 2021, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/will-harvard-continue-to-fail-asian-americans–or-will-it-learn-from-the-past/2019/02/12/80fb1492-2f04-11e9-86ab-5d02109aeb01_story.html; “At Harvard, Asian-American students urge diversity efforts beyond admissions,” The Boston Globe, February 9, 2019, accessed May 10, 2021, https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2019/02/09/harvard-asian-american-students-urge-diversity-efforts-beyond-admissions/TMzB9hZvzH6VxJDA5h9WAN/story.html “Harvard students call for ethnic studies program after Asian American Studies professors depart,” The Daily Pennsylvanian, February 6, 2019, accessed May 10, 2021, https://www.thedp.com/article/2019/02/harvard-asian-american-program-ethnic-studies-penn-bacow-asam-tenure. See also “Students and faculty reflect on the status of Asian American studies at Yale,” Yale News, May 2, 2021, accessed May 17, 2021, https://yaledailynews.com/blog/2021/05/02/students-and-faculty-reflect-on-the-status-of-asian-american-studies-at-yale/

[9] “Racial/Ethnic Distribution of Advanced Degrees in the Humanities,” American Academy of Arts and Sciences, accessed May 17, 2021, https://www.amacad.org/humanities-indicators/higher-education/racialethnic-distribution-advanced-degrees-humanities; “Racial/Ethnic Distribution of Bachelor’s Degrees in the Humanities,” American Academy of Arts and Sciences, accessed May 17, 2021, https://www.amacad.org/humanities-indicators/higher-education/racialethnic-distribution-bachelors-degrees-humanities

[10] “The History BA Since The Great Recession The 2018 AHA Majors Report,” Perspectives on History, November 26, 2018, accessed May 10, 2021, https://www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/perspectives-on-history/december-2018/the-history-ba-since-the-great-recession-the-2018-aha-majors-report

[11] “Asian Americans are the fastest-growing racial or ethnic group in the U.S.,” Pew Research Center, April 9, 2021, accessed May 17, 2021, https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/04/09/asian-americans-are-the-fastest-growing-racial-or-ethnic-group-in-the-u-s/; “Asian American and Pacific Islander Students in Higher Education,” The Postsecondary National Policy Institute, May 11, 2021, accessed May 17, 2021, https://pnpi.org/asian-americans-and-pacific-islanders/#

[12] “Why are Asian Students Leaving the Humanities?” AsAmNews, June 9, 2020, accessed May 10, 2021, https://asamnews.com/2020/06/09/asian-students-in-humanities-struggle-to-get-their-parents-to-accept-their-major/

[13] On model minority myth see Madeline Y. Hsu, The Good Immigrants: How the Yellow Peril Became the Model Minority (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015) and Ellen D. Wu, The Color of Success: Asian Americans and the Origins of the Model Minority (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014).

[14] “University approves certificate program in Asian American studies,” Princeton University, April 30, 2018, accessed May 17, 2021, https://ams.princeton.edu/news/2017-18/university-approves-certificate-program-asian-american-studies

[15] “After 50 years, Asian American studies programs can still be hard to find,” NBC News, June 27, 2019, accessed May 10, 2021, https://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/after-50-years-asian-american-studies-programs-can-still-be-n1022331

[16] “New Asian Pacific American Studies Minor Launches at ‘Vital Time in Our History’,” University of Arizona News, April 28, 2021, accessed May 17, 2021, https://news.arizona.edu/story/new-asian-pacific-american-studies-minor-launches-vital-time-our-history

[17] “Underfunded, Underrepresented Despite the lack of formal departments, ethnic studies programs remain vital for Northwestern students,” North by Northwestern, n.d., accessed May 18, 2021, https://northbynorthwestern.com/underfunded-underrepresented/; “Asian American faculty, staff and students call for establishment of Asian American studies program,” The Dartmouth, Mar 29, 2021, accessed May 18, 2021, https://www.thedartmouth.com/article/2021/03/asian-american-faculty-staff-and-students-call-for-establishment-of-asian-american-studies-program; “Tenure Denied,” Inside Higher Ed, May 17, 2016, accessed May 18, 2021, https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/05/17/campus-unrest-follows-tenure-denial-innovative-popular-faculty-member-color

[18] “Students, faculty continue decades-long struggle to uplift Asian American Studies,” February 18, 2021, accessed May 17, 2021, https://www.cavalierdaily.com/article/2021/02/students-faculty-continue-decades-long-struggle-to-uplift-asian-american-studies; “Asian American Studies prof.’s departure reignites concern over lack of support for program,” The Daily Pennsylvanian, accessed May 17, 2021, https://www.thedp.com/article/2021/03/david-eng-leaving-penn-asian-american-studies-program-concerns; See also “Asian American Studies Faculty Page,” Dartmouth College, accessed May 17, 2021, https://asian-american.dartmouth.edu/people; “Asian American Studies Faculty Page,” University of Pennsylvania, https://asam.sas.upenn.edu/index.php/people/faculty; “AASP Faculty,” Cornell University, accessed May 17, 2021, https://asianamericanstudies.cornell.edu/faculty

[19] “Racist attacks revive Asian American studies program demand,” AP News, May 15, 2021, accessed May 17, 2021, https://apnews.com/article/race-and-ethnicity-health-coronavirus-pandemic-lifestyle-education-75e52566e991e492d60b55ec7c38830a

[20] “Without Asian American Studies, We Can’t Understand American Racism,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, April 5, 2021, accessed May 17, 2021, https://www.chronicle.com/article/without-asian-american-studies-we-cant-understand-american-racism; “New Asian Pacific American Studies Minor Launches at ‘Vital Time in Our History’,” University of Arizona News, April 28, 2021, accessed May 17, 2021, https://news.arizona.edu/story/new-asian-pacific-american-studies-minor-launches-vital-time-our-history

[21] See “Asian American Studies,” Google Map, accessed May 18, 2021, https://www.google.com/maps/d/u/0/viewer?oe=UTF8&ie=UTF8&msa=0&mid=1gheEEJScqCrdG-qp1F6dO8dV4aw&ll=36.20718669030337%2C-114.427031&z=4

[22] “Center for Asian American Studies,” The University of Texas at Austin, accessed May 18, 2021, https://liberalarts.utexas.edu/aas/index.php

[23] Texas, behind California, has the second largest increase in Asian population among all the states in the past decade. See “Asian Americans are the fastest-growing racial or ethnic group in the U.S.,” Pew Research Center, April 9, 2021, accessed May 17, 2021, https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/04/09/asian-americans-are-the-fastest-growing-racial-or-ethnic-group-in-the-u-s/

History Department Moment of Recognition, 2021

Not Even Past is honored to share this Moment of Recognition for undergraduate and graduate students in the Department of History. The names and photographs of the graduating students are included in the video below.

Order Of Ceremony

Greetings from the History Department Chair, Dr. Daina Ramey Berry, History Department Chair, Oliver H. Radkey Regents Professorship in History

Introduction of the guest speaker

Dr Jacqueline Jones, Ellen C. Temple Chair in Women’s History and Mastin Gentry White Professor of Southern History

History Department Chair’s Address, Dr. Daina Ramey Berry, History Department Chair, Oliver H. Radkey Regents Professorship in History

Introduction of doctoral candidates, Dr. Alison K. Frazier, History Department Associate Professor, History Graduate Adviser

Recognition of History Honors, Dr. Denise A. Spellberg, History Department Professor, History Honors Director

Introduction of the graduating class, Dr. Madeline Y. Hsu, Associate Chair and Professor, History, Core Faculty, Center for Asian American Studies, Affiliate Faculty, Department of Asian Studies and Center for Mexican American Studies

Final remarks from the History Department chair, Dr Daina Ramey Berry

We would like to congratulate the class of 2021! The gallery below reflects the undergraduate students who submitted photographs for the moment of recognition.

Review of Hazards of the Job: From Industrial Disease to Environmental Health Science (1997) by Christopher Sellers

In Silent Spring, Rachel Carson pioneered the public discussion of the dangers of toxic substances present in the environment as a result of industrial activity. Christopher C. Sellers investigates the type of scientific knowledge about toxic substances that Rachel Carson built upon and popularized in this famous study. The book follows the development of industrial work-related illnesses from the 1890s through the early 1950s. First understood as “bodily idiosyncrasies” (28) that were outside the main concern of employers, or that should be endured by masculine workers, knowledge about occupational disease underwent significant transformations over the course of the early 20^th century.

Cover of Hazards of the Job: From Industrial Disease to Environmental Health Science

Sellers’ work is tightly woven and tracks multiple factors that contributed to the development of environmental health science. First, his work follows a series of key studies across the American industrial landscape: phosphorus poisoning from match factories, lead poisoning from a number of industries, silicosis from mining, radium poisoning from watch-making, and others. These demonstrate the slow development of the objects of study for this field. His study also traces changes in who had the expertise and authority to comment on the underlying causes of the illnesses, who should bear the brunt of these diseases, and the impact that this kind of medical science had for both industry, the medical profession, the state, and the lives of workers. Among the many scientists that Sellers writes into the history of environmental health science, Alice Hamilton stands out as a key advocate for the social (and political) purpose of the field and its development. Her work is important even if other contemporary physicians (such as David Edsall at the Harvard Division of Industrial Hygiene) overlooked it because it did not meet their standards for depoliticized science.

Dr. Alice Hamilton (1869-1970), an expert in occupational health issues, was Assistant Professor of Industrial Medicine at Harvard Medical School. After graduating from the University of Michigan, Hamilton did additional research in Germany and then began a lifelong effort to apply bacteriology, pharmacology, and toxicology to public health. Source: Acc. 90-105 – Science Service, Records, 1920s-1970s, Smithsonian Institution Archives

The scope of the book is clearly-defined and the chapter sequence is well-structured. Sellers frames the presentation of his research with a question containing an easy touchstone for anyone interested in environmental humanities and environmentalism: where did Rachel Carson’s knowledge of toxins come from? Sellers starts his narrative with the 1893 Chicago exhibition, by drawing our attention to the lead that was present in much of its white paint. The book is presented with a great deal detail, which makes for a somewhat slower read, but the subject necessitates the slow, methodical weaving he sets out to do.

Sellers is writing about the nature of the production of knowledge, and the implications that it had for industry, American public policy, and medical education. Even if he doesn’t specifically highlight the voices of the workers, Sellers’ work illuminates what the stakes were them. Many industrial workers distrusted the physicians who examined them, for they could be deemed unfit to work, thus hampering their chances to earn a living. When he does return to Carson’s work towards the end of the book, it is easy to understand her work as inheriting this rich history.

Sellers’ work is unique in that it first brought together medical and environmental history. In the wake of Hazards of the Job, a number of other studies of the environmental and health impacts of economic activity have followed, including Michelle Murphy’s Sick Building Syndrome and the Problem of Uncertainty: Environmental Politics, Technoscience and Women Workers (2006); David Naguib Pellow’s Garbage Wars: The Struggle for Environmental Justice in Chicago (2004); and Geoffrey Tweedale’s Magic Mineral to Killer Dust: Turner & Newall and the Asbestos Hazard (2000).

Book cover of Sick Building Syndrome and the Problem of Uncertainty: Environmental Politics, Technoscience, and Women Workers by Michelle Murphy

Book cover of Garbage Wars: The Struggle for Environmental Justice in Chicago by David Naguib Pellow

Within the fields of Environmental history and the History of science, Sellers’ book makes another key historiographical intervention. Given that industrial diseases could not be studied only in the laboratory because a) their cause wasn’t always known and b) often it was a combination of environmental factors along with the pollutants themselves which produced the illness, the type of medical and environmental knowledge produced required study in industrial settings. In this regard, the early industrial work-place was neither a “field”, such as we might find in environmental histories of particular geographic regions, nor “the laboratory”, in the case of a specific type of invention or discovery.

Beyond these two fields, Sellers makes wider contributions. By looking at the specific hazards that workers were exposed to, his work contributes to histories of labor, as well as histories of public health as it outlines specific tensions between medical education and industrial activity.

When we eventually meet Rachel Carson’s book, as the book draws to an end, we are able to understand not only the specific historical processes that resulted in increasing knowledge of toxins like DDT, but also the peculiar relationships of research between industry and health professionals. These research activities served to confirm the “benignity” (232) of American commodities in the latter part of the 20^th century. This helps the reader understand, for example why even though knowledge of lead poisoning was common, leaded gasoline boomed in production until its eventual-phase out in the 1970s.

Ultimately, Sellers’ book is a valuable contribution to multiple fields and there is much within it that can be mined depending on one’s interest. It is a a challenging but rewarding read for anyone interested in the history of environmentalism.

Review of From Angel to Office Worker: Middle-Class Identity and Female Consciousness in Mexico, 1890-1950 (2018) by Susie S. Porter

In this fabulous book, historian Susie S. Porter examines the material conditions of working women between 1890 and 1950 and the consequent formation of middle-class female identity in Mexico City. To highlight the historical existence of this social class in Mexican society, the author focuses her attention on the ways that societal practices and debates helped construct it. Porter’s class-based analysis of the early twentieth century Mexican women’s movement considers and engages both with public debate over the role of women in society as well as with women’s rights activism. Furthermore, she frames her research as part of a broader transnational history of women and gender that accounts for the contextually differentiated development of the “feminization of bureaucracy”. Taking into consideration the global feminist movements, the author represents how women’s work and feminist movements played out at the turn of the century, how they engaged and negotiated their position during and after the Revolution, and how they organized to demand improvements in their working and living conditions.

book cover for From Angel to Office Worker cover features a woman with a 1920s bob sitting at a typewriter.

From Angel to Office Worker is a history of labor feminism. Porter’s primary contribution to this scholarship lies in her focus on the middle and working classes as a combined unit of analysis rather than as separate entities fighting different battles within the struggle for women’s rights. In doing so, she makes a case for the inclusion of the middle classes into labor studies as a whole. Porter’s study highlights the role of women’s schools and women’s later incorporation in the post-revolutionary bureaucratic system in office jobs, such as typists, archivists, and administrative secretaries. She later contends that their employment informed their activism. In constructing her argument in this way, Porter draws from a long line of feminist literature that asserts the importance of the written word (cultura escrita) in the political empowerment of women.

This, of course, links her research with female activism for the right to education, a history she traces in the implementation of schools for girls in the city, with a particular focus on the Miguel Lerdo de Tejada Commercial School for Young Ladies, inaugurated in 1903 under the governance of Porfirio Díaz. The importance Porter gives to commercial schools is an essential aspect of the book. She presents them as places of socialization where girls gained social and cultural through which they were able to find jobs and form networks of employed and educated women. These would become the nexus of feminist organized struggles.

One of the book’s most important contributions is the history Porter presents of the concept of feminism. As any sociopolitical concept, feminism has a conceptual history of its own that reflects how the concept has been used and defined depending on the historical, cultural, and social contexts it has been applied in. Thought the book, the author traces this conceptual history and in doing so explains the importance this has in the production of women’s history in Mexico. Hence, the book has a second function aside from studying the development of Mexican middle-class identity, namely tracing this concept’s incursion into Mexican society through its use and application to certain female-related practices. Susie Porter traces these practices through a meticulous analysis of the press. Her primary sources are mostly newspapers, both feminine and national ones. Media (film) is only consulted in the last chapter due to the study’s temporal focus. There is a book there waiting to be written.

*Feminist march in Mexico City, circa 1940s. Source: D.R. Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, México.*

The book is divided in seven chronological chapters, each of which that trace the Mexican history of the concept of feminism and of middle-class identity formation in parallel. Although From Angel to Office Worker concludes before women won the right to vote in 1955, the last two chapters engage with the early stages of suffrage activism. The book begins by tracing the discursive and material conditions of class in Mexico at the turn of the century. Thus, the first chapter conceptualizes the author’s class-based analysis and contribution. From there, Porter engages with women’s education and their incursion into the workplace (Chapter 2-3). Changes in women’s employment led to a shift from teaching, the feminine profession per excellence, to working in the bureaucratic system (Chapter 4-6). In these three chapters, the author studies and analyzes the female organizations led by women, which pressured the government to take into consideration and to apply reforms for women in order to benefit for the revolutionary government. The author’s historical analysis is impressive since the history of Mexican feminisms is a highly understudied topic. Finally, the book finishes off with an analysis of Sarah Batiza Berkowitxz’s book Nosotras las taquígrafas, and its filmographic adaptation by Emilio Gómez Muriel which the author argues exemplify the general concerns and perceptions of female workforces at a pivotal moment when a backlash aimed at removing women from the bureaucratic workforce struck.

Today, organized feminist struggles are at the core of political mobilization in favor of social justice in Mexico. One need only skim the news to see the pressure both government and society are under to dramatically modify the power structures that have historically oppressed women and feminized bodies. From Angel to Office Worker demonstrates that organized feminisms and the struggles for women’s inclusion in the workplace and society in Mexico is a century-old battle that has gone through many different stages, of which the book analyzes only one. By taking up the book, the reader can be certain that they will deepen their knowledge on the fundamental role women have historically played in the consolidation and creation of history, citizenship, and society in Mexico. More importantly, the readers will be surprised to see Mexican revolutionary and postrevolutionary history in a completely different light, one which separates itself from its highly masculine characters, premises, and common places.

NEP Year in Review: Five Fascinating Talks and Panels from the Institute for Historical Studies, 2020-21

In Fall 2020 and working closely with the IHS Director, Dr. Miriam Bodian, we created a new section on NEP designed to showcase the work of the Institute for Historical Studies. Since its creation, this section has grown to feature a wide range of talks, panels, resources, book reviews and connected articles. Dr. Bodian is stepping down from the Directorship after four highly successful years. NEP would like to thank Dr. Bodian for her leadership and for a remarkably productive and exciting year of academic programming that we have been privileged to be part of. In a turbulent year, the Institute has provided a hub for academic insight, exchange and discussion. In this article, we highlight five fascinating panels and talks from the IHS in 2020-21 that are well worth revisiting. These are just a few examples of an incredible range of content all collected here.

“Rodney King and the LA Riots: 30 Years Later”

Thirty years ago, in March 1991, Rodney King, a Black man, was stopped after a police chase, ordered out of his car, and beaten savagely by Los Angeles police officers. An amateur videographer filmed the beating and sent the footage to a local news station. As the film was broadcast across the U.S., the incident came to symbolize the wider issue of disproportionate police brutality against minorities. In the wake of recent events, including the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement, the Institute for Historical Studies has organized this panel to discuss an issue that is no less pressing today than it was in 1991. To address the wider scope of the phenomenon, it will also include an examination of the long history of police violence targeting multiple racial and ethnic minorities in Texas.

For the full video and discussion see here

“Her Neighbor’s Wife: A History of Lesbian Desire Within Marriage”

At first glance, Barbara Kalish fit the stereotype of a 1950s wife and mother. Married at eighteen, Barbara lived with her husband and two daughters in a California suburb, where she was president of the Parent-Teacher Association. At a PTA training conference in San Francisco, Barbara met Pearl, another PTA president who also had two children and happened to live only a few blocks away from her. To Barbara, Pearl was “the most gorgeous woman in the world,” and the two began an affair that lasted over a decade. Through interviews, diaries, memoirs, and letters, Her Neighbor’s Wife traces the stories of hundreds of women, like Barbara Kalish, who struggled to balance marriage and same-sex desire in the postwar United States. In doing so, Dr. Lauren Jae Gutterman draws our attention away from the postwar landscape of urban gay bars and into the homes of married women, who tended to engage in affairs with wives and mothers they met in the context of their daily lives: through work, at church, or in their neighborhoods.

In the late 1960s and 1970s, the lesbian feminist movement and the no-fault divorce revolution transformed the lives of wives who desired women. Women could now choose to divorce their husbands in order to lead openly lesbian or bisexual lives; increasingly, however, these women were confronted by hostile state discrimination, typically in legal battles over child custody. Well into the 1980s, many women remained ambivalent about divorce and resistant to labeling themselves as lesbian, therefore complicating a simple interpretation of their lives and relationship choices. By revealing the extent to which marriage has historically permitted space for wives’ relationships with other women, Her Neighbor’s Wife calls into question the presumed straightness of traditional American marriage.

For the complete article and talk see here.

“Sex in an Old Regime City: Young Workers and Intimacy in France, 1660-1789”

Our ideas about the long histories of young couples’ relationships and women’s efforts to manage their reproductive health are often premised on the notion of a powerful sexual double standard. In Sex in an Old Regime City (Oxford University Press, 2020), Julie Hardwick offers a major reframing of the history of young people’s intimacy. Based on legal records from the city of Lyon, Hardwick uncovers the relationships of young workers before marriage and after pregnancy occurred, even if marriage did not follow, and finds that communities treated these occurrences without stigmatizing or moralizing. She finds a hidden world of strategies young couples enacted when they faced an untimely pregnancy. If they could not or would not marry, they sometimes tried to terminate pregnancies, to make the newborn go away by a variety of measures, or to charge the infant to local welfare institutions. Far from being isolated, couples drew on the resources of local communities and networks. Clerics, midwives, wet nurses, landladies, lawyers, parents, and male partners in and outside the city offered pragmatic, sympathetic ways to help young, unmarried pregnant women deal with their situations and hold young men responsible for the reproductive consequences of their sexual activity. This was not merely emotional work; those involved were financially compensated. These support systems ensured that the women could resume their jobs and usually marry later, without long-term costs. In doing so, communities managed and minimized the disruptions and consequences even of cases of abandonment and unprosecuted infanticide.

For the complete article and talk see here.

“Environmental Justice in Indian Country and Moving Toward a Transformational Land Ethic”

Drawing on the book’s theorizing of an Indigenized environmental justice, this talk covers some of the central themes examined in Professor Gilio-Whitaker’s recent publication As Long As Grass Grows: The Indigenous Fight for Environmental Justice from Colonization to Standing Rock (Beacon Press, 2019). It then leans into the author’s current work from her forthcoming book to understand what a transformational land ethic looks like. https://www.youtube.com/embed/ZkR_Pk6SgcM

Dina Gilio-Whitaker (Colville Confederated Tribes) is an independent writer and researcher in Indigenous studies, having earned a bachelor’s degree in Native American Studies and a master’s degree in American Studies from the University of New Mexico, and also holds the position of research associate and associate scholar at the Center for World Indigenous Studies. Her work focuses on issues related to Indigenous nationalism, self-determination, and environmental justice. She is the author of As Long As Grass Grows (see above) and co-author (with Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz) of “All the Real Indians Died Off” and 20 Other Myths About Native Americans (Beacon Press, 2016). An award-winning journalist, she is a frequent contributor to Indian Country Today Media Network and Native Peoples Magazine. Dr. Gilio-Whitaker is currently a Lecturer in American Indian Studies at California State University, San Marcos. Read more about her work on her website, and follow her research and publications on academia.edu.

For the complete talk see here

“Teaching Climate Change: Perspectives from History and the Humanities”

For the complete roundtable see here.

New Research: History Honors Projects

From the editors: Not Even Past is delighted to publish this introduction to new research by four remarkable students in the History Honors Program at UT. Their groundbreaking research spans different periods and places and was conducted in the most difficult of circumstances dues to the COVID-19 pandemic. Undergraduate research is at the heart of the Department’s unique three-semester Honors Program. Other disciplines in the Liberal Arts offer Honors study for seniors only. Students in the History program begin a year earlier. As juniors they take a class reserved just for them: the Honors Historiography Seminar (HIS 347L) taught by the Honors Director annually. Students learn experientially. They visit treasured UT archives: the Harry Ransom Center and the Briscoe, exploring with curators documents on display selected to support their research interests. Successful Honors graduates return to share their theses and recount tales of research in archives and abroad. For more about the program see here.

‘You Have Not What You Ought to Have’: Sexual Transgression and Gender Nonconformity of Women in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century England – Dawn McKamie

Science, Socialism, and a Spark: The Life and Work of H.J. Muller – by Seth Hamby

The Pazzi Conspiracy: The Change of Power in Medici Hegemony – by Hubert Ning

‘Not a Work of Magic’: The Foundations of Women’s Mobilization in the 1968 Mexico City Student Movement – by Sara Greenman-Spear

‘You Have Not What You Ought to Have’: Sexual Transgression and Gender Nonconformity of Women in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century England

By Dawn McKamie

For the past year, I have conducted independent historical research on a History Honors thesis that discusses both the broad cultural perspective and lived experiences of gender nonconforming women in England in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-centuries. Pictured above, is an illustration of a pair of women who proved vital to my research—the Ladies of Llangollen, Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby. Descending from elite families, the two women grew up in Ireland in the mid-1700s and formed a close relationship after attending boarding school together. Despite immense pressure from their families, neither woman desired to marry a man and they began to form a plan to flee from Ireland and begin a life together, far from the affluent circles they felt trapped in during their youth. After a failed initial attempt, the two women left Ireland together in May 1778. The two women settled together in the remote Northern Welsh town of Llangollen in 1779, where they became permanent fixtures.

The pair began to engage in gender nonconformity immediately after leaving Ireland and arriving in Llangollen. It was reported in a firsthand account from the visiting comedian Charles Mathews that “there is not one point to distinguish them from men; the dresses and powdering of their hair, their well-starched neckcloths, the upper part of their habits…made precisely like men’s coats, with regular black beaver hats, everything contributing to this semblance…”[1] Eleanor and Sarah were wholly devoted to each other; they were inseparable for fifty years and admitted to having ardent love for one another. Despite these characteristics being treated with disdain and aggression by the print culture of the time, the pair was beloved by their community and travelers alike.

Susan Lady Sitwell. “The Ladies of Llangollen 1819”

Why were these displays in gender nonconformance permitted by the community of Llangollen, when other such displays were met with harsh backlash? The answer lies at the intersection of class, location, and social activity. Overall, their existence was palatable to a society that preferred to neither see nor hear evidence of sins like same-sex attraction and excessively “deviant” gender nonconformance. The Ladies led fairly quiet lives, largely free from drama or scandal. Furthermore, their status as affluent individuals from historically important families likely afforded them a great deal of protection in society. Finally, at this time, Llangollen was sparsely populated — living in a small community in a remote location allowed Butler and Ponsonby to live as a couple and dress masculinely without fear of retribution that might have come from a larger, more publicized community. Though society in early modern England broadly abhorred gender nonconformity and same-sex attraction between women, these characteristics shielded the Ladies of Llangollen from any potential harsh backlash that was experienced by others who were not as fortunate.

[1]John Hicklin, “The Ladies of LLangollen, as sketched by many hands,” (Chester: Thomas Catherall, Eastgate Row, 1847).

Science, Socialism, and a Spark: The Life and Work of H.J. Muller

By Seth Hamby

On June 1, 1932, a handful of young Marxists at UT Austin anonymously published The Spark, a monthly newspaper focused on student issues, race, class, and poverty. It was the only edition published. In less than a month, its writers were found and suspended. The Spark was in part a reaction to the desperation of the Great Depression; many students worked long hours for little pay or could find no jobs at all. Many more were outraged by Jim Crow era oppression, especially powerful in segregated Austin. The Spark expressed these grievances and demanded that students act.

The Spark articulated a common fear that the student body’s impoverishment was not a temporary symptom of the Great Depression but rather a permanent effect of capitalism. The Spark criticized the university for failing to pay “a legal or a livable wage.” They printed their solution in bold, saying, “Students and Workers! Form A United Front!” The writers also warned that “what is facetiously known as a minimum wage law” – recently passed by the Texas legislature – was simply an empty promise to pacify the masses. As the illustration below implies, neither a minimum wage nor the “benefits of higher education” will save the reader from capitalism.

Cartoon shows men waiting in line behind a sign saying "20 cents per her". Caption reads: "After graduation--what?" — Illustration from *The Spark*, June 1, 1932. Artist unknown

The Spark was equally concerned with race, especially the disproportionate impact of the Great Depression. In a survey of 200 working-class families, The Spark noted the average white family spent a meager $1.15 on food per week. In contrast, families of color could afford even less, only seventy to eighty cents a week. When interviewing the respondents, they highlighted a few examples, including a recently laid-off couple that now had to rely on their disabled son to provide for the family. Similarly, a middle-aged African American couple had been surviving off a single bag of flour for the past month. They had been denied aid by the city of Austin.

Though The Spark was primarily written by students, genetics professor H.J. Muller had first inspired the idea. Throughout the process, Muller helped the students write and revise. After publishing the first issue, Muller sent a letter to a friend expressing his excitement at publishing a second issue. After an FBI raid on this friend’s home, the letter was found and turned over to the UT Board of Regents. My thesis focuses on the effects of the Regent’s investigation, alongside other Austin scandals, on the life and work of H.J. Muller, who would go on to win a Nobel Prize for his scientific research in 1946, many years after his unceremonious departure from UT Austin.

The Pazzi Conspiracy: The Change of Power in Medici Hegemony

By Hubert Ning

In the heart of Florence on April 26, 1478, hundreds of Florentines gathered in the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore, awaiting the rites for the observance of Easter day. The cathedral was silent with the exception of the ringing of a bell. There was no movement except for the eyes in the room following the elevation of the host. Suddenly out of nowhere came a shout, a scream, and a thud. Medici blood has been spilled.

This event would become known as the Pazzi Conspiracy, a critical event to my thesis research regarding the power dynamics of the Medici during the Florentine Republic. The Pazzi Conspiracy was a failed assassination plot against the de facto ruler of Florence, Lorenzo de’ Medici, and his brother, Giuliano de’ Medici. While Lorenzo escaped, Giuliano would be left on the floor, murdered.

My thesis centers on one extremely important document: Poliziano’s Coniurationios Commentarium. Following the conspiracy, maintaining a robust public image was pivotal to Lorenzo. In order to maintain legitimacy as the de facto ruler of Florence, it was critical that the narrative of the conspiracy was told from his perspective, and not from that of the conspirators. To achieve this, Lorenzo resorted to the dissemination of Poliziano’s commentarium, which was written immediately following the conspiracy in 1478 and was an account of the attack and its aftermath.

First page of Angelo Poliziano’s Coniurationios Commentarium. 1478. Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze, digitized for Early European Books. — First page of Angelo Poliziano’s *Coniurationios Commentarium*. 1478. Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze, digitized for Early European Books.

Examining Poliziano’s commentarium we clearly see explicit bias and subjectivity. In every description of Giuliano de’ Medici, he is praised in the form of an eulogy. His words literally described Giuliano as if he was a Greek God. Similarly, Poliziano praises Lorenzo in almost every way possible. He states that the people would stand outside the Medici palazzo and “celebrate his well-being” and that Lorenzo alone, “[was whom] the Florentine Republic depended and in whom lay all the hopes and the power of the people…”

But Poliziano’s commentary was not just limited to praise. All the conspirators were made out to be evil heretics. Describing Francesco Salviati, the Archbishop of Pisa and conspirator, Poliziano states, “Out of rage, Salviati sank his teeth into Francesco Pazzi’s corpse…he held on with his teeth to the other’s chest, eyes frozen in an angry stare.” And in describing Jacopo Pazzi, Poliziano states, “Even as he neared the moment of his death, Jacopo never abandoned his raging and furious nature, shouting that he was giving his soul over to the devil.”

Arguably, Poliziano’s commentarium can be seen as propaganda. Poliziano was indeed painting a clear image of good versus evil, which we know is seldom the case in history. But more importantly, he attempted to give his commentary legitimacy by stating that everything he wrote was from an observational standpoint, whether or not it was true. The Pazzi Conspiracy was a key event in the Florentine Republic’s history. However tilted in Lorenzo’s favor, Poliziano’s commentarium provides a unique insight into the events of that day and a real glimpse into the past.

‘Not a Work of Magic’: The Foundations of Women’s Mobilization in the 1968 Mexico City Student Movement

By Sara Greenman-Spear

“The power to respond in ’68 with the velocity they responded cost a lot of work, no one takes into consideration that after the 26th and 29th of July a week passed until the schools started to go on strike. That was not a work of magic, but what represented a very wide organizational infrastructure, that had been consolidating for many years.”[1] – Martha Servín Martínez, interview, transcript in “1968, El fuego de la esperanza,” Raúl Jardón, 253.

Martha Servín Martínez was a student studying biological sciences at Mexico City’s National Polytechnic Institute (Instituto Politécnico Nacional or IPN) when she joined a student movement in 1968. In late July of that year, a fight erupted between students from rival schools. While the fight may have remained a simple skirmish, the arrival of riot police known as granaderos heightened tensions as students viewed them as a symbol of the authoritarian Mexican government. As a result, this street fight became the catalyst for a series of protests by students against the government and their oppressive tendencies. These protests form part of what is now known as the 1968 Mexico City student movement.

Students protest. The front line holds signs with letters that spell ciencias — Student demonstration, August 1968. Source: Marcelí Perelló

I discovered Martha’s story and quote while researching for my Honors History thesis about the movement. The above quote, from an interview marking the movement’s 25^th anniversary, shows that women were politically active before 1968 and relied on these earlier experiences during the movement. This challenges common narratives that suggest otherwise. The 1968 movement is often depicted as a watershed moment unlike anything that came before it. For women in particular, this often means a supposed lack of political involvement prior to the protests. However, as Martha explains, 1968 was not spontaneous but the result of years of careful planning and organizing undertaken by herself and other student leaders. Martha’s experience in student politics, in fact, dated to 1966, two years before the start of the movement, and included involvement in anti-war protests.[2] Those earlier experiences gave Martha the connections and knowledge to organize the new movement in 1968. For this reason, women’s involvement in the 1968 protests cannot be disconnected from their prior activism.

Other women who joined the 1968 movement besides Martha took many different paths, as a result of their unique backgrounds. No matter their background, I have found that before 1968, these women were not politically inexperienced as other researchers have suggested in the past. Some women joined via an association with student politics or radical political organizations. Others were former members of the party that had controlled the Mexican government for decades or had a family history of political engagement (a history that, in many cases, included these young women’s mothers). Even working women whose political roots came from labor organizing or women from mainstream religious backgrounds, two groups often not considered actors in their own right when it comes to the student movement, joined because they felt an affinity between the students and the beliefs they held. No matter the case, many of the women who joined the 1968 student movement had a previous experience in activism or politics, which shaped their actions during the movement and, in turn, shaped the movement as a whole.

[1] Martha Servín Martínez, interview, transcript in 1968, El fuego de la esperanza, Raúl Jardón (México, D.F.: Siglo Veintiuno Editores, 1998), 253.

[2] Antecedentes de Martha Servín Martínez, Archivo Sergio Aguayo, The Mexican Intelligence Digital Archives (MIDAS), Center for Research Libraries.

To Rule the Waves: Britain’s Cable Empire and the Birth of Global Communications

Nowadays most of us take for granted that we can be in almost immediate contact with someone anywhere in the world. We can place a phone call, send a text, hold a Zoom meeting, or access a website based thousands of miles away and think nothing of it. The pattern of pixels you are looking at right now has arrived at your screen by a process to which you have probably given little thought and find more than a bit mysterious, knowing only that it has reached you via some combination of copper wires, fiber optic cables, and radio waves.

Across the long stretch of history, the availability of such rapid communications is very recent, and its consequences have been so enormous as to make it one of the hallmarks of modernity. The first glimmers of this era of modern communications appeared in the 1840s, when electric telegraph lines began to go up in parts of Europe and the United States. The next major step came in 1851, when the Submarine Telegraph Company laid the first undersea cable across the English Channel, putting London and Paris (or at least their financial markets and newspaper offices) into almost instantaneous contact. This was followed in 1858 by a cable across the Atlantic, and though this first one failed after only a month, a lasting cable was laid in 1866, and Europe and North America have been linked telegraphically ever since. By the early 1870s submarine cables had been extended to India, Australia, East Asia, and South America, and soon almost every major city or seaport in the world was part of the global telegraphic network.

*A souvenir piece of the failed Atlantic cable of 1858. Author’s photograph.*

Significantly, almost all of these cables were built, laid, and operated by British firms. As a maritime trading nation and the leading economic, industrial, and imperial power of the day, Britain had both the strongest motives and the most effective means to build and run a global cable system. This web of wires was often called the “nervous system of the British Empire,” with information pictured flowing in toward London and commands flowing out. All of this had far-reaching effects on commerce, the dissemination of news, the deployment of military and naval forces, and the administration of the empire.

The task of building and running the global cable network also had a strong effect on British work in electrical science. Cable telegraphy was the high tech industry of the day; it provided the main market for electrical expertise from the 1850s until at least the 1880s, and it drove the growth in Britain of a substantial community of electrical scientists and engineers. Moreover, work on long telegraph cables exposed British scientists and engineers to phenomena they would never have encountered in a laboratory or on overhead land lines, which were electrically much simpler, and so forced them to deal with problems that their counterparts in Germany, France, and the United States simply did not face. Much of what was distinctive about British electrical science in the second half of the nineteenth century—and it was remarkably distinctive, as well as highly productive—can be traced to the influence of cable telegraphy.

In my new book, Imperial Science: Cable Telegraphy and Electrical Physics in the Victorian British Empire I explore the growth of this technology and its effects on work in physics. It grows out of my earlier books The Maxwellians and Pursuing Power and Light: Technology and Physics from James Watt to Albert Einstein. The Maxwellians were a group of young physicists who in the 1870s and 1880s took up James Clerk Maxwell’s then poorly understood theory of the electromagnetic field, clarified it, extended it, and confirmed it experimentally. As I dug into the work of this group, I became especially intrigued by one of its members, Oliver Heaviside. The other Maxwellians were, as one might expect, university-trained physicists. Not Heaviside; he had left school at 16 and gone to work on a submarine cable across the North Sea. After turning to Maxwell’s theory in the early 1870s in hopes of finding a way to improve transmission rates, he spent the next two decades making himself into perhaps the leading electromagnetic theorist of the day, while devising new mathematical techniques of great power and utility—all in the context of cable telegraphy. My work on Heaviside convinced me that technological concerns held the key to some of the most important developments in physics in the nineteenth century, a theme I explored more broadly in Pursuing Power and Light.

*World cable map from 1901. Source: William Clauson-Thue, The ABC Universal Commercial Electric Telegraphic Code, 5th ed. (London: Eden Fisher and Co., 1901).*

In Imperial Science I have returned to the early years of the cable industry to examine exactly how this new technology shaped British work in electrical science in the mid-Victorian era. Cable telegraphy had its strongest effects in two areas: the seemingly mundane but in fact crucial realm of electrical measurement, and the fundamental question of how electromagnetic effects propagate through space and time.

Unlike overhead telegraph lines, which could be run very well with quite rough and ready methods, submarine cables required precise electrical measurements, both for quality control during their manufacture and, once the cables had been laid, to provide a way to locate faults in their insulation by performing tests on their ends. A lack of good measurements was sorely felt in the failure of the 1858 Atlantic cable, and a government-funded investigation launched in its wake gave an important impetus to efforts to develop accurate and reliable electrical units and standards. The British Association Committee on Electrical Standards, formed in 1861 on the initiative of the physicist William Thomson (later Lord Kelvin) and the cable engineer Fleeming Jenkin, devised a connected system of units for resistance (ohms), current (amps), and electromotive force (volts) and set about constructing accurate standards, particularly resistance coils—yardsticks, in effect, for gauging electrical quantities.

*The Great Eastern grappling for the broken end of the Atlantic cable in August 1865. Source: Louis Figuier, Mervielles de la Science (Paris, 1868), vol. 2: 281.*

In my chapter “Units and Standards: The Ohm Is Where the Art Is,” I trace the origins of the British Association committee and examine the close collaboration between physicists and engineers that marked its work. I focus in particular on Maxwell, who joined the British Association committee in 1862 and, along with Jenkin, carried out the experiments that established the value of the ohm. James Clerk Maxwell is not a name that is familiar to the broader public, but physicists consistently rank him just behind Newton and Einstein. Significantly, they generally regard Maxwell as a pure theorist. But while he was never as deeply involved in the practical side of the cable industry as his friend Thomson, who sailed on all of the early Atlantic cable-laying expeditions and made a fortune from his patented telegraph instruments, Maxwell in fact had closer ties to cable telegraphy than his later reputation might suggest. His work on the British Association committee, which had been set up to serve the needs of the cable industry, helped redirect Maxwell’s thinking at a crucial point, orienting him toward formulating his nascent theory of the electromagnetic field in terms of measurable relations. And after he and Jenkin has established the value of the ohm, Maxwell’s associated measurement of the “ratio of units”—a quantity whose nearness to the speed of light was, he showed, no coincidence—long provided some of the best experimental evidence for his electromagnetic theory of light.

Maxwell’s theory of the electromagnetic field was rooted in ideas Michael Faraday had first put forward in the 1830s, but its reception and later development owed much to the demands of cable telegraphy. The key here was the phenomenon of “retardation,” discovered by the cable engineer Latimer Clark in 1852. On overhead land lines, pulses of current passed along almost instantaneously while retaining their clarity; a line could carry as many signals per minute as a telegrapher could manage to tap out. But as Clark discovered, the case was very different on an undersea cable. He found that a sharp pulse—a “dot”—sent into one end of a cable emerged at the other only after an appreciable delay and, more importantly, in badly stretched and distorted form. If a telegrapher tried to send a string of dots and dashes in too quick succession, they would run together into an indecipherable blur. This put severe limits on the amount a traffic a cable could carry and, since the retardation worsened with the square of the length, it threatened to make any really long cable, like one across the Atlantic, too slow to be commercially viable.

Illustration of the instrument room of the Atlantic cable station at Valentia, Ireland, in 1865 — *The instrument room of the Atlantic cable station at Valentia, Ireland, in 1865. Source: Illustrated London News (7 August 1865) 47: 117.*

As Faraday himself pointed out, retardation was evidently the result of electrical induction acting across the layer of insulation that surrounded the copper wire at the center of the cable. As cable engineers and scientists wrestled with a problem that threatened their entire enterprise, they were led to focus closely on this inductive effect and more generally on exactly how electromagnetic effects propagate through the space or “field” around currents and charges. This became a hot issue in the late 1850s amid controversies over the design and operation of the planned Atlantic cable, and by the 1860s experience on that and other long cables had produced a growing “market” for field theory—a market that had not existed in the 1830s when Faraday first broached such ideas, only to have them widely dismissed as fanciful speculations. This market for field ideas was uniquely British, since only British engineers and scientists had to deal with retardation and the other propagation phenomena that were peculiar to submarine cables. To put the point simply, the British did field theory because they had submarine cables, while the Germans, French, and American did not because they had none.

In the final sections of Imperial Science, I return to the figure who got me started on the subject: Oliver Heaviside. Maxwell’s theory of the electromagnetic field is most compactly expressed in an iconic set of four interlinked vector equations. “Maxwell’s equations” are to be found inscribed in textbooks, printed on T-shirts, and cast in bronze beside the statue of Maxwell that stands near his birthplace in Edinburgh. But you will not find them in Maxwell’s Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism. The equations we now know as “Maxwell’s” have in fact been taken from papers Heaviside published in 1885. He arrived at this distillation of the theory—“Maxwell redressed,” as Heaviside called it—while searching for the best way to represent the propagation of energy along a telegraph cable. Maxwell’s equations are often seen as simply an expression of timeless laws of nature, and in a sense they are. But they were also the product of a particular time and place, and of the demands and opportunities presented by a particular technology: cable telegraphy, one of the characteristic technologies of the Victorian British Empire.

For more on this topic, see:

IHS Book Talk: “Imperial Science Cable Telegraphy and Electrical Physics in the Victorian British Empire,” by Bruce J. Hunt, University of Texas at Austin (History Faculty New Book Series)

Imperial Science: Cable Telegraphy and Electrical Physics in the Victorian British Empire

Film Review: La Llorona, Directed by Jayro Bustamante

The legend of La Llorona is ubiquitous in Latin America. The tale typically centers on a woman who, upon learning of her husband’s infidelity, drowns their son and daughter in a moment of madness. She soon realizes what she has done and drowns herself in a river. Despite her contrition, she is unable to enter heaven and wails incessantly throughout the night. For this reason, she is known as La Llorona, the weeping woman.

In Jayro Bustamente’s 2019 film adaptation, La Llorona cries for her children once more. But rather than being killed by their own mother, the Guatemalan director foregrounds Enrique Monteverde (Julio Díaz), a former Guatemalan general during the nation’s civil war, as the perpetrator.

Movie poster for La Llorona; byline "the past will haunt you". A women peers out from behind an embroidered veil.

This powerful and moving film begins in Monteverde’s mansion. The elite, upper-class officer — ostensibly based on Guatemala’s infamous President Efraín Ríos Montt — is depicted in decline, struggling to breathe, and increasingly paranoid. Bustamante employs dark lighting and gaunt makeup to underscore the man’s ailing state. Yet it quickly becomes clear that Monteverde is not senile but rather haunted by the ghosts of his past. He is standing accused of genocide against the Ixil Mayas during the nation’s 36-year-long civil war.

At Monteverde’s trial, a veiled Maya woman begins testifying in a shadowy courtroom. In a beautiful-tracking shot, she recounts how the Guatemalan army arrived in her village, brutalized children, and razed her house to the ground. The grey-haired former general then takes the stand, flanked by more victims of his crimes. He declares that his intention was “to create a national identity in this country” and that he does not even understand the accusations against him. Despite his defiance, the court finds him guilty, causing Monteverde to hyperventilate before being rushed to the hospital.

The abuelas [grandmothers] of Sepur Zarco. First row seated (from right-left): Antonia Choc (blue huipil); Felisa Cuc (orange huipil); Rosario Xo (blue huipil); Candelaria Maaz (pink huipil); Manuela Bá (light blue huipil); Demesia Yat (dark blue huipil);

Seated behind Demesia Yat (left) (wearing white huipil with green embroidery): Margarita Chub.

Standing, second row, (from right-left): Matilde Sub (pink); Catarina Caal (off-white); María Bá (purple huipil); Cecelia Xo (purple huipil); Carmen Xol (tan flowered huipil) — Director Jayro Bustamente’s courtroom scene drew inspiration from indigenous women who testified, with their faces covered by veils, against military officers in the the Sepur Zarco case. The groundbreaking case resulted in the conviction of two former military officers of crimes against humanity and granted 18 reparation measures to the women survivors and their community. Source: UN Women

As the defeated Monteverde and his family await the patriarch’s sentencing in their mansion, Bustamante’s La Llorona enters the picture. Alma (María Mercedes Coroy), an almost spectral Maya woman, arrives at the front door after wading through a crowd of demonstrators celebrating the guilty verdict outside. She requests work since the house’s servants have all resigned due to the former general’s increasingly erratic behavior. Distracted by Monteverde’s conviction, the family hires the woman as a housemaid despite knowing little about her.

When Alma starts her job, Bustamante unravels Monteverde’s sinister past, and the horrors of the Guatemalan Civil War, with increasing detail. The former general’s history of sexually abusing indigenous women, for example, surfaces as the otherworldly Alma compels the depraved man to watch her as she dries off in the bathroom. When the family discovers Monteverde aroused by Alma, his daughter Natalia (Sabrina De La Hoz) and granddaughter Sara (Ayla-Elea Hurtado) look at him with utter disgust. The following morning, Sara mysteriously tells her mother that Alma’s two children died. Bustamante juxtaposes these surreal scenes with slow shots of Monteverde chasing voices of wailing women down the mansion hallway with a gun. In the process, he prompts viewers to wonder if Alma has possessed the former general in retribution, or if the woman’s sheer presence has caused him to unravel from long-standing guilt.

María Mercedes Coroy as Alma walks through protestors toward police in a still from the film. — *María Mercedes Coroy as Alma walks toward police in a still from the film.*

Regardless, Monteverde and his family’s hallucinations only become more vivid the longer Alma resides in the mansion. Bustamente’s llorona eventually possesses Monteverde’s wife Carmen (Margarita Kenéfic), who previously denied her husband’s invidious history. “The past is the past,” she had claimed, “[and] if we turn around, we’ll turn into salt sculptures.” The older woman is then forced to live the murder of Alma’s children as though they were her own. Here, Bustamante’s choice to foreground Guatemalan elites’ confrontation with the war, rather than indigenous victims’ physical suffering, helps prevent watchers from being unwittingly transformed into voyeurs of violence.

Ultimately, La Llorona is an engrossing interpretation of the famous folk legend. Bustamante’s follow-up to Ixcanul (2015) and Temblores (2019) —which addressed similarly fraught topics — uncovers the civil war’s indelible imprints on Guatemalan society. His use of magical realism evinces how indigenous victims remain profoundly impacted by the army’s counterinsurgency and how perpetrators have repressed their guilt. Although Alma herself perhaps demanded more characterization, her role largely stands as a representation of the war’s victims. Her hauntings of the elite family reveal that the past is not even past in Guatemala. And only by allowing suffering to speak, or wail, will justice be realized.

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Session I: Emerging Perspectives: A Graduate Student Roundtable

Session II: Historicizing Climate

Session III: Contextualizing the Climate Crisis

Session IV: Practicing What We Preach: A Roundtable

Session V: Going Public with Climate History: A Roundtable

THURSDAY, APRIL 22

Opening Remarks

Land Acknowledgement

Conference Theme Introduction

Session I. Emerging Perspectives: A Graduate Student Roundtable

Opening Keynote Address: Bathsheba Demuth, Brown University

Session II. Historicizing Climate

FRIDAY, APRIL 23

Opening Remarks

Session III. Contextualizing the Climate Crisis

Session IV. Practicing What We Preach: A Roundtable

Session V. Going Public with Climate History: A Roundtable

Concluding Remarks

Closing Keynote Address: Naomi Oreskes, Harvard University

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“Her Neighbor’s Wife: A History of Lesbian Desire Within Marriage”

“Sex in an Old Regime City: Young Workers and Intimacy in France, 1660-1789”

“Environmental Justice in Indian Country and Moving Toward a Transformational Land Ethic”

“Teaching Climate Change: Perspectives from History and the Humanities”

‘You Have Not What You Ought to Have’: Sexual Transgression and Gender Nonconformity of Women in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century England

Science, Socialism, and a Spark: The Life and Work of H.J. Muller

The Pazzi Conspiracy: The Change of Power in Medici Hegemony

‘Not a Work of Magic’: The Foundations of Women’s Mobilization in the 1968 Mexico City Student Movement

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