Adam Clulow, Author at Not Even Past

Review of The Science of Useful Nature in Central America: Landscapes, Networks, and Practical Enlightenment, 1784–1838, by Sophie Brockmann (2020).

Banner for Review of The Science of Useful Nature in Central America

What is the ‘Enlightenment’? This is a question that has occupied scholars ever since Kant. But historians no longer focus on great white heroes to provide answers. Yet sociologies of knowledge on the ‘Enlightenment’ continue to render the experiences of the north Atlantic normative. These sociologies tell us that the Enlightenment was not about secular radicals using reason to topple the religious and feudal hierarchies of the ancien régime. It was rather about new forms of sociability triggered by revolutions in print and communication that made a republic of letters and a public sphere of coffee shops and periodicals possible. These new bottom-up institutions, as this narrative has it, allowed for new mercantile middle classes to challenge top-down hierarchies of knowledge and politics.

As common as it is, this model, however, does not fit most global experiences of the ‘Enlightenment’. In a 2020 study, Brockmann investigates the case of turn-of-nineteenth-century Central America to challenge the norm.

Brockmann brings to life a coterie of religious and lay Spanish American bureaucracies that for some forty years were obsessed with ‘bringing light’ onto everyone, from Chiapas to Costa Rica. Engineers, military officers, architects, bishops, field justices, priests, high court judges, doctors, lawyers, landowners, among many others, organized themselves in patriotic societies to produce a newspaper to network and to circulate only ‘useful’ knowledge aimed at transforming local landscapes. One could argue that this community was a ‘public sphere’ created by print culture. Yet Brockmann demonstrates that these were colonial bureaucracies who were prompted by top-down crown initiatives to create patriotic societies and newspapers to communicate and innovate. Moreover, in the kingdom of Guatemala, landscapes were constantly threatened by earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, locust, anthrax, typhus, smallpox, and falling prices of indigo, the main staple.

An Indian gathers cochineal with a deer tail. Painting. — *An Indian gathers cochineal with a deer tail José Antonio de Alzate y Ramírez 1777. Source: Wikimedia Commons*

How to produce indigo, flax, silk? How to avoid tropical miasmas caused by rotten, humid tropical trees? How to reorganize settlement patterns and prompt populations to settle in both Pacific and Atlantic new ports? How to reengineer mercantile circuits opening new roads? These bureaucracies had long drafted reports on local demography, production, roads, landscapes. Bishops, field justices, court magistrates, and municipal authorities of the various administrative units of the kingdom of Guatemala, a territory that covered dozens of cities and towns from southern Mexico to northern Panama, had long crisscrossed the lands and produced paperwork to mete out justice and enact reform.

They embodied the Enlightenment as much as the late eighteenth-century engineers and judges Brockmann has chosen to study. All lay and religious colonial bureaucracies, Habsburg and Bourbon, used archives to develop a sense of the changing nature of territories bewildered by contingency, disaster, and environmental change. Guatemala’s capital, alone, was twice obliterated, relocated, and rebuilt after eruptions and earthquakes. Theirs was an enlightenment of ever-changing landscapes and bureaucratic archives.

Brockmann demonstrates that these bureaucratic networks held together by new patriotic societies and print embraced new languages of utility and political economy but not necessarily new practices of paperwork and administering knowledge and land reform. Transfixed by the idea of Enlightenment progress and innovation, Brockmann artificially separates these late eighteenth-century bureaucracies from their robust predecessors, neglecting some two hundred years of bureaucratic audits, reports, and endless horizontal and vertical communication with peers, and local and peninsular authorities.

*Códice Dehesa. Source: Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia (INAH)*

The assumption to see bureaucracies of engineers, architects, bishops, and priests as the product of Bourbon reforms, leads Brockmann to eliminate all bottom-up communication. These bureaucracies communicated constantly with ‘Indians” and Blacks through myriad mechanisms of tribunals and audits. Indigenous communities had their own paperwork bureaucracies. It is therefore strange that Indian and Black voices are almost absent in Brockmann’s study. Either these populations did not get to participate in the new networks of print and sociability (patriotic societies and merchant tribunals) or Brockmann assumes that in the Spanish Empire these populations rarely talked, particularly after the Enlightenment reforms. That their voices dimmed with the Bourbon reforms might well be true, but this is something that requires detailed research rather than vague assumptions.

Brockmann interpretation of Enlightenment is unquestionably important. It shows that something peculiar happened in the Spanish empire as the language of light, patriotism, and utility replaced religious discourses of service among both lay and religious bureaucracies. Utility meant a rejection of abstraction. The Gazeta of Guatemala, the newspaper of the reformers, privileged articles that had demonstrable utility at the very local level, privileging empirical local knowledge over theory. Linnaeus was rejected, indigenous plant taxonomies were embraced.

In this world, the pursuit of utility was a language of commitment for both empire and local community. Brockmann avoids any discussion of “creole” identities leading to friction with peninsular outsiders, the alleged culture of resentment that prefigures the conflict of the wars of independence. The Science of Useful Nature in Central America takes issue with my own work on “science” and creole patriotism (albeit mine is rather on patriotic epistemologies, not science) because the members of these patriotic networks saw themselves as neither ‘Spaniards” nor ‘Creoles’. Since the author focuses on networks of local lay and religious bureaucrats one could argue that patriotism was simply a manifestation of love of service to king, empire, and community to be compensated by grace privileges.

Cover of The Science of Useful Nature in Central America

Brockmann shows that with Independence, these bureaucracies continued serving a Federal Republic, no longer a global monarchy. Yet their concerns and modus operandi remained the same. These bureaucracies started to develop networks of all kinds with the British empire, political, economic, and particularly scientific. Brockmann demonstrates that many of the new republican bureaucracies began to transfer colonial archives of maps and reports to the British state as they sought to secure loans, support, or simply old-fashion patronage. Enlightenment came to mean plunder.

Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra is the Alice Drysdale Sheffield Professor of History at the University of Texas at 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.

Review of Carros y Cultura: Lowriding Legacies in Texas at the Bullock Texas State History Museum

It’s usual when hearing the word “lowrider” to imagine a car, lifted just barely above the road by wheels with stylized rims, and probably an impressive paint job and hydraulic system. Alongside this meaning, lowrider also refers to an entire culture and community that surrounds the customization and competition of cars, bikes, and anything else that can be converted to fit the lowrider aesthetic. Lowriding is a culture rooted in Mexican American communities with southwestern influences, that values family, community service, creativity, and dedication. This phenomenon has given rise to numerous car shows and competitions across the nation, and internationally, all with the goal to inspire and encourage lowriders to “create cars that push the limits of what a car can be.”

At the Bullock Texas State History Museum, Carros y Cultura: Lowriding Legacies in Texas, is on display until September 2nd, and it’s one cruise that should not be missed. Immediately when walking through the exhibit entrance, you’re struck by color and creativity. Large banners hang from the ceiling displaying words that encompass what it means to be a lowrider: community, character, creativity, family, artistry, dedication, style, respect, culture, skill, identity, “con safos”, valor, passion, and pride. These embody the values of the car club community. Approaching each item, whether it be a modified bicycle, or a car painted to resemble a mural, the values become clear from the level of detail, dedication, and familial story each piece needed to become the museum-worthy work it is today.

1967 Ford LTD. Green. Image from Bullock Museum for Review of Carros y Cultura — *Courtesy of the Bullock Texas State History Museum. 1967 Ford LTDcourtesy John Colunga, Austin.*

Lowriding originated in California after the end of World War II as a conveyor of cultural expression and as a reflection of Mexican American identity. At the time, the cultural movement was heavily associated with the Chicano civil rights movement, which resulted in city laws targeting the lowriding cars by restricting car height. The restrictions didn’t deter the lowriders, who cleverly adapted by installing hydraulic systems that let them raise the cars to a legal height for driving, then lower them for cruising. This creative solution to the targeting laws became a beacon of lowriding culture and is embedded in competitions and shows as a testament to the skill of designers.

After a resurgence in the 1970s, lowrider culture expanded outside of California, reaching the rest of the Southwest region and Texas. Soon, car clubs began popping up in West Texas cities such as El Paso and Odessa that are through points of traffic flowing from Texas, California, and Mexico. The club and car culture continued to grow throughout Texas, and soon reached relevance in pop culture and media. Publications like Lowrider Magazine gave the community a unified voice, while lowriders gained visibility in movies and music. Eventually, the community activity reached formal competitions and car shows, bringing lowriding into the mainstream auto industry and cementing the culture’s relevance in a new audience. Lowriding has expanded its reach past the U.S. borders, with shows taking place all over the world.

Community is a major tenet of lowrider culture, and this can be seen through the more than a thousand official car clubs that support the culture and maintain its connections throughout the country. Lowrider Magazine has a registry of over 1,300 clubs today, but this is a low estimate of the true number of clubs that individuals and families run on their own. Each of them has an individual story and identity: some choose to focus on a certain style of car (the Chevrolet Impala is one of the most popular models to customize), and some base their membership on shared values. All seek to serve their communities and sustain their culture through familial connections and positive, respectful environments. Clubs can serve the community in a variety of ways, including raising money for charities and providing collective family friendly gatherings for small towns and neighborhoods. In Austin specifically, the club Highclass Austin works to help less fortunate children through hosting an annual holiday toy drive for orphans in Mexico.

1963 Chevy Impala, red. Image from Bullock Museum for Review of Carros y Cultura — *Courtesy of the Bullock Texas State History Museum.*
*1963 Chevy Impala courtesy Raul Rodriguez Jr., Round Rock*

One of the earliest lowriding car clubs in Texas was founded in the 1970s by Nick Hernandez, a legendary lowrider from Odessa, Texas. The club, Taste of Latin, had 14 chapters across the state at its peak of popularity, and aside from showcasing the various creations of the lowriders, acted as a vocal outlet for Mexican American civil rights. Nick Hernandez is also the father of America’s longest running lowrider car show, the Tejano Super Show, which began in 1972. One of Hernandez’s personal cars was a 1964 Impala called the “Odessa Masterpiece,” which helped grow the Taste of Latin’s reputation for customized paint schemes. The iconic piece, the hood mural, was featured in Lowrider Magazine in 1980, and recognized in Texas Monthly as Best Lowrider in 1985. The mural features a dual-paned painting centered around two blue fairies set in a grassy waterscape, and colorful striped detailing framing the hood.

Since family is a strong tenet of lowrider culture, most car club gatherings take place on Sunday afternoons, with activities such as picnics, car shows, and cruises. Familial bonds are strengthened through time spent together, but also teaching the art of customization to the next generation. A lowrider child’s first introduction to the culture is often a Taylor Tot stroller, vintage strollers with custom paint jobs, or a custom pedal car, both displayed alongside the full-size cars in the exhibit to emphasize the intergenerational connections of lowriding. Lowriding, the exhibition tells us, is something that runs in the family, and parents who participate in the culture encourage their children to find their own ways of creative expression by teaching them lowriding techniques. A phenomenon that began as a way for children to engage with the culture, working on bikes allows parents to pass lowriding values and skills to their children, and inspires them to build their own personal connections to the culture and the craft.

Pink interior of car. Heart shaped wheel is made out of chains. Image from Bullock Museum for Review of Carros y Cultura — *Courtesy of the Bullock Texas State History Museum.*
*1984 Chevy Monte Carlo “La Mera Mera” courtesy Mercedes Mata, Dallas*

The cars themselves are the true marvel of the exhibition. Lowrider cars are extraordinary vehicles for personal expression, and the two Chevrolet Monte Carlos on display are of the most eye-catching of the group. One, “La Mera Mera,” is a dazzling pink 1984 Monte Carlo designed by third-generation Dallas lowrider, Mercedes Mata. This car features a custom pink interior, molding, exterior, and even a heart-shaped chain steering wheel. The hood’s mural depicts the creator, Mercedes, with the backdrop of her hometown’s skyline, honoring its importance to her and her family. Mercedes cemented her place in the Dallas community as the youngest woman to build her own lowrider, and she continues to advocate for other female lowriders as well as for mental health through her social media presence.

The “Blue Monte” is one of the most impressive parts of the exhibit, boasting more than thirty years of different major paint jobs and customization, and numerous awards and accolades from Lowrider Magazine. The intense dedication and work put into this car is obvious from the second one lays eyes on the Monte Carlo car, and it is difficult to put into words how stunning the artwork is. Blue Monte’s base is a sparkling royal blue paint topped with a rainbow of stripes and geometric line work that make this car truly unique. The mysticism does not end with the paint; the entire interior of the convertible is covered with a vibrant golden crushed velvet, which is also found in the trunk surrounding the hydraulic motor. Gold and reflective details are found all around the car, from the mirrored doors and center console, to the rims and engraved bumpers. And resting on top of the rear center console is a miniature version of the Blue Monte—a testament to the car’s place in lowrider pop culture.

Blue Monte’s owner and designer, Chuy Martinez, is as much an icon to the lowrider community as the car itself. He has been an active member of Laredo’s lowrider community since he was 15 years old. Quickly becoming a prominent member of one of the oldest Texas lowrider clubs, Brown Impressions, Martinez has held the position of club president since 1982. When Martinez became the owner of the car that would become the infamous “Blue Monte,” he knew he wanted to create something that was completely unique to himself, and in 1990 he began this process by turning the car into a convertible. This iconic duo of car and designer has earned numerous show awards at car shows, including Best Full Custom, Best Metal Engraving, and even Best Lowrider of All.

Picture of Blue Monte car. Image from Bullock Museum for Review of Carros y Cultura — Courtesy of the Bullock Texas State History Museum
1975 Chevy Monte Carlo courtesy Chuy Martinez, Laredo

The cars and bikes not only represent a personal creative output, but reveal deep ties to Texan and Mexican culture through artistic expression. Under a front spotlight at one of the exhibit’s entrances rests the “Still Texas,” a 12-inch 1972 Schwinn Fastback bike designed with the familiar orange and white color scheme of the Texas favorite, Whataburger. The bike’s owner and designer, Danny Pechal, wanted to create the piece as an homage that felt purely Texan when competing around the country. Sporting an eye-catching neon orange, the small but intricate bike holds a scavenger hunt’s worth of Whataburger iconography, from the “24-Hours” sign posted on the front wheel, to the signature “W” logo emblazoned on the sides, wheels, and handlebars of the bike.

Another element of cultural representation comes through in Austin lowrider John Colunga’s 1967 Ford LTD, which displays a mixture of high-quality materials and refined technique to create two massive painted murals. Colunga used a polyurethane paint that is also used on airplanes, buses, and trains, creating murals that are not only detailed works of art, but also stand the test of time and weather. The murals, one a mélange of sky and color resembling the northern lights with a center image of the Virgin of Guadalupe, a highly significant figure in Mexican Catholic culture, is accompanied by vines of roses that encompass the frame of the car. With a green body, white roof, and red painted details, the car and its colors represent a tribute to Mexico and its culture, cemented by the Mexican flag displayed proudly in the open trunk.

John Colunga with 1967 Ford LTD. Image from Bullock Museum for Review of Carros y Cultura — *Courtesy of the Bullock Texas State History Museu*m. *John Colunga with 1967 Ford LTD.*

In gazing at the intricate creations of the lowrider designers, it’s important to also recognize the small details that come together to form these pieces of art. The exhibit displays the parts of what makes a custom lowrider special in both up-close models you can touch and an interactive digital game that gives the viewer a deeper glimpse into how much work goes into creating a fully customized lowrider car. Parts of the display include a chain-link steering wheel, switches for a hydraulic system, an engraved chrome plaque, and samples of the crushed velvet and leather upholstery that is commonly found in lowriders.

From the full-size cars exhibited in the museum to the small but vitally important details of engraved chrome and fabric, every aspect of creating a lowrider is displayed for visitors to enjoy. Even more impressive than the cars themselves are the stories, of communities coming together for the less fortunate, of families finding a collective bond through multiple generations, and of individuals finding their passions and holding pride in their unique works of art. Nowhere else will one see such strong community ties, a rich cultural history, and absolutely dazzling cars all in one place. This particular collection tells the story of lowriding beautifully, and is not one to be missed.

The exhibition, which ran at the museum from May 11, 2024, to September 2, 2024, is sadly no longer on display but it remains a significant achievement.

Review of We the King: Creating Royal Legislation in the Sixteenth-century Spanish New World by Adrian Masters (Cambridge University Press, 2023)

In late 1546, auditor-president Pedro de la Gasca landed in the New World charged with retaking the entire continent for the crown, from Nicaragua to Chile. After having beheaded the viceroy, Gonzalo Pizarro had declared himself ruler of larger Peru with a fleet controlling the South Sea, from Callao to Panama. Curiously, La Gasca came with no armies, just a pile of blank decrees signed by Charles V. In one year, however, La Gasca quickly took over Pizarro’s fleet and routed Gonzalo into the Peruvian heartland. He was able to accomplish this because of the power of royal decrees and edicts granting rewards to any potential turncoat. La Gasca quickly dispatched the Pizarros, reorganized Peru, and promptly went back to become bishop of Palencia in 1550.

This largely bloodless, swift conquest of conquistadors by paperwork seems not to have caught the attention of historians of the sixteenth-century Spanish Indies, who were accustomed to narrating gory blood baths in Tenochtitlan. How did a faraway monarch manage to control a sprawling empire teeming with violent and ruthless factions, including, not only raiding conquistador-pirates but also thousands of theocratic friars and rebellious indigenous lords, all willing and able to seize control. This is the subject of Adrian Master’s extraordinary We, the King which was published by Cambridge University Press in 2023.

Anyone superficially familiar with the history of conquest and colonialism in the Americas knows two things: First, Spain imposed a ruthless autocratic regime via top-down religious bureaucracies that enforced religious compliance and cultural uniformity. Second, Anglo America was a decentralized society of settlers with loose crown oversight until the eighteenth century, when overreach triggered revolution. This is not a cartoon version of history but rather our current historiographical canon. It is the argument at the heart of John Elliott’s monumental Empires of the Atlantic (2006). The Anglo-American bottom-up and Spanish American top-down dichotomy also structures the writings of the entire Cambridge School, from J.G.A Pocock to Quentin Skinner to David Armitage. Clerical Dominican and Jesuit theology allegedly organized top-down state formation in the south whereas bottom-up markets and indirect providence did it in the north.

Drawing of Guaman Poma — *GKS 2232 4º: Guaman Poma, “Nueva corónica y buen gobierno” (1615), Det Kongelige Bibliotek, Copenhagen*

In a bold, deeply researched book drawing on no less than twenty-six archives, Masters shatters this paradigm. The liberal and decolonial obsession with top-down Spanish autocracy has overlooked that the discourse of tyranny, underlying all neo scholastic theories of regicide, implied vast bottom-up forms of communication between vassals and monarchs. To claim legitimacy, that is not to be a tyrant, the crown encouraged all sorts of bottom-up paperwork communication via petitioning, audits, and denunciation (which was the point of the Inquisition). In the Spanish Indies, the state was created from the bottom up every bit as much as it was in Anglo America.

Masters’ subject is the hundreds of thousands of royal decrees created in the sixteenth century, but he does not discuss the millions of viceroyal edicts, mandamientos. Scholars have argued that the crown regulated everything from the length of trousers of Purepecha commoners to the number of horses of Nahua lords. We have been told that the crown rounded up natives into towns and issued top-down decrees on how to sleep on mattresses. The topic of race is especially dear to this scholarship. The crown decreed out of thin air prefigured categories of human difference. From the top-down, it engineered republics of Indians, Spaniards, Mestizos, and some forty Casta out of the Reconquista experience with purity of blood statutes.

Masters has no patience with any of this. Most decrees, he shows with brilliant empirical skill, came from bottom-up petitioning from millions of vassals, including both enslaved people and women. Even the very language of the decrees was often taken verbatim from bottom-up petitioning. The function of the Council of Indies was primarily to handle bottom-up paperwork on unsolicited reform and legislation. To be sure, this was no democracy where commoners had unmediated access to the Council and paperwork, but neither, it should be said, is ours. Be that as it may, Masters shows that systems of legislating petitioning were largely responsible for the creation of most racial categories in the Indies. Indigenous factionalism prompted petitions to draw casta (caste) and mestizo distinctions. Every bit as much as friars, bishops, and viceroys, native commoners participated in the creation of colonial categories of human difference.

Map of Teozacoalco — Mapa de Teozacoalco (1580) was part of a set of documents made in response to inquiries from the Spanish King Philip II. Source: Relación de Teozacoalco y Amoltepec, Relaciones Geográficas of Mexico and Guatemala Collection, Benson Latin American Collection at the University of Texas, Austin.

This is not a minor contribution. The scholarship on colonial Latin America is plagued by teleological narratives. As with any bad script, we all know how the movie ends. Categories, institutions, allegedly all came down prefigured from Spain. Masters shows throughout that the labor of making of the law not only took up a lot of actants (scribes, paper, ink, tlacuilos, ships, rowers, servants, porters, muleteers, magistrates, rivers, oceans, candles, seals, chasquis) but also rendered the system unpredictable. It took individual and communal agency to succeed. It also involved, stubbornness, networking, resilience, corruption, lying, luck.

Along with the top-down authoritarian shibboleths, the literature on the Spanish Empire is packed full of picaros, the much-needed Macondo picaresque in our much-loved liberal and decolonial narratives. Masters is aware that the Indies was not Spain and that petitioning in the Indies changed over time. Corruption and deception were the twin bête-noir of legislation (decrees, edicts, ordinances).

Masters shows that over the entire century the crown struggled to stem corruption and misinformation from undermining its own legitimacy before vassals. In fact, this was the main function of Council magistrates. In a series of riveting chapters, Masters shows how various council audits transformed Indies systems of communication, relegating elite women from legislative decisions, for the wives and daughters of magistrates were the main conduits used by petitioners to communicate and sway the will of magistrates. Masters also shows that the battle to control misinformation led to the creation of a far less passive crown toward the end of the century, capable through its own archives of finally assessing the credibility of Indies testimonies accurately. For every picaro there was an archive.

This book is a tour de force that ought to transform our understanding of Latin American colonial state formation. We, the King: Creating Royal Legislation in the Sixteenth-Century Spanish New World is a brilliant study that I recommend to all.

Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra is the Alice Drysdale Sheffield Professor of History at the University of Texas.

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.

Participatory Crisis Archiving: The Japan Disasters Digital Archive

On 29 February 2024, Dr Nick Kapur from Rutgers delivered an important and fascinating talk at the Institute for Historical Studies. The talk was entitled “Participatory Crisis Archiving: The Japan Disasters Digital Archive”.

The origins of The Japan Disasters Digital Archive lie in the catastrophic events of March 2011. On the afternoon of 11 March 2011, a 9.0 earthquake struck the Pacific floor just eighty miles to the east of Sendai, Japan. This earthquake caused a tsunami that raced towards the Japanese shore at 500 miles per hour, generating waves as high as 12 feet in Hawaii. In Japan, a 33-foot wave crashed into coastal cities, damaging everything in its path and flooding up to six miles inland. These disasters caused massive death and devastation, killing almost 20,000 people. The devastation was worst on the east coast of Honshu, the main island of Japan.^[1]

Source: Japan Disaster Digital Archive

In a country heavily dependent on nuclear power, a powerful earthquake and tsunami can mean even greater disaster. As a result of the strong tremors and massive tsunami, the nuclear power plant at Fukushima Daiichi experienced partial meltdowns and released large amounts of radiation into the surrounding environments. People already impacted by the previous environmental phenomena were forced out of their homes due to radioactivity.^[2]

Each of these three disasters by themselves would have resulted in chaos and confusion. The fact that they occurred almost simultaneously, meant that most normal recovery procedures were ineffective. With the large amount of people displaced by the damage to their homes and towns, or forced out because of the Fukushima Daiichi meltdown, citizens turned to both the government and social media for information. Twitter (now X) took off as a quick way to find and connect with family and friends in devastated areas, both for those in Japan and outside of it. Additionally, government websites gave continually-updated information on search and rescue efforts and the radiation levels in Fukushima prefecture. Such digital tools presented the best and fastest way to communicate and share information in the aftermath of March 11^th.

*Radiation hotspot in Kashiwa. Source: Wikipedia Commons*

The amount of information and data created immediately after these events, and in the years afterwards, was enormous. Hundreds of thousands of citizens searched for family and friends. Equally large numbers took photos and videos of the events and their aftermath. News stations ran twenty-four-hour coverage, and the government was continually updating its websites.

As one group of researchers at Harvard’s Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies sat and watched these events unfold across the globe, they felt the need to do something. This led to the idea of archiving the events in real time. It was a significant departure from past practices. When we think of an archive, we often think of a building that houses old papers, photographs, or books that were made centuries ago. What Dr. Nick Kapur, then a post-doctoral fellow in the department, and the wider team came up with was a brand-new way to archive digital data as it was created.

Today, such an archive is no longer an exception. Other disaster, or “crisis” archives exist, such as the archive for the Covid-19 pandemic (https://archive-it.org/collections/4887) and the Ukraine War (https://ukrainewararchive.org/eng/). The Society of American Archivists even has a Tragedy Response Initiate Task Force and offers a “resource kit” for “Documenting in Times of Crisis.”^[3] These archives use documents that are “born-digital,” or that were digitally created and so do not have to be digitized to be added to the archives. However, at the time, Kapur and his colleagues were at the forefront of this style of archive and one of the first groups to attempt such a documentation project.

With the support of the Reischauer Institute at Harvard and the involvement of influential Japan historian Andrew Gordon, Dr Kapur and the wider team came up with The Japan Disasters Digital Archive. Kapur became the manager of the project. They immediately began crucial discussions over how to document an event that was still unfolding. One key question was the goals of the archive itself. They first asked, “who is this archive for?” Their answer shaped how they developed their goals of research, teaching, and commemoration. They wanted to index, preserve, and make widely accessible digital records of the triple disasters in Japan in March 2011 for research. They also wanted to design an integrated platform that would be useful to students and teachers alike in learning and teaching about the 3/11 disasters, historical documents, digital methods, and crisis archiving.Finally, they wanted the archive to serve as a space of shared memory for those most affected by the disasters and most concerned about their consequences, allowing them to create their own narratives with the sources.

The center of Namie is a ghost town, Namie, Fukushima Pref., Japan. — *The center of Namie is a ghost town, Namie, Fukushima Pref., Japan 12 April, 2011. Source: Wikipedia Commons*

Based on these goals, the wider team developed some guiding principles that informed how they created and worked within their newly created archive. They wanted it to be open access and open source. It was to be digital and distributed, so that there would be redundancy and a “safety-net” for the archive to last into the future. They also wanted it to be participatory and embrace multiple narratives, understanding that victims experienced the disasters in different ways, and thus, there shouldn’t be a single way of narrating the events.

Digital-born archives come with significant advantages. The fact that most of the documents were digital made adding them and other types of sources to the Japan Disasters archive easier, as there was no scanning process. It was also a much faster way to add sources to the archive, so that the team was able to incorporate documents that might have otherwise disappeared, such as tweets or continually updating websites. Digital data also meant that the information was quickly able to work with data visualization applications and metadata analysis functions. Unlike physical archives, digital archives like The Japan Disasters allow for easier reorganization if new systems emerge or ways of cataloging change.

*Conceptual Diagram of the Japan Disasters Digital Archive Project*.
*Source: Japan Disasters Digital Archive*

One of the biggest advantages to a project like this lies in the ready participation of the public. Digital archives close gaps between archivists, archive users, and event participants and victims. They allow for a back-and-forth engagement between producers and consumers of knowledge. The public can add sources and explore the archive in ways that allow them to develop their own stories and understanding of what happened, instead of having a single narrative imposed by archivists or historians. The website allows for each visitor to create their own “collection” of sources from the archive, in effect creating their own curated exhibit based on their own interests or questions. It also allows users to upload their own testimonials, photos, and videos, which adds to the numerous perspectives available within the archive already.

However, with such advantages comes challenges. A significant challenge was the overwhelming amount of data produced during the events. How do you make sure you don’t miss anything? How do you gather it quickly while even more information is being produced, especially the more ephemeral sources that get overwritten or disappear faster than the rest? One solution was adopting an open-source approach, which allows users to contribute sources that are not already in the archive. Also, much like traditional archives, digital archives also face storage issues. While more traditional archives need the physical space for books, boxes, and files, digital archives need space either in the “cloud” or on physical servers. Both digital spaces not only cost money, but also bring up questions of the durability and accessibility over time: floppy disks were seen as an indispensable storage technology until the CD and now cloud storage (good luck finding a computer today that can read a floppy disk). How can digital archives and archivists make sure that the sources are accessible over the long run? The same issues arise when talking about the software used for interfacing with the sources – will the software used today still work in ten, twenty, or thirty years?

A map analyzing tweet data in the JDA by the group from the Digital Methods Summer School in 2014. — *Mapping the JDArchive: Fukushima, Twitter and the Politics of Disaster Communications by Gerlitz, Grotto, Jansen, Madlberger, Moats,* *Papazu, Petkova, Segault, Skarpelis, Tromble, van der Vlist, and Zwemmer*. Source: *Japan Disasters Digital Archive*

The Japan Disasters archive is not alone in facing these questions. Every digital library, archive, and platform faces the questions of future technological changes. While there is no single solution, Kapur hopes that the foundations put in place will help to steer the archive in the right direction down the line.

One final problem that was unique to Japan was the issue of copyright and image rights. Japan has restrictive copyright laws, and their image rights require the personal approval of every individual shown in an image or video – something that could be impossible during times of crisis and chaos. While the United States has far less restrictive laws on some of these topics, especially image rights, The Japan Disasters archive is committed to respecting the wishes of its Japanese partner institutions and, by extension, Japanese citizens. Their commitment seems to have paid off. Over the thirteen years, the archive has served as a lesson in successful partnerships, as no content partners, such as major Japanese media channels, have left the archive and almost all the data is still available.

Today, The Japan Disasters Digital Archive includes over 735 collections curated from over 1.5 million items in both English and Japanese. While Dr. Kapur no longer actively manages the archival team, he is still active on the site. The amount of data the archive collected, and continues to collect, will be invaluable for future researchers and historians when they look back on the three overlapping disasters of 3/11.

[1] Kenneth Pletcher and John P. Rafferty, “Japan earthquake and tsunami of 2011,” Britannica, viewed 4 March 2024: https://www.britannica.com/event/Japan-earthquake-and-tsunami-of-2011.

[2] Pletcher and Rafferty, “Japan earthquake and tsunami of 2011.”

[3] See https://www2.archivists.org/groups/tragedy-response-initiative-task-force for information on the Task Force and https://www2.archivists.org/advocacy/documenting-in-times-of-crisis-a-resource-kit for the Resource Kit.

Abolitionist and Civil War Chronicler: The Unique Perspective of the Thomas Jackson Letters

Thomas Jackson’s story has been largely untold, but the record he left behind demands historical analysis. His erudite letters have much to contribute to our understanding of the abolitionist movement, the evolution of attitudes to race, and everyday experiences of the U.S. Civil War. Jackson’s status as a British immigrant also provides us with an added analytical layer in which to view American abolition, race, and the Civil War in a transnational context.[1] In this article, I introduce the Thomas Jackson Collection and what we can learn from it.

Following in his father’s footsteps, Thomas Jackson, whose life came to be absorbed by the spirited abolitionist movement of his day, became a successful rope-making trader not long after his relocation to America, circa 1829. His father, John Jackson, who “suffered persecution of a year’s imprisonment and three times in the pillory for what he spoke and published in the cause of the revolted colonies,” served as a consistent moral compass for his son.

Born into England’s working class, Thomas Jackson admired the newly christened American Republic.[2] Although he knew, by his own account, next to nothing about slavery in America before he emigrated there, Jackson found his spiritual calling in political activism—abolitionism, in particular.

Jackson’s path to American politics was far from linear. Born on December 7 1805, Thomas grew up in the rural town of Ilkeston, roughly fifty miles northeast of Birmingham. There he was raised, along with six siblings, by working-class parents and likely received no more than a basic education. Despite his modest upbringing, by the time he passed away in Reading, Pennsylvania in 1878, he came to be known more for his impassioned abolitionist work than for the trade he was born into.

Jackson empathized with the anti-slavery cause after witnessing the stunning inhumanity of an American slave market. Because of this, he supported the Union when the war broke out, hoping that the terrible violence would at least serve a worthy purpose: bringing an end to slavery. In October 1862, with the war grinding on perhaps longer than anticipated, Thomas wrote that “the traitors [i.e. the confederate states] have now [received] fair warning; that if they do not lay down their arms by Jan. 1. 1863. slavery will be abolished in all rebellious states and districts…I most devoutly pray that they may continue obstinate…That is now the only hope for freedom every were [sic] in the United States.”[3]

Image of the original Thomas Jackson letter to the editor. All scans are reproduced with permission from the owner. — *Images of the original letter to the editor. All scans are reproduced with permission from the owner.*

Image of the original Thomas Jackson letter letter to the editor. All scans are reproduced with permission from the owner.

Judging by his letters alone, it’s clear that Thomas Jackson embraced abolitionism as a core part of his identity. By extension, he considered himself a purist when it came to honoring the “free principles and republican government” for which the United States ostensibly stood.[4]

Because values like individual liberty and freedom of expression transcended national borders, it mattered little to him that he was born in England and, therefore, lived in the United States as an immigrant.

The collection

These strongly-held ideals shine through in almost every letter and newspaper editorial that make up the bulk of the Thomas Jackson Collection. His reports on slavery and the Civil War have been painstakingly transcribed, organized, and curated to offer historians a rare glimpse into a unique abolitionist who was entangled in both American and British politics. While the original letters are now safely housed in the Library of Congress’ Manuscript Division, their digitized copies are fully accessible online thanks to the efforts made by Jackson’s descendant, John Paling, and his team, to organize and digitize the collection.[5]

The Civil War and the nineteenth-century abolitionist movement have of course been studied in depth. Many of these studies take a top-down perspective. Thomas Jackson’s collection of letters provides a valuable and much-needed grassroots perspective. It is rare to find source material written from Jackson’s vantage point, that is letters penned by someone from a working-class background who also understood the value of recording and commenting on the magnitude of his historical moment: America’s mid-nineteenth-century political crisis.

Jackson arrived in the United States in 1829. Still in his twenties, he held an idealized view of the country that would soon be complicated by his encounter with the brutalities of slavery and violent division. Like other immigrants, he primarily sought fresh opportunities that had been closed off to him in his home country. In this case, his father’s political imprisonment drove the family to bankruptcy.[6] As such, Thomas and his brother Edward suffered from meager resources once setting foot on the American continent. Despite the initial challenges, he and his brother managed to secure their footing in Reading, Pennsylvania, by using the local Schuylkill Canal to establish a rope-making business.

“…we are doing a large business. Generally employ about 20 men and eight boys…Annexed is an engraving of our wheel houses, Hackle lofts, and engine house & a part of the walk & the office. We have a very nice place here now and fast improving.”[7]

Lithography of two enslaved people that reads: Am I not a man and a brother? Am I not a woman and a sister? — *From the cover of the 1866 annual report of the Edinburgh Ladies Emancipation Society. Source: Wikimedia Commons*

Despite facing near penury, Thomas Jackson’s entrepreneurial spirit eventually allowed him to rise to a prosperous position, giving him resources very different from those he was born to. His relative financial success enabled him to become a kind of working-class autodidact. His lucid letters, which are notable for the quality of the prose and the artistic flourish of his penmanship, suggest a level of learning that was mainly confined to the privileged elite of the day.

Although he became a successful businessman in America, the country failed to fully live up to his expectations. The young republic, a self-proclaimed land of opportunity and equality, was also home to what he considered a blight on the American experience: the continuation of slavery.

In a letter to his cousin, Caleb Slater, back in England, which was subsequently published in a local newspaper, Jackson claimed to have first witnessed a slave market in 1833. Given the “glowing ideas of free America” his father had instilled in him as a boy, he “never dreamed that such a thing was possible as liberty and slavery existing together under a free government, and just laws.” He was adamant: I “Never thought such a thing could be; do not now think it can be; know now it cannot be.”[8]

Stereograph showing a man with a rifle sitting outside a commercial building used as a slave market, bearing a sign "Auction & Negro Sales" on Whitehall Street. — *The Slave Market. Atlanta, Georgia. Source: Library of Congress*

From this introduction, Thomas went on to describe the slave auction scene underway in Richmond, Virginia, where a “most interesting young woman…as white as [his] own English wife” stood at the auction block before a “queer-looking crowd [of] dirty mouthed, rum-drinking tobacco chewers…liable to become the property, and entirely subject to the power and the lust of the grossest brute among them, if he bid high enough!”[9]

Jackson was enraged by the harsh realities of a slave republic. He used his unique perspective to approach the abolitionist movement with a distinct strategy. He leveraged his connections in England to provide British citizens firsthand reports of slavery in America, as he did with the letter above. In doing so, he hoped his visceral and emotional first-person stories about slavery’s horrors would influence British public opinion. Eventually, he hoped the British government would be discouraged from supporting the American cotton trade, which was intertwined with slavery. When the Civil War came, he doubled down on these efforts, as he became aware that Britain’s “freedom-hating” aristocracy, with the government’s tacit support, secretly aided the “villainous rebels” as a means of keeping the cotton industry alive.[10]

Examining Jackson’s rhetoric and the political positions they reveal enable us to answer questions about the nature of nineteenth-century abolitionism. Were the aims of British abolitionists living in the United States more radical than those of their compatriots living back in England?[11] If so, were the political differences more a matter of class or of vantage point? In other words, did it require witnessing slavery firsthand for an abolitionist to draw a harder line on the issue, or were other factors, such as social standing, more important in delineating the moderates from the radicals?

*Abraham Lincoln and his Emancipation Proclamation / The Strobridge Lith. Co., Cincinnati. Source: Library of Congress*

If we were to view Jackson’s political discourse alongside the writings of the British metropole’s largely elite circle of abolitionists, it’s easy to discern a more fiery, visceral retelling of slavery’s horrors—and of the urgent need to abolish it immediately and by any means necessary.[12] Early in the war, before the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation, Jackson witnessed the country “in all directions…being desolated by fire and sword and shell” and declared that “slavery must perish, with all its abettors.”[13] Perhaps traveling to Harrisburg and seeing firsthand the rebels and Union soldiers make preparations for further carnage enabled him to imagine not a gradual but rather an immediate—and, if necessary, violent—end to the institution of slavery, a “doom it so richly deserves.”[14]

Thomas Jackson’s letters reveal an unwavering commitment to abolition; they also show striking ways in which race underpinned life both in the US and in Britain. There is little doubt as to the value of this source material for scholars studying race, particularly in early America, for Jackson’s writings betray his struggles to come to terms with race and racism in his adopted country.

As an abolitionist, Jackson clearly intended to convince readers of the fundamental humanity of Black slaves and the need to guarantee equality to vulnerable non-white groups.[15] But Jackson was also a product of his time and he displayed attitudes rooted in this.

Depiction of the Anti-Slavery Meeting on the Boston Common held in 1851. People are gathered under a tree, there is text on the meeting on the lower end of the picture. — *Anti-Slavery Meeting on the [Boston] Common. Source: New York Public Library*

As shown in his account of the slave market above, Jackson obsessed over the surprising “whiteness” of many enslaved people he encountered. He was scandalized to see men and women with complexions similar to his own being held in bondage. Returning to his account of the slave market, we find a long digression into the racial characteristics of both the slaves and their would-be owners:

I suppose I saw 15 or 20 sold, of all shades of colour [sic.] from black to three-quarters white. Then they brought out a good-looking, well-dressed, modest, and most interesting young woman, about 23 or 24 years old, and, to all appearance to me, as white as my own English wife. She had a little daughter about three years old by her side, and a beautiful babe of about a year old in her arms, both, for all I could see, as white as my own children at home…the offspring of slave mothers have been whitening, until the very small taint of negro blood is not perceivable in many.[16]

Jackson went on to describe the men placing bids as “dirty-mouthed” and “seemingly not half as white as their victims,” preparing to subject an example of “feminine loveliness” to their “power and [their] lust.”[17]

To him, the white complexion of many of these Black slaves seemed to underline the patent absurdity and cruelty of slavery, especially when placed against the “brute” status of the southern whites he encountered.

There’s little doubt, too, that Jackson knew evoking whiteness would be effective in garnering sympathy from white readers. In a later letter describing the lecture tours organized by abolitionists, in which runaway slaves featured prominently, he doubled down on this rhetoric. Many of the former slaves, he writes, were “so white that no one would ever suspect that they had a drop of African blood in their veins.”[18] In this way, whiteness became a term loaded with value for Jackson even as he denounced the racism that underpinned slavery.

The work of Mary Niall Mitchell and Martha Cutter, among others, points out that American abolitionists readily employed the language of whiteness as a tool to sway public opinion on the issue.[19] Although he was born in Britain, Thomas Jackson, used a similar rhetorical strategy. He may have arrived at this independently or adopted it from wider writings.

It is worth considering the implications behind an English immigrant’s echoing of American attitudes about race. Given that Jackson largely aimed his writing to English readers, his apparent confidence that an English readership would be equally moved by American racial rhetoric is significant. Indeed, this challenges assumptions about the uniqueness of American racial thought.

None of this is to say that Thomas Jackson ignored enslaved people who could not “pass” for whites. Nor did he mean to suggest that slaves with darker skins were somehow less deserving of sympathy or equality. Further down in his letter concerning former slaves, he mentions he employed darker-skinned freedmen, one of whom was a “smart fellow,” another a “deep thinker,” and another who demonstrated “intellect…of a high order.”[20] Yet when quoting them directly, he transformed his interlocutors into characters out of a minstrel show, capturing their voices with terms like “day” instead of “they” and “den” instead of “then.”[21] In short, his commitment to abolitionism was sometimes contradicted by his racialized language.

Most people don’t know Thomas Jackson but he left behind a remarkable historical record. This provides an opportunity for further reflection on a critical moment in the nation’s history. As such, this collection deserves a broad readership.

[1] For representative scholarship, see Mason, Matthew. “The Battle of the Slaveholding Liberators: Great Britain, the United States, and Slavery in the Early Nineteenth Century.” The William and Mary Quarterly 59, no. 3 (2002): 665–96. https://doi.org/10.2307/3491468.

[2] “Article_1859-03-01 – Thomas Jackson Letters.” 2023. Thomas Jackson Letters. July 28, 2023. https://thomasjacksonletters.com/articles/article_1859-03-01/.

[3] “TJ_Letter_1862-08-12 – Thomas Jackson Letters.” 2023. Thomas Jackson Letters. August 25, 2023. https://thomasjacksonletters.com/letters/letter_1862-08-12/.

[4] “Article_1844-10-26 – Thomas Jackson Letters.” 2023. Thomas Jackson Letters. July 28, 2023. https://thomasjacksonletters.com/articles/article_1844-10-26/.

[6] “Article_1825-12-24 Bankruptcy – Thomas Jackson Letters.” 2023. Thomas Jackson Letters. March 25, 2023. https://thomasjacksonletters.com/other-documents/np_1825-12-24-from-london-gazette/.

[7] Thomas Jackson in letter to cousin Caleb Slater, June 3, 1856. “TJ_Letter_1856-06-03 – Thomas Jackson Letters.” 2023. Thomas Jackson Letters. March 22, 2023. https://thomasjacksonletters.com/letters/letter_1856-06-03/.

[8] “A Native of Ilkeston in an American Slave Market.” Thomas Jackson Letters. August 25, 2023. https://thomasjacksonletters.com/letters/letter_1862-08-12/. Published in Eastwood, England area newspaper September 11, 1862.

[9] Ibid.

[10] “TJ_Letter_1864-09-01 – Thomas Jackson Letters.” 2023. Thomas Jackson Letters. March 22, 2023. https://thomasjacksonletters.com/letters/letter_1864-09-00/.

[11] For British abolitionism, see Huzzey, Richard. “The Slave Trade and Victorian ‘Humanity.’” Victorian Review 40, no. 1 (2014): 43–47. http://www.jstor.org/stable/24497035.

[12] For comparative analysis of British and American abolitionism, see Mason, Matthew. “The Battle of the Slaveholding Liberators: Great Britain, the United States, and Slavery in the Early Nineteenth Century.” The William and Mary Quarterly 59, no. 3 (2002): 665–96. https://doi.org/10.2307/3491468, and Mason, Matthew. “Keeping up Appearances: The International Politics of Slave Trade Abolition in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World.” The William and Mary Quarterly 66, no. 4 (2009): 809–32. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40467542.

[13] “———.” 2023d. Thomas Jackson Letters. August 25, 2023. https://thomasjacksonletters.com/letters/letter_1862-08-12/.

[14]“TJ_Letter_1863-08-20 – Thomas Jackson Letters.” 2023. Thomas Jackson Letters. March 22, 2023. https://thomasjacksonletters.com/letters/letter_1863-08-20/. In addition to political commentary, this letter provides detailed description of Confederate movements at this time which would also prove useful to military historians of the Civil War.

[15] Since Thomas Jackson expressed disapproval of universal voting rights, we should interpret his understanding of equality to be of a limited nature, i.e., the guarantee of “natural rights” for all. For his criticisms on full democracy, see for instance: “TJ_Letter_1862-10-12 – Thomas Jackson Letters.” 2023. Thomas Jackson Letters. March 22, 2023. https://thomasjacksonletters.com/letters/letter_1862-10-12/.

[16] “———.” 2023e. Thomas Jackson Letters. August 25, 2023. https://thomasjacksonletters.com/letters/letter_1862-08-12/.

[17] Ibid.

[18] “TJ_Letter_1864-04-18 – Thomas Jackson Letters.” 2024. Thomas Jackson Letters. March 27, 2024. https://thomasjacksonletters.com/letters/letter_1864-04-18/.

[19] Cutter, Martha J. “‘As White as Most White Women’: Racial Passing in Advertisements for Runaway Slaves and the Origins of a Multivalent Term.” American Studies 54, no. 4 (2016): 73–97. http://www.jstor.org/stable/44982355. Mitchell, Mary Niall. “‘Rosebloom and Pure White,’ or so It Seemed.” American Quarterly 54, no. 3 (2002): 369–410. http://www.jstor.org/stable/30042226.

[20] “———.” 2024b. Thomas Jackson Letters. March 27, 2024. https://thomasjacksonletters.com/letters/letter_1864-04-18/.

[21] Ibid.

Review of American while Black: African Americans, Immigration, and the Limits of Citizenship (2019) by Niambi Michele Carter

Immigration policy and regulation have been at the forefront of the contentious 2024 presidential election campaign. While discourse regarding public attitudes towards immigrants has traditionally centered the opinions of US-born-white populations, political scientist Niambi Michele Carter’s book, American While Black: African Americans, Immigration, and the Limits of Citizenship, moves the focus away from that trend by centering her study on the political opinions of African Americans themselves.

In six carefully researched chapters, Carter examines African American political attitudes regarding immigration and how it impacts their status in the United States. The study leans on quantitative and qualitative methodology (semi-structured interviews and surveys) and focuses on the African American residents of Durham, North Carolina. Carter argues that African Americans remain ambivalent towards immigration because of the way the immigration policy has been utilized to deter Black progress in the United States. Carter theorizes this ambivalence as conflicted nativism, which she defines as “a sensibility that immigration will potentially harm black progress, but immigration should not be restricted, because white supremacy, not immigration, is what ultimately harms black social mobility.”1 Therefore, African Americans report not being against immigration but also not necessarily for it, only because of how immigration has been used to marginalize their status further to maintain white supremacy.2

Demonstrators marching in the street holding signs during the March on Washington, 1963. — Demonstrators marching in the street holding signs during the March on Washington, 1963
Source: Library of Congress

Carter presents readers with a historical analysis of how immigration has hindered Black mobility in the United States. She begins her discussion by focusing on how European immigrants, particularly Irish immigrants, engaged in anti-Black tactics to secure their place in the United States.3 This history demonstrates how the attainment of American citizenship and belonging, vis-a-vis whiteness, was inextricably linked to Black exclusion. Carter presents another example of how Chinese immigrants were brought to the Mississippi Delta to work on plantations after reconstruction to prevent Black economic and political rights as well as to benefit the plantation owners economically.4 Based on these historical facts, Carter stresses that US immigration policy is deeply connected to white supremacy and Black marginalization and that the culmination of these historical events influenced African American political opinions about immigration.

Chinese grocerymen and merchants in fron to a store in the Mississippi Delta — “In the Mississippi Delta. There is an ever-increasing number of Chinese grocerymen and merchants. Leland” by Wolcott, Marion Post, 1910-1990, photographer
Source: Library of Congress

According to Carter’s interview and survey results, African American respondents generally expressed moderate views about immigration policy. Many reported that unauthorized immigrants should be able to attain citizenship after working and living in the United States for several years and that English proficiency should be required for U.S. citizenship.5 Carter’s results also reveal that although African American respondents reported feeling that the government needs to curb unauthorized immigration, they did not support efforts to outright ban immigrants.6 This distinction is important because while African Americans report not being in favor of the marginalization of other groups, they prioritize investing in the well-being of their group.

As the fields of diasporic and migration studies continue to flourish, Carter’s study illustrates how the unique experiences of US-born minority populations are just as central to both fields of study as the immigrant communities themselves. In recent years, major metropolitan areas such as New York City and Chicago have been under scrutiny from residents, including some African Americans, who reportedly feel slighted that public goods are being channeled to address the migrant influx instead of addressing long-standing quality of life issues (e.g., housing crisis). Therefore, the significance of Carter’s timely text details how modern-day immigration patterns and policies shape the public opinions of African Americans.

In general, Carter makes a compelling argument to readers that the complex political attitudes African Americans hold about immigration are reflective of their collective experience in the United States while simultaneously condemning white supremacy for their continued marginalization.

Book cover: "American While Black: African Americans, Immigration, and the Limits of Citizenship"

While Carter’s study primarily centers on historical relations between African Americans and non-Black migrant groups, it would be interesting to further explore the intricate interethnic relationship between African Americans and Black migrant groups. This exploration can potentially showcase the promotion of co-ethnic coalitions that collectively challenge white supremacy for a genuine multiracial, multiethnic democracy to be achieved.

Carter’s thought-provoking work adds a crucial new perspective to wider examinations of the politics of immigration.

1 Carter, Lies, Fairytales, and Fallacies, p. 23.

2 Ibid.

3. Carter, Lies, Fairytales, and Fallacies, p. 14

4 Carter, Citizens First?: African Americans as Conflicted Nativists, p. 40.

5 Carter, Conflicted Nativism: An Empirical View, p. 155.

6 Ibid.

From Africa to Austin: Bondy Washington

Census records are invaluable historical documents, but they are frustratingly limited, especially when you try to use them to tell the stories of formerly enslaved people. One example is Bondy Washington, a woman likely trafficked from Africa into slavery who became a long-term Austin resident.

For the past three years, I have been working with Dr. Edmund T. Gordon to create demographic maps of Austin, Texas from 1880-1950. These maps were created with massive amounts of census data—over 372,000 people’s information was transcribed from thousands of scanned pages across seven decades. When we completed this large database, I calculated some other large aggregate figures, beginning with the 1880 census.

In 1880, 49.99 percent of Austin residents were born in Texas. In today’s terms, that would mean almost half a million people, but back in the late nineteenth century, this figure was less than six thousand or 5,481, to be precise. Digging deeper into the census figures, I found an intriguing data point—one. In 1880, one person in Austin was born in Africa. Her name was Bondy Washington, and she was a Black woman.

At first, I thought that this could be a transcription error. I checked the original document and saw that the person recording her information had in fact written “Africa” as her birthplace.

Bondy Washington in the 1880 Census

I also found Bondy in the 1900 Census. Again, Bondy’s birthplace is recorded as Africa.

Bondy Washington in the 1900 Census

Bondy wasn’t in my database again after 1900, but I became fascinated with her story and decided to dig deeper. The earliest record that I can confidently match to her dates from 1870. In this census, Bondy’s birthplace is recorded as “Congo R., Africa.” She is listed as living with a man named Frank, who, in other censuses, is recorded as her husband. Several city directories from 1880 to 1900 mention Frank, all associating him with the same address—821 E 11^th Street, in a neighborhood then known as Robertson’s Hill. It is safe to assume that Bondy also lived there and that her exclusion was probably related to her gender. City directories from 1903 and 1906 associate Bondy with the same address. Frank, who was left out of these documents, possibly passed away between 1900 and 1903.

Picture of original - Bondy Washington in the 1870s Census — *Bondy Washington in the 1870 Census*

I later found Travis County death certificate for a Black woman named “Bondig Washington.” Despite the error, I believe that this is likely the same person. While people provide their own information in the census and directories, someone else must record their death certificate. In this case, the (white) county clerk filled it out and recorded Bondy’s birthplace as Texas. In her death, her place of birth was erased.

Picture of original document - Bondy Washington's Death Certificate — *Bondy Washington’s Death Certificate*

Already, Bondy has a remarkable story: a Black woman born in Africa around 1850 was brought to Austin, TX and lived in the same place for more than thirty years. But what else can we know about her? Who was she before 1870, and who was she before emancipation?

Picture of original document - Bondy Washington's sale — The final record I found that mentions Bondy is a notice of sheriff’s sale in the Statesman. The house that she had lived in, at least since 1880, was being sold for $3.77. Sheriff’s Sale of Bondy Washington’s Property

It’s impossible to say what her life was like, but Bondy was likely trafficked to the United States from Congo as a child. She had enough memory of this to claim her birthplace as Africa on records she filled out personally.

Bondy’s African origins are especially puzzling when considered in the context of the legality of the slave trade. When the United States Constitution was written, its authors agreed to allow the trafficking of African slaves into the county until at least 1808. In 1807, President Thomas Jefferson signed into law a bill banning the practice starting the next year. Because Texas was not a part of the United States, and was rather a part of Mexican territory, it was not beholden to this rule. The Mexican government banned the importation of slaves into Texas in 1824. When Texas became a Republic, its constitution also banned the practice.

Image of Canoe for Transporting Slaves, Sierra Leone — *Section of Canoe for Transporting Slaves, Sierra Leone, 1840’s.*
Source: *Slave Voyages*

So, if Bondy was brought to Texas to be enslaved, she was brought illegally. Historians have written about the illegal slave trade in Texas in the republican period and thereafter. They have documented that the illegal slave trade continued through the 1850s, sometimes on ships purporting to import camels into the United States.

American politicians generated a scheme to allow for clandestine trafficking of Africans to the United States. They petitioned the United States War Department to allow the importation of camels for use in domestic combat. This gave large cargo ships travelling to West Africa a cover story—their large holds were for military camels, not slaves. The last speculated instance of this practice was in 1856.

Illegal trafficking continued during Bondy’s early years, and it is likely that this is how she came to the United States. We can’t know, though, how she was brought there—on a camel ship or otherwise. Rare is the slave ship that records the names of its passengers. Certainly, an illegal slave ship trafficking people to the United States in the 1850s didn’t leave such traces. Even if they did, who knows the name Bondy was given by her mother? Who knows if she changed it once she landed in Texas or had it changed for her?

Ship records weren’t the only ones that excluded people’s names. The 1860 slave census records the number of people an individual enslaved, but it completely omits their names. As such, it would be impossible to identify Bondy in the slave registers. However, there is one potential lead. Someone in the Austin area with the surname “Washington” enslaved, among many others, two people of the same ages that Bondy and Frank would have been in 1860. Since some people took the surnames of their enslavers upon emancipation, it is possible that these two people were Bondy and Frank.

Two images of selection of the 1860 Slave Census, showing two people of Frank and Bondy’s ages, owned by a man in Travis County named T. P. Washington. — *A selection of the 1860 Slave Census, showing two people of Frank and Bondy’s ages, owned by a man in Travis County named T. P. Washington.*

Because those collecting their information recorded them as property and not people, we don’t know the names of those two people, and we don’t know who they are.

A depiction of the house at 821 E 11th St (on the corner) in 1887 from the Augustus Koch map. — *A depiction of the house at 821 E 11^th St (on the corner) in 1887 from the Augustus Koch map.*

We do know some things. Bondy was from Africa, and she lived in Austin. Bondy and Frank probably built that house themselves, and they lived there for decades. They lived in a neighborhood that is today so utterly transformed by modernity, segregation, and gentrification.

A Google Streetview photo of the location of historic 821 E 11th St, Austin, Texas—just across the street from Franklin BBQ and the African American Cultural and Heritage Facility. — *A Google Streetview photo of the location of historic 821 E 11^th St, Austin, Texas—just across the street from Franklin BBQ and the African American Cultural and Heritage Facility.*

Bondy had no children, so no personal genealogical inquiries would have made her story known. Our project has the potential to find other people in Austin with unique stories. By looking at big data, we can find individuals with differences. However, there are still limitations to what we can know because of what was recorded in the past.

Amy Shreeve Bridges is a J.D. Candidate at Yale Law School and a graduate of the University of Texas at Austin. While pursuing her undergraduate degree in history, she completed digital humanities and urban geography research that focused on mapping the racial geography of historic Austin. Her research interests include historical GIS, segregation, and urban housing policies.

References

“912 E 11^th Street,” Google Streetview, March 2024, https://www.google.com/maps/@30.2698205,-97.7309772,3a,75y,209.52h,104.14t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1syJa1RPhIgQNCmJL-o4CPKg!2e0!6shttps:%2F%2Fstreetviewpixels-pa.googleapis.com%2Fv1%2Fthumbnail%3Fpanoid%3DyJa1RPhIgQNCmJL-o4CPKg%26cb_client%3Dmaps_sv.share%26w%3D900%26h%3D600%26yaw%3D209.52129397598353%26pitch%3D-14.140192174838944%26thumbfov%3D90!7i16384!8i8192?coh=205410&entry=ttu.

Austin, Texas, City Directory, pg 168. Morrison & Foumy. 1881.

Austin, Texas, City Directory, pg 239. Morrison & Foumy. 1887.

Austin, Texas, City Directory, pg 258. Morrison & Foumy. 1891.

Austin, Texas, City Directory, pg 288. Morrison & Foumy. 1893.

Austin, Texas, City Directory, pg 297. Morrison & Foumy. 1895.

Austin, Texas, City Directory, pg 273. Morrison & Foumy. 1903.

Austin, Texas, City Directory, pg 285. Morrison & Foumy. 1906.

“Sherrif’s Sale,” Austin Statesman, March 16, 1909. https://www.newspapers.com/image/366290646

Barker, Eugene C. “The African Slave Trade in Texas.” The Quarterly of the Texas State Historical Association 6, no. 2 (1902): 145–58. http://www.jstor.org/stable/27784929.

Koch, Augustus. Austin, State Capital of Texas. 1887. Lithograph, 28 x 41 in. Austin History Center, Austin Public Library.

“Racial Mapping Austin,” Central Texas Retold, accessed June 19, 2024, https://ctxretold.org/black-communities/mapping-the-city/.

“Report of Death,” Travis County Death Certificates via FamilySearch (https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:33S7-9Y1H-SYKH?view=index), image 1490 of 3319.

U.S. Census Bureau. The Ninth Federal Census (1870); Census Place: Austin, Travis, Texas; Roll: M593_1606; Page: 297A.

U.S. Census Bureau. The Tenth Federal Census (1880); Census Place: Austin, Travis, Texas; Roll: 1329; Page: 262d; Enumeration District: 136.

U.S. Census Bureau. The Twelfth Federal Census (1900); Census Place: Austin Ward 8, Travis, Texas; Roll: 1673; Page: 3; Enumeration District: 0096

River Depths, Bordered Lands, and Circuitous Routes: On Returning to Texas

Banner for River Depths, Bordered Lands, and Circuitous Routes, a Layered History of South Texas by Jonathan Cortez

Not Even Past republishes this moving and insightful article on returning to Texas by Jonathan Cortez to celebrate them joining the faculty of the Department of History at UT Austin as an Assistant Professor of Borderlands History. Dr. Cortez wrote this piece about returning to Texas to teach after 10 years on the East Coast while serving as an Early Career Postdoctoral Fellow. The History department officially welcomes Dr. Cortez with delight.

During my first weekend back in Texas I waded into the Río Nueces.

Torrential rain the night before caused record flooding. My body, buoyed by the rushing water, could barely reach the rocks below. Looking downstream, I watched the flood pass over and submerge the man-made barriers meant for passing cars. The flood now mended what was once an interruption of the river caused by the building of the highway in 1919. Vehicles paused as brown-skinned people floated by on rafts, tubes, and kayaks. The energy was relaxed and convivial.

Water meets land and is reminded of its duties.

Photograph by Jonathan Cortez of the Río Nueces in South Texas, Uvalde County. — *The author took this photograph of the Río Nueces in Uvalde County on the first weekend they moved back to Texas, September 3, 2022.*

Stretching for 507 kilometers along the southeast of current-day Texas, the Río Nueces has a long history to be learned. Various indigenous tribes of the ancestral Coahuiltecan peoples including the Pacuaches, Sacuaches, and Tepacuaches concentrated their livelihoods around the Nueces as early as the late 1500s. But they were forcibly thinned and dispersed by the imperial forces of Spain, Mexico, and eventually the United States. In the late eighteenth century, second-generation Spanish conquistadors and colonizers such as Blas María de la Garza Falcón and Alonso de León traveled into this region and settled ranching outposts to be used by Spanish soldiers and missionaries for exploration.

Under Mexico’s tutelage during the mid-nineteenth century, the Río Nueces became a highly contested natural boundary between Mexico’s northern state of Tamaulipas and an in-limbo Texas Republic. Whereas Mexico claimed the Río Nueces as their northern divide, Texas claimed the Río Grande as its southern territorial demarcation. However, since neither side could undeniably claim what has been referred to as the Nueces Strip – the land between the two rivers – Texas received assistance from the United States to achieve its territorial goals.[1]

The 240-kilometer Nueces Strip played an important role in the institution of slavery and influenced the rivalry between the two interests. Slaveholding Anglo settlements in Mexico’s Texas, many of which U.S. citizens established by uprooting their families and African captives from states like Virginia and the Carolinas in response to promises of vast lands and prosperity, grew angry after Mexico abolished slavery in 1829. Over time, Texas wedged itself off politically and culturally from Mexico, and by 1845, the United States had consumed Texas, bringing it into its union.

As abolitionist intellectual and refugee Frederick Douglas orated in Belfast, Ireland on January 2nd, 1846, “Here [the United States’ annexation of Texas] was an act of national robbery perpetrated, and for what? For the re-establishment of slavery on a soil which had been washed pure from its polluting influence by the generous act of a ‘semibarbarous’ people!”[2] Between 1846 and 1848, the United States entered into war with Mexico over these boundary disputes, which ended with the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. By the end of this conflict, Mexico was forced to cede fifty-five percent of its territory and accept the Río Grande as the divide between the two countries. Slavery was reinstated in the Nueces Strip.

An 1847 map of Mexico drafted by John Desturnell and used during the negotiations that concluded in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

My body, submerged in water, is reminded of an entangled past.

I was visiting a prima in Uvalde my first weekend back in Texas when we decided to spend the day on the Río Nueces, sixteen kilometers from the city center. She moved there a few years earlier for a job and found comfort in the town’s quaint lifestyle and in the possibilities for her and her girlfriend to make a home amongst other ethnic Mexican working-class people. A community in mourning, Uvalde was the town where, three months earlier, an 18-year old former student purchased a military-grade weapon, entered Robb Elementary School, and proceeded to murder twenty-one students and teachers. The incident devastated the town where over seventy percent of residents identify as “Hispanic” – and more specifically, as “Mexican American.”[3]

Grieving parents from Uvalde now lead the charge for gun reform in Texas, hoping to eliminate any chance of tragic reoccurrence without the need to increase police presence in their schools.[4] Robb Elementary was also the origin site for the 1970 Uvalde Chicano Movement in opposition to Mexican American discrimination, which caused reverberations and Chicano uprisings throughout the region.[5] If this small town has taught us anything, it is that its residents have always understood how their struggles for autonomy connect to those of other ethnic Mexicans in South Texas. These legacies of violence and resistance echo all along the Río Nueces.

We are all trying to survive the aftermath of the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo.

I grew up where the Río Nueces empties into the Gulf of Mexico. Robstown, Texas, to be exact. My family members have lived their entire lives inside this contested territory, bordered by the Río Nueces and the Río Grande. We didn’t go north past San Antonio or south past Matamoros—at least while I was an adolescent. Before my time, my family was largely migratory. In January 1960, when my dad was just five years old, my grandmother brought him and his four siblings to Texas from Sandoval, Tamaulipas, Mexico. They were asked to pose as a group in their passport photo, and each of their documents holds the exact same picture.

Once in the United States, they used seasonal migrant farmworker routes to travel from South Texas to the San Joaquin Valley, picking onions, tomatoes, cucumber, and other produce. My mother, born in Texas during the 1950s, was a child of Mexican immigrants who migrated to the South Texas region during the 1920s – a period of massive Mexican farmworker migration into the U.S. – from Saltillo, Coahuila, Mexico. They lived in Texas in an age when it was illegal to speak Spanish in schools and doing so was punishable by force. Juan Crow laws determined where ethnic Mexicans could live and learn, and society deemed them incapable of intellectual pursuits, relegating them to farmwork or cannon fodder

Photograph of Jonathan Cortez's father with his mother and three siblings in South Texas — *Photograph of the author’s father (far left) with his mother and three siblings. They attached this photograph to their immigration documentation to cross the U.S.-Mexico border in 1960.* *From the personal archive of Inez Cortez. Robstown, Texas.*

I left South Texas to pursue a Ph.D. in American Studies at Brown University. Leaving Texas seemed like the best option for gaining the analytical framework needed to better understand the conditions and context under which I was raised. Before this move, I attended the University of Texas at Austin and earned my bachelor’s degrees in Sociology and Mexican American Studies. I learned Texas and U. S. History through the lenses of Ethnic Studies and Mexican American Studies. Everything that the Texas Legislature conveniently forgot to include in my K–12 public school curriculum was laid bare.

I could no longer be a complicit participant in the myths into which I had been unknowingly raised since childhood – American exceptionalism, patriotism, capitalism, the gender binary, patriarchy, (trans)misogyny, anti-Blackness, and anti-indigeneity. I left for the East Coast to leave those constructs behind, not because they don’t exist in New England but because I needed to uproot myself from the horrors of internal colonialism deeply entrenched in this specific geographical location that I knew so well. Instead, I made the choice to engage with theories of liberation, histories of the oppressed, and to make deep work of epistemological shifts from afar.

If I am not careful, I lose my footing.

After almost ten years away, I return to Texas to take up the position of Provost Early Career Fellow in Borderlands History at UT Austin’s Department of History. My route back to this place, where my intellectual curiosities began, has been circuitous. Continuing my work, I will research, write, and teach histories of immigration, ethnic studies, Latino studies, and borderlands studies. Further, my commitment to working with South Texas communities on public history initiatives is central to my pedagogy as a professor at a flagship university. In many ways my research, writing, and public-facing work are situated in the aftermath of the struggle over the Río Nueces and the Río Grande as national divides – a struggle with important implications for migration, labor, and racialization.

My book, The Age of Encampment, focuses on the history of migrant camps along the U. S.–Mexico border from the late nineteenth century to the late twentieth century. As issues related to the national divide came continuously to define the United States and Mexico, so too did the makeshift and federally-funded encampments that dotted both sides come to delineate the plight of migrants. In the book I take up the history of Chinese migrant fugitive encampments during the era of Chinese Exclusion, the story of Mexican refugees placed into camps during the Mexican Revolution, the establishment of labor camps along the border during the Great Depression and New Deal, the transformation of these camps for the purposes of Japanese incarceration during World War II, and the shift into the militarized border encampments during the late twentieth century – and which we now inherit.

But still, the water remembers my name, and whispers.

Photograph of Mexican children in the Crystal City Migrant Labor Camp in South Texas — Photograph of Mexican children in the Crystal City Migrant Labor Camp, August 1941, Photographer unknown. From Records of the Farmers Home Administration, Farm Security Administration & Predecessor Agencies, RG 96, Project Records 1935-1940.

Taking up residence at UT Austin is therefore a returning of sorts: a returning to Texas, the land that my family has traversed for generations; a returning to landscapes of resistance forged by kin in search of colonialism’s trap door; a returning to spaces that are so deeply infused with colonial violence that a dip in the Río Nueces turns into an identity crisis (and an NEP article); a returning to the classrooms that inspired my urge for consuming and creating knowledge about Mexican Americans, South Texas, and the border; a returning to the halls where borderlands thinkers such as Américo Paredes, Rolando Hinojosa-Smith, Neil Foley, and Gloria Anzaldúa moved the field of Borderlands Studies towards academic legitimacy; a returning to the very place where marginalized students who I seek to mentor and teach search for answers on ancestry, on identity, and on being; a returning home.

In the Río Nueces my first weekend back in Texas, I took a deep breath and plunged into the water.

Dr. Jonathan Cortez is at present the Early Career Provost Postdoctoral Fellow of Borderlands History in the Department of History at The University of Texas at Austin. Previously, they held the title of César Chávez Provosts’ Postdoctoral Fellow (2021-2023) in the Department of Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean Studies at Dartmouth College. Their current manuscript, The Age of Encampment, details the history of vernacular and federally-funded migrant camps along the U.S.-Mexico border for the purposes of perceived national security, capital accumulation, and labor control from the late 19th century to the late 20th century. The Immigration and Ethnic History Society, the Western Historical Association, and the American Historical Association have given high recognition to their work. Read about their work at: https://historiancortez.com/.

[1] For information about the history of the ancestral Coahuiltecan, see: Native American Peoples of South Texas, edited by Bobbie L. Lovett, Juan L. González, Roseann Bacha-Garza, and Russell K. Skowronek (Edinburg: The University of Texas – Pan American, 2014), 13-22; Thomas N. Campbell, “Pacuache Indians,” Handbook of Texas. For information on Spanish colonizers, see: Clotilde P. García, “Garza Falcón, Blas María de la,” Handbook of Texas; Chipman, Donald and Harriett Denise Joseph, Notable Men and Women of Spanish Texas (Austin, University of Texas Press, 1999).
For information on the Nueces Strip, see: Durham, George. Taming the Nueces Strip: The Story of McNelly’s Rangers (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982). Author note: The U.S. Army, Texas Rangers, and other U.S. officials have historically used the term ‘Nueces Strip’ to place their fears on a specific geographical location, which they saw necessary to control for Manifest Destiny. However, this piece uses the term to demarcate the land between the Río Nueces and Río Grande and to highlight, instead, the violence U.S. officials did to indigenous peoples and other racialized bodies in the region.

[2] Frederick Douglass, “Texas, Slavery, and American Prosperity: An Address Delivered in Belfast, Ireland, on January 2, 1846,” Belfast News Letter, January 6, 1846; Blassingame, John (et al, eds.). The Frederick Douglass Papers: Series One–Speeches, Debates, and Interviews (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), Vol. I, p. 118.

[3] U.S. Census Bureau (2021). Uvalde County, Texas Quick facts. Retrieved from https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/uvaldecountytexas#qf-headnote-b

[4] Gamboa, Suzanne. “Families of victims of Uvalde massacre call for legislation amid more gun violence.” NBC News. January 24, 2023; Gibson, Caitlin and Clyde McGrady. “The prospect of more police at schools is no comfort for Black parents.” The Washington Post. June 3, 2022.

[5] Cabrera, Kristen and Shelly Brisbin. “How a school walkout in Uvalde helped spark the 1970s Chicano rights movement.” Texas Standard. May 31, 2022; García, Uriel J. and Jinitzail Hernández. “Before the school shooting, Uvalde was known for a 1970 Hispanic student walkout. Its aging participants fear its spirit and memory are fading.” The Texas Tribune. June 22, 2022.

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. Although we strive to ensure that articles contain factual information from reliable sources, Not Even Past does not take responsibility for any errors or omissions

Review of The Floating World: Masterpieces of Edo Japan at The Blanton Museum of Art

The Floating World: Masterpieces of Edo Japan from the Worcester Art Museum, Blanton Museum of Art, The University of Texas at Austin,

Over one hundred ink-and-paper survivors from “the floating world” of Edo-period Japan are on display at the Blanton Museum in Austin, Texas. This diverse collection of woodblock prints, many of them strikingly colorful despite the passage of two centuries or more, debuted on February 11, 2024, and will close on June 30, 2024. Like spring’s short-lived cherry blossoms, these ukiyo-e masterpieces will not appear in public again for a long while and never in quite the same splendid arrangement. On the drizzly April day, I viewed them, the exhibit space was especially crowded, as eclipse-watchers who’d traveled to Austin for the celestial event rounded out their trips with a weatherproof indoor spectacle. A woodblock print exhibit may not be quite as rare as a Texas eclipse, but it’s rare enough that you don’t want to miss it.

Katsushika Hokusai, Fuji at Gotenyama, from the series Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, 1830–32, color woodblock print, 17 1/8 x 23 1/8 x 1 in., Worcester Art Museum, John Chandler Bancroft Collection, courtesy of the Blanton Museum of Art

The Japanese phrase ukiyo-e translates to “pictures of the floating world,” a reference to the almost otherworldly pleasures of Edo (now Tokyo) during the relatively peaceful, prosperous, and cosmopolitan 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries. It was peaceful because the Tokugawa clan, the last shogunal dynasty, had emerged victorious in the great battles for supremacy that took place at the end of the sixteenth century. It was prosperous because the shogun required Japan’s many regional lords to make biannual pilgrimages to Edo, ensuring steady business for the city’s merchants. It was cosmopolitan because, despite severe restrictions on foreign trade, ideas from the other side of the world trickled through to the capital and influenced its now-iconic artwork in ways this exhibit makes clear. Most suggestively, Edo “floated” through its golden age because of its courtesans, actors, athletes, festivals, fireworks, gardens, bridges, temples, and breathtaking vistas, both natural and man-made, all of which remain alive for us thanks to the detailed, dreamlike output of the era’s woodblock print masters.

The Blanton’s well-annotated trip through the floating world plays out in five thematic sections, though there is some inevitable overlap between them. The first and smallest, Origins, introduces the time, place, and, critically, the technique of woodblock printing. A final ukiyo-e print was the work of about four people: a designer, a carver, a printer, and a publisher. To illustrate their craftsmanship, Texas artist Daryl Howard offers an introductory display – a work of art in its own right – that breaks down the process. First, each layer of the image is carved into a wood block (backward from how it will appear on paper). Next, colorful ink is brushed onto the wood blocks. The paper is then pressed onto the blocks, one after another, resulting in a layered, multicolored final image.

*The Floating World: Masterpieces of Edo Japan from the Worcester Art Museum*, Blanton Museum of Art, The University of Texas at Austin, February 11–June 30, 2024, *courtesy of the Blanton Museum of Art*

Over time, ukiyo-e artists increased the number of layers and colors. The colors themselves changed over time, as when a new and longer-lasting chemical formula for “Prussian blue” arrived in Japan via Dutch sailors. Some woodblock artists were keen to experiment with foreign techniques like one-point perspective. As the Edo era approached its violent end, prints sometimes depicted foreign gunboats flying foreign flags with foreign crews. Yet, for the most part, both the style and the content of ukiyo-e prints remained decidedly local.

The second part of the exhibit, Entertainment, shows the many ways the people of Edo amused themselves. Prints depict frolics under spring cherry blossoms, summer fireworks, autumn foliage, and winter snow. In one large triptych, people go pleasure boating under a landmark Edo footbridge. It also seems strikingly familiar. As curator Holly Borham points out, scenes like this happen almost daily a few blocks south of the Blanton on Austin’s Ladybird Lake. There are also prints detailing the military prowess of the samurai caste, but with the absence of battles under Tokugawa rule, martial pomp takes on a playful quality. Warriors throw themselves into a fray against a wild boar, they practice archery for sport, and children reenact military parades. Right alongside elite samurai, and seemingly even more celebrated and coveted, are prints of famous kabuki actors and sumo wrestlers. “Candid” illustrations of entertainers’ private lives, as they relax at home with family, seem to prefigure a later century’s magazine spreads.

*Katsushika Hokusai, A Hawk in Flight, circa 1840, color woodblock print, 17 1/8 x 23 1/8 x 1 in., Worcester Art Museum, Gift from the estate of John Chandler Bancroft*, *courtesy of the Blanton Museum of Art*

Part three of the exhibit, Poetic Pictures, shows one of the social functions of ukiyo-e as a platform for celebrating ideas. While woodblock prints were first and foremost decorative objects, some of them contain substantial text. Poetry clubs and other groups of literati could commission prints to commemorate their contests and events. Occasionally, the Japanese language’s complex kanji characters are accompanied by furigana, simpler characters to aid pronunciation, but the majority of prints assume a high degree of literacy on the part of their audience. This fact alone speaks volumes about the social world of Edo, as peace and prosperity facilitated education for men and women alike. Don’t worry if your archaic Japanese is rusty – the exhibit’s explanatory panels are generous and in plain English.

As the first three parts of the exhibit show, contemporary earthly pleasure is a far more common subject in ukiyo-e than religion, history, or myth, but the Blanton also spotlights some of the movement’s most interesting counter-programming. The famous artist Utamaro found himself in prison after violating the shogun’s prohibition against depicting the 16th-century warlord Toyotomi Hideyoshi, who had a complex relationship with the Tokugawa family that deposed his son. Gods, monsters, demon-slayers, and ghosts also appear occasionally, though in keeping with the recreational spirit of the era, several of these are actually depictions of stage plays about the supernatural. Playful monkeys, brash roosters, and fearsome dragons also rear their heads, sometimes in reference to the zodiac but often as supporting players in anthropocentric scenes.

The fourth section, Landscapes and the Natural World, contains some of the best-loved examples of the ukiyo-e art form. Here you can soak in several large, vivid pieces from two legendary printmakers whose work has inspired generations of designers, travelers, and Japan lovers: Hokusai, creator of the 36 Views of Mt. Fuji series, and Hiroshige, the artist behind the 100 Famous Views of Edo series. The Blanton exhibit boasts examples from each series, and all on their own, they justify fighting Austin traffic.

Utagawa Kunisada I, Woman Holding a Paper Lantern, 1844, color woodblock print, 38 5/8 x 19 5/8 x 1 1/4 in., Worcester Art Museum, John Chandler Bancroft Collection, Courtesy of the Blanton Museum of Art

The final part of the exhibit, Bijin-ga, shifts the focus to Edo’s “fashionable beauties.” Geisha, bathers, and hostesses don their makeup or remove their robes, chat with each other or gaze into mirrors, and relax outside their workplaces or take seaside strolls. A close look at their kimono reveals stunningly intricate patterns. Their possessions and surroundings hint at Edo’s vast marketplaces and vibrant consumer culture, and at the goods and services that were coveted and accessible in Japan’s booming capital. One of my favorite surprises was a rare print by Hokusai in the shape of a folding fan. Since it was meant to attach to a fan and would have become heavily creased through regular use, few examples survive.

This temporary exhibit has drawn admirers from across the UT community, including art students, textile makers, and students of Japanese language and history. This is the Blanton’s first Japan-focused exhibit in many years, and when it finishes its run, the prints will return to their permanent home at the Worcester Museum in Massachusetts. To preserve their color, the prints can only go on display for a few months at a stretch and only three times in a 10-year period. To see so many in one place and so well-arranged and annotated is a singular experience. Look in on the floating world while it lasts.

David A. Conrad received his Ph.D. from UT Austin in 2016 and published his first book, Akira Kurosawa and Modern Japan, in 2022. He is currently working on a second book, which will also focus on postwar Japan. David lived in Japan’s Miyagi prefecture for three years and can’t wait to go back to his home away from home.

Review of The Devil’s Cup: A History of the World According to Coffee by Stewart Lee Allen (1999)

Inspired by a never-finished ceremonial cup of coffee in Ethiopia and a Jules Michelet quote attributing the Enlightenment to the advent of coffee, author Stewart Lee Allen dives head-first into a voyage across the world to trace the path coffee took out of Africa. In The Devil’s Cup: A History of the World According to Coffee, Allen weaves the history of coffee in between his eccentric tales of travel. A self-proclaimed “addict” himself, Allen argues that the coffee bean’s integration into our daily lives has been central to the flourishing of human civilization, from intellectual innovations in the Arabic world to the political revolutions of the West.

Allen focuses on the role of coffee in culture, politics, spirituality, and trade. Coffee’s link to spirituality is explored throughout the first half of the book. The journey begins in Harrar, Ethiopia, where it is believed that the cultivation of the aromatic Coffea Arabica species began. Allen attends a traditional ritual from the Oromo tribe – an exorcism in which coffee beans are roasted, chewed, and then brewed to release the power of the priest. In what follows, Allen attempts to visit the alleged home of al-Shadhili in al-Makkha (Yemen), the Muslim idol who is rumored to have invented brewing coffee beans for drinking in 1200 C.E. Allen stresses how a group of traveling Islamic orders called Sufis incorporated coffee into their spiritual practices and contributed to its spread beyond North Africa. In Turkey, Allen traces the roots of contemporary coffee consumption habits and takes the story up to coffee’s introduction to Europe.

A depiction of a late eighteenth-century Ottoman coffeehouse in Istanbul.
Source: Wikimedia Commons

Allen’s primary argument rests upon the social and historical impact of the coffee shop to prove his thesis. Previously centered around drinking in taverns, European society lacked a common space for sober socialization. A drunk mass, consuming beer as though it was water, led to a less efficient, intellectual, and healthy population. Coffeehouses became multi-functional public spaces that facilitated a multitude of historical moments. They were the original meeting spots of choice for business powerhouses like Lloyd’s of London and the East India Company. As well, these cafés served as spaces for intellectual dialogue, where scientists like Isaac Newton or philosophers like Jean-Jacques Rousseau were known to frequent. Allen even states that in being a site for political organizing, the cafés of Paris were central to the French Revolution. As he himself admits, some of Allen’s claims are bold. For example, he suggests that this stimulant pushed the Ottoman empire to success, created Great Britain’s drive for dominance, contributed to Napoleon’s fall, and even helped the Sons of Liberty attain independence from the British.

*A coffee vendor in Paris during the 18th century. Source: Wikimedia Commons.*

After Allen’s long discussion of Europe, we find the author distracted from his “history of the world according to coffee” and focusing more on storytelling. He continues his narration of Gabriel De Clieu’s fabled introduction of the coffee bean to the New World until he arrives in Brazil. The focus here is on the link between coffee and the horrors of Brazilian slavery. In wondering if the slave trade brought with it coffee’s spiritual origins in the Zar cults of eastern Africa, he finds himself participating in an Afro-Brazilian ritual where coffee beans are left as an offering to summon a spirit named Preto Velho.

The final stretch of the author’s trek takes him to the United States. Following Route 66, Allen seeks the quintessential cup of coffee, i.e., a foul but “soulful” cup of drip, ever flowing thanks to the attentiveness of a kind all-American waitress. After finding himself at the mercy of several Tennessee cops and countless stops at roadside chain restaurants and diners, he heads home to Los Angeles. The book fades out in ephedrine and caffeine-induced haze, where the author gives his final ruminations on the substance: “…Each age had used the bean according to its understanding of reality…We citizens of the brave new world, who worship efficiency and speed, are just turning it into a high, another way to go a little faster, get there a bit quicker and feel a little better. Only there’s nowhere left to go” (p. 223).

Xpresso Drive Thru Cafe, Denver, Colorado.
Source: Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, photograph by John Margolies, call number LC-MA05- 7312

Allen’s book is fast-paced, entertaining, and easy to read. But this assessment comes with significant reservations. While there is certainly truth to many of these claims, I suspect that the author has overstated the role of coffee. Some of his work seemed to shade into fiction, a problem for a book that claims to be factual. There was a minimal inclusion of dates and citations, which made it more difficult for me to take what he was saying seriously. The timeline felt fuzzy, and occasionally, facts seemed poorly researched. For example, Allen argues that coffee’s 13^th-century arrival in al-Makkha not only aided the intellectual advancements of the Islamic world but allowed their civilization to “flourish beyond all others”. Many historians consider the Islamic Golden Age to have occurred from the 8^th to the 13^th centuries.[1] Coffee reached this region during a period of decline for some of these older empires, and the flourishing of the Ottoman Empire that Allen points to was yet to come for a couple of centuries.[2]

The book often reads more like a travelogue than historical literature. Many of his side discussions felt aimless, almost like reading someone’s inner monologue. Allen’s sardonic tone was humorous at times but occasionally felt obnoxious. His characterization of some of the Middle Eastern and Indian people he met during his journey seemed to evoke Orientalist tropes. The author’s insensitivity may be attributed to the age of the book, which is now twenty-five years old, but it makes the work feel dated. Some descriptions were deeply problematic, for instance, Allen’s description of India: “Most people do not associate India with coffee. Disorganized, dirty, undereducated, lazy, muddled, poor, and run-down – not to mention superstitious – it is clearly a nation of tea drinkers” (p. 76).

book cover for "the devil's cup: a history of the world according to coffee."

Despite these criticisms, The Devil’s Cup is an interesting and accessible read for those looking to learn more about the origins of one of the world’s most beloved beverages. The sections focused on presenting historical information and analysis were well-written and drew my attention. There were a handful of lines that struck me for their beauty. Allen knows how to paint a scene, and his colorful descriptions of coffee often made me crave a cup. Here’s just one example: “It proved to be the first all-American joe we’d found – black, tarry, and powerful, rich with half-and-half, cascading in waves from the waitress’ Pyrex coffeepot and into our mugs, breaking over us, washing through our veins like rocket fuel. It was awful and terrifying beyond compare” (p. 220). While the book has flaws, Allen’s story remains a unique, light-hearted whirlwind of a read. And if you love coffee, The Devil’s Cup will likely make you cherish your morning cup even more.

Alexandra Tipps is a senior in the College of Liberal Arts, currently working toward her B.A. in History and Sociology. She hopes to pursue a Ph.D. in History with a focus on modern Latin America.

[1] Steve Tamari, 2009. “Between the ‘Golden Age’ and the Renaissance: Islamic Higher Education in Eighteenth-Century Damascus.” In Trajectories of Education in the Islamic World, edited by Osama Abi-Mershed (Routledge: 2009): 36

[2] Şahin, Kaya. Empire and Power in the Reign of Süleyman: Narrating the Sixteenth-Century Ottoman World / Kaya Şahin, Indiana University (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 7-8

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