Adam Clulow, Author at Not Even Past

Littlefield Lecture Series 2021 with Nikole Hannah-Jones

The Department of History’s Littlefield Lecture Series is pleased to host a conversation and moderated audience Q&A with Nikole Hannah-Jones.

NIKOLE HANNAH-JONES
Pulitzer Prize-Winning Creator of “The 1619 Project”;
Staff Writer, The New York Times Magazine;
Winner of the MacArthur Genius Award, and of the National Magazine Award
http://nikolehannahjones.com/
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/10/11/magazine/11nikole.html

in conversation with

DR. DAINA RAMEY BERRY
Chair of the Department of History, and Oliver H. Radkey Regents Professor of History
The University of Texas at Austin
http://www.drdainarameyberry.com/
https://liberalarts.utexas.edu/history/faculty/db27553

Registration: http://bit.ly/reg-hannah-jonesWednesday, March 10. 12:00-1:00pm CST.

Online. Free and Open to the Public.

Hannah-Jones was awarded the MacArthur Genius Grant in 2017 for “reshaping national conversations around education reform.” This is but one honor in a growing list: She is the creator of the The New York Times Magazine’s “The 1619 Project,” about the history and lasting legacy of American slavery, for which her powerful introductory essay was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for commentary. She’s also won a Peabody, two George Polk awards, and the National Magazine Awards three times.

Hannah-Jones covers racial injustice for The New York Times Magazine, and has spent years chronicling the way official policy has created—and maintains—racial segregation in housing and schools. Her deeply personal reports on the Black experience in America offer a compelling case for greater equity. Hannah-Jones is the creator and lead writer of the New York Times’ major multimedia initiative, “The 1619 Project.” Named for the year the first enslaved Africans arrived in America, the project features an ongoing series of essays and art on the relationship between slavery and everything from social infrastructure and segregation, to music and sugar—all by Black American authors, activists, journalists, and more. Hannah-Jones wrote the project’s introductory essay, which ran under the powerful headline “Our Democracy’s Founding Ideals Were False When They Were Written. Black Americans Have Fought to Make Them True.” The essay earned Hannah-Jones her first Pulitzer Prize, for commentary. Random House has also announced it will be adapting the project into a graphic novel and four publications for young readers, while also releasing an extended version of the original publication, including more essays, fiction, and poetry.

Hannah-Jones has written extensively on the history of racism, school resegregation, and the disarray of hundreds of desegregation orders, as well as the decades-long failure of the federal government to enforce the landmark 1968 Fair Housing Act. She is currently writing a book on school segregation called The Problem We All Live With, to be published on the One World imprint of Penguin/Random House. Her piece “Worlds Apart” in The New York Times Magazine won the National Magazine Award for “journalism that illuminates issues of national importance” as well as the Hillman Prize for Magazine Journalism. In 2016, she was awarded a Peabody Award and George Polk Award for radio reporting for her This American Life story, “The Problem We All Live With.” She was named Journalist of the Year by the National Association of Black Journalists, and was also named to 2019’s The Root 100 as well as Essence’s Woke 100. Her reporting has also won Deadline Club Awards, Online Journalism Awards, the Sigma Delta Chi Award for Public Service, the Fred M. Hechinger Grand Prize for Distinguished Education Reporting, and the Emerson College President’s Award for Civic Leadership. In February 2020, she was profiled by Essence as part of their Black History Month series, celebrating “the accomplishments made by those in the past, as well as those paving the way for the future.”

Hannah-Jones co-founded the Ida B. Wells Society for Investigative Reporting with the goal of increasing the number of reporters and editors of color. She holds a Master of Arts in Mass Communication from the University of North Carolina and earned her BA in History and African-American studies from the University of Notre Dame.

Please share widely with your interested colleagues and networks. Thank you.
For event questions or technical issues, please email: cmeador@austin.utexas.edu.

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.

Celebrating Research Excellence: The Lathrop Prize and the Perry Prize, 2021

Not Even Past is delighted to congratulate Sandy Chang and Gabrielle Esparza,the winners of the 2021 Lathrop and Perry prizes. The awards are for the best PhD dissertation (Lathrop) and MA thesis (Perry) in History at the University of Texas at Austin.

Lathrop Prize: Sandy Chang, “Across the South Seas: Gender, Intimacy, and Chinese Migration to British Malaya, 1877-1940“

Supervisor: Philippa Levine

Perry Prize: Gabrielle Esparza, “The Politics of Human Rights Prosecutions: Civil Military Relations during the Alfonsín Presidency, 1983-1989″

Supervisor: Jonathan Brown

For more on this groundbreaking research, see below:

Across the South Seas: Gender, Intimacy, and Chinese Migration to British Malaya, 1877-1939 (Sandy Chang)

*“Wedding of an Early Chinese Female Immigrant in the Straits Settlements, 1920s,” Marjorie Lau Collection, National Archives of Singapore*

Across the South Seas investigates how gender and sexuality shaped Chinese migration and settlement in British Malaya during Asia’s mobility revolution. Based on immigration records, court cases, trafficking files, and oral interviews, it traces the border-crossing journeys of over a million Chinese women and girls, who traveled as wives, domestic servants, and prostitutes. Although scholars have often argued that global Chinese migration was, historically, a predominantly masculine enterprise, this dissertation illuminates instead how women’s intimate labor networks served as linchpins that sustained the colonial Southeast Asian economy. From makeshift brothels in the tin-mining hinterlands to polygamous households in the port cities, migrant women engaged in adaptive labor strategies and intimate relations across the Malay Peninsula. By attending to the sexual, emotional, reproductive, and care work itinerant women provided, the study revises conventional histories of Chinese migration that have overlooked how women’s “invisible” labor knitted together transregional immigrant communities.

*“Statement Claim of a Chinese Widow, 1898,” Koh Seow Chuan Collection, National Library of Singapore*

This dissertation weaves together the social history of migrant women with the politics of global border control. It argues that colonial anxieties about gender demographics, sexual economy, and the racial boundaries of “Chinese-ness” rendered Chinese women the primary targets of an emergent immigration regime. As such, they disproportionately bore the burden of new techniques of documentary control and surveillance at the border and beyond, as the colonial state simultaneously promoted their settlement and circumscribed their intimate relations and labor practices. While scholars of Asian American studies typically examine immigration through the transnational racial politics of Chinese exclusion, my work emphasizes how the logic of facilitation underpinned the British colonial immigration regime. Migration governance in British Malaya was, from the start, a gendered and sexual project aimed at managing prostitution, promoting marriage, and importing domestic laborers. This study contributes to the history of empires and Asian diasporas by showing how Chinese women’s mobility ultimately shaped the making of colonial borders in Southeast Asia.

*“North Bridge Road, Singapore, c. 1907,” Lee Kip Lin Collection, National Archives of Singapore*

The Politics of Human Rights Prosecutions: Civil Military Relations during the Alfonsín Presidency, 1983-1989 (Gabrielle Esparza)

*The presidential inauguration of Raúl Alfonsín. Source: Archivo General de la Nación Argentina*

The Politics of Human Rights Prosecutions examines the evolution of President Raúl Alfonsín’s human rights policies from his candidacy to his presidency. Alfonsín’s election in 1983 followed Argentina’s most repressive dictatorship and marked the country’s return to democracy. This democratic transition occurred at the beginning of a wave of similar shifts from military to civilian rule throughout Latin America. As a result, the Argentine experience heavily influenced the transitional justice scholarship that emerged in the 1990s. Argentina pioneered new methods of addressing state sponsored human rights violations during Alfonsín’s administration. Never Again, the first published truth commission report became an international model, and more than thirty countries have followed Argentina’s example since 1983.

*Ernesto Sábato, writer and president of the National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons, delivers the truth commission’s final report to President Raúl Alfonsín. Source: Radio Perfil*

Alfonsín also ordered criminal prosecution of military generals for human rights violations. The trials respected legal codes and due process in order to demonstrate the law’s ability to address wrongdoing. Such efforts helped reestablish trust in judicial processes. These mechanisms applied early in Alfonsín’s term revolutionized the field of transitional justice, but the later years of his presidency limited this initial momentum toward accountability through the authorization of Full Stop and Due Obedience laws. Both measures, dictated under military pressure and insurrection, narrowed the scope of the trials in order to ensure democratic stability. President Alfonsín had dedicated himself to overcoming Argentina’s legacy of authoritarianism and emphasized democratization as the main goal of the country’s transition. No president had completed his or her mandate against the wishes of the armed forces since 1928. In light of these political realities, Alfonsín made prudent decisions to achieve his legislative goals without undermining democratic processes and institutions. This approach marked a clear break with the past and sought to model democratic governance. Alfonsín’s methods also demonstrated that democracy, even when producing complicated and uneven policy victories, had the power to address social problems.

*Alfonsín addresses the multitude gathered in Plaza de Mayo following the peaceful resolution of a military insurrection on Easter Weekend 1987. Source: Archivo Télam*

Documenting the Texas Winter Storm – Images from the UT Community

Scholars will be writing for decades about the catastrophic failures that underpinned and magnified the impact of the recent winter storm in Texas. The intertwining crises and the scale of human suffering will require exhaustive research across multiple disciplines. Not Even Past will be producing specialized content over the coming weeks related to the storm but for now we’ve started to collect images sent in by members of the UT community.

These images are not intended to document the full extent of the storm and the resultant suffering but rather to contribute to the first draft of history. Some of the images have captions supplied by the photographers, others do not. If you would like to contribute images please click here. Together we believe these images provide a powerful representation of the extraordinary sequence of days in which life in Texas ground to a halt. Please note that this is an evolving resource and we will continue to add to it as we receive images. We do not edit images or captions and the names of the contributors can be found at the bottom of the page. We thank all our contributors for their willingness to share their experience.

I finally returned home on Monday 2/22, greeted by a burst pipe and no available plumbers.

Images from Ilan Palacios Avineri, Tiana Wilson, Maria Aina (Aina) Ongcheap, Kathleen Conti, Daina Ramey Berry, Ulrike Unterweger, Raymond Hyser, Madeline Hsu, Haley Price, Judy Coffin, Lance Wittlif, Adam Clulow, Jon Buchleiter, John Gleb, Rebecca Johnston, Jeff Zhao, Janine Barchas and others. Our thanks to all those who submitted images.

From Peaceful Village to Army Outpost: Memories of Militarization in Huehuetenango

Standing in the outskirts of western Huehuetenango, Juan Gonzalez described to me the fields which surrounded his childhood home during the 1970s. “Our family used to raise a few cows in this area,” he said softly, “I used to tend to one named Membrio.” The bull’s hair was tan and tough on the outside, like the quinces people often eat growing up in Guatemala. He remembered being very happy those days. “I grew up without shoes,” he said, “same as all my siblings…but we had enough for basic things…and we cared for each other.” But everything began to change for Gonzalez when a 7.6-magnitude earthquake struck in 1976 and the Guatemalan military started setting up l tents in those precious fields. His story captures the profound turmoil wrought by the Guatemalan military during the civil war, a pattern of disruption that continues to drive outwards migration extending even into the present.

*The fields of Huehuetenango. Source: Ilan Palacios Avineri*

The soldiers began storming Huehuetenango in the aftermath of the 1976 terremoto (earthquake). The earthquake had leveled houses, roads, and bridges across the country, and the army needed to reconstruct critical infrastructure. Specifically, the military sought to build a new base in Huehuetenango, the Quinta Brigada de Infanteria MGS, as a staging ground for attacks against the insurgent Guerrilla Army of the Poor (EGP). The armed forces believed that this massive project could be achieved through the labor of hundreds of Huehueteco/as, who, in their view, would work for little money to build their damaged homes.

Gonzalez remembers being drawn into the Guatemalan military’s construction project in 1976. On his first day working on the base, he was tasked with trenching. He dug alongside indigenous Mayas who the army trucked in from neighboring villages to exploit for the most grueling tasks. Occasionally, the trenches would collapse, Gonzalez recalled, “and the ground would open and swallow people whole.” Twice a week, soldiers would arrive from Guatemala City in armored jeeps, carrying cases of cash to pay the laborers who earned roughly 30 cents for two weeks’ work.

Occasionally, the trenches would collapse, Gonzalez recalled, ‘and the ground would open and swallow people whole.‘

The army effectively transformed Huehuetenango’s western outskirts, the Gonzalez family’s neighborhood, into a full-blown military town. Despite the poor pay, “which was just barely enough for food,” hundreds flocked to the base to work as laborers, plumbers, masonry workers, and carpenters. They constructed sewer lines, guard towers, and prison cells. These workers did not know that such sites would later be used to torture suspected subversives.

For Gonzalez, who was 17 at the time, this period marked the end of his childhood. The Guatemalan Civil War had officially arrived in Huehuetenango. When construction on the base ended, the armed forces became a permanent feature in the town. Soldiers began infiltrating communities in the early 1980s, conscripting all the city’s men into patrols called the Patrullas de Autodefensa (PACs). These civil defense units were tasked with monitoring their own neighborhoods for suspicious activity. Troops would seize people off the streets near the town center or use comisionados (local military leaders) to ensure civilian participation. “None of us wanted to do it,” Gonzalez said, “but if you didn’t join, they could kill you for being a suspected guerrilla.”

*Residents of Huehuetenango watch as Guatemalan army soldiers show captured banners made by a militant guerrilla group on October 1, 1982. Source: Robert Nickelsberg/Getty Images*

On some days, even PAC membership did not offer protection from the Guatemalan Army’s suspicion. Gonzalez’s brother, Antonio, recalled being ambushed by soldiers one day. The army — looking for guerrillas suspected of bombing a nearby airfield —grabbed Antonio off the streets near his home. The soldiers beat him up and strangled him. He only survived by pretending to be dead. “They eventually stopped,” Antonio said softly, “they said, ‘just leave him, he’s dead already’.”

This violent episode was one among many that consumed the life of the Gonzalez family during this period. “They grabbed me off the street too once,” he said, “and attacked me after bursting into my friend’s house.” He began planning when he could he leave home and which roads to take to avoid being stopped and frisked by troops.

By the mid-1980s, the military’s surveillance pushed Gonzalez into a deep depression. “I saw so much destruction,” he shared, “I knew people who just vanished…there was no future for any of us.” He felt sick constantly, from headaches, nausea, and fatigue. “I used to save all my money to go to the doctor…” he remembered, “and they would tell me nothing was wrong with me.” But eventually, Gonzalez decided to flee to the United States. “As soon as I made that decision…I felt healthy again…and suddenly there was hope.”

*Images of los desaparecidos, the disappeared, in Guatemala. Source: Carlos Adampol Galindo*

Gonzalez’s story reveals the effects of the Guatemalan military’s counterinsurgency campaign on one small community in Huehuetenango. Over the course of a decade, the armed forces transformed a relatively peaceful town into a military outpost. They conscripted citizens into their campaign and terrorized communities in the process. For people like Gonzalez, the troops reduced life to a set of strategies for survival and eliminated the hope of a better future. In many ways, this story captures the physical and emotional costs of the Guatemalan military project writ large.

Perhaps, most importantly, Gonzalez’s description of the army’s relentless intimidation during the Cold War also resonates with what historians Julie Gibbings and Heather Vrana call “post-peace Guatemala.” After the signing of the Peace Accords in 1996, which formally ended the Guatemalan Civil War, the country’s security forces continued to monitor young men across urban centers. Police officers routinely cast them as gang members or, at the very least, gang sympathizers. Such social marginalization has become a principal factor driving Guatemalan youth into gangs. In this way, the testimony of Juan Gonzalez not only highlights Guatemala’s longer history of state terror, but implores us to consider the continued human costs of police and military surveillance.

Global Environmental Justice Project

On Monday, March 8th at noon, David N. Pellow will deliver a talk at the Institute of Historical Studies at UT Austin entitled “Exploring Critical Environmental Justice Conflicts from the Neighborhood to the Carceral System.” Dr. Pellow is the Dehlsen Chair and Professor of Environmental Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is also the Director of the Global Environmental Justice Project (the GEJP), which he describes as “a force for supporting, encouraging, and launching a range of efforts on and off-campus, locally and globally that link research, teaching, service, and action for environmental justice.”

Dr. Pellow’s work centers on environmental justice, defined as “the integration of social justice and human rights with efforts to secure ecological sustainability.” His website for the GEJP “supports faculty, students, staff, entrepreneurs, artists, film makers, Environmental Justice advocates, and community leaders in their efforts to explore new ideas, questions, and possibilities for studying, learning about, communicating, and promoting environmental justice.”

The GEJP site offers a range of resources for students and scholars of environmental justice. It provides a regularly updated list of relevant publications, including annual reports on the US prison system and its overlap with themes of environmental justice. It also features related news stories, interviews, and podcasts. One recent podcast focused on “Where the Movement Stands Now in the Age of COVID-19 and BLM.”

The GEJP provides a direct link to relevant news stories, such as this recent article on “Pandemics, policing, and a just transition” in Environmental Health News.

The site complements Dr. Pellow’s extensive research on Environmental Justice and community outreach. He has published books including What is Critical Environmental Justice? (Polity Press, 2017), Keywords for Environmental Studies (editor, with Joni Adamson and William Gleason, New York University Press, 2016), and Total Liberation: The Power and Promise of Animal Rights and the Radical Earth Movement (University of Minnesota Press, 2014). His outreach has involved “supervising a group of UCSB students in developing a Green New Deal for California’s Central Coast,” collaborating with the “Central Coast Climate Justice Network to advance our knowledge base concerning fossil fuel development projects in the region,” and investigations of “how environmental privilege and environmental racism shape the local ecology and life chances of native born and immigrant residents of Aspen and Colorado’s Roaring Fork Valley.”

His upcoming talk contributes to the 2020-2021 theme of the IHS: “Climate in Context: Precedent and the Unprecedented.” For more events related to climate and environmental history at the Institute, see the calendar or find us on Facebook and Twitter.

Review of The Frigid Golden Age: Climate Change, the Little Ice Age, and the Dutch Republic, 1560-1720 (2018) by Dagomar Degroot

Banner image for Review of The Frigid Golden Age: Climate Change, the Little Ice Age, and the Dutch Republic, 1560-1720, by Dagomar Degroot (2018)

This review is part of the wider IHS Climate in Context Series. For more content, see here.

As the world struggles with unpredictable weather patterns and unstable food supplies caused by the current climate crisis, many have turned to the past for answers. Climate change is not new to human history. The Earth experienced a global drop in temperatures starting in the thirteenth century and continuing into the mid-nineteenth century, known as the Little Ice Age. Books on the Little Ice Age, such as Geoffrey Parker’s The Global Crisis, often highlight how the Earth’s cooling climate wreaked havoc on societies around the world as people struggled to adapt. Dagomar Degroot’s The Frigid Golden Age deviates from this standard narrative. He argues, instead, that the Dutch Republic, now the country of the Netherlands, actually flourished during, and even in part because of, the Little Ice Age.

Front and back of The Frigid Golden Age: Climate Change, the Little Ice Age, and the Dutch Republic, 1560-1720, by Dagomar Degroot (2018)

Degroot explores how the years from 1560 to 1720, a period often referred to as the Dutch Golden Age, the Dutch Republic experienced an era of relative stability and strong economic growth that, counterintuitively, coincided with the coldest decades of the Little Ice Age. Did the Little Ice Age create climatic conditions that allowed the Dutch to flourish? Degroot stresses that correlation does not necessarily imply causation. He highlights that the reasons behind Dutch prosperity were complex and tied to a variety of factors that were also independent of fluctuating weather conditions. He admits, however, that the cooler temperatures did prove advantageous for the entrepreneurial and resilient Dutch.

Thus, as societies across the early modern world struggled to cope with cooling temperatures and decreased crop yields, Dutch society remained largely malleable to these changes and, at times, took advantage of them. For example, the changing climate shifted sea ice that facilitated their exploitation of Arctic resources, produced adverse weather conditions that aided in important Dutch military victories against English and Spanish forces, and influenced Dutch culture through the emergence of winter landscape paintings depicting the consequences of the Little Ice Age.

For the majority of his book, Degroot examines the effects of the Little Ice Age on Dutch commerce, conflict, and culture. He examines how the changing climate affected each of these aspects of the Dutch Republic by applying a three-part method. In using this methodology, he convincingly addresses the issues of scale and causation when connecting climate trends to human activities.

In the first step of this method, he determines how long-term global climate changes influenced local environments across short timeframes. For example, he highlights how cooling temperatures across northern Europe increased the frequency of autumn storms in the North Sea. Second, he uncovers examples of short-term, local environmental changes that affected human activities on similar temporal and geographic scales. For instance, and in connection with his discussion of Dutch commerce, he discovers that more shipwrecks often coincided with stormy autumn seasons. Degroot, however, notes that large, ocean-going Dutch merchant ships often survived the storms and in turn used the storms’ powerful winds to shorten their journeys. In his final step, he establishes the relationship between climate change and human history over long timeframes and large geographical areas. For example, while the increased frequency of storms also increased the risk, and thus the cost, of traveling on the North Sea, they also sped up the journeys of Dutch ships, increasing efficiency and decreasing the amount of time sailors were exposed to the deadly elements. His innovative methodology allows him to parse out how the Little Ice Age influenced how the Dutch conducted commerce, waged war, and responded culturally to climate change.

The Battle of Terheide, Jan Abrahamsz. Beerstraten, 1653 - 1666 — **The Battle of Terheide, Jan Abrahamsz. Beerstraten, 1653 – 1666**. Between 1652 and 1674, three naval wars were fought with England – the so-called Anglo-Dutch Wars. This painting represents the Battle of Terheide during the Anglo-Dutch Wars. The Dutch Republic won the battle but lost its commander Tromp, who was fatally wounded. Source: Rijksmuseum

The Frigid Golden Age is a detailed, empirical study that brings to light the ways in which the Dutch Republic adapted to the changing climatic landscape of the Little Ice Age. Degroot draws on an expansive array of evidence, from ship logs to landscape paintings to tree ring analyses to depict the complex nature of Dutch society and its relationship with a changing climate. His work provides a refreshing perspective on the Dutch Golden Age by focusing not only on merchants and political figures, but also on farmers, craftsmen, and soldiers that comprised the Republic’s cosmopolitan nature.

Degroot offers a rich and valuable contribution to the scholarship on the Little Ice Age and climate history more generally. Written in clear and lucid prose, he generally maintains a fine balance between detailed forays into paleoclimatology and engaging vignettes through a thoughtful analysis of his sources. His work successfully challenges the reader to scrutinize human activity in the face of climate change and provides an innovative framework to explore the effects of climate change and how societies can adapt to changing environmental circumstances. The Frigid Golden Age is a must-read for those interested in climate history or early modern Dutch history, and for anyone broadly interested in the implications of climate change on human societies.

IHS Climate in Context – Can We Leave It All Behind?

By Adam Rabinowitz

As part of IHS Climate in Context, Not Even Past is delighted to partner with Planet Texas 2050. Together we’ll publish a series of posts and articles designed to introduce the Planet Texas 2050 project with a particular focus on how historians and archaeologists are contributing to it.

There was once a town called Myous, on the coast of what is now Turkey. It was a Greek town near the mouth of the Maeander River, under the control of the much larger city Miletus. The ancient travel writer Pausanias tells us that an inlet of the Mediterranean initially gave it access to the sea. But he goes on to explain that the river shifted its course and silted up the opening of the inlet. The resulting stagnant lagoon bred so many biting insects that all the residents of Myous simply picked up and moved to Miletus, leaving only a marble temple of Dionysus as a testament to the town’s better days.

I heard this story from geoarchaeologist Helmut Brückner in the summer of 2018, while he was visiting the Greek site of Histria in Romania, where I had recently begun a joint Romanian-American archaeological project. Brückner, whose work on coastal change is legendary, had come with a geography field school from the University of Cologne. He and his students were collecting soil cores to try to understand the development of Histria’s harbor over time.

2019 excavation of Histria, a once bustling residential and industrial area in a major seaport city, then a cemetery in a shrinking provincial backwater, and now an open field seven kilometers from the sea. Source: Professor Valentin Bottez/University of Bucharest

When it was established in the 7th century BC, Histria offered an excellent harbor and easy access to the interior of the Balkans via the Danube River. But now we’re not even sure exactly where that harbor should be located. The site has been abandoned since the 7th century AD, and it’s nearly five miles from the sea as the crow flies — behind a stagnant coastal lagoon that breeds vicious mosquitoes.

A Growing Threat

Both the old world and the new are littered with such ruined cities and towns — they’re bread and butter for archaeologists like me. Sometimes they’re as small as Myous; sometimes they’re as large as the densely urbanized Maya landscape LiDAR has revealed under the jungles of Guatemala. In Western Massachusetts, where I grew up, we’d peer into the water of the Quabbin Reservoir to look for traces of towns drowned in 1939 to meet Boston’s growing water needs.

I tend to take their presence for granted. But occasionally, I am sharply reminded of their implications for the challenges that face us today.

LiDAR imagery of Maya ruins in Guatemala. Source: Wild Blue Media/National Geographic

An IPCC report released in 2018 suggests that climate change will affect us sooner and more dramatically than we expected: a 2.7-degree Fahrenheit average increase in temperature by 2040 — the more optimistic trajectory, if we take action immediately — could still bring droughts, fires, loss of coral, and increased coastal flooding due to sea-level rise and extreme weather. That last development would threaten many of the world’s major urban centers, which — like the ancient trading cities before them — are frequently oriented to the sea. The vibrant city of Miami, for example, contains by some estimates more than a quarter of the homes at risk for rising sea levels in the United States.

Where Would We Go?

In the past, changes in sea level, droughts, erosion or sedimentation, or flooding (an alternate explanation offered for the abandonment of Myous by the Roman author Vitruvius), have led to the abandonment of settlements. Those ruined towns and cities bear witness to environmental changes that left them unsustainable.

But the people who lived in them didn’t simply die or vanish. They moved. We can read this movement in the old settlements scattered across the landscape, but we can also read it in our own DNA, equally dotted with the evidence for past migrations.

For all of our history, mobility has helped to ensure our species’ success. If the mosquito problem in our neighborhood was too much to bear, we left. But as more and more of the world’s population lives in cities, as more and more of our infrastructure and wealth is invested in those cities, and as our national borders harden in response to population movements driven by the ancient impulse to flee from danger, this option is increasingly fraught with conflict and risk. It also highlights inequities in the effects of climate change, as disproportionately-affected poorer communities are forced to choose between the abandonment of traditional ways of life or staying in harm’s way.

*Specialists in Mesoamerican archaeology for LiDAR imagery at the Texas Advanced Computing Center VisLab on the UT campus during a February 2020 Maya LiDAR workshop. Source: Adam Rabinowitz*

As part of the Planet Texas 2050 Grand Challenge, I have sought to find ways to bridge the divide between the distant past and the present, and to show how previous human experience is relevant to our future. The new flagship project I help lead, Stories of Ancient Resilience, focuses in particular on the ways complex societies in the past responded to climate change and pressures on shared resources like water — issues that today’s cities are also grappling with. As my colleagues and I seek to understand the reaction of past urban communities to environmental stresses through archaeological investigation, I am increasingly struck by the role mobility played in that response. How will we adjust to similar stresses in a world where the vast majority of people can no longer simply pick up and move?

Adam Rabinowitz is an associate professor of classics and is the assistant director of the Institute of Classical Archaeology at The University of Texas at Austin. He is also a founding Planet Texas 2050 grand challenge researcher. His work focuses on understanding how climate and environmental change affected past civilizations and applying those lessons to urban areas today.

State of the City – How Paris foreshadowed today’s urban politics of displacement and segregation

Joint Editor’s note: Like so many cities, Austin is in a process of rapid transformation. To better understand this moment and its consequences for the city’s residents, we can draw on insights from other places and periods. This review is the first in a new series called The State of the City. The series, which is a collaboration between Urbānitūs and Not Even Past, aims to share insights from the latest research as well as classic books that explore the varied lives of cities and the connection between urban development and globalization.

Paris – Capital of Modernity, by David Harvey, 2006, 230 pp, Routledge, Taylor and Francis Group

The rule of Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte was bracketed by two violent revolutions in the French capital: the Revolution of 1848 and the Paris Commune of 1871. Elected as president in 1848, he staged a coup three years later and, like his famous uncle, anointed himself emperor of the “Second Empire.” Bonaparte amassed an enormous amount of political and financial power, which he proceeded to unleash onto the city of Paris, transforming the physical landscape and Parisians’ experiences of time, space, neighborhood, and identity.

Beginning with the double-entendre in its title, Marxist historical geographer David Harvey’s Paris, Capital of Modernity emphasizes both the role that capitalism played in thrusting Paris into modernity and the fact that the radical re-envisioning and restructuring of the City of Light heralded urban transformations around the globe over the next century.

Paris, Capital of Modernity self-consciously positions itself as a counterpoint to Karl Marx’s famous class analysis of the 1851 coup, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. Marx, writing in 1852, focused on the political and class machinations that ultimately led to the betrayal of French laborers by the bourgeoisie. Harvey takes the analysis a step farther. He argues that 1851 demarcated two fundamentally different visions for the city: one bourgeois, founded on the rights of individuals but even more on rights of private property; the other, a socialist vision that aimed to alleviate the dire poverty and dismal working and living conditions of the laboring classes.

*Paris and the River Seine, Paris, France. Paris France, 1897. Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/item/2019642044/.*

The economic crisis of 1846-1847 that precipitated the revolution had resulted in over-accumulations of both capital and labor. The coup of 1851 resulted in a concentration of power in the executive. Conditions were therefore ripe for the new prefect, Baron Georges Haussmann, to embark on a massive public works program. How, Harvey asks, did capital and finance, labor, municipal politics, community identity, and the compression of space and time act upon each other during the Second Empire and lead toward the bloodshed of the 1871 Commune?

With the use of dubious but effective financing mechanisms, Haussmann procured the capital to purchase both the necessary political power and construction labor for his projects. He bulldozed many of the city’s narrow medieval streets and replaced them with the grands boulevards, parks, and vistas that we know today. Haussmann’s projects pushed money throughout the city and pulled labor into it from the provinces. The construction of railroads, public transportation, and communication systems accelerated the flow of people and information and drastically shrank the amount of time it took to travel around and into Paris, creating a new geography of experience and imagination.

*The old city island in the Seine, on which the city was started – from the Louvre, Paris, France. Paris France, 1900. Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/item/2019643007/.*

Capitalism and social mobility transformed the landscapes inhabited by the upper classes, providing the space for sidewalk cafés and large, showy department stores—an explicitly consumerist and “extroverted urbanism.” Meanwhile, workers migrated into the metropolis in huge numbers. However, foreshadowing the spatial homogenization of American cities (including Austin!) sixty years later, the poor were displaced to the periphery in a push-pull cycle. As industrial land use was moved from the center, the workers followed. At the same time, they were pushed out by the demolition of their neighborhoods and the astronomical rise in rents. Whereas before they shared buildings with the higher-income bourgeois, they were increasingly socially segregated and fragmented. Before 1848 Paris had been fairly heterogeneous; after Haussmman’s reconstruction, it was increasingly polarized into wealthy western and poor, more radical eastern neighborhoods, such as Belleville.

This reinforced a new dynamic in local politics. Haussmann and Bonaparte refused to allow Paris to have a municipal government and devolved responsibilities to the city districts, or arrondissements. As a result, Parisians across the city developed an anger toward the national government and increasingly identified with their neighborhoods as a site of belonging.

*Eiffel Tower, from the Arch of Triumph, Paris, France. Paris France, 1896. Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/item/2019643009/.*

France’s catastrophic loss during the 1870 Franco-Prussian War ended Bonaparte’s reign and the Second Empire. The national government fled to the small city of Tours, and a radical, socialist, and locally sourced Parisian government stepped into the power vacuum and assumed control over the city. This commune lasted for exactly two months and became the model for Marx’s concept of a “dictatorship by the proletariat.”

Harvey’s analysis leads almost too neatly and inevitably to the violence during the Commune and the bloodshed that followed when the national government and army recaptured the city and massacred the communards. While the number of victims, ranging from seven to thirty-five thousand, continues to be fiercely debated (Harvey claims thirty thousand), what is clear is that the vast majority were from the working classes and their supporters. The bourgeois horror of public disorder—particularly, any that threatened their property—amplified by the increased social polarization, resulted in a racialized ideology directed at workers that went beyond the pathologizing of previous decades and permitted the degree and speed of violence against them, including against women.

Both The Eighteenth Brumaire and Paris, Capital of Modernity conclude in their final pages with the toppling of the imperial column in the Place Vendôme and the statue of Napoléon Bonaparte (dressed as Julius Caesar) on its top. In Marx’s 1852 book, this act of symbolic violence against a capitalist empire was a prophetic vision of an event Marx could only imagine, while Harvey recounts the actual toppling of the column twelve days before the Commune collapsed. “Between the prediction and the event,” Harvey declares, “lay eighteen years of ‘ferocious farce.’” Three years after the bloodshed and conflagration, the column was re-erected along with the nation’s colonial ambitions, but the burned-out shell of the Tuileries palace, France’s last royal residence, was torn down. The disparate fate of these monuments embodies the unresolved contradictions left in the wake of the Second Empire at the dawn of the Third Republic.

Isabelle S. Headrick is a PhD candidate in history at the University of Texas at Austin. She works on the global modern education movement and its interaction with Iranian, Jewish, global French, and family histories. Specifically, her research focuses on a family of French-educated, Jewish school directors who lived in Iran for seventy years (1908-1978) and worked during that time for the Alliance Israélite Universelle, a transnational Jewish educational organization. Her article, “A Family in Iran: Women Teachers, Minority Integration, and Family Networks in the Jewish Schools of the Alliance Israélite Universelle in Iran, 1900–1950,” was published in October 2019 in The Journal of the Middle East and Africa. Her work has been supported by the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute and the Schusterman Center for Jewish Studies and Center for European Studies at UT-Austin. Prior to entering the history program, Isabelle worked for fifteen years as an affordable housing non-profit director and developer in Austin with organizations that serve people with disabilities, people experiencing homelessness, seniors, and families with children.

For more articles from Urbānitūs see here. This review was first published in February 2020 on Not Even Past and is reprinted here with new illustrations.

An Inconvenient Past: Slavery at the Texas Governor’s Mansion

By Kyle Walker

Completed in 1856, the Texas Governor’s Mansion is the oldest executive residence west of the Mississippi River and the fourth oldest continuously occupied executive residence in the US. Between 1856 and 1865, eight men would serve as the Governor of Texas and call this residence home. While the histories of these men and their families are well documented, little is known about the lives of the other occupants of the Mansion, the enslaved men and women who belonged to these Texas Governors.

My research at Texas State University has focused on the history of enslaved African Americans at the Texas Governor’s Mansion. The topic of slavery at the Texas Governor’s Mansion first came to my attention in the spring of 2019. From 2013-2019 I worked for the Texas State Preservation Board in various roles but primarily as a gallery assistant at the four historic sites that the agency preserves and operates. While concluding a tour at the Mansion in April 2019, a visitor asked me where the slaves of former governors lived while at the Mansion. I was dumbfounded, not only because I did not know the answer to their question, but because I had never stopped to ask that question myself.

*Left: John P. G. McKenzie, Drawing of the Governor’s Mansion, 1856. Source: Austin History Center Right: The Texas Governor’s mansion in 1866. Source: Austin History Center*

Reflecting on the visitor’s question raised so many more questions for me. Had the subject of slavery at the Mansion ever been explored before? Why had the history of slavery at the Governor’s Mansion not been explored in greater detail? Why did the Preservation Board decide not to include this aspect of the mansion’s history in their tour material or at least inform their guides about how to interpret this difficult history? Had other cultural institutions such as the Texas Historical Commission, Friends of the Governor’s Mansion, Austin History Center or George Washington Carver Center in Austin explored this subject through publications or exhibits?

The history of slavery at the Texas Governor’s Mansion is a little known and rarely discussed topic at the state’s executive residence today. The tours of the historic home that are offered by the Preservation Board or the Friends of the Governor’s Mansion (a private non-profit organization which manages the home’s collection of historic furniture and artwork), make no mention to the presence of enslaved individuals who worked at the residence between 1854-1865. Brochures and guidebooks available to visitors make no reference to the presence of slaves at the residence although a few scholarly publications, including Kenneth Hafertepe’s Abner Cook: Master Builder on the Texas Frontier (1992) and James Haley’s biography of Sam Houston (2002), do discuss slaves at the site before the end of the Civil War. No interpretive signs stand outside the home, nor are there any exhibits on display in any state, city or county museum in Austin that discuss the role of slavery in the history of the state’s executive residence.

Texas Historic Landmark medallion and National Historic Landmark plaques on the Texas Governor's Mansion — *Texas Historic Landmark medallion and National Historic Landmark plaques on the Texas Governor’s Mansion. Author’s photograph.*

Despite the scholarly work that has been produced about the history of the Texas Governor’s Mansion, the careers of these governors and the lives of their spouses, there exists no substantial analysis of slaves at the Governor’s Mansion. They are seldom talked about or mentioned in publications. When they are, their status was often referred to as that of “servants.” Although more recent publications do at least acknowledge the presence of slaves, little attention has been given to the extent of slavery at the site.

My research into the history of the Mansion has confirmed that up to thirty-eight slaves may have resided at the Texas Governor’s Mansion between 1856 and 1865. I have also shown that slave labor was employed in the construction of the state’s executive residence. The slaves of Texas Governor’s primarily resided in the servant’s quarters above the home’s detached kitchen, located off the back (west) of the home. Some Governors with larger numbers of slaves housed some of them in the stable and carriage house behind the Mansion. A few Governors even allowed some of their slaves to reside in the unused rooms of the house and the slaves of Governor Pendleton Murrah (1863-1865) were left to care for the residence when the Governor abandoned the Mansion after the surrender of the Confederacy.

This photo taken in 1933 shows the rear of the Governor's Mansion which is where the kitchen and slave quarters above the kitchen were located. — This photo taken in 1933 shows the rear of the Governor’s Mansion where the original detached kitchen and slave quarters above the kitchen were located. The original detached kitchen structure was demolished in 1912 when the Mansion was expanded to include a modern kitchen, conservatory, basement, wash room and more second floor living space. For original photos and plans of this space, see pages 103-105 of Kenneth Hafertepe’s *Abner Cook: Master Builder on the Texas Frontier* (1992). Source: Library of Congress

In my research I also set out to determine if other cultural institutions in Austin had investigated the subject of slavery at the Governor’s Mansion. As I expected, the subject was a topic that had been largely neglected by the Preservation Board, the Bob Bullock Texas State History Museum, the Austin History Center, the George Washington Carver Center and even the Texas Historical Commission. This was even though exhibits and historic plaques had been produced focusing on the slave narrative of Jeff Hamilton, a slave of Sam Houston.

What explains this lack of attention? As a historic site, the Texas Governor’s Mansion is an administrative conundrum. It is administered by four state agencies; the Texas State Preservation Board, which preserves, maintains and operates the visitor services of the Mansion; the Texas Historical Commission, which oversees the historic integrity of the home; the Texas Department of Public Safety which provides security for the First Family; and the Office of the Governor. The Governor of Texas is a sitting member on the State Preservation Board, along with the Lieutenant Governor and Speaker of the Texas House of Representatives, who all have a direct say in the preservation and interpretation of the state’s executive residence. This political connection to the state’s top executives has likely caused the Preservation Board to tread lightly when interpreting difficult history such as slavery and the Confederacy at the four historic sites they operate in Austin, for fear of political backlash not just from state politicians but also their constituents.

*View from the second floor gallery looking north east to the Texas State Capitol*, *Author’s photograph.*

It is clear, however, that slavery and enslaved individuals were a significant feature of the Texas Governor’s Mansion throughout its first decade. Despite the controversial nature of the subject and the political sensitivity of the Governor’s Mansion, the continued lack of interpretation or acknowledgement of the subject is, I believe, a disservice not only to the memory of the enslaved persons that once called the Mansion home, but to the greater heritage of African Americans in Austin and the wider state of Texas.

With thanks to Dr Kenneth Hafertepe for his valuable comments.

Kyle Walker is a recent graduate of the Public History program at Texas State University. He earned his bachelor’s degree from the University of Texas at Austin in Anthropology and Geography. As an undergraduate, he participated in archaeological field schools in central Texas and Belize as well as interning with the Texas Historical Commission’s Archaeology Division. As an intern Kyle assisted in cataloging artifacts from the seventeenth century shipwreck of the LaBelle and conducted research for Presidio La Bahia in Goliad Texas. Before enrolling at Texas State, he worked for five years with the Texas State Preservation Board in Austin at historic sites such as the Texas State Capitol, the Capitol Visitors Center in the Old Land Office, the Texas Governor’s Mansion and the Texas State Cemetery. As a graduate student his studies have coincided with his previous work experience, focusing on local and community history, architectural history, historic preservation, museum management, exhibit design, digital history and material culture. In the coming year he hopes to publish his graduate research in an academic journal and is currently assisting the Longhorn Alumni Band in research for a photographic history of the Longhorn Band to be published in 2022. At present, Kyle works as an Administrative Assistant for the Department of History at UT.

Review of Terms of Inclusion: Black Intellectuals in Twentieth-Century Brazil (2011)

By Gabrielle Esparza

Alberto, Paulina L. Terms of Inclusion: Black Intellectuals in Twentieth-Century Brazil. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2011.

In Terms of Inclusion, Paulina Alberto traces the history of Black activism and thought in twentieth-century Brazil. She focuses on the urban centers of São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, and Salvador da Bahia between the early 1900s and the mid-1980s while tracing the strategies that Black intellectuals used to shape discourses about race relations and to negotiate their citizenship. Over the course of the twentieth century, Black political thought and action changed as the possibilities for equality and inclusion shifted with developments in local, national, and international politics. Alberto frames the distinct political strategies applied by Black thinkers as part of a century-long struggle to influence and contest dominant ideologies of racial harmony.

Although Terms of Inclusion focuses on three influential urban centers, they do not all receive equal weight in the text. This is largely driven by the availability and depth of sources. São Paulo, home to a prolific Black press, receives the most attention throughout the study. The large written record left by Black intellectuals in São Paulo’s Black newspapers forms the bulk of Alberto’s documentary sources. She also uses these sources to indirectly access the voices of Black thinkers from Rio de Janeiro and Salvador da Bahia. Academic publications and government documents supplement records from São Paulo’s Black newspapers. By the 1940s, a smaller but influential Black press emerged in Rio de Janeiro. Alberto draws on these sources for the latter half of her study. Salvador da Bahia, which did not develop a strong Black press, receives briefer treatment throughout the text with a stronger focus on the Afro-Brazilian religion of Candomblé.

Because the depth and availability of sources differed in each city, Alberto does not take a strictly comparative approach. Instead, she tries to integrate these regional subplots into a broader national history of Black thought and activism during the twentieth century. In tracing this intellectual history, Alberto engages with scholarship on racial democracy and shows that Black intellectuals did not engage with this doctrine because of its truth but rather because of its potential to negotiate a more inclusive vision of citizenship. Racial democracy therefore represented a shared ideal that these thinkers and activists demanded the state make real.

*Photograph by Arthur Ramos de Araujo Pereira titled “Mãe do santo” shows practitioners of Candomblé in Bahia, 1940. Source: Biblioteca Nacional Digital Brasil*

Alberto develops her argument over six chronological chapters: foreigners (1900-1925); fraternity (1925-1929); nationals (1930-1945); democracy (1945-1950); differences (1950-1964); and decolonization (1964-1985). Each chapter represents a moment in Black Brazilian history and places it within the context of regional and national history. Through this structure, the book moves from the emergence of whitening discourses in the early republic to the doctrine of racial democracy during the 1940s and beyond. However, this organization decentralizes elite white voices and asks readers to consider how people of color engaged with and pushed against these dominant narratives of race relations in Brazil.

Although Terms of Inclusion follows a chronological narrative, it does not present a history of steady progress toward racial equality. Alberto traces how each period’s political circumstances shaped the demands and actions of Black intellectuals. Chapter four, democracy (1945-1950), outlines how Black thinkers used the expansion of freedoms of speech and association to form new organizations and publications. They also adopted the language of democracy and the law to advocate for their own inclusion. In contrast, the subsequent period between 1950 and 1964 provided less freedom to organize around racial identity and to denounce racial discrimination. Narratives of racial harmony and a growing perception of Brazil as a post-racial society had gained popularity in the wake of democratic governance, so exposing differential treatment or forming distinct racial or cultural organizations challenged these ideas of national unity. Thus, Black activists and thinkers faced greater pushback and suspicion when denouncing discrimination.

Terms of Inclusion: Black Intellectuals in Twentieth-Century Brazil furthers our understanding of Black intellectual and activist history in twentieth-century Brazil and engages contemporary debates surrounding anti-racism efforts. For scholars of Latin America, the book is essential reading. However, the text will appeal to a broad academic audience due to its compelling treatment of race, citizenship, and nationhood. In tracing Black thought and racial activism over the course of a century, Alberto demonstrates that Black thinkers continually challenged Brazilian ideologies of racial harmony. At times, this resistance took the form of overt denunciations of racism while other moments embraced popular narratives of racial equality in order to demand that the state live up to such ideals. These differing strategies do not show a contradiction in the movement’s beliefs but rather an effort to adapt to the demands of the historical moment.

« Previous Page

Across the South Seas: Gender, Intimacy, and Chinese Migration to British Malaya, 1877-1939 (Sandy Chang)

The Politics of Human Rights Prosecutions: Civil Military Relations during the Alfonsín Presidency, 1983-1989 (Gabrielle Esparza)

A Growing Threat

Where Would We Go?

Paris – Capital of Modernity, by David Harvey, 2006, 230 pp, Routledge, Taylor and Francis Group

Recent Posts