Adam Clulow, Author at Not Even Past

In Memoriam: Dr. Laurie M. Wood

Laurie M. Wood was one of the foremost early modern global historians of her generation and a remarkable friend and colleague. Her first book, Archipelago of Justice: Law in France’s Early Modern Empire, won the 2021 Boucher Prize from the Society of French Colonial History. The committee lauded her integrated framing of the Caribbean and Indian Ocean worlds as “a remarkable accomplishment … a powerful and creative intervention” made possible by “astonishing archival tenacity” and “beautiful writing.” They highlighted her use of stories of the powerful and marginalized to show how they created “power, order and the very nature of French colonialism.” The commendation astutely encapsulated all the qualities that made Laurie’s work so outstanding and impactful. She was one of the leaders of a new research approach that saw all the regions of the first French empire as inextricably linked.

Laurie was a native Texan who was proud that every educational institution she was part of was public. She grew up in Abilene, graduated summa cum laude as a History major from Texas Tech, and earned her PhD at the University of Texas at Austin. Her horizons of all kinds expanded quickly far beyond the Texas Panhandle but she remained devoted to Texas food (serving barbecue for the many out of state visitors to her wedding in Abilene, and delighting in eating queso, chips, salsa and tamales on a trip back with her family last Thanksgiving), to the faith she grew up with, and to watching football as a holiday ritual. An alchemical year as a UW Law & Society Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison profoundly shaped Laurie’s professional and personal life. In nine months in Madison, she framed her book project, secured a tenure-track job at Florida State University, and met her partner, Cale Weatherly.

Soft-spoken and kind, Laurie was a no-nonsense intellectual powerhouse who thrived under pressure. Her work was always profoundly collaborative, and she generously exchanged research, writing, and ideas with many peers. Unfailingly thoughtful and supportive, her straightforward pep talks, warm sense of humor, and incisive feedback made her an ideal scholarly interlocutor – and more than that, a true friend who was always there to talk through setbacks and celebrate successes, both personal and professional. She brought her trademark combination of energetic enthusiasm, seriousness of purpose, and historiographic acumen to her collaborative projects, which included one on everyday materials of colonial legal spaces and another on the multiple meanings of a botanical expedition in French Guyane, to be completed by her co-author. She told one coauthor her goal was to make their work “maximally helpful” to fellow scholars, which was a very Laurie approach to historiography.

Laurie’s research track was jump started early in her PhD program by the generosity of John Garrigus, who shared his archival photographs of notarial documents made in Saint Domingue in the early 1790s for a first-year research paper. Laurie was fascinated by the questions of the broader French world – its legal process, its varied set of actors, its geographical immensity and its extraordinary archival records. As she framed her dissertation and then her book, she integrated these themes as the core of her research agenda. In her reading (she was the first UT student who had ever taken four graduate historiography courses – in colonial Latin American, early American, and African as well as early modern European history) and in her sharing work in writing and conversation with the UT’s early modern history group and others, she came to recognize the essential role of the Indian Ocean, and centered the problematic as a global, not simply Atlantic, one.

Yet even as her work expanded geographically, it remained grounded in the stories of the individual people who made France’s empire. This very human scale reflected a core methodological priority of Laurie’s: to think about and work to see the past from the perspective of historical actors. As she explained in an interview about Archipelago of Justice, she didn’t want to just look at the big picture of France’s empire but to grapple instead with “the very localized question of what happens when … you’re trying to imagine the French empire that rules your life in really tangible ways but is also really hard to wrap your mind around.” The twin priorities of thinking globally and locally drove much of Laurie’s research agenda.

At Florida State, Laurie quickly became a dedicated and creative professor. Bubbling over with ideas to help the department, she lit up any meeting with characteristic insight and ruthless practicality. Her innovative and popular courses often dealt with parts of the world students are unfamiliar with. She was as committed to students who would go on to important but ordinary occupations as she was to academic stars, always making her classes accessible to a wide range of undergraduates. She strongly believed that confronting historical truths could have a lasting trickle-down effect that her students would take with them into many parts of their lives. From the moment she walked in the door, she also turned her determination to be “maximally helpful” toward the graduate students. In addition to leading a wide range of seminars and broadly training early modern scholars, she also coached them through grant proposals and interviews and all the skills of being a professional historian that graduate school seldom actually teaches. She knew how hard the work was, and she wanted people to go into it with their eyes open and with the best skills and tools she could provide them.

Staying true to her research priorities, Laurie developed her second book project, Flickering Fortunes: Women, Catastrophe & Complicity in the French Tropics, with lightning speed. With the support of the Shelby Cullom Davis Center at Princeton, the Hagley Library, and the Library Company of Philadelphia, Flickering Fortunes focused on the female “foot soldiers” of the eighteenth-century French empire in what would have been a major historiographic intervention. Drawing on material from her extraordinary archival database, Laurie envisioned arguing how even though women were often left behind in port cities, they had a significant role to play in building, managing, and upholding slavery and global capitalist systems.

Laurie’s synergistic approach to research and teaching was driven by her enthusiasm for all aspects of her work. As any of Laurie’s colleagues can testify, her passion for early modern history was endless and infectious. Perhaps nothing better testifies to her intellectual energy than the fact that, through two years of intensive treatment for aggressive breast cancer before her death aged 38, she continued to find joy and meaning in her research and teaching. She also sustained her connections with students and colleagues. She leaves her two young children, her husband, their families, and a wide circle of friends. She loved them so much and she loved everything about being a professor.

A fund has been established at Florida State in Laurie’s honor to support the undergraduate community she cared about so much and at Penn where she received her care. This fund is designed to support research into the subtype of breast cancer (mTNBC) that Laurie had. mTNBC is the most deadly, the least understood and the most lacking in targeted treatments.

Julie Hardwick, University of Texas at Austin

Meghan Roberts, Bowdoin College

A Conversation about Teaching with Dr Ashley Farmer (updated)

From the editor: Not Even Past Teaching Profiles are designed to explore how historians at the University of Texas and beyond teach, how they inspire and galvanize students. In this article, we speak with Dr Ashley Farmer. Dr Farmer has a remarkable record of achievement in the classroom. She won the 2020 Faculty Teaching Award from the John L. Warfield Center for African & African American Studies, the 2020 Josefina Paredes Endowed Teaching Award from the College of Liberal Arts and the 2019 Jean Holloway Award for Excellence in Teaching from Texas Exes. She was also nominated for the Lucia, John and Melissa Gilbert Teaching Excellence Award in Women’s and Gender Studies and was a semi-finalist for the Friar’s Centennial Teaching Award Fellowship. This conversation was recorded in 2020 at the height of the pandemic but we are republishing it now to mark another milestone for Dr Farmer. In 2023, the Academy of Distinguished Teachers recognized Ashley Farmer for her exceptional record of teaching excellence and invited her to become a member.

As part of this conversation, I was able to read some of Dr Farmer’s syllabi and classroom materials. They speak to a classroom that engages, excites and transforms students, making them better citizens and giving them new ways to understand the world. Most moving is a video included below in which one of Dr Farmer’s student’s speaks to their experience as a freshman in one of her classes. Such teaching requires enormous commitments of time and energy. In addition to showcasing incredible teachers, my hope is that such teaching profiles will also provide a resource for other teachers thinking about specific classroom strategies and the discussion below focuses particular attention on a series of unique activities and exercises that Dr Farmer has developed for use in the classroom.

AC: Alongside your groundbreaking research, you’ve won a range of teaching awards and I don’t think I’ve ever seen quite such a record of achievement in the classroom in a relatively short space of time. What classes and academic experiences shaped you as teacher?

AF: I know this is going to sound a little funny, but I was a Montessori school kid for many years. I didn’t just go to preschool, but I went through a good chunk of grade school as a Montessori student. And I bring this up because one of the things that Montessori pedagogy focuses on is experiential learning, tactile learning, and also this idea that if we trust students, they’ll do what they need to do and can be in control of organizing their own lives and how they want to learn. And so I think that that had a more profound effect on me than I realize now that I am a teacher, just that ethos about letting students explore; the ethos about saying here’s a collection of things we have to do, but we don’t have to do them in one particular way, but here’s some concepts that we’re going to explore together. I think that was really useful.

And going to a historically Black college like Spelman. It was small. The entire curriculum was not just Black centered, but Black women centered. So, for example, I was a French and Spanish major in college, which is different from what I do now but the point is, that instead of learning French history, we would take classes like Francophone literature of North Africa, right. We would read novels about the Black experience that happen to be in French. So you’re learning the language and the writing, but also thinking about the Black experience that way. And I think that was just really formative for reminding me that we don’t always have to engage in learning in the dominant modes in which it’s expected or in a certain kind of curriculum that often marginalizes certain types of people.

AC: Our conversation today will focus on your course, Introduction to African American History. Can you introduce that course to someone who’s not familiar with it?

AF: So Introduction African American history is an entry level course for anyone interested in learning more about the Black experience in America. It goes from the 1400s to the present so it’s very quick in 16 weeks. I often call it an odyssey because we’re hopping from one point to the next very quickly. But it is meant to not only give students a basic understanding of Black history, but also to get them to think about how this history is shaping the world around them. So I often ask students to think less about regurgitating points and dates like when was the Civil War? Or, what was the 13th Amendment? Instead, I ask my students to think about what the 13th Amendment meant for everyday Black people or what life choices did Black people have to make based on the options that were given to them in a certain historical moment. The course has a cultural diversity flag and also a History core credit flag so I get a range of students from freshman to seniors who take the class.

*Classroom exercise from Introduction to African American History*

AC: This course includes a range of highly innovative and effective class exercises. I was struck especially by the classroom activity, “Creating a New Society”. Can you tell us about this exercise?

AC: This is a large lecture class but you don’t start each class by lecturing. Instead you write that you cede “the floor for the first five minutes of class to a student who wants to raise an issue about campus, Austin, or the national climate.” Can you tell us more about this?

AF: I like to always get to the classroom a little bit before class starts. I set everything up and then we just kind of talk informally as a class. I ask what’s going on campus? Or if they saw a certain topic in the news? To give an example around Halloween time, we talked about costumes. I know students are aware of conversations about racism, sexism, and cultural appropriation around costumes, so I will say something along the lines of: did you see this costume I saw online? Does anybody know what’s happening with costumes on UT’s campus? And usually that will allow for someone to speak up about something that they have been thinking about.

I start that way at the beginning of the semester and I find it by mid semester students come in with something they want to talk about. One day, I arrived a bit late, so I didn’t get to do this. And I had one student stop me and say: “What are we talking about today? Because we always talk about stuff before we get started. So what’s our topic today?” They wanted me to go back and do our informal discussion first before we got started with our lesson plan for the day. It made me laugh, but also showed me that they value these conversations that we have together. I think beginning class this way is important for a couple of reasons. Typically, students bring up things that are happening in the world that are related to class. We learned about something, say, the prison industrial complex in class. Students will then bring up an article they have seen about prisons in Texas. Or, we talk about the historical context of policing and then students will want to talk about the school’s relationship to policing or something like that. So these conversations help students connect what’s happening in the classroom to the real world. Also, in the spirit of consciousness raising, it also shows students that I believe that I’m not the only person in the room that can offer valuable information or perspectives or who has something to teach or raise awareness about. We all can contribute to helping each other understand what’s happening on our campus, in the world, around us. And truth be told, because the students live and work and learn on the campus in a way that faculty members don’t, this is honestly where I get a lot of my news about what is happening on campus. So it’s mutually beneficial

Classroom exercise from Introduction to African American History

AC: Another exercise I was really struck by is the “Freedom Reflection Exercise”? Can you describe this exercise and what it aims to achieve?

AC: What it like to be teaching this course in this moment when the national conversation about race is being transformed by Black Lives Matter?

AF: You know, it makes our conversations feel very urgent. All of a sudden, things are happening both locally and nationally that really clues students in, if they haven’t been engaging before in these conversations, that something’s not right. And they need to know more. I don’t think many people have a hard time understanding how watching the George Floyd murder is something that is heartbreaking and tragic. It should not happen. It happens disproportionately to Black people. But then when you start to learn about how it’s not an isolated incident, you’re in search of ways to understand something so difficult, in search of a kind of language or lens to understand it. Students are often thinking: I know something unjust has happened and continues to happen. How did we get here? How do I talk about it and how do I possibly do something about it in a responsible way? And that’s what I see as a history class like this doing. It is helping people get the language or the framework to understand the world around them and take different actions. So I will say that even though I’m not teaching this particular class this year, I have had at least 10 emails from students who have taken the class over the last couple of years. In the emails they say that they remember when we talked about these issues in class, and now they understand how that’s coming in to play. They tell me that they remember when we talked about the Voting Rights Act and voter suppression and how that is playing out in society now. So I do think that this is a part of education that can really meet the moment we are in.

AC: There is a remarkable video of a student who has nominated you for a major teaching prize explaining their transformative experience in one of your classes. I think it speaks to exactly what you’re saying about how teaching can meet the moment we’re in. Can you tell us about that particular class?

AF: For that class, we were in a midterm election year. And I planned for us to talk about the Voting Rights Act on the same week that the election was happening, to draw the connection between the class and larger society very clearly. I told them when you have learned about people getting beat within an inch of their life and people getting shot, people losing their jobs, how dare you not go literally 50 feet to the library and cast a vote? And I said it in those terms: you cannot take this so lightly. And I think that that is important because we’re now teaching students who have become politically literate and electorally literate in a moment where a Black man or a woman president or vice president are all possible, which for most of us, was perhaps something that we thought would never happen. And I think that sometimes this can lull people into a sense of complacency about the security of our electoral system and the democratic process. So I try to draw a clear line for them between struggles of the recent past and today. I think this is contextualization that can really help prepare students to understand this moment.

One of Dr Farmer’s students describes their experience as a freshman in one of her classes

AC: For a class like Introduction to African American History, you cover some very difficult and traumatic topics. For example, you discuss lynching as a form of racial and sexual terror. Can you tell us how you approach this and how you create an environment in which you’re able to respect and honor the victims of these crimes while engaging the students as historians?

AF: I start out by saying: We’re going to look at some really, really difficult things and everybody is going to have a really different reaction to them because we all have a different relationship to heinous act. But it is not something that we can turn away from. It’s not something that we cannot discuss if we are going to try to make ourselves understand the Black experience in America. So our job here is to figure out how as a community we want to do that. One of the ways I do this is by starting with just a few pictures of lynchings. And I ask students to work together with each other, usually just with the person sitting next to them, to think about their initial emotional response to these images. I ask them to think about the images and how they want to talk about them. I ask them to consider what language they want to use to honor these victims and what our role as historians is in documenting and talking about lynching. I treat the students like they’re historians, you know, in the professional sense in talking about this in a way that doesn’t let the perpetrators off the hook. I have students collectively come up with a set of community rules about how we should talk about lynching in an honest and respectful way. I put them on the board and say this is how we have decided how to talk about this topic as a group. And then we move forward with our discussion with these rules in mind.

AC: : What I found most fascinating and effective is the ways in which your research and teaching intersect and speak to each other. Key to this is your classroom pedagogy, where you model your approach after the community meeting “where interested parties from all ranks and backgrounds come together to discuss a subject or issue”. Can you tell us more about this?

Thank you so much for talking to me and for sharing some of the teaching strategies, methods and approaches you use in the classroom.

“Texas, Our Catholic Texas”?

Please join UT Libraries, Texas Catholic Historical Society, The Summerlee Foundation, LLILAS Benson Latin American Studies and Collections and The Institute of Historical Studies for:

“Carlos E. Castañeda’s ‘Catholic’ Texas?”

Wed & Thu, Sep. 20-21, SRH.1, Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection, Second Floor Conference Room)

Texans may remember singing the state song, “Texas, Our Texas,” during their state history classes in fourth and seventh grade. The state curriculum for fourth graders requires students to recite the words of the state song and the Pledge of Allegiance to the Texas State Flag. Texans who moved after elementary school may be more familiar with state symbols adopted by the state legislature, including the bluebonnet, longhorn, pecan tree, mockingbird, chili con carne, or monarch butterflies.

It raises an obvious question: how were the official words and symbols that represent Texas selected?

Invitation for the Carlos E. Castañeda’s 'Catholic' Texas? event

In 1923, Texas Governor Pat M. Neff announced a call for a state song through a contest with a $1,000 prize. Hopeful songwriters submitted several hundred pieces for the competition, including entries by songsmiths outside of Texas. Ultimately, “Texas, Our Texas” was selected as the winning song. Native Texan Gladys Yoakum Wright penned the song’s lyrics with music composed by newcomer William J. Marsh. Six years later, Governor Dan Moody designated the state song and officiated it during a formal ceremony in 1930. “Texas, Our Texas” remains the only official state song for the Lone Star state, with a one-word lyric change of “largest” to “boldest” following the admittance of Alaska to the United States in 1959.

Advertisement card distributed by Rev. Paul J. Foik, C.S.C. of St. Edward's University. — *Advertisement card distributed by Rev. Paul J. Foik, C.S.C. of St. Edward’s University. The first side of the card includes the music of “Texas, Our Texas”.* *Courtesy of the Catholic Archives of Texas*

Today, some debate the relevance of the state song through editorial pieces, online petitions, and private discussions. Some claim the lyrics and music composition do not accurately reflect Texas’s multicultural heritage. Others argue that songs from musical genres birthed from distinct Texana cultures, such as blues, country, rap, or Tejano, should also be recognized as official state songs. Others state that better-known songs such as “Deep in the Heart of Texas” should replace “Texas, Our Texas.”

Nonetheless, the state song is part of the distinct Texas identity crafted while planning celebrations for the Texas Centennial in 1936. Beyond the centenary anniversary of the Texas Revolution’s conclusion, the Texas Centennial ushered in the adoption of unique branding used for tourism advertisements, the establishment of Texas history museums, and the erection of monuments. The Texas Centennial Exposition in Dallas showcased the state’s cultural heritage through exhibit halls and live performances. Other Texas cities hosted events showcasing their unique local history and culture.

Pamphlet on the Centennial’s “El Paso Day”. — *Pamphlet on the Centennial’s “El Paso Day”*. *Courtesy of the Catholic Archives of Texas*

Like the newly adopted branding romanticizing the history of Texas cities, the Catholic Church in Texas tried to cement its role within the overall Texana identity. In 1923, the same year Governor Neff called for a state song, the Texas State Council of the Knights of Columbus passed a resolution to establish their Historical Commission. The Texas Knights of Columbus Historical Commission was charged with collecting and interpreting historical documents to create a Catholic account of Texas history. The Commission proposed a publication deadline before the secular Texas Centennial with plans to host a Texas Centennial Exposition exhibit documenting Catholic contributions to the state. The legacy of the Commission’s work is seen today with its groundbreaking publication, Our Catholic Heritage in Texas, 1519-1936, which was authored by Dr. Carlos E. Castañeda.

During the 1920s and 1930s, discussions centering on identity politics questioned the nationalism of Catholics across the United States. Catholics were denied membership in social organizations or trade unions, with some Catholic institutions vandalized by the Ku Klux Klan. Nationally, anti-Catholicism prevailed during Al Smith’s failed presidential run against Herbert Hoover. In Texas, the Knights of Columbus desired to prove their Americanness through supporting historical memory projects like the Commission. Catholic contributions to statehood were not regularly as part of the academic interpretation of Texas history.

While the Commission was busy locating archival material for its final publication, its chair, Rev. Paul J. Foik, C.S.C. of St. Edward’s University, sought ways to involve lay Catholics. The Knights of Columbus and the Commission aimed to assimilate Catholics into mainstream culture by combining nationalistic symbols with public religious displays. Foik encouraged Catholic social organizations like the Catholic Daughters of the Americas, parochial schools, higher education institutions, and parish priests to celebrate Texas Independence Day as a “Catholic Fourth of July.” The Texas Independence Day celebrations were to be public patriotic events with Texas flags displayed in parishes and parochial schools.

Foik distributed the card below to use during Texas Independence Day celebrations statewide. One side of the card includes famous Texas Revolution quotes, while the other consists of the music for “Texas, Our Texas.” Although not explicitly mentioned by Foik in his correspondence, it was certainly not a coincidence that he promoted the new state anthem as its composer, Marsh, was a devout Catholic. In addition to composing the state anthem, Marsh wrote music for the Texas Centennial Exposition’s Catholic Day Mass at the Cotton Bowl Stadium with an estimated 20,000 attendance.

Explore more on the work of the Texas Knights of Columbus Commission, Dr. Carlos E. Castañeda, and the Catholic exhibit at the Texas Centennial Exposition here: https://txcatholic.omeka.net/exhibits/show/castaneda.

The conversation on the Commission and Castañeda’s legacy will continue during “Carlos E. Castañeda’s ‘Catholic’ Texas?” on September 20-21, 2023, at the Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection: https://liberalarts.utexas.edu/historicalstudies/events/symposium-carlos-e-castaneda-s-catholic-texas-day-1.

Selena Aleman is the archivist for the Catholic Archives of Texas, where she oversees collections from Texas Catholic hierarchy and lay organizations like the Texas State Council of the Knights of Columbus. She holds a master’s degree in information studies from UT’s School of Information.

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.

Did Mark the Evangelist Write a Secret Gospel? Did Jesus Have a Relationship with a Young Man? A Fresh Investigation into the Secret Gospel of Mark

banner image for Did Mark the Evangelist Write a Secret Gospel? Did Jesus Have a Relationship with a Young Man? A Fresh Investigation into the Secret Gospel of Mark

In 1958, an American biblical scholar named Morton Smith was inspecting the book and manuscript collections of Mar Saba, a 1500-year-old monastery in the Judean wilderness. While leafing through a 17th-century printed book Smith discovered something unexpected–a note in Greek written on the blank pages at the back of the book. At the start of the note was a cross, a clue that a monk may have written it. The note purported to be a letter written by an important early Christian leader, Clement of Alexandria, along with quotes from a secret version of Mark’s Gospel. Smith soon realized that the contents of this letter and the secret Gospel were so shocking that, if true, they could call into question the traditional image of Jesus found in the gospels.

Morton Smith's photo of the last page of Voss' printed book and the first page of the Letter to Theodore manuscript. — Morton Smith’s photo of the last page of Voss’ printed book and the first page of the Letter to Theodore manuscript. Morton Smith Papers, box 1/7, and Saul Liebermann Papers, box 1/11. Image courtesy of the Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary.

In the letter, Clement reveals that the version of the Gospel of Mark found in the New Testament was only a first, incomplete draft of the Gospel. Clement claims that after the death of the Apostle Peter, his assistant Mark traveled to Alexandria in Egypt, where he wrote an expanded version of his Gospel that contained secret teachings for spiritually advanced Christians. But this Secret Gospel of Mark, Clement says, eventually fell into the hands of a group of hedonistic Christian heretics who believed that experiencing carnal pleasures would lead to salvation. Known as the Carpocratians, these heretics rewrote parts of the Secret Gospel of Mark so that it could lend scriptural support to their sexual practices.

A Christian named Theodore, to whom Clement writes, is anxious to know whether stories about Jesus that the Carpocratians have told him are really part of the Secret Gospel. In response, Clement quotes a passage from the “real” Secret Gospel, a story about Jesus raising a young man from the dead. When he comes back to life, the youth looks at Jesus, loves him, and begs Jesus to stay with him. The youth is rich and has his own house, where Jesus stays for six days. Finally, instructed by Jesus, the youth comes to him at night, naked except for a linen sheet over his body, and Jesus teaches him—as the Secret Gospel puts it—“the mysteries of the Kingdom of God.” Despite its suggestive content, Clement tells Theodore that the Carpocratian heretics have wrongly interpreted this story sexually, adding phrases like “naked man with naked man” to their corrupted version of the Secret Gospel. Clement is about to explain to Theodore what this enigmatic story about Jesus really means . . . but then the letter breaks off.

Clement of Alexandria as depicted in André Thevet's Les vrais pourtraits et vies des hommes illustres grecz, latins et payens (1584). — *Clement of Alexandria as depicted in André Thevet’s* Les vrais pourtraits et vies des hommes illustres grecz, latins et payens (1584). *Source: Wikimedia Commons.*

Morton Smith soon realized the enormity of his discovery, and after taking black and white photographs of the handwritten pages, he put the book back where he found it in the monastery. Two years later, he announced the discovery of the letter of Clement to Theodore concerning the Secret Gospel of Mark at the Society of Biblical Literature Annual Meeting, an announcement that was also heralded on the front page of the New York Times. Ever the provocateur, Smith shocked the straight-laced audience of biblical scholars by quipping that any priest who behaved like Jesus did in this text would find himself in serious trouble with his ecclesiastical superiors. After his announcement, Smith then devoted years trying to make sense of the letter’s contents, and in 1973 he released two books detailing his findings—one technical and academic, and the other designed for a general audience.

Smith did not believe, as Clement claimed in the letter, that the Secret Gospel was an expanded version of the Gospel of Mark written by the same author—namely, Mark the Evangelist. But because the story of the raising of the young man resembled the raising of Lazarus in the Gospel of John (chapter 11) and the story of the rich young man in the Gospel of Mark (chapter 10), Smith believed that the Secret Gospel preserved a very ancient story that both Mark and John used in their Gospels. If he was right, Smith had discovered in the Secret Gospel one of the earliest known stories about Jesus, a narrative that offers us a glimpse of the historical Jesus’ secret teachings and intimate interactions with his closest disciples.

*A seventeenth-century portrait of St. Mark by Guido Reni. Source: Wikimedia Commons.*

After Smith published his findings in 1973, most scholars believed that Smith had indeed discovered an authentic, ancient letter from Clement of Alexandria, but few thought that the story from the Secret Gospel predated the canonical gospels, as Smith argued. Rather, many scholars preferred to see the Secret Gospel as a second-century apocryphal expansion upon the Gospel of Mark, which was similar to a number of other early apocryphal gospels.

But there were a handful of scholars who were suspicious about the circumstances of the discovery, and suggested that it might be a modern forgery—possibly fabricated by Smith himself. After all, other than Smith’s photographs, there was no proof that this manuscript existed, and Smith’s decision to leave the manuscript in the monastery instead of removing it for safekeeping was second-guessed. Despite allegations of forgery, however, the conventional wisdom among scholars was that Smith’s initially assessment was likely correct.

Morton Smith's photo of Mar Saba from his personal sketchbook. — *Morton Smith’s photo of Mar Saba from his personal sketchbook. Image courtesy of T. Alwood.*

Yet this conventional wisdom was shattered in 2005 by Stephen Carlson, a patent lawyer who at the time was not a trained biblical scholar. Carlson published a book whose title made his view of Smith’s discovery absolutely clear—The Gospel Hoax: Morton Smith’s Invention of Secret Mark. Carlson alleged not only that forensic analysis of the manuscript showed the presence of a “forger’s tremor” (that is, irregular movements indicating an attempt to imitate a different style of handwriting), but also that Morton Smith had left behind several subtle clues–“breadcrumbs”–in the letter of Clement that revealed him to be the author.

Although scholars who believed that Smith had discovered an authentic writing pushed back against Carlson’s claims, his book led a flurry of other scholars to claim to have found evidence that Smith had forged the manuscript. Some pointed to parallels between Smith’s discovery and the contents of a 1942 novel, The Mystery of Mar Saba; others saw indications that Smith was already interested in the ideas that the Secret Gospel contained before he “discovered” the manuscript; still others alleged that Smith was a gay man, and that he had created a text containing a homoerotic encounter between Jesus and a young man in order to validate his own sexuality.[1]

Many of the arguments that Smith forged the document rely on evidence that is highly circumstantial. Nevertheless, the sheer number of these arguments seems to have created a new conventional wisdom among biblical scholars: that the Secret Gospel of Mark is a modern forgery, and Morton Smith is likely its author. Certainly, there are still scholars who argue that Clement’s letter and the Secret Gospel are genuine ancient writings, but these voices have become increasingly marginalized. At present, scholars can be divided into two broad camps: those who believe that Morton Smith discovered an enormously important ancient writing, and those who believe that he invented this writing himself.

*Morton Smith in front of Mar Saba in 1983. Image courtesy of A. Pantuck.*

While there is much about Morton Smith’s discovery of Clement’s letter and the Secret Gospel of Mark that remains unclear, we are convinced of two facts that, taken together, render both of the current scholarly opinions about this text inadequate. First, given our extensive experience working with manuscripts, we regard the Greek handwriting style of the manuscript to be so complex and so characteristic of other Greek handwriting of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that it would have been impossible for Morton Smith to forge it. Perhaps a master forger whose native tongue was Greek might have been able to create this manuscript, but Smith was not a Greek-speaking master forger.

Second, we are convinced that this letter, even if ancient, was likely not written by the second-century Christian writer, Clement of Alexandria. The real author of the letter probably made use of the writings of Eusebius of Caesarea, a fourth-century Christian historian and biographer. While the true name of the author remains a mystery, it was probably not Clement of Alexandria. So, the writing that Morton Smith discovered was not composed by Clement of Alexandria. Nor was it forged by Smith himself. Neither of the current scholarly opinions about the Secret Gospel of Mark are correct. The truth, we argue, lies somewhere in between.

book cover for the secret gospel of mark

In our new book, The Secret Gospel of Mark: A Controversial Scholar, a Scandalous Gospel of Jesus, and the Fierce Debate over Its Authenticity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2023), we offer a new theory about the origins and historical significance of the Secret Gospel of Mark. But we also reveal that the story of the Secret Gospel transcends the document itself, which incidentally is now lost. While the Secret Gospel of Mark can teach us something about Christianity’s distant past, it also exposes the inner workings of a small cadre of biblical scholars tasked with reconstructing that past. In the end the Secret Gospel may have less to say about the historical Jesus than it does about the preoccupations, politics, and rivalries of those who seek to uncover the truth about him.

[1] For a lively back and forth that addresses much of this evidence for Smith’s alleged forgery, see Craig Evans, “Morton Smith and the Secret Gospel of Mark: Exploring the Grounds for Doubt,” 75-100; and Scott Brown and Allan Pantuck, “Craig Evans and the Secret Gospel of Mark: Exploring the Grounds for Doubt,” 101-134; both of which can be found in Tony Burke (ed.) Ancient Gospel or Modern Forgery? The Secret Gospel of Mark in Debate (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2013).

Connecting the Dots: How ClioVis Can Help You Prepare for an AP History Exam

From the Editors: “Course Notes” is a new series written by and for history students. It allows undergraduate History majors to reflect on their experiences and share useful advice with their high-school, college-bound, and undergraduate peers. “Course Notes” will showcase important academic resources, proven study methods, and valuable test preparation strategies. It will also introduce readers to the History major program at the University of Texas at Austin, explaining what majoring in history entails and what undergraduates find meaningful about studying the past. In the first article in our series, UT History undergrad and former high-school tutor Samantha Tonini explains how she turned ClioVis–a digital teaching tool that allows users to build historical timelines–into a study guide for Advanced Placement exams. Samantha’s article invites students to take advantage of ClioVis’ unique features, which can help make sense of the names, dates, and changes over time that form the backbone of every high school history class.

I remember when I took an Advanced Placement European History course during my sophomore year of high school, it was a major step up from other advanced courses in terms of reading, memorization, and writing. Anytime there was an exam, you could always spot the AP European History students: right up to the last minute, our heads would be buried in massive binders as we tried to go over everything. It was extremely stressful and I struggled to find an effective study method.

Advanced Placement courses culminate in a lengthy comprehensive exam administered by the College Board, the organization responsible for designing AP course curricula. When AP exam season rolled around, I and several classmates shared Google Slides designed to integrate major events on a single timeline. It was extremely useful in terms of just memorizing the facts, but it did make it more difficult to understand the complexities of the material we were studying. The events began to feel very separate and independent from each other. Thankfully, we all passed the exam, so our timeline was at least somewhat effective as a study tool.

The next year, I became a tutor for other AP Euro students, and it was my goal to try to help them understand how timeline events are connected–this is an extremely useful way to organize course material for the writing portions of the AP exam. To that end, I began building an AP Euro study guide using ClioVis, a timeline-based digital teaching tool developed by UT Austin historian Erika Bsumek. When I started to create my study guide, I must admit, it was rather daunting at first. AP European history is dense course, and I had some flashbacks to my sophomore year of high school as I looked over the College Board course guide. All the kings, wars, and philosophers came flooding back and I was quickly reminded why I found the course so stressful to begin with. However, I quickly found that as I created the events and divided them by categories using the “category” tagging feature in ClioVis, the significance of each event and its relationship to other events became clearer. I found that focusing on events tagged with specific categories helped me create a streamlined narrative that I was able to follow and study.

One of my favorite features of the platform is that users can embed videos into each event. Using this, I was able to include videos from popular YouTube study channels such as Crash Course and Heimler’s History. Similarly, in the reference section, I could include links to different sources or websites relating to each event. These tools, along with writing my own descriptions of the events, helped create a perfect study tool that fifteen-year-old me would have loved to have access to. In the timeline below, you can see that I only created events for the first time period of the AP Euro curriculum. However, I hope that other AP Euro students will use my guide as a model and will create a study guide that will allow them to better prepare for their AP exam.

When it came to connecting events, I was initially stumped. What was the best way to use this feature? In the end, I decided that I could use it most effectively to show the kinds of connections students might use to address different writing prompts. AP history exams require students to write three kinds of essays in response to three types of question: Short Answer Questions (SAQs), which students are supposed to answer in just a few sentences; a Long Essay Question, which requires several well-organized paragraphs of analytical writing; and a Document-Based Question (DBQ), which asks students to write another long essay based on a packet of primary sources. To help students prepare for the written portion of the AP Euro exam, I looked over past SAQ, LEQ, and DBQ prompts from the past decade that covered the historical period my study guide addressed. Once I had found all the prompts that I wanted to use, I put the prompts in text boxes attached to connections between events that could be used to answer the question. Of course, other students may prefer using the connections feature to write out how events are actually related. It is all up to personal preference. I personally felt that I would have wanted a way to tie in practice prompts into the study tool. There is no wrong way to do it!

If I had ClioVis back during my sophomore year, I would have been overjoyed! While my large Google slides timeline was useful, ClioVis made the process of mastering content more engaging. Using this tool is a fabulous way to organize study materials and to begin to understand how course-relevant historical events are related to each other. I would encourage students to collaborate and build timelines together since AP history exams cover so many events. And building a timeline with a peer could lead to interesting conversations, which would also help master material. But regardless of whether you use it to build a timeline with your classmates a week before the AP exam or by yourself throughout the school year, ClioVis can help improve your studying.

Samantha Tonini is a UT History Major and the ClioVis Intern for 2023.

Image source: Photo by Pixabay: https://www.pexels.com/photo/black-and-white-book-stack-books-education-207740/

Review of Going the Distance: Eurasian Trade and the Rise of the Business Corporation, 1400-1700 (2020) by Ron Harris

Bannar image for Going the Distance: Eurasian Trade and the Rise of the Business Corporation, 1400-1700 (2020) by Ron Harris

It’s an old question: how did northwestern Europe, seemingly an economic backwater around 1400 CE, rise to trade dominance in just a few centuries? In Going the Distance: Eurasian Trade and the Rise of the Business Corporation, 1400-1700, Ron Harris offers a fresh answer. He traces the financial tools and organizational forms in Eurasia that offered alternatives to—or building blocks for—the business corporation. By comparing these organizational forms in China, India, the Middle East, and Western Europe, Harris argues that the business corporation was formed in response to the structural and commercial weaknesses, rather than the strengths, of England and the Dutch Republic.

Book cover for Going the Distance: Eurasian Trade and the Rise of the Business Corporation, 1400-1700 (2020) by Ron Harris

Harris underpins this complex discussion with a clear organizational structure. Part I provides the context of premodern Eurasian trade and its gravitational center, the Indian Ocean. From at least the second century CE, regular maritime trade networks connected Rome to Indian Ocean markets, while ancient Silk Routes across Central Asia reached their fullest extent under Mongol rule in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Following the disintegration of the Western Roman Empire, Europeans were largely cut off from these trade routes. In contrast to previous theorists, Harris argues that Europeans possessed no substantial technological or military advantages to overcome this commercial marginalization. In a position of relative weakness, Europe was more often an importer than an exporter of business innovations.

In Part II, Harris considers the “organizational building blocks” that determined the possibilities of Eurasian trade before 1400.[1] The itinerant trader, the bilateral trade relationship (established through an agency contract or loan), and the merchant ship with its specialized personnel appeared independently in every major region. More complex organizational forms migrated from distinct points of origin. Harris attributes the spread of two major organizational forms to Islam, namely the funduq or caravanserai and the qirad.

Tracing its roots to ancient Greek traveling lodges, the Arab funduq followed Muslim conquerors and traders to North Africa, southern Europe, and Central Asia. These outposts provided lodging, sustenance, protection, and trading opportunities for merchants; they were a boon to trade networks across the Silk Routes and beyond. The qirad, on the other hand, was a “bilateral limited partnership.”[2] Particularly useful to Muslims forbidden to profit from interest-bearing loans, it brought investors into contact with traveling merchants in a particular way: the investor would contribute capital to a shared “pool of assets” that the traveling merchant would manage on a trading mission.[3] When the traveler returned, he and the investor would divide the profits, usually claiming 50% each. It is likely that the Arab qirad inspired the Italian commenda.

A painting of a funduq in Persia from the 19th-century. — *This 19th-century print by Eugène Flandin portrays a funduq in Persia. Source: Rijksmuseum.*

Part III highlights three Eurasian institutions that effectively dominated trade before the business corporation. The first was the family firm. For example, the Pu lineage in southern China monopolized official government positions that provided near-exclusive access to maritime commerce under the Yuan dynasty. In Mughal Gujarat, the Ghafur and Vora family firms were less connected to the state apparatus and had the freedom to send ships and agents across the Indian Ocean world. The Fugger family in Augsburg rose from peasant origins to great wealth in a few generations, thanks to the flexible use of partnership contracts and other tools. The second institution was the merchant network, which usually involved the family firm but extended to other merchants within a particular region or ethno-religious group. Jewish networks based in Cairo or Livorno and the Armenian network in New Julfa made use of many of the financial building blocks discussed in Part II. The third institution was the state-supported trading expedition. The Ming dynasty voyages of Admiral Zheng He and the Portuguese Carreira da Índia are key examples.

According to Harris, each of these organizational forms was outpaced by the European business corporation, first manifested in the English and Dutch East India Companies that were founded at the turn of the seventeenth century. In Part IV, Harris explains that the business corporation, a distinctly European form, grew from the legal and financial partnerships that the clerics and religious orders of the medieval Roman Catholic Church established to protect Church property. The emergent legal “corporate form” was adopted by chartered towns and guilds.[4] In sixteenth-century England, as merchant guilds evolved into regulated corporations and eventually business corporations, four financial tools were added: joint-stock equity, investment lock-in, interest transferability, and protection from state expropriation. Limited liability would only be introduced to the corporation in the eighteenth century. Harris argues that this innovative combination of features was a pragmatic response by the English and the Dutch to the “significant entry barriers” they faced in accessing Eurasian trade because of their marginal location, lack of attractive export goods, and late entry to the game.[5]

Two relatively brief chapters are devoted to the early organizational history of the English East India Company (EIC) and the Dutch East India Company (usually known by its Dutch acronym, VOC). Most importantly, Harris contrasts the oligarchic management of the VOC with the more egalitarian structure of the EIC, in which all shareholders were entitled to voting rights as well as access to company news and accounting. In any case, both companies raised significantly more capital from a larger pool of investors than any previous venture in Eurasian history. Because they achieved the broad, impersonal cooperation of investors in political contexts that resisted the expropriation of company funds by the state, the EIC and VOC offered “the ultimate organizational solution” to the problems of long-distance trade.[6]

The Dutch East India Company (VOC) trading post at Hooghly in Bengal, 1655. — *The Dutch East India Company (VOC) trading post at Hooghly in Bengal as depicted by artist Hendrik van Schuylenburgh in 1665. Source: Rijksmuseum.*

But why did the business corporation not develop elsewhere in Eurasia, and why did the form not migrate to the Middle East, India, or China until the modern period? Harris sees the corporation as an embedded European institution that did not migrate because of three possible factors: (1) a lack of demand in other locations, (2) the availability of alternative institutions, or (3) political resistance to its migration. In the Middle East, for example, there was little distinction between the state and the religious establishment, which jointly dominated institutions that may have otherwise benefitted from the corporate form—especially towns and guilds. The waqf (or religious endowment) shared certain features with the corporation through the pooling and protection of assets, but it did not—and could not—engage directly in trade. In South Asia, there was little demand for the corporation because the subcontinent existed at the center of historic trade networks and produced the most valuable goods that were sought by others. In China, Harris suggests that “[t]here was no space between the state and the family.”[7] Thus, the state monopolized trade and the family lineage was limited to pooling and protecting its own assets in the manner of a trust, rather than a business corporation.

A word of caution: Going the Distance does not make for light reading. Furthermore, regional specialists may take issue with the inevitable gaps and generalizations that accompany all comparative history. For example, Gregory Schopen’s Buddhist Monks and Business Matters has much to say about a powerful corporate form—the Buddhist monastery in South Asia—that bears comparison to the supposedly unique medieval European equivalent.[8] Such work is notably absent from Harris’s analysis. Yet, viewed as a whole, Going the Distance is a compelling piece of comparative history that also takes the trouble to incorporate detailed case studies on the basis of primary sources. Informed readers will recognize Harris’s intervention in scholarly debates about the so-called Great Divergence of European and other global economies. Some may find his treatment of the joint-stock business corporation too sanguine, in spite of his explicit “preemption concerning Eurocentrism.”[9] Ultimately, Harris resists the pressure to make absolute claims about the historical legacy of the business corporation and concludes his book with an expression of ambiguity: “Was the organizational revolution a precondition to the financial revolution, to the fiscal-military state, and to the British Empire? Possibly.”[10]

[1] Ron Harris, Going the Distance: Eurasian Trade and the Rise of the Business Corporation, 1400-1700 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020), 63.

[2] Ibid., 110.

[3] Ibid., 132.

[4] Ibid., 254.

[5] Ibid., 273.

[6] Ibid., 373.

[7] Ibid., 364.

[8] Gregory Schopen, Buddhist Monks and Business Matters: Still More Papers on Monastic Buddhism in India (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2004).

[9] Harris, 11.

[10] Ibid., 376.

Review of Electric News in Colonial Algeria (2019) by Arthur Asseraf

Electric News in Colonial Algeria offers readers an understanding of how new forms of media and ordinary people came into contact with one another with increasing frequency during the period of French colonial occupation in Algeria. The major argument of this work has two premises. First, the dominance of a new form of media does not mean that the older forms become irrelevant but rather that the new forms add to an existing media ecosystem. As an example, the popularity of cinemas as spaces to consume media did not mean that print faded away. Second, this expanded media density and diversity in form and content over the course of the colonial also increased the polarization of Algerian society. This density of media facilitated through technologies that gradually condensed space, served more as a divisive factor than a unifying one in Algeria’s efforts toward fostering nationalism.

Book cover for Electric News in Colonial Algeria (2019) by Arthur Asseraf.

When Asseraf uses the word “electric” in this work, he is referring to more than just the literal infrastructure of electricity. Changing media landscapes created social shocks in Algeria as well. To put it another way, the news was metaphorically electric as it circulated just as much as it was actually electric in delivery. In constructing his work this way, Asseraf digs into what new forms of media and their circulation meant for social actors as they were consumed, rather than focusing on the media itself as a mouthpiece for editors. Also central to this work is the tension between the colonial state’s attempts to control media circulation and the reality of Algerians’ practices surrounding media consumption. Circulation in colonial Algeria involved more than the information the state freely allowed to circulate. It was also a matter of censorship and the options for circumventing restricted flow that ordinary Algerians participated in.

Although this book covers the entire French colonial period in Algeria, it gives the most weight to the early decades of the twentieth century. This serves as a strength since works on Algerian history have a tendency to pay more attention to flashpoint moments in the nation’s history, especially its war of independence from 1954 to 1962 and, to a lesser extent, the early period of colonial rule following French occupation in 1830. It is less common to see a work like this, which offers us a solid sense of what life was like for everyday Algerians in the early twentieth century.

Chapter One serves primarily to present background information constructing the relationship between early print in Algeria and the so-called civilizing mission of the colonial project. Chapters Two through Four likewise analyze various forms of media to help readers understand the increasingly diverse media landscape in colonial Algeria. The forms of media these chapters explore are, respectively, the telegraph at the turn of the twentieth century in Chapter Two; news, rumor, and songs about World War I in Chapter Three; and cinema and radio in the interwar period in Chapter Four. Chapter Five is distinctive, arguing that distance from nationalist struggles, such as those in Palestine and Libya, created the space for the Algerian press to debate a “proxy nationalism”. The conflicts in these places acted as a mirror, allowing Algerians to debate their own sense of national identity from a distance. More than anything, this chapter serves to complicate the neat divide we tend to place between foreign and domestic news.

*A view of colonial Algiers ca. 1900. Source: Wikimedia Commons.*

The book’s introduction tackles a range of relevant historiographical issues: the relationship between media and nationalism, concerns about the dominance of technological determinism in previous works, and questions of directionality in circulation, flow, and blockage of information. Asseraf argues that the effect of media formats on circulation is subtle—essentially, he constructs his rejection of technological determinism by arguing that form does not bear too significantly on content, especially when considering how information circulates among human actors. In other words, the medium is not the message. As an example, Asseraf argues that the introduction of radio did not affect consumption as significantly as others have argued. News may have found new methods of spreading over time, but the act of spreading news was always more social in nature than anything else.

In a world where questions surrounding the relationship between the media ecosystem, the technologies that carry media, and political polarization have become increasingly salient to all of us, this work offers a historical perspective on how such processes have taken place in an earlier period. Furthermore, the book offers a perspective of these processes on the ground among everyday people, and not only at the state and private sector levels. Because of this, Electric News in Colonial Algeria is a highly accessible work that can be enjoyed by specialists and general audiences alike. Likewise, it is a book that those outside of the history and area studies fields can find fruitful, especially those with interests in media studies and anthropology.

Erin Kelleher is a third year PhD student in the Department of Middle Eastern Studies at UT Austin. Her research areas are print culture and its circulation in Tunisia, as well as the Ottoman Empire’s enduring cultural legacy in North Africa.

Lecturing in Kherson: A One-Year Reflection on Maps, Occupations, and Russia’s War against Ukraine

One year ago, on March 18th, 2022, I was lecturing via Zoom on the history of Ukraine and Ukrainian cartography in the city of Kherson. My public talk to a classroom of students, faculty, and administrators was entitled “Ukraine Mapped: Between History and Geopolitics.”

My talk was not normal. Kherson is a strategic port city in Ukraine today, about the size of Pittsburgh or Cincinnati or my post-Rust Belt hometown of Buffalo, New York. My lecture took place in a Zoom chamber, with a war outside. Checkpoints were blocked. The audience was besieged. I spoke to Ukrainians about map uses and abuses as Russians were killing Ukrainian Russophone soldiers and as Ukrainian civilians were getting shelled. From the outset, I struggled to find the right tone. Should I be muted or melodramatic? Deliberately shaky? Show propaganda? Be sober or exhortative? How should I teach or commemorate a map? Was it right to urge other perspectives and voices? How asymmetrical it was to be “westplaining” Ukraine during war, even though I’ve been active in Ukrainian Studies (doing research in 10 languages) for over twenty years. My space remains a relatively privileged vantage point in Texas.

I’m a historian of maps, archives, and geography. I tried to do what I could.

*The title slide from Dr. Seegel’s March 18th presentation at Kherson State University. Image courtesy of the author.*

On that day a year ago, my 45-minute lecture turned into a two-hour conversation. I started by talking “to” the occupied. I had no idea how to start, and I haven’t shared this until now. How I began: “In times of war, every map becomes a weapon. You need maps now, very desperately, to see where enemy troops are stationed, how they are actively attacking. Maps are useful. They gather people into a snapshot. You assemble now against threats no one else can comprehend, to exercise your rights as citizens. Americans are arrogant bastards, so I am not here to tell you how to make choices. That’s your business. You’ve studied your history. You live in a sovereign, independent Ukraine. You have used your intelligence to elect your officials in local government and the Rada [parliament], based on manipulated lines. These lines were drawn by mapmakers whom you’ve probably never met, or will meet. In times of peace, we forget about the power of maps because they seem so ordinary. Apps on our phones. Demographics. Migration. Money makes maps. Power puts books into libraries and artifacts into museums. Maps of Ukraine, now attacked on at least three and likely four fronts, are something to hang on the wall as nostalgic mementos, curiosities, or patriotic gestures. There’s no time for that anymore here on the 18th of March, as you experience life and death. Yet we use maps all the time: for walking around, getting from place to place. They can kill us. Maps will kill you. Geolocation can kill your population, your civilians, as we know from Mariupol. You are in Kherson, and I am not.”

All to say: I didn’t want to lecture “at” the Khersonians. Indeed, Ukrainians–citizens of a country of 44 million people–do not need to be re-told their tragedies; or that they are permanent victims of decolonization; or that, as Europeans, they “have agency.” Since the annexation of Crimea by Putin’s forces in March 2014 and the start of the Russian-separatist backed war in Donbas, which has resulted in the loss of 14,000 lives on the Ukrainian side, Ukrainian civic identity and agency have been toughened. Ukrainians in the defense forces fight for a future EU-in-Ukraine and Ukraine in the EU. Americans are volunteering to fight alongside Ukrainians in legions of the Ukrainian armed forces. There are prayerful Muslims, devout Christians, and practicing Jews in Ukraine. Ukraine has multiple frames, multiple maps, and multiple histories. Poets know this well, as do decolonial literary scholars and historians. Yuri Andrukhovych, Serhii Zhadan, Oksana Zabuzhko, Andrei Kurkov, Oksana Lutsyshyna, and many more. Ukraine has a revolutionary past characterized by a struggle for civil rights, transparency and democracy not merely in 2013-14 or 2004, but also throughout a long, protracted fight for independence. This extended through two world wars.

Early modern Ukraine was located at the crossroads of empires. Modern Ukraine, facing Soviet promotion and demotion of Ukrainization, political and geopolitical issues of collaboration, and ultimate erasure, was a land and a people in between. This was true even during the period of Soviet Ukraine.

Two images from Dr. Seegel’s March 18th presentation: at left, a 1904 pictorial map by a Japanese satirist critical of Russia’s imperial ambitions; and at right, a Russian map from 2014 disseminated online as a piece of “neoimperial” propaganda. Images courtesy of the author.

The geography of Ukraine’s imperial and postimperial borderlands should be better known: Sweden; Poland-Lithuania; the Romanov dynasty; the Habsburg Empire (later Austria-Hungary); the early modern Cossack Hetmanate, a proto-state and perhaps a proto-Empire; the Ottoman empire; and of course, Crimea. Every map is a prejudice, a blind spot, a way to avoid facts. People look at maps to live in myth and avoid history, in the way that Putin does. Or rather, to turn everything into geopolitics and geoeconomics. G20 into G8, G8 into G7, G7 into G2 (or G3). Great power imperialism, colonialism, neo-Stalinism, neo-fascism. When I first studied Ukrainian history as part of the Harvard Summer School, I learned from Professors Yaroslav Hrystak and Timothy Snyder the historical regions of Ukraine: Transcarpathia, Halychyna/Galicia, Volhynia, Podolia, Left- and Right-Bank Ukraine, Kyiv, Chernihiv, Siberia, Sloboda Ukraina, Bukovina, Donbas, Crimea. Hrytsak brought maps designed by Paul Robert Magocsi, another prominent historian and cartographer now in Toronto.

Putin is a dictator. He refuses all of this. Let it be told: he wants to exit his bunker in a mythic time, during the neocolonial Soviet Russocentric world of May 9th, 1945, otherwise known as Victory Day. Conquest and territorial revision, with new maps. He denies a genocidal policy, or any connection to European fascism in current Russian politics, or that there is any such thing as modern Ukrainian history or democracy in independent Ukraine.

Ukrainians have a new day, February 24th, 2022. That also seems imperfect to me. I have come to share long stories of Ukrainian maps over many wars, transnational Ukrainian-Polish and Ukrainian Jewish and German-Ukrainian histories, how conflicts and coexistence came to be–and were–developed and preserved. Maps, too. After the Orange Revolution of 2004 in Ukraine, when I was still a Ph.D. student at Brown University, a substantial collection of 900 maps was donated by the family of a famous Ukrainian poet-journalist to Harvard University. I wrote a book about it, in which I curated a private collection of maps donated by the Ukrainian Bohdan Krawciw (1904-1975), who came from an important family in the North American diaspora. He became much loved by experts, for his translations of Rainer Maria Rilke from German into Ukrainian. Krawciw was influential, and is counted among the founders of HURI, the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute.

*A slide from Dr. Seegel’s March 18th presentation displaying a sketch and photographs of Ukrainian cartographer Bohdan Krawciw. Image courtesy of the author.*

In the lecture, I displayed these maps of Ukraine, mine and Bohdan Krawciw’s, at a moment when the Kremlin was trying to destroy the country, its people and history. All part of a fair commemoration now in mid-2023, though I’m not sure how to do it in the face of Putin’s denial of genocide and the Kremlin’s ridiculously Goebbelsian propaganda. Pundits (some, anyway) continue to urge Ukrainians to sue for a “peace” that 90% of the population regards as a surrender to a brutal occupation and genocidal policy. The EU and NATO security environments are pro-Ukrainian; they have also been changed substantially in just a year. For many, the February 24th date is a convenient start to the war. Don’t all wars need a convenient starting and ending date? I’ll return to this.

Some non-specialists think of independent Ukraine even after 1991–the independent state existed for much longer–as a borderland or a “former Soviet” space that somehow lacked agency and was mapped by others. But Ukraine has a long history–running straight up to the present–of independent agency, and it is full of groups and individuals with agency and historical rights and claims that clearly have histories (in the plural). Ukraine is not blameless: it has its own history of Holocaust collaboration, pink “greater Ukraine” maps, and Eurocentric and (neo)colonial traditions in cartography. This independent country of 44 million people, with now roughly eight million displaced people, has a rich and unacknowledged history of geography. Ukraine has even richer histories of cities beyond Kyiv, provinces and zones of contact, and regional geographies.

The founder of modern Ukrainian cartography, the “map man” Stepan Rudnyts’kyi (1877-1937), was a geoscientist (we’d now say) and a speaker of Ukrainian, German and Polish. Mapping out of Habsburg Galicia, he was born to a German world of European empires. Though he had hoped in build a school for the study of Ukrainian geography, and in fact moved from Vienna and Prague to Kharkiv in the 1920s, Rudnyts’kyi was arrested by the NKVD in 1933 and murdered during Stalin’s purges in 1937. He was a victim and an agent of history, a storied and layered cartographic architect of modern Ukrainian politics.

The experience of lecturing to the residents of occupied Kherson showed me that war commemoration doesn’t work. We tend to think of history in time and maps in space, with wars having a clear beginning and an end, the guns going quiet on the front, the roads demined, or the flowers blooming again from the trenches. In reality, wars are muddy and messy, and so are the maps that tell their stories. War anniversaries propped up by historians strike me as odd. As any student who has designed or examined one in an archive can tell you, maps require frames. Yet something is always distorted, or left out. Maps of Ukraine in 2023 show us fluctuating borders: worlds of hope and fear, desire and impermanence. Their details speak of loss, and of the human stories of unquantifiable pain. I post endless maps on my Twitter feed, but I am also aware of the ineffable and the intangible. Not all of this can be mapped: long memories of forcible displacement or removal might go unearthed for generations. Traumas of famine and genocide in Ukraine aren’t digestible, and often decades will pass before they get told, until we write them, map them, relive them.

It is an existential matter. Khersonians knew they could be killed for maps, and as a result, some mobilized very quietly (or not at all). Despite my evident obsession with cartography, maps are not just for describing what’s already been. They are futuristic. Maps draft and anticipate hopes and dreams. They are tools to guide us, instrumentalize (often dangerously) and explicate, interpret new worlds spatially, and help us along. As I said to Khersonians, “Kherson today should be mapped into Ukrainian history as well as Russian history, Greek history, Jewish history . . . social history, LGBTQ+/gender history, feminist history, and many other histories. It makes little sense to me to think of fabricated fictions like ‘Novorossiya’ or ‘Russkii mir’ or other such pretexts for re-colonized empires and destroyed populations. The Kremlin wants you to leave, and at this point, three weeks into its war, it probably wants you destroyed. Mainly as a scholar, I think maps are failed claims and arguments, or rather questions that anticipate failed arguments. Clearly, Mr. Putin’s mental map is of a new world order, with Russia (and Moscow, and himself, because he allows no elections and considers no alternatives) at the center of everything, backed by military, siloviki, security services, and armed police. Maps are a means to his end, and those who do not agree with his world maps can be eliminated.”

*Russian president Vladimir Putin announcing the annexation of four Ukrainian regions on September 30th, 2022. Source: Wikimedia Commons.*

The future of Kherson and of Ukraine was in doubt now, and to some extent, remains in doubt. I now know that the people I’d “met on Zoom” were busy arming the resistance, even as they wondered about the checkpoints and fates of their families. There was no romance to any of it: it was dangerous there since the start of the escalated war. I compare this map imaginary to occupied Warsaw or Lwów/Lviv/Lvov/Lemberg (and many, many other Ukrainian or Soviet Ukrainian multicultural cities) during World War II.

The talk I gave to Khersonians on March 18th, 2022 took place several months before the successful Ukrainian counter-offensive of August 29th–November 9th, 2022. Ukrainian defense forces effectively liberated the city. But Russian forces continue to launch terror attacks on the city and the civilians within it. Students and young professionals who have been forcibly displaced express fears of going back there permanently to live, work, and story. Some do it anyway, like Kherson’s hunted, recently profiled, heroic mayor.

One year on, I think of my connection to the people of Kherson as a kind of emotional transnational map, a bond of global solidarity. The lecture went on, after which point the students went to sleep in the dormitory rooms, hoping to avoid missile attack. My audience had assembled at Kherson State University. Through the first month of the war, I had watched Russian missiles literally destroy university offices and classrooms where some of my colleagues had been teaching. I tried hard to get people to pay attention, in my Twitter feed and elsewhere. I am a public-facing historian, a historical geographer and an academic, but I know now that the people in my audience had special, rare courage. Their “public” was a civic space in war. Young and old, they studied maps. They had put up heroic resistance in defense of a Ukraine rich in traditions and history, right in the center of their city. Not virtue signaling, or merely performative in the ways of the West when they sang Ukrainian songs or waved Ukrainian flags.

In my talk on the Krawciw Ucrainica Map Collection and Ukraine’s history, I showed how Sweden, the Ottoman Empire, then Dutch, German and Italian cartographers drew from Renaissance and early modern mappings of the country. One of the centerpieces was the famous mid-17th century maps of “Ukraine” (so noted) by Guillaume le Vasseur de Beauplan (c. 1600-1673), who served the king of Poland-Lithuania as a military topographer, hydrographer, and cartographer. In Kherson beyond Russia, I literally had no idea where to start or what to do or say, what tone to choose. But we managed, and we did it together because we knew that Ukraine had a history. It has a history. Ukrainians have fought back, for a future Ukraine. They remember the Euromaidan protests in November 2013, and the forcible annexation of Crimea by the Kremlin during March 2014. I signaled for Putin’s Russia to return to history, not myth. Ukraine was not Russia, I intoned, and Russia is not the center of all maps.

*One of Guillaume le Vasseur de Beauplan’s 17th-century maps of “Ukraina”–note the name used in the map’s title in the lower righthand corner. Source: Wikimedia Commons.*

We must pay attention to such maps and how Ukraine is mapped. What maps did to the Khersonians in March 2022 is something the world is only starting to process as war crimes investigators move in. The Crimean annexation of 2014, the siege of Sarajevo and genocide in Bosnia, the Budapest memorandum of 1994, the partition of India in 1947, the occupation zones of Berlin, the fate of Poland at Yalta, the annexation of the Sudetenland and then Austria in 1938, the world of national self-determination that failed under US President Woodrow Wilson, the end of Europe’s great power empires in 1917 and 1918, the Berlin Conference carving up the map of Africa, the partitions of Poland in 1772, 1793, and 1795. Ukraine mapped geopolitically is its curse, like partitioned Poland in the 19th century, or Soviet Belarus after 1921. I concluded, “Maps of Ukraine are sites of famine, genocide, ideological claims to power, and modern (and now postmodern) mass death. But maps of Ukraine also suggest peace. We pay attention to your maps, because they connect us. Maps have life. Those lives of Ukrainians I know and love bring me here with you. And those lives give me hope, as you do, to resist.” The work done by war crimes investigators will need to be combined with the history of maps and Ukraine’s tragedies to further contextualize the larger stories of population displacement, ethnic cleaning, and genocide.

Maps can help us resist, by speaking truth to power. But this is difficult in a place like Ukraine with all its historical regions, because maps are power. I can explain these imperfect tools and artifacts on my channels of history, and I would like to think of map history as a noble cause. It is not. My writing or lecturing about Ukraine’s history can’t stop the mass death. This was apparent to me in Kherson on March 18th, 2022. And while I wish I knew how to commemorate a war, I’m still figuring out how to speak to a Ukrainian audience, and how to give them the maps to resist an occupation. I don’t, but I will.

I will never forget that lecture in Kherson.

Steven Seegel is Professor of Slavic and Eurasian Studies at The University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of Map Men: Transnational Lives and Deaths of Geographers in the Making of East Central Europe (University of Chicago Press, 2018), Ukraine under Western Eyes (Harvard University Press, 2013), and Mapping Europe’s Borderlands: Russian Cartography in the Age of Empire (University of Chicago Press, 2012). He has been a contributor to the fourth and fifth volumes of Chicago’s international history of cartography series, and has translated over 300 entries from Russian and Polish for the US Holocaust Memorial Museum‘s Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933-1945, in multiple volumes, published jointly by USHMM and Indiana University Press. Professor Seegel is a former director at Harvard University of the Ukrainian Research Institute‘s summer exchange program. He is active on Twitter @steven_seegel and currently as the host of author-feature podcast interviews on the popular New Books Network. He is the founder of The February 24th Archive, an ongoing community-driven digital project (with 1000s of threads, 8 GB of tweets, 15 million people in terms of audience reach) that focuses on building global solidarities during Russia’s war against Ukraine.

Review of Radio for the Millions: Hindi-Urdu Broadcasting Across Borders (2023) by Isabel Huacuja Alonso

In Radio for the Millions, Isabel Alonso provides a captivating history of radio that sits at the intersection of sound studies, cultural history, and the politics of nationalism in modern South Asia. In this virtuosic tale, we read about the policymakers, artists, singers, political figures, and poets who inhabited a broader transnational space in South Asia. Using relatively neglected sources, as well as the usual range of newspapers, advertisements, posters, and memoirs, the book is pioneering in making radio the object of historical analysis.

Readers learn that radio played a vibrant role in forging political subjectivities and mobilizing identities during the anti-colonial struggles of the twentieth century. It also created an aura around political figures. It was through the radio that the nationalist activist Subhas Chandra Bose remained a captivating figure and loomed large in the imagination of the listeners.

The history of rumors constitutes another fascinating aspect of this book’s narrative. Rumors about Bose, Radio Ceylon and its competitive relationship with All India Radio, the India-Pakistan war of 1965, and—last but not least—the famous singer Nur Jehan all constitute this larger fascinating arena of historical analysis.

Though the author does not identify her work as a contribution to ethnomusicology, her sensitivity to the place of music in a broader spectrum of sociability makes the book even more remarkable. Theoretically, following an Adornoian tradition, the literature around music in radio’s history has focused almost exclusively on radio’s role in promoting popular music and the notion of regression of listening. According to this theoretical tradition, radio and the popular industry made listeners passive consumers of the popular industry’s product. As a result, the relationship between the radio and the listeners is narrativized in a suspicious mode. This cynical approach towards radio has informed the historiographies of radio and sound in various contexts from the global South. In Iranian historiographies of radio, for instance, this Adornoian theoretical metanarrative has loomed large.

Alonso disrupts this tradition by focusing on the Director of All India Radio, B. V. Keskar, and his attempts to use radio to inculcate “discerning listeners.” The book shows how the newly independent Indian state considered radio the medium for developing “classical” tastes in Indian audiences. Keskar’s unease with popular culture marks an exciting point of departure for the revision of radio’s history globally. As Alonso’s work masterfully shows, “the citizen listeners” of radio – however briefly – became the subject of the elite’s cultural and artistic sensibilities, which at times sharply contrasted with that of the popular industry. In placing sound at the cusp of politics, nationalism, and identity, the author does not fall into the theoretical jargon sometimes associated with sound studies. While the book is theoretically informed and engaging, it is a situated historical work that brings sustained conceptual insights. Following Manan Ahmad’s work, the author argues for a transnational history of sound and sonic experience. The ‘soundscape’ of her book transcends the territorial limits of the nation-state.

*Nationalist leader Muhammad Ali Jinnah announcing the creation of an independent Pakistan over All India Radio, June 3rd, 1947. Source: Wikimedia Commons.*

In a similar vein, Alonso’s coinage of the term “citizen listeners” gestures at a collectivity of listening subjects. The citizens of newly independent India (and Pakistan) became also citizen subjects through programs that were mediated via transmitters. Rich in its narrative and coverage of various aspects of sound, Radio for the Millions opens numerous interesting avenues for further investigation. For instance, we can certainly wonder about the ways in which listening “citizen subjects” thought about the sounds they heard on the radio and acted to shape the programming beyond writing letters.

This book will benefit an expansive community of readers, including academic communities in the disciplines of history and ethnomusicology and specifically readers interested in the cultural history of sound and music. It provides a wonderful model of the cultural history of sound and music for other societies, especially modern Iran, where writing cultural histories of sound and listening has been an arduous task.

Pouya Nekouei is a Ph.D. student in Middle Eastern history at the department of Middle Eastern studies at the University of Texas, Austin. His research interests pertain to the social and cultural history of Iran, the Indian Ocean world, and the connected social and cultural history of South Asia, Iran, and Europe.

Art and the Public

UGS 302 • Art and the Public is a first-year seminar course devoted to understanding public art in a variety of contexts: on the UT Austin campus, along the US-Mexican border, on neighborhood walls in Los Angeles, on the National Mall in Washington, DC, and elsewhere around the world. Some of these art works are made by world-renowned artists and some by volunteer members of the local community. They can be permanent monuments or they can disappear after one performance or as nature erodes them. We study the works themselves: learning about the inspiration behind them, the controversies and other responses they provoke, the ways they are sustained, or defaced, or torn down. We study the processes for funding public art, and for obtaining permission to construct these works, the choices made by town councils and city governments, and the role of individual curators like our own at UT’s Landmarks Public Art project. We also examine their locations and the ways the works are shaped by their environment and shape, in turn, the communities that surround them.

Teaching this course in Fall 2021, after a year of pandemic, and with no vaccine or mask mandate, was a challenge. I was nervous walking into the classroom. And I wasn’t sure I could keep students healthy and still get them to cohere as a community, masked and sitting six feet apart. But, as many of my colleagues noticed, first-year students came to the university this year more eager to learn than we can ever remember. This class was diverse in every way– ethnicity, background, training, abilities, and interests — but they quickly became responsive, curious listeners, working together through the material that was new to all of them. They were active, critical readers, open to new ways of seeing and thinking, and sharing their very different experiences with each other.

The final project for this class is an imaginary or virtual work of art. Each student is asked to design a work, to explain its inspiration and its purpose, to choose a specific location for it and describe how it is meant to interact with the local community, including a plan for testing public responses through focus groups or representative local governments, and a plan for obtaining funding and permissions. The students’ projects are wonderfully creative, diverse, and attuned to specific local needs and priorities. Here is a sample.

Sharon Chang, Ours

My imaginary project would be constructed of various interlocking, interchangeable 3D geometric shapes of different colors. It would have many pieces, making up a large structure. From there, the piece becomes interactive. The public can climb on and touch the piece as they wish, as well as rearrange the pieces to reconstruct the whole. The purpose of this artwork is to reflect the complicated, give-and take relationship between the public and public art. It would bring people together with a collaborative, fun public sculpture and reflect the bright and communal nature of public art. On the flip-side, since the pieces are free for the public to move, they would also be free to be stolen. That’s just how the public is, both good and bad, and the art piece was made with all the possibilities for re-shaping and disappearing in mind. The message on the last block would ask, “everything?” and hopefully evoke a sense of sadness for the colorful sculpture that was once there. All it takes is a few people who would rather take than leave things for other people to enjoy. How long the piece would remain intact and collaborative is for the public to decide. Perhaps the public would respect the pieces and leave them for others to enjoy for a while, or perhaps someone will steal all the pieces within the first few days of installation. Ultimately, the piece would be made for the public and eventually end up in pieces in the hands of the public.

Dariela Hernandez, Yo Tambien Camino

Yo Tambien Camino, (I Also Walk), is a kinetic wind sculpture related to the place I grew up in: the border between the United States and Mexico at Eagle Pass, Texas. Yo Tambien Camino, invites spectators to see their own experiences in those of people who have traversed a long journey to and through the border. Many Americans view the borderlands as a place where illegal activity runs rampant. This sculpture is intended to highlight the struggle and determination of immigrants who cross the border. My public artwork will use wind to propel itself along the border on the American side, mimicking the strides of those many people who crossed the border seeking opportunities. The structure will be modeled on Theo Jansen’s self-propelling wind sculptures, pictured in the Gif below, modified as in the sketches. On its path, the sculpture will almost certainly be damaged, showing that this walk is a harsh one. My main goal is to foster empathy for the people who take this path not because they “want” to, but because it is necessary to escape violence, corruption and despair.

Eliana Salazar, Neuron

Neuron is a blown-glass sculpture created from transparent glass and composed of LED color-changing motion-sensor lights. The sculpture itself is entirely made of clear glass and emulates a collection of neurons, similar to those within the human brain, that are interconnected and constructed in various sizes. Within the glass piece are color-changing motion-sensor LED lights that slowly turn on and off similar to the electrical signals passing between neurons when the brain is stimulated. The sculpture is twenty feet long and five feet tall and will be suspended by wire cables from the ceiling skylight of the corridor of the Weill Neurosciences Building at the University of California, San Franciso. Neuron’s purpose is to evoke a sense of exuberance for those entering the building, provide its audience a chance to question its presence, and to promote Neuroscience.

Jane Vanzant, Forever Ephemeral

How often are you faced with a painting, sculpture, or other art form so beautiful that you wish you could just step forward and get a closer look – until you turn around to find a frowning security guard or sign with bright red letters reading “DO NOT TOUCH?” Perhaps if the public were given the option to touch, they would more actively engage with art. “Forever Ephemeral “will encourage its audience to use their tactile senses in order to inspire a deeper understanding or personal connection. Forever Ephemeral consists of two large-scale steel sculptures that are identical in shape but differing in surface materials. Both will be constructed of durable steel, resistant to marks and stains, but “Ephemeral” is going to have a thermochromic finish. Thermochromic paint is heating or cooling activated, which will temporarily reveal the imprint of anyone who touches it. Because the surface of “Ephemeral” is constantly changing, it symbolizes not just the short-term effects we have on others but also how we ebb and flow as a product of our surroundings. Together, “Forever” and “Ephemeral” create a kind of duality: there are permanent aspects, people, and things in our lives that anchor us, and there are fleeting ones that change us slightly. The title itself, Forever Ephemeral, is an oxymoron that exemplifies this idea. And so, through outward and inward reflection encouraged by tactile stimulation, my project has the purpose of revealing how we impact those around us, and how those around us impact ourselves.

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Sharon Chang, Ours

Dariela Hernandez, Yo Tambien Camino

Eliana Salazar, Neuron

Jane Vanzant, Forever Ephemeral

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