Adam Clulow, Author at Not Even Past

Online Resources for the Study of Climate History and Suburban Life

On Monday November 23, the Institute for Historical Studies will host a workshop centered around a paper by Dr. Christopher Sellers entitled “From Smog to Climate Change?: The Precarious Precedents for Curbing Greenhouse Gases in the U.S. and Mexico” at noon Central Time. Dr. Sellers is Professor of History at Stony Brook University and a 2020-2021 Residential Fellow at the IHS. His research concentrates on the history of environment and health, of cities and industries, and of inequality and democracy, with a focus on the United States and Mexico. He has also designed several digital projects to share his work with the broader public, including a site called Suburban Nature.

Throughout his career, Dr. Sellers has examined the intersection of human and natural life, and his Suburban Nature site provides an opportunity for the wider public to explore these themes. The webpage functions as a complement to his publications, including his books Crabgrass Crucible: Suburban Nature and the Rise of Environmentalism in Twentieth-Century America and his forthcoming work Skewed City, Democratizing Seeds: Inequality, Democracy, and Environmental Politics in Atlanta’s Twentieth Century. As he notes, he designed the site to “to offer a taste of what these books are about.”

Suburban Nature includes several features. For interested readers, it offers a profile of Crabgrass Crucible, winner of the 2013 Independent Publisher Book Award Environment/Ecology/Nature Bronze Medal and the 2013 Abel Wolman Award by the Public Works Historical Society.

It also provides a jumping off point for the study of “the evolving ideas and perceptions of nature among suburbanites” and “the shifting realities of suburban ecology to the way these places spurred a new ‘environmental’ style of politics.” Under the ‘Places’ tab, users can examine interactive maps of the cities covered in Dr. Sellers’ books, such as Los Angeles and New York.

Along with accompanying written descriptions, the maps provide several branches of information for the featured places: their climate conditions throughout history, their current environmental status, income and race distributions in each respective region, and references to their impact on Dr. Sellers’ work.

The ‘People’ tab provides a rich description of many of the personal accounts that Dr. Sellers has sought out for his research. He cites dozens of firsthand experiences from individuals who lived in the regions he investigated. He has organized their responses around four main topics: Home-buying, Planting, Pets and Wildlife, and Local Activism.

Finally, Suburban Nature features visualizations of some of the data collected through the research process. Dr. Sellers has created graphs to demonstrate trends in both environmental phenomena (such as dustfall) and society’s responses to them (such as the amount of news coverage on issues of pollution.

The combination of scientific research and investigations of the lived experiences of suburban nature make the work of Dr. Sellers a uniquely valuable contribution to the field of environmental history. Learn more about his research at his IHS workshop on November 23, 2020 at noon central time. Register here.

For more events related to climate and environmental history at the Institute, see the calendar and follow the IHS on Facebook and Twitter.

Image credits: Photo by David McBee from Pexels

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.

Primary Source: Pamphlets, Propaganda, and the Amboina Conspiracy Trial in the Classroom

By Adam Clulow

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

For more than a decade now I have been researching and teaching about the Amboina (Amboyna) trial. This was an enormously controversial conspiracy case that took place on a remote island in Indonesia but involving a global list of characters including Japanese mercenaries, English officials, Dutch merchants, slaves from South Asia and local polities. In 1623, Dutch authorities accused a group of English East India Company merchants and Japanese soldiers of plotting to seize a Dutch East India Company fort and with it control over the trade in precious spices. The alleged conspirators were arrested, tortured and based on their confessions subsequently executed. By the time the trial concluded, a total of twenty-one men were dead, beheaded by Dutch East India Company (Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie or VOC) authorities.

The trial is important for two reasons. First, there is a still unresolved question over the guilt or innocence of the alleged conspirators. For close to four hundred years now, scholars and popular writers have been debating just what happened on this island: who was guilty, who was innocent and what it all means. Historians writing in English have generally insisted that no plot existed and hence that the VOC had no basis to execute a group of English merchants and their supposed Japanese collaborators. In contrast, most Dutch historians argue that there was some sort of conspiracy and, because of this, that the Company had every right to take judicial action.

While this debate shows no signs of ending, Amboina is also important for a second reason: it became the centerpiece of a long propaganda campaign waged by the English East India Company that turned what happened on this remote island into a symbol of Dutch treachery, cruelty and betrayal.

The trial

The Amboina case generated a vast archive of court records, depositions and other materials spanning more than five thousand pages. But because so many witnesses were on the payroll of either the Dutch or English companies, the archive offers little clarity about the possible conspiracy and the trial itself. Instead, putting together the different versions of the case creates a dizzying Rashomon-like kaleidoscope of possible interpretations. While working on what would become my book, Amboina, 1623: Conspiracy and Fear on the Edge of Empire, I decided to develop a specialized teaching website designed to take the case into the classroom.

My impetus for this website came from watching my students talk about a long-concluded trial in a different part of the world. What I was witnessing was the remarkable worldwide response to the groundbreaking first season of the podcast Serial, which focused on a 1999 murder case in Baltimore. Serial became the most downloaded podcast in history, and it generated a tremendous response as the public logged vast numbers of hours working through the key pieces of evidence.

Screen-capture from the website for the first episode of Serial, Season One: Episode 01.

Listening to Serial, I began to wonder if I couldn’t do something similar (on a far smaller scale) for my classroom: what would it be like to make primary source documents related to the 1623 trial freely available for students to dig into and interpret, putting forward their own conclusions about what happened? Working with the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, I built an interactive website, The Amboyna Conspiracy Trial, designed to do just that.

Screen-capture of the homepage of *The Amboyna Conspiracy Trial*.

At the heart of the site is an interactive trial engine which places students at the center of the case. To make a complex trial more accessible, we boiled the controversy down to six key questions that have to be answered one way or the other in order to come to a verdict. For each question, the site presents the arguments mobilized by both sides, the prosecution and defense, in conjunction with the most important pieces of evidence, related documents and legal commentary from a distinguished trial attorney. In addition, we created a large repository of additional material and documents, which students can work through at their own pace to support their conclusions.

The site became the centerpiece of classes I taught on the rise of the Dutch and English chartered companies in the seventeenth-century and their competition over precious spices. Students were challenged to work through large quantities of seventeenth-century primary source material online before taking on one of four roles—Barrister (Attorney), Witness, Researcher or Judge—in a comprehensive and competitive examination of the original trial. The exercise produced some of the most exciting classes I have taught. Students pored over the minutiae of the case and came to class prepared to debate their conclusions.

The trial exercise proved so successful in part because it harnessed a familiar genre: True Crime and the dissection of a single criminal case and subsequent trial. Students know this genre intimately, and once they are confronted with an archive of this kind I have found that they tend to dive right in. But Amboina is also important because it seeped into the English popular imagination for decades after the trial concluded. This part, the long legacy of the Amboina trial in print and image, has always been far more difficult to teach.

The long legacy

When news of the case reached Europe around May 1624, it sparked immediate outrage. Passions were inflamed by the publication of a slew of incendiary pamphlets on both sides that sought either to damn the Dutch as bloody tyrants or condemn the English as faithless traitors. While both companies pushed their own version of the case, the English East India Company scored the greatest successes. By any measure, the English East India Company waged an extraordinarily successful propaganda campaign against its Dutch counterpart. This is brilliantly discussed in Alison Games’ recent book, Inventing the English Massacre: Amboyna in History and Memory, which shows how successive generations of English writers came to invoke “Amboyna as a shorthand to convey cruelty and betrayal without comment or elaboration, so certain were they that their readers would understand the significance of the word.”

The propaganda campaign took many forms. The English East India Company commissioned a “very large picture, wherein is set forth those several lively, largely artificially bloody tortures and executions inflicted upon our people at Amboyna.” But its key instrument was a printed pamphlet, a relatively cheap publication that was printed again and again, often with an illustration of the English being brutally tortured.

The first shots of the pamphlet war were fired by VOC supporters in a short publication, Waerachtich Verhael vande Tidinghen ghecomen wt de Oost-Indien, that was first published in July 1624 and later translated into English as A True Declaration of the News that Came Out of the East Indies. Widely believed to be the work of a senior Dutch official, it denounced the “abominable conspiracy” while offering a measured defense of the legal proceedings. The English Company was quick to respond, commissioning A true relation of the unjust, cruell, and barbarous proceedings against the English at Amboyna in the East-Indies, by the Neatherlandish gouernour and councel there, which was compiled on the basis of the testimony provided by the handful of survivors of the trial who had made their way to England.

A true relation of the vnivst, crvell, and barbarovs proceedings against the English at Amboyna in the East-Indies (London: Nathanael Newberry, 1624). Harry Ransom Center Book Collection, DS 646.6 E2 1624b. — *A true relation of the vnivst, crvell, and barbarovs proceedings against the English at Amboyna in the East-Indies* (London: Nathanael Newberry, 1624), sigs. π1r and B1r. Harry Ransom Center Book Collection, DS 646.6 E2 1624b.

True Relation proved an enormously successful and durable text. It took a complex trial and turned it into a straightforward and compelling story in which the “unsatiable covetousnesse of the Hollanders” had driven them to engineer a “cruell treacherie to gain the sole trade” in precious spices. It reimagined a disparate and largely undistinguished group of British merchants as pious martyrs united by their Protestant faith and it included a potent woodcut image showing an unnamed English merchant being tortured with water and candles while another kneels in prayer, ready for execution. As Anthony Milton has shown, such depictions, which seem to have drawn on an early edition of John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, confirmed the English in Amboina in their new role as righteous martyrs. The 1624 True Relation was endlessly printed, modified, retitled and reprinted for the rest of the seventeenth century, making it an extraordinarily successful weapon in the English Company’s campaign to place blame and win compensation for what had happened on Amboina.

John Foxe, The first [-second] volume of the ecclesiasticall history, contayning the Actes & monumentes (London: John Daye, 1576), sig. TT6v. Harry Ransom Center Book Collection, -q- BR 1600 F6 1576.

While these printed books underpinned a sharp deterioration in Anglo-Dutch relations, it is a struggle to get students interested in poor-quality PDFs of old pamphlets. In Spring 2020, however, I tried something different. With Aaron T. Pratt, the Carl and Lily Pforzheimer Curator of Early Books and Manuscripts at the Harry Ransom Center, I combed through the Center’s vast collection for everything connected to Amboina and laid out what we found around a group of large seminar tables.

It proved a revelation. By the time we were done, the students could see before them in concrete form an extraordinarily successful propaganda campaign as represented by a series of interlocking texts that all borrowed from each other. Beginning with the 1624 True Relation, the display showed how an image was formed, how it was entrenched with key symbols and how it was subtly manipulated over time, appearing each time in a slightly different form. In 1651, for example, the same basic pamphlet was reprinted for a new audience.

A true relation of the unjust, cruel, and barbarous proceedings against the English at Amboyna in the East-Indies (London: William Hope, 1651). Harry Ransom Center Book Collection, DS 646.6 E2 1651. — *A true relation of the unjust, cruel, and barbarous proceedings against the English at Amboyna in the East-Indies* (London: William Hope, 1651). Harry Ransom Center Book Collection, DS 646.6 E2 1651.

In 1665 it was republished again, and in 1672, close to fifty years after the original trial, a new version promised to reveal “the naked truth of this cause, hirtherto masked, muffled and obfuscated”.

True Relation spawned a host of sub-texts, too. In 1673, for example, John Dryden wrote the charges against the Dutch into a play, Amboyna: A tragedy. Damning the Dutch as bloody murderers, the play gave a new generation the chance to discover, as one stage direction put it, “the English tortured, and the Dutch tormenting them.” And Dryden threw in new crimes, accusing the Dutch of rape and cannibalism.

By the 1680s, Amboina had not lost its potency even though half a century had passed since the trial itself. The Center has a remarkable text from 1683 entitled Unparallel’d varieties: or, the matchless actions and passions of mankind. Displayed in near four hundred notable instances and examples. This introduced a new and evolving image of Amboina. Here the English were not simply righteous martyrs. Instead, their judicial murder had been marked by a sign of divine wrath from the heavens. In this retelling, which drew from part of the True Relation but gave it new form, the execution of the English merchants in Kota Ambon was accompanied by “a great darknesse, with a sudden and violent gust of winde and tempest” that almost wrecked the Dutch ships clustered in the harbor. This was followed by a terrible illness that “swept away about a thousand people, Dutch and Amboyners.” The meaning of such signs was unmistakable. They were “a token of the wrath of God for this barbarous tyranny of the Hollanders.” In 1683, all of this was included in a new image paired alongside one drawn from the original 1624 woodblock print. Like its predecessor, this image had a long life and was reprinted in 1712 as part of a new text, The History of the Barbarous Cruelties. There can be little question as to what it would have meant to the reader. Here we see God’s wrath at the top of the image in response to what the Dutch have done in the lower half.

*The history of the barbarous cruelties and massacres, committed by the Dutch in the East-Indies* (London and Westminster: n.p., 1712), frontispiece and sig. A1r. Harry Ransom Center Book Collection, DS 642 H25.

We live in a digital world. This trend has become even more pronounced now as the COVID-19 pandemic has forced us out of in-person seminar spaces and into Zoom classrooms. But there remains something immensely powerful about encountering original documents right in front of your eyes, in seeing how an image morphs and evolves in print and in standing around a table with a series of interlocked texts arrayed in front of you. This is the joy of having something like the Ransom Center on campus. It is a reminder of how lucky we are as historians to have this incredible resource available to us and our students.

Adam Clulow is an Associate Professor at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of The Company and the Shogun: The Dutch Encounter with Tokugawa Japan (Columbia University Press, 2014), which won multiple awards including the Jerry Bentley Prize in World History from the American Historical Association, and Amboina, 1623: Conspiracy and Fear on the Edge of Empire (Columbia University Press, 2019). He is creator of The Amboyna Conspiracy Trial, an online interactive trial engine that received the New South Wales Premiers History Award in 2017, and Virtual Angkor with Tom Chandler, which received the Roy Rosenzweig Prize for Innovation in Digital History.

Colonial Latin America through objects: Teaching with Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra

In Spring 2020, Dr Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra taught a new variant of his highly successful course, Colonial Latin America through objects. The course description is as follows:

Objects (furniture, textiles, tools, maps, books, guns, kitchen ware, buildings, settlements, monuments, ships, tombs ) often shed more light about past societies than text themselves. This course explores the past of the colonials Americas (from north to south) by paying attention to the objects these societies left behind. We’ll gain new insights on the history of slavery, education, travel, technology, science, architecture, urbanism in the Americas.

Four students below show how clay ceramics, stones, and screen folds offer significant insights. Two use objects to shed light on the notions of the afterlife among the Mocha and the Aztecs. Another uses a variety of objects the Carib people considered divine, Zemis, to explore indigenous sacralization of space and landscapes. The fourth uses screen folds to explore the way Catholic Japanese communities’ struggled to understand the novelty of Black sailors, translators, and animal handlers present in Portuguese crews.

Jeremy Miller

To further understand the complex mythological and religious beliefs of the Moche civilization (AD 1-800), archeologists and historians alike have taken a deep dive into the ancient tombs of this South American tribe to uncover a deep fascination with bird iconography within the ancient civilization. Though a large array of bird species are represented and lay unknown on their meaning to the Moche, it is certain that birds themselves held a high esteem to these peoples as they centered their funerary and sacrificial principles around birds, two instances which were defining characteristics to the culture. Specifically, a careful study of artifacts shows the Moche’s inclined interest between that of the owl, the hummingbird, and the bat, replicating intense meanings within their lingering artifacts and drawings. Though no written record is yet to be found, what can be concluded is that birds played an active role in Moche religion, mythology, and most importantly, in ritual adaptation, making these winged creatures a cornerstone to our understanding of this civilization.

Vessel; Dipper, A.D. 100-800. Peru. Trujillo. pottery. Height: 11.50 cm, Length: 28.30 cm, Depth: 18.00 cm. The British Museum, London, U.K.

See the full project here…

Ethan Walje

Prior to Spanish contact, The Taino people of the Caribbean possessed a vibrant and diverse culture. Their civilization, however, experienced a significant decline after contact with Christopher Columbus. Without a written record, a great deal of mystery shrouds their beliefs and practices. One window into their culture, however, exists within the Zemi idols that they left behind. By examining the manner in which these idols were created, worshipped, and utilized in Taino society, we are offered a window into the Taino civilization that helps illuminate the relationships that bound their society together. The Zemi idols reveal a society with complex spiritual, societal, and political relationships that are tied together by the worship of Zemis and the creation of the idols that housed them.

*Boinayel the Rain Giver, Collected in Vere (Jamaica), June 1792, The British Museum, 15th Century.*

See the full project here…

Erika Voight

Prior to the Spanish arrival in Latin America, the Aztecs had long established rituals concerning burials. These practices revolved around ideas of the afterlife and the journeys that it required. In researching the objects special to Aztec rituals, I noticed similarities with Colonial era Catholic beliefs which extended beyond physical rituals, but included beliefs as well. The general afterlife for someone in the Aztec time resembles the Catholic belief in Purgatory and the comparisons between the two vastly different ideologies inevitably leads to a discussion on the primary differences. These differences manifested in various ways once the Spaniards arrived in the “New World”. Oftentimes, the differing beliefs and a need to prove superiority lead to conflict, however some natives welcomed the Spanish with open arms as ancestors. Regardless of the conflict, many Aztec’s held fast to their beliefs and continued to use objects as a way to aid the souls of the dead in their various journeys through the afterlife.

*Mosaic mask of Tezcatlipoca. Collection: The British Museum, Location Found: Modern day Mexico, Date: 1400 – 1521*

See the full project here…

Abel Martinez

Abstract: This project seeks to understand how Japanese Nanban screen folds helped construct a different narrative of the slave trade in Southern Japan. Black individuals depicted in Nanban art arrived with Portuguese expeditions to Southern Japan as slaves. However, the status of these enslaved Africans was different from those who arrived in the Americas on transatlantic voyages. The African slaves that arrived in Japan often held intellectual occupations (clerics, translators, clerks, guides) and some were proficient in multiple Asian and European languages. These differences were shown in Nanban screen folds that displayed African slaves working alongside Portuguese explorers in many cases rather than as direct subordinates. One central conclusion that should be drawn from this presentation of Nanban screen folds is that although they may have occupied a subservient position in the eyes of the Portuguese, African slaves were, in their own right, explorers of faraway places.

Domi, Kano. Barbarians From The South. c.1593. Painting. 172.8 x 380.8 x 2 cm. NMAA, Lisbon.

See the full project here…

IHS Book Talk: Sex, Love, and Letters: Writing Simone de Beauvoir

The History Faculty New Book Series presents:

Sex, Love, and Letters: Writing Simone de Beauvoir
(Cornell University Press, 2020)

A book talk and discussion with
Judith G. Coffin
Associate Professor of History
The University of Texas at Austin
https://liberalarts.utexas.edu/history/faculty/jcoffin

With discussants:

Indrani Chatterjee
Professor of History, The University of Texas at Austin
https://liberalarts.utexas.edu/history/faculty/ic2396
and
Yoav Di-Capua
Professor of History, The University of Texas at Austin
https://liberalarts.utexas.edu/history/faculty/yd386

When Judith G. Coffin discovered a virtually unexplored treasure trove of letters to Simone de Beauvoir from her international readers, it inspired her to explore the intimate bond between the famed author and her reading public. This correspondence, at the heart of Sex, Love, and Letters, immerses us in the tumultuous decades from the late 1940s to the 1970s— from the painful aftermath of World War Two to the horror and shame of French colonial brutality in Algeria through the dilemmas and exhilarations of the early gay liberation and feminist movements. It also provides a glimpse into the power of reading and the power of readers to seduce the authors of their favorite books.

The relationship between Beauvoir and her audience proved especially long, intimate, and vexed. Dr. Coffin traces this relationship, from the publication of Beauvoir’s acclaimed The Second Sex to the release of the last volume of her memoirs, offering an unfamiliar perspective on one of the most magnetic and polarizing philosophers of the twentieth century. Along the way, we meet many of the greatest writers of her generation—Hannah Arendt; Dominique Aury, author of The Story of O; François Mauriac, winner of the Nobel Prize and nemesis of Camus; Betty Friedan; and, of course, Sartre—bringing the electrically charged salon experience to life.

Sex, Love, and Letters lays bare the private lives and political emotions of the letter writers and of Beauvoir herself. Her readers did not simply pen fan letters but, as Dr. Coffin shows, engaged in a dialogue that revealed intellectual and literary life to be a joint and collaborative production. “This must happen to you often, doesn’t it?” wrote one. “That people write to you and tell you about their lives?”

See the Not Even Past story on the book here.

“[Coffin] writes engagingly about… historic developments while paying strict attention to the vivid immediacy of those letters that range far and wide across the categories of sentiment, education, and motive, revealing personalities that run the gamut from the elegant to the crude, the appreciative to the demanding.”
—Boston Review
“Coffin opens up a new perspective onto a major writer, and makes a convincing case for her continuing intellectual relevance.”
—Publisher’s Weekly
“This beautifully written, frequently moving book is a crucial addition to the scholarship on Simone de Beauvoir.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Beauvoir has often been either unduly attacked or zealously defended by biographers and critics. Coffin gets beyond this impasse, neither apologizing for her subject’s limitations, nor reproducing the biased standards by which contemporaries and historians often judge women. Those who read bestsellers by Tony Judt or Rebecca Traister will enjoy Sex, Love, and Letters.”
—Sharon Marcus, author of The Drama of Celebrity
“Coffin’s book is a signal achievement in the history of reading and literary history writ large. Her sensitive and astute use of the unexplored letters written to Simone de Beauvoir gives us a truer sense than we’ve ever had of this writer’s central role in postwar culture.”
—Alice Kaplan, author of Looking for The Stranger
“A delightful analysis of a little-known aspect of Beauvoir’s life and legacy: the extraordinary epistolary relationships with her readers. Coffin shares intriguing insights into the highly personal and concrete ways that Beauvoir moved and inspired generations of women and men.”
—Skye Cleary, author of Existentialism and Romantic Love
“A highly original, exciting contribution to the cultural history of the postwar period, Sex, Love, and Letters offers a nuanced, beautifully detailed portrait of Beauvoir’s readership, her ‘intimate public.’ Coffin’s book sheds vivid new light on the preoccupations of an entire era.”
—Emma Kuby, author of Political Survivors

See Professor Coffin’s book featured in The Guardian (“Intimate letters reveal Simone de Beauvoir’s role as an agony aunt”), and in the Boston Review (“The Obligation of Self-Discovery”).

Dr. Coffin is Associate Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of The Politics of Women’s Work: The Paris Garment Trades, 1750-1915 (Princeton University Press) and co-author of four editions of Western Civilizations (W.W. Norton). She has authored numerous articles on radio, mass culture, and sexuality. She is currently at work on two projects, “A Short Biography of Story of O: the Postwar Politics of Sexuality and Eros” and “The Adventure of the Interior: Radio and Psychoanalysis in Postwar France.” Follow her on Twitter @judygcoffin.

IHS Book Talk: Her Neighbor’s Wife: A History of Lesbian Desire Within Marriage

The History Faculty New Book Series presents:

Her Neighbor’s Wife: A History of Lesbian Desire Within Marriage
(University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019)

A book talk and discussion with
Lauren Jae Gutterman
Assistant Professor of American Studies, and Women’s & Gender Studies, and
Faculty Affiliate, Department of History and LGBTQ Studies
The University of Texas at Austin
https://liberalarts.utexas.edu/ams/faculty/lg32432

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

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

Her Neighbor’s Wife is the winner of the 2019 Berkshire Conference of Women Historians Book Prize.

“Her Neighbor’s Wife is a revelation. Lauren Jae Gutterman locates lesbian histories not at the margins but at the center of postwar American life, often accommodated within marriages with men and family life. Alert to the complex meanings of married women’s desire for women, beyond the poles of protest and conformity, Gutterman queers postwar marriage, the family, and normativity itself.”
—Regina Kunzel, author of Criminal Intimacy: Prison and the Uneven History of Modern American Sexuality

“In a field dominated by studies of gay men (still), Her Neighbor’s Wife offers an LGBT history that centers a gendered analysis of women’s lives. It is a critical intervention in histories of marriage, same-sex desires, feminism, and therapeutic ideas of the authentic self.”
—Rebecca L. Davis, author of More Perfect Unions: The American Search for Marital Bliss

“Her Neighbor’s Wife is an engaging, highly readable sociocultural history that serves as a necessary and illuminating corrective to the general dearth of lesbian history. Lauren Jae Gutterman shows the concept of fluidity has a much deeper past than what is typically imagined and that heterosexual marriage was much less straight than it seemed.”
—Heather Murray, author of Not in This Family: Gays and the Meaning of Kinship in Postwar North America

Lauren Jae Gutterman graduated with a B.A. in American Studies and Women’s and Gender Studies from Northwestern University. After completing her doctorate in twentieth-century U.S. History at New York University, Dr. Gutterman was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Society of Fellows at the University of Michigan. In the fall of 2015, Professor Gutterman joined the American Studies Department at UT Austin. She is also a core faculty member in the Center for Women’s & Gender Studies, and a faculty affiliate of LGBTQ Studies and the History Department. Professor Gutterman has published articles on the history of women, gender, sexuality, popular culture, digital history, and oral history in the Journal of Social History, Gender & History, The Public Historian, Transformations: The Journal of Inclusive Scholarship and Pedagogy, the Journal of the History of Sexuality, and the Oral History Review. Her public writing has appeared in The Washington Post, Public Seminar, Jezebel, Slate, The Huffington Post, Notches: (Re)marks on the History of Sexuality, and the Organization of American Historians’ blog, Process. Her next book project, tentatively titled “Queer Survival,” examines changing understandings of the relationship between gender and sexual non-conformity and surviving childhood sexual abuse since the late-nineteenth century. She is also the co-founder and co-host of the Sexing History podcast.

HPS talk: “Reconsidering Buddhist Embryology as Science History.”

John Wallingford of the UT Department of Molecular Biosciences speaks on “Reconsidering Buddhist Embryology as Science History.”

It has not gone unnoticed in recent times that the history of science is heavily Eurocentric. A striking example can be found in the history of
developmental biology, the science of embryonic development. Textbooks and popular science writing frequently trace an intellectual thread from Aristotle through a small handful of 19th century German pioneers to 20th century genetics and 21st century genomics. Few historians and fewer still biologists are aware, however, of the depth and breadth of early embryological thinking outside of Europe. Here, I provide a series of vignettes highlighting the rich history of embryological thinking in early Asia. The impact of this body of thought on the “development” of modern developmental biology is unclear, but I contend that because culture shapes our thinking, these early Asian studies have significant implications for the modern practice. My goal is to provide an entertaining, even provocative, synopsis of an important but understudied topic, with the hope that this work will spur others to more thorough investigations.
____________________

John Wallingford holds the William and Gwyn Shive Endowed Professorship in UT’s Department of Molecular Biosciences. His work combines in vivo imaging with systems biology to explore the cell biological basis of embryonic development. He also has a strong interest in the history of embryology and associated sciences.

An Intimate History of the Twentieth Century

Simone de Beauvoir would not be surprised by #metoo. After all, she wrote the book that laid out just how profoundly women’s position as the subordinate Other warped sexuality, intimacy, and even love . The Second Sex, Beauvoir path-blazing 1949 work of feminist theory, did not mince words on what Kate Manne in Down Girl (2018) calls the “gory details” of women’s lived experience and their inequality. What is more, Beauvoir did not underestimate the difficulty of cutting through the knots of misunderstanding, incomprehension, complicity and denial that tangled relations between men and women. To dismantle deep structures of power would take inner transformation, stamina, real clarity of purpose, and it would require women declining invitations to “collaborate” – in our terms, refusing to latch onto class and racial privilege. Seventy-some years later, then, we are still contending with deep inequalities, sexism, and misogyny. Of course, Beauvoir might say: she had only explained how deep the problem ran.

The Second Sex is only part of the Beauvoir story. The Mandarins, her 1954 novel about postwar politics, intellectual debates, and love lives of her circle of French existentialist thinkers made her into a literary celebrity. She went on to unspool her life story in four best-selling volumes of autobiography: Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter (1958), The Prime of Life (1960), The Force of Circumstance (1963), and the retrospective All Said and Done (1972). She brought readers along for her struggles as a writer, her travels, her politics, and her love life. These volumes were not a detour from philosophy. For Beauvoir, autobiography was a philosophical challenge: a reflection on freedom and one’s situation — and a very public process of self-discovery. Readers thrilled to it. Tens of thousands of women and men wrote to her to recount how, where, why and often with whom they had read her work, to endorse or argue with her ideas, excavate memories of historical events, to share dilemmas, and to puzzle through and interpret their own lived experiences.

Book cover of The Mandarins by Simone de Beauvoir

Book cover of Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter by Simone de Beauvoir

I stumbled on these letters at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris when the collection was barely open and still being catalogued. They astonished me. They were vividly detailed, thoughtful, funny, eloquent, and direct –alternately admiring and irreverent. What an outpouring of projection, identification, expectation, disappointment, and passion! “For some reason I can’t explain, after reading this book I suddenly feel very close to you and feel the need to tell you that.” “Simone de Beauvoir, you belong to all of us, that is why I do not call you Madame.” “…you will cruelly disappoint me if you don’t give me the confidence or the support I expect.” I came to see how Beauvoir had invited herself into her readers lives. In The Prime of Life, she spelled out her ambitions as a writer. “What I wanted was to penetrate so deeply into the lives of others that when they heard my voice they would have the impression they were speaking to themselves.” It is a remarkable phrase. Small wonder countless readers cited it back to her, and that they felt summoned to think and feel with her, and to invite her into their lives. And small wonder that unlike many writers, Beauvoir saved letters from ordinary readers; they testify to the intensity of her bond with the public.

Sex, Love and Letters is based on this remarkable collection of letters. It follows this passionate and emphatically reciprocal relationship between author and reader from the publication of The Second Sex to the last volume of autobiography. The letter writers came from many different walks of life, and from men as well as women. Their missives arrived from across the world: Brazil, Argentina, Colombia, Mexico, Italy, Romania, the US and the Francophone world. As they wrote, these readers relived with Beauvoir the decisive developments of the postwar world: the efforts to grapple with traumatic memories of World War II, the Occupation and the Holocaust, the Cold War, the rapid rise of American cultural, political, and military power, an economic boom, decolonization. The letters take us through the inner turmoil of these tumultuous decades: we see the popularization of psychoanalysis and new theories of sexuality from a different perspective. The portrait of gender relations and politics is extraordinary. Readers reported on impossible marriages and families, confusing sexual desires, unwanted pregnancies, illegal abortions, and domestic violence in gory — and moving — detail. Many women wrote in anguish about their complicity in their situation, and their far from successful revolts against it. Their voices reveal much about the complexities of the sexual revolution and the volatile politics of feminism. They give us an intimate history of the twentieth century.

Simone de Beauvoir remains a polarizing figure: brilliant, fearless, and determined “not to miss anything of her time;” cagey and self-concealing, especially about her lesbian relationships. Was she blind to the distortions of looking at the world from a position of intellectual and white European privilege? Does she represent the radicalism of women’s liberation or its infirmities and limits?

She continues to attract a combustible mix of desire, resentment, and admiration. The letters at the center of Sex, Love, and Letters: Writing Simone de Beauvoir capture all these dimensions of her presence and legacy. More important, the book takes the spotlight off Beauvoir and turns it on the authors of these letters. As one wrote to Beauvoir, “What you lived in the spotlight I lived as an unknown, in the shadows.” These individuals are no less fascinating than Beauvoir. Their letters are a gripping portrait of everyday life and the politics of sex and gender. They are also testimony to the emotional and imaginative magic of books and letters, and a chapter in our ongoing love affair with memoir.

Judith Coffin is Associate Professor of History. She has written about gender, labor, sexuality, advertising, radio. You can find her work, here, or follow her on Twitter @judygcoffin.

Update: The Society for French Historical Studies awarded Sex, Love, and Letters the David H. Pinkney Book Prize. The citation is as follows:

Judith G. Coffin, Sex, Love, and Letters: Writing Simone de Beauvoir (Cornell University Press). Judith Coffin’s elegantly written book is a detailed portrait of the wide-ranging readership of Simone de Beauvoir through the letters that her readers wrote to Beauvoir. Coffin reveals the deep engagement that readers felt toward Beauvoir’s work, and ways that readers sought Beauvoir’s personal advice and political advocacy. Coffin’s deeply situated book shows how readers made sense of their lives, while also suggesting the ways this ongoing stream of correspondence affected Beauvoir. Coffin highlights what she calls the “public intimacy” of new forms of selfhood in the 1950s and 1960s, while also situating Beauvoir and her readers in the maelstrom of postwar reckoning with sexuality, gender roles, Vichy, Algeria, and postwar authoritarianism.

The article above is adapted from a piece that first appeared with Cornell University Press.

*Featured photo by Mihai Surdu.

Digital Tools for Studying Empire: Transcription and Text Analysis with Transkribus

By Brittany Erwin

Transcribing historical documents, that is, copying the exact text word-for-word, can be a long and arduous process. Some handwriting styles from earlier periods have become almost indecipherable to modern-day readers without extensive training and practice. Many texts also feature abbreviations, which helped keep the cost of paper and ink down for the original authors. The meaning of those shortened words and phrases may have been commonplace centuries ago, but they are far from self-evident today.

Although it requires considerable effort and difficulty, transcription is often essential for historical research. Digital versions of historical texts allow for analysis on a larger scale because they transform each document into a searchable field. For example, identifying trends, common words, and shared phrases across dozens of documents enables a significantly quicker process.

Within the realm of Digital Humanities, many tools exist to help facilitate transcription, with even more currently being developed. Transkribus is one useful interface. I utilized the tools that Transkribus offers to analyze the frequency of prominent phrases in around thirty documents from the Genaro Garc í a Collection, housed at the Benson Latin American Collection at UT-Austin.

The Genaro García documents I transcribed with Transkribus originate from the interactive digital exhibition that I created on the 1765 visita, or royal inspection, of New Spain. The visita examined local institutions, evaluated economic policies, and reorganized society in a broad display of royal authority. This procedure helped the reigning monarch (Charles III) implement widespread political, economic, and social reform in this territory in order to tighten control and increase efficiency. It set the precedent for changing policies throughout the empire over the next several decades.

Designed for a non-specialist audience, the exhibition explores the timeline, spatial breadth, and procedure of the inspection, by providing access to digital versions of the original documents produced by the royal inspection visita. The project provides an accessible way to understand how the lengthy and expensive process of royal governance effectively fostered relations between the ruling government in Spain and its many different constituencies on the ground in the Americas. I prioritized transcription of the visita documents to help shed light on the Crown’s objectives for imperial reform.

Transkribus is a fairly new platform, designed by the Digitisation and Digital Preservation Group at the University of Innsbruck in Austria. Its basic function is creating programs that learn to read documents and produce transcriptions on their own. The user interface allows researchers to design the programs, monitor their progress, and correct them as needed.

*The Layout Analysis feature appears at the top of the panel on the right side of the screen. Users can run Layout Analysis one page at a time, or one document at a time.*

The first step in the process is to upload high-resolution images of the documents in question and employ the Layout Analysis feature. This step automatically maps out the lines of text on each page so that the next feature, the actual transcription, knows where to look for the characters. It will only read letters within those lines. The user can manually add or delete lines in case the Layout Analysis feature made a mistake, such as recognizing a spare mark or an ink blot as text.

After Layout Analysis is complete, users can begin to build their transcription model. Transkribus models work based on an input from the user. In most cases, a manually transcribed document of about 15,000 words serves as the ideal input. The program will essentially learn to match characters in the image of the document to the ones provided in the manually-created transcription. From there, the model can read and translate any number of subsequent documents. The wait time for transcription depends on the size of the document, but it can be ready in as soon as a few hours.

An important point about the efficacy of these Transkribus models: handwriting matters. Since the program will read documents based on the model, it is essential that the handwriting for both is either the same or highly similar. For my specific documents, the handwriting was consistent, coming mostly from a Spanish Royal Inspector named José de Gálvez.

*The above image illustrates that the highlighted line of text matches the line below, labeled 1-9, where the user can edit the text as necessary.*

Even after the program generates transcriptions for the selected documents, the Transkribus interface allows for a manual review process. For example, if the model misinterpreted the flow of the text, users can reorder the lines. They can also correct any misread words by simply clicking on the relevant line and replacing the letters or characters. At any point in this process, users can save their work, which Transkribus automatically backs up on its own servers.

The box in the top right has the option, which is currently selected, to “Show lines reading order. If the user wishes to reorder the lines, she can double click on any of the light blue numbers to change it.

There are a few options for the end product of a document transcribed with Transkribus. Users can download integrated files, which include the photo of the document together with its text transcription, a text-only file (.txt), or a Word document (.doc). Each of those formats provides a digital version of the original document that is well-suited for continued analysis.

One platform that works well with a .txt file is Voyant Tools. By simply uploading the text (or even copying and pasting it) in Voyant, users can track the frequency of certain words and create data visualizations, such as word clouds and graphs. Especially for a large collection of long documents, such visual representations can lead to new, unexpected insights.

*This word cloud, called a Cirrus in Voyant, was one of the data visualizations that I created from my transcriptions from Transkribus.*

Transkribus is a promising tool for researchers working in many different languages and time periods. Its ability to create a model based specifically on the handwriting of the documents that a user selects make it a highly adaptable platform. It is currently offered as a free interface, but is transitioning to paid service that would charge based on the file-size of projects. However, the developers have prioritized accessibility, and aim to offer scholarships to undergraduate and graduate students.

A new collaboration between This is Democracy and Not Even Past

We are delighted to announce a new collaboration with This is Democracy, a podcast moderated by Dr Jeremi Suri.

The title of Not Even Past reflects our professional and ethical commitment to bringing the work of professional historians into a public conversation that illuminates the importance of the past in shaping our actions, values, and beliefs in the present. In short, we believe that the past is never dead, it’s not even past. With this in mind, we seek always to engage with and illuminate the past in diverse ways. But we believe as well that we can do more to find solutions and ways forwards.

Because of this we are honored to feature podcasts from This is Democracy, a forward-looking podcast developed by Dr Jeremi Suri, the Mack Brown Distinguished Chair for Leadership in Global Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin. As the podcast description notes, the past offers hope for the present and the future, if only we can escape the negativity of our current moment. Each show offers a way to do that. This is Democracy brings together thoughtful voices from different generations to help make sense of current challenges and propose positive steps forward. Its goal is to advance democratic change, one show at a time. For the origin story of This is Democracy, please see our interview with Jeremi and Zachary Suri.

Not Even Past will feature podcasts from This is Democracy alongside 15 Minute History. We will also publish reading recommendations that serve as companions to select pieces. For the first of these, see below:

This is Democracy Reading List: Dissent and National Security (episode 120)

Not Even Past is proud to partner with This is Democracy, a groundbreaking podcast that brings together thoughtful voices from different generations to help make sense of current challenges and propose positive steps forward. For Episode 120 of This is Democracy, Jeremi and Zachary Suri hosted Professor Hannah Gurman and Professor Kaeten Mistry to discuss the role of dissent, specifically whistleblowers, in U.S. national security and defense.

…one of the discoveries we made is that, in many respects, whistle-blowing is an act of desperation. But it is not necessarily radical, it’s historical phenomenon that have made it radical. So that’s why it’s important to trace this history.
Professor Hannah Gurman

Listen to the podcast below or see it here.

For further readings on whistle-blowers and the role of dissent in U.S. national security and defense, Hannah Gurman and Kaeten Mistry recommend the following five books.

Kaeten Mistry & Hannah Gurman, eds., Whistleblowing Nation: The History of National Security Disclosures and the Cult of Secrecy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2020).

“The twenty-first century witnessed a new age of whistleblowing in the United States. Disclosures by Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden, and others have stoked heated public debates about the ethics of exposing institutional secrets, with roots in a longer history of state insiders revealing privileged information. Bringing together contributors from a range of disciplines to consider political, legal, and cultural dimensions, Whistleblowing Nation is a pathbreaking history of national security disclosures and state secrecy from World War I to the present. The contributors explore the complex politics, motives, and ideologies behind the revelation of state secrets that threaten the status quo, challenging reductive characterizations of whistleblowers as heroes or traitors. They examine the dynamics of state retaliation, political backlash, and civic contests over the legitimacy and significance of the exposure and the whistleblower. The volume considers the growing power of the executive branch and its consequences for First Amendment rights, the protection and prosecution of whistleblowers, and the rise of vast classification and censorship regimes within the national-security state. Featuring analyses from leading historians, literary scholars, legal experts, and political scientists, Whistleblowing Nation sheds new light on the tension of secrecy and transparency, security and civil liberties, and the politics of truth and falsehood.”

Hannah Gurman, The Dissent Papers: The Voices of Diplomats in the Cold War and Beyond (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012).

“Beginning with the Cold War and concluding with the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Hannah Gurman explores the overlooked opposition of U.S. diplomats to American foreign policy in the latter half of the twentieth century. During America’s reign as a dominant world power, U.S. presidents and senior foreign policy officials largely ignored or rejected their diplomats’ reports, memos, and telegrams, especially when they challenged key policies relating to the Cold War, China, and the wars in Vietnam and Iraq. The Dissent Papers recovers these diplomats’ invaluable perspective and their commitment to the transformative power of diplomatic writing. Gurman showcases the work of diplomats whose opposition enjoyed some success. George Kennan, John Stewart Service, John Paton Davies, George Ball, and John Brady Kiesling all caught the attention of sitting presidents and policymakers, achieving temporary triumphs yet ultimately failing to change the status quo. Gurman follows the circulation of documents within the State Department, the National Security Council, the C.I.A., and the military, and she details the rationale behind “The Dissent Channel,” instituted by the State Department in the 1970s, to both encourage and contain dissent. Advancing an alternative narrative of modern U.S. history, she connects the erosion of the diplomatic establishment and the weakening of the diplomatic writing tradition to larger political and ideological trends while, at the same time, foreshadowing the resurgent significance of diplomatic writing in the age of Wikileaks.”

Daniel Ellsberg, Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers (New York: Penguin, 2003).

“In 1971 former Cold War hard-liner Daniel Ellsberg made history by releasing the Pentagon Papers – a 7,000-page top-secret study of U.S. decision-making in Vietnam – to the New York Times and Washington Post. The document set in motion a chain of events that ended not only the Nixon presidency but the Vietnam War. In this remarkable memoir, Ellsberg describes in dramatic detail the two years he spent in Vietnam as a U.S. State Department observer, and how he came to risk his career and freedom to expose the deceptions and delusions that shaped three decades of American foreign policy. The story of one man’s exploration of conscience, Secrets is also a portrait of America at a perilous crossroad.”

Judith Miller, The Story: A Reporter’s Journey (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2015).

“In The Story, Judy Miller turns her journalistic skills on herself and her controversial reporting, which marshaled evidence that led America to invade Iraq. She writes about the mistakes she and others made on the existence in Iraq of weapons of mass destruction. She addresses the motives of some of her sources, including the notorious Iraqi Chalabi and the CIA. She describes going to jail to protect her sources in the Scooter Libby investigation of the outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame and how the Times subsequently abandoned her after twenty-eight years. Judy Miller grew up near the Nevada atomic proving ground. She got a job at TheNew York Times after a suit by women employees about discrimination at the paper and went on to cover national politics, head the paper’s bureau in Cairo, and serve as deputy editor in Paris and then deputy at the powerful Washington bureau. She reported on terrorism and the rise of fanatical Islam in the Middle East and on secret biological weapons plants and programs in Iraq, Iran, and Russia. Miller shared a Pulitzer for her reporting. She describes covering terrorism in Lebanon, being embedded in Iraq, and going inside Russia’s secret laboratories where scientists concocted designer germs and killer diseases and watched the failed search for WMDs in Iraq. The Story vividly describes the real life of a foreign and investigative reporter. It is an account filled with adventure, told with bluntness and wryness.”

Tom Mueller, Crisis of Conscience: Whistleblowing in an Age of Fraud (New York: Penguin, 2019).

“We live in a period of sweeping corruption — and a golden age of whistleblowing. Over the past few decades, principled insiders who expose wrongdoing have gained unprecedented legal and social stature, emerging as the government’s best weapon against corporate misconduct–and the citizenry’s best defense against government gone bad. Whistleblowers force us to confront fundamental questions about the balance between free speech and state secrecy, and between individual morality and corporate power. In Crisis of Conscience, Tom Mueller traces the rise of whistleblowing through a series of riveting cases drawn from the worlds of healthcare and other businesses, Wall Street, and Washington. Drawing on in-depth interviews with more than two hundred whistleblowers and the trailblazing lawyers who arm them for battle–plus politicians, intelligence analysts, government watchdogs, cognitive scientists, and other experts–Mueller anatomizes what inspires some to speak out while the rest of us become complicit in our silence. Whistleblowers, we come to see, are the freethinking, outspoken citizens for whom our republic was conceived. And they are the models we must emulate if our democracy is to survive.”

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Online Resources for the Study of Climate History and Suburban Life

Primary Source: Pamphlets, Propaganda, and the Amboina Conspiracy Trial in the Classroom

The trial

The long legacy

Colonial Latin America through objects: Teaching with Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra

Jeremy Miller

Ethan Walje

Erika Voight

Abel Martinez

IHS Book Talk: Sex, Love, and Letters: Writing Simone de Beauvoir

IHS Book Talk: Her Neighbor’s Wife: A History of Lesbian Desire Within Marriage

Further reading on Not Even Past

HPS talk: “Reconsidering Buddhist Embryology as Science History.”

An Intimate History of the Twentieth Century

Digital Tools for Studying Empire: Transcription and Text Analysis with Transkribus

A new collaboration between This is Democracy and Not Even Past

This is Democracy Reading List: Dissent and National Security (episode 120)

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