Adam Clulow, Author at Not Even Past

Alexei Navalny’s Legacy and Anti-Putin Resistance

Moscow’s southeast neighborhoods of Maryino and Lyublino always seem to be where the authorities locate controversial events. On March 1, 2024, it was Maryino who hosted the funeral of Russian dissident Alexei Navalny. The church that held the ceremony is a post-Soviet building and dominates the center of a neighborhood otherwise filled with high-rise apartments, broad streets, shopping centers, and a string of parks and ponds along the Moscow River. On the day of the funeral, striking photos showed the lines of people paying their respects against the backdrops of apartment blocks. Other photos soon appeared online from inside the church despite authorities forbidding photography. Having world historical events occur in a neighborhood you usually associate with medical visits, shopping, haircuts, and eating Uzbek food and sushi is surreal. With Navalny’s death, however, my wife and I also had a grim sense of both déjà vu and inevitability.

When assassins shot journalist Anna Politkovskaya at her home in central Moscow in 2007, I was teaching English to cheery businesspeople a few blocks away.[1] When assassins shot politician Boris Nemtsov on a bridge by the Kremlin in 2015, I was researching in the Moscow archives. My reaction was writing a post for Not Even Past about how Russian TV coverage immediately made light of Nemtsov’s “ladies’ man” reputation.[2] Over the next month, I walked past the murder scene to view the mound of flowers on the sidewalk. The pile was usually small because the city ordered the street cleaners to remove them daily. When we awoke to Navalny’s death on February 16, we were saddened but not very surprised.

Alexey Navalny in court, February 2021.
Source: Wikimedia Commons

Born to a Ukrainian father and a Russian mother, Navalny was involved with several political parties before gaining international attention for leading protests against fraud in the 2011 Russian parliamentary elections. His profile rose in 2013 as he became a candidate for the Moscow mayoral position. Afterward, he organized protests and investigated corrupt politicians while facing increasing legal troubles and threats. Navalny believed that Putin had him poisoned in August 2020, leading him to nearly die. He sought medical care in Germany even as Russian authorities seized his assets and apartment.[3] So why did Navalny return to Russia knowing he would face certain imprisonment and likely death?

Political dissidents making a crucial choice about remaining in exile or returning home have a long history that weaves through the Russian Imperial and Soviet periods to the present. Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky were in exile in Switzerland and Brooklyn, respectively, when the February Revolution overthrew Tsar Nicholas II in 1917. They only returned home (Lenin with German assistance) after the government had fallen. During Joseph Stalin’s rule in the Soviet Union, Trotsky was forced into exile once again, this time to Mexico City, where he was assassinated in 1940. Historian Barbara Martin has highlighted how Soviet dissidents such as Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Roy Medved faced this conundrum in the post-Stalinist Soviet Union. While life in exile was safer and provided academic and political freedoms, leaving felt like a dereliction of duty or abandoning your home. It also lessened dissidents’ authority among their fellow citizens.[4] Navalny seemed to take this point to heart and hence accepted the risk of confrontation with the regime, likely believing that his brave anti-Putin legacy would be cemented even at great personal risk.

A political dissident in exile. Leon Trotsky (wearing a white suit) in Mexico, 1938.
Source: Wikimedia Commons

Navalny’s return to Russia in January 2021 was stunningly brave, even as the end result was strikingly predictable. However, he is also a complex figure, and his actions, words, and legacy are intertwined in a set of wider issues and conflicts.

Consider for a moment the Russians in the apartments overlooking his funeral, not the mourners. Assessing Navalny’s popularity through Russian opinion polls, many of them problematic, is difficult.[5] But as I lived and visited Russia, even during Navalny’s poisoning, exile, return, and arrest saga, I heard many people expressing negative voices against him. Some recurring comments were skepticism about his anti-corruption campaigns or the simple belief that he was just another self-aggrandizing politician. With the 2014 Maidan Revolution in Ukraine, the Russian occupation of Crimea, and the Russian intervention in Eastern Ukraine, cynicism turned to accusations of treason and other conspiracy theories, all repeated in various iterations in the Russian official media.

Navalny protesting in Moscow, 2013.
Source: Wikimedia Commons

Part of this seems obvious. Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 solidified the state media’s portrayal of Navalny as a foreign agent. Furthermore, numerous new laws have designated Navalny, his organization, and most anti-Putin journalists and organizations as treasonous foreign terrorists acting on behalf of the West or Ukraine. The onslaught of such accusations wears people down. And yet, sociologist Jeremy Morris argues that his contacts’ reaction to Navalny has little to do with propaganda. Many Russians simply dislike Navalny’s image and consider his campaigns naïve and inconsequential.[6] In other words, you can trust that conversations with Russians in Russia about his death are often very different than the coverage by non-Russian media.

Aside from propaganda and everyday anti-Navalny sentiment, his politics and statements have also been a point of contention among other anti-Putin politicians and activists. While Navalny is often portrayed as a stereotypical “Russian liberal,” earlier in his political career, he spoke the language of Russian ethno-nationalism. He amplified racial stereotypes directed towards Russia’s large immigrant and Muslim communities, as well as its other numerous non-Russian ethnic groups. He attended the far-right Russian marches, which blamed most of Russia’s ills on immigrants and called for mass deportations. He moderated such stances over time and apologized. Still, his early remarks defined his image for many non-Russian ethnic groups within and outside of Russia.[7] Even as his wife, Julia Navalnaya, took the reigns of his organization, the question of where non-ethnic Russians stand within their vision of Russia remains uncertain.[8]

The logo of Alexey Navalny’s party – “Russia of the Future.” Source: Wikimedia Commons

In the context of the Russian occupation of Crimea in 2014, Ukrainians and Crimean Tatars (the indigenous Muslim minority of Crimea) had good reasons to be skeptical of his denunciations of the full-scale Russian invasion in February 2022. Beginning with the 2014 occupation of Crimea, Navalny had denounced Russian methods but echoed the Russian nationalist ethos that Russia and Crimea possessed a kind of supernatural bond.[9] As someone who was researching Stalin’s ethnic cleansing of Crimea at the time the occupation began, this was disappointing, to say the least. He made such statements as Russian authorities began a new wave of repressions, arrests, and sometimes murders of Crimean Tatars, Crimean Ukrainians, and Russians who protested Putin.[10]

One point that many of Navalny’s varied detractors may agree on (albeit for different reasons) is that the Western media is too focused on Navalny himself and less on the audiences he represents. At the very least, the acknowledgment of Navalny should come with a recognition of the bravery and defiance of individuals and victims outside the media spotlight. There are thousands of other political prisoners in Russia and occupied Ukraine, and Putin’s army and occupation kill Ukrainians every day. These prisoners suffer from malnourishment, torture, and death. In Ukraine, the use of torture, rape, and mass executions is now well documented.[11] In Russia, dissident Vladimir Kara-Murza is now serving a 25-year sentence for condemning the war and has become chronically ill.[12] Last year, Crimean Tatar activist Dzhemil Gafarov died in a southern Russian prison after being tortured and denied medical release.[13] The list of absurd arrests for anti-war activities is far too long to recount here. One of the latest examples is the 7-year prison sentence for Russian poet Alexander Byvshev, who questioned the morality of Russia’s invasion.[14] In other words, the legacy of sacrifice and resistance to Putin is multi-national and multi-ethnic in scope and is far more diverse and broad than just Navalny, the individual.

Vladimir Kara-Murza is now serving a 25-year sentence for condemning Russia's invasion of Ukraine. — Vladimir Kara-Murza is now serving a 25-year sentence for condemning Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Source: Wikimedia Commons.

In the month since his death, Russia-related news has remained grim. Russian attacks have killed dozens of Ukrainian civilians and left the country’s second-largest city, Kharkiv, without power. Putin has “won” his latest election with absurd margins. He used the election celebrations to signal “enthusiastic voting” in Russian-occupied Ukraine and, almost with a sense of accomplishment, finally mentioned the now-deceased Navalny by name. However, the events of last week showed that Putin does not control everything in Russia. ISIS-K militants launched a horrific terrorist attack on a Moscow concert venue, killing well over 100 people. Putin’s reaction has been a confused mix of attempting to blame Ukraine and the West, while Russian society and the state have descended into targeting Muslim immigrants and ethnic minorities with threats, deportations, and violence.

Both Russia’s present and its future seem grim. That is perhaps when it is best to think of Alexei Navalny. If nothing else, a consensus seems to have developed that Navalny was remarkable for being a Russian optimist and having the audacity, no matter how flawed or naïve, to believe that Russia’s current course could be reversed. Realistic or not, I do think about that possibility every day and whether – just maybe – there might be some truth to his belief.

Andrew Straw is a historian of Soviet Crimea. He has taught courses on Russian and Soviet history at the University of Texas and Huston-Tillotson University. At the moment, he teaches high school world history and is an instructor for the University of Texas OnRamps history program. He continues research as an independent scholar and is preparing a book proposal that will focus on Stalin’s Crimea policy and Crimean Tatars in the immediate postwar period. He can be reached at astraw@utexas.edu or on Twitter at @astrawism1

[1] https://www.iwmf.org/community/anna-politkovskaya/

[2] https://notevenpast.org/tag/boris-nemtsov/

[3] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-54369664.amp

[4] https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/dissident-histories-in-the-soviet-union-9781350192447/

[5] https://www.levada.ru/2021/02/05/vozvrashhenie-alekseya-navalnogo/

[6] https://postsocialism.org/2024/02/16/russia-lost-its-greatest-and-most-naive-optimist-a-curmudgeons-obituary-of-alexei-navalny/

[7] https://www.euronews.com/2023/07/07/racist-or-revolutionary-is-alexei-navalny-who-many-westerners-think-he-is

[8] https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2024/02/29/navalnys-difficult-relationship-with-indigenous-russians-a84291

[9] https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2023/03/07/navalnys-policy-shift-on-crimea-may-be-too-little-too-late-a80396

[10] https://unn.ua/en/news/at-least-60-people-died-from-repressions-in-crimea-during-russian-occupation-ctrc

[11]https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/mar/25/russia-weaponising-sexual-violence-ukraine-values

[12] https://www.npr.org/2023/04/17/1168667764/vladimir-kara-murza-prison-sentence

[13] https://khpg.org/en/1608812709

[14] https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/russian-anti-war-poet-gets-seven-year-jail-term-over-poem-ukraine-war-2024-03-22/

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 Caviar: The Strange History and Uncertain Future of the World’s Most Coveted Delicacy (2002), by Inga Saffron.

Inga Saffron’s Caviar presents a well-rounded history with deep insight into the lives of various parties involved in caviar production, trade, and regulation. The book beautifully details the volatile caviar industry, painting a picture of a world where the sturgeon no longer jumps freely in the waters of the Volga River—or anywhere, for that matter.

Caviar, or the eggs of a mature female sturgeon, has impacted history in unexpected ways, shaping a new cultural and natural landscape while also leading to a tragedy of the commons in global waters. According to Saffron, the democratization of access to luxury goods has transformed the food of the tsars into a highly desired middle-class delicacy, all the while creating intense strains on sturgeon populations.

Image - Sturgeon on a beach, Rijksmuseum, RP-P-1888-A-12546 — *Sturgeon on a beach, Rijksmuseum, RP-P-1888-A-12546*

Caviar explores three distinct processes: (1) the rise of caviar to the forefront of the public mind, (2) the rush to capitalize on this newfound popularity, and (3) the post-Soviet destabilization of the caviar market. Saffron writes that sturgeon eggs were long approached with caution, considered a backward dish enjoyed in the five nations surrounding the Caspian, and discarded for the pigs anywhere else. Caviar was widely appreciated in the Russian Empire for religious reasons, and travelers who indulged in it at its freshest attempted to bring delicacy to the Italians, Greeks, and Ottomans. The perishability of caviar made it challenging to trade in until the invention of refrigeration and steam-powered ships rocketed it into a position of global prestige. Saffron writes that by 1820, “Caviar’s ephemeral nature and exorbitant price gave the food a status that appealed to the burgeoning bourgeoisie of Europe” (p. 77). With most Russian-produced caviar being shipped abroad, the price of caviar within Russia rose far beyond a working man’s budget.

Saffron then discusses the global race among nations to become caviar’s top producer. German, French, and American waters were quickly divided among competing companies eager to cash in on the growing market. Overfishing led to the near extinction of the American and European sturgeons as the next generation of fish was devoured on bread and blinis. The Soviet Union managed to maintain some control over sturgeon fishing by nationalizing caviar production, but even that wouldn’t last. Electric dam production and overfishing threatened to end the Russian caviar empire. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, however, poachers and newly established private institutions flooded global markets with cheap caviar (p. 164). Since the 1990s, the global caviar market has been a battleground between conservationists and poachers, and a limited number of legitimate businesses are still allowed to fish in the waters and tributaries of the Caspian.

Shed for Preparing Caviar on the Columbia River, 1899.
Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Saffron provides a highly persuasive argument, prompting a meaningful conversation about the place of caviar in the global commodity market. If one were to measure the impact of caviar on the global market in terms of consistent demand, reliable supply, and reliable transportation infrastructure, the caviar trade would seem to be in decline. Saffron reports that there are simply not enough wild sturgeon to “support the appetite of the whole world” (p. 264). Only around 1,800 mature sturgeon persist in the waters of the Volga River as of the writing of Saffron’s book.

Demand has grown substantially since the initial caviar explosion during the Industrial Revolution, leading to an imbalance exacerbated by heightened production restrictions. Today, the three species most associated with Caspian caviar production (beluga, Russian sturgeon, and stellate) have been classified under Appendix II endangerment and placed under international watch. With catch limits placed on the largest caviar producers, international importers like Gino International and Caviar & Caviar resorted to buying smuggled caviar to feed high demand. This illegally acquired caviar is often harvested before it is ripe, eliminating the interchangeability expected of a commodity. Transportation is also unreliable in the post-Soviet caviar market. The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) reports stopping hundreds of pounds of caviar per suitcase brought through international airports by smugglers in the 1990s. The future of legally produced caviar is left in the hands of experimental projects like the costly sturgeon breeding of Stolt Sea Farms.

Cover of Caviar: The Strange History and Uncertain Future of the World’s Most Coveted Delicacy (2022), by Inga Saffron

Inga Saffron’s Caviar provides a charming yet chilling historical account of the challenges of sustaining a luxury commodity in a world where natural resources are under increasing pressure. Saffron focuses on modern culture as a driving force for the luxury goods market. Caviar was “appropriated as a delicacy by the wealthy” (p. 264). Intrigue fueled by the enigmatic Russian empire introduced caviar to the world as a food of “legend and tradition” (p. 164). This strange obsession has left the sturgeon in a compromised and uncertain position, deserving of Saffron’s title. The book is a rich historical account featuring several colorful interviews that read almost more like a work of investigative journalism than an academic publication. I greatly enjoyed Saffron’s writing and would recommend Caviar to readers looking for a captivating history of a well-loved delicacy or looking to engage in conversation surrounding the sustainability of the modern luxury market.

Emma Fisk is a sophomore in the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Texas at Austin, currently pursuing her B.A. in Government. She hopes to attend law school with a focus on intellectual property law.

Flawed Assertions and Questionable Evidence: A Critical Examination of Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States

In his seminal work, A People’s History of the United States, Howard Zinn presents a compelling alternative perspective on American history. In an important article, Professor Aaron O’Connell, who teaches at UT, made a powerful case for using Zinn in the classroom:

To take my students through the long history of violence in America, I use a book that has been in the news lately: Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. This book is well-known – even controversial, both inside academia and out – partly because Zinn tackles some of the sacred cows of America’s national mythos: Is Christopher Columbus better remembered as a genius sailor or a genocidaire? What does it say about the progression of liberty that single women in New Jersey had the vote until 1807 when it was stripped from them by an all-male state legislature? Most importantly, why have so many history books focused almost exclusively on the stories of white, wealthy men whose total numbers have never approached half – or even a quarter – of the country’s total population?

Zinn’s answer to all of these questions is that there have always been long-standing structural inequalities in American society that have shaped everything from the writing of laws to the ways they are interpreted to the stories we tell today about the nation’s past. It is nice to think of America as one big family, Zinn explains, but telling the story that way conceals fierce conflicts in that family’s history “between conquerors and conquered, masters and slaves, capitalists and workers, dominators and dominated in race and sex. And in such a world of conflict, a world of victims and executioners, it is the job of thinking people, as Albert Camus suggested, not to be on the side of the executioners.”^[1]

In a class I took with Professor O’Connell, he challenged us to assess Zinn. In this article, I evaluate some of the flaws primarily related to his framing of economic issues that I saw within Zinn’s text. This does not diminish Professor O’Connell’s broader point that Zinn’s perspective is a valuable supplement to our historical education, but hopefully, it adds to the discussion and provides additional nuance in evaluating Zinn’s work.

cover of Howard Zinn's "A People's History of the United States."

Zinn sets out to challenge entrenched views of American history and to debunk what O’Connell describes as some of “the sacred cows of America’s national mythos.” While he succeeds in part, Zinn’s narrative reveals certain flaws. While I applaud Zinn’s goal, it is also important to maintain a fair and objective portrayal of events. I contend that Zinn’s selective use of evidence compromises the overall credibility of his narrative, exposing a lack of both an objective attitude and a comprehensive understanding of the economic system. Zinn asserts that, for government officials, the economy is “a short-hand term for corporate profit,” and their economic policies are primarily directed towards “the needs of corporations.”[2] This is a central strand of Zinn’s critiques, and it’s here that I will focus my attention.

In supporting this sweeping argument about government priorities, Zinn neglects many crucial aspects of economics, such as the global events that were out of the control of the US government. For instance, his depiction of big oil and gas corporations’ profits and the public’s struggles with inflation and unemployment in the 1970s lacks a nuanced understanding of the economic factors contributing to the stagflation of 1973–1975 and 1979–1983. According to Alan Blinder, the 15^th vice chairman of the Federal Reserve and an influential economist, the inflation of 1973 was pushed by a combination of special factors such as the food shock, the energy crisis, and wage-price control.^[3]The first two factors were predominantly products of foreign conflicts and natural disasters beyond the control of the US government. Thus, a more critical approach would involve evaluating how well the US government managed the crisis by comparing its economic status to similar nations rather than hastily attributing domestic economic hardship solely to the government. Zinn’s work is powerful and illuminating, yet I think he sacrifices accuracy when it comes to economics as he tries to fit everything into one narrative.

Zinn tends to single out the United States, but detailed data from the Foreign Labor Statistics program shows that all major developed countries suffered from a surge in unemployment from 1974 to 1975.^[4] Although the US had the highest unemployment rate in 1975–1976 and was affected the most by the stagflations of the 1970s, its economic state gradually improved during the 1980s. The unemployment rate remained one to two percent lower than in Canada and Europe, whose rates were generally lower than in the US back in the 1960s. Indeed, from 1960 to 2000, US unemployment rates improved from relatively high levels to the lowest among the G7 countries.^[5] This suggests that the American establishment produced significant gains for people when it came to matters of employment. Zinn might argue that such decent economic standing was built on the expansion of American imperialism—a plausible assumption. However, this would contradict Zinn’s previous claim that government-promoted economic interests were solely the interests of corporations, as the majority of Americans seemed to have benefited.

book cover for "a people's history of the United States."

In broad terms, Zinn views any abolition of price regulation or adjustment of corporate tax as a tool to advance corporate interests. The wage-price control system implemented by President Nixon was undeniably a deliberate policy adopted by the establishment. Zinn appears to endorse price control for its popularity, considering that he criticizes President Carter‘s end of price regulation as a departure from populism and embracing big oil and gas interests.^[6] However, Zinn overlooks the start of this price regulation—Nixon’s wage-price control policy and the Emergency Petroleum Allocation Act. This legislation established a strict oil price regulation, setting a price ceiling of $5.25 a barrel for all the oil coming from wells drilled before 1973.^[7] Instead of building his argument on this widely recognized government policy, Zinn presents a document meant only for the Arabian-American Oil Corporation’s internal deliberations to argue that “the system” always works in favor of the oil corporations.^[8] This flawed presentation of evidence weakens his argument, as Zinn selects a corporate discussion, lacking meaningful implications about the government’s attitude, over an act passed by Congress as his evidence. Interestingly, the document Zinn cites was revealed by a Senate subcommittee investigating multinational corporations, indicating the government’s confrontational attitude towards oil corporations. It seems to contradict Zinn’s narrative of a government corrupted by the business world.

Line at an American gas station, June 1979. — *American drivers lining for gas,* June 1979.
Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Furthermore, Zinn fails to acknowledge the disastrous effect of price regulation or comprehend the economics at play. Dr. Blinder identifies “the imposition and subsequent demise of wage-price controls” as the primary driving factor behind the 1973–1975 double-digit stagflation. The wage-price control system accumulated inflation as it struggled to maintain regulation, contributing to the dramatic price behavior in the market. As the price control system eventually collapsed, the surging catch-up inflation was released, leading to sharp accelerations and decelerations of nonfood and nonenergy prices in 1974.^[9]

Zinn’s critique of corporate tax deduction, based on the correlation between low capital investment and lower corporate taxes in 1973–1975 and 1979–1982, ignores the context of double-digit stagflation during both time periods.^[10] It’s far more likely that low capital investment reflects a weak economy, with the tax deduction being the government’s response to stimulate economic growth—an interaction evident, for example, in the relationship between governmental policies and national GDP during the COVID-19 recession.

In summary, Zinn selectively presents evidence while either disregarding or downplaying instances when the president disagreed with Congress, Democrats clashed with Republicans, or the primary goals of governmental policies were genuinely aligned with social well-being. Considering Zinn’s own sentiments expressed in his opening chapter, where he observes that nations are not communities and individuals cannot be viewed as a homogenous collective group, it becomes evident that what Zinn perceives as the establishment—the wealthy and government officials serving their interests—is hardly a unified group with shared objectives. Recent political events underscore that conflicts among political factions do not necessarily benefit the American people. Quite the opposite, a yearning for a return to an era characterized by political stability and harmony is discernible among many citizens.

Editorial cartoon drawing showing President Jimmy Carter as the biblical David confronting Goliath labeled "Inflation." By Edmund S. Valtman, 1978. — Editorial cartoon drawing showing President Jimmy Carter as the biblical David confronting Goliath labeled “Inflation.” By Edmund S. Valtman, 1978.
Source: Library of Congress.

After reading A People’s History of the United States, I find that Zinn’s argument is persuasive in some ways but also suffers from selective use of evidence and inconsistency. He condemns Carter for demolishing price regulation yet does not credit Nixon for its creation; he talks about how the public should know that welfare only took a tiny part of the taxes, yet in the previous chapter, he boosts the success of popular movements marked by social spending taking thirty-one percent of the budget; he observes how the establishment used the press as a tool to inflame public opinion, yet he relies heavily on polls conducted by the press to directly reflect the supposed people’s will. While Zinn has undoubtedly covered essential and neglected facets of history, his selective and hypocritical use of evidence erodes the credibility of his major claims.

How can readers trust a historian to reveal the true history when he himself omits crucial contexts for the evidence he presents? How can people believe in the validity of a thesis arguing that specific economic concerns are the driving factor behind decision-making when the author himself cannot acknowledge the nuances of the modern economic system? How can people agree with Zinn’s cynical assessment of our political system when he himself fails to appreciate the complexity of it? The delicate balance between acknowledging historians’ inevitable personal bias, as Zinn himself admits, and maintaining an objective stance seems to elude Zinn. His work, while groundbreaking in many respects, may be perceived as crossing the line into the realm of subjective opinion on many occasions. Ultimately, this raises questions about the extent to which readers can trust Zinn’s narrative as an objective and comprehensive account of American history.

In the end, I’m more critical than Professor O’Connell, but I share his belief that Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States is a valuable text for the classroom. Despite its flaws, Zinn’s book is worth reading and writing about because it fulfilled the primary goal of academic research: it got me thinking.

Yunzhou Lu is an undergraduate computer science major who is also pursuing a Core Text and Ideas certificate as well as a history minor. He is a history enthusiast and is particularly interested in economic history, global diplomacy, and premodern military history. Yunzhou hopes to keep history learning a lifelong passion that brings fulfillment to his free time and gives him lenses through which to view contemporary issues.

^[1] Aaron O’Connell, “Why Study the Ugliest Moments of American History? Reflections on Teaching Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States,” Not Even Past, October 3, 2020,

Why Study the Ugliest Moments of American History? Reflections on Teaching Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States

^[2] Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States (HarperPerennial, 2015), 537-539 https://files.libcom.org/files/A%20People%27s%20History%20of%20the%20Unite%20-%20Howard%20Zinn.pdf

^[3] Alan Blinder, “The Anatomy of Double-Digit Inflation in the 1970s”, Inflation: Causes and Effects, January 1982, 268-269, http://www.nber.org/chapters/c11462

^[4] Constance Sorrentino and Joyanna Moy, “U.S. labor market performance in international perspective”, Monthly

Labor Review, June 2002, 17

^[5] Sorrentino and Moy, “U.S. labor market performance in international perspective”, 17-18

^[6] Zinn, A People’s History, 532

^[7] Christopher R. Knittel, “The Political Economy of Gasoline Taxes: Lessons from the Oil Embargo”, Tax Policy and the Economy 28, no.1 (2014):105-106, https://doi.org/10.1086/675589

^[8] Zinn, A People’s History, 511

^[9] Blinder, “The Anatomy of Double-Digit Inflation in the 1970s,” 266-268

^[10] Zinn, A People’s History, 540

Introducing CineMAP: Visualizing Places of Japanese Film: A talk by Jonathan E. Abel

For fans of any movie or television show shot on location, there’s always a thrill when visiting, in person, the same places your favorite characters have been. Fans often share the locations in blogs or other forums, and metropolises like New York and Los Angeles have tours that take you to where famous scenes from movies and shows took place. There are even a few apps that show you the filming locations around you or at your travel destination.

The CineMAP project does something similar but is rooted in academic research and teaching. CineMAP is a database and visualization tool that Dr. Jonathan E. Abel and his colleagues from Penn State University have been working on for the past ten years. Using a variety of online sources, they have created a database of films from Japan, Germany, France, and Pennsylvania from the early twentieth century to the present.

While the database and forthcoming website give the locations for films, one of the larger goals of the project is to change the way that we think about and study film. Film studies often break down movies based on time[1]: how long a scene lasts, the number of scenes that focus on a specific topic or location, or the frequency of scene length throughout an entire film. Instead, Abel wants us to think about films in terms of space, such as breaking down how a scene is staged on screen, mapping theaters and cinemas around cities to study the reception of movies, and exploring where films are shot when on location. Pulling information from “official” sources, like production studio websites, as well as “unofficial” sources, like IMBD and prefecture film offices[2], Abel and his team have created a large database of movies that were filmed in Japan, either by Japanese studios or foreign studios filming in the country.

What can such a large database of movies tell us about Japanese films or movies filmed in Japan? In a fascinating presentation, Abel talked about three different ways to use this information to dig deeper into film. His first example focused on the role the physical location assumed for the audience. Across the thirty Godzilla movies, the buildings within the scenes played an important role in connecting the audience to the monster’s destruction. For instance, one of the theaters in which the very first movie debuted was also in the background of Godzilla’s destruction, giving an added sense of fear to moviegoers as they sat in that same theater, seemingly watching Godzilla destroying the city outside. The changing locations over time can also help to highlight the historical gaps within the movies, such as when the Diet building (which houses the national legislature) from the 1940s showed up again in a Godzilla film from the 2020s. The original Diet building no longer exists, so it was digitally recreated for the recent film – something many without background knowledge of Japan would not know, but something that would stand out when studying the filming locations.

Abel’s second example compared the locations of filmographies by three famous directors. By placing the database information on a map, scholars can study where directors chose to film and investigate any patterns that show up. This could also be expanded to explore where films were shot over time more generally, especially within larger cities that quickly expanded outwards during the twentieth century, like Tokyo. One interesting instance Abel found was that many Nikkatsu[3] films from 1955 to 1965 were shot along a specific train line. Looking closer, Abel found a common thread in the movies that tied this line, the Odakyu train line, to ideas of escaping from the modern city or to the big city. He also found a much more practical explanation: one of Nikkatsu’s studios was built at the end of the Odakyu line in 1954, making filming along the line much easier than in other locations.

A poster invitation to Dr. Abel's lecture at the IHS, 2.12.2024

Finally, historians can use the platform to do a deep dive into locations in a single film. Abel used the 1983 Japanese film Family Game to demonstrate what we could learn by looking at the various specific locations in this way. He screened some clips from the film, showing that the family lived in some industrial location in Tokyo. The first short scene tried to show that the apartment complex they lived in was a newly developed and still relatively low-income part of town, demonstrated by an escort coming home just as the son was heading off to school. Upon closer study, Abel found that the apartment building was located on a man-made island constructed in Tokyo Bay that was built up and populated in the 1980s by up-and-coming families. Today that same location is home to expensive, high-rise apartments. By examining that specific location during the early 1980s, we now know that the family in the movie would have been considered part of the rising middle class. This is something that many Japanese movie-goers at the time would likely have understood, but viewers in the 2020s would likely have missed it because the location was poorly understood and has changed so much over time.

Datasets from CineMap — *Example of CineMap in action*

CineMAP is still a work in progress, but its database already has a range of search abilities that will be helpful for academics when it is released to the public. With help from Wikipedia synopses, researchers can search for a single term, and all the movies that include that term in their synopsis will populate. Searches can also be conducted based on genre, keywords, cast or crew names, and the percentage of women that make up the cast. The search results will also generate a timeline with the films that meet the search criteria, so a researcher would know if a certain genre was more popular during a stretch of time or if movies with certain keywords were filmed in certain time periods. The results populate on an interactive map, which gives film information with the place marker and allows researchers to look for spatial patterns.

The platform is large and interactive, but Abel points out that the information is only as good as the sources, and some sources give better information than others. For instance, some location information is more specific than others, with some giving an exact address while others give the general name of a town or city. In the future, Abel wants to open the tool up for possible crowd-sourcing to improve the location and film information, including building an app that would allow people to use the database and interactive map while also contributing corrections and additional information. Future plans also include running movie subtitles through a “tokenizer” to pull out place names and for better systems of coding the large amounts of information that are pulled through from the various websites. For fans of film or scholars who use film in their research, CineMAP will be a valuable application for finding locations where films were shot and for exploring research questions based on possible patterns in these same locations.

*Tracking the three masters: Mizoguchi Kenji, Ozu Yasujiro, and Kurosawa Akira*

A recent funding award from the Yanai Initiative at UCLA is helping CineMAP to switch platforms to create a better user interface. A conference later this year that will focus on the academics’ use of CineMAP will help Abel and his colleagues fine-tune the website for its eventual future release. Until then, it’s exciting to know that a tool like CineMAP exists and is making its way to public use. The fields of film studies, film history, and the broader field of digital humanities will surely benefit from this valuable platform.

Alyssa Peterson is the current IHS Graduate Research Assistant and a PhD Candidate in the History department. Her work focuses on the history of science, medicine, and the environment in the early modern British-Atlantic world. Her dissertation examines how British chemists and physicians used earthquakes and other natural disasters happening in Jamaica, North America, and England to better understand the composition of air over the long eighteenth century.

Jonathan E. Abel serves as an Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Japanese Studies at Penn State University. His teaching and scholarly interests focus on questions of global modernism, literary reception, translation studies, film studies, new media, and literary and cultural theory. He was the Director of the Global and International Studies Program at Penn State from 2016-2022. He is currently Associate Director of the Center for Humanities and Information at Penn State. For the academic year 2022-2023, he was a Woodrow Wilson Center Fellow. His recent book, The New Real: Media and Mimesis in Japan from Stereographs to Emoji (University of Minnesota Press, 2023), shows how cultural products reflect, refract, and change the world through their mediations.

[1] One of the more popular software is UChicago’s Cinemetrics, which helps the user track the length of scenes.

[2] A prefecture is roughly equivalent to an American state. It is one step below the national government but above the city and town governments.

[3] One of the oldest film studios in Japan and one of the largest in the country today.

_________________________________________________________________________________________

The Master in Bondage: Factory Workers in China, 1949-2019

In my research on the social history of modern China, I have long focused, first, on how ordinary people lived their everyday life in a local community, such as a village, a production team, a factory or a workshop within it, during times of historical change. And, second, on how their personal experiences differed from what the organizations or movements imposed on them intended to be, and from what the master narratives told us about the events that involved the masses of local people. Before writing about factory workers in post-1949 China, I had published two books on peasant communities and agrarian changes in China before and after 1949, namely, Village Governance in North China, 1875-1936 (Stanford University Press, 2005) and Village China Under Socialism and Reform: A Micro-History, 1948-2008 (Stanford University Press, 2009). What I wanted to investigate in those two books was not so much about the formal, visible institutions operating in local communities, as it was about how such externally imposed institutions interplayed with the less visible, less formal institutions embedded in the village community to shape villagers’ day-to-day experiences.

I adopted a similar approach to studying factory workers. The Master in Bondage pays equal attention to both formal institutions and the subtle, less visible workplace practices. Its goal is not to assess whether the formal factory institutions succeeded or failed in executing their official functions as claimed by the state. Instead, it aims to explain how the imposed policies, systems, regulations, or organizations interacted with local practices and social relations to dictate worker performance in everyday production and factory politics.

Book cover of "Vilage government in north China, 1875-1936."

Book cover for "Village China under Socialism and Reform, a micro-history, 1948-2008."

The approach I employed in this book can be characterized as substantivist, meaning it seeks to contextualize formal, legal systems within the broader framework of informal relations and practices. It departs from the formalist approach that is often found in past studies, which focuses primarily on formal institutions and interprets individuals’ behavior as derivative from such institutions. For example, the “egalitarian” nature of the wage system in state-owned factories in the Maoist era lead many to believe that worker performance in production was necessarily subpar and inefficient; and the cadres’ extensive power in factory management also caused many to deduce their relationship with workers as one of domination and subordination. Workers in this light appeared to be either powerless and susceptible to cadre abuses or seeking favoritism from the powerful.

I do not deny the existence of issues such as inefficiency in production or favoritism in cadre-worker relations; they did indeed exist with varying intensity across different factories and time periods. My point is that factory life was much more complex and multifaceted than the formalist perspective suggests. Factory workers inhabited a social environment in which a diverse range of formal institutions and informal practices intermingled, both constraining and motivating them as individuals and as a group; their strategies and actions were far more varied and adaptable than what one would find in the formalist literature in academic publications or in the discourse prevalent in mainstream media in post-Mao China, which was often influenced by recently imported neoclassical economic theories.

Workers in a "commune candle" factory, China, 1979. — Workers in a “commune candle” factory, China, 1979.
Source: Library of Congress.

This book is based primarily on interviews with 97 retirees from mostly large-size, state-owned factories in different parts of China (with a few exceptions of locally owned “collective firms”), which my collaborators and I conducted in 2012-2013. The method of using workers’ oral account for studying factory politics in contemporary China can be traced to the 1970s and early 1980s and even earlier, when the availability of refugees and emigrees from mainland China made it possible for researchers to conduct interview with them in Hong Kong.

In comparison, doing such interviews three decades later has its own merits and shortcomings. The shortcomings are obvious: for our informants, factory life under Mao belonged to the remote past, and many details about their experiences on the shop floor had faded from memory and become increasingly inaccurate as time went by. The merit is that, having experienced enterprise reforms and restructuring in the post-Mao years, which brought to them both improvements in living conditions and unprecedented frustrations because of unemployment or insecurity of livelihood, the workers’ attitude towards the Maoist past could be ambivalent: a mix of nostalgia and resentment are both present in their memories. Overall, however, a more balanced account of their life in state firms can be expected in comparison to the views expressed by the emigres of the 1970s and early 1980s, who witnessed huge contrasts between Hong Kong and mainland China, and whose account of their recent past tended to be highly selective and dismissive.

Book cover for "The master in bondage, factory workers in China, 1949-2009."

This book also draws on documents on factory governance preserved at the Nanjing Municipal Archives. Similar issues exist with the archives from the Mao era. Most of the files were produced by the management or “mass organizations” (trade union, the staff and workers’ congress – usually known as the SWC, and the youth league) of state firms. While they provide interesting details about the implementation of state policies and the firm’s own initiatives or about the activities of the mass organizations, these documents were written primarily to prove the necessity and effectiveness of such policies or measures, and the examples included in these reports were highly selective and one-sided in many cases. Therefore, caution is necessary when using these files. Despite the various flaws with oral histories and official archives, however, these sources turned out to be immensely valuable and informative for forming a well-rounded interpretation of factory politics in Maoist China and afterward.

My interpretation in this book revolves around “substantive governance,” a concept that I initially conceived in Village Governance in North China and further developed in this book. Instead of focusing on the officially defined goals and functions of factory institutions and evaluating their effectiveness by looking at how the operational realities of those institutions met their officially stated objectives, this concept instead emphasizes the real purposes of factory institutions and how their everyday operations fulfilled the factory’s actual needs in maintaining its functionality.

Take the trade union and the Worker’s Congress or SWC. By official definitions, these two organs were intended to be tools for workers to exercise their rights as the “masters” of the factory, enabling them to participate in the factory’s decision-making process and supervise enterprise management; post-Mao reformers further hailed these two organs as mechanisms of “grassroots democracy” presumably leading China to the future of political democratization at higher levels. But a close examination of the actual functioning of these two institutions shows that their only purposes were to satisfy workers’ everyday needs in production and subsistence in order to ensure the factory’s smooth operation; they had little to do with promoting workers’ social standing or political rights. Thus, while those institutions appeared to be a failure in the eyes of people aspiring to be the masters of the factory or promoting democracy in China, they worked effectively in satisfying the real-world needs of both the workers and the factory.

A propaganda poster shows the bright future of a post-Maoist China with a modern consumer society and a one-child family, 1982.
Source: Wikimedia Commons

At the core of the concept of substantive governance lies my analysis of the mechanisms of dual equilibrium in regulating worker performance in everyday production and power relations. Contrary to the prevailing narrative in China’s mainstream media that assumed widespread inefficiency in production in state firms because of egalitarianism in labor remuneration, most workers turned out to be neither fully dedicated to production as the Maoist representation of them as masters of the factory suggested, nor as slacking and negligent as the pro-reform elite made people believe after the death of Mao. In fact, how workers performed in production was subject to the functioning of two distinct sets of factors that interwove to constrain as well as motivate them. One was the formal institutions of lifetime employment guarantees, the wage system, labor discipline, workshop regulations, supervision by group leaders, daily political study meetings, and the nomination of advanced producers and model laborers, among others. The second was informal factors on the shop floor, such as peer pressure, group identity, and work norms among coworkers.

These two sets of factors converged to form a social context in which workers developed their strategies for everyday production. As our interviewees repeatedly confirmed, both those who aspired to be model laborers and those who overtly shirked were few; instead, most of them worked hard enough to meet the minimum requirements of factory regulations and disciplines in order to avoid being openly censured or criticized by supervisors. At the same time, however, they also managed to conform to the informal norms and attitudes that prevailed on the shop floor to avoid being ridiculed or complained by their peers. An equilibrium thus prevailed in labor relations, which explains why industrial production at the micro level was neither as terrible as taken for granted in the post-Mao discourse nor as efficient as the Mao-era state propaganda claimed.

Mao-era Propaganda Poster from 1956 Featuring a Chinese Typist.
The poster reads, “Whatever Work Aims to Complete and Not to Fail the Five-Year Plan, All That Work Is Glorious!”
Source: Wikimedia Commons.

A similar equilibrium prevailed in power relations between cadres and workers in state-owned factories. Here again, two sets of factors worked together to dictate their relationship, giving rise to an equilibrium in it. One was the formal institutions of the SWC and the trade union, including the system of appeal by letter and visits to expose cadres’ injustice, the factory management’s lack of power to fire workers and change their wage grades, workers’ guaranteed lifetime employment and wage grades pegged with seniority, workers’ superiority in political discourse, and the recurrent political movements that target corrupt cadre

The second included informal factors and practices such as personal loyalty and friendship, cadres’ care of personal reputation among subordinates, their dependence on worker collaboration to fulfill production targets, and workers’ taken-for-granted rights to subsistence. It was in this context of both formal and informal institutions that workers defined who they were and how to deal with cadres. Contrary to the conventional wisdom that assumed the predominance of the patron-client network in factory politics, cadres’ favoritism was limited in nominating workers for honorary titles or recruiting new party members and even more difficult in determining wage raises, bonus distribution, and housing allocation. In fact, not only was it difficult for the cadres to practice favoritism openly, but given the huge risk of doing so under immense pressure from both above and below, most of our interviewees also believed it unnecessary to seek cadres’ peculiar favor and protection, given the security of their job and livelihood. Instead of workers’ personal dependence on cadres, what prevailed between the two sides was an overall balanced relationship, each having their own strength and leverage in dealing with the other.

*Workers in a glass factory, with baskets of glassware, in Shanghai, China, 1979. Source: Library of Congress.*

The dual equilibrium in production and power relations suffered severe damage and, in many state firms, even disappeared during the first few years of the Cultural Revolution due to the chaos or stoppage of production and the paralysis of factory management as workers engaged in Red Guard rebellions and seizures of power, and most factory leaders stepped down. It re-emerged in the early 1970s when political disorder subsided, and most factories rebuilt their leadership, restored production, and reinforced labor discipline. However, it eventually collapsed in the 1980s and early 1990s as a result of economic reforms, which granted individual enterprises the power to hire and lay off workers and increase their wage or bonus payments. It was during this period of enterprise transformation, rather than in the years before it, as many of our informants observed, that cadres’ favoritism prevailed because of their greatly increased power in labor management and workers’ weakened position in relation to them. Similarly, it was also during the years of enterprise reform, rather than before it, that workers’ slacking and negligence in production became a severe problem, as many of them began to seek opportunities outside the factory for extra income and as bonus payment became the only tool to incentivize them.

The equilibrium in production and power relations was completely gone in the late 1990s and early 2000s when most state-owned factories were incorporated and turned into private businesses. Instead of being the master of their factory, a political status that they had enjoyed, at least rhetorically, in the Maoist past, workers became the vulnerable “master” of their own labor only, subject to enterprise management’s complete control and reckless abuses in the absence of effective labor law and an autonomous trade union to protect them.

Interestingly, it was during the privatization of state firms, when workers were confronted with the immediate danger of losing their privileges of lifetime employment and security of livelihood, that for the first time, they used the SWC as the legal weapon to defend their rights, as best seen in the case of Zhengzhou Paper Mill. In October 1999, workers of this paper mill occupied factory buildings when the mill was to be sold to a private firm. They further convened a SWC meeting to pass a resolution that demanded the termination of the merger. The workers succeeded when the city government approved the termination to avoid the worsening of the situation, but it refused to restore the paper mill into a state-owned enterprise as the workers originally requested. Instead, the paper mill was transformed into a shareholding company in the end, with its management board members elected by the company’s SWC.

Factory in China at Yangtze River, 2008.
Source: Wikimedia Commons.

But such cases of successful resistance were rare. Millions of workers of former state firms suffered unemployment after their factories were privatized, and they were compensated with only a one-time payment by the new owners of the factories to “buy out” their seniority and the pension plan that came with it. Those who were lucky enough to be re-employed in the newly restructured firm became wage workers only, where the roles of the trade union and the SWC were marginalized and even nonexistent at all. Even less fortunate were the millions of migrant workers, who were hired as informal and temporary labor force, lacking the protection of labor law and eligibility for welfare benefits. While enterprise reforms propelled China’s industrial expansion and economic growth, workers’ income levels and living conditions, while improving over time, lagged steadily behind the growth of wealth they created.

In recent years, China has made huge efforts to upgrade its manufacturing industry and narrow its technological gap with the most advanced industrial nations. Key to this task, as many in China have observed, is the need to maintain a large, stable rank of skilled workers. Cultivating “the spirit of craftsmanship” (gongjiang jinsheng) among the workers thus has been a popular slogan that the party-state has vigorously promoted in its quest for China’s rise as an “advanced manufacturing power” (zhizhaoye qiangguo). Increasing workers’ wages and providing them with legal protection are no doubt effective tools to incentivize the workers. However, to make them not only technically competent but also fully dedicated to the workplace requires the cultivation among the new generation of the Chinese working class a shared sense of belonging to the workplace and pride over their workmanship. There is still a long way to go for a new type of equilibrium to resurface on the shop floor, where workers are treated more as members of a community than simply wage earners.

Huaiyin Li, Ph.D. from UCLA, teaches modern Chinese history at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of Village Governance of North China, 1879-1936 (Stanford, 2005), Village China under Socialism and Reform: A Microhistory, 1948-2008 (Stanford, 2009), Reinventing Modern China: Imagination and Authenticity in Chinese Historical Writing (Hawaii, 2012), The Making of the Modern Chinese State, 1600-1950 (Routledge, 2020), and The Master in Bondage: Factory Workers in China, 1949-2019 (Stanford, 2023). His latest article on the origins of Chinese civilization appears in The Journal of Asian Studies (Vol. 82, No.4, November 2023).

Review of Up Against the Law: Radical Lawyers and Social Movements, 1960s-1970s, (2022) by Luca Falciola

The legal cases of activists, including Angela Davis, Huey Newton, and the Chicago Seven, captured public attention throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Crowds crammed into courtrooms to watch these high-profile cases unfold, and many people became directly involved in efforts to free the defendants. While the United States has a long history of trying and imprisoning political dissidents, the decades following World War II witnessed a surge of public interest in such cases and the development of large and dynamic defense campaigns. Yet, the role that attorneys played in these campaigns—and within the broader movements that they represented—has been largely overlooked by historians.

As Luca Falciola reveals in his recent book, Up Against the Law: Radical Lawyers and Social Movements, 1960s-1970s, lawyers were indispensable to the progressive social movements of the period. They used their skills to defend radical activists who challenged the legitimacy of mainstream political institutions and promoted structural social change. Not only did these lawyers file briefs and argue in court, but they also formed personal relationships with their clients, participated in public protests, and became members of the organizations they represented. Most significantly, radical lawyers rejected conventional legal practices and transformed the courtroom into a platform for making political—rather than purely legal—arguments.

Up Against the Law documents this shift in legal practice and the emergence of what Falciola calls “militant litigation.” Attorneys associated with the National Lawyers Guild (NLG) played an outsized role in this process, and Falciola highlights this group’s members, politics, and programs. Founded in 1937, the NLG experienced a resurgence during the 1960s and became one of the leading progressive legal associations. Its members represented a range of activists, including those involved in the civil rights, anti-war, labor, Chicano, and prison movements. Lawyers affiliated with the NLG not only became actively involved in some of these movements, but they also gained new perspectives on the law and developed innovative legal strategies.

Ferdinand Pecora, New York Supreme Court Justice and former Counsel of the Senate Banking Committee, after being elected as the President of the National Lawyers Guild, 2.22.38.
Source: Library of Congress

A range of sources informs Falciola’s argument, including court transcripts, organizational records, NLG literature, and perhaps most significantly, memoirs and correspondence from radical lawyers like William Kunstler and Charles Garry. As these sources reveal, involvement in the Southern civil rights movement was one of the most radicalizing experiences for NLG members. During the sit-in movement of the early 1960s, lawyers from northern states traveled south to Mississippi and Alabama, where they provided logistical and financial support to their southern counterparts. The brutal reality of the Jim Crow legal system and the lack of federal intervention shocked the organization’s predominantly white membership.

Traditional defense strategies proved futile in this environment, and the NLG was forced to develop a streamlined process for disbursing bail funds and representing the thousands of activists arrested. In Falciola’s words, this early movement work offered “a laboratory in which a new relationship between lawyers and activists could be forged” (p.279-80). Over the following decades, radical lawyers built upon and refined this relationship as they defended student activists, anti-war protesters, and other political prisoners.

These shifts within the NLG were especially visible in the courtroom. As radical lawyers began to see the law itself as an instrument of oppression, they experimented with strategies to minimize the impact of racism and discrimination in jury trials. They crafted questions designed to eliminate prejudiced jurors during the selection process, worked to secure changes of venue when a local climate proved hostile, secured testimony from expert witnesses, and undermined the authority of the prosecution by constructing compelling narratives about cases. Younger lawyers and law students also challenged traditional professional standards; they dressed casually, disregarded courtroom decorum, and questioned the hierarchical nature of their own organizations. As Falciola reveals, these critiques gave way to some more radical experiments in alternative legal practices. Lawyers in New York City and San Francisco, for instance, went so far as to create legal collectives that provided free services to clients and promoted public legal education.

Civil Rights Protesters and Woolworth's Sit-In, Durham, NC, 2.10.1960. — Civil Rights Protesters and Woolworth’s Sit-In, Durham, NC, 2.10.1960.
Source: Wikimedia Commons

Using the law as a tool to promote radical social change was an inherently contradictory and unsustainable goal. As Falciola writes, “An effective defense strategy was often incompatible with a full-fledged critique of the legal system or with a truly alternative law practice. Yet radical lawyers worked undoubtedly to combine these two goals and–at least for a while–they seemed to succeed” (p.79). Much of this early success began to unravel by the late 1970s. Like the activists they represented, these lawyers’ conflicts were exacerbated by internal disagreements and political repression. Yet, they would leave an indelible mark on the practice of law through their radical critiques, innovative strategies, and personal commitment to their clients’ causes.

This book provides an excellent overview of the mid-twentieth century’s major progressive social movements while shedding light on the underappreciated role of lawyers within these movements. The book’s impressive scope invites further research on specific cases that appear only briefly in the text while also providing a useful framework for conceptualizing the relationship between radical lawyers and their clients. While the book works well as an overview, Falciola does sacrifice breadth for depth in several places. In discussing the histories and platforms of organizations like the Black Panther Party and the American Indian Movement, for instance, Falciola glosses over important context and nuances. In some cases, he comes across as overly critical.

While the book’s focus on the NLG anchors the text and allows Falciola to examine legal cases associated with a wide range of social movements, it also leaves some questions unanswered. Radical lawyers who worked for other groups receive only brief consideration, while attorneys drawn to radical causes through personal relationships are almost entirely excluded. The cases of political prisoners Assata Shakur and Angela Davis, for instance, receive only brief attention; Shakur was represented by her aunt, Evelyn Williams, and Angela Davis’s childhood friend, Margaret Burnham, worked on her defense. This focus on attorneys associated with the NLG also minimizes political prisoners’ critical role in crafting their own defense strategies.

*Assata Shakur. Source: Wikimedia Commons*

Ultimately, Up Against the Law offers readers a compact but thorough account of radical lawyers and social movements between the 1960s and 1970s. By emphasizing the key role that attorneys played in these movements, Falciola identifies the courtroom as an important site of protest and a space in which such movements were taking shape. Activists and lawyers transformed the courtroom into an arena where political ideas could be publicly debated. At the same time, they developed innovative strategies designed to put the criminal legal system on trial. Many of the ideas radical lawyers promoted—from client-centered law firms to more practical legal education—have gained currency in recent decades. In recounting this history, Falciola broadens our understanding of progressive social movements and their enduring impact on American jurisprudence. For this reason, the book is valuable and deserving of a wide readership.

Sarah Porter is a Ph.D. student in the Department of History at the University of Texas at Austin. She studies twentieth-century social movements, policing, and mass incarceration in the United States.

The Fellowship of the Tree Rings: A ClioVis Project

My grandparents and I looked down onto the vast Sonoran Desert from Mount Lemmon, north of Tucson, Arizona. At nearly 8,000 feet, quaking aspen, cottonwood, alder, and other tree species surrounded us—a stark contrast with the desert below. An audio guide played on my grandma’s Samsung Galaxy as we took in our surroundings. The voice, who I later learned is a singer named Joey Burns, told us about how researchers at the University of Arizona learned that fires are essential to healthy forests by studying tree rings.^[1] Burns continued, “Every tree you see around you has the story of its life hidden in its rings.”^[2]

Fast forward six years: Dr. Erika Bsumek sends me a podcast called The Fellowship of the Tree Rings, which explores connections between tree rings, hurricanes, the Golden Age of European Piracy, and even the Sugar Revolution.^[3] The podcast is based on research from Valarie Trouet, Marta Domínguez-Delmás, and Grant Harley, reconstructing 500 years of Caribbean hurricane records by studying tree rings.^[4] It is a remarkable resource that sheds light on the intersection between climate science and history.

A dendrochronological sample from a beam in Gödenroth Rathaus, Germany.
Source: Wikimedia Commons

Meeting at the Second American Dendrochronology Conference in Tucson, Arizona, near Mount Lemmon, the three researchers discussed how shipwreck records and tree ring data could be combined to reconstruct a history of hurricanes in the Caribbean.^[5] After successfully reconstructing a chronology, the researchers observed a dip in the number of hurricanes between 1645 and 1715.^[6] Trouet noticed that this correlates with what is known as the “Maunder Minimum,” a period of low solar radiation.^[7]

This made sense—less solar radiation meant cooler temperatures, which is not the ideal environment for forming hurricanes. Hurricanes thrive in environments with warm water and air.^[8] But why is the connection between the “Maunder Minimum” and a period of fewer hurricanes significant? The work of Trouet, Domínguez-Delmás, and Harley illustrates the ability of climate proxies to reveal new perspectives on history that would go otherwise unnoticed. Assistant Professor of History Melissa Charenko, whose research was influential in the creation of my project, defines climate proxies well in another article for Not Even Past. She writes:

Proxies are things like tree rings, ice cores, pollen, and lake sediments. They are material traces that indirectly reflect the climates of the past. For example, scientists can use tree rings to reconstruct past temperature and moisture. Or they can use the air bubbles trapped in ice to study the composition of the atmosphere through time.^[9]

In the case of The Fellowship of the Tree Rings, researchers used tree rings as a climate proxy to reconstruct a chronology of hurricanes in the Caribbean. Their use of climate proxies is especially interesting because of the subsequent historical connections they made using the chronology.

When looking at the larger history of the Caribbean, the lull in hurricane activity can be connected with an influx in Caribbean maritime activity, specifically within the context of the Sugar Revolution and Golden Age of European Piracy, which lasted roughly from 1650 to 1730.^[10] The Fellowship of the Tree Rings asserts that the sun—and, more broadly, the environment—played a vital role in both shaping and uncovering our past. By connecting solar phenomena like the “Maunder Minimum” to historical periods such as the Sugar Revolution, The Fellowship of Tree Rings illuminates the environment’s unseen hand in transforming human history. Furthermore, by understanding how Trouet, Domínguez-Delmás, and Harley used tree rings to provide insight into a larger Caribbean history, we can reconsider our natural surroundings as a burgeoning resource in explaining our past.

Sugar manufacture in the Antilles Isles, 1665.
Source: Library of Congress, LC-USZ62-72094 DLC

As I think back to my trip to the top of Mount Lemmon, I did not understand how impactful the story of a tree’s life might be to understanding human history. Human history is all too often framed as something separate from environmental history when really it should be seen as inextricable. The work of Trouet, Domínguez-Delmás, and Harley demonstrates that the environment and human history are forever intertwined.

All of this inspired me to build a timeline that contextualized their research.

For this project, I took The Fellowship of the Tree Rings podcast episode and mapped information from it onto an interactive timeline using ClioVis—an interactive timeline software that allows you to chart historical (or nonhistorical) concepts, events, and themes, emphasizing connections between them. The Fellowship of the Tree Rings lent itself well to the ClioVis format as the story contains various historical and scientific connections. After mapping the RadioLab episode, I went through the timeline and added my own events, connections, and eras to give greater context to the story.

While building this timeline, I became increasingly fascinated in how interconnected piracy, the Sugar Revolution, and hurricanes were. I learned about the complex relationship between empires and piracy. Although they were outlaws operating in maritime spaces, pirates paradoxically facilitated the expansion of empires by assisting in territorial conquests.^[11] This took place against the backdrop of the Sugar Revolution, where imperial powers scrambled to gain control of lucrative trading ports and colonies. European states sought to extract as much wealth as possible from the Caribbean. To do so, they plundered indigenous communities and violently exploited enslaved African labor.^[12]

As millions of enslaved Africans were forcibly taken by these empires from Africa to the Caribbean, some African people were able to escape and join pirate crews.^[13] This all took place during a historic period of low hurricane activity. When the idea of the climate shaping these events is added to the picture, it changes things. Did the significantly reduced threat of hurricanes to ships propel both the Sugar Revolution and piracy? In my timeline, I attempt to map out this complex history and answer that question.

As the timeline shows, contextualizing The Fellowship of the Tree Rings demonstrates the complex relationship between the “Maunder Minimum,” hurricanes, the Golden Age of European Piracy, and the Sugar Revolution. Between 1650 and 1715, a lull in hurricane activity associated with the “Maunder Minimum” transformed the environment. As maritime trade increased, ships simultaneously faced a comparatively lower threat of hurricanes than in other periods in history. This meant that hurricanes did not play their traditional role in the Caribbean ecosystem—their check on human activity was temporarily weakened.

Why is this important? Between 1650 and 1715, European colonial powers cemented their position in the Americas through the Sugar Revolution. European ships transported a massive amount of wealth—including enslaved African people—in the triangular trade, which helped fund Europe’s industrial revolution.^[14] The Fellowship of Tree Rings introduces the environment as playing a role in accelerating that process, sinking fewer fleets because of hurricane activity. This connection reveals how historical periods are impacted by changes in climate, providing us with new understandings of the larger societal shifts that come with them.

Valerie Trouet, Marta Domínguez-Delmás, and Grant Harley make use of tree rings as climate proxies to establish these connections and illustrate the value of studying human history in terms of the environment. Their study joins the growing field of paleoecologists who seek to learn about our climatic history from the natural world around us. In addition to learning about climate history as it is narrowly understood, these scholars are studying the environment to learn about systems of power, like the rise of the Sugar Revolution and its relationship with the Golden Age of European Piracy.

Historians often leave out an important voice in their stories: the planet. In The Fellowship of the Tree Rings, we hear about the environment’s role in one of the most formative time periods in the Western Hemisphere, the Sugar Revolution and the Golden Age of European Piracy. As we enter an era defined by human-made climate change, it is even more important to understand the historical relationship between social changes and the climate. Trouet, Domínguez-Delmás, and Harley tell us to first look at the environment itself.

Now, when I reflect on my work contextualizing The Fellowship of Tree Rings, I think again about what Joey Burns meant when he said, “Every tree you see around you has the story of its life hidden in its rings.”[15] A tree’s rings are not just the story of its life but a perspective on the history of the world around it.

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

^[1] Joey Burns, “Mt. Lemmon Science Tour” (Audio Tour, University of Arizona College of Science, 2015).

^[2] Burns.

^[3] Latif Nasser and Lulu Miller, “The Fellowship of the Tree Rings,” RadioLab, accessed October 25, 2023, https://www.radiolab.org/podcast/fellowship-tree-rings/transcript.

^[4] Valerie Trouet, Tree Story: The History of the World Written in Rings (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2022), 203.

^[5] Trouet, 201.

^[6] Trouet, 204.

^[7] Nasser and Miller, “The Fellowship of the Tree Rings.”

^[8] Hackney Blackwell, Amy, and Elizabeth P. Manar, eds. “Hurricane.” In U-X-L Encyclopedia of Weather and Natural Disasters, 398–407. Farmington Hills, MI: Gale, 2016.

^[9] Charenko, Melissa. “IHS Climate in Context: Climate by Proxy.” Not Even Past, December 15, 2020. https://notevenpast.org/ihs-climate-in-context-climate-by-proxy/.

^[10] Nasser and Miller, “The Fellowship of the Tree Rings.”

^[11] Robert C. Ritchie, Captain Kidd and the War against the Pirates (Cambridge (Mass.): London Harvard University Press, 1986), 15.

^[12] Richard S. Dunn, Sugar, and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, 1624-1713 (Chapel Hill, UNITED STATES: Omohundro Institute of Early American History & Culture, 1972), 50–68.

^[13] Aimee Wodda, “Piracy in Colonial Era,” in The Encyclopedia of Criminology and Criminal Justice, 1st ed. (Wiley, 2013), 2, https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118517383.wbeccj528.

^[14] Barry W. Higman, “The Sugar Revolution,” The Economic History Review 53, no. 2 (2000): 213.

^[15] Burns, “Mt. Lemmon Science Tour.”

Review of A Ritual Geology: Gold and Subterranean Knowledge in Savanna West Africa (2022) by Robyn d’Avignon

Using the goldfields in Kedougou in southeastern Senegal, historian and anthropologist Robyn D’Avignon, in Ritual Geology, explores the instrumentality of African indigenous knowledge systems in developing modern mining economies in French West Africa from the nineteenth century to the present. D’Avignon defines ritual geology as a set of practices, prohibitions, and cosmological engagements with the earth widely shared and cultivated across a regional geological formation in French West Africa. Her work affirms African agency in West Africa’s literature on the environment and challenges French colonial narratives about West Africa. For those familiar with the literature on mining in Anglophone West Africa, her work bridges an intellectual gap by providing the Francophone perspective on the development of mining in West Africa. Also, Ritual Geology significantly contributes to West Africa and Africa’s growing body of environmental history. It points to new avenues of research on vital themes in West African history, such as indigenous knowledge systems, religious syncretism, the historical relationship between artisanal and industrial mining, material culture, migration, and international relations, all within environmental history. D’Avignon’s work provides a conducive entry into the ecological history of French West Africa.

In Ritual Geology, D’Avignon sought to provide a narrative that gives agency to African mining culture in a relatively unbalanced field historiographically. Colonial narratives of geological exploration relegated African indigenous knowledge systems in mining economies to the base of the imperial pyramid while extolling Western knowledge systems as effective and environmentally friendly, which became a significant justification for colonization. Traditional mining was described as customary or artisanal and, thus, limited to a locale, whereas Western mining was industrial and global. This perception, d’Avignon argues, has gained popularity in the environmental histories of Africa, leading scholars to overlook the central role of African expertise in geological exploration in colonial and postcolonial periods. D’Avignon challenges common historiography by proposing to examine the region’s Ritual Geology. Regarding the role of Africans in modern geology in West Africa, d’Avignon identifies two threads: Africans as intellectual actors in the emergence of contemporary exploration geology and, second, Africans’ claim to mineral resources and trade as their natural rights.

Divided into seven chapters, d’Avignon begins by mapping Kedougou (the study area) and identifying the book’s main characters. The characters are presented as personalities (communities), corporate firms, and the political state (colonial and postcolonial). She argues that the various characters blur the line between legal and illegal artisanal and industrial extractions. However, she skillfully weaves different anthropological narratives of characters that paint a vivid picture of artisanal mining in Senegal. The study period witnessed women’s changing role in artisanal mining at Kedougou as the scale of dominance tilted to men from the colonial period to the present. Before colonial rule, women were key at both the exploitative and refinery stages of artisanal mining. However, excessive competition for geological resources during the colonial period led to the relegation of women to the base of production in artisanal mining. Another pattern of change was the emergence of Islam in the study area and how, over time, indigenous miners have been able to merge traditional religion and Islam in mining activities.

*The Kedougou region in Senegal. Source: Wikimedia Commons*

D’Avignon explores the development of West African ritual geology from the eighth to the twentieth century. Drawing on oral tradition, she recounts how, within the context of survival strategies, gold-producing communities occupied Birimian rocks over the past millennium and identifies three elements in West Africa’s ritual geology. First, the existing literature is silent on gold-producing communities and their relationship to mineralized land. She attributes this to scarcity of sources and argues that non-centralized societies controlled gold mining during this period. Second, the emergence of Islam in West Africa began the denigrating and racializing of African miners as pagans. Lastly, the West African communities of the Savanna and Sahel regarded gold as a dangerous occult substance tied to spirits, including malevolent ones. The latter position is very prevalent in the sub-region, and there is a need for further research into other Anglophone regions in West Africa. Another area that needs further research is the recent incursion of Chinese miners into West Africa. Questions like what led to the incursion and whether these developments have impacted artisanal mining need to be interrogated.

In examining the role of African expertise and technological knowledge in colonial mining economies, d’Avignon contests colonial narratives of mining and shows how it displaced indigenous mining economics in French West African colonies of Soudan, Senegal, and Burkina Faso. Colonial mining records presented Indigenous mining as inferior in expertise and technology and gave Indigenous miners as degrading the land and engaging in fetish activities. The latter was considered among the Abrahamic religions as barbaric and unconventional. D’Avignon maintains that French colonial narratives defined African mining customs based on a vertical and horizontal rights division. The former presents African technological machinery as inferior, and the latter explains how African mining rights are geographically limited. Irrespective of the negative tag, orpaillage customary rights triumphed over time, allowing indigenous peoples to earn personal wealth. Furthermore, D’Avignon discusses the ambivalent nature of traditional rights in French West Africa; those rights prohibited Africans from mining gold, but they were seasonal and usufruct rights that territorial administrators could rescind. Also, Africans were barred from accessing more stable mineral property rights because they were consigned with customary rights.

*Gold miners at work in the Tarkwa Gold Mine, Ghana, 1957. Source: Wikimedia Commons*

D’Avignon explores subterranean rights in gold mining among the Kedougou people (Southeastern Senegal) in the mid-2000s. She does this within the context of legitimizing indigenous mining and focuses on the discursive elements of claim-making. According to D’Avignon, there were four primary modes of Africans asserting their claim to gold mines. First, the claim to discover or produce. Second, orpailleurs (local miners) claim juura (mining sites) as a subsistence right. Thirdly, orpaillage claims to mine only surface mining. Finally, orpaillage have the right to gold mines because they have been marginalized from colonial to postcolonial periods. D’Avignon, therefore, documents the language of subterranean rights innovated by Africans.

Focusing on mining during the colonial period, d’Avignon explores French articulation in West Africa and how French geologists relied on it for their mining activities in the region. The period witnessed how the French capitalized on indigenous mining systems in mapping the geology of West Africa. However, it is essential to note that little has been revealed about the role and identity of West Africans who participated in the geological exploration. Here, d’Avignon’s work inserts African agency in developing geology in West Africa by examining the role of some key personalities from different regions. D’Avignon avers that West Africa’s ritual geology witnessed rapid evolution during the colonial period as orpailleurs adopted new techniques from European geologists and moved to new Birimian fields for mining.

Valdiodio Ndiaye (Interior Minister), Mamadou Dia (Prime Minister), and Léopold Sédar Senghor (President) at a reception at the palace of the Republic of Senegal, November 1960. — Valdiodio Ndiaye (Interior Minister), Mamadou Dia (Prime Minister), and Léopold Sédar Senghor (President) at a reception at the palace of the Republic of Senegal in November 1960.
Source: Wikimedia Commons.

The politics in the aftermath of World War II played a crucial role in the development of mining in West Africa. D’Avignon brings West African mining activities into the narratives of the Cold War. She extends our knowledge of the Cold War politics of mineral resources in the Congo basin to the Birimian regions of West Africa. The Cold War period witnessed an influx of mining companies into West Africa as newly independent states began to leverage competing offers for technical assistance to meet their national goals. The period thus saw interactions between African states and the main actors of the Cold War. For example, Senegal engaged Euro-American and Soviet geologists in mining initiatives. An essential highlight during this period was the criminalization of orpaillage in some independent West African states such as Senegal. Influenced by the politics of the Cold War, African leaders saw orpaillage as antithetical to the principles of African socialism and a hindrance to newly African governments’ efforts to build modern nationalized industries. However, a series of droughts in the 1970s made most West African leaders to reconsider the criminalization of orpaillage adopted at independence.

Ritual Geology is an excellent addition to the study of the relationship between African knowledge systems within the context of indigenous mining culture and Western (colonial) science in West Africa. The latter operates under the pretext of regulating the environment of settler communities. In this vein, settler communities function as “laboratories” where colonial theories are experimented. This is evident in the works of scholars such as Richard Grove, Peder Anker, Helen Tilley, and Megan Black, who illustrate how the colonial powers of the West established research stations in Africa as centers for ecological research. D’Avignon’s work, therefore, demonstrates the resilient nature of African knowledge systems of mining in French West Africa in the face of Western science incursion from the colonial period to the present. Again, D’Avignon shows how the collaboration between African mining culture and Western science has contributed to modern mining in French West Africa, a position that gives primacy to the instrumentality of ethnoscience in Africa.

Victor Angbah is a doctoral student in the Department of History at the University of Texas at Austin. His research interests include education, agriculture, and riverine histories of Africa. He is currently researching the symbiotic relationship between the Pra River and the Akan people of Ghana, West Africa, in the 19th and 20th centuries.

AudiAnnotate: Amplifying Audio & Video in Research, Scholarship, and Teaching (IHS Talk Report)

Historians take a lot of notes, especially when it comes to our primary sources. For those of us who are fortunate enough to have access to digitized sources, our notes keep a record of our thoughts on the material in question and its use in our research. For those using sources that are not digitized (and will not be any time soon), notes are their lifeline. The time spent in archives can produce many notes, and they are as unique as the person writing them. Some historians stick to pen and paper, while others use a range of electronic methods. Still others take an overwhelming number of photos to dig through later when the push to see as much as possible in a short amount of time has subsided. A final group, which includes myself, takes both photos and notes and incorporates both into programs like Tropy, where I can take notes in more detail on specific photos and sources.

But what about historians that don’t rely on written records? How do you take notes on audio records from early recordings, vinyl LP records, tapes, or 8MM videos? Even those that have been digitized by archives are still not conducive to note-taking. When audio sources can’t be readily or easily used in research – even with something as simple as the ability to take clear notes or collaborate with others on researching a source – then the sources stay inaccessible. In some cases, archives and libraries may discard inaccessible sources in order to make room for sources that people are more likely to use.[1]

Sound and Audio Archive, Finland, 1930s.
Source: Wikimedia Commons

Dr. Tanya Clement and her team have created an easy-to-use tool that addresses this problem. In the talk “AudiAnnotate: Amplifying Audio & Video in Research, Scholarship, and Teaching,” given at the Institute of for Historical Studies (IHS) in October, Clement presented AudiAnnotate, and its newest sister, AV-Annotate, both applications that help scholars take notes on audio and visual records. The talk is part of this year’s IHS research theme, “Experiencing Place: Interrogating Spatial Dimensions of the Human Past.”

How exactly does AudiAnnotate work? Despite what you might think, the tool does not rely on a supercomputer or a massive database. Instead, Clement and her team worked hard to avoid making AudiAnnotate more complicated than it needed to be. AudiAnnotate uses GitHub, a free online coding and collaboration site. Users upload their sources to their GitHub repository. The tool then works like a layer placed on top of the source, which connects notes taken in a spreadsheet program to the original audio source. Once the annotations from the spreadsheet are added to the application, they automatically sync and pop up when the audio is played. The user can then follow the notes as the recording plays or go directly to specific points within the source connected with a specific annotation. Dr. Clement put together this example to demonstrate how the final result could look.

A screenshot from Dr. Clement’s example.

While taking notes on an audio source takes time, it is no more work than taking notes on written sources that are then added or transferred to different programs or applications. For instance, I use Tropy to take notes on written sources page by page. My notes are not automatically generated or connected to each page when I place the original source within Tropy; instead, I have to go through each page and enter my notes. However, when I go back through it later, the work has already been done, and I can find and use the information easily. The same goes for AudiAnnotate: by inputting the annotations and completing all the work upfront, the notes are then easily and readily available for future use. Like many other note-taking programs currently available, there are step-by-step instructions for how to get started and use AudiAnnotate, as well as example projects that demonstrate what the program is capable of when used by researchers.

Because there is no sprawling, expensive-to-use database, and the underlying platform is a free repository, there is no cost to use AudiAnnotate, which is great for academics or history enthusiasts, who often struggle with high user costs. There is also no fear of the program losing or clearing the information you created or holding it hostage behind a paywall of some kind. By using GitHub, all notations made within the AudiAnnotate “layer” stay in your personal GitHub repository. Thus, AudiAnnotate designers have no access to individual repositories, and all information will stay within your own repository until you delete it on your own. The program also creates a static (i.e., unchanging) and sharable “webpage” for the source and notes, allowing scholars to have a stable way to view their work while also allowing collaboration on projects.

A screenshot from the example projects page.

AudiAnnotate is great for classroom collaboration projects. Programs like Perusall (for written texts) and Hypothesis (for websites) allow for collaborative note-taking and have been used to engage students with subjects and sources in various courses. AudiAnnotate can be used in similar ways, from demonstrating knowledge of film techniques or critiquing plot lines in film classes to showing students different types of non-written sources and allowing them to experience the difficulty of working with primary sources in history classes. The application also allows students to collectively work on a single source, upload all of their annotations into one place, and interact with each other’s thoughts and ideas.

Alongside their use in the classroom, such platforms permit collaborative work by libraries and archives. One of Dr. Clement’s goals is for libraries and digital archives to incorporate the collaborative ability of AudiAnnotate into their work. Imagine that, instead of relying on a few interns or workers to transcribe audio materials, archives used AudiAnnotate to allow scholars, researchers, and other interested parties to transcribe their sources. This is not a new idea; with projects like Citizen Archivist at the National Archives or Project PHaEDRA at the Smithsonian, crowdsourcing transcriptions can save institutions money and attract attention to their holdings. For all the internal pressure to digitize sources, combined with the external pressure from researchers who want access to digitized sources, AudiAnnotate serves as a cost-effective and collaborative way to answer the call to make sources more accessible.

Library Of Congress. Photoduplication Service, photographer. A man holds up a vinyl recording disc from a box of discs at the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. Washington D.C, ca. 1949. Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/item/2022886636/.

While filling a void within the accessibility of archives and sources, AudiAnnotate not only allows scholars a more meaningful interaction with sources but also gives students and archives the ability to collaborate in new and innovative ways on audio sources that would otherwise be stored away in the “back storage room” of the digital archive. By giving researchers an easier means of engaging with audio material, Clement and her team give all the “lost” audio material a chance to be retrieved, transcribed, used, and preserved for future generations.

Dr. Tanya Clement is an Associate Professor in the English Department and the Director of the Initiative for Digital Humanities at the University of Texas at Austin. These applications are products of the High-Performance Sound Technologies for Access and Scholarship (HiPSTAS), where Clement is the principal investigator (PI) and has been supported variously by National Endowment for the Humanities grants, an Institute for Museum and Library Services grant, a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) grant, an American Council of Learned Societies Digital Extension grant, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

[1] “In August 2010, the Council on Library and Information Resources and the Library of Congress issued a report titled The State of Recorded Sound Preservation in the United States: A National Legacy at Risk in the Digital Age. This report suggests that if scholars and students do not use sound archives, our cultural heritage institutions will not preserve them. “About,” High-Performance Sound Technologies for Access and Scholarship, accessed 13 December 2023, https://hipstas.org/about/.

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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.

Notes from the Field: Reflections on Dictatorship and Democracy in Argentina

In January 2023, I traveled nearly three hundred miles from my apartment in Buenos Aires to meet a stranger in Paraná, Argentina. We had chatted sporadically via WhatsApp, but I had agreed to spend a long weekend in her home months before we ever met. As I stepped off the bus, I had little sense of what awaited me, yet I was excited to finally meet Luz.

Our meeting happened by chance. A few months earlier, I started research in the Archivo General for my dissertation on President Raúl Alfonsín. He had led Argentina’s 1983 democratic transition, following the country’s longest and most brutal dictatorship. Between 1976 and 1983, the military junta forcibly disappeared an estimated 30,000 people. I had mentioned this project to Álvaro, another doctoral student working in the archives. That weekend he texted me from his friend’s home. “You’ll never believe this,” he said, “but my friend’s parents were friends of Alfonsín.” Accompanying his text was a photo of Luz, walking alongside the president. Álvaro said that he had told Luz about my project, and she had invited me to visit.

*Raúl Alfonsín and Enrique Pereira at a book talk in the Biblioteca Popular in Paraná (courtesy of Luz Buscema)*

Luz’s invitation was unexpected and unusual but also very exciting. I quickly followed up by WhatsApp. She promised to share books and photos from her late husband Enrique’s personal archives. Enrique had held local political office for Alfonsín’s party, la Unión Cívica Radical (the Radical Civic Union, UCR). He had also spent thirty years writing a history of the UCR and its important figures. After Enrique’s death, Luz had undertaken the process of editing and publishing his life’s work. Now she offered to share these materials and her memories of Alfonsín’s presidency with a curious historian from the United States.

*Luz alongside President Alfonsín (courtesy of Luz Buscema)*

Arriving in Paraná in January, I immediately felt overwhelmed. The bus ride from Buenos Aires lasted a little over eight hours, and Luz greeted my tired face with a flurry of questions. I worried that my Spanish would sound rough or that she would regret inviting me. On the way to her home, I tried to organize my thoughts. I had never collected interviews in such an intimate way, and I was anxious not to overstep or offend my host. Luz, on the other hand, seemed eager to begin sharing her stories.

I spent the first full day in Paraná sorting through Enrique’s papers and photos. As I read his work, I gained a better sense of his life and career. Luz helped fill in the gaps—the tiny details that remained outside of her husband’s papers. She remembered difficult years under the military dictatorship. Prior to 1976, Luz and Enrique had participated in local politics and labor unions. The military regime would criminalize these activities, and those who participated risked arrest, torture, or disappearance. Despite the high levels of repression, Luz and Enrique continued to engage in their old social circles and to organize secret political meetings.

*This framed photo of President Raúl Alfonsín greets all visitors to Luz’s home (author’s photo)*

A palpable sense of fear permeated Luz’s memories. She spoke of how the couple navigated the constant threat of repression. “We thought one of us should stay . . . stay alive to take care of the children,” Luz said. Often this meant that she stayed home while her husband attended meetings. Other times the couple ignored their fears and opened their own home as a space for political gatherings. They hosted a talk by future president Raúl Alfonsín at their home in 1981—two years before the dictatorship’s end. Luz explained how they had carefully instructed guests to arrive at varying times and in small groups to avoid suspicion. “The only one who wasn’t afraid was Alfonsín,” recalled Luz.

*Raúl Alfonsín in the backyard of Luz and Enrique in December 1981 (courtesy of Luz Buscema)*

Later, I asked Luz why she agreed to host meetings in her home despite her fears. “I always liked open doors,” she replied. Perhaps that also explained why she willingly invited a stranger to spend the weekend in her home. This openness struck me as remarkable, and our conversations enriched my project. Luz’s recollections might not become the focus of my dissertation, but her stories echo throughout its pages. Often overshadowed in the official narratives, experiences like those of Luz and Enrique are a powerful reminder of the everyday courage and resilience that quietly shaped Argentina’s path toward democracy.

Gabrielle Esparza is a Ph.D. candidate in Latin American history, with a focus on twentieth-century Argentina. Her dissertation revisits President Raúl Alfonsín’s democratic project to examine the intersection of welfare policy and democratization in post-dictatorship Argentina. She holds a B.A. in History and Spanish from Illinois College and received a Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship to Argentina in 2017. There she taught at the Universidad Nacional de La Plata. Gabrielle graduated with her M.A. in History from the University of Texas at Austin in 2020. Her master’s thesis The Politics of Human Rights Prosecutions: Civil Military Relations during the Alfonsín Presidency, 1983-1989 examines the evolution of President Raúl Alfonsín’s human rights policies from his candidacy to his presidency, which followed Argentina’s most repressive dictatorship.

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