Adam Clulow, Author at Not Even Past

NEP Author Spotlight – Alejandra Garza

The success of Not Even Past is made possible by a remarkable group of writers, both graduate students and faculty. Not Even Past Author Spotlights are designed to celebrate our most prolific authors by bringing all of their published content across the magazine together on a single page. The focus is especially on work published by UT graduate students. In this article, we highlight the many contributions of Alejandra Garza.

Alejandra Garza is a PhD Candidate at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research analyzes ranching communities along the Texas-Mexico border during the 20th century. She positions the life of Mexican American vaqueros beside the legacy they left behind in their communities. Those legacies are often depicted by monuments, festivals, and celebrations that stretched into the 21st century. Alejandra’s research examines the intersections between gender, race, and culture in a geographical area that is often overlooked in the historiography of Mexican Americans. Rural towns in south Texas provide sites of memory against the backdrop of the ranching economy that evolved throughout the twentieth century.

Some of her publications on Not Even Past are included below.

My Journey Through Career Diversity - Part One

“I don’t want to be a professor.”

Those seven words are probably not what a typical Ph.D. candidate is supposed to say. But that’s exactly what I announced in 2015 as I considered the University of Texas at Austin as the potential site for my doctoral research. Thankfully, these seven words did not derail my admission. I breathed a sigh of relief when Dr. Alison Frazier, the graduate advisor, opened that Recruitment Weekend with a straightforward but hugely important statement: “We know not everyone wants to be a professor, or will obtain a tenure-track job. That is okay. We believe in the malleable Ph.D. and we will help you build your skill set.”

The idea of the “malleable PhD” became my driving motivation (along with my research) as I completed my graduate school education at UT-Austin. I have not only felt comfortable saying that my career aspirations extended beyond faculty-positions but I also have seen the history department here actively engage with what is so often called “alt-ac.” Read the full article here.

For the complete series as curated by Alejandra see below

Part I: My Journey Through Career Diversity
Part II: Navigating the PhD and Beyond: Verónica Martínez-Matsuda
Part III: Navigating the PhD and Beyond: David Conrad
Part IV: Navigating the PhD and Beyond: Eric Busch
Part V: Navigating the PhD and Beyond: Brian Stauffer

Textbooks, Texas, and Discontent: The Fight Against Inadequate Educational Resources

By Alejandra Garza and Maria Esther Hammack

Controversies surrounding textbooks are nothing new, especially in Texas. For years, textbook selection in Texas has grabbed headlines and generated great discontent and debate. Textbooks adopted by the Texas State Board of Education (SBOE) are unusually important because they are also adopted for use in classrooms across the country. Whatever Texas adopts, students across the United States get. In 2014, a coalition of unpaid Texas citizens who called themselves “Truth In Texas Textbooks,” presented the SBOE with a report containing 469 pages of factual errors, “imbalanced presentation of materials, omission of information, and opinions disguised as facts,” found in three world history and geography textbooks that were being considered for adoption that November. And who can forget the 2015 textbook fiasco, when the Texas Board of Education refused to allow professors to review and fact-check textbooks that were to be implemented in Texas curricula that year. Historians and other academics protested because non-experts were writing and reviewing history textbooks.

Read the full article here

A Gold Mine in a Silver Edition: Jim Hogg County, March 9, 1939

Browsing through the online finding aids for the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, I was stunned to discover that they housed an original copy of a 1939 newspaper from Hebbronville, my hometown in South Texas. The curiosity quickly got the better of me and I was at the repository the next day calling up this item. Two thoughts running ran through my mind: “How funny that it ended up here” and “What is so special about March 9, 1939?”

The archivist brought me a larger than usual box that held newspapers from towns all across Texas beginning with the letter “H.” The archivist looked at the box, said “Good luck,” and left me to my searching. To my delight and relief, the newspaper I was looking for sat at the top of the pile, bound in its own cover.

Read the full article here

Border Land, Border Water: A History of Construction on the U.S. Mexico Divide

The U.S.-Mexico border is a constant subject in today’s news. Debates over immigration and the building of a wall along the border keep the spotlight fixed on the land and water that stretches from California to Texas on the U.S. side and Baja California to Tamaulipas in Mexico. As a native South Texan, the route from Laredo to Brownsville was my stomping ground. Laredo was a short 50 mile drive west from my hometown of Hebbronville. It was not uncommon for us to cross the international border into Nuevo Laredo. When my family stopped crossing into Nuevo Laredo, I attributed it to the rise in violence. Historian C.J. Alvarez shows that the debate about the built environment along the border began before the Trump administration and control of the border region includes more infrastructure than the infamous wall.

Read the full article here

African-Soviet Encounters: New Histories of Russian Racism and Anti-Racism

Questions of race have complicated histories in Russia and the Soviet Union, where a commitment to anti-racist and internationalist ideology often disguised racialization and racial conflict. The strong negative reactions to Black Lives Matter in Russia in 2020 have given these questions new attention and urgency. One factor in this history that is routinely overlooked is the role played by representations and representatives of Africa and Africans in politics and culture. This symposium will bring together new voices and perspectives on the history of race and racialization in the Soviet Union by focusing on Soviet interactions with African governments and people, and the presence of Africans in the Soviet Union.

February 3, 2021. 12noonCT.

Speakers:

Nana Osei-Opare, Asst Professor, Department of History, Fordham University

“Black Ghanaians’ Experiences in the Streets of the Soviet Union and Russia, 1960s and 2010s.”

Black Ghanaians in the Soviet Union often found themselves mediating between the Soviet ideological commitment to anti-racism and the racism they encountered every day. How did Ghanaians who lived in Russia in two distinct periods build a Ghanaian national identity and racial solidarity in the conditions of legal, immigration, and economic marginality?

Thom Loyd, PhD candidate, Department of History, Georgetown University

“Dupes and Defectors: African Students as Cold War Propagandists”

In the 1960s, a flurry of travel accounts by Black African students in the Soviet Union appeared in both capitalist and communist publications. Their chronicles of racial discrimination, segregation, and poor conditions were often taken at face value but recently declassified documents require us to rethink the ways these documents have been used to understand the Black African students’ experiences.

Hilary Lynd, PhD candidate, Department of History, UC Berkeley

The collapse of the Soviet Union exacerbated anxieties about where Russia fit into global hierarchies. No longer a superpower, no longer animated by the upward Marxist sweep of progress, Russia in the 1990s found itself in a newly insecure position. Africans suffered the consequences of these new global anxieties. How did Russians invoke images of Black Africa in making sense of Russia’s new condition during and after the Soviet collapse?

Discussants:

Chelsi West Ohueri, Asst Professor, DSES/CREEES, UT Austin

Morgan Henson, MGPS/MA UT Austin, Graduate Student, Department of Sociology, UW Madison

Organizers

Rebecca Johnston, PhD candidate, Department of History, UT Austin

Joan Neuberger, Professor of History, UT Austin

Sponsored by: UT Austin’s Department of History, Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies, African and African Diaspora Studies Department, and John L. Warfield Center for African and African American Studies

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.

A Temperate Empire: Making Climate Change in Early America by Anya Zilberstein (2016)

Centuries before contemporary debates about anthropogenic climate change took shape, early British settlers to New England and Nova Scotia believed that they could “improve” the climate of these otherwise inhospitable regions by placing the land under cultivation. In A Temperate Empire, Anya Zilberstein draws from a rich primary source base to analyze how these early ideas of anthropogenic climate change developed in relation to British colonialism and Anglo-American understandings of race. Decentralized networks of genteel amateur scientists spread throughout the British Empire and the Atlantic World exchanged weather reports, observations, plant and mineral specimens, and technical instruments with the goal of “improving” agriculture and local environments. By their own estimation, the climate had warmed significantly over the course of the 17^th and 18^th Centuries, even though, as Zilberstein points out, their observations coincided with some of the coldest decades of the Little Ice Age.

By examining the debates surrounding the nature of the North American climate, Zilberstein shows how exposure to the new environments of northeastern North America challenged prevailing beliefs about the connection between latitude and climate. Roman and Greek geographers assumed that bands of tropical, temperate, and polar climates wrapped around the globe, an idea that Europeans carried with them to the “New World.” Early explorers and settlers anticipated that New England would have had a climate like Northern France, and that Nova Scotia would resemble Scotland due to their similar latitudes. In reality, however, the regional climates defied the expectations of the colonizers, proving to be dominated by brief yet hot summers, and frigid, long winters. Regardless of these significant challenges, local landowners, agriculturalists, and natural historians aimed to reinforce the idea that the two areas possessed healthy, temperate climates in order to help attract settlers.

Writings by prospective settlers, farmers, and foreign travelers who believed that Europeans ought to settle in “temperate” climates help Zilberstein show how early colonists encountered and understood the climates of New England and Nova Scotia. The author shows a progression from early writings on climate that emphasized latitude, to an understanding of climate than emphasized cultivation and agricultural improvement as a crucial determining factor. Referring to correspondence and the records of agricultural promotion societies, much of which had previously received little to no attention from historians, shows the circulation of knowledge through networks of scholarly gentry, and how the knowledge moving through these networks began to disrupt previous understandings of the climate. The gentleman scientists of colonial New England sought to “acclimatize” the landscape by putting it under cultivation, organizing themselves into learned societies and exchanging scientific information and tools as a form of patronage and “cosmopolitan sociability” (pp. 54). Here, Zilberstein’s attention to the transatlantic nature of knowledge circulation networks and how they persisted from colonial to post-colonial times in the United States stands out as an especially admirable historical contribution.

A prospective view of the town of Boston, the capital of New-England - and the landing of --- troops in the year 1768 — A prospective view of the town of Boston, the capital of New-England – and the landing of — troops in the year 1768, in consequence of letters from Gov. Bernard, the commissioners, &c. to the British ministry / P. Revere. Source: Library of Congress)

After addressing knowledge circulation networks in New England, the book turns its attention to the colonial government of Nova Scotia and its efforts to attract settlers to the colony despite its frigid, often inhospitable climate. Zilberstein notes that a previous colonial experiment in Panama led Governor Samuel Vetch to believe that settlers from cooler temperate areas like Scotland or Northern Europe would be ideal for the region, but failed to attract sustained interest. The connections between ideas of race/ethnicity and climate are further examined by the author when she examines the attempted relocation and resettlement of 568 Jamaican maroons to Nova Scotia in 1796. Local elites and international abolitionists lambasted this decision, since mainstream thinking about race contended that Africans could not adapt to a frigid climate. Her use of this case study again allows the author to transcend traditional historiographical boundaries between nation-states and between different parts of the British Empire, placing extremely local phenomena in dialogue with global scientific discourses.

*Nova Scotia, Kitchin, Thomas, 1718-1784, cartographer. Source: Library of Congress)*

The book ends without a separate conclusion, a decision which invites the reader to return to and reread the introduction, or otherwise to reflect on the book’s core themes and integrate the chapters on their own. While this may be a surprising decision for some, at the same time, it could be seen as encouraging conversation and discussion when the book is assigned for a class. Some may wish that the author had devoted more time to the role of the indigenous people in producing knowledge about the local climates. Although Zilberstein acknowledges the presence of Native Americans, her book tends to focus explicitly on the elite production and circulation of knowledge. Nonetheless, the book offers a thought-provoking analysis of how ideas of climate and anthropogenic climate change developed along colonial frontiers, providing a valuable look into an otherwise understudied historical phenomenon. It has the potential to be of broad interest not only to academics but also to members of the general public interested in learning more about how our contemporary ideas of climate have developed.

_________________________________________________________________________________________

IHS Climate in Context: Climate by Proxy

by Melissa Charenko

In 1998, Michael Mann, Raymond Bradley, and Malcolm Hughes published a graph in a top scientific journal. The pattern shown by the graph has become a leading example of a “hockey stick graph.” The graph shows that, since the year 1000, temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere slowly cooled. But, around 1900, temperatures rose sharply. The black line indicating these temperature trends looks like the shaft and blade of a hockey stick.

*Source: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/17/Nordhemispheric_temperatures_of_the_last_millenium%2C_based_upon_Mann%2C_Bradley%2C_Hughes_%281999%29.s*vg

While the hockey stick graph usefully illustrates the rapid warming of the twentieth century caused by human emissions of greenhouse gases, a closer look at the graph reveals the sources of knowledge about climate. The red bars indicate temperatures measured with instruments like thermometers. But scientists have only been collecting instrumental data since the late nineteenth century. For most of Earth’s history, instrumental measurements are not available. To study periods without instrumental measurements, scientists rely on “climate proxies.” On the graph, that data is blue.

Proxies are things like tree rings, ice cores, pollen, and lake sediments. They are material traces that indirectly reflect the climates of the past. For example, scientists can use tree rings to reconstruct past temperature and moisture. Or they can use the air bubbles trapped in ice to study the composition of the atmosphere through time.

*Source: M.P. Edgeworth, Pollen, London : Hardwicke & Bogue, 1877*

Pollen was one of the first climate proxies used by scientists for climate reconstructions. Vegetation produces pollen every year. Each plant genus produces pollen with a distinct shape, size, and surface texture. The pollen travels through the surrounding area and may be washed or blown into lakes and bogs. These low-oxygen environments preserve the pollen well. To study climate using pollen, scientists take a core from the bottom of a body of water. The core contains pollen and other sediments. Scientists will examine pollen in the core, counting the pollen grains in various layers to understand which vegetation was present at particular moments of time. They can then make inferences about climate given the historical distribution of vegetation when the pollen was deposited. Some vegetation assemblages speak to warm, wet periods, while others indicate phases that were cool and dry.

Scientists have been working with proxies since the twentieth century. In 1916, Swedish peat geologist Lennart von Post was the first to suggest that scientists could use pollen for climatic inferences. While many expressed excitement about the method’s potential, they knew more work was needed to understand the relationship between vegetation, pollen, temperature, moisture, and other environmental features. Things like topography or prevailing wind direction could influence the production, dispersal, deposition, or preservation of pollen. These factors had the potential to influence any inferences about climate.

To make pollen into a reliable measure of past climates, scientists studied pollen closely. They set out traps for pollen. They sucked pollen out of the air using modified Electrolux vacuum cleaners on cross-Atlantic voyages. They examined the springtime pollen rain and compared it with contemporary vegetation. They collected pollen and studied its morphology to track whether it fell rapidly or traveled easily by air. They counted (and counted and counted) pollen from many field sites so that foreign or extremely local pollen would be swamped out of the samples. By understandings pollen dynamics, they could reconstruct vegetation and climate.

This work could be wet and rough. Pollen workers needed to traipse through perpetually damp places in the spring when vegetation disperses most of its pollen. As one student sent to Michigan to collect samples in 1928 complained, “my pollen collecting is proceeding very slowly due to the unusually wet weather… This is my sixth day here and it has rained, sometimes terrifically, every day. Mosquitoes are the worst in the history of the station for this time of the year, while blackflies are bothering about as usual.” It was also slow work. The leading American pollen worker, Paul Sears, worried that his colleagues found him “singularly unproductive” as he counted pollen and tried to understand local environmental features before drawing conclusions about the climates of the past.

All this work means that, today, proxies have become a reliable tool for climate reconstructions. Pollen analysis, for instance, lets scientists reconstruct historical plant communities and interpret the speed and character of their response to climate change. Proxies, in short, have unlocked knowledge of past climates, knowledge that scientists are using to understand the climate of the past and future.

IHS Workshop: Royal Power and a Piece of Bread: Sufi Discipleship and Dargah Worship in the Maratha Empire

In 1707, after the death of the last great Mughal emperor Aurangzeb, the power and authority of the Mughals who ruled over the greater part of South Asia for about two hundred years started to disintegrate. The weakening of the imperial center altered the socio-political conditions, which led to the rise of strong regional powers who aspired to fill the political vacuum. The Maratha empire established by Shivaji in 1674 was an important post-Mughal state which grew in this period and posed a formidable challenge to the British political ambitions in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Conventionally, historians of early colonial and modern India have viewed the rise of Shivaji and the Maratha state as an assertion of Hindu religious orthodoxy. It has been argued that symbolic acts such as the coronation ceremony of Shivaji popularized the notion of caste and Brahmanical caste hierarchy among the people in an unprecedented way which led to hardening of caste and religious boundaries. This paper will critique and revise the historical interpretations that associate Maratha polity with religious orthodoxy and the Brahmanization of Indian society by highlighting a parallel tradition of Indo-Islamic Sufi discipleship and Dargah worship practiced and patronized by the Maratha aristocrats and the masses.

Rupali Warke earned her Ph.D. in History at The University of Texas at Austin in 2020. Dr. Warke is a historian of early modern and modern South Asia, specializing in history of gender, colonialism, and political economy. Her other research interests include popular culture and contemporary politics in South Asia. She holds an M.A and M.Phil. in history from Jamia Millia Islamia University, in New Delhi. In 2018, she received a Continuing Fellowship from the Office of the Dean of the Graduate School at UT Austin. In 2016 she won the American Institute of Indian Studies’ Rajendra Vora Fellowship. She is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute for Historical Studies in 2020-2021. Read more about her work here.

Responder:
Donald R. Davis, Jr.
Professor and Chair, Department of Asian Studies
University of Texas at Austin

IHS Climate in Context Workshop: “From Smog to Climate Change? The Precarious Precedents for Curbing Greenhouse Gases in the U.S. and Mexico

Monday November 23, 2020 • Zoom Webinar

I plan to present a draft article that looks at the roots and recent realities of greenhouse gas regulation in the U.S. versus Mexico. Comparing the control of environmental toxics (and other pollutants) instituted over 1970s in the United States with that of the 1990s in Mexico, the piece then goes on to look at how these regulatory regimes have (and haven’t) furnished each nation with tools for overseeing greenhouse emissions. I’ll conclude by exploring the strengths and drawbacks of approaching carbon emissions as we do other kinds of environmental pollution.’

Christopher Sellers is Professor of History at Stony Brook University. His research concentrates on the history of environment and health, of cities and industries, and of inequality and democracy, with a focus on the United States and Mexico. He holds a Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale and an M.D. from the University of North Carolina. Among his numerous grants and fellowships are those from the Wilson Center, the National Science Foundation, the National Humanities Center, and the National Library of Medicine; and among his awards, the Abel Wohlman Award (for best book in public works history) and the Alice Hamilton Prize (a best article award from the American Society for Environmental History). He is the author of Hazards of the Job: From Industrial Disease to Environmental Health Science (University of North Carolina Press, 1997), Crabgrass Crucible: Suburban Nature and Environmentalism in Twentieth-Century America (University of North Carolina Press, 2012), and currently forthcoming from the University of Georgia Press, Skewed City, Democratizing Seeds: Inequality, Democracy, and Environmental Politics in Atlanta’s Twentieth Century, along with numerous edited volumes and articles. In 2016, he co-founded and now serves as co-moderator of the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative, an influential group of scholar- and scientist-activists. As a residential Fellow at Institute of Historical Studies this year, Dr. Sellers will complete an in-depth comparative and transnational study of the history of environmental change and hazards connected to the oil industry in Mexico and the United States.

Respondents:

Dr. Christopher R. Boyer
Dean of the College of Arts and Letters
Northern Arizona University
https://nau.academia.edu/ChrisBoyer

Dr. David Adelman
Harry Reasoner Regents Chair in Law
University of Texas at Austin
https://law.utexas.edu/faculty/david-e-adelman

IHS Fellow Dr. @ChrisCSellers co-authored a piece for @voxdotcom w/ Dr. Marianne Sullivan @WPUNJ_EDU, on why the new administration must rebuild & strengthen the EPA: http://bit.ly/34xptZI.

The Vanishing American Century?

By Jeremi Suri (with comment by Daniel Immerwahr)

From the Editors: This article is accompanied by a comment from Daniel Immerwahr (Northwestern University) who specializes in twentieth-century U.S. history within a global context. Such comments are a new feature for Not Even Past designed to provide different ways to engage with important new work.

One problem with arguments that bemoan or cheer the end of the “American Century” is that there never was one. Despite the United States’ moment of economic and atomic predominance after World War II, the United States immediately faced strategic challenges from the Soviet Union, and soon from Communist China, among others. If anything, American citizens felt less safe from foreign adversaries in 1945 than they had a decade earlier.

The Cold War meant that deadly conflict continued. Five years after the Japanese surrender at Tokyo Bay, American soldiers were again in combat in Asia. Between 1950 and 1953 more than 33,000 Americans died on the Korean Peninsula, which remained divided near where the conflict had started. Hostile, aggressive governments in North Korea, China, and North Vietnam redoubled their efforts to undermine U.S. interests, especially around Japan. U.S. Sen. Joseph McCarthy frightened a majority of Americans into believing that communists were infiltrating all aspects of domestic society. Some American Century.

The reality is that, throughout the Cold War, American military power rarely produced the battlefield dominance that leaders and citizens expected. More often than not, American soldiers and their proxies fought to a standstill against smaller, determined adversaries in Korea, Lebanon, Cuba, Vietnam, Angola, and elsewhere. Similarly, generous foreign aid rarely gave U.S. leaders the leverage they wanted. Cold War historians have chronicled in detail how allies from Paris and Bonn to Tokyo, Tehran, and Tel Aviv resisted and manipulated Washington while benefiting from American protection, markets, and resources. The allies realized that the United States needed them, and they could play to a mix of fears, hopes, and hubris among American leaders. There was always a threatening adversary to justify continuing to send aid to allies, despite their resistance to Washington’s demands for reform and loyalty. Very often, smaller partners pulled the United States into projects and conflicts that did not serve American interests. Vietnam, a former French colony, was the most infamous of many examples.

Washington’s international leadership was always limited, uncertain, and contested. It was most effective when it facilitated cooperation, often among a diverse group of allies and former adversaries. In Western Europe, the United States helped to build institutions for economic integration and collective security through the Marshall Plan, the European Coal and Steel Community (later the Common Market and the European Union), and NATO. In East Asia, Washington nurtured economic development, trade, and security cooperation among Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. On a more global scale, the United States helped create the United Nations and its associated agencies that constructed webs of technical and political cooperation across issues from atomic energy and peacekeeping to health, education, and communications. Through the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, also U.S.-led institutions, the United States helped to bring numerous countries together to address global poverty and economic instability.

Postwar internationalism served American interests by making the world safer and more stable—for the prosperity of U.S. citizens, as well as many others. American diplomacy and foreign assistance supported alternatives to communism, war, and depression. Every high-ranking American foreign-policy maker before 1980 remembered how the isolated and conflictual environment before World War II contributed to that cataclysm. These chastened officials—Democrats and Republicans —sought to prevent a recurrence, in a nuclear age, at almost all costs. “Never again” did not mean the United States had to dominate the world; it could not. “Never again” meant the United States must lead a diverse group of nations to work together toward common interests.

*Marshall Plan Posters, Intra-European Poster Competition 1950*

This postwar commitment to international engagement and cooperation had many flaws. It was intolerant of communist and many nationalist alternatives. It presumed Western, and especially American, superiority. And it gave disproportionate voice to figures (“the establishment”) with access to capital, prestigious institutions, and specialized knowledge. Many voices, at home and abroad, were locked out of U.S. policy discussions. Despite incessant claims about democratization, American postwar leadership often encouraged a kind of fraternal cooperation among like-minded trans-Atlantic figures who fit the stereotypical descriptor “pale, male, and Yale.”

These serious limitations notwithstanding, American leadership in the second half of the 20th century still worked because it brought numerous countries together to cooperate on improving the lives of their citizens. Instead of war, societies that allied with the United States increased their trade and consumption. Many allies, especially in Europe and East Asia, became more open and democratic. Others, especially in the Middle East and Latin America, remained repressive, but they also had to grapple with rising calls for reform, openness, and human rights that the United States legitimized, even if it did not always support them in practice. Frequently, U.S.-supported institutions, especially the United Nations, promoted national independence and human rights, despite Washington’s own abandonment of those priorities.

The postwar international ecosystem seeded by U.S. leadership made repression harder to justify or ignore, and American realists did not control the narrative. American claims about freedom and justice abroad reverberated at home, fueling civil rights activism and forcing Jim Crow Cold Warriors on the defensive.

The infrastructure that grew around this ecosystem was both American and global at the same time, giving Washington unique influence, but not full control. That was the genius of the postwar international order. The emergence of a dollar-based global financial regime is a perfect example. From the earliest postwar years, American printed currency lubricated commerce in the most vibrant economies. By the end of the 20th century, international finance was denominated almost entirely in dollars, depending on the ability of the U.S. Treasury and the Federal Reserve to both circulate sufficient money, especially during crises, and prevent inflation from spending and borrowing excesses. This delicate balance required cooperation between the printers of the currency in Washington, the bankers around the world, and the governing powers in large economies.

U.S. Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and other NATO Ministers of Defense and of Foreign Affairs met together at NATO headquarters to give final political guidance in preparation for the meeting of Allied Heads of State and Government at the upcoming NATO Summit in Lisbon, Portugal in November in Brussels, Belgium, on Thursday October 14, 2010. DOD photo by Master Sgt. Jerry Morrison(RELEASED)

The great and enduring success of American leadership was to manage this process, even when the circulation of dollars created new competitors, including Japan and then China. Americans were better served by a global capitalist system they could help regulate, but not control, rather than the alternatives. Although U.S. policy in recent years has undermined postwar internationalism—and also faced renewed challenges from foreign rivals—real American leadership remains vital. The COVID-19 pandemic illustrates how essential international cooperation is for monitoring threats, managing supply chains, serving suffering populations, and stimulating weakened economies. The pandemic has become more contagious and deadly, particularly in the United States, because American-led international cooperation has been lacking. And the countries that have managed well on their own will still suffer from the pandemic’s deepening damage to the U.S. and world economies.

No other country has the resources, networks, and history to support cooperation on the scale of the United States. American leaders, because of their global media presence, frequently set the tone for interactions between societies. It is simply impossible to imagine the core foundations for international cooperation holding around economy, science, health, and environment without contemporary U.S. leadership. There’s no other country that could step forward and stand up effectively against destructive actors.

All international orders have a life cycle. They rise and fall, but they do not disappear overnight. The American postwar international order has long shown signs of decline, identified by Henry Kissinger and others more than 50 years ago. Until there is a viable replacement, Americans and the plurality of nations would be wise to continue to support U.S. leadership in bringing openness and stability to a very dangerous, conflict ridden world. One country cannot guarantee security and justice, but someone must lead.

Debates about renewing or abandoning the pretenses of a mythical “American Century” are distractions. The real work is in renewing the cooperative American international leadership that insured so much peace and prosperity for 70 years.

Comment by Daniel Immerwahr

There never was an “American Century.” This is the provocative argument of the often-provocative Jeremi Suri, and it could not come at a better time. In the Trump Era, the leading position of the United States in the world has visibly eroded, triggering an argument about whether this is bad (“It’ll lead to anarchy or a world run by totalitarians”) or good (“It’ll lead to a more democratic world”).

But for Professor Suri, the historian, all this misses the point. The grip the United States held on the world since 1945 was never strong and fell far short of “full control.” Yes, the United States controls the world’s largest military, but it hasn’t won very many wars with them. Yes, the United States gives foreign aid, but it hasn’t thereby turned the world’s leaders into puppets. Whatever success the United States has enjoyed on the world stage has been by cooperating with consenting allies, not by ruling them as a quasi-emperor. Suri is not here arguing that U.S. leaders are pure of heart, but rather than they are weak of limb. The “postwar international ecosystem” has forced the United States to play nicely with others, fall in line with human rights, and recognize national independence.

Understanding U.S. hegemony as “leadership”—effective only when it is cooperative—rather than empire, Suri asks for more of it. No other country is yet in a position to orchestrate coordinated responses of the world’s countries to challenges like the novel coronavirus, hence “it is simply impossible to imagine the core foundations for international cooperation holding around economy, science, health, and environment without contemporary U.S. leadership.”

The position Suri implicitly argues against is one that sees the United States as strong and destructive, rather than weak and cooperative. Advocates for that position point out that even if the United States hasn’t won many of its wars, it’s done quite a lot of damage to many countries in losing them. They argue that U.S. foreign policy has been as likely to oppose democratic regimes as support them, and that its global promotion of prosperity, health, and environmentalism have been complicated at best, perverse at worse.

This is a live debate, and an important one. In it, Professor Suri stands with the optimists who believe U.S. power to be essentially beneficent. Let’s hope the coming years prove him right.

A version of this article first appeared in Foreign Policy. It has been revised since then and a comment added.

Jeremi Suri holds the Mack Brown Distinguished Chair for Leadership in Global Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin. He is a professor in the University’s Department of History and the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs.

Daniel Immerwahr (Ph.D., Berkeley, 2011) is an associate professor at Northwestern University, specializing in twentieth-century U.S. history within a global context. His first book, Thinking Small (Harvard, 2015), offers a critical account of grassroots development campaigns launched by the United States at home and abroad. His second book, How to Hide an Empire (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019), tells the history of the United States with its overseas territory included in the story.

IHS Climate in Context Talk: Ancient Trees in Modern Times

Talk: “Ancient Trees in Modern Times” by Jared Farmer, University of Pennsylvania

Thursday December 3, 2020 • Zoom Webinar

Just as modernity created antiquity, modern science created ancient trees. However, most old trees do not suit the needs of data-driven science. After looking for centuries for the “oldest living thing,” scientists finally found something both ancient and instrumental: the tree-rings of Great Basin bristlecone pines. In the end, the abstract science of dendrochronology recapitulated the material history of sacred trees. As proxies for past climates and as symbols of climate change, bristlecones cannot be more timely or timeful.

Jared Farmer is Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Farmer studies the overlapping historical dimensions of landscape, environment, technology, science, religion, culture, and law. His temporal expertise is the long nineteenth century; his regional expertise is the North American West.

Farmer has received fellowships and grants from institutions such as the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Humanities Center, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. His book On Zion’s Mount: Mormons, Indians, and the American Landscape (Harvard University Press, 2008) won the Francis Parkman Prize from the Society of American Historians. In 2014, the Dallas Institute presented him the Hiett Prize in the Humanities; in 2017, the Carnegie Corporation of New York named him an Andrew Carnegie Fellow; and in 2018, the American Academy in Berlin awarded him a Berlin Prize.

His recent peer-reviewed work includes “Executive Domain: Military Reservations in the Wartime West,” in World War II and the West It Wrought (Stanford, 2020); “Taking Liberties with Historic Trees,” in the Journal of American History (March 2019); and “Technofossil,” in Future Remains: A Cabinet of Curiosities for the Anthropocene (Chicago, 2018). His current book project is a place-based planetary history of ancient trees and the problem of long-term thinking.

Read more about Dr. Farmer’s work on his Penn profile page and on his professional homepage. Prof. Farmer uses Instagram to record his landscape observations

The Myth and the Massacre: A Murder on Brazil’s Black Consciousness Day

By Marcelo José Domingos

Brazil’s Black Consciousness Day (November 20th) was traumatic in 2020. Amid the devastating effects of COVID-19, in which more than 169,000 people have died, Brazilian citizens awoke to news of a racially-motivated murder. João Alberto Silveira Freitas, a 40 year old Black man, went to a supermarket with his wife in Porto Alegre, the capital of Rio Grande do Sul state. After a not-so-clear dispute involving Freitas and the security officers at the cashier, he was ”invited” to leave the grocery store. While his wife was paying the bill, Freitas was beaten to death by security guards. This heinous incident was recorded, and then disseminated on social media. The news of his death was released on the date officially recognized by Brazil to commemorate Afro-Brazilians’ historical struggle against slavery and racism.

In a press interview, Brazilian Vice President General Hamilton Mourão, categorically condemned as ”regrettable” Freitas’s death at the hands of the security guards. But he went further, stating: ”For me, in Brazil there is no racism. This is something they want to import here to Brazil. It doesn’t exist here.”^[1]

The Vice President’s statement might sound like nonsense today, especially for black activists, given the extensive data showing Black Brazilians discriminatory treatment in employment, housing, education, and by law enforcement. Yet such a conviction is disturbingly consistent with the historic rhetoric of the Brazilian armed forces and conservative sectors regarding the nation’s race relations during the civil-military dictatorship that ruled the country between 1964 and 1985. The recently declassified intelligence Army reports of Black Movement activism in Brazil are the most valuable source for this discussion.

*Photo Credit: Jacqueline Lisboa, a Brazilian photojournalist and political activist.*

During the so-called decompression period (1974 – 1985) of controlled democratization, the Brazilian dictatorship gradually relaxed authoritarian rule. Simultaneously, new political and social organizations – such as unions, student and grassroots associations, and the modern Black movement initiated their activities. Its leading anti-racism group, the Movimento Negro Unificado Contra a Discriminação Racial – later renamed simply Movimento Negro Unificado^{^[2]} – MNU, was founded in 1978 in the city of São Paulo. Given its connections with emerging leftist factions, the MNU, since its inception, had its activities monitored by the repression intelligence.

The origins of the November 20 commemoration as Black Consciousness Day date back to the same decade. At that time in Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, and Bahia, groups of Black intellectuals met to discuss Brazil’s racial inequalities. In 1978 these groups would form the coalition of the MNU. Among the various ideas and proposals for action and discussion, activists rejected two broadly accepted beliefs among Brazilians. The first was the concept of the so-called Brazilian racial democracy. This term is attributed to Brazilian anthropologist Gilberto Freyre (1900 – 1987), originating from his seminal book Masters and Slaves (1933). Freyre advocates the idea that Brazilian society’s formation, based on racial mixture, was a harmonious process.

The work of sociologists Florestan Fernandes and Roger Bastide, Brancos e Negros em São Paulo (1959) The Negro in Brazilian Society (1969) however, dismantled the ‘myth’ of racial democracy. Subsequently, other authors, such as Lélia Gonzalez and Carlos Alberto Hasenbalg, to name just a few, did the same. Black activists also sought to revisit the historical memory of slavery in Brazil. On May 13, 1888, Princess Isabel de Orleans e Bragança, as acting head of the government, had proclaimed emancipation. Official commemoration of the date reinforced the idea that the freedom of the Black population had been given rather than achieved through their individual and collective effort.

Dates are potent ingredients for the production of myths. The selection of November 20 was a response of Brazilian black activism to official history. Activists sought out the colonial past of Brazil for inspiration. At that time, the enslaved who fled their owners created communities of resistance and struggle called quilombos. The largest and most powerful of them, Palmares, lasted almost 100 years. After several attacks by the colonial forces, it was destroyed by mercenaries on November 20th, 1695. Its leader, Zumbi, was executed that same day. This date was chosen by activists to become Black Consciousness day, almost 300 years later.

During the 1970s , military intelligence reports targeted Black intellectuals and activists who denounced racism. They were accused of introducing “subversive” foreign ideas to Brazil from the Black Power movement in the United States. Those intellectuals were a permanent threat to the country’s image of racial democracy. Abdias Nascimento (1914 – 2011) was the most notorious example. The Brazilian Black activist was a political exile and professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo in the 1970s. One of his most important books, Brazil Mixture or Massacre? Essays in the Genocide of a Black People (1979), denounces the falsehood of racial democracy, and the Brazilian state’s attempt to omit racial data from the national census. As Nascimento writes:

The fact is that since 1950 race and color data have been omitted from census information in Brazil on the assumption that an act of ‘white magic’ can eliminate ethnicity by decree. This process occurs under the rationale that it is founded on a perfect social justice system – everyone is Brazilian, be he black, white, Indian or Asian. But its real significance is that it provides another instrument of social control.^{^[3]}

Such frank discussions of racial inequality promoted by Nascimento were categorized as “racist” and subversive by government agents of repression. And the same strategy of demonization would be employed against other Black activists who questioned the dogma of racial democracy. According to Article 33 of the Decree-Law 314 of 1967 – the National Security Law that was based on the National Security Doctrine – incitement of hatred or discrimination based on race was defined as a crime. According to this logic, Black activists or organizations that denounced acts of racism could be deemed in violation of the law.

During the 1980s, Army reports insisted that racism was alien to Brazil. Regarding Black activist groups, for instance, Special Information Report #04 drafted by General Mario Orlando Ribeiro Sampaio, head of Army’s Information Center (CIE), stated in 1982:

CIE intends, however, with this Report, to warn of the danger represented by the deliberate and criminal intention of stimulating the growth in the country, by all means, of moral cancer that is racial discrimination and the stupid antagonism between brothers of different skins. Among the disintegrating ideas that have been occurring to subversives of all shades, (…), There is the idea of stimulating the racial problem, creating it even where it doesn’t exist (…), [These subversives] They will not get their intention, as long as we are attentive to their intentions.^⁴

Note that the author insists on the absence of racial antagonisms in Brazil and suggests that movements like the MNU and other “subversive” groups create such divisions. To the Army officials, the idea of racial democracy was an ideology shared by all of Brazilian society. Those who question such orthodoxies must necessarily be deemed “foreigners.” During military rule, the Brazilian government went so far as to exclude the category of race from the national census of 1970.

As Vice President Mourão’s statement reveals, many Brazilians seem to think the same way about race relations decades later. General Mourão is part of the Brazilian population that romanticizes social harmony and views countervailing beliefs as subversive or foreign to Brazilian culture. Likewise, President Jair Bolsonaro, who also attended military academies in the 1970s, champions an ideology that denies racism and race-based inequalities in Brazil.

Historically, racism in Brazil has not been legally-sanctioned or discursively explicit, but it can be observed in statistics on education, health, and job employment, as well as life expectancy. Today, the numbers are undeniable: more than 50,000 people die violently in Brazil in a country without wars, and the majority are Black males under thirty.^[5] João Alberto Silveira Freitas, in this sense, was already a survivor of systemic racial violence and social exclusion until he met his death at the hands of security guards while buying groceries. Despite such grim numbers, however, conservative groups have sustained and defended a lasting idea of racial democracy that far outlived Brazil’s military dictatorship. For those reasons, the Vice President’s proclamation of the absence of racism in Brazil, on the occasion of a Black man’s murder on the Day of Black National Consciousness, is both unforgivable but also sadly entirely predictable.

Marcelo José Domingos is a PhD candidate and fellow at Center for the Studies of Race and Democracy. His work in progress, City, Repression and Resistance: Recovering the Narratives of Black Activism in Brasilia-DF (1978-1988) analyses the Dictatorship intelligence files on the anti-racism struggle in Brazil’s capital.

^[1] https://g1.globo.com/politica/noticia/2020/11/20/mourao-lamenta-assassinato-de-homem-negro-em-mercado-mas-diz-que-no-brasil-nao-existe-racismo.ghtml accessed in 11/20/20

^[2] Black Unified Movement against the Racial Prejudice and after simply Black Unified Movement.

^[3] Nascimento, 1979, 79-80

^[4] Arquivo Nacional. BR_DFANBSB_V8_MIC_GNC_AAA_86059514_d0001de0001.pdf

^[5] .https://www.ipea.gov.br/atlasviolencia/arquivos/artigos/3519-atlasdaviolencia2020completo.pdf acessed in 11/22/20

This is Democracy Reading List: Historical Memory and National Trauma (episode 121)

Not Even Past is proud to partner with This is Democracy, a groundbreaking podcast that brings together thoughtful voices from different generations to help make sense of current challenges and propose positive steps forward. This is Democracy Reading Lists are designed to accompany the podcast interview and to provide additional, curated readings for anyone interested in the topic under discussion.

For Episode 121 of This is Democracy, Jeremi and Zachary Suri hosted Dr. Susan Neiman to discuss the role of historical memory in addressing past injustices.

We tend to assume that the crimes of the Nazis were so awful, that the minute the war was over, they fell on their knees and begged for atonement. That is not what happened at all. In West Germany, in particular, they thought of themselves as the world’s worst victims…And I suddenly realized they sound just like the defenders of the Lost Cause
Dr. Susan Neiman

Listen to the podcast below or access it here.

For further readings on historical memory and national trauma, Dr Susan Neiman recommends the following six books.

Susan Neiman, Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019).

“In the wake of white nationalist attacks, the ongoing debate over reparations, and the controversy surrounding Confederate monuments and the contested memories they evoke, Susan Neiman’s Learning from the Germans delivers an urgently needed perspective on how a country can come to terms with its historical wrongdoings. Neiman is a white woman who came of age in the civil rights–era South and a Jewish woman who has spent much of her adult life in Berlin. Working from this unique perspective, she combines philosophical reflection, personal stories, and interviews with both Americans and Germans who are grappling with the evils of their own national histories. Through discussions with Germans, including Jan Philipp Reemtsma, who created the breakthrough Crimes of the Wehrmacht exhibit, and Friedrich Schorlemmer, the East German dissident preacher, Neiman tells the story of the long and difficult path Germans faced in their effort to atone for the crimes of the Holocaust. In the United States, she interviews James Meredith about his battle for equality in Mississippi and Bryan Stevenson about his monument to the victims of lynching, as well as lesser-known social justice activists in the South, to provide a compelling picture of the work contemporary Americans are doing to confront our violent history. In clear and gripping prose, Neiman urges us to consider the nuanced forms that evil can assume, so that we can recognize and avoid them in the future.”

David Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002).

“No historical event has left as deep an imprint on America’s collective memory as the Civil War. In the war’s aftermath, Americans had to embrace and cast off a traumatic past. David Blight explores the perilous path of remembering and forgetting, and reveals its tragic costs to race relations and America’s national reunion. In 1865, confronted with a ravaged landscape and a torn America, the North and South began a slow and painful process of reconciliation. The ensuing decades witnessed the triumph of a culture of reunion, which downplayed sectional division and emphasized the heroics of a battle between noble men of the Blue and the Gray. Nearly lost in national culture were the moral crusades over slavery that ignited the war, the presence and participation of African Americans throughout the war, and the promise of emancipation that emerged from the war. Race and Reunion is a history of how the unity of white America was purchased through the increasing segregation of black and white memory of the Civil War. Blight delves deeply into the shifting meanings of death and sacrifice, Reconstruction, the romanticized South of literature, soldiers’ reminiscences of battle, the idea of the Lost Cause, and the ritual of Memorial Day. He resurrects the variety of African-American voices and memories of the war and the efforts to preserve the emancipationist legacy in the midst of a culture built on its denial. Blight’s sweeping narrative of triumph and tragedy, romance and realism, is a compelling tale of the politics of memory, of how a nation healed from civil war without justice. By the early twentieth century, the problems of race and reunion were locked in mutual dependence, a painful legacy that continues to haunt us today.”

Craig Wilder, Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2013).

“A 2006 report commissioned by Brown University revealed that institution’s complex and contested involvement in slavery–setting off a controversy that leapt from the ivory tower to make headlines across the country. But Brown’s troubling past was far from unique. In Ebony and Ivy, Craig Steven Wilder, a rising star in the profession of history, lays bare uncomfortable truths about race, slavery, and the American academy. Many of America’s revered colleges and universities–from Harvard, Yale, and Princeton to Rutgers, Williams College, and UNC–were soaked in the sweat, the tears, and sometimes the blood of people of color. Slavery funded colleges, built campuses, and paid the wages of professors. Enslaved Americans waited on faculty and students; academic leaders aggressively courted the support of slave owners and slave traders. Significantly, as Wilder shows, our leading universities, dependent on human bondage, became breeding grounds for the racist ideas that sustained them. Ebony and Ivy is a powerful and propulsive study and the first of its kind, revealing a history of oppression behind the institutions usually considered the cradle of liberal politics.”

Harold Marcuse, Legacies of Dachau: The Uses and Abuses of a Concentration Camp, 1933-2001 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

“Dachau was the first among Nazi camps, and it served as a model for the others. Situated in West Germany after World War II, it was the one former concentration camp most subject to the push and pull of the many groups wishing to eradicate, ignore, preserve and present it. Thus its postwar history is an illuminating case study of the contested process by which past events are propagated into the present, both as part of the historical record, and within the collectively shared memories of different social groups. How has Dachau been used–and abused–to serve the present? What effects have those uses had on the contemporary world? Drawing on a wide array of sources, from government documents and published histories to newspaper reports and interviews with visitors, Legacies of Dachau offers answers to these questions. It is one of the first books to develop an overarching interpretation of West German history since 1945. Harold Marcuse examines the myth of victimization, ignorance, and resistance and offers a model with which the cultural trajectories of other post-genocidal societies can be compared. With its exacting research, attention to nuance, and cogent argumentation, Legacies of Dachau raises the bar for future studies of the complex relationship between history and memory. Harold Marcuse is Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he teaches modern German history. The grandson of German emigré philosopher Herbert Marcuse, Harold Marcuse returned to Germany in 1977 to rediscover family roots. After several years, he became interested in West Germany’s relationship to its Nazi past. In 1985, shortly before Ronald Reagan and Helmut Kohl visited Bitburg, he organized and coproduced an exhibition “Stones of Contention” about monuments and memorials commemorating the Nazi era. That exhibition, which marks the beginning of Marcuse’s involvement in German memory debates, toured nearly thirty German cities, including Dachau.”

Heather Cox Richardson, How the South Won the Civil War: Oligarchy, Democracy, and the Continuing Fight for the Soul of America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020).

“While the North prevailed in the Civil War, ending slavery and giving the country a “new birth of freedom,” Heather Cox Richardson argues in this provocative work that democracy’s blood-soaked victory was ephemeral. The system that had sustained the defeated South moved westward and there established a foothold. It was a natural fit. Settlers from the East had for decades been pushing into the West, where the seizure of Mexican lands at the end of the Mexican-American War and treatment of Native Americans cemented racial hierarchies. The South and West equally depended on extractive industries-cotton in the former and mining, cattle, and oil in the latter-giving rise a new birth of white male oligarchy, despite the guarantees provided by the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, and the economic opportunities afforded by expansion. To reveal why this happened, How the South Won the Civil War traces the story of the American paradox, the competing claims of equality and subordination woven into the nation’s fabric and identity. At the nation’s founding, it was the Eastern “yeoman farmer” who galvanized and symbolized the American Revolution. After the Civil War, that mantle was assumed by the Western cowboy, singlehandedly defending his land against barbarians and savages as well as from a rapacious government. New states entered the Union in the late nineteenth century and western and southern leaders found yet more common ground. As resources and people streamed into the West during the New Deal and World War II, the region’s influence grew. “Movement Conservatives,” led by westerners Barry Goldwater, Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan, claimed to embody cowboy individualism and worked with Dixiecrats to embrace the ideology of the Confederacy. Richardson’s searing book seizes upon the soul of the country and its ongoing struggle to provide equal opportunity to all. Debunking the myth that the Civil War released the nation from the grip of oligarchy, expunging the sins of the Founding, it reveals how and why the Old South not only survived in the West, but thrived.”

Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Penguin, 2006).

“Sparking a flurry of heated debate, Hannah Arendt’s authoritative and stunning report on the trial of German Nazi leader Adolf Eichmann first appeared as a series of articles in The New Yorker in 1963. This revised edition includes material that came to light after the trial, as well as Arendt’s postscript directly addressing the controversy that arose over her account. A major journalistic triumph by an intellectual of singular influence, Eichmann in Jerusalem is as shocking as it is informative—an unflinching look at one of the most unsettling (and unsettled) issues of the twentieth century.”

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The Myth and the Massacre: A Murder on Brazil’s Black Consciousness Day

This is Democracy Reading List: Historical Memory and National Trauma (episode 121)

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