Adam Clulow, Author at Not Even Past

CEAS Talk: “Migration in the Time of Revolution: China, Indonesia, and the Cold War” with Taomo Zhou

Friday April 30, 2021 • Virtual Event

What happens when geostrategic collaborations between states intersect with ethnic tensions? In response to this question, this talk examines how two of the world’s most populous countries interacted between 1945 and 1967, when the concept of citizenship was contested, political loyalty was in question, national identity was fluid, and the boundaries of political mobilization were blurred. Even though China and Indonesia do not share geographical borders, the existence of 2.5 million ethnic Chinese in Indonesia—many of whom had economic influence but an unclear citizenship status—gave rise to a porous social frontier. Through their everyday social, political and economic practices, “ordinary” Chinese diaspora influenced bilateral diplomacy. Their life experiences were shaped by but also helped shape the trajectory of governmental relations.

Taomo Zhou is an Assistant Professor of History at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, specializing in modern Chinese and Southeast Asian history. Taomo received her B.A. from Peking University and Waseda University, M. Sc. with Distinction from the London School of Economics and Ph.D. in History from Cornell University. Her writings have been accepted by journals such as Diplomatic History, Journal of Asian Studies, The China Quarterly, and The Critical Asian Studies. Taomo’s first book, Migration in the Time of Revolution: China, Indonesia and the Cold War (Cornell University Press, 2019), was selected as one of the Best Books of 2020 by Foreign Affairs and received an honorable mention for the Harry J. Brenda Prize. Taomo is working on a new research project on Shenzhen—the first Special Economic Zone of China—and its connections with the Export Processing Zones and free ports across Southeast Asia. This research is funded by a Tier 1 grant from the Ministry of Education, Singapore.

Talk: “Migration in the Time of Revolution: China, Indonesia, and the Cold War” with Taomo Zhou

Talk organized by UT Department of History Professor Madeline Hsu.

This event will be held on Zoom and is open to the public. Please register here.

Outstanding Graduate Teaching: Dr. Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra

Outstanding Graduate Teaching: Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra

Not Even Past congratulates Dr. Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, who received the Outstanding Graduate Teacher Award for 2021. The Outstanding Graduate Teaching Award recognizes the distinguished teaching of a graduate faculty member. It is one of numerous such awards for Dr. Cañizares-Esguerra, who also received the 2018 Nancy Lyman Roelker Mentorship Award from the American Historical Association. In their nomination letter for that award, a group of his students wrote:

“We […] honor Jorge’s commitment to mentoring an entire generation of top-tier scholars, including graduate students, young scholars, and junior colleagues at UT Austin and around the world, regardless of background, age, country, or institutional affiliation. They carry with them his new paradigms of historical thinking, as well as his broad vision of global history beyond the field’s conventional constrictions. They excel as graduate students, winning competitive national and international grants, succeeding in the job market with postdoctoral fellowships and tenure-track positions at top-tier universities. They also bring with them Jorge’s lessons of intellectual and personal generosity. Bestowing Jorge with the Nancy Lyman Roelker Mentorship Award would enable a broad community of scholars to thank Jorge for enriching historical scholarship and many lives around the world; in [one professor’s] words ‘I know of no other graduate mentor so invested in their students’ lives, no other teacher who has given so much of themselves to re-imagine what the history of the Americas could be.’ As [another professor] explains, ‘in terms of professional recognition and remuneration, mentorship of graduate students and early career scholars is almost literally a thankless task. And that is why Dr. Cañizares-Esguerra’s unwavering commitment to his graduate students and to early career scholars in the United States, in Latin America, and elsewhere, is so impressive.'”

In recent years, students working with Dr. Cañizares-Esguerra have won a string of prestigious prizes. They include Dr. Bradley J. Dixon (’18) and Dr. Cameron Strang (’13) who were each awarded William and Mary Quarterly’s Richard L. Morton prize; Dr. Adrian Masters (’18) who won the Conference on Latin American History’s James Alexander Robertson Memorial Prize; and Dr. Kristie Flannery (’19) who won both the Lathrop Prize for Best Dissertation and the UT Graduate School’s Outstanding Dissertation Award.

Dr. Cañizares-Esguerra has worked with numerous groundbreaking researchers, some currently in the graduate programs, others who have graduated. To help celebrate this award and as part of NEP’s commitment to sharing the latest research we wanted to profile just a few of these students, current and former, who have worked with Dr. Cañizares-Esguerra.

Alexander Chaparro-Silva is a third-year PhD Student in History at UT-Austin. Drawing upon intellectual and cultural history, his dissertation analyzes how Latin American intellectuals came to the US, offered a sophisticated comparative reflection on democracy and race relations in both Americas, and crafted racialized continental differences during the nineteenth century. His project examines the creation of a vibrant continental public sphere, from Santiago de Chile to New York, and highlights the importance of transnational intellectual networks in the production of this comparative reflection between South and North. His peer-reviewed articles have been published in the US, Colombia, and Argentina. He is also a 2020 recipient of the James R. Scobie Memorial Award from the Conference on Latin American History.

Read more about Alexander’s research here.

Diana Heredia-López is Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of History at UT Austin. She holds a B.Sc. in Biology from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). Her interests have always revolved around how humans have studied nature and made use of it. This theme is particularly relevant for her since Latin America is usually seen as a site for extraction of natural resources and a place to find exotic plants and animals. Upon coming to the University of Texas at Austin she has explored different methodologies to incorporate new voices into global histories of science, commerce, and consumption.

Her dissertation project focuses on cochineal trading networks in early colonial Mexico. She examines the social and material culture transformations that Central and Southern Mexico communities underwent as they became embedded in early modern global commerce. The obtention of this highly specialized insect crop entailed establishing commercial relations with indigenous traders and producers, a process distinct from silver production but also quite profitable. By integrating the histories of dye producers, intermediaries, and merchants into the Atlantic world, she seeks to expand current understandings of early modern consumption and its ties to knowledge production.

Ernesto Mercado defended his dissertation in April and will be a Mellon Faculty Fellow and Assistant Professor of History of the Black Diaspora at Dartmouth College, starting in July 2021. Ernesto’s work offers a revisionist history of Lesser Antillean geopolitics. He demonstrates how the autonomous community of Black Carib Indians shaped the early-modern Antilles as much as Spain, England, Holland, and France. The Black Caribs were a group of formidable seafarers, warriors, and diplomats. They emerged out of mixing between Antillean Indians, Africans, and Europeans brought into contact through captivity, intermarriage, and ritual adoption. By juxtaposing Spanish, English, and French official and missionary sources, Ernesto demonstrates how the Black Caribs evolved into independent slave traders, smugglers, and prolific planters, fully integrating themselves into the Atlantic World’s politics and economy, between the Spanish conquest of Puerto Rico in the 1510s and the French Revolutionary Wars in the 1790s.

Kristie Flannery is a historian of the global Spanish empire and early modern Pacific worlds. She is interested in the contested connections that colonialism, capitalism, and faith forged between the Americas and Asia. Dr. Flannery sifts through scattered imperial archives to write history from above and below, recovering how subalterns experienced, imagined, challenged, and ultimately made the local and global communities that they inhabited. Her research also tries to analyze the early modern ideas and practices that, for better or for worse, persist and influence the way we see each other and our world today.

Her first book on piracy and empire in the Philippines is under contract with Penn Press. You can learn more about Dr. Flannery’s articles and book chapters here. She is an editor-at-large of the Toynbee Prize Foundation blog, and a member of the Global Urban History Project’s International Advisory Committee.

Dr. Flannery is a research fellow in the Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences at Australian Catholic University. Previously, she held a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver.

Read more about Dr. Flannery’s work here.

Christopher Heaney is an historian of Modern Latin America, with research interests in the history of science, indigeneity, museums, race, and deathways in the Andes, Americas, and the World. He is the author of Cradle of Gold: The Story of Hiram Bingham, a Real-Life Indiana Jones and the Search for Machu Picchu (2010), published in Peru as Las Tumbas de Machu Picchu: La historia de Hiram Bingham y la Busqueda de las últimas ciudades de los Incas (2012). He is currently at work on two monographs, both informed by research in museums and archives in Peru, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Spain: a cultural and material history of the collection, circulation, study, and display of Inca mummies and ancient Peruvian skulls in the Americas; and an intellectual history of the legalization of grave-robbing in Peru and the Anglo-Iberian Atlantic World.

His approach to teaching presumes a Latin America that has always been modern, and an Americas and Atlantic World shaped by movements, infrastructures, and knowledge of Native peoples. In 2012, he co-founded and was the Editor-in-Chief of The Appendix, a journal of narrative and experimental history. From 2016 to 2018 he was the Barra Postdoctoral Fellow at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. His work has been featured by The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and The New York Times.

See more of Dr. Heaney’s profile here.

Chloe Ireton is a Lecturer in the History of Iberia and the Iberian World 1500-1800 at University College London, and works on the histories of race, slavery, freedom, and empire in the early Southern Atlantic world. Dr. Ireton joined UCL in 2018, after completing a PhD at The University of Texas at Austin. Over the last few years, Chloe has also held institutional affiliations with the Departmento de Historia at Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá, the Instituto de Investigaciones Históricas at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México in Mexico City, and the Área de Historia Moderna at the Universidad de Pablo Olavide in Sevilla, and she has also been a fellow in residence at the John Carter Brown Library in Providence, Rhode Island, and the Huntington Library in San Marino, California. Dr. Ireton is currently at work on Intellectual History from Below: Slavery & Freedom in the Early Iberian Atlantic, a monograph that explores how free and enslaved Black men and women in the early Atlantic world conceptualized two strands of political thought – freedom and slavery. The monograph adopts a social history approach that explores Black voices in, and across, diverse historical archives to think about the possibilities of writing an intellectual history from below through fragmentary evidence and archival silences. Intellectual History from Below maps how enslaved and free Black Africans in the early Atlantic conceptualized and defined meanings of slavery and freedom as Black individuals and communities fought to obtain greater degrees of lived freedoms in colonial society through their work as litigators in court, as petitioners for royal justice, membership in trans-Atlantic communities, laborers, and in their daily lives across the early Atlantic world. The book explores how Black Africans and their descendants spearheaded diverse discursive landscapes about freedom and slavery in the early Hispanic Atlantic, and traces how their discourses and actions reshaped European political thought.

See more of Dr. Ireton’s profile here.

Refusing to Forget

Last week, the Organization of American Historians awarded the prestigious Friend of History Award to Refusing to Forget. The award recognizes an institution or organization, or an individual working primarily outside college or university settings, for outstanding support of historical research, the public presentation of American history, or the work of the OAH. The citation reads as follows:

Refusing to Forget, an award-winning educational nonprofit, works to increase public awareness of an often-forgotten period in the history of the United States, and to raise the profile of a struggle for justice and civil rights that continues to influence social relationships today.

Between 1910 and 1920, ethnic Mexicans living on the Texas-Mexico border were targets of state-sanctioned violence. The dead included women and men, the aged and the young, longtime residents and recent arrivals. They were killed by strangers, by neighbors, by vigilantes, and at the hands of local law enforcement officers and the Texas Rangers. Some were summarily executed after being taken captive, or shot under the flimsy pretext of trying to escape. Some were left in the open to rot, others desecrated by being burnt, decapitated, or tortured. Extralegal executions became so common that a San Antonio reporter observed that “finding of dead bodies of Mexicans, suspected for various reasons of being connected with the troubles, has reached a point where it creates little or no interest. It is only when a raid is reported or an American is killed that the ire of the people is aroused.”

Far from being surreptitious, the violence was welcomed, celebrated, and even instigated at the highest levels of society and government. Although historians estimate that several thousand Mexican nationals and American citizens were killed, this period of violence has received little public attention.

The advocacy and awareness-raising work of Refusing to Forget has included the launching of a major museum exhibit at the Bullock Texas State History Museum and working to erect historical markers across seven Texas counties. It has meant convening conversations and creating lesson plans for K–12 educators. For all these efforts and in recognition of its continuing ambitions for the future, Refusing to Forget receives the 2021 OAH Friend of History Award.

Refusing to Forget’s members are:

Christopher Carmona, University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, Member

The Refusing to Forget team dedicated the OAH award to Melba Coody, a collaborator and friend who recently passed away. Coody was a descendant of Jesus Bazán and Antonio Longoria who were murdered in 1915 in Hidalgo County. She helped preserve that history, she loaned photographs for the Bullock Museum exhibit, presented her family history at public history events and at conferences, and volunteered her time to speak with journalists like Rosa Flores at CNN. We are grateful that her interview with Rosa Flores is available for people to watch online:

Refusing to Forget has previously won the American History Association’s Herbert Feis Award for distinguished contributions to public history and the Autry Public History Prize.

The projects undertaken by Refusing to Forget are remarkable–both for their scholarship and their public reach. In this profile, we highlight just a few of their many efforts to bring awareness to a period of state-sanctioned violence.

Life and Death on the Border, 1910-1920: An exhibit at the Bullock Texas State History Museum

Life and Death on the Border re-examines historic events in Texas during which some of the worst state-sanctioned racial violence in the U.S. occurred. On display from January – April 2016 at the Bullock Museum, Texas’ flagship history museum in Austin, the exhibit examined the climate for ethnic Mexicans living on the Texas-Mexico border who were targets of state-sanctioned racial violence during the early 20th century.

Complete with photographs, relics from family archives, Texas Ranger artifacts and more, the exhibition made connections between the past and the continuing struggle for justice today. The American Association for State and Local History (AALSH) awarded the exhibit the Leadership in History Award of Merit. The award acknowledges standards of excellence in the collection, preservation, and interpretation of state and local history in order to make the past more meaningful to all Americans.

In the Bullock exhibit, the truth is beginning to be told. -San Antonio Express News

You can listen as well to a 15 Minute History episode with John Morán González here.

Historical Markers Project

Beginning in 2014, the Refusing to Forget team started supporting applications for Undertold Historical Markers. The Texas State Historical Commission approved two historical markers in 2014, a third in 2015, and a fourth in 2016. In October 2017, the team unveiled the first historical marker in Cameron County to recognize the unknown victims of La Matanza (The Massacre) in 1915.

This project reflects wider efforts in Texas to recognize previously ignored or overlooked people, events, communities, and structures in Texas history. County historical commissions recently unveiled related state historical markers in Anderson County to memorialize the 1910 Slocum Massacre and in Karnes County to honor Gregorio Cortez. To date, the Undertold historical marker program has unveiled over 100 state historical markers.

Markers:

La Matanza, Cameron County

Jovita Idar, Webb County

Jesus Bazán & Antonio Longoria, Hidalgo County

Porvenir Massacre, Presidio County

Antonio Rodríguez, Edwards County

Lesson Plans

To meet the requests from Texas teachers, Refusing to Forget is developing curriculum specifically designed for K-12 classrooms. These forthcoming lesson plans will provide historical context and activities for educators interested in incorporating the historical markers, which were recently passed by the Texas Historical Commission, into their local history units.

A group of men and one women stand facing the camera in a print shop — *Jovita Idar, second from right, in El Progreso print shop. Source: University of Texas San Antonio Special Collections*

The first lesson plan available on Refusing to Forget’s website explores the life of Jovita Idar, who was a prominent civil rights activist and journalist in South Texas. The team at Refusing to Forget secured a historical marker for Idar in Laredo, Texas, and the lesson plan is designed to help educators contextualize the Jovita Idar historical marker. Designed for seventh grade classrooms, the sample lesson plans include a teacher guide, handouts, primary sources, and suggested activities.

Introducing the keynote speakers for Climate in Context – Bathsheba Demuth

"The Reindeer & the End of the World: Apocalypse, Climate, and Soviet Dreams" by Bathsheba Demuth

From the Editors: The Climate in Context: Historical Precedents and the Unprecedented conference will take place on April 22-23, 2021. It is free and open to the public. Register to attend here. In preparation for the conference, we are delighted to introduce the work of Dr Bathsheba Demuth. Dr Demuth is Assistant Professor of History and Environment and Society at Brown University and a keynote speaker for the conference.

Sometime in the middle of 2019, I began to see a series of haunting, short articles about nature appear in the mediascape I frequent. The articles were written by a young academic historian with an unforgettable sensitivity and authority about a world I thought I knew — modern Russia and Siberia. I was impressed by the quality of the writing, but I was also impressed by the successful effort of an assistant professor to reach out to readers of a wide range of publications, from big brand names like The New Yorker and The Atlantic, to smallish online magazines with niche audiences like Aeon and Emergence. The author not only described the history and the stakes of environmental calamity in the Far North, but she did so in unusual ways, bringing us closer than I imagined possible to the experiences of the creatures with whom we share our worlds. As someone who has been writing about animism and immersion in nature, I couldn’t wait to read her book, and I wasn’t alone.

Bathsheba Demuth is Assistant Professor of History and Environment and Society at Brown University. She received her PhD from UC Berkeley in 2016. Her first book, Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait was published by W.W. Norton in 2019 and promptly won a bouquet of prizes, six in all. The book examines the history of the environment on both the U.S. and the Russian/Soviet sides of Beringia and shows the ways that socialism and capitalism had equivalent effects on the region. But the book isn’t about the human impact on land and sea. In Floating Coast, Demuth examines the tangled interactions of the whole ecosystem – animal, vegetable, mineral — over a two-century stretch of time. In so doing, she also compels us to re-think our notions about time itself and the ways that our human experience of past and present merges with the time scales of animals, plants, and place.

Cover of the Floating Coast, features whale's tail above the water

It is not easy to write about animals in a way that conveys their experience without seeming false or twee. Demuth does this with remarkably close observation of their movements within their environments, which she joins to description and analysis of the forms of their interdependence that captures plausible motives in their behaviors. Such observations are rooted in Demuth’s own experience. For two years, between high school and college, she lived in the Yukon where she was responsible for a team of sled-dogs. She took care of them and they, literally, took care of her in the extreme weather where they were the experts. Except for that time when they left her in the snow in their rush home to eat.[1]

It is also not easy to write about the environment with anything but despair. However, Demuth also gives us new ways to think about the worlds and bodies we inhabit. This is from an article written last summer, about the fires that have consumed Siberian forests, and raised global temperatures, for years now.

Smoke rises above trees during a forest fire on Yuganskiy Nature Reserve — *Forest fire in Yuganskiy Nature Reserve, July 2012. Source: Tatiana Bulyonkova*

“Playing host to the coronavirus for three months has made me think about normalcy—its shifty character, how it plays with my sense of time—and the drive to pretend that things are at stasis, despite all evidence indicating turmoil. My case of COVID-19 was never acute; I was not on a ventilator or even close, nor do I have the harsher ills of many long-haulers, who report roving pain, memory loss, tachycardia. My experience of the virus has not been an event so much as a shift, erosion rather than earthquake. The most enduring symptom is a corporeal heat wave that shows no more sign of fully lifting than the warmth in northern Eurasia. As the weeks drag on, the hale clarity of my normal self is receding. Perhaps this is just what I am now: weaker, wan, soggy-brained.

As summer tips toward autumn—an autumn in which there will be too little sea ice and too much virus—I do not want to forget the possibilities of my April self, or of Siberia without fire, or of whales by the tens of thousands. The need to build a society that cares for all, that does not let some hide in the safety of distance, has never been more acute. The habits of wealth need reconditioning to account for the real costs of consumption. These are forward-looking projects. My experience of this virus makes me think, however, that we should not forget a longer view, one able to see how the conditions of 2020 are not inevitable. The line of heat that connects my body and Siberia has existed for only a few centuries. It is not inevitable. Thinking past it, as this summer of our many discontents moves into fall, requires a kind of split imagination: to conjure moments of past flourishing, and a future where we might flourish again.”[2]

[1] “The Power of Fear in the Thawing Arctic,” The Atlantic, September 17, 2019.

[2] “The Empty Space Where Normal Once Lived,” The Atlantic, August 28, 2020.

Introducing the keynote speakers for Climate in Context – Naomi Oreskes

From the Editors: The Climate in Context: Historical Precedents and the Unprecedented conference will take place on April 22-23, 2021. It is free and open to the public. Register to attend here. In preparation for the conference, we are delighted to present this introduction to the work of Dr. Naomi Oreskes. Dr Oreskes is the Henry Charles Lea Professor of the History of Science at Harvard University and a keynote speaker for the conference.

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

Not many historians of science have had their work cited in an Oscar-winning movie by a Nobel Prize-winning vice president. But Naomi Oreskes’s paper “The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change,” published in Science in 2004 and cited by Al Gore in his film “An Inconvenient Truth,” not only established that virtually all climate scientists agree that anthropogenic climate change is all too real. It also established Oreskes as a leading voice both in understanding the formation of that consensus and in exposing the powerful forces that have sought to deny it. In her subsequent writings, particularly Merchants of Doubt (2010) and her fictional “history of the future,” The Collapse of Western Civilization (2014), both written with Erik M. Conway, Oreskes has carried this work much further, reinforcing her standing as a public intellectual on issues of climate change and the place of science in contemporary policy debates. In Why Trust Science (2019), based on her Tanner Lectures at Princeton University, she has brought together much of her recent work to argue that the real basis of the trustworthiness of scientific knowledge lies in its social character.

Originally trained as a mining engineer at Imperial College in London, Oreskes worked in the field in Australia for several years before returning to graduate school at Stanford, where she completed a specially designed doctoral program in both geological research and the history of science. She then taught at Dartmouth and New York University before moving to UC-San Diego, where she spent fifteen years in the History Department and the Program in Science Studies. In 2013 she moved to Harvard, where she is now a professor of the History of Science and an affiliated professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences.

Oreskes’s first book, The Rejection of Continental Drift: Theory and Method in American Earth Science (1999), already reflected her combination of careful historical research with close attention to issues of method and credibility in science. Along the way she produced an especially illuminating paper, “Objectivity or Heroism? On the Invisibility of Women in Science,” in which she used the case of the astronomer and geophysicist Eleanor Lamson to examine how and why scientific work done by women is often devalued or ignored. The History of Science Society awarded this paper its Women in Science Prize, just one of the many prizes and honors Oreskes has received.

In 2011, Merchants of Doubt received the Watson Davis Prize, awarded by the History of Science Society for the best book in the field aimed at a wide public. In it, Oreskes and Conway examine, as their subtitle states, “How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Climate Change.” Focusing in particular on Fred Seitz, Fred Singer, Bill Nierenberg, and Robert Jastrow, physicists associated with the George C. Marshall Institute and other politically conservative “free market” organizations, Oreskes and Conway show how this small circle of well-placed scientists was able to sow doubts in the public mind and slow the regulation of tobacco smoke, acid rain, ozone-depleting chemicals, and most prominently, the sources of anthropogenic climate change. Merchants of Doubt attracted wide attention and strong praise. Robin McKie of the The Guardian was not alone in calling it “the best science book of the year,” and Al Gore declared that “Anyone concerned about the state of democracy in America should read this book.” Robert Kenner’s 2014 documentary film, also called Merchants of Doubt, brought the themes of the book to an even wider audience.

In Merchants of Doubt, The Collapse of Western Civilization, and a third book with Conway, The Magic of the Marketplace: The True History of a False Idea, due out later this year, Naomi Oreskes has brought the tools of historical research to bear in innovative ways on issues of pressing global concern. Her 2004 paper on the scientific consensus on climate change appeared in a section of Science called “Essays on Science and Society: Beyond the Ivory Tower,” and that is a fitting description of her work and its impact.

Bruce J. Hunt, History Department, University of Texas

Engaging Communities: Emilio Zamora and the Work of the Historian

In April 2021, Professor Emilio Zamora was honored with the Roy Rosenzweig Distinguished Service Award from the Organization of American Historians. The citation was as follows:

Recognizing a stellar career as an academic historian, and an equally stellar record as a public interpreter of the American past for communities across Texas, the Organization of American Historians presents Professor Emilio Zamora, University of Texas at Austin, with the OAH Roy Rosenzweig Distinguished Service Award. Professor Zamora is not only an award-winning researcher and writer but also a visible scholar-citizen who has made significant contributions to the public understanding of Mexican American people in Texas.

Emilio Zamora has roots in the Mexico-Texas region dating back to the 1700s, growing up and educating himself on both sides of the border. His research interests include the history of Mexicans in the United States and their relationship with Mexico, as well as oral history, the history of the U.S. working class, Texas history, and the archival enterprise in Texas and northern Mexico. Dr. Zamora has single-authored three books, co-edited three anthologies, assisted in the production of a Texas history text, co-authored a Texas history text for high schools, co-edited an Ebook on Tejano history, translated and edited a World War I diary, and written numerous scholarly articles, chapters, and essays. He has received seven best-book awards, a best-article prize, and a Fulbright García-Robles fellowship. Zamora is a lifetime member of the Texas Institute of Letters, a lifetime Fellow with the Texas State Historical Association, and a former member of the Board of Directors and a former president of the Texas State Historical Association.

In recognition of his many contributions to the pursuit of historical knowledge and his work as a public-facing scholar, intellectual, and educator, the Organization of American Historians is proud to present Emilio Zamora with the OAH Roy Rosenzweig Distinguished Service Award.

See also the announcement from the Department of History.

As the citation makes clear, Dr. Zamora’s achievements defy quick summary. He holds a George W. Littlefield Professorship in American History at UT and is an affiliate with the Center for Mexican American Studies and the Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies at the same institution. Zamora writes and teaches on the history of Mexicans in the United States, Texas history and oral history, and focuses on the working class and transnational experiences of Mexicans in Texas during the twentieth century. His latest awards include: the 2017 Scholar of the year from the National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies (NACCS), the 2017 NACCS Tejas Foco Premio Estrella de Aztlán Lifetime Achievement Award, the 2019 Ruth A. Allen Pioneer in Texas Working Class History Award from the Texas Center for Working-Class Studies, Collin College and of course the OAH award. Zamora is a lifetime member of the Texas Institute of Letters, a lifetime Fellow with the Texas State Historical Association (TSHA), and a past-President of TSHA in 2019-20, including membership in the organization’s Executive Committee. He has served as a member of the Board of TSHA, and is on the Advisory Committee of the University of Texas’ Voces Oral History Project, the Advisory Board of the Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Project, the University of Houston, and the Editorial Board of the U.S. Latino Oral History Journal. His community engagement record includes current membership in the Patronato of the Mexican American Civil Rights Institute at Our Lady of the Lake University at San Antonio, and past membership on the Advisory Board of Austin’s Emma S. Barrientos Mexican American Cultural Center (ESB-MACC)and Austin’s Hispanic/Latino Quality of Life Commission. Zamora is also a founding and continuing member of Nuestro Grupo, the sponsor of Academia Cuauhtli / Cuauhtli Academy, a Saturday morning language and cultural revitalization program in Austin sponsored by the ESB-MACC and the Austin ISD

For more about his many publications, see a brief profile of two of Dr Zamora’s books below. He describes his own background as follows:

I am a first-generation college student. My motivation to attend college stems from a family understanding that as the oldest of nine children I had to help out with parenting responsibilities. This partly meant that I was to set an example in school and other endeavors. My first professional decision was to become a barber. The low earnings, especially after young men began to grow long hair, led me to consider attending college. I decided to attend Texas A&M University in Kingsville (then known as Texas A&I University) because it was the only four-year institution in South Texas in the late 1960s. The Mexican-American social movement of the 1960s and 1970s inspired me to continue to do well in my studies and to aspire for greater things, including a Master’s degree in History, Education, and Spanish and then a doctorate in history. The added sense of responsibility to do public service energized me. My parents were very supportive, although they had to do without their son’s financial contributions to the family’s working-class income. My advice to first-generation students is: Embrace the opportunity to set new directions for your family. It’s gratifying and gives added meaning to your dreams.

The following short video documents a little of Dr. Zamora’s extraordinary life:

Books

Claiming Rights and Righting Wrongs in Texas: Mexican Workers and Job Politics during World War II

In Claiming Rights and Righting Wrongs in Texas, Emilio Zamora traces the experiences of Mexican workers on the American home front during World War II as they moved from rural to urban areas and sought better-paying jobs in rapidly expanding industries. Contending that discrimination undermined job opportunities, Zamora investigates the intervention by Mexico in the treatment of workers, the U.S. State Department’s response, and Texas’ emergence as a key site for negotiating the application of the Good Neighbor Policy. He examines the role of women workers, the evolving political struggle, the rise of the liberal-urban coalition, and the conservative tradition in Texas. Zamora also looks closely at civil and labor rights–related efforts, implemented by the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) and the Fair Employment Practice Committee.

Reviews and Praise

“Claiming Rights and Righting Wrongs in Texas is a strong example of clear thinking, clean writing, and nuanced analysis. As the author himself underscores, given the importance of this period for the history of Mexicans and Mexican-Americans in the United States, it is remarkable how little research has been done on the period between the end of the Great Depression and the early 1960s. Zamora’s exhaustively researched and dense analysis of developments in Texas should help fill this gap.”

David G. Gutiérrez, The Southwestern Historical Quarterly

“Zamora’s argument rests on an impressive array of sources, from labor market reports and FEPC records to Spanish-language newspapers and Mexican government documents. . . . His book encourages historians to rethink old interpretations and should be widely read.”

Kevin Allen Leonard, Journal of Social History

The World of the Mexican Worker in Texas

The twentieth century brought industrialization to Texas cities. For Mexican workers in the state, this meant worsening economic conditions, widespread discrimination, and an indifferent or at times hostile Anglo labor movement. Faced with such challenges, Mexicans often looked to each other or toward Mexico for support and inspiration in building a largely autonomous, occasionally trans-border labor movement. In this first book-length examination of the earliest organized efforts by Mexican-origin workers in Texas, Emilio Zamora challenges the usual, stereotypical depiction of Mexican workers as passive and hard to organize.

Instead, working within the framework of the “new labor history,” he looks beyond the conventional focus on trade unionism and collective bargaining to encompass the broader social experiences and culture of Mexicans as a national minority and a repressed segment of the working class.

Through extensive use of Spanish-language archives in Mexico and the United States, Zamora examines workers’ independent organizations–including mutual aid societies and cooperatives that functioned as unions–as well as spontaneous informal actions, including strikes, by Texas Mexican workers. He portrays the gradual yet increasing integration of those organizations into the mainstream labor movement and examines labor solidarity across ethnic lines. In addition, he discusses the special role Mexican labor played in bridging labor struggles across the international border and in challenging racial exclusion on the job in the predominantly Anglo labor federations and in the broader institutional life of South Texas.

Although the early efforts at inter-ethnic unity failed to materialize fully, Zamora concludes, they nevertheless provided a legacy that tells much about the minority position of the Mexican community, the impressive organizing activity and bid for incorporation of Mexican workers, and the ambivalent response by organized and unorganized Anglo workers.

Reviews and Praise

1993 T.R. Fehrenbach Award, presented by the Texas Historical Commission. 1994 H.L. Mitchell Award, presented by the Southern Historical Association.

“The work is meticulously documented, making use of previously unused Spanish-language archive materials. . . . Essential for Chicano and labor studies collections.”

Lisa K. Miller, Library Journal

“Based on key archival sources including Spanish-language newspapers as well as Texas labor records, Zamora has written a substantive and well-organized study of those Mexican immigrant workers who courageously organized themselves against both class and race/ethnic discrimination.”

Mario T. Garcia, The Journal of Southern History

“The originality of Zamora’s historical research contributes to uncovering the ‘voice’ of Mexican labor activity.”

Veronica Garcia, Contemporary Sociology

“Though she wasn’t a man, she was as good as one”: Labor, Seapower, and Nineteenth-Century Seafaring Stewardesses

On March 7th, 1826, HMS Blonde rescued six emaciated survivors from the wreck of the Frances Mary. They included two women: the captain’s wife and Ann Saunders, a young woman hired to serve her. They had spent twenty-two days adrift, crowded in the main top of the half-submerged wreck, kept afloat by its load of timber, with only ten days of food and water. Six of sixteen survived. But they did so by resorting to cannibalism. Amidst this horror, Saunders, with “more strength in her calamity than most of the men,” transformed from working passenger to a key provider.[1] When her fiancé, James Friar, who had also worked aboard for passage, died, Saunders “shrieked a loud yell […] cut her late intended husband’s throat, and drank his blood, insisting that she had the greatest right to it.”[2] Ann Saunders kept two sharp knives in her monkey jacket – at every death, bled, cleaned, and carved – and kept those who remained alive. Without the women, the Morning Chronicle reported, some of the men would not have survived.[3]

Representation of the Crew of the Blonde Frigate in the act of rescuing six survivors from the Ship Francis Mary — *Source: Frontispiece Illustration, Ann Saunders, Narrative of the Shipwreck and Sufferings of Miss Ann Saunders (Providence, RI: Z. S. Crossmon, 1827).*

Maritime life, especially in places like Europe or the United States, has been the subject of much mythologizing. From Cooper to Conrad to today’s Pirates of the Caribbean, fiction has familiarized audiences with creative tropes, contemporary stereotypes, and sometimes suspect ‘common knowledge’ of the maritime world of the past. These include ideas like “women and children first,” the drunken jolly Jack Tar, with a sweetheart in every port, and the belief that women were bad luck on ships. Maritime historians have spent decades investigating, and for the most part, debunking these myths, in an effort to differentiate between the stories we tell and the realities of maritime life. In the nineteenth century, when many of these myths solidified, the maritime world was at once practical, a real engine of economic and imperial life, and an idealized and mythologized cultural keystone of the national self-image. Every maritime myth presents us with two important questions: how true is the myth itself, and why was the myth perpetuated?

My research examines women working at sea. I push back against the idea that life at sea was exclusively a masculine domain, a false notion that has all but wiped-out the history of women’s seafaring labor. In the nineteenth century, women not only went to sea in ever-increasing numbers, but in increasingly professionalized positions as seafarers. Women, in other words, gained a recognized and appropriate place aboard ships.

Women are present at sea, and often overlooked in stories otherwise well-known. In 1908, when Violet Jessop interviewed for a position as a ship’s stewardess, the hiring agent at first had misgivings: “I was far too young, they generally took officers’ widows, and then again, I was too attractive”. She got the job.[4] To make her “attractiveness as inconspicuous as possible without losing zest in life” Jessop and her mother compiled a “man-frightening wardrobe.”[5] Four years later, early on the morning of April 15th, 1912, she found herself in perhaps the most famous shipwreck of all – the Titanic. Jessop again confronted an unsuitable wardrobe. She recalls saying to Stanley, a bedroom steward, as he “brought forth my new spring outfit, all trimmings and things. ‘That’s no rig for a shipwreck, all fussed up and gay.’ Suddenly I was trying to be jocular, afraid if I wasn’t I might cry.”[6] Though trying to maintain calm for both the passengers and their own sakes, it was hard to believe the Titanic was sinking. As she left the room, she called for Stanley to follow soon. In fact, it was the last she would see of him, “he was standing with his arms clasped behind him in the corner where he usually kept his evening watch. He suddenly looked very tired.”[7]

*Violet Jessop as part of the Voluntary Aid Detachment of HMHS Britannic. Source: The personal papers of Margaret and Mary Meehan*

Women could be found at sea in newly professional positions. But defining those positions cut off the many liminal, indeterminate, and often invisible spaces in which women had previously worked. What changed between Saunders and Jessop was not the sudden sense that women belonged in certain places on ships, but the way labor was hired, managed, and bureaucratically surveilled.

There is a basic paradox here. Why, even as women grew ever more present, did the idea of their presence grow ever more antithetical to seafaring culture? This paradox is at the center of my research.

The answer lies, I believe, in the complex interactions between society, technology, and culture. It has implications for the very foundations of the Britain’s nineteenth-century empire, but it begins with finding women working at sea. For reasons both practical and prejudicial, histories of women at sea have focused on, the exceptional and the elite: officer’s wives, cross-dressed cabin boys, wealthy women travelers, female pirates, and victims of disaster. As Jo Stanley notes, however, “a celebratory over-focus on exceptional ‘heroines and hellions’ of the sea throughout world history highlights the need for grounded, contextualized studies in which scholarship is not sacrificed in the understandable excitement at finding missing women.”[8] Surviving remarkable wrecks saved the stories of Jessop and Saunders for posterity, but there is more to them than a shared acquaintance with disaster – they represent two ends of a century-long evolution in the relationship between gender, labor, and seapower, which reveals the multiple mythologies underpinning our understanding of the past.

Log of the Birdie. "Dec 12th 1856, Montevideo, Grace Frank resigned work today without any provocation whatever for which I stop pay to this date she remaining onboard idle — *Selection from the log of the Birdie, Official Number 48213, 12^th December, 1865. Source: Crew Lists and Logbooks, Maritime History Archives, St. John’s, Newfoundland, Canada*

To tell this story, I use a wide range of sources. I have been able to find stories of average women working at sea through collections of Crew Agreements and Official Logbooks, the majority of which are located in the Maritime History Archives at Memorial University of Newfoundland. These collections represent a trove of information on the average seafarer including many women. With the help of digital projects like the Atlantic Canada Shipping Project Database and the CLIP archive, I have been able to trace the careers of several women working at sea in the latter half of the nineteenth century. In a way, these women working at sea were exceptional. Some traveled without their husbands, earned professional wages, or ventured far from home. But their presence in the masculine world of seafaring was not unusual. They demonstrate how the exceptional – that which belies expectations premised on what ‘should be’ rather than what ‘is’ – often was, for many, the everyday. It is these everyday women at sea that are the subject of my research and which prompt a reevaluation of maritime worlds.

[1] “Shipwreck, Attended with Horrid Circumstances,” Morning Chronicle (London, England), March 20, 1826, Issue 17633. British Library Newspapers, Part I: 1800-1900.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Violet Jessop, Titanic Survivor: the Newly Discovered Memoirs of Violet Jessop Who Survived Both the Titanic and Britannic Disasters, edited by John Maxtone-Graham (Dobbs Ferry, NY: Sheridan House, 1997), 52.

[5] Ibid., 53.

[6] Ibid., 128.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Jo Stanley, “And After the Cross-Dressed Cabin Boys and Whaling Wives?: Possible Futures for Wome’s Maritime Historiography,” Journal of Transport History 23:1 (2002): 11.

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

It’s all Connected: Introducing Filmmaker Adam Curtis

Adam Curtis, Can’t Get You Out of My Head: An Emotional History of the Modern World (BBC, 2021, 7 hours in 6 parts).

Meet Adam Curtis. Age: 66. Gender: Male. Race: White. Place of Birth: Dartford, UK. Marital Status: Unknown. Education: Oxford. Profession: Well . . . , here is where things get a bit complicated. Originally, Curtis saw himself as a historian, but for reasons that will soon become apparent, that did not quite work out. So, instead, he ended up making films for the BBC. Lots of them. And yet the title of BBC journalist and filmmaker does not quite capture the man. Nor does it encapsulate his rise to prominence. In the 1980s, Curtis’ work was considered fringe. Indigestible to many, it was tolerated by some and intensely loved by few. He was an obvious outlier. But gradually, since the late 1990s, his unique outlook has gained respect. With that success, he became a filmmaker at large with no direct boss to report to and a steady budget to work with.

This rare freedom brought out the best in him, and by the early 2000s, Curtis was something of a cult figure, whose work is pirated as soon the BBC broadcasts it. After making it big across the pond, he was slowly discovered by the Americans, who began inviting him to film festivals, giving him awards and writing generously about his brilliance. They, too, struggled to account for the exact nature of his films. They draw you in, but what are they about, really? One answer is that no one really knows: Curtis’ films are about everything, and about nothing in particular. Indeed, his work defies easy characterization, and it borders on being so unreviewable that critics normally resort to an automatic 5-star verdict. I wish to alert the reader that this review is no exception.

*Adam Curtis (right) with David Thomson answers questions after the showing of Power of Nightmares in 2005. Source: Steve Rhodes*

Curtis’ oeuvre revolves around the human modern condition and while it includes footage of China, Africa, North America, the UK, Russia, and the Middle East, he does not need to travel far. A short commute to the enormous 80-year-old BBC archive suffices. It is, most likely, the biggest television archive anywhere in the world, and Curtis can do whatever he wants in it. This past January he described his working method to the New Yorker (yes, they have finally discovered him, too), which consists of watching thousands of hours of raw, unedited material in fast-forward mode until an image sparks his interest. Then, he takes it slow, and digs in. This careful curatorial act – which is performed by him rather than by a fleet of aspirational assistants – results in visual material which, though very familiar, feels entirely new and foreign to the eye. Then comes an unconventional soundtrack that produces a similar effect, so that even his take on the all-too-familiar Trump presidency feels entirely new, as if dealing not with the most-documented presidency in history but with a distant tribe in the Amazon encountering the camera for the first time.

Next comes the signature script, which is a frontal assault on linear narration and the British cult of “common sense.” Here, Curtis juxtaposes Grand history with the biggest G possible with individual experience set on the tiniest scale imaginable, down to the level of the atom. It is a filmmaking craft built around juxtapositions of scale, from neurological webs in the brain to global networks and back to the inner world of the self. All along, this journey is void of straightforward arguments and simple conclusions. Instead, it uses an associative and elusive mode of reasoning which is stitched together by “patterns.” Patterns that are so obvious and apparent to Curtis that it makes no sense at all to actually argue about them. Everyone can just see it, or maybe not. Probably not.

But that did not matter, as he would say, because by this time, Curtis had become a phenomenon. We can trace the rise of Curtism to the end of the Cold War, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of big ideologies and state-synchronized collective action. Divesting from utopias, the 1990s globalized neo-liberal world of Pax Americana quickly replaced revolution with money and instant pleasure. Instead of “Workers of the World Unite!” we got the ubiquitous mode of “Unlimited Everything for Everybody Now!” in which self-absorbing radical individualism was hailed as the new king (the selfie of the selfie, if you wish). Curtis thrives in this matrix and is probably his most consistent explorer. We know it by its collective name the “End of History;” a term which perfectly captures the essence of Curtism.

Curtis has assembled an impressive record that both critics and admirers describe as fragmented, disjointed, avant-garde, experiential, nonsensical, incoherent but still, utterly brilliant, mesmerizing and genuinely captivating. So, what is going on here? Is Curtis a journalist, a historian, an experimental artist, all and/or none of the above?

With more than thirty films to his name, including the post-Cold-War classics Pandora’s Box (1992), The Century of the Self (2002), The Power of Nightmares (2004), HyperNormalisation (2016) and now, the monumental seven hour magnum opus Can’t Get You Out of My Head (2021), Curtis has assembled an impressive record that both critics and admirers describe as fragmented, disjointed, avant-garde, experiential, nonsensical, incoherent but still, utterly brilliant, mesmerizing and genuinely captivating.

So, what is going on here? Is Curtis a journalist, a historian, an experimental artist, all and/or none of the above? For his part, Curtis insists he is a journalist whose exclusive subject is “power and politics.” It sounds simple and straightforward but it really isn’t. In journalism, the reader or viewer does not have to second-guess the scale and dimensions of the subject at hand. Here, when after many hours of watching my wife asked me whether I was finally done, I truly did not know what to answer. Am I? Is it over? And mind you, unlike the New Yorker, I am not a newcomer to the Curtis scene.

How did I hear of Curtis? Fifteen years ago, a Portuguese colleague recommended The Century of the Self, a classic Curtis film about how Freud’s theory of the unconscious was picked up by the American PR and advertising industry for the sake of mass marketing and Cold War population control. “Recommended” is not really the appropriate verb to the describe the actions of my colleague. To recommend Curtis is never the generic Netflix-nudge of “you must see the new whatever” – the “whatever” being something that will likely drain your soul and leave no cognitive trace in your brain aside from a certain numbness. To “recommend” Curtis is to gently follow-up with the recommendee, in the following days, weeks and months, prod when you need to, and be sure that the message sinks in. If she fails to engage – as recently happened with someone to whom I “recommended” Curtis – you have to leave your manners behind, double down on your efforts and be ready to press the matter further.

Upon success, you then invite yourself to her virtual living room to start a conversation. By that point, if you choose your victims intelligently, the conversation will have a life of its own. In other words, to recommend Curtis is not to extend the casual invitation to share something that is reasonably good and popular. Rather, it is an initiation process into a cult. The kind of cult which never really works as, aside from all the admiration for Curtis’ genius visual extravaganza and idiosyncratic reasoning, it is never quite clear what you are actually worshiping. What are the films about? What do they mean? And why should we care? And this is exactly the point.

All Curtis films begin with the innocent and promising fairytale line “This is a story about …” only to find out 2-3 minutes later that there is no story, or that it has shifted and is about to change yet again, or that it was, all along, the wrong story and that you were actually duped. There is no beginning, middle, or end, just his signature speech pattern of smooth transitions from one “obvious” pattern to the next. Here are some classic lines: “At the heart of it . . .”, “but at the very same time . . .”, “they claimed . . .”, “but in the process . . .”, “But that did not matter . . .”, “But this was a fantasy . . . in fact . . .” and so on and so on. Did I understand anything the first time I watched his work? No, yes, it does not really matter because I was immediately mesmerized by the captivating aesthetics and the occasional brilliant insight. Let me show you how it works. Watch this trailer to HyperNormalisation. Now watch the Adam Curtis parody by “common sense” BBC viewers who have had enough (over there they pay for their public broadcasting). Now answer: Style over substance? Hyperbolic claims? Or, rather, a high-minded exploration of how we got from here to there, why, and who benefited? Who to believe? Do you want to watch more?

Let’s discuss the latest masterpiece Can’t Get You Out of My Head which I automatically award as many stars as Curtis would like. With this new production, Curtis has brought his craft to perfection. Like a good DJ, he drew on previous projects, mixing them with new material to create something familiar yet exciting, unexpected and mightily relevant. Released straight after the US elections, the first scene, hits the viewer with the image of President Obama and the subtitle “if you liked this, you will also like that,” following which President Biden makes an entry. But though accessible from the very first minute, that does not mean you can just go ahead and watch the whole 10 hours straight on. If you just turned 21 and are going to your Curtis neighborhood pub for the first time, don’t empty the best and most expensive bottle of scotch in one long sip just because you can. Take it easy and start with something lighter like The Power of Nightmares, about how American neo-conservatives and Islamic jihadis jointly made the 9/11 world in which we are still living. Or even Pandora’s Box, subtitled A Fable from the Age of Science about Cold War technocratic rationality, system analysis, game theory and the impending rule of algorithms. Anticipating the current era of Big Tech mind-shaping and soul-bending – and well ahead of the game – Curtis made this one in 1993. It might strike you as slightly outdated but this is alright, as you will find here many of the vintage themes of a good Curtis movie and begin to train your eye and brain. Besides, your liver is probably not yet ready for the strong stuff. Come back tomorrow, and in the meantime watch this quick BBC introduction, from Curtis’ Oh Dearism (2009) about the meaninglessness of mainstream television news media.

Welcome back. Meet some of the characters in Can’t Get You Out of My Head. Every Curtis film has a unique set of characters. Some are large-scale familiar actors like the Libyan ruler Muamar Qadafi, Chairman’s Mao’s wife Jiang Qing and Vladimir Putin. Alongside them, but on equal footing, you will find the rapper Tupac Shakur (2Pac) and his Black Panther activist mother Afeni Shakur. Then, you will be introduced to forgotten men and women like 1960s model turned novelist, Sandra Paul and the black slumlord executioner-turned-freedom-fighter-conman and murderer Michael X. Next in line are ordinary people like transgender activist Julia Grant, a British citizen who, during the 1970s, fought the psychiatrist establishment on camera to allow her a sex change operation. Also on board is the celebrated behavioral economist and Nobel Prize laurate Daniel Kahneman, American cultural subtour Kerry Thornley who, during the 1960s, presided over “Operation MindF***”, which spread conspiracy theories just to see what would happen (answer: a lot).

You can also meet people you’ve never heard of, like Kremlin master political manipulator Vladislav Yuryevich Surkov. Or, for instance, someone you have heard of, like al-Qaida jihadi and resident of Guantanamo Bay prison Abu Zubeida who, following a brain injury while fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan, was “trapped in a perpetual now haunted by fragments of memory.” When interrogated by the CIA he turned the mental mishmash that included, among other things, Rambo III, into prime “intelligence” that satisfied his captors but was otherwise a piece of fiction. You will also meet innocent Irish convicts “The Birmingham Six”, British imperial archeologist and spy Gertrude Bell, distinguished members of the Ku Klux Klan and – last but not least – pharmaceutical industrialist Arthur M. Sackler and his family of drugs. There are also some impersonal characters such as “governments” “the CIA” “the Banks” “the Elites” “valium” and OxyContin.

Together, and in no particular order, these characters successfully carry sizable themes. As his most complete work to date and by his longest, Can’t Get You Out of My Head showcases themes such as mass dissociation of the middle class from the real world, de-industrialization, the slow (and then very fast) rise of China, 1960s counterculture, the rise of global systems, the dot com crisis, the 2008 crisis, populism, AI and algorithmic governance, the Iraq war as a video game detached from the realities at home, the crack epidemic and urban gangs, the gender revolution, the Saudi fairytale reality, apocalyptic terrorism, humanitarian aid, Chaos Theory, how the CIA overthrew 66 foreign governments, metadata, and James Bond.

Zipping from one theme to another to follow the pattern and flow of power, Curtis presents moments of sheer cinematographic brilliance. In one such scene, a camera slowly enters the compound of jihadi men in Peshawar, Pakistan, and moves slowly between them zooming in and out on their faces to the soundtrack of “The Lady in Red” by Chris De Burge (apparently, Abu Zubeida’s beloved track). You don’t need more than that in order to understand the madness of it all. Another memorable moment comes as the camera follows an Iraqi journalist in one of the biggest sandstorms recorded in Iraqi history, just days before the American “Operation Desert Storm.” These 50 seconds anticipate the disaster better than any learned explanation.

In another sequence, we move from Pakistan to 2Pac’s visions of revolution and then straight to the Eiffel Tower and the French Revolution and then to the collapse of the Soviet utopia. There are scenes in which Curtis does try to provide a learned explanation, for example of the subprime mortgage crisis, but ends up delivering a superficial statement about the complexity and intelligibility of the computer networks that caused the problem. In such moments, Curtis moves from the sublime to the farfetched in the space of a few minutes. If you get tired and want to get to the end of it quickly, watch episode six, which is the most coherent of them all, but also the one that can largely stand on its own. The series ends with a quote from the late radical anthropologist David Graeber that more or less captures Curtis’ life-long motto: “The ultimate, hidden truth of the world, is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently.”

His work, he argues, looks behind the fake world we live in, where nothing is as real as it seems, to reveal how powerful actors impose modes of being and systems of thought and action on the rest of us. Sometimes these actors come from the right (Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan) and sometimes from the neo-liberal Left (pick your villain).

Do not mistake this final line by an emerging guru of the alternative Left as an indication that Curtis is taking sides in politics. This is a strictly metapolitical affair. Curtis himself believes that all he does is chronicle phenomena that exist outside the ubiquitous categories of public perception. That we fail to make sense of the liquid we all swim in and the air all breathe. His work, he argues, looks behind the fake world we live in, where nothing is as real as it seems, to reveal how powerful actors impose modes of being and systems of thought and action on the rest of us. Sometimes these actors come from the right (Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan) and sometimes from the neo-liberal Left (pick your villain).

If, by the end of this long review cum introduction to Curtis, I must say something concrete about him, it is that he is the master and prince of a radical postmodern documentary style. It is a style that has no ordered Enlightenment narrative but just a pure and powerful effect that passes as truth and rings as such with no trace of American-style conspiracy theories for which he has no patience at all.

It is all fascinating and very historical. But it is not history. And yet, now, when Curtis has finally made it in America, it might pass and come to be viewed as historical truth. In fact, I am curious to see which university will start the first Adam Curtis Program in Critical Visual Arts. I predict it will be NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, but UT Austin, with its associative SXSW ambience, may surprise me too. I look forward to the first class to graduate from this program and convene the inaugural “We Are all Adam Curtis” conference, to which I expect an invitation as a keynote speaker.

And as for you, dear reader, welcome to the cult, and don’t expect it to make much sense.

Primary Source: Patronage and Power in Machiavelli and the Elizabethan Court

By Haley Price

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

Among the many shelves dedicated to European history in the Harry Ransom Center’s stacks is a first edition of the first English translation of Machiavelli’s Florentine Histories. Thomas Bedingfield undertook the translation from Italian in the later 1580s and saw its publication in London in 1595.

Niccolò Machiavelli, *The Florentine Histori*e, trans. Thomas Bedingfield (London: William Ponsonby, 1595), sig. A1r. Harry Ransom Center Book Collection, DG 737 A2 M4.

The text is fascinating for many reasons. It was an early introduction to one of Machiavelli’s key works for an English audience. The Center’s copy was acquired by an affluent London merchant, Valentine Mortoft, in 1598, and he surely was one of many readers the book eventually had. My own interest in the text comes, however, from its dedicatory preface. It reveals a fascinating story of patronage sought and apparently never fully realized. This in turn echoes the underlying themes of my undergraduate thesis on the Pazzi Conspiracy of 1478.

Patronage was a vital part of civic life in both Machiavelli’s Florence and Bedingfield’s England. As Paul McLean explains in his classic study, “Florentines sought each other out, face‑to‑face or through letters, to perform a multitude of favors. Such favor seeking was fraught with anxiety, ambiguity, and dissimulation on the part of both petitioners and patrons.”¹ But patronage was also fraught with multiple perils.

Niccolò Machiavelli, *The Florentine Histori*e, trans. Thomas Bedingfield (London: William Ponsonby, 1595), sig. A2r. Harry Ransom Center Book Collection, DG 737 A2 M4.

The dedication in the Center’s edition was written by Thomas Bedingfeld on April 8, 1588, fully seven years before the volume was actually published.² Already well known for his translation skills, Bedingfeld was also already embedded in Queen Elizabeth’s court by the time he entered the orbit of Sir Christopher Hatton in the 1580s. Lord Chancellor of England in 1587, Hatton was one of the central figures in Elizabeth’s government. His influence was far-ranging, which may be why Bedingfeld thought him the perfect choice to dedicate his translation of Florentine Histories to. On the other hand, in another preface to the volume, Bedingfield writes that “The translation . . . was diverse years past desired by an honorable personage, not now living.” This suggests that Hatton may, in fact, have requested the translation in the first place. In the dedication, Bedingfield suggests that an official like Hatton might learn from Machiavelli’s “judicial discourses and observations” on the “causes of foreign and domestic discords, the commodities and discommodities of treaties, and the secret humors of Princes.”³

Bedingfeld’s dedication is a careful mix of humility and praise designed to appeal to Hatton. Although he we do not know all the details, it is hard to see the document as anything less than a bid for patronage; if successful, he would win a powerful ally at court and likely advance his career. Unfortunately for Bedingfeld, Hatton died in 1591, ending his hopes of patronage. We don’t know exactly why it took so long for his Florentine Histories translation to see print, but Hatton’s death may very well have eliminated any sense of urgency for Bedingfield.

The preface reveals a frustrating story of patronage sought but never completely obtained. It may be a historical footnote for most scholars, but it is precisely what interests me. Just as Bedingfeld discovered, patronage is a risky business because it relies entirely on people. They may prove fickle; they may change their minds or they may, as happened with Hatton, die at the wrong time.

Patronage was a key part of Machiavelli’s world, so of course his Histories reflects its importance. Of particular interest to me is the fact that the last book of Florentine Histories centers on a very famous example of patronage networks falling apart: the Pazzi Conspiracy. To summarize a complex story, a disgruntled group of top statesmen, bankers, and church officials who had all been snubbed by Florence’s most powerful men, Lorenzo and Giuliano de’ Medici, plotted to murder them as revenge and usurp power in Florence.

Detail of Niccolò Machiavelli, The Florentine Historie, trans. Thomas Bedingfield (London: William Ponsonby, 1595), sig. A6v. Harry Ransom Center Book Collection, DG 737 A2 M4. — Table of contents d etail of Niccolò Machiavelli, *The Florentine Historie*, trans. Thomas Bedingfield (London: William Ponsonby, 1595), sig. A6v. Harry Ransom Center Book Collection, DG 737 A2 M4.

The Pazzi Conspiracy is the focus of my undergraduate thesis. I use the conspiracy as a case study to illustrate the importance of patronage networks in maintaining Medici power in 1478 Florence. My project shows how a carefully woven network of obligation both secured Lorenzo and Giuliano de’ Medici at the top of the social order, and simultaneously created the very enemies that would plot their murder. Giuliano’s death was a violent consequence of patronage gone wrong, and Lorenzo’s survival very much depended on the clients he was able to keep.

Programming dialog for my video game on the Pazzi Conspiracy in Unity.

Rather than writing a traditional research paper as my thesis, I decided to develop an interactive video game to show patronage in action and allow my audience to experience the Pazzi Conspiracy in a more immersive way. In my game, students get to participate directly in Medici patronage networks by taking on a role as a servant in the Palazzo Medici at the time of the conspiracy. As the servant discovers the plot to kill Lorenzo and Giuliano over the course of five playable levels, they begin to fear for their own livelihood and that of their masters. If the Medici are killed, the servant will be out of work and likely cast out on the streets, or worse, killed in whatever violent political drama might ensue.

Relying on the wrong person could leave a man helpless, but snubbing the wrong one could get him killed. Lorenzo and Giuliano’s exclusion of powerful men like Francesco de’ Pazzi, Girolamo Riario, and Archbishop Francesco Salviati from their patronage networks provided the catalyst for a murder plot. If the conspirators couldn’t get what they wanted through a relationship of mutual obligation with the Medici, they would just take it by force.

In the end, Lorenzo escaped death and prospered by using patronage networks. Bedingfield had fewer resources but he seems to have navigated the death his would-be patron. Despite the death of Hatton, he was able to find a route to publish the work. After Giuliano’s murder, the Medici family continued to wield power. The way Machiavelli (and many historians) tells it, Lorenzo went on to become the sole hero of the ensuing Pazzi War.⁴ The war can be spun as a heroic tale with Lorenzo at the center, saving Florence through great bravery, intellect, and self-sacrifice, but mostly with his ability to bring new allies into the folds of his patron-client network. Lorenzo charms his enemy, the King of Naples, into becoming a fierce new ally, and so glues together what’s left of his alliances in Florence and emerges from the war stronger still.⁵

Patronage was everywhere in this period. It permeates every page of the Florentine Histories, and the early translation preserved in the Ransom Center’s volume offers a perfect example of how fragile such networks could be.

Haley Price is a senior at The University of Texas at Austin majoring in History and Honors Humanities. Her research interests include the nexus between games and history education as well as the Italian Renaissance. She hopes to combine these interests in her senior thesis and go on to pursue further study with a focus on digital history.

¹ Paul Douglas McLean, The Art of the Network: Strategic Interaction and Patronage in Renaissance Florence (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 4.

² Machiavelli, Niccolò. Florentine Histories. Translated by Thomas Bedingfeld. London: T. Creede, 1595. This is the date that appears at the end of the dedicatory letter.

³ Ibid.

⁴ Machiavelli, Niccolò. “Book VIII.” In History of Florence and of the Affairs of Italy: From the Earliest Times to the Death of Lorenzo the Magnificent. Peter Smith, 1974.

⁵ Both the Pazzi Conspiracy and the Pazzi War are very complex events. I’ve been studying them for nearly three years and I still have so much to learn. The way I summarized them in this article emphasizes the importance of patronage and the role of Lorenzo as a heroic figure, but as with anything worth studying, it is all so much more complicated than I had space to communicate. For those interested in further reading, the following books are extraordinarily useful:

Hibbert, Christopher. The Rise and Fall of the House of Medici. Penguin Books Limited, 2001.

Martines, Lauro. April Blood: Florence and the Plot against the Medici. Oxford University Press, 2003.

New Documentary – Origins of a Green Identity: Austin’s Conservation Pioneers

By Karen Kocher

Origins of a Green Identity is an hour-long documentary exploring Austin’s earliest efforts to preserve Barton Springs and Barton Creek, and ultimately to create a city with publicly-accessible green spaces along Austin’s waterways throughout the City. The film is narrated by Texas novelist, Sarah Bird and features original music from Austin’s Graham Reynolds and guitarist, David Murray.

Rich in archival imagery, the story focuses on two primary architects at the center of efforts to protect Barton Springs, Barton Creek and to clean up and develop Ladybird lake, Chairman of the Austin Parks Board, Roberta Crenshaw and Director of the Austin Parks and Recreation Department, Beverly Sheffield.

Together they worked for over two decades to raise awareness about the ways in which Austin’s post-war growth was threatening Barton Springs, Barton Creek, and indeed all of Austin’s waterways. Another key aspect of their continued efforts was to purchase lands for the public along Austin’s creeks, and to fight against the privatization of open space along these waterways. While Austin today prides itself on its parks and a green sensibility, in their day, Beverly and Roberta were working against the status-quo; a time when real estate and development interests steered the ship in Austin’s city politics.

Roberta was a visionary thinker and woman of high society who refused to be intimidated, even as she clashed repeatedly with powerful political and business interests. Roberta’s principle ambition was to preserve the best green open spaces for the citizens of Austin to use and enjoy regardless of their social or economic status. She fought tirelessly to safeguard Austin’s natural treasures from the ill-effects of rapid and unregulated growth, even while facing open hostility and sexism. She had many successes but made some missteps along the way. It is perhaps due to the bridges that she burned that her efforts related to Austin’s conservation scene are little remembered. Beverly Sheffield, fueled by his love of the out-of-doors, and driven by a deeply spiritual motivation, worked from within the system as the Director of the Parks and Recreation Department. Together Roberta and Beverly sounded the alarm bells, drawing attention to the need to protect Barton Springs and Barton Creek before they were destroyed by Austin’s rapid growth, and cut off from public access.

Certainly, had Roberta and Beverly not laid the essential groundwork at such an early phase in Austin’s development, it would not be the city it is today. The enduring natural state of Barton Creek and Barton Springs, for instance, can be traced directly back to their tireless efforts beginning five decades ago. Our video reveals for the first time in a documentary format Crenshaw and Sheffield’s critical roles in the shaping of Austin’s identity as a City with green at its heart.

Airing on 4/18/2020 at 1:00 pm and 4/22/2021 at 10:00 pm on KLRU

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