The past is never dead. It's not even past

Not Even Past

West African Compounds in 18th-century Colonial Jamaica

A major question among scholars of freedom and slavery in the Atlantic world concerns the extent to which Indigenous African characteristics were successfully transferred to the Americas and survived enslavement, a system of formalized debasement, and dominant European or American social and political systems. This sprawling question has generated intense academic debate. Published in 1976, Sydney Mintz and Richard Price’s The Birth of African American Culture: An Anthropological Perspective argued that the extreme hardships of the Middle Passage and enslavement profoundly shaped the lives of African and Afro-descendant communities in the Americas. This process of ‘creolization’, they contended, gave rise to entirely new cultures, distinct from their Indigenous African roots.[1]

Both schools of thought produce interpretations that hinge on an unquestioned acceptance of the principles of cultural syncretism that uncritically delineates ‘African’ and ‘non-African’ characteristics. More recently, James Sidbury and Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra have argued that such claims risk becoming increasingly meaningless. Instead, dominant historiographical trends are shifting to describe the early modern Atlantic world as a fluid landscape where change and cultural mixing were constants, challenging the assumption that one can draw a clear line between ‘African’ and ‘non-African’ characteristics. Scholars such as Brown, Sidbury and Cañizares-Esguerra, and Thornton use the backdrop of ethnogenesis, or the formation and development of ethnic groups, to investigate older arguments about the continuity or separation of African and Afro-descendant populations from their African roots. In this article I propose that the understudied indigenous African socio-political institution of the compound provides a useful lens to study the organization and evolution of African and Afro-descendant populations with a focus on 18th-century colonial Jamaica.

Image of Leonard Parkinson, Maroon Leader, Jamaica, 1796.
Leonard Parkinson, Maroon Leader, Jamaica, 1796.
Source: Wikimedia Commons

The study of the Indigenous characteristics of African and Afro-descendant populations in 18th-century colonial Jamaica is prominent in colonial and contemporary historiography. Scholars have focused particularly on Akan-speaking enslaved people transported from the Gold Coast in West Africa and who were known for their numerous and persistent acts of rebellion. Known as the Coromantee, among many other names, they were described by colonial writers such as Thomas Phillips, Brayan Edwards, W.J Gardner, and Edward Long as exceptionally strong, hardworking, rebellious, and warlike compared to other groups of enslaved people.[2] Most modern scholars recognize that African-born Akan-speaking groups composed the largest (albeit decreasing) demographic segment of the island during the 18th century, forming the so called “Coromantee nation.”[3] In Tacky’s Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War Vincent Brown argues that Jamaican slaves derived much of their leadership, tactics, and rituals directly from indigenous Akan-practices. However, this was a far from straightforward process.

Scholars have been focused on the ethnogenesis of the Coromantee as a tool for their organization and self-identification, and the degree to which this transformation represented a continuation or break from previous socio-political formations. However, through subsequent readings of scholarship on the discourse of ethnicity, major discrepancies in the study of African socio-political modes of organization appear. Few contemporary sources about slavery and ethnicity in Jamaica substantially analyze the complexity and contexts in which the socio-political characteristics of enslaved communities were originally and continuouslyproduced.

Modern historians like Vincent Brown, Robin Law, Simon P. Newman, and John Thornton widely accept that the “Coromantee nation” was originally an European invention: an amalgamation of diverse groupings of people that roughly (but not exclusively) corresponded to the Gold Coast that had no shared identity.

1794 Boulton and Anville Wall Map of Africa (most important 18th centruy map of Africa)
1794 Boulton and Anville Map of Africa
Source: Wikimedia Commons

Crucially, these ‘non-African’ impositions seem to have been, at least partially, accepted by Akan-speaking slaves in the 18th century.[4] While the Coromantee remained far from a unified ‘nationality’ it is clear that some form of shared Coromantee identity developed in 18th-century Jamaica. This suggests the creation of a Coromantee identity may constitute an example of cultural syncretism, that is, the mixing of two distinct cultural elements to create something new: an epistemological creolization. More concrete examples of supposed Afro-European ‘cultural syncretism’ can be found in Alleyne Mervyn’s study of Jamaican linguistics and Erin Trahey’s analysis of kinship networks among elite freed women of color in Jamaica, where the island’s populations incorporated many elements of “European culture,” reflecting cultural creolization.[5] Such interpretations suggest that the incorporation of ‘non-African characteristics’ into populations previously considered ‘authentically African’ prior to enslavement creates something entirely new and removed from “the past.” [6] It is like the ship of Theseus: part by part, the African ship is replaced with new, non-African parts. All of this raises a question: At what point is the African ship no longer African but something else entirely?

The Compound in West Africa

How did African and Afro-descendant populations maintain continuity in the face of radical change in both Africa and the Americas through the socio-political institution of ‘the compound’?Qladejo O. Fadipẹ describes the compound as the smallest and most important political unit in Yoruba society.[7] The ‘compound’ derives from the Yoruba term, “agbo Ilé, (lit., a flock of houses),” which houses the “idile”[8] or family/clan, led by a baálė, the head of a compound, usually the eldest male relative of the founding lineage of a compound chosen by popular consensus from full compound-members.[9] Compounds, especially during periods of violence, might contain multiple extended families and dependents.

At its most basic level, the compound represents a complex set of unequal client-patron relationships producing vertical power structures where social and political standing was defined by one’s place in a steep but fluid hierarchy.Compounds contained dependents—clients—like children, wives, enslaved people, and refugees subject to the immediate and personal authority of a compound’s patron(s), like a baálė.[10] Each baálė oversaw the internal and external affairs of their compound, with few exceptions, acting as a bridge between compound members and the higher authorities within the community, thereby fostering stable political units.[11] Conversely, these vertical power structures existed within complex horizontal power networks containing thousands of other compounds organized into alliances and polities of varying size and sophistication.[12] They existed at the intersections of kinship, lineage groups, chieftains, village/town authorities, religious cults, and states, binding them all together.

The geography and violent landscape of pre-colonial West Africa, driven by the trans-Atlantic slave trade, fostered constant displacement and circulation of people, creating what James Scott refers to as “shatter zones” or areas where continuous waves of peoples settled into heterogeneous communities organized to foster mutual aid and protection. One example is Lagos, which was populated by numerous waves of different people.[13] Because the wealth and power of pre-colonial West African groupings were usually based on the control of people, its socio-political institutions developed to incorporate large numbers of diverse individuals.[14] To do this, compounds not only needed to operate in violent and chaotic areas but also overcome the cultural differences among their heterogeneous members. The key to doing so, according to Sandra T Barnes, was the incorporation of outsiders and outside knowledge.

In pre-colonial Akan-speaking communities, there was a potent desire to obtain and incorporate outside knowledge vis-á-vis the acquisition of foreign dependents, sometimes through violence. An example from Asante oral traditions is Gynama Nana, the Queen Mother of Takyiman, who was captured and taken to Kumasi as a enslaved person. Her granddaughter was later given a prominent role in the Asante state as the Abanasehene, responsible for the Asantehene’s clothes.[15]

Takyiman oral traditions argue that the introduction of Gynama Nana and other individuals from Takyiman was even more significant, supposedly “civilizing” the Asante Empire.[16] Even the more modest Asante account shows how Takyiman outsiders were brought into Asante society and incorporated into the households of prominent officials.

Another example is the case of Kramo Tia, which showcase the importance of outside knowledge in Akan-speaking communities. Kramo Tia was a gifted Muslim Imam from the polity of Gonja north of Asante. Asante oral traditions claim that Kramo Tia was captured by the Asante and made into a slave of the Asantehene because he was a “…powerful Kramo or Moslim who was gifted in the Koran and worked miracles…”[17] Conversely, Gonja oral traditions claim that the Asantehene invited Kramo Tia to participate in his court because the best Imams were said to come from Gonja.[18]

Pictures of AKAN gold weight sculptures of different bovin heads
Akan Gold Weight MHNT bovid head. Source: Wikimedia Commons

Both the Asante narrative and Gonja counter-narrative demonstrate how the Asante sought Kramo Tia’s unique outside knowledge. Like Gyamana Nana and her family, Kramo Tia, and his descendants gained prominent positions of power in Asante society because of their outside knowledge. This power was reinforced through Kramo Tia’s formation of a compound as shown through the accounts of Al-Hajj Sulayman, grandson of Kramo Tia.[19] Kramo Tia organized these enslaved people into a cohesive but heterogeneous community bound through shared bondage to Kramo Tia’s central lineage group.[20]

While the specific characteristics of compounds varied significantly, there were three important commonalities. First, compounds tended to be localized hierarchical institutions bound by varying client-patron relationships: vertical power networks. Second, compounds operated within complex networks of fellow compounds and other political formations such as towns, chieftains, or kingdoms: horizontal power networks. Together, compounds created flexible political relationships forged in chaotic environments, making the compound incredibly resilient. Third, the heterogeneous populations of compounds—attributable to the region’s endemic violence—made them unusually open to the incorporation of outside knowledge that produced change.

The compound was a remarkably adaptable institution, which accounts for both its enduring significance and the challenges in recognizing and studying it. Just as ethnic categories make complex groupings legible, the compound can provide a framework for understanding socio-political groupings across ethnic, state, kinship, and religious lines, binding these elements together. I suggest that the compound survived its forced relocation to 18th-century Jamaicabecause it incorporated heterogeneous populations and ideas into workable groupings that were able to operate within the brutal conditions of racial slavery. Thus, the reconfigurations observed in African and Afro-descendant populations in 18th-century colonial Jamaica should not be seen as a break from their pasts. Instead, these changes should be understood as continuations of a much longer process of transformation across the early modern Atlantic World.

The Compound in Jamacia

In his article, The Coromantees: An African Cultural Group in Colonial North America and the Caribbean, John Thornton analyzes the ethnogenesis of the Coromantee, or the coming together of the Coromantee as a distinct and real ethnic, or “national” grouping in 18th-century colonial Jamaica.[21] Both Thornton and Vincent Brown agree that no widespread Coromantee identity existed in Africa, and argue that upon arriving in the Americas, heterogeneous Akan-speaking communities fostered immediate connections with fellow Akan speakers due to their shared language.[22] However, besides language, Thornton argues that there were “…no other common institutions that might have linked the linguistic group together.”[23]  He points to the absence of indigenous political and religious homogeneity capable of fostering a pan-Coromantee identity. Instead of indigenous socio-political institutions, Thornton argues that a new and more flexible ethnic community emerged, forming a broad “super-family” known as the Coromantee nation.[24]

Lithograph of Slave uprising in Jamaica in 1759.
Slave uprising in Jamaica in 1759.
Source: Wikimedia Commons

Connecting compounds on the Gold Coast to compounds in Jamaica requires an examination of the contexts and characteristics necessary for compound formation. As explored through the case studies of Gyamana Nana and Kramo Tia, Gold Coast communities existed in porous landscapes. Both individuals may have been forcefully brought into Asante society through violence. Kramo Tia and his descendants built his wealth and power by incorporating dislocated slaves into his compound. Brown further corroborates the endemic chaos of the Gold Coast, predisposing the region to compound formation.[25] Jamaica was similarly characterized by endemic violence and displacement from the slave trade and racial slavery.[26] This chaos was exacerbated during Jamacia’s frequent periods of warfare and armed insurrection, including Tacky’s Revolt (1760-1761).

Gold Coast and Jamaican groupings were highly heterogeneous.[27] DNA tests among modern Jamaican populations have traced significant numbers of their ancestors from Senegambia, Sierra Leone, the Gold Coast, the Bight of Benin, Bight of Biafra, West-Central Africa, Southeast Africa, and East Africa.[28] From the Gold Coast, the majority of ancestors were Akan speakers, though groups like Gā and Ewe speakers were also represented. Even among the Akan, colonial writers observed a high degree of diversity where many non-Akan populations around the Gold Coast adopted Akan as a regional lingua franca.[29]

Thornton cites several examples of non-Akan individuals integrating themselves into high positions of Coromantee “national associations”. In 1736, a prominent slave named Court, possibly of Gā origin, was executed after his public coronation as king of the Coromantees in Antigua.[30] Court likely possessed specialized leadership knowledge due to his high social standing in West Africa. He brought this knowledge into a new society as an outsider, and was able to obtain a high position of power. His story clearly mirrors that of Kramo Tia and his family/compound’s integration into Asante society.

Furthermore, during Tacky’s Revolt in colonial Kingston, Queen Akua was elevated to a high position of power by the city’s Coromantees. Her socio-political network, defined by reciprocal and uneven relationships, resembled the porous political structures of the West African compound, where loyalty, not territorial boundaries, determined the scope of her power.[31] Erin Trahey’s analysis of extended kinship networks among elite free women of color in Jamacia illustrate how localized socio-political patronage networks incorporated Euro-American characteristics.[32] Trahey uses Jamaica’s rich archival records, citing the will of Mary Gwyn to reconstruct the inner workings of Gwyn’s “kinship network”.[33] Gwyn’s socio-political network consisted of a complex web of horizontal “African-descended bonds of affection and affiliation” and a number of dependents (slaves) organized in hierarchical (vertical) manner. Many of the characteristics and contexts indicating compound formation are present in this case study.

However, the existence of Mary Gwyn’s compound and its authentic “Africaness” may be called into question by the Euro-American elements of her life. Gwyn made use of British paperwork and laws to secure the transfer of her property. She had an English name, likely spoke English and wore European clothing. It is unclear how Mary Gwyn identified herself and imagined her heritage. Each individual had a unique relationship with and conceptualization of their heritage.

In this article I have argued that the compound, an “originally African institution,” survived its reconfiguration in the Americas, particularly in Jamaica, and remained a crucial form of socio-political organization among African and Afro-descendant populations. This view challenges the perspectives of Burnard, Mintz, Price, and Thornton, who contend that these populations lost much of their indigenous characteristics due to Euro-American influences through slavery. While Thornton describes the ethnogenesis of the Coromantee as a blend of African and European epistemologies, Vincent Brown emphasizes the agency of the Coromantee, linking their organization to indigenous African practices.

However, without the compound, this view risks essentializing the identities and actions of these populations as either more or less ‘African.’ The compound’s flexibility allows for a more nuanced understanding of cultural adaptation and the continued agency of African-descended people. By examining these processes, this articles advocates for a more dynamic framework that critiques fixed notions of “Africanness” and “Europeness,” offering a broader lens through which African and Afro-descendant agency in the Americas can be explored.

Acknowledgements

I want to thank Dr. Cañizares-Esguerra for the capstone undergraduate seminar he taught this fall of 2024. The course’s focus on reading each week academic monographs, book reviews, and/or primary source anthologies gave needed historical and historiographical contextualization about freedom and slavery in the Americas. Moreover, this rigorous coursework provided excellent training for navigating the discipline of history: the production of guiding historical questions, the examination of primary source evidence, the analysis of a field’s broader historiography, and finally the creation of unique and valuable historical interpretations. Dr. Cañizares’ emphasis on primary source material challenged me to incorporate tangible historical evidence into my analysis of prominent historiographical narratives, grounding my research. His extensive knowledge of slavery in the Atlantic World, and the fields in which these subjects are studied was incredibly stimulating and rewarding. 

[1] Sidbury, James and Jorge, Cañizares-Esguerra. “Mapping Ethnogenesis in the Early Modern Atlantic.” The William and Mary Quarterly 68, no. 2 (2011): 181.

[2] Other names for the Coromantee include (but by no means are exclusive to) Mina, Aminas, Coromantis, Koromantyn, Coromantin, and Cormantine.

[3] Quantifying the Coromantee population of Jamaica is a challenging task. DNA analysis evidence corroborates mainstream stances that Gold Coast populations were generally the most significant. Newman, Simon P., Michael L. Deason, Yannis P. Pitsiladis, Antonio Salas, and Vincent A. Macaulay. 2012. “The West African Ethnicity of the Enslaved in Jamaica.” Slavery & Abolition 34 (3): 394. doi:10.1080/0144039X.2012.734054.

[4] Information originally cited from: Public Record Office, London (henceforward PRO) Colonial Office (hencefoward CO), vol. 9, file 10 (hencefoward 9/10), Antigua Minutes of Council, 1 November 1737, “Negro’s Conspiracy,” fol. 67. Cited From Thornton, John. “The Coromantees: An African Cultural Group in Colonial North America and the Caribbean.” The Journal of Caribbean History 32, no. 1 (1998): 162.

[5] Erin, Trahey. “Among Her Kinswomen: Legacies of Free Women of Color in Jamaica.” The William and Mary Quarterly 76, no. 2 (2019): 257-288; Alleyne, Mervyn ‘Language in Jamaica’, in The Language, Ethnicity and Race Readers, ed. Roxy Harris and Ben Rapton (London: Routledge, 2003); Peter L, Patrick. “Jamaican Creole: morphology and syntax.” A handbook of varieties of English 2 (2004): 407-438.

[6] Trevor, Burnard. “The Atlantic slave trade.” In The Routledge history of slavery, 2010.

[7] Qladejo O. Fadipẹ, and Okediji Olu Francis. Sociology of the Yoruba. Ibadan. UP, 1970, 97-117.

[8] Peel, John David Yeadon, and J. D. Y. Peel. Religious Encounter and the Making of the Yoruba. Indiana University Press, 2003.

[9] Many of these newly arrived dependents: slaves, refugees or otherwise, may not be considered, at least initially ‘kin’ but may have partial membership within the compound nevertheless. Fadipẹ 105.

[10] Fadipẹ 117.

[11] Certain legal offenses committed by compound members, “were placed by custom outside his [the baálė’s] jurisdiction. These were murder, witchcraft, incest violation, and the communication to women of the secrets of the secret societies,” Fadipẹ 108.

[12] Fadipẹ 106 ; Peel 59.

[13] Sandra T, Barnes. “Ritual, Power, and Outside Knowledge.” Journal of Religion in Africa 20, (1990): 250.

[14] Sidbury and Cañizares-Esguerra 185.

[15] Takyiman was a polity northeast of Kumasi conquered by the Asante Empire in 1723. For more background information about Takyiman and its relationship to the Asante Empire, please reference, Kwuame, Adum-Kyeremeh. “The historical background to the Takyiman disputes with Asante.” African Journal of History and Culture 8, no. 5 (2016): 30-40; The Asantehene is the title given to the ruler of the Asante Empire; Dr. Alex Kyerematen: Interviewed by Prof. Ivor Wilks and Dr. Phyllis Ferguson, September 12, 1973, Kings College, Cambridge, England. This interview can be found in the Ivor Wilks, Conversations about the Past. Taken from African Voices on Slavery and the Slave Trade.16-17.

[16] Nana Kofi Biantwo: Interviewed by Eva L. A. Meyerowitz in 1945. Taken from Eva L. R. Meyerowitz, Akan Traditions of Origin (London, 1952) 43–44. Taken from African Voices on Slavery and the Slave Trade, 23-24.

[17] The stool histories excerpted here were collected by J. Agyeman-Duah and are now housed at the Manhyia. Taken from African Voices on Slavery and the Slave Trade, 24. Archives in Kumase, Ghana. These excerpts come from Glenna Case, Wasipe, 231–232. Cited in Glenna Case, Wasipe under the Ngbanya: Polity, Economy and Society in Northern Ghana. (unpublished PhD dissertation, Northwestern University, 1979), 231. Taken from African Voices on Slavery and the Slave Trade, 24-27.

[18] Wasipewura Mahama Safo II: Interview by Glenna Case with Mathilda M. Soale, February 14, 1976, Wasipewura’s Palace, Daboya. Cited in, Case, Wasipe. Taken from African Voices on Slavery and the Slave Trade, 25.

[19] Al-Hajj Sulayman: Interviewed by Thomas James Lewin, July 10, 1970, Kumase. Cited from, Thomas James Lewin, The Structure of Political Conflict in Asante, 1875–1900. Volume II – Asante Field

Texts (unpublished PhD dissertation, Northwestern University, 1974), 65–75. Taken from African Voices on Slavery and the Slave Trade, 27.

[20] Al-Hajj Sulayman 27.

[21] Thornton 169; Brown 102

[22] Brown 86-87, 90; Thornton 164-165

[23] Thornton 166.

[24] Thornton 166-169.

[25] Brown 92-93.

[26] Thornton 169.

[27] Al-Hajj Sulayman 27.

[28] Newman 385.

[29] Long 472; John Thornton, Africa and Africans in Making of the Atlantic World, 1400-1680 (Cambridge, 1992), 184-92. Cited from Thornton 165; Robin Law, The Slave Coast of West Africa, 1550–1750: The Impact of the Atlantic Slave Trade on an African Society (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 22–25.

[30] Public Record Office, London (henceforward PRO) Colonial Office (hencefoward CO) Vol 9 PRO CO 9/10, fold. 45, 51, 100-102. Cited from Thornton 170; According to Thornton, “The name Tackey, by which he [Court] was also known, is a name associated with the royal family in Gā-speaking Accra. The fact that he was considered to be of “considerably family” may reflect this heritage. See the table of Gā royal names, in Hart, Slaves Who Abolished Slavery, 12, 29 nn. 13 & 14. Hart’s sources for this table were interviews with Na Anowa Tackie, the Queenmother of the Tackie lineage,” Thornton 178, endnote 44.

[31] Long, History of Jamaica, 2: 455; Rucker, Gold Coast Diasporas, 155, 212, 213– 215. Cited from Brown 162.

[32] Trahey 263.

[33] Trahey 276, quoted from Will of Mary Gwyn, proved June 21, 1783, LOS 47, fols. 114–115 (“kinswom[e]n,” 114), RGDJ.

Remembering Violeta Parra

California State University’s Professor of Latin American Studies, Ericka Verba, has published a highly engaging volume entitled, Thanks to Life: A Biography of Violeta Parra. The Chilean folk musician and graphic artist, Violeta Parra (1917–1967), was indeed as the dust jacket claims, “an inspiration to generations of artists and activists across the globe.” She was also very important to me, personally. Let me explain why .[1]

On a warm Saturday morning in 1985, in the period when massive protests against dictatorial rule had just begun to ramp up in Santiago’s peripheral poblaciones, I had a fortunate, unique, and transformative experience. I had taken the bus, guitar in hand, from the población where I lived in La Florida on the southeast edge of the city for the two-hour journey to Pudahuel, on the northwest edge of town. That was where el Mingo lived. He was my partner in a musical duo. Saturday was our rehearsal day.

Our act had become mildly popular on the semi-clandestine protest circuit. Church communities, embattled labor unions, and university students put on shows to raise money for soup kitchens and families of persecuted resistance operatives. We performed for mulled wine, sopaipillas, and bus fare, if we were lucky. Mingo’s crowded home was at the end of the line. Mingo’s family had moved to the capital after the death of his father. Mother and father had been cantores—country musicians—the kind who played and sang for three days at a time for weddings, baptisms, and funerals, before electricity, phonographs, and cassettes. Mingo’s mother didn’t perform anymore. Back in the day, she had played until her fingers bled, while her husband had died of alcoholism—an occupational hazard for los cantores. She had had enough, but her children inherited her the musical talent. Mingo was the youngest, and the most gifted of the all.

Statue of Violeta Parra in Plaza de Armas in San Carlos, Chile
Violeta Parra Sculpture. Source: Wikimedia Commons

That day, on the last leg of my bus ride, I heard music coming from a bike shop on Calle Serrano, the last paved street on the edge of town. It sounded familiar, so I got off before my stop to check it out. There was Mingo, playing and singing with the bike shop owner, whose five wiry sons—under their father’s supervision—repaired the bicycles and cargo tricycles on which working men depended for their livelihoods. Their clever mechanical solutions helped maintain an essential material component of survival.

The bike shop’s owner was Don Lautaro Parra, one of the many surviving siblings of the late Violeta Parra. People remembered Violeta as a renowned folklorist, and arguably one of the most influential women that Chile had ever known. Her recordings of Chile’s folk music, as well as her many original compositions in the traditional style, had guided my understanding of how our resistance to the Pinochet dictatorship fit within a much longer struggle for the dignity of working men and women. Since the early days of the republic, they had been oppressed by the predatory inclinations of an unbridled oligarchy. In this context, song was a survival mechanism for the soul.

Don Lautaro was a tall man, expert in bike repair, and honored as working class nobility. Like his famous sister, Don Lautaro played instruments and sang in the authentic, traditional style. He had invited Mingo to join him at the Cementerio General on the anniversary of Violeta’s death, along with friends and family, for an informal a sidewalk singalong—he called it an esquinazo—to honor the godmother of the Chilean soul. He called her, la Chicoca, the little one, a term of endearment, and also, a reference to her short stature in a family of tall brothers. They rehearsed Parabienes al revés, a wedding song about a poor country bride who arrives at the church riding in an oxcart all covered in flowers.[2] Don Lautaro invited me to join, assigning me some very intricate harmonies. He encouraged us to “let our ears grow” until we had mastered the complex possibilities that lurked just beneath the surface of the simple but clever tune.

Foto of Población León XIII
Población León XIII. Source: Wikimedia Commons

I missed the homage at the cemetery. I can’t remember why. Communication was not easy. There were no cell phones, and poor people didn’t have ground lines, either, so we might have just missed a signal. But it had been my privilege to sing with a man that Chileans considered royalty, because of his lovely sister, that day.

Violeta Parra was a figure of mythical dimensions for us. Under the dictatorship, people tended to hide or discard her recordings, lest they spark rumors of subversive inclinations. As such, a whispered oral tradition had condensed the memory of Violeta Parra into a few bare essentials. Only a one-dimensional version of the woman who meant so much to us had survived. Ericka Verba’s biography recovers the lost details, the subtle nuances, and the dizzying evolutionary process of the gifted and impassioned artist who created and recreated herself, giving shape, verse, and melody to the common people of Chile.

Verba leaves no stone unturned, using interviews, recordings, and images from Santiago to Paris and Helsinki, to piece together a monumental human endeavor. Violeta’s unique style brought a dying cultural tradition back to life. She thought of herself not as a star, but as the silenced everywoman without whom Chile made no sense. However, not everything Verba has to say is flattering, including a discussion of Parra’s theatrical arrogance, her unbridled temper, and her sense of self-importance. Because of that sincerity, the overall picture stands out as far more reliable than the frequent lionizations that tend to circulate in artistic and political circles. This biography combines rigorous historiographical methods with fine aesthetic and musical sensitivities to formulate an authentic version, with all its symphonic dimensions and awkward dissonances.

Yo no tomo la guitarra por conseguir un aplauso : yo canto la diferencia de lo cierto lo falso … Source: Library of Congress

Verba frames her lively narrative as the artist’s quest for authenticity. The world of folk music in Chile and abroad had a growing tendency, in the increasingly mass-produced world of music for profit, to lean into an overly polished and often stylized version of itself. The commercial folksingers, like Los Huasos Chicheros, reminisced about an idyllic hacienda experience that affirmed the oligarchic status quo.[3] On two long sojourns in Paris, Violeta even encountered a naive fascination with staged exoticism. She recalls sharing a venue with a duo of upper class women from Buenos Aires, who dressed up as indigenous women from the Argentine pampa, to perform Andean music from a completely different region, for a Parisian audience that couldn’t tell the difference.[4]

As a young woman, Violeta had done her share of barroom singing to survive,  With her sister Hilda, they performed whatever the people wanted to hear. But in her early 30s, Violeta experienced an awakening. With the help of her brother, the poet and physicist, Nicanor Parra, she discovered the profound artistic value in the authentic traditions of her own people.[5] She became a collector of the people’s poet-songs, and then a composer, in a style that she knew by instinct from her childhood. Verba points out the paradox of “becoming authentic,” but she shows that the artist herself lived that paradox. Performance, by nature, involves artifice, but Violeta’s brand of artifice found its beauty in truth.

A pivotal paragraph at the end of Chapter 3 captures her struggle for authenticity:

“In her newfound vocation as folklorista, Parra assumed the role of intermediary between the pueblo or folk and her cosmopolitan audience…. A number of factors—some unintentional, others deliberate—contributed to the blurring of lines between folklorista and folk informant: Parra’s claim to authenticity as a birthright… her lack of formal training in music or folkloric studies, her untrained singing voice, unassuming stage presence, and a repertoire of ancient poet-songs that allowed her public to experience her not as a performer but as the “real thing”; her offstage appearance as everywoman… and finally, encompassing all the other factors, her steadfast identification with the pueblo.  Within this context, Parra’s turn to folklore in the early 1950s may be considered the first step in a process of authentication that would span the rest of her life.”[6]

Violeta Parra's signature.
Violeta Parra’s Signature. Source: Wikimedia Commons

Her careful biographer signals the cultural and technological tipping points that situated Violeta Parra strategically so that she could voice Chile’s broader quest for authenticity. The possibility of recording provided a way to preserve folk traditions from extinction, but they also threatened those traditions with an overwhelming and market-friendly foreign supply. Modernity pushed musical culture—including folk traditions—toward a global standard of success, but that could drown out the front porch style of not for profit musical production. Violeta depended on rooted people, who had lived for generations in the same place, but she herself became a wanderer. Her many years abroad helped her to identify, define, and embrace her local roots.

Violeta Parra found herself in a borderland between the erudite world of artists and intellectuals—her father’s world—and the uneducated country of her mother’s upbringing. Verba points to Violeta’s longing for market success. She thought it was not only her right, but the rightful place of her brand of artistry. In fact, her work, though always critically acclaimed, remained niche. Even in my time, the poor Chileans who appreciated Violeta’s work, and honored her as their champion, could not afford to but it. By then, cassette tapes had made it easy to pirate her recordings—and even easier to hide them from prying authorities.[7]

One recurrent flaw of Verba’s book might not undermine the overall argument of this biography, but it could affect her credibility with Chilean readers. The author tends to make erroneous assumptions about details of local culture. Verba narrates how the Parra children, in a period of extreme poverty, would sometimes steal and drink the chicha they found in people’s sheds. Verba explains that chicha is a fermented drink made from maize. True, Quechua women in the Peruvian altiplano have made it from maize for centuries, and they still do. But that chicha is not particularly sweet or attractive for mischievous children. Moreover, the common chicha found in Chile’s central valley is a cider made from grapes. The “chicha de uva” has been, and still is, the traditional drink for Chilean Independence Day celebrations on every 18th of September, and no Chilean would assume that the mischievous Parra children snuck off with anything other than that.[8]

Thanks to the Life cover
Thanks to the Life cover

Additionally, Verba describes how some of Parra’s earliest recordings of the cueca came with the traditional animación, improvised shouts of encouragement that musicians and bystanders tend to provide as part of the usual ritual. The point is that Violeta wanted to demonstrate folk music in its most authentic form, with all of its improvisations and rough edges. But Verba assumes that the encouragement is directed to the singers. It is not. The cueca is dance music: animators encourage dancers to put extra energy into their steps.[9]

Verba references a special interest that Leonard Berstein showed in Violeta’s performance at an afterparty of the New York Philharmonic’s performance in Santiago. But she doesn’t mention the fact that Bernstein’s wife, Felicia Montealegre, was Chilean. This might partly explain why the world-renowned conductor paid attention to Violeta at all.[10] These details in no way affect the validity of Verba’s research or her arguments, but they merit correction, particularly if an eventual, and probably long-awaited, Spanish version is forthcoming.[11]

More importantly, Verba argues that Violeta Parra pushed the boundaries of gender roles in Chile. She longed to be a star, and she had the right stuff, but the patriarchal system held her back. I suspect that represents a reading of Violeta Parra’s experience from the perspective of first world women, trying to make a name for themselves in a toxic masculine world that thwarts their efforts and achievements. And, that might be a valid reading, if we were talking about the beautiful, protected, and submissive women of the Chilean upper crust, some of whom have broken the mold in courageous ways.

But I would argue that Violeta Parra comes from a tradition of impoverished women who have survived and raised their children over the centuries because of their tenacity, their audacity, and their implacable fighting spirit. Thus, she was not an outlier. Instead, she was a spokesperson for her class. She struggled, not to create a modern space of gender equality, but to preserve a traditional space of feminine prerogative that modernity had begun to eradicate.[12] Perhaps, Violeta is the most prominent, and the most expressive, of this brave and fearless sisterhood, but we need look no further than the Chilean “Families of the Disappeared” – the courageous mothers, wives, daughters, and girlfriends of the men that the Pinochet dictatorship erased from history – to find the same pattern of fearlessness exemplified in the life and work of Violeta Parra.

In spite of these minor defects in the details, I would recommend Verba’s Thanks to Life not only as a gripping read that puts chronology back into the narrative of a cultural icon on the verge of becoming just a one-dimensional symbol. The humanity of Violeta Parra as a Chilean woman and a world class artist shines through. Moreover, Violeta’s world might serve as the ideal prologue for a syllabus focused on Chile’s impending revolution.

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.

[1] Erika Verba, Thanks to Life: A biography of Violeta Parra, (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2025).

[2] See Verba, Gracias, 224. This one of the songs that Violeta depicted visually in a painting that would be included in her one-woman show at the Museum of Decorative Arts in the Louvre, in Paris, in 1963.

[3] Verba, Gracias, 149.

[4] Verba, Gracias, 103.

[5] Verba, Gracias, 68-71.

[6] Verba, Gracias, 91-92. Pueblo, here, means the common people.

[7] Verba frequently notes that Parra was “good at being poor,” but she was not unique in that regard. Her most faithful followers were good at it, too.

[8] Verba, Gracias, 19.

[9] Verba, Gracias, 56.

[10] Verba, Gracias, 161.

[11] This kind of thing is not uncommon. The very prestigious historian, Karin Rosemblatt, in her monograph, Gendered Compromises: political cultures & the state in Chile, 1920-1950 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), situates the action of Nicómedes Guzmán’s novel, La Sangre y la Esperanza, in the neighborhood of the Estación Central, because it mentions a train station. In fact, it is in the neighborhood—in which I lived for a year—of the old streetcar station, which is no longer there.

[12] Chilean anthropologist José Bengoa argues that the sphere of powerful feminine prerogative dates back to precolonial Mapuche communities. See José Bengoa, “El Estado desnudo. Acerca de la formación de lo masculino en Chile,” in Sonia Montecino and María Elena Acuña, eds., Diálogos sobre el género masculino en Chile, (Santiago: Programa Interdisciplinario de Género, Universidad de Chile, 1996), 63-81.

Zheng Yi Sao: Piracy and Performance

Banner for Zheng Yi Sao: Piracy and Performance

From her probable origins on a floating brothel in Canton, Zheng Yi Sao became one of the most formidable figures in East Asian piracy, commanding around 70,000 pirates at the peak of her power.[1] Due to a number of factors, including a general scholarly neglect of East Asian piracy in China and the emphasis placed on her husbands, Zheng Yi and Chang Pao,[2] Zheng Yi Sao has only recently become a topic of significant interest. Though women’s participation in piracy was by no means rare in her time, Zheng Yi Sao is an especially fascinating figure because she was able to weave through social conventions and amass a remarkable level of influence not just relative to other women but relative to other pirates in a society that at least nominally emphasized Confucian views of female domesticity.[3] This article traces how Zheng Yi Sao adapted contemporary roles available to women as a strategy for advancement and argues that her ability to do so enabled her to shift the balance of power for herself throughout her life.

Piracy is inherently performative, as projecting either an extremely violent image or markers of gentility and statehood allowed pirates to retain power through reputation. Recent developments in gender studies and anthropology also recognize performativity as intrinsic to gender, acknowledging that participation in certain gendered roles, institutions, and norms constitute a “performance” of one’s gender and the expectations associated with it.[4] Zheng Yi Sao’s performance of gender is interesting as it intersects with what initially appears to be a conflicting performance of piracy. As a woman in Confucian society, she gained power partly from marriage and widowhood, while simultaneously leading an organization known for employing terror tactics and extreme brutality. This is not to say that Zheng Yi Sao’s participation in gendered forms was always strategic but it was undeniably a strong influence. She was a masterful leader who wound her way in and out of social convention, selectively choosing when to obey gendered expectations and when to ignore them. Thus, she offers a unique glimpse into how her gender performance intersects with the performative nature of piracy and how that ultimately played a role in her success.

On The Margins

Personal details about Zheng Yi Sao are scarce. She was born in Canton around 1775 and was likely trafficked into sex work.[5] Scholar Nathan Kwan has argued that South China in particular lent itself to female involvement in piracy because it was a place where many marginalized groups resided outside mainstream Han culture.[6] This gave women the opportunity to break out of conventional norms and pushed people of all genders to turn to piracy under economic and political strain. Following the Opium War and the incursion of foreign powers into the region, economic deprivation and political upheaval deeply impacted the South China coast and pressured coastal communities. Women often worked on ships or in jobs related to maritime life, or were sex trafficked and worked on floating brothels called “flower boats.” [7] Given the context in which Zheng Yi Sao lived and worked and the significant presence of minority groups in southern coastal communities, perhaps the best way to understand this figure is as a person on the margins.

Saucer with an image of a Chinese junk near a fort anoniem, c. 1775 - c. 1799.
Saucer with an image of a Chinese junk near a fort anoniem, c. 1775 – c. 1799. Source: Rijksmuseum.

These origins provide a point of departure for understanding how Zheng Yi Sao entered into the world of piracy and highlight how her gender may have played a key role in facilitating that entry. It was Zheng Yi Sao’s connection to maritime life as a sex worker that shaped and gendered her interaction with piracy.[8] Crucially, unlike some of the other moments in her career where Zheng Yi Sao participated in gendered arrangements to gain power, this was likely not a choice, given the widespread prevalence of sex trafficking in the region. Simply because sex work was important to her entrance to piracy does not mean that the work was inherently empowering. Zheng Yi Sao met Zheng Yi through this work. Though embellished European accounts offer speculative and hypersexualized depictions of their meeting that provide little factual value, it is clear that Zheng Yi Sao’s role as a sex worker brought her into frequent contact with pirates, ultimately resulting in her marriage to Zheng Yi in 1801.[9]

Marriage and Widowhood

Though Zheng Yi Sao may not have chosen to be a sex worker, her transition from this role to a wife exemplifies how active participation in marriage, a gendered institution, provided her an escape from sex work and a foundation from which to build influence in the maritime world. Zheng Yi held significant power among pirates operating in Tây Sơn Vietnam. From 1792 to 1802, the Tây Sơn rulers made the Vietnamese Coast a hotspot for Chinese piracy. Because of political tensions in Vietnam, groups of pirates were typically able to secure sponsorship as privateers and their activities flourished. However, piracy in the region collapsed alongside Tây Sơn rule in 1802, at which point pirate activities shifted to the Chinese coast.[10] Zheng Yi Sao and her husband led the new, smaller pirate gangs, still reeling from the collapse of pirate activities, forming seven fleets commanded by leaders loyal to the family, thus establishing their Guangdong Confederation as the dominant Chinese pirate group.[11]

Dish with a standing woman
Dish with a standing woman. Source: Rijksmuseum

At this point, we can begin to understand how the merging of piratical leadership with the gendered “wife” role—regarded as essentially subservient in Confucian China—became an advantage for Zheng Yi Sao. Charlie Harris argues, for example, that due to limited paths for women’s upward mobility, Zheng Yi Sao’s marriage to Zheng Yi was likely a deliberate exercise of agency, not merely an “extension of her status as a second-class citizen.” [12] He emphasizes that although Zheng Yi Sao participated in a patriarchal marriage, she was never Zheng Yi’s “accessory [but] rather… his business partner.” [13] Once married, Zheng Yi Sao used her position as Zheng Yi’s wife to actively participate in efforts to gain power and influence over the maritime world. Dian Murray, the foremost scholar of Zheng Yi Sao, describes her as a true partner to her husband in the consolidation process:

Cheng I [another name for Zheng Yi], aided by his wife, met the crisis [in Vietnam] by leading the pirates to re-establish their power across the border in China…While [Zheng Yi] was the unifier and patriarch, his wife was consolidator and organizer.[14]

By 1804, the Guangdong Confederation numbered 400 ships that were home to 70,000 pirates.[15] In a sense, Zheng Yi Sao’s ability to access power through working with her husband on the consolidation of gangs was not unheard of: elite Chinese women did, on multiple occasions throughout Chinese history, gain influence through their marriages or their sons. These still remained “extraordinary cases where ambitious and socially well-connected women were able, as a direct result of their marriages, to manoeuver their way to power within the male-dominated official bureaucracy.” [16] Yet Zheng Yi Sao’s was far from elite, and non-elite women who succeeded in gaining a degree of power usually only exercised that influence “within their homes.” [17] She therefore wielded the power obtained from her marriage with unconventional strength and independence as a woman from a marginal background, turning her marriage into a political opportunity.

Part of Map of Asia
The World of Zheng Yi Sao. Part of a map of Asia, Gilliam van der Gouwen. Source: Rijksmuseum

Even after her first husband’s death in 1807, Zheng Yi Sao continued to push the conventional pathways to power for Chinese women, leveraging gendered positions as a foundation for dominance. Widowhood offered Zheng Yi Sao a window of opportunity to seize control of the organization she and her husband had built.[18] The crucial component of Zheng Yi Sao’s takeover of the Guangdong Confederation lay in her relational power. Upon her husband’s death, Zheng Yi Sao began to “create and intensify the personal relationships that would legitimize her in the eyes of her followers” and “carefully [balance] the factions around her, building on the loyalties owed to her husband and making herself indispensable to each.” [19] The explicit use of her relationship to Zheng Yi paired with her own strategic abilities yet again demonstrates how Zheng Yi Sao integrated gender into her strategy for ascent, using marital status and diplomacy in tandem.

Zheng Yi Sao’s second marriage presents another revealing case study of her ability to simultaneously use and break marital norms to solidify her influence. By marrying her adoptive son Chang Pao and strategically installing him as leader of the powerful Red Fleet, she “ultimately secured her position at the top of the pirate hierarchy,”  while departing from marital norms by breaking the taboos around incest and the remarriage of widows.[20] Following her retirement, her relationship to Chang Pao would once again prove a taboo-breaking method of gaining status when she claimed the benefits of his military title, despite laws against remarried widows claiming the titles of their second husbands.[21] This marriage seems to have been an explicitly strategic choice, since Zheng Yi Sao’s decision to initiate a sexual relationship with Chang Pao came after she installed him as the Red Fleet commander.[22] Scholars who have studied this relationship concur that Chang Pao became a conduit through which Zheng Yi Sao could exert influence over the Confederation. Both Laura Duncombe and Charlie Harris, for example, cite the establishment of harsh legal codes on the Confederation’s ships as a crucial element in Zheng Yi Sao’s consolidation of power. These were codes she implemented through Chang Pao, using his leadership position to legitimate them.[23] In fact, Zheng Yi Sao’s leadership was so effective that marriage to Zheng Yi Sao clearly provided her husband with upward mobility, turning the contemporary relationship between marriage and political power on its head.[24]

Power, Codified

Zheng Yi Sao was undoubtedly the driving force behind the Confederation’s success. The establishment of protection rackets, investment in on-land enterprises, an aggressive military structure, and the power to negotiate with Chinese officials all demonstrate the professionalization of the Confederation under her leadership.[25]  She was responsible for the financial affairs of the Confederation and set up the tax offices and protection rackets that allowed it to shift into a state-like entity.[26] This professionalizing process allowed Zheng Yi Sao to transform a confederation based on interpersonal relationships into a structured entity with a bureaucracy that kept her in power. As Dian Murray explains, “Although [Zheng Yi Sao] used her marriage as an access to power, her own abilities maintained it thereafter.” [27] Zheng Yi Sao’s ability to convert power which she gained through interpersonal, gendered relationships into formal control of the Guangdong Confederation is a clear example of how she turned combinations of feminine forms with piratical work into tangible power.

Coastal scene
Coastal scene. Source: Rijksmuseum

Of course, the switch from relational to formal power did not entirely remove the influence of gender on Zheng Yi Sao’s career. Most notably, she continued to use Chang Pao to influence the Confederation. It is difficult to render a complete account of how her gender performance interfaced with the period of her life in which Zheng Yi Sao reached peak power, but two interesting issues emerge that can be explored in relation to gender: the treatment of women in her legal codes and the relationship between her gender and the violence of the organization she led.[28]

The legal codes Zheng Yi Sao implemented for the Confederation are interesting in many ways. Some scholars interpret their emphasis on fair division of plunder and protection for women as evidence of an ideological egalitarianism.[29] Notably, the codes also reveal Zheng Yi Sao’s belief that regulated romantic and sexual relationships were intrinsically linked to the smooth functioning of the Confederation. A rose-colored view might see the rules mandating capital punishment for rape and requiring men to remain faithful to captives as proto-feminism. However, provisions calling for the execution of participants in consensual extramarital sex show that these regulations were primarily aimed at keeping order on the ship by controlling personal relationships, reflecting a belief that unregulated romantic and sexual dynamics threatened stability.[30] As Laura Duncombe writes, Zheng Yi Sao “viewed sex as a distraction that kept men from focusing on their jobs.” [31]

The codes, though structured, reflect the violent nature of the Confederation that extended beyond life on deck. Charlie Harris summarizes the violence that formed the core of Zheng Yi Sao’s piratical reputation:

To proactively cultivate a violent mystique, the pirates would drink an explosive combination of wine and gunpowder before sailing into battle… When the pirates captured naval vessels, they would execute even those who had surrendered – apparently by chopping them into small pieces, which would then be thrown overboard. On occasion, they would preface this by nailing their victims’ feet to the decks of their ship. Unsurprisingly, the pirates’ vicious reputation preceded them across the South China Coast.[32]

These practices were not mere rumor or superstition among a terrified Chinese coastal population. Writings from European mariners and merchants captured by the confederation give us a firsthand account of the group’s highly theatrical violence, including disembowelment and consumption of human hearts.[33] The extreme contrast between what would have been expected of Zheng Yi Sao as a woman versus how she operated as a pirate leader served to make her reputation all the more frightening. Dian Murray notes that Zheng Yi Sao “perhaps playing on male fear of her ‘mysterious potency,’ forced government officials to come to terms with her in effecting a settlement.” [34] If this held true for Zheng Yi Sao’s surrender, it was certainly the case for her preceding career. Under her command, the Guangdong Confederation terrorized the coast, besting Chinese, British, and Portuguese ships and even traveling further into mainland China via rivers.[35] Zheng Yi Sao planned and perhaps fought in attacks, cultivating a vicious image made all the more mystical and terrifying by its incongruence with traditional images of Confucian femininity. Zheng Yi Sao’s performance of piratical violence as a woman and her role as “commander-in-chief of the confederation” who “overpower[ed] the provincial navy and challenge[ed] fortresses on land” was a way to assert both reputational and tangible dominance. Her actions were so formidable that Chinese admirals feared venturing to sea..[36]

Surrender and Retirement

Zheng Yi Sao brought both her violent reputation and a deliberate emphasis on her identity as a woman to surrender negotiations, further merging feminine gender performance with piracy and the accompanying reputation for gratuitous, performative violence. Of all the glimpses into Zheng Yi Sao’s career, her surrender offers perhaps the clearest evidence that she knew how to manipulate situations to her advantage through the conscious performance of femininity. Surrender negotiations with the Chinese government began after factionalism threatened the Confederation’s stability, but quickly reached a stalemate when the government refused to let the Confederation members retain their wealth and ships. Both Chang Pao and Zheng Yi Sao insisted on keeping a smaller fleet of 80 ships with 5,000 crew members, plus 40 ships for salt trading.[37] Zheng Yi Sao broke this deadlock by going to the governor-general in Canton unarmed with a number of wives and children in the confederation on April 8, 1810.[38] Taking a step away from her husband and the male officials who worked under her, she presented a feminine image when reopening negotiations. Duncombe suggests that arriving unarmed was a way of “[letting] her powerful track record speak for her,” [39] while Kwan believes Zheng Yi Sao thought that Chinese officials may “panic” if they saw an armed fleet arrive with her.[40] The use of her femininity is not the only reason for Zheng Yi Sao’s successful surrender; the mere threat of her return to piracy ultimately forced the hand of Chinese officials into giving her what she wanted.[41] Yet her choice to meet the governor with women and children after the failure of Chang Pao’s negotiations in February 1810 is perhaps evidence that she approached surrender as not just a pirate but a woman and a wife, securing a position for her husband in the military while surrendering on terms that were highly favorable to members of the confederation in general.

Just as she had gained power through marriage, so too did Zheng Yi Sao set up a successful life after piracy in part through marriage, negotiating a high-ranking military position for Chang Pao and using her status as an official’s wife to claim its benefits.[42] Following Chang Pao’s death in 1822, Zheng Yi Sao continued to use her status as a widow and mother to seek advancement. In 1840, she used her marriage to Chang Pao to charge an official with embezzlement from her long-deceased husband. Additionally, she used her role as a mother to her and Chang Pao’s son (born 1811) to “raise [him] to be a better official than his father.”[43]

Zheng Yi Sao continued using gender roles as a survival tactic until her death in 1844, at age 69. After Chang Pao’s death, stories suggest she ran either a gambling house or a brothel, a lucrative job for women seeking economic prosperity.[44] Perhaps the most remarkable signal of Zheng Yi Sao’s successful career is that she died of old age and not from the dangers of piracy, an accomplishment that may well have been affected by the tactics she used in surrendering, among which her April 8, 1810 performance of gender, discussed above, stands out.

Any investigation of Zheng Yi Sao raises more questions than answers. Fully understanding how she used gender as a strategy for advancement would require speculation about her inner thoughts. There is far too much we may never know about her, including her real name (Zheng Yi Sao translates to “wife of Zheng Yi”). However, she remains a fascinating figure, not least because she was able to transform her gender into a strategic advantage by merging wifehood with power, femininity with violence, and performance with strategy. 

Zheng Yi Sao was not a feminist figure, nor do I suggest that she was a proponent of women’s empowerment.[45] She was a proponent of her own empowerment, able to turn her identity as a woman to her advantage. Zheng Yi Sao’s path to power was not, at its foundation, an abnormal route for a Chinese woman of the period to take. However, Zheng Yi Sao’s ability to use gender as a springboard and a tool to build and maintain the powerful organization she led, an organization that was truly astounding in scale and effectiveness within the history of East Asian piracy, was exceptional and merits careful attention. Zheng Yi Sao negotiated piratical leadership as a woman and as a person on the margins through a mix of preexisting social channels available to her while pushing and breaking the boundaries of gender, thus creating new points of access to power and solidifying her legacy as a markedly powerful and subversive leader.

Maya Jan Mackey is a senior at the University of Texas at Austin pursuing a BA in Plan II Honors, history, and government. She is currently completing her thesis on the Attica Prison Uprising. While completing her undergraduate degree, she has been involved in research on American social movements, gender and politics, the social impact of conspiracy theories, and the history of race. She looks forward to attending law school in pursuit of studying Constitutional and civil rights law.

Acknowledgements: This article originates in Dr. Adam Clulow’s undergraduate seminar on the history of East Asian piracy

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.

[1] One significant exception is the work of the Dian Murray. Murray, Dian. “One Woman’s Rise to Power: Cheng I’s Wife and the Pirates,” Historical Reflections, Vol. 8, No. 3(1981), 148, www.jstor.org/stable/41298765

[2] Duncombe, Laura S. “The Most Successful Pirate of All Time,” in Pirate Women: The Princesses, Prostitutes, and Privateers Who Ruled The Seven Seas (Chicago: Chicago Review Press Incorporated, 2017), 180-181.

[3] Murray, Dian. “Cheng I Sao in Fact and Fiction,” in Bold in Her Breeches: Woman Pirates Across the Ages, ed. Jo Stanley (Elmhurst: Pandora Publishing House, 1995), 206.

[4] See, for example, Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990).

[5] Murray, “Fact and Fiction,” 209-210.

[6] Kwan, Nathan. “In the Business of Piracy: Entrepreneurial Women Among Chinese Pirates in the Mid-Nineteenth Century,” in Female Entrepreneurs in the Long Nineteenth Century, eds. Jennifer Aston & Catherine Bishop (Camden: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), 199-201. See also MacKay, Joseph, “Pirate Nations in Maritime Societies,” Social Science History, vol. 37, no. 4 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), www.jstor.org/stable/24 573942 for a discussion of the Guangdong Confederation as an escape society that was explicitly anti-state in nature and how this may have arisen from the marginal society Zheng Yi Sao came from.

[7] Kwan, “Business of Piracy,” 199-201.

[8] Kwan, “Business of Piracy,” 197.

[9] Harris, Charlie. “Ching Shih and the Pirates of the South China Coats: Shifting Alliances, Strategy, and Reputational Racketeering at the Start of the 19th Century,” in Global History of Capitalism Project Case Studies, ed. Christopher McKenna (Oxford: Oxford Centre for Global History, 2021), 4.

[10] Murray, “Rise to Power,” 149.  

[11] Murray, “Fact and Fiction,” 210.

[12] Harris, “Ching Shih and the Pirates,” 8.

[13] Harris, “Ching Shih and the Pirates,” 8.

[14]  Murray, “Rise to Power,” 149.

[15] Murray, “Rise to Power,” 147-148.

[16] Kwan, “Business of Piracy,” 199-201.

[17] Murray, “Rise to Power,” 148.

[18] Murray, “Rise to Power,” 150.

[19] Murray, “Rise to Power,” 150.

[20] Murray, “Rise to Power,” 150.

[21] Murray, “Rise to Power,” 159.

[22] Murray, “Rise to Power,” 151.

[23] It is worth noting that there is some debate as to the degree to which Chang Pao himself created these legal codes, yet the admittedly limited scholarship there is on his relationship with Zheng Yi Sao tends to take the position that she exerted a significant amount of influence on him and therefore played a significant role in the formation of these codes. Though sources may attribute these codes to either one of the couple, Zheng Yi Sao’s influence is present. For more on this debate, see Duncombe, “Most Successful Pirate,” 178-179.

[24] Murray, “Rise to Power,” 159.

[25] Harris, “Ching Shih and the Pirates,” 10.

[26] Murray, “Fact and Fiction,” 210-211.

[27] Murray, “Rise to Power,” 160.

[28] A minor speculative point also emerges from the fact that at the time, running brothels was a heavily female profession that allowed women a way to enter the Chinese economy, as Nathan Kwan notes (“Business of Piracy,” 211). There is no evidence that Zheng Yi Sao led a brothel, but the possibility that her background in sex work influenced her financial management skills as well as her attitudes towards the capture, ransoming, and selling of women as part of the operations of the Guangdong Confederation. This point requires more evidence and analysis that will not be undertaken here, and we may never know the answer, but the possibility that Zheng Yi Sao’s sex work contributed more to her piratical career than just the opportunity to meet Zheng Yi is one with fascinating implications for the discussion of gender and piracy at hand.

[29] Both Joseph MacKay and Nathan Kwan seem to support ideological or egalitarian readings of the confederation. See MacKay, “Escape Societies,” 564-566; Kwan, “Business of Piracy,” 201.

[30] Duncombe, “Most Successful Pirate,” 178.

[31] Duncombe, “Most Successful Pirate,” 178.

[32] Harris, “Ching Shih and the Pirates,” 5.

[33] Murray, “Fact and Fiction,” 230.

[34] Murray, “Fact and Fiction,” 207.

[35] Murray, “Rise to Power,” 156-157; Harris, “Ching Shih and the Pirates,” 10.

[36] Murray, “Rise to Power,” 154-155.

[37] Murray, “Rise to Power,” 158.

[38] Murray, “Rise to Power,” 157-158.

[39] Duncombe, “Most Successful Pirate,” 179.

[40] Kwan, “Business of Piracy,” 196.

[41] Murray, “Rise to Power,” 158.

[42] Since she remarried to Chang Pao after the death of her first husband, Zheng Yi Sao should not have been able to access these benefits. We do not know the details of how she prevailed, but she was seemingly successful in her petition to the government to be able to use the title and accompanying privileges. Murray, “Rise to Power,” 159.

[43] Murray, “Rise to Power,” 159.

[44] Duncombe, “Most Successful Pirate,” 180; Kwan, “Business of Piracy,” 211.

[45] Duncombe, “Most Successful Pirate,” 178; Murray, “Fact and Fiction,” 230-231.

The Weak and the Powerful: Omar Torrijos, Panama, and the Non-Aligned Movement in the World (IHS Book Talk)

Banner for The Weak and the Powerful: Omar Torrijos, Panama, and the Non-Aligned Movement in the World (IHS Book Talk)

Dr. Jonathan Brown, emeritus professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin, followed an unconventional path to academia. Following a master’s degree in history at the University of Arizona, he received a commission in the Army R.O.T.C. program. Brown served as a lieutenant in the Panama Canal Zone from 1968 to 1970. Later promoted to captain, he completed his final tour of duty in Thailand in 1971 before enrolling in the history doctoral program at UT-Austin. His first book, A Socioeconomic History of Argentina (1979), won the Bolton Prize for the best book in English on Latin American history. Over his career, Brown has published six books. Spanning centuries and continents, his scholarship explores labor, nationalism, and revolution among other themes

In October 2024, the Institute for Historical Studies hosted a book talk for Dr. Brown’s latest publication, The Weak and the Powerful: Omar Torrijos, Panama, and the Nonaligned Movement in the World. This most recent work reflects the contours of his career—both within and outside academia. His initial exposure to Panama and General Torrijos began when he was stationed in the Southern Command from 1968 to 1970. However, Dr. Brown would not undertake a study of the canal until nearly five decades later. The impetus was another project. His 2017 book, Cuba’s Revolutionary World, traced the Cuban Revolution’s influence on hemispheric affairs and ultimately renewed his interest in the Canal Zone. Where Cuba’s Revolutionary World de-centers the United States and focuses on Cuban foreign policy, The Weak and the Powerful positions Panama as a critical yet understudied player in regional politics.

Book cover of The Weak and the Powerful: Omar Torrijos, Panama, and the Non-Aligned Movement in the World

The Weak and the Powerful opens with a provocative question: “How does a small country, without resort to war, convince a great power to give back valuable real estate?” This framing shifts the focus away from traditional spheres of influence in Cold War studies. During his talk, Brown shared that he aimed to write about imperialism while focusing on its victims. The Weak and the Powerful largely succeeds in centering Panama, although this history filters through the biography of the nation’s strongman. The United States and its political leaders remain on the periphery of this transnational study. Instead, the book devotes considerable attention to Panama’s relations with the Global South and members of the Non-Aligned Movement. General Torrijos proactively engaged these countries to build solidarity and to unite many “weak” powers against the United States. “He made it difficult for American diplomats to engage with international organizations without living up to their own democratic principles,” concludes Brown.

Picture of Omar Torrijos photographed in the countryside with Panamanian farmers
Omar Torrijos with Panamanian farmers. Source: Wikimedia Commons

Omar Torrijos, who took power through a military coup in 1968, successfully negotiated an end to nearly a century of U.S. occupation of the Canal Zone. Remarkably, he did so not through force but through negotiation. For this accomplishment, Brown argues that “the Panamanian strongman deserves a study of international dimensions” (7). Thus, The Weak and the Powerful devotes considerable attention to Torrijos’ biography. The author traces the dictator’s rise through the Panamanian National Guard, which offered economic and social mobility to many Panamanians. Perhaps surprising to many readers, military service also provided Torrijos with “a greater sense of social inequities in the mountains, plains, and jungles of the nation” (24). The dictator came to see himself as a progressive, championing issues of social justice and offering a reformist domestic agenda.

Black and white picture of General Omar Torrijos and with President Carter.
General Omar Torrijos with President Carter [Panama Treaty]. Source: Library of Congress

Inclusionary policies and social reforms allowed Torrijos to cultivate popular support and to consolidate his power. Brown also maintains that the Torrijos regime made scant use of repression in contrast to other Latin American dictatorships of the era. Ultimately, this leadership style allowed Torrijos to hold power as long as it took to sign the Panama Canal Accords. Illuminating this history, The Weak and the Powerful offers a compelling reexamination of Panama’s role in hemispheric politics. The book highlights Torrijos’ strategic use of international alliances to pressure the United States into granting historic concessions. This achievement came at a time of significant U.S. intervention in Latin America—an irony that reinforces Brown’s larger argument that “no model of international relations can explain [Torrijos’] accomplishments” (269). Ultimately, Dr. Brown’s return to the Panama Canal offers a fresh perspective on treaty negotiations and enriches existing Cold War historiography.

Gabrielle Esparza is a Ph.D. candidate in Latin American history, with a focus on twentieth-century Argentina. Her dissertation examines the evolution of President Raúl Alfonsín’s human rights policies from his candidacy to his presidency in post-dictatorship Argentina. At the University of Texas at Austin, Gabrielle has served as a graduate research assistant at the Texas State Historical Association and as co-coordinator of the Symposium on Gender, History, and Sexuality in 2020-2021. Gabrielle was also Associate Editor and Communications Director of Not Even Past from 2021-2022. Currently, Gabrielle works as a graduate research assistant in the Institute for Historical Studies and as an Editorial Assistant for The Americas: A Quarterly Review of Latin American History.

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.

Review of Stalin as Warlord, by Alfred J. Rieber (2022)

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At the age of 91, the prolific historian of Soviet history Alfred J. Rieber published a monograph on Josef Stalin. Covering the period from the 1920s to the post-war period after 1945, Stalin as Warlord adopts a historical and, at times, materialist perspective. It focuses in particular on the “paradoxes” of the supreme leader, the tensions between creative and destructive impulses that together, as the author argues, played a critical role in forging the complex outcome of Soviet war performance. Leaving aside common speculations about Stalin’s paranoid mentality, Rieber explains Stalin’s decisions in significant historical and theoretical contexts and interactions with his subordinates, thereby taking a firm stand in academic debates and condensing serious political lessons beyond myths of the dictator.

According to Rieber, the fundamental step in understanding Stalin was acknowledging his persistent fear of war, which the leader expected to take place between the Soviet Union and imperialist nations, demanding the industrialization and ideological unification of the entire country. This anxiety was rooted in his experience of foreign interventions in the civil war, threats of war with Western powers in the late 1920s, and the rising fascism in Europe. And it manifested itself in rapid collectivization and industrialization, as well as the initiation of the Great Terror. Some of these campaigns produced tragic results that many party members struggled to tolerate. Nonetheless, the author reminds us of the great collective drive behind them. In his view, Stalin was the representative of the Bolsheviks in the sense that his actions mirrored the historical challenge faced by revolutionaries: leading a massive, sometimes resistant, agricultural population through a time of general international hostility.

Picture of Nikolai Yezhov with Stalin and Molotov along the Volga–Don Canal
Nikolai Yezhov with Stalin and Molotov along the Volga–Don Canal, orignal. Source: Wikimedia Commons

For Rieber, another critical aspect of Stalin was his selective, mostly pragmatic, yet non-negligible subscription to Marxism-Leninism. While conventional discussions have explored his non-Marxist antisemitism, Russo-centrism, and investment in crafting a tamed privileged bureaucracy, rarely have scholars touched the egalitarian aspects of his policies. The book reveals that Stalin built a creative tension between Russian and other nationalities—one that involved not only the promotion of Russian culture but also the limited tolerance and even inclusion of indigenization. Further, during the Great Terror of 1936-1938, amidst the massive arrests and executions of managers and specialists, people of peasant or worker origins gained promotions, indeed constituting – to some degree – a class revolution from above.[1]

Stalin, in Rieber’s eyes, was, after all, characterized by “paradoxes.” Although the author clearly favors such a term over “contradictions,” the term is intriguing yet elusive. An example of this is the author’s formulation of Stalin’s “rational and irrational” impulses. While the author has accounted for the material, historical, and theoretical context that de facto justified Stalin’s decision, his final abstraction of “paradoxes” circles back somehow confusingly to a non-materialist conclusion on irrationality.[2] For critical readers, this is a problematic and self-contradictory tieback.

Roosevelt, Stalin, and Churchill on portico of Russian Embassy in Teheran
Roosevelt, Stalin, and Churchill on portico of Russian Embassy in Teheran, during conference–Nov. 28 – Dec. 1, 1943. Source: Library of Congress

Moving away from Rieber’s “paradoxes” to materialist “contradictions” better emphasizes the historical and dialectical lesson of Stalin as a Warlord: that hasty, arbitrary actions in both scope and method can produce unexpected oppositions. In Stalin’s case, such a pattern of action can be observed in the destruction of the communist leadership in different republics and the Comintern during the Great Terror. These actions ultimately undermined Soviet foreign support of anti-fascism campaigns or gave ground to extreme nationalists who would collaborate with Nazi forces. Perhaps echoing this observation, during 1956-1957, as they offered an alternative theoretical assessment of Stalin following Khrushchev’s 1956 report, Chinese leaders criticized the deceased leader for confusing two distinct types of contradictions: those between “the enemy and us” and those arising “within the people.” A revised thesis of Stalin as Warlord thus emerges: While Stalin’s decisions may have been justified by the historical and theoretical contradictions he faced, his frequent arbitrariness in decision-making generated opposition that undermined his agenda—an outcome which, at first glance, appears “paradoxical.” By addressing this overshadowed pillar of Rieber’s explanation, I believe readers can comprehend the duality in Stalin’s decision-making: ambitious planning existed alongside improvisation to counter unforeseen challenges of his own making—a hallmark of Stalinist governance.

Book cover of Stalin as Warlord

In sum, Stalin as Warlord is a book that deserves close reading. Its importance lies in the enormous amount of detail that the author assembles to provide a striking but meticulous analysis of Stalin. Far from a dictator without constraint, he was caught between numerous challenges surrounding the Soviet system and the pitfalls created by his actions. But to fully comprehend this history, I suggest one additional: using “contradictions” instead of the author’s elusive notion of “paradoxes.”

Shutong Wang (王庶同) was born and raised in China. He earned a B.A. in History at McGill University and is currently a PhD student at the University of Texas at Austin. He studies the social movements of the 1950s, with a particular focus on the interactions between grassroots communities in Modern and Contemporary China.

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.

[1] Further in this direction, Rieber points out his ignorance of technocrats and a preference for practice over theory.

[2] This is not to say irrationality did not exist but to question the legitimacy of using such a term here.

Piecing Together the Past: How Renaissance Scholars Reconstructed Ancient Athenian Law

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When most of us think of the Renaissance, we usually imagine the rebirth of classical culture, bringing to images of spectacular paintings, life-like sculptures, and breathtaking architecture. We seldom reflect on the painstaking and often very dusty work required to bring ancient culture to life. In sixteenth-century Europe, gaining access to the cultural treasures of ancient Greece and Rome demanded effort and skill. There was no modern archaeology. Inscriptions and physical relics of the ancient world (especially those from Greece, which was occupied by the Ottoman Empire) were largely unavailable. And even the manuscripts of ancient authors were rarely ancient themselves; they were often produced centuries after classical authors like Herodotus or Thucydides originally penned their works.

As a result, recovering the culture of Greece and Rome took a lot of work. One of the most impressive projects of this recovery – and one that has received almost no attention from modern scholars – was a century-long project of reconstructing the ancient Athenian legal system. From 1546 to about 1640, nearly twenty lengthy books appeared on the subject. During that century, Greek law attracted the attention of nearly every eminent Greek scholar in Europe, including Philip Melanchthon (1497-1560), Julius Justus Scaliger (1540-1609), and Claudius Salmasius (1588-1653). Even the famous Paris printer Henricus Stephanus (1528-1598) intended to write a book on the subject, although he never followed through on his plans. Stephanus was such a crucial figure in Renaissance Greek scholarship that his system of citing Plato’s works is still used today, four centuries after his death. Virtually every important figure in Greek studies wanted to try their hand at piecing together the Athenian law.

Image of manuscript by Samuel Petit in Piecing Together the Past
Philip Melanchthon, Collatio actionum forensium Atticarum et Romanarum praecipuarum (A Comparison of the Chief Attic and Roman Legal Actions). Original 1546. (Wittenberg, 1554).
Image of manuscript by Philip Melanchthon in Piecing Together the Past

Samuel Petit, Leges Atticae (The Attic Laws). (Paris, 1635).

What made the study of Greek law such an intellectual challenge? Couldn’t these scholars just look at ancient Athenian lawbooks, do a bit of rearranging, and produce a fancy new edition of the Attic laws? Not exactly. Scholars were able to do this sort of thing with Roman law, which had survived antiquity in four massive volumes compiled under the emperor Justinian (r.527-565 CE) in the late sixth century. Renaissance Roman lawyers faced their own unique challenges like restoring corrupted text and interpreting archaic Latin terms. For example, one of the first and most important tasks of jurists such as François Hotman (1524-1590) was detecting the ways in which Justinian’s editors had changed the original Roman text and restoring the Roman laws to their original wording. Work of this sort abounded, but Roman lawyers held a critical advantage: they possessed four imposing volumes of Justinianic laws, providing a clear foundation for studying their subject.

Athenian law, on the other hand, was a blank spot on the map. No compilations of ancient Athenian law survived from antiquity. As far as we know, the Athenians themselves never created systematic legal texts to organize their own laws. If you asked even the most educated European scholar in 1500 what the contents of Athenian law were, they might be able to vaguely point to a legal citation from Demosthenes or another Greek orator. But there was no comprehensive body of knowledge about the content or procedure of Greek law. In a culture that was obsessed with recovering ancient culture, this was a massive gap in knowledge.

As a result, reconstructing Athenian law was a project with no obvious starting point. There was no central text to work from; hints and clues about the laws of Athens were scattered across ancient literature. For this reason, piecing together Greek laws required sustained detective work. Take, for example, Philip Melanchthon, the German Lutheran reformer and the first scholar to attempt to reconstruct them. By 1546, when Melanchthon published his work entitled “A Comparison of the Chief Attic and Roman Legal Actions”, Melanchthon had taught Greek literature at the university of Wittenberg for nearly two decades. He had translated, lectured on, or written commentaries on nearly every imaginable Greek author, including famous writers like Homer and Euripides as well as lesser-known figures like Theognis. This broad experience allowed Melanchthon to draw from an encyclopedic knowledge of Greek literature as he embarked on the first  attempt to reconstruct the various trials and procedures of the Attic legal system.

Litography with multiple images comemorating the 400th anniversary of Philipp Melanchton
Zur Erinnerung an den 400 jährigen Geburtstag, Philipp Melanchthon’s (In commemoration of Philip Melanchthon’s 400th Birthday)
Source: Library of Congress

Greek orators like Demosthenes were particularly important for this project of reconstruction. Since most surviving Greek speeches are actually legal speeches which were given at trial, they contained a wealth of information about law, including details about legal procedures and the roles of witnesses and judges. When scholars like Melanchthon got especially fortunate, they could even find quotations of entire laws buried within the speeches. Similarly, historians like Xenophon and geographers like Pausanias often contained offhanded remarks mentioning specific laws. Drama, too, was an important source, since Greek plays often included characters getting into various kinds of legal trouble. It is worth highlighting how advanced these Renaissance scholars were in their method. Twenty-first century scholars of Attic law draw from these same basic sources, although they now incorporate evidence from newly discovered inscriptions and a much deeper knowledge of the ancient Greek world. The Renaissance approach prefigured the one that is still used in universities today.

The haphazard and scattered nature of these sources underscores that this recovery of Athenian law was a magnificent achievement of Renaissance intellectual life. After the publication of Melanchthon’s text, a stream of works appeared that deepened the European understanding of the ancient Greek law. In 1559, the French lawyer Pardoux Duprat published a work reconstructing the laws of the ancient Athenian legislators Solon and Draco. In 1593, the Danish historian Niels Krag even expanded the scope of inquiry beyond Athens and uncovered the laws of ancient Sparta in his De republica Lacedaemoniorum (On the Spartan Republic). In 1635, the English jurist Samuel Petit produced the capstone of Athenian legal history in the form of his monumental Leges Atticae (The Attic Laws), which was still cited well into the nineteenth century.

Xenophon bust
Xenophon. Source: Wikimedia Commons
Pausanias bust
Pausanias in the Capitoline Museums, Rome. Source: Wikimedia Commons

But what, exactly, was the point of all this? Were these scholars just aloof antiquarians? The surprising but critical fact is that Greek law actually came to feature in some of the most contentious intellectual debates of the day. Attic law became an important way to think about the relationship between law and religion. For example, Melanchthon had arranged the Attic legal actions in parallel with the Roman ones and then organized them under the headings of the Ten Commandments. Under the commandment “Thou shalt not kill”, Melanchthon included all the Attic and Roman actions against assault and murder. As the introduction to the clearly indicates, Melanchthon saw the Attic law as proof that God’s law – the Ten Commandments – had been valid even for the ancient pagan nations. For Melanchthon, Greek law confirmed the universality of biblical morals.

Scholars drew upon Greek law for a variety of other uses. In his 1564 work, De Republica Atheniensium (On the Athenian Republic), the Italian historian Carlo Sigonio illustrated how law fit into the broader context of ancient Athens, providing one of the first holistic accounts of ancient Athenian society. The Danish historian Niels Krag held up the Spartan laws as a rebuke to European customs. In particular, he used Spartan laws about crime and punishment to highlight the barbarity of the European practice of displaying the bodies of those who were publicly executed. Greek law also became a part of contentious political and economic debates. The recovery of the ancient commercial laws of the Greek city-state of Rhodes set off a series of controversies about maritime law and free trade, something I write about at length in my upcoming monograph project. And in the 1640s, Athenian laws about monetary loans took center stage in important debates between French scholars Claudius Salmasius and Desiderius Herauldus over whether Christians could charge interest. Significantly, the seventeenth-century debates which overturned the medieval consensus against interest contained heated arguments about Attic law.

Recovering Greek law was a tremendous accomplishment. But it was also emblematic of a new way of doing history. The majority of Renaissance readers perused ancient texts for lessons about morality or models for eloquence and poetics. The scholars discussed above did not do that. They looked to ancient texts for submerged knowledge about the ancient world. They read orators like Demosthenes not for lessons on style and persuasion, but for information about how the ancient Greeks handled their differences in court. These scholars looked at ancient literature as a mass of clues about the ancient world, and they approached it as detectives. Perhaps more accurately, they approached it as modern historians. In other words, the recovery of Greek law was one of the first major accomplishments of modern history writing.

Alexander Batson received his PhD in History from Yale University in 2024. He is an intellectual and legal historian of early modern Europe. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Journal of the History of International Law, Reformation & Renaissance Review, Grotiana, and the Journal of the History of Ideas. Alexander is a postdoc at the School of Civic Leadership at UT Austin.

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.

Banner picture: Photo by Josiah Lewis: https://www.pexels.com/photo/stonewall-palace-772689/

13 Ways of Looking: JFK’s Missing Wreath

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Over sixty years ago, in November 1963, President John F. Kennedy took a fateful trip to Texas. It would be the last of his life. The trip had four planned stops: San Antonio, Houston, Dallas, with a final planned fundraiser dinner in Austin. In the days after his shocking assassination, JFK was buried at Arlington National Cemetery. Four years later in 1967, he was reinterred in his final resting place, marked by the Eternal Flame at the official presidential gravesite. The evolving design of the gravesite at Arlington had been publicized after his initial burial. However, behind the scenes, plans developed for an encircling memorial artwork. This missing wreath has remained undisclosed for decades.

With the Oak Spring Garden Foundation, I revealed the story of “The Missing Wreath: On JFK’s Grave & Mrs. Mellon’s Maquette” in an article published this fall in Ploughshares (the full text can be read here). Told as a detective narrative, it is woven like the structure of a wreath, exploring the planning, creation, and eventual disappearance of the artwork over time.

A short version of the story goes like this: 

After JFK’s assassination and his initial interment in Arlington National Cemetery in November 1963, an architectural firm owned by John (Jack) Warnecke was commissioned to design the formal gravesite. Detailed research reports were created in conjunction with consultations by prominent family, scholars, architects, art critics, and clergy, along with a public exhibit of design plans at the National Gallery of Art and coverage in major news outlets. First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy wanted the gravesite to be publicly accessible yet personal and intimate as befitted a family grave. In 1964, she designated her close confidant, Rachel “Bunny” Lambert Mellon—who had designed JFK’s beloved White House Rose Garden—to represent Jackie’s wishes in the grave design.

Arligton cementary JFK memorial.
President John F. Kennedy Gravesite, Arlington National Cemetery, Arlington, VA. Photo by author, November 2021.

With her sophisticated landscaping eye, Bunny softened Warnecke’s design around the Eternal Flame. As the final reinterment approached in 1967, she also worked behind the scenes on a secret memorial sculpture with another close confidant: the French-born Tiffany jewelry designer, Jean Schlumberger.

Bunny Mellon and Jean Schlumberger took as inspiration a wreath of military hats around the Eternal Flame that had been laid by JFK’s funerary Honor Guard in an impromptu gesture at his initial interment. Robert “Bobby” Kennedy, JFK’s brother, had been so moved by the gesture that he said the hats should remain around the grave until they “crumble to dust.” By 1969, the memorial wreath had been secretly made by French-born sculptor Louis Féron. Yet due to series of events and issues that delayed installation, the sculpture went missing by the early 1970s and was essentially lost to time—until it was rediscovered earlier this year.

Through the diligent sleuthing of Elinor Crane and Nancy Collins at the Oak Spring Garden Foundation (the Mellon’s former estate outside Upperville, VA), and with thanks to the memory of a stonemason named Tommy Reed, who had worked for essentially a half-century at Oak Spring, the lost artwork was finally found after a multi-year search. It was found disassembled in packing crates in an offsite storage facility at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum.

Originally written when the artwork was still missing, the story of “The Missing Wreath” aimed to inspire a search for the lost sculpture. In the process of writing, the search to me became a meditation on who and what gets lost and found in retellings of history. As I wrote in the longer article:

Original memorial wreath, JFK’s Missing Wreath
Cast and assembled memorial wreath for JFK’s gravesite, unknown location and date, photographer unknown. Photo acquired in 2021 by OSGF from an eBay sale of unidentified photos of “War Art Work” by Louis Féron (from the 2018 estate sale of Louis Féron and Leslie Snow). Courtesy of Oak Spring Garden Foundation.

“Historical artifacts never exist in a vacuum, and inanimate objects have lives and even afterlives. Public and private events color retellings; an artwork can be curated dozens of ways, even to the point of disappearing behind variations of accounts. The aura around the memorial wreath’s absence makes it almost more powerful than if it were present. When public celebrity is involved, when privacy is fiercely guarded, when privilege can determine what is noticed or neglected or even erased, stories can constellate between private records and the public imagination … Histories can get lost between lines and behind headlines—just as a crumbling stone maquette in a rural cemetery can lie for decades without notice.”

In the two years since “The Missing Wreath” was finished and accepted for publication by Ploughshares, additional puzzle pieces have emerged from different corners of the country, aiding in the search for the artwork’s final resting place. A brief coda notes the memorial’s rediscovery, highlighting its journey from lost to found, while leaving room for future historians.

As I reflect back on this remarkable story, what remains of interest to me are different ways to see the memorial wreath. Any history is always incomplete, as acts of remembering grow spaces for future storytellers to fill more gaps. With a nod to Wallace Stevens’ poem “13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” I offer here some frameworks for interpreting and re-interpreting the wreath:

1. Histories of Art and Design: JFK’s memorial wreath was co-created by the American gardener and philanthropist Rachel “Bunny” Lambert Mellon, French-born jewelry designer Jean Schlumberger, and French-born sculptor Louis Féron. When lines between artist, craftsman, and commissioner blur, who is credited as the creator of an artwork? How do historical traditions and cultural systems influence this valuation and reevaluation where art and design meet?

Nancy Collins hanging holiday wreath on headstone of Rachel “Bunny” Lambert Mellon
Nancy Collins hanging holiday wreath on headstone of Rachel “Bunny” Lambert Mellon, in Trinity Episcopal Church Cemetery, Upperville, VA. Photo by author, December 2021.

2. Histories of Labor: In addition to the co-creators in name, JFK’s memorial wreath owes much to contributions by highly skilled tradesmen including stonemasons, gardeners, servicemen, foundry workers, and more. The story of the missing wreath surfaced at the Oak Spring Garden Foundation (the former estate of Paul and Bunny Mellon in Virginia), thanks largely to a stonemason, who originally worked on a stone maquette in the early 1970s in the Oak Spring cemetery, where the sculpture briefly weathered. Since many people played a role in this memorial, how are such layers of labor credited?

3. Histories of Memorials: Plans for JFK’s Gravesite included commissioned reports in the 1960s by interdisciplinary critics and experts who considered distinctions among graves, memorials, and monuments in shaping the design. This was complemented by public-facing exhibits and family engagements with the process. Whether a national or personal memorial, how do incorporated elements do more than reflect a singular era to stand the test of time? Since the memorial wreath was not installed on JFK’s grave, how does its rediscovery offer a different reading of the same object in a different historical context?

4. Histories of Cemeteries: Multiple cemeteries in Virginia help to illuminate the story of the missing wreath: Arlington National Cemetery (where JFK is buried), Oak Spring’s Fletcher Cemetery (where the stone maquette was constructed based on JFK’s grave), Trinity Episcopal Church Cemetery (where the Mellons are buried), not to neglect other marked graves, along with unmarked cemeteries in neighboring mountains (largely interring free Black communities). Cemeteries balance preservation of memories with residual presence of physical bodies, cycles of life and death, shaped by beliefs about afterlives rooted in culture and ecology. JFK’s Gravesite sits in a national cemetery; he is one of only two presidents buried at Arlington. How do considerations of burial and commemoration reflect not only the person who died but also the values of the living?

5. Histories of Gardens: Bunny Mellon designed JFK’s White House Rose Garden during the president’s life, his Gravesite at Arlington after his death, and later the bayside grounds in Boston for his Presidential Library and Museum. After her death, the Mellon estate at Oak Spring transitioned from a private estate into a “garden foundation” to cross-pollinate the humanities, arts and sciences. One of its responsibilities includes stewarding the property’s cemetery, which caught the attention of Elinor Crane. Crane began asking questions about the crumbling stone maquette and enlisted Nancy Collins, the Foundation’s archivist, to help her search. Histories of gardens and cemeteries overlap. As landscapes change over time, how do attentions to plants help to support living histories and reparative futures, including attending to climate change?

6. Histories of Materials: JFK’s grave is composed of engraved slate headstones around a large round stone sourced from New England, in a sea of wavy pink granite, surrounded by specimen trees and other signature plantings. The design of the memorial wreath symbolically interweaves materials from bamboo to rope, driftwood to military hats, which inspired the wreath after JFK’s Honor Guard laid their hats in that shape at his initial interment. His memorial artwork was cast at a metal foundry and brought outside for a brief time to weather on an oyster shell stone maquette at Oak Spring. Considering both natural and manmade resources, how does materiality contribute to this story of the memorial wreath?

7. Histories of Ecology: After her multi-year search for the missing memorial wreath, Elinor Crane finally witnessed the artwork in early 2024 disassembled and crated at the JFK Presidential Library and Museum in Boston. On one of the disassembled pieces, she spied an unexpected detail: some bird droppings which she surmised came from Oak Spring when the memorial had been laid to rest for a short time on the outdoor stone maquette in the cemetery in the early 1970s. Since Oak Spring has transitioned from a private estate to a garden foundation to focus on cross-pollinating research, would it be possible to test and trace those droppings to identify the avian species? What foods might that bird have eaten, and does its kin still migrate through this ecosystem? This detail may seem insignificant but reveals the living world that surrounds such memorials.

Stone maquette related to JFK gravesite in Fletcher Cemetery at Oak Spring Garden Foundation
Stone maquette related to JFK gravesite in Fletcher Cemetery at Oak Spring Garden Foundation, Upperville, VA. Photo by author, November 2021.

8. Histories of Lands (Ancestral, Colonized, Enslaved, Emancipated, Legislated): Established in 1864, Arlington National Cemetery is relatively young. It occupies land once owned by Robert E. Lee, which was requisitioned during the Civil War as a national burial ground. On the heels of the Emancipation Proclamation, part of the land was designated Freedman’s Village to support free Black women and men escaping enslavement. In centuries before colonization, the intersecting waterways of the Potomac and Chesapeake region served as homeland for hundreds of Indigenous communities. How are these ancestral lands recognized and represented in national and regional cemeteries, and who else may be buried in marked and unmarked graves in and beyond this region?

9. Histories of Witnesses: Most of JFK’s contemporaries have died, but after the memorial wreath was found in 2024, Elinor Crane and Nancy Collins learned that an important member of JFK’s funeral Honor Guard still lives. James L. Felder was only the tenth Black American to serve with the Honor Guard (with the other nine preceding him by only months), and he wrote an account of his experience, I Buried John F. Kennedy (1994). When the Oak Spring Garden Foundation gathered experts for a private meeting in September 2024 to share news of the lost-and-found memorial, Felder spoke about his experience and also shared his personal album of JFK’s funeral, made for him personally by First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy. Attendees also received a copy of Felder’s book with an advanced copy of “The Missing Wreath.” His album was reproduced for an exhibition on the memorial wreath that will run at the Oak Spring Garden Foundation from October 2024 into 2025. “The Untold Story of a Lost Memorial” exhibition invites attendees to share their own intersecting memories.

10. Histories of Libraries & Museums: Many museums and libraries figure in this story, including the Oak Spring Garden Library, Museums of Fine Arts in Virginia and Boston, the JFK Presidential Library and Museum, and others. Collections are never complete by themselves. Primary research often requires years for researchers to piece together a story. Large collections  may take years to process, catalogue, and create finding aids to make items accessible. Versions of cataloguing can leave items relatively invisible. Conservation and preservation of a single item may take months or longer. Events like a global pandemic can separate curators from collections. Scholarly trends may neglect aspects of objects that hide in plain sight. Historical events influence why items were collected in the first place, leaving gaps in historical records. Collaborations help to reconnect parts that have been disassembled over time. How do related histories influence the lost-and-found memorial wreath and other aspects that may be missing from this story?

11. Histories of Speculative Futures: If the memorial wreath been installed after JFK’s reinterment, what would its reception have been in the era of the late 1960s or early 1970s? Would it have distracted from the timeless simplicity of the Eternal Flame, and what other unrealized memorial plans for the president’s grave lie buried in other archives? Now that the memorial wreath has been found, what are its possible futures, from its current resting place disassembled in Boston to an anticipated exhibition reassembled in Virginia, or otherwise? Why does the specter of JFK’s unrealized presidency continue to haunt our current moment, including vulnerabilities around civil rights and other social concerns that remain pressing issues? Beyond surmising what the world might have been if JFK had survived, would it be more helpful to consider: What descendants have we become, and what kind of ancestors do we wish to be?

12. Symbolic Histories: Many symbols are woven into JFK’s memorial wreath—military hats, ropes, driftwood, a leaf, and more—not to neglect the symbol of the wreath itself. Why have the symbol of wreaths played such an important role over time? What does the choice of a memorial in the shape of a wreath resembling a crown of thorns offer to this larger encircling story? Now that over a half-century has passed since the memorial wreath was created, what symbols still carry resonance or not, depending on the eye (and age and background) of the beholder? Beyond the memorial wreath, how might the living symbol of the Eternal Flame illuminate a path forward, among other eternal flames that have existed across centuries and cultures?

13. Public Histories and Public Memories: For many, the memory of that day remains remarkably vivid. If you were alive in 1963, consider what do you remember? If you weren’t alive then, ask someone who was to share generational knowledge—not only about JFK but also about their daily lives. How do generations connect to learn about the arc of evolving and intersecting histories? What other questions arise? What knowledges emerge by sharing these stories? As I wrote:

“Even as this story tells the arc of an artwork that went missing, it is as much if not more a story of those who co-created a memorial and who cared to go searching for an artifact that got lost, about the ephemeral or privileged materiality of human lives, how cultural collections are acquired and stewarded in ways that evolve, laying groundwork for future researchers and historical understandings.” ~ GEH, “The Missing Wreath”

These are 13 ways of looking at JFK’s lost-and-found memorial wreath, offering more questions than answers. There are surely more. But these questions provide a starting point to look again at this traumatic and critical moment in modern American history, as we work to imagine and co-create possible futures.  

Gretchen Ernster Henderson is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Texas at Austin and writes across environmental arts, cultural histories, and integrative sciences. Her publications, exhibitions, and performances include five books, arts media, and opera libretti. She previously served as Associate Director for Research at the Harry Ransom Center at UT-Austin and Co-Director of a National Endowment for the Humanities Institute on Museums: Humanities in the Public Sphere at Georgetown University with UC-Santa Cruz.

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.

Banner picture: Oak Spring Garden Library, Oak Spring Garden Foundation, Upperville, VA. Photo by author, April 2021.

Chuco Punk: Sonic Insurgency in El Paso (IHS Book Talk)

Chuco Punk: Sonic Insurgency in El Paso (IHS Book Talk) banner

On September 30, 2024, Dr. Tara López, Assistant Professor of Ethnic Studies at Winona State University, presented her new book, Chuco Punk: Sonic Insurgency in El Paso, at the Institute for Historical Studies. Part of The University of Texas Press’ American Music Series, the book traces El Paso’s influential Chicanx punk rock scene from its evolution in the 1970s through the early 2000s. López uses ‘Chuco punk’ as a lens to explore broader political, social, and cultural forces in the borderlands.[1] In doing so, she reveals how this music scene reflected a longer history of cultural and musical resistance among El Paso’s predominantly Chicanx community.

Chuco Punk is deeply embedded in the cultural and geographical specificity of El Paso, a city marked by the realities of militarization and segregation along the U.S.-Mexico border. “Dr. López’s work is impressively propulsive—weaving her expertise as a sociologist, a musicologist, and a transnational historian,” praises Dr. Annette Rodriguez, Assistant Professor of History at UT-Austin. “She elevates late-20th century El Paso, Texas, and Ciudad Juárez to their proper historical significance by documenting this long insurgent sonic landscape.” As Dr. Rodriguez notes, López explores how El Paso’s punk music scene created an outlet for marginalized voices while also responding to the wider social and political environment.

Punks in El Paso found ways to create their own space, sound, and community outside mainstream venues by staging shows in backyards and mechanic shops. The DIY and underground spirit of the scene often garnered dismissive attitudes. Bobby Welch, a concert promoter interviewed by López, recalled feeling that many people dismissed punk musicians as “stupid people who [couldn’t] play two chords.” However, Chuco Punk upends that narrative, showing that these El Paso artists forged a platform to vent frustrations and express solidarity while also pushing back against broader social expectations. By taking these musicians seriously, López emphasized that punk music in El Paso was more than just a rebellious subculture. The genre was also a form of political memory and protest.

López’s research draws on over seventy interviews with punks as well as unarchived materials, such as flyers, zines, photographs, and other ephemera. For the punks of El Paso, personal collections became informal archives. They carefully preserved their own history, which challenges the conventional narrative that punk music is predominately white and male. López’s work resists this framing. Instead, she illustrates how Chicanx women, in particular, carved out their own space within the punk scene.

Alongside these unarchived materials, oral histories serve as the backbone of López’s historical research. However, she initially faced some hesitation within the punk community, whose members were wary of academics seeking to document their story. This skepticism—rooted in the sense that punk itself was never taken seriously by mainstream culture—eventually gave way to rich collaboration. In gaining the punk community’s trust, López is able to elevate marginalized voices and materials by drawing on their rich, informal archives.  

Ultimately, López offers more than a history of punk music in El Paso. She also challenges scholars to rethink their assumptions about what sources, archives, and communities are worthy of academic study. In her presentation, she recounted stories of fellow scholars who framed her research as “fun” or “a hobby.” Pushing back, she argued that these attitudes marginalize important narratives and constrain academic scholarship. The power of centering communities at the periphery became apparent during the talk’s question and answer session. Multiple attendees, themselves from El Paso, became emotional as they thanked López for telling the story of their community. Their reactions demonstrate the project’s ability to awaken and animate historical memory. Chuco Punk thus opens new possibilities for how we think about archives, memory, and the role of subcultures in shaping broader historical narratives.

SBITCH – Onion Street, Austin, TX 2000. Video of local punk band discussed in book.

Sicteens, August 27, 1996 at The Attic. Video of local punk band discussed in book.

Gabrielle Esparza is a Ph.D. candidate in Latin American history, with a focus on twentieth-century Argentina. Her dissertation examines the evolution of President Raúl Alfonsín’s human rights policies from his candidacy to his presidency in post-dictatorship Argentina. At the University of Texas at Austin, Gabrielle has served as a graduate research assistant at the Texas State Historical Association and as co-coordinator of the Symposium on Gender, History, and Sexuality in 2020-2021. Gabrielle was also Associate Editor and Communications Director of Not Even Past from 2021-2022. Currently, Gabrielle works as a graduate research assistant in the Institute for Historical Studies and as an Editorial Assistant for The Americas: A Quarterly Review of Latin American History.

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.

[1] El Chuco is a common nickname for El Paso. Scholars attribute the term’s origins to the pachuco subculture that originated in El Paso in the 1920s. Pachucos were particularly well-known for their jargon and style, which included ‘zoot suits.’ See Dictionary of Chicano Folklore (2000)by Rafaela G. Castro for more on this term. 

Leaps of Fame: The Rise of Sam Patch and a Changing Industrial Landscape

Banner for Leaps of Fame: The Rise of Sam Patch and a Changing Industrial Landscape. Background image is of Niagara Falls

I was on a train listening to the podcast The Road to Now and I couldn’t stop laughing. The hosts joked about drunken slogans from the 19th century on American daredevil diver, Sam Patch, a feud fought by jumping off Passaic Falls, and a ship with an effigy of Andrew Jackson being sent over a waterfall. [1] As I stifled my laughter, it became clear that there was much more to the story. The podcasters explained Patch’s bizarre journey to becoming one of the United States’ first ‘common man’ celebrities during the onset of the Industrial Age, a narrative also explored in Leaps of Fame: The Rise of Sam Patch and a Changing Industrial Landscape.

To better understand Sam Patch’s life in the context of 19th century working-class culture, I set out to make a ClioVis timeline. ClioVis is an interactive timeline software that allows you to chart, and emphasize connections between, historical concepts, events, and themes. My project incorporates The Road to Now’s podcast episode on Patch, allowing users to hear audio clippings of the podcast. Additionally, I relied heavily on Paul E. Johnson’s research in his excellent book Sam Patch: The Famous Jumper. Not many records exist on Sam Patch, especially preceding his fame, and Johnson’s book is the product of extensive research.

Patch life’s offers a fascinating window into a crucial moment in US history as industrial change transformed literal and cultural landscapes. Born around the turn of the 19th century, Patch spent his youth navigating a shifting landscape of worker identity in New England. He worked as a skilled laborer in various textile mills and, in Paterson, New Jersey, even joined the Paterson Association of Spinners.[2] Outside of work, he quickly began mastering the art of jumping from high places.[3] Thousands of people gathered to watch Patch’s leaps, but his story goes beyond showmanship. Studying his life as a performer reveals how class-status determined access to natural spaces and illuminates the rise of the American daredevil celebrity.

A lithograph of Paterson, New Jersey. In the middle there is a landscape depiction of the port, and it is surrounded my small square landmarks of the city.
A lithograph of Paterson, New Jersey nearly 88 years after its founding  (Packard & Butler Lith. Philadelphia 1880). Source: Library of Congress

The United States’ emerging Industrial Revolution provided the backdrop to Sam Patch’s life. At the time of Patch’s birth, the United States’ first water-powered mills were not even a decade old. In Pawtucket, Rhode Island, Samuel Slater opened the country’s first water-powered textile mill in 1793.[4] This style of mill would eventually transform New England’s waterways as entrepreneurs sought to harness the power of water for industrial production. In Paterson, New Jersey, the Society for Establishing Useful Manufactures (S.U.M.) built an industrial city that Alexander Hamilton hoped would define the United States’ industrial landscape. Paterson Mill—eventually water-powered—opened in 1794.[5]

Patch worked in both of these industrial centers before becoming a daredevil. In Pawtucket, Patch found joy and escape by jumping in the Blackstone River with other children, where he began learning the art of high dives. In 1824, Pawtucket was the site of the nation’s first factory strike. Limited evidence makes it difficult to know if Patch took part in the strike. Regardless, he witnessed the formidable power of Pawtucket’s mill owners who colluded in setting working conditions to limit competition and maximize profits.[6] His time in Rhode Island helped form his sympathies for New England’s working-class.

In 1826, Patch moved to Paterson, New Jersey where he would perform a jump designed to antagonize local businessman Timothy Crane over his use of public land. Patch and his fellow spinners frequently enjoyed the Passaic River recreational area. In contrast, Crane built a park called “Forest Garden” which featured a curated selection of plants for the enjoyment of the city’s elite. For a fee, people could enter Crane’s new park which used to be the site of a public playground.[7] In September 1829, Crane promoted the installation of a bridge across Passaic Falls to his new park. Patch intentionally chose to organize a leap to coincide with the unveiling of this bridge. Crane, hearing of these plans, worked with the police to lock Patch in a basement with Patch’s other favorite pastime: the copious consumption of alcohol. Despite this effort, Patch found a way to freedom and jumped from Passaic Falls right as Crane placed the bridge.[8] As planned, Patch stole the large crowd’s attention. Perhaps unintentionally, Patch also started his path toward becoming the United States’ first famous stuntman.

By jumping at the same time as Crane’s bridge unveiling, Patch staged a public show of resistance to Crane’s attempt to privatize land and regulate the recreational use of natural spaces. We may understand Patch’s jump as highlighting two important concerns that came to define his career as a showman: the public use of natural spaces and his sympathy with New England’s working-class. Patch brought entertainment to public audiences and championed the use of natural spaces for common enjoyment. Crane, on the other hand, created his “Forest Garden” in an attempt to make recreational areas more exclusive.

Drawing of 97-foot-ladder-like platform with Sam Patch on top. At the base, Goat Island.
“Sam Patch on platform. (Typed and glued on the back: “In the 1829 Sam Patch built a 97-foot ladder-like platform at the base of Goat Island and jumped into the river”) Source: Wikimedia Commons

By fall 1829, Patch had become famous and regularly attracted audiences of thousands. Invited to an event celebrating ‘the Niagara Frontier,’ Patch headed to the falls in early October. He planned to jump his highest jump yet off of a platform on Goat Island—a site in between the United States and Canadian Falls. Patch arrived late which led the organizers to delay his jump by a day. When the date came, he had a drink and prepared to throw himself from the prepared platform. As per his routine, Patch wore his Paterson Association of Spinners uniform during his jump.[9] He leapt from the platform and gracefully landed in the pool below. His audience cheered as he emerged from the water. Patch went on to do another jump at the falls just 10 days later. These events further strengthened Patch’s fame.

As Historian Paul E. Johnson argues, Patch was one of the first ‘common men’ to reach celebrity status without significant wealth or ties to positions of great authority. In his words, Patch “wanted to be famous and he succeeded”, a fear that was far from common at the time.[10] In this way, he represented many aspects of the Jacksonian Era. His rise to fame mirrored the ideals that President Andrew Jackson and the Democrats promoted—an image of opportunity and success available to supposedly “ordinary” white male Americans.

My ClioVis timeline expands on Sam Patch’s story while better situating it within the context of the early 19th century. Using the ‘categories’ feature, I organized my timeline into cultural history, labor history, and the events of Patch’s life. The software also allows me to incorporate images, audio clippings, and ‘connections’ to strengthen my argument. These features enabled me to create a complex chronology of Patch’s life.

Sam Patch ended his career with a fatal jump into the Genesee River in 1829—yet, his legacy lives on. Following his death, Patch’s name entered into the colloquial lexicon. “What the Sam Patch,” “Where the Sam Patch,” and “Some things can be done as well as others” all became common sayings.[11] President Jackson named one of his horses Sam Patch, and the actual Patch became a character in countless theatrical productions and literary works across the world.[12] Today, Patch’s life offers us a platform to jump off for a deeper understanding how the Industrial Revolution changed natural and cultural landscapes in New England. His story provides insight into how capitalists and workers varied in their approaches toward using public land. Finally, examining Patch’s rise to fame tells us something about how Patch and the Jacksonian Era ushered in new ideas of the ‘American celebrity.’ Patch claimed physical space—through his jumps and their audiences—for the working-class on public land and in peoples’ minds as a ‘common man’ celebrity.

Aidan Dresang is an undergraduate history major studying to become a public high school history teacher. He is interested in environmental history and resistance movements. As a future history teacher, Aidan hopes to teach history critically and bridge the community-classroom divide. He is currently a ClioVis intern.

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.

Banner photo by Anthony Rodriguez.

[1] Rivers Langley, Narado Moore, and Ben Sawyer, “Sam Patch: America’s First Daredevil,” The Road to Now, accessed July 15, 2024, https://open.spotify.com/episode/3qHTRGbVgsrML2z5nYmtAL?si=c6bbc181cf284adb.

[2] ‘Spinners’ refers to workers who made thread, often using the ‘spinning jenny.’ The adoption of power looms in textile production mills often led to the displacement of skilled textile workers (spinners).

[3] Paul E. Johnson, Sam Patch, the Famous Jumper, 1st ed (New York, NY: Hill and Wang, 2003).

[4] National Park Service, “Slater Mill,” National Park Service, July 13, 2023, https://www.nps.gov/blrv/learn/historyculture/slatermill.htm.

[5] National Park Service, “The Birthplace of the American Industrial Revolution,” National Park Service, January 12, 2024, https://www.nps.gov/pagr/learn/historyculture/the-birthplace-of-the-american-industrial-revolution.htm.

[6] Gary Kulik, “Pawtucket Village and the Strike of 1824: The Origins of Class Conflict in Rhode Island,” Radical History Review 1978, no. 17 (May 1, 1978): 5–38, https://doi.org/10.1215/01636545-1978-17-5.

[7] Paul E. Johnson, Sam Patch, the Famous Jumper, 1st ed (New York, NY: Hill and Wang, 2003), 48.

[8] Ruth Rosenberg-Naparsteck, “The Real Simon Pure Sam Patch,” Rochester History, 1991.

[9] Janet M. Davis, “Proletarian Daredevil,” ed. Paul E. Johnson, Reviews in American History 32, no. 2 (2004): 176–83.

[10] Johnson, Sam Patch, the Famous Jumper, 164.

[11] Johnson, 163.

[12] Langley, Moore, and Sawyer, “Sam Patch: America’s First Daredevil.”

The bold political style of Luciano Cruz: The Chilean student protests of 1967

Banner for The bold political style of Luciano Cruz: The Chilean student protests of 1967

The following narrative is adapted from my recent dissertation on revolutions in Latin America. When I shared it with upper division history students for a class discussion, the story surprised them. Most of them had only ever experienced student government as something to put on your resumé for grad school applications. They had never imagined that student activism could be so decisive for crucial issues of public policy. The Chilean experience seemed to awaken their interest in a rich local legacy of passionate student activism and of unconditional commitment to causes that transcend personal gain. Here I share the story of the bold political style of Luciano Cruz.

As Chile’s first Christian Democratic government attempted to bring social justice through reform during the mid-1960s, medical students in the nation’s second city proposed a more radical change. In a political system designed to concede real power only to the already powerful, they argued, a mere change of government leadership would never suffice. Along with a few disaffected union organizers, the students at the University of Concepción, located in Chile’s second city, formed the Movement of the Revolutionary Left, (MIR), proposing a new constitutional order that, they hoped, would uplift Chile’s perennially poor and underprivileged.

The undisputed leader among the students was the fiery and brilliant Miguel Enríquez, who in 1961, had written on his medical school application essay, “everything has been given to me…, the time has come to give back.” Like Che Guevara before him, the call to heal the sick blended seamlessly with the call to make revolution for the poor. His classmate and best friend, Luciano Cruz, brought a uniquely impulsive energy and irresistible charm to that struggle. The political style of Luciano Cruz allowed him to knew how to rouse, entertain, and impassion any crowd at a moment’s notice.

Picture of Miguel Enríquez
Miguel Enríquez. Source: Resumen
Picture of Luciano Cruz
Luciano Cruz. Source: Resumen

Whereas Enríquez made measured, brilliant speeches—many of which have survived as written documents—his energetic deputy could improvise behind a microphone, holding the multitude spellbound for hours. Historian Marian Schlotterbeck points to Cruz’s debut as a student leader during a 1965 protest of the recent fare increase in public transportation. Chile’s largest labor federation, CUT, (Central Única de Trabajadores), had called for the protest, and they had invited Cruz as one who “embodied the contentious, combative style of the Concepción student movement.” Schlotterbeck points out that there was more at stake than just bus money. “Amidst wild applause,” she writes, “Cruz proclaimed that the demonstrations were no longer about fare hikes but ‘a demonstration by Chile’s poor against the rich.’”[1]

By 1967, Luciano Cruz had set his sights on the presidency of the student federation. The university had reached a crossroads. The Christian Democratic government of Eduardo Frei was promoting university reform on a national scale. Frei’s men had lifted up the University of Concepción as a model. They wanted to restructure higher learning as a driving force for modernization. But members of the newly configured MIR, known as Miristas, understood the plan as an attempt to co-opt and “Americanize” their university. Cruz would become MIR’s candidate to spearhead the resistance.

While technically private, the University of Concepción depended on funding from UNESCO and the Ford Foundation, making it vulnerable to foreign interference in crucial policy decisions.[2] With MIR’s support, the student federation (FEC) demanded the democratization of the power structure so that students and junior professors could have a voice in the decision-making process. But MIR had to win the presidency of the student federation to legitimize its proposal. Focusing his campaign on ideology, class interests, and the social role of the university, Miguel Enríquez had failed in his bid for that office two years earlier. This time, Miguel recognized his classmate’s dynamic advantage. Luciano’s landslide victory in Concepción marked MIR’s arrival as a national political force.

Schlotterbeck highlights a “new brand of audacious student activism” that would predominate in the student federation, transforming university students into political actors on a national scale.[3] Undergrads—and some even younger protestors—made headlines with strikes, street protests, and the occupation of campus buildings. Riot police confronted them with tear gas, truncheons, and water cannons. Jailed students went on hunger strikes, and their objectives began to escalate. Miguel Enríquez called for more than just a university reform. The time had come for a true university revolution. His statement to that effect appeared in the preeminent national magazine of the non-aligned intellectual left, Punto Final, with a photo of Luciano Cruz in a scuffle with five police officers that would become iconic.

Luciano Cruz in close contact with policemen.
Luciano Cruz defies Carabineros, Punto Final, 38, (septiembre 1967), 30
Trojan horse depiction, CIA inside the wooden structure. Drawing
CIA agents use the Peace Corps as their Trojan Horse. Punto Final, 47, (enero 1968), 47

Miguel directed MIR’s leadership to confront the “legal dictatorship” of the current system with relentless combat. They should denounce every detail, he said, so that the forces of repression were compelled not only to cease and desist, but to give ground.[4] On that note, MIR demanded the immediate expulsion of four Peace Corps volunteers from the University of Concepción. Perceived as the youth branch of the dubiously regarded Alliance for Progress, the Peace Corps presence symbolized the imperialist assumptions behind Frei’s model of reform.[5] Students argued that Peace Corps volunteers took up much needed space at the university residence. They also voiced their suspicions (likely credible) that Peace Corps volunteers had provided a stream of inside information to U.S. intelligence services.[6]

While Enríquez focused on the national politics of the reform, Cruz emerged as MIR’s chief tactician and spokesperson. Under his command, at one of their daily demonstrations, students in Concepción abducted a police officer. After holding him hostage in the university for several days, they offered his release in exchange for the same for all the students who had been arrested during recent protests.[7] The symbolic value of that gesture weighed heavily. With it, students reconfigured their recent detentions by Carabineros as similarly random and arbitrary abductions.

Carabineros fought back. They arrested Cruz, and the movement seemed to fall apart until Cruz dramatically escaped from jail and waltzed back into the meeting where student leaders discussed their next move.[8] Although the details of Cruz’ escape remain unclear, his stealth and proficiency in the martial arts seem to have played a part. His return to the front line provided a huge boost for morale, dramatically enhancing his personal mystique and his reputation for dauntless courage and invincibility. It also established MIR’s place in the leadership of the student federation at the Universidad de Concepción (FEC) for the foreseeable future.

Picture of student protest in Concepción
Student protest in Concepción. Source: https://www.diarioconcepcion.cl/politica/2019/05/22/reforma-en-la-udec-buscando-mas-participacion.html

But MIR’s ambitions did not stop with the student federation in Concepción. Members of the movement’s inner circle did not want Chileans to think of them as merely the radical fringe of the nation’s restless youth. Aligning themselves with the youthful and dynamic Cuban revolution, Miristas defied the perennial lethargy of Chile’s traditional left to project a hugely inflated image of the new movement’s political significance. Their claim had no real basis in the number of militants, access to material resources, or concrete influence in social organizations, but Mirista leadership bet on the oppressed masses’ perception of their growing visibility as a foreshadowing of an imminent and viable armed revolt. In his incisive analysis of the MIR phenomenon, literary scholar Hernán Vidal observes that MIR’s Comité Central manipulated the obvious contrast between an appearance of mythical power and a reality of tactical impotence, calling it a strategy of “establishing presence.”[9] They didn’t have to really be everywhere; they only had to seem to be everywhere. Luciano Cruz figured as the master of MIR’s expanding illusion of ubiquity.

Until 1969, MIR had mostly operated out in the open. Their practical jokes and disruptions only remained covert until they had succeeded. Then, they generated positive PR. But a pivotal student prank in Concepción would initiate a period of tension between the gregarious publicity that had shaped MIR’s style and method, and a new strategy of strict secrecy. As fate would have it, Luciano Cruz’ impulsive abduction of a local journalist in June of that year provoked the ire of the Frei government, driving the entire movement underground for the first time. Miristas had to learn to hide their militant activities and to use code names. The demands of clandestine living made MIR a more dangerous commitment for new recruits, but it also provided an undeniable aura of romance.

Kidnappings, though frequent, lucrative, and lethal among revolutionary movements in Brazil, Uruguay, and Argentina, did not figure in MIR’s habitual playbook. Leaders observed that, in terms of promoting public sympathy for the cause, they usually backfired. But acting independently, Luciano’s regional task force in Concepción crossed the line with a targeted prank in the austral winter of 1969. The Christian Democratic journalist, Hernán Osses Santa María, had lost his job at the University of Concepción because of the reform. He got his revenge by disparaging young Miristas in his editorials. He never criticized their politics. He derided their personal lives, and he made fun of their girlfriends. That seemed to violate an unspoken code of honor. The clever Luciano Cruz decided to teach him a lesson in respect.

Photograph of members of the Central Committee of the Revolutionary Left Movement (MIR) during a press conference. From left to right are Roberto Moreno, Luciano Cruz, Nelson Gutiérrez, Miguel Enríquez, Bautista Van Schouwen and Andrés Pascal.
Fotografía Conferencia de prensa MIR. Source: Archivo Digital Londres 38

Luciano’s team of tricksters abducted Osses Santa María with the archaic idea of tarring and feathering him. Finding no tar, they released him naked in the courtyard of the university during an annual event. There was no real harm done, except to Christian Democratic pride. The Frei government took advantage of the public outcry to invoke a national security statute declaring MIR illegal, and to order the arrest of the Secretary General, along with his wily second in command.[10] That meant that most of MIR’s operatives had to go underground, something Miguel Enríquez had in mind anyway. Cruz had not cleared his plan with the more prudent Enríquez, but his audacity triggered MIR’s rather sudden transition from the gentler politics of campus protests and community organizing to a more decisive program of direct action; most of it, illicit; and some of it, armed. Cleverly-staged bank robberies, framed as Robin Hood style gestures of taking from the rich to benefit the poor, became the order of the day. Ever sensitive to the importance of good publicity, however, the students took precautions to make sure that no one ever got hurt.

After the election of Chile’s first Socialist President, Dr. Salvador Allende, in September of 1970, MIR continued to agitate for faster and more radical reform, but without the emphasis on spectacular disruptions of daily routines. Luciano Cruz took a flat in Santiago, where he conducted a covert program of surveillance, keeping watch over potential coup-plotting generals and their supporters. To this end, he recruited a sizeable contingent of young militants who learned to quietly follow and watch. In that role, Cruz’ team pieced together all the elements of the right-wing attempt to prevent Salvador Allende’s inauguration to the presidency, one that culminated in the assassination of General René Schneider, a trusted army commander.[11] Chilean police investigators, more attuned to internal bureaucracy and protocol than really solving crimes, had failed to break the case, but Cruz’ investigation uncovered embarrassing complicity that reached to the highest levels. Though published in Punto Final, the justice system failed to follow up on his findings.

Picture of funeral procession of Luciano Cruz
Funeral de Luciano Cruz. Source: Archivo Digital Londres 38

Luciano Cruz died of accidental gas inhalation in his one-room basement flat in downtown Santiago on August 14, 1971. After he missed an arranged meeting, Miguel Enríquez discovered his friend’s lifeless body. He frantically attempted to revive him, but it was too late. A CIA report surmised that Enríquez might have had Cruz murdered to resolve an internal power struggle.[12] But gas heaters in those days had no safety valves, and Luciano had been complaining of morning headaches for a week. All the witnesses mentioned the smell of gas in the flat. So it was likely careless rather than malicious.

Tens of thousands followed the funeral procession in support of the charismatic Luciano Cruz and the incisive student protest movement he represented.[13] MIR would never be the same without him. But, to this day, Chilean students put their whole heart and soul into their protests.

Nathan Stone, Professor of Instruction at the University of Texas and a recent Ph.D. recipient from the Department of History (2023) of the same institution. His specialization is Modern Latin American revolutionary movements. Previously, he lived and taught in Chile for thirty years, Uruguay for two, and IN Brazil for five. H is fluent in Spanish and Portuguese, and he has published his writing, both academic and non-fiction, in both languages.

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.

Banner image source: http://archivodigital.londres38.cl/index.php/afiche-del-comite-de-solidaridad-luciano-cruz

[1] Marian E. Schlotterbeck, Beyond the Vanguard: Everyday Revolutionaries in Allende’s Chile (Oakland, University of California Press, 2018), 23.

[2] Schlotterbeck, Beyond the Vanguard, (2018), 26; Punto Final, 12, (septiembre 1966), 16-18.

[3] Schlotterbeck, Beyond the Vanguard, (2018), 26.

[4] Punto Final, 40, (oct 1967), 37.

[5] Punto Final, 12, (sept 1966), 18; Punto Final, 37, (sept 1967), 39, and Punto Final, 40, (oct 1967), 36.

[6] Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times. (UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 35; and Punto Final, 32, (julio 1967), suplemento, 1-10.

[7] Schlotterbeck, Beyond the Vanguard, (2018), 26.

[8] “La rebelión de la juventud,” in Punto Final, 38, septiembre 1967, 28-30.

[9] Hernán Vidal, Presencia del MIR: 14 Claves Existenciales (Chile, Mosquito Comunicaciones, 1999), 28.

[10] Punto Final, 138, 31 agosto 1971, suplemento, 5.

[11] “El MIR denuncia a los verdaderos culpables del asesinato del General Schneider,” in Punto Final, 117, 10 noviembre 1970, suplemento, 1-10.

[12] CIA, Directorate of  Intelligence, 1141-1.37, Confidential, 1 October 1971, declassified September (1999),  https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/DOC_0000365918.pdf.   

[13] Jorge Müller Silva, “Funerales de Luciano Cruz Aguayo, 16 de agosto de 1971.” First released 1972; remastered by Chilefilms, Santiago, (2014).

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