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Review of Mosquito Empires: Ecology and War in the Greater Caribbean, 1620-1914 (2010) by J. R. McNeill

Banner image for Review of Mosquito Empires: Ecology and War in the Greater Caribbean, 1620-1914 (2010) by J. R. McNeill.

For approximately three centuries, the greater Caribbean hosted the Spanish empire‘s most important social, environmental, and political connections. Interactions between people, the environment, and mosquitoes played an essential part in this history, as John McNeill explains in Mosquito Empires. A professor of history at Georgetown University, McNeill uses his book to explore the links between ecology, disease, and Atlantic politics in the Greater Caribbean from 1620 until 1914. Mosquito Empires won the Albert J. Beveridge prize from the American Historical Association in 2011.

Mosquito Empires serves as an excellent introduction to the field of environmental history. It opens an exciting pathway to understanding how the past’s ecological, political, and epidemic problems continue to impact our present. McNeill makes an important contribution to the field of environmental studies through connections to different fields, including history, politics, epidemiology, climatology, ecology, and others.

Book cover for Mosquito Empires: Ecology and War in the Greater Caribbean, 1620-1914 (2010) by J. R. McNeill.

Throughout Mosquito Empires, we find examples that show ecology shaped the history of the Americas because of environmental changes and human agency. Its title is suggestive of the relevance of mosquitoes in an imperial age. McNeill also touches on other subjects, including the transport of animals between continents and the ways in which existing fauna exercised agency to influence how people occupied territory. Furthermore, Mosquito Empires allows us to recognize the role of disease in human and environmental history. As such, it may be even more interesting today, in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. As McNeill points out, humans prefer to understand and explain history based on human affairs such as war, revolutions, or conquest. But sometimes, we forget our ecological agency in the environment as a part of our history. McNeill’s book shows co-evolutionary processes bridging the gap between society and nature, demonstrating that the agency of mosquitoes is as important as human agency. 

Mosquito Empires also helps us comprehend how the significance and understanding of disease has changed over time. For instance, many diseases did not impact all of the Spanish Empire’s diverse populations in the same way. Diseases encounter different environments, immunities, and susceptibilities as they spread. Moreover, as parts of an ecological chain, certain diseases depended on specific circumstances for transmission: temperature, flora, and land conditions determined how contagious they were. Consequently, McNeill also considers some unique features of malaria and yellow fever, which required mosquitos to spread.

McNeill uses a scalar perspective, beginning his analysis on a global scale before moving towards a local space. Mosquito Empires starts by looking at the Spanish empire from an Atlantic perspective and then focuses on its Caribbean ecology. From 1620 until 1820, the linkages between ecological and political affairs occupied most of the central historical interactions in the Caribbean. Atlantic American geopolitics gave local politics an ecological focus during the early colonial period when Spanish authorities focused on preserving Indigenous and enslaved populations because they provided a labor force for the Spanish empire. The colonizers also built plantations, which occupied most territories in Brazil and the Americans during this period and were more important than silver and gold mines or other sources of economic activity. Also, the creation of plantation systems helped the permanence of mosquitos, producing the conditions necessary for the ongoing existence of diseases. At the same time, geopolitical turbulence in Atlantic America coincided with ecological transformations in the Greater Caribbean. Most of their impacts were related to the introduction of new plants and animals in the Americas, which affected preexisting environmental conditions.

A drawing depicting a plantation on the San Juan River in Nicaragua.
This nineteenth-century drawing depicts a plantation on the San Juan River in Nicaragua. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

One of the most exciting contributions made by Mosquito Empires is its creation of a unified historical and ecological framework for analyzing epidemiologic problems. Through his book, we can gain new insights into diseases by studying them in a single ecological and historical context. Mosquito Empires considers many variables: demography, ecology, immunity, and climate changes which could affect the spread of diseases in the Caribbean. McNeill compares how yellow fever affected Caribbean locals and European immigrants; he also shows that the disease impacted rural areas (where plantations were located) more than urban ones.

Other factors such as climate change and European immigration, contributed to the spread of diseases, leading to variations across time and space. McNeill’s framework shows how yellow fever’s agency operates and examines its transmission, immunity, and impact on humans and across landscapes. Nonetheless, the disease did not make its history by itself. As McNeill demonstrates, yellow fever acquired historical relevance only when it became an epidemic and had a persistent cycle of transmission. Through this argument, the author shows how human activity converted a diminutive organism into a historical and ecological concern for many years.

Another outstanding feature of McNeill’s book is the diversity of manuscript sources it taps, many of which come from Iberic-American archives. The demographic and health features presented in the book are essential to consider the perception of the disease, but also the knowledge (scientific or empirical) to cure or resolve the epidemics. Case studies examine Brazil, Jamaica, Kourou, Darien, and The Viceroyalty of New Granada. Mosquito Empires performs a valuable service just by gathering so much information. But the information is also critical to the book’s central aim because it documents the disasters created by geopolitical colonialism. According to McNeill, these events show “the power of imported diseases, after the 1640s establishment of yellow fever in the region, to prevent new large-scale European settlement in the Greater Caribbean (p. 135).” 

Mosquito Empires serves to remind historians of the role of diseases in our environment. McNeill’s book presents a history of empire’s power as shown through the links between ecological and political matters. McNeill describes the mosquitoes as shields of empire, but readers should also consider them as actors in this geopolitical puzzle. Mosquitoes were protagonists with agency and specific power, capable of defending (through immunity) or destroying (through mortality) an army or a population group; they could also transform the environment.

Cindia Arango López is a doctoral student at UT Austin at the Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies. She studies the relationship between the environmental and social history of the Magdalena River and its navigators, the bogas, during the 18th century in Colombia. She has researched thematics about enslaved history in the colonial period in Colombia. Also, she published relating to the current territorial dynamics of displacement in Colombia from a human geography perspective.

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.

Converting “Latinos” during Salem’s Witch Trials: A Review of Cotton Mather’s Spanish Lessons: A Story of Language, Race, and Belonging in the Early Americas (2022) by Kirsten Silva Gruesz

banner image for A Review of Cotton Mather's Spanish Lessons: A Story of Language, Race, and Belonging in the Early Americas (2022) by Kirsten Silva Gruesz

In 1699 Cotton Mather published a 16-page catechism in Spanish, La Fe del Christiano.

The only three surviving copies reveal a hastily printed catechism riddled with improvisations and errors. To get an “ñ,” as in Señor (Lord), the anonymous typesetter split a fragment of a double long “ff” serif.

Mather’s catechism was printed in miniature: on an eighth of a folded page with one letter page per catechism. In an important new book, Cotton Mather’s Spanish Lessons: A Story of Language, Race, and Belonging in the Early Americas, Kirsten Silva Gruesz has examined the origins of this tiny piece of ephemera, one of 4,000 titles written by Mather, including the ten-volume Biblia Americana.

book cover for cotton mather's spanish lessons

Who was the intended audience of Mather’s catechism? How did Mather learn Spanish? Seeking to answer such seemingly simple questions, Gruesz uncovers the extraordinarily complex racial universe of early eighteenth-century colonial Boston. Using the little-known history of this ostensibly disposable item, Gruesz boldly explores the colonial origins of “Latinos” in Anglo America.

To be sure, there were no “Latinx” in Mather’s Boston. Gruesz, however, focuses on the many “Spanish Indian” and “Spanish Negro” slaves serving Puritan households. These early modern captives not only lacked names, but they also embodied ambiguity. What did “Spanish” mean? That they were Timucua captives driven from Florida missions by the Westo and Yamasee allies of South Carolina planters? That they were maroon Spanish captives from Jamaica? That they were Angolans that shared common ethnic Catholic markers with “Spain”? That they were “Spanish-speaking” captives introduced in Boston by the numerous Portuguese conversos relocating from Olinda, Curaçao, and Surinam? Gruesz argues that these are the same ambiguities of belonging that Latinos face today. Latinos, she maintains, are the nation-state descendants of the mongrel, “Tawny,” and “Spanish-speaking” populations that Mather sought to address. They are, in other words, unclassifiable in the traditional White-Black racial dichotomies of Anglo-America.

A mezzotint portrait of Cotton Mather
A mezzotint portrait of Cotton Mather, ca. 1700. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Gruesz suggests that Mather learned Spanish from the various nameless “Spanish” Indian-Negro slaves in his household and that the catechism was addressed to similar individuals on the continent. Mather’s project, Gruesz argues, was one of conversion not unlike that of the Franciscan missionaries with the Timucua in Florida or John Eliot with the Wampanoag in the praying towns of Massachusetts. Mather introduced La Fe del Christiano citing Acosta’s Procuranda Indorum Salute (1589–in English, How to procure the salvation of Indians), an influential Jesuit text on missions that argued for the use of indigenous vernaculars in conversion.

Acosta was responsible for putting together catechisms, confessional manuals, and sermons in Quechua and Aymara during the Third Council of Lima, which took place in the1580s.

Mather uses Acosta to argue that it was a “right” of people to hear the word of God in their own tongues. This basic Protestant tenant was, however, tested by King Phillip’s War, which pitted Puritans against the Wampanoag, the very people who the “apostle” Eliot had sought to convert. It was Mather himself who put an end in 1700 to all further printing of Wampanoag bibles and catechisms.

Gruesz suggests that the “mongrel,” “tawny” castas of the continental and Caribbean Spanish “frontier” became Mather’s new mission target. Gruesz draws on Mather’s and Mather’s friend, Samuel Sewall’s, chiliastic publications to make her case.

Clearly, Calvinists like Mather and Sewall thought that end of times was near, provided that all Jews were converted. Since Indians were the lost tribes of Israel, their conversion would hasten the apocalypse. In Sewall and Mather’s rendition, “America” would be the place of the millennium, not the rearguard of Satan from where the armies of Gog and Magog would attack the elect–as suggested by previous Puritans divines. This chiliastic vision had prompted Cromwell in 1650 to send a massive armada to conquer the Spanish American empire. Cromwell expected oppressed Black slaves, maroons, and Indians to join the English in a liberating crusade against the cruel “Spanish.”

To their surprise, the “tawny” masses turned against the English, routing Cromwell armadas in several humiliating defeats. It turns out, “they” were the “Spanish.” This Western Design however left the English in control of tiny Jamaica, a smuggling entrepot perfectly positioned to secure access to Spanish silver, which became the engine of Boston’s commercial prosperity. Gruesz argues that Mather and Sewall sought a less violent assault on the evil Catholic empire, this one spearheaded by cheaply printed catechisms.

The frontispiece of Mather's Spanish-language catechism La Fe del Christiano
The frontispiece of Mather’s Spanish-language catechism La Fe del Christiano.

Drawing on a careful reading of Mather’s diaries, letters, and autobiographies, Gruesz masterfully reconstructs Mather’s household and millennial dreams. There is a disconnect between Mather’s grandiose geopolitical crusading aspirations and the scale of his output, one miserly, badly printed catechism. The tiny size of the catechism might have served to help smuggle Calvinist dogma into the Spanish Caribbean. Yet it was a cheap, hastily printed document full of grammatical, orthographic, and syntaxial errors. Like Cromwell, Mather was deeply condescending to his audience of “Spanish-Indian-Negros.” Given this basic fact, it seems to me that we could more productively focus on Cromwell’s and Mather’s condescension and what exactly it prefigures. It was not “mosquitoes,” John Robert McNeill notwithstanding, that ultimately defeated the British in Cartagena in the War of Jenkins Ear or in Cuba and the Philippines in the Seven Years’ War or in Buenos Aires in the failed attacks of 1806 and 1808. Every time the British sent armadas to Spanish colonies to help set “Indians and Negros” free (to become consumers and pliant labor), the British were routed by “Indian,” “Negro,” and “casta” armed militias.

There is a dimension of Latinidad in this book that invites further exploration: Mather’s Indians and Negros were “Spanish” because they were foreigners. This is what made them “Latinos.” The English, including Mather, never considered those that they called “mongrels” as part of a political nation. In this, they differed from the “Spaniards.” “Tawnies” were foreigners. Identity in English America was not religious but always ethnic. Portuguese conversos in Boston could be English. Blacks and Indians never. Free Blacks remained Africans, whether in late 17th-century Cambridge or in 19th-century Boston. Black churches, clubs, and athenaeums remained “African” until the New Negro movement. What happened to “Africans” happened to “Latinos” too. It took centuries until the landmark 1954 Hernández v. Texas case for Mexicanos (Tejanos born in the U.S.) to gain some rights of citizenship. They finally became hyphenated Mexican-Americans almost 90 years after Reconstruction. This heavy colonial legacy is what begat “Latinos.” This is what keeps one million “Latinx” English native speakers, early childhood arrivals to the U.S., as foreigners. And it applies even to individuals born in this country. Throughout his twelve years of elementary, middle and high school education, my U.S.-born son has had to prove every year to both Federal and State governments that he is in fact a full American. He was classified in kindergarten as an “English Learner” because of his bilingual background. It is difficult to escape the obvious conclusion: that he is being socialized by the wider system to believe that he is somehow deficient. He is, therefore, a full-fledged Latino.

Kirsten Silva Gruesz has produced a masterful study that should be widely read. But there are more questions to be asked of this text and the attitudes that gave birth to it.

Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra is the Alice Drysdale Sheffield Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin and the Director of the Institute of Historical Studies.

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.

Breaking ChatGPT: Good Teaching Still Beats the Best AI

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At this point, everyone seems to have heard of ChatGPT 3, the breakthrough artificial intelligence engine released in November 2022. A product of the OpenAI consortium, this online tool can generate long-form prose from simple prompts, with results often indistinguishable from human efforts. A New York Times column reported that ChatGPT “creates new content, tailored to your request, often with a startling degree of nuance, humor and creativity.”[1] The bot thus commonly passes the Turing Test: it can convince users that it is human.

Many observers greeted ChatGPT with something close to terror. Our dystopian future, they declared, will be the inverse of that foretold by The Jetsons. Instead of cheerful robot servants freeing us from manual drudgery, robots will replace us as writers, artists, and thinkers. Domestic labor and farm work will become the last arenas where humans surpass our robot creations. Our niche will shrink to that of Romba assistants, tidying up the spots missed by robot vacuums. While some of these commentaries were arch, many were earnest. Writing in the MIT Technology Review, Melissa Heikkilä explicitly posed the question “Could ChatGPT do my job?”[2] In the New York Times, Frank Bruni wondered “Will Chat GPT Make Me Irrelevant?”[3]

Screenshot from "Could ChatGPT do my job?"
Screenshot from “Could ChatGPT do my job?”, https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/01/31/1067436/could-chatgpt-do-my-job/

Many academics echoed these alarms. “You can no longer give take-home exams,” wrote Kevin Bryan, a professor of management based at the University of Toronto. Samuel Bagg, a University of South Carolina political scientist, suggested that ChatGPT3 “may actually spell the end of writing assignments.”

I dissent.

At its core, ChatGPT is just a predictive text algorithm. Simple predictive text engines are ubiquitous. In the common email client Microsoft Outlook, for example, if I write several lines of text (an indication that it might be time for a conclusion), and then type “please get”, the software immediately suggests “back to me.” If I accept that suggestion, it offers “as soon as possible.” This is not scary or surprising. The algorithm is simply relying on predictable prose patterns. The best predictive text algorithms are adaptive. You have likely experienced how your phone’s texting feature improves with time. That is simply a product of the software incorporating the probabilities of your writing habits. If I routinely write, “Please get me a taco and change the oil on my car,” a good algorithm will accordingly change the autocomplete suggestions for “Please get.”

ChatGPT3 is nothing more than those familiar text algorithms but at a massive scale. It seems different because size matters. The textbase is roughly 300 billion words, and the computational costs to train the engine (essentially the electric bill) ran into millions of dollars. Unlike familiar predictive text methods, which look at a few words (e.g., “please get” prompts “back to me”), ChatGPT3 accepts, and returns prompt with thousands of words.

That difference in scale obscures key similarities. After all, although both are primates, a 400 lb. mountain gorilla is threatening in ways that a 5 lb. ring-tailed lemur is not. But the fact that ChatGPT3 is just a predictive text algorithm is essential to appreciating its limits. Gorillas, however large and scary, are primates and share the core limits of that order: they cannot fly, live underwater, or turn sunlight into starch. In the same way, ChatGPT does not “think.”

A 2013 photograph of The Thinker, a sculpture by Auguste Rodin on display at the Musée Rodin in Paris
A 2013 photograph of The Thinker, a sculpture by Auguste Rodin on display at the Musée Rodin in Paris. Source: Wikimedia Commons/Tammy Lo. Image reproduced under the terms of Creative Commons License 2.0.

No predictive text algorithm, no matter its scale, can write anything new. The scope of ChatGPT3 conceals that it is just a massive “cut and paste” engine, auto-completing our text prompts based on billions of pages scraped from the internet. That is both its great power and its core limitation. ChatGPT3 is devastatingly “human” at the most mundane “cut and paste” aspects of writing. It will likely automate many forms of “compliance writing” (certifications that a person or organization conforms to rules and regulations), as well as customer service letters, legal forms, insurance reports, etc. Of course, many of those tasks were already partly automated, but ChatGPT3 has radically streamlined the interface. By extension, ChatGPT can resemble a human student and earn a solid B+ when responding to any question that has an established answer. If there are thousands of examples on the internet, ChatGPT will convincingly reassemble those into seemingly human prose. 

ChatGPT thus poses a real but energizing question for teachers. If ChatGPT is most human-like when answering “cut and paste” questions, why are we posing such questions? Adapting to ChatGPT requires not a ban on the software, much less a retreat into an imaginary past before computers, but merely some healthy self-reflection. If we are genuinely teaching our students to think and write critically, then we have nothing to fear from ChatGPT. If our test questions can be answered by ChatGPT, then we aren’t requiring critical reading or thinking.

We can break ChatGPT simply by demanding that students directly engage historical sources. Consider the prompt, “Relate the Gettysburg Address to the Declaration of Independence. Is Lincoln expanding on an older vision of the Republic or creating a new one?” ChatGPT generates a compelling simulacrum of a cautious B-student: “the Gettysburg Address can be seen as both an expansion of the principles outlined in the Declaration of Independence and the creation of a new vision for the nation.” But essay never quotes either document and ChatGPT gets confused as soon we push for specifics. Thus, the prompt “When Lincoln declared that ‘all men are created equal’ was he creating a new vision of liberty?” generates the response “Abraham Lincoln did not declare that ‘all men are created equal’; rather, this phrase comes from the United States Declaration of Independence, which was written by Thomas Jefferson in 1776.” This answer is incoherent because ChatGPT3 does not “understand” the meaning of “declare.” It was likely tripped up by a probabilistic association of “declare” with “declaration.”

This early 20th century poster reproduces the text of the Gettysburg Address.
This early 20th century poster reproduces the text of the Gettysburg Address. Note that the very first sentence contains the phrase “all men are created equal”—something ChatGPT missed. Source: Wikimedia Commons/Library of Congress.

ChatGPT3 collapses completely when we move beyond canonical sources and press further on specifics. Consider the prompt “Washington’s famous ‘Letter to a Hebrew Congregation in Newport’ is a response to an invitation from that congregation. Using your close reading skills, which aspects of that invitation does Washington engage and which does he ignore?” Here, GPT becomes an expert fabulist. There is no massive internet corpus on the original invitation, so it infers grievances: “For example, the Jewish community in Newport had expressed concerns about their status as a minority group, as well as their economic and social opportunities.” In other iterations, it asserts that Washington ignored a plea to “help secure the rights of all citizens, including those who are marginalized or oppressed.” Those answers have little to do with the primary sources, although they are compelling imitations of a poorly prepared student.

ChatGPT misses core elements of the exchange. For example, the invitation calls for the divine protection of Washington and for his ascent to heaven, but Washington responds modestly and with a broadly ecumenical vision of the afterlife. Even when I pasted the original Newport letter to Washington into ChatGPT, it responded with a boilerplate summary of Washington’s response. It can only write what’s already been written.

I have focused here on American history because in my specialty of Japanese history, where there are comparatively few English-language examples to repurpose, ChatGPT breaks down both rapidly and thoroughly. I asked it about Edogawa Ranpō’s 1925 short story “The Human Chair.” It is a haunting, gothic work about an obsessed, self-loathing craftsman who builds a massive chair for a luxury hotel, conceals himself in it, and then thrills as he becomes living furniture for a cosmopolitan elite. ChatGPT insisted that it was about a man who tried to turn his wife into a chair. ChatGPT didn’t do the assigned reading because it can’t read. That insight applies across fields and disciplines: the algorithm can only write modified versions of what’s already on the web.

Perhaps, in some distant future, ChatGPT 500 (the descendant of ChatGPT 3) will have absorbed everything that has been written or said. Until then, we need merely inflect our questions to move beyond predictable answers. Open ended questions about Rousseau’s Social Contract or Kant’s What is Enlightenment? need to slip into oblivion. But relating any of those canonical texts to non-canonical sources, and insisting on quotes, is a vibrant alternative. How, for example, does this Boston newspaper editorial on the Haitian Revolution relate to Rousseau? Or “Here’s an neglected passage of Spinoza. Relate to it to this well-known passage from Kant.” Such questions stymie ChatGPT3. They can also give our students a better education that is also more true to the objectives of the humanities—teaching students to think for themselves. And they will make teaching more rewarding. At first glance, ChatGPT3 is genuinely scary. But even the scariest gorillas cannot fly or turn sunlight into starch. And, “please get back to me as soon as possible.”

Mark Ravina is the Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Chair in Japanese Studies at the University of Texas at Austin.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/12/26/upshot/chatgpt-child-essays.html?searchResultPosition=1

[2] https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/01/31/1067436/could-chatgpt-do-my-job/

[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/15/opinion/chatgpt-artificial-intelligence.html?searchResultPosition=5

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.

Remembering Rio Speedway

“THRILLS! SPILLS! CHILLS!” was how Rio Speedway advertised its stockcar races, and at that little track we must have totaled classics worth a million dollars. Maybe I’m exaggerating, but you get the idea.

When I lived there, Pharr, Texas, was a hamlet of 5000, two hundred miles south of San Antonio and just across the river from Reynosa, Mexico. It shared (and I suppose still does) the city limits sign with neighboring McAllen. Both towns are at the western edge of the Rio Grande Valley’s citrus belt. (I don’t know why they call it a valley, because the land is flat as a pancake.)

Those soon blended into stocks—Fords from the 1930s, with a few Plymouths, Chevies, and a Buick or two. All were built in the Thirties, had survived World War II, and were passing their final days up on blocks or in junk yards, where you could pick one up for $20 or $30.

Rio Speedway opened in 1946. It was five miles south of town on the road to Reynosa and at first it featured home-brew “midgets,” little home made open-wheel machines built strictly for auto racing. These were small in size and usually powered by little Ford ’60’ motors designed in the early 30s.

Once you got your car running and tuned it up, you stripped it of upholstery, installed a surplus airplane seat, and sometimes added what passed for roll-bars. You also cut off the fenders and installed large plumbing pipes to protect the radiator. Such refinements made it a “modified” stock, and if the car was especially fast and you were especially good, you might win $50 for first place in the fifty-lap “feature.” First place in a ten-lap “heat” would earn you maybe $15. Short of that it might be $5 and some cartons of cigarettes.

I was just a kid, but I had a Kodak with shutter speeds and it let me talk my way past the one-dollar ticket booth. Now I’m thinking this happened because my dad owned the Hub Cafe, a truck stop, the only place in town where you could get a beer.

I came to know the owner of the racetrack and quite a few drivers. The owner was Wayne Hartnett, I guess nearly fifty, and he lived in a fine brick house just outside of town. He also had a really fine daughter, Darlene, about my age. But she had class and I didn’t, so I lacked the courage to ask her for a date. (For that matter, I didn’t know how to date.)

Most of the drivers were regulars, and most had raced the open-wheeled midgets before moving into stocks. They would buy the 4×5-inch photographic prints I made at home and carried with me in a shoulder bag. Twenty-five cents each.

Of all the drivers, my favorite was Roy Cameron. He was a frequent winner and so friendly that everybody liked him. His main rivals were Red Davis, Bob Whistler, and J. W. Brown. Red was fun and sometimes let me ride with him on warm-ups, if I held tight to the roll-bars and there weren’t other cars on the track. Bob Whistler was OK; I was told he had a plate in his head from a car wreck some years earlier. J. W. Brown was a little stand-offish but had a really exotic car. It was a stripped-down ‘32 Ford with big roll-bars front to back and over, and I’m surprised they even let him race (although “they” was Mr. Hartnett).

Next to Roy Cameron, my other favorite driver was Slim Nagy. He was tall, decent looking, didn’t win all that often, and specialized in bad luck. As a crop-duster (his day job) he once piled up his Stearman biplane, an Air Corps trainer left over from the Thirties. He was skimming a cotton field, wheels touching the plants, when he was surprised by tree stump that wasn’t supposed to be there. The plane flipped upside down and shook him up, but all he had to do was pop his seat-belt.

Where he really had bad luck was at the track, first in a midget and then in stocks. When he crashed his midget, the radiator hose broke and scalded his legs. Later he rolled stocks, maybe three or four times. Like nearly all the cars, his had an aluminum seat surplussed from the jillions of T-6 trainers used in World War II, and his wasn’t anchored too well. The roll cost him a broken collar bone. I don’t know how long it takes for collar bones to heal, but he was back to racing a month or so later.

Incidentally, Mr. Nagy gave me my first airplane ride. He said Would I like to? and I said Sure! In those days, nobody worried about parental permission or things like liability insurance.


Getting back to stock cars—

If Slim’s luck was sometimes bad, the two best dumb-luck guys were the Byrd Brothers, Dave and Elmer. For them, racing was a labor of love, if not much else. They never missed a Sunday, never rolled their cars, and often finished last. They both lived in a small frame house and were so friendly that I liked to hang out there, watch them tinker with their cars. I don’t know what Dave did, but Elmer was the projectionist at our little Texas Theater. I’d visit him in its upstairs projection booth and he’d show me things like how movie film would flare up if you touched it with a match. I don’t know when they changed its chemistry, but back then movie film was nitrate-based. He smoked, other projectionists smoked, and I’ve always wondered why more movie theaters didn’t blow sky-high.

Anyway, every race had its spins and crashes and rolls that were monitored by our firetruck and the funeral home ambulance. The firetruck was manned by three or four of our Volunteers, and two Angels of Mercy brought the ambulance. I think all of them came unbidden, because they liked to watch the races.

In 1954 I graduated high school and went off to college. Rio Speedway remained in operation, but not for very long. During vacations I attended several races but knew fewer and fewer drivers. The Valley’s biggest sport was high school football, ferociously played among the dozen or so towns that lined the Rio Grande. The other sport, if you could call it that, was auto racing.

I’m still in touch with friends who tell me that the Valley’s population is now several hundred thousand and the road past Rio Speedway is residential all the way to Mexico.

These days it hurts to watch those antique auto auctions on television and think of all the classic cars we wrecked.

Photographs: All images come from the author.

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.

Fear Not the Bot: ChatGPT as Just One More Screwdriver in the Tool Kit

From the Editors: This article first appeared A User’s Guide to History. It is reprinted here with the kind permission of the author.

In Herman Melville’s day, businesses in cities like New York employed small armies of scriveners, as professional copyists were called. They had to write legibly, uniformly and swiftly. A person who could do that, even if as eccentric as Melville’s Bartleby, could make a modest living.

There is no longer any such niche in the work world. Scriveners gave way to typists, who gave way to word processors (when that term denoted humans who entered words on computer keyboards), who disappeared when business executives and others learned to operate their own computers.

Typists working in Sydney, Australia’s Motor Pool Building in 1938. Source: Wikimedia Commons/State Library of New South Wales.

Garrison Hall at the University of Texas at Austin, the building in which I have my office, was built in the 1920s. My office and three others are situated off an anteroom where a secretary used to sit. The four faculty members who occupied the offices shared the services of the secretary, who would type up their handwritten manuscripts into typescripts for books and articles. The last such secretary disappeared before my time. All of us now type our own stuff.

When I started teaching history in the late 1970s, I took pains to ensure that my students mastered a certain factual base of historical information. They were examined on this information, and the examinations informed a substantial portion of their semester grade. 

Then came computers and smartphones and Google and Wikipedia, until information is ubiquitous and free. I no longer teach information per se; I assume the students can summon it when they need to. Instead, I require them to show what they can do with the information: what arguments they can form, what hypotheses they can test. They would do poorly on an examination I gave in 1976. On the other hand, my students from 1976 would do poorly on the examinations I give today. I consider this a step forward, in that reasoning ability is more valuable than the mastery of mere information.

The latest tool for gathering and deploying information is the chatbot. Since its release last fall, ChatGPT by Open AI has fueled incessant commentary about what it means for the workplace, for schools and for life in general. Schools and universities, including my own, have organized task forces to devise strategies for ensuring that students not use ChatGPT to do their homework or take their tests. An arms race has developed, with counterprogrammers selling software said to be able to detect the difference between an essay produced by AI and one produced by Al (or Barb or Chuck: this orthographical play works better in sans serif).

I’m not worried. If anything, I’m excited. I have long thought that the historical essay of the kind students are taught to write in high school advanced placement classes is an overrated genre. It’s vaguely similar to op-ed pieces in newspapers, and has an even weaker resemblance to legal briefs in court cases. What the historical essay tests, primarily, is the ability to write historical essays. I only occasionally require students to write such essays; now that there is a temptation for students to use a chatbot to write them, I’ll dispense with them entirely, with no regrets.

A History seminar room in Garrison Hall at the University of Texas at Austin. Source: Not Even Past.

I will go in one of two directions. I might simply require less writing and give oral examinations instead. This is a closer approximation to the way most of the world beyond schools works. Members of the managerial class still communicate via email and text, but Zoom and the like are restoring the primacy of oral communications even among this group. And anyone making a case for an important initiative in the business world will be expected to be able to make the case orally. Beyond the business world, in daily life, oral communication has always been the default, and will remain so.

Or I will assign writing projects and simply raise the bar for giving grades. I will ask for true originality, and I will demand that students identify and verify their sources. I might well have to keep raising the bar progressively over time. The chatbots of today are the first generation; they will certainly get better. ChatGPT appears to be programmed to fabricate what it doesn’t know. In the very near future, the chatbots will indicate their degree of confidence in the assertions they make. They will include footnotes or the equivalent, allowing the user to track down the sources.

In other words, they will do what students are supposed to be doing today. Naïve students today—and all of us start out as naïve—don’t know truth from falsehood on subjects they are researching. They read various sources, compare them against others, and make their best judgments as to what is true and what is not. A chatbot, suitably programmed, could easily do this.

A pencil and notepad, the traditional tools of student writers. Source: Pexels/Miguel Á. Padriñán.

Some historians have long been receiving similar service from bright research assistants. Judges have law clerks who do the same thing. Junior executives perform a like function for their bosses. The chatbots will level the playing field between those favored groups and the rest of us—in the same way that typewriters leveled the office desk between persons who wrote like engravers and those who scratched like chickens.

Some workers will be displaced, like Bartleby and the secretaries of Garrison Hall. Greater things will be asked of their heirs than was asked of them. But those heirs, being more productive, will be better compensated, and their work will be more interesting.

People long set in their ways will lament the change, as such people always do. Young people will wonder what the old fogeys are complaining about, as young people always do. And the world will move on, as the world always does.

Henry W. Brands is the Jack S. Blanton Sr. Chair in History at the University of Texas at Austin.

The views and opinions expressed in this article or video are those of the individual author(s) or presenter(s) and do not necessarily reflect the policy or views of the editors at Not Even Past, the UT Department of History, the University of Texas at Austin, or the UT System Board of Regents. Not Even Past is an online public history magazine rather than a peer-reviewed academic journal. While we make efforts to ensure that factual information in articles was obtained from reliable sources, Not Even Past is not responsible for any errors or omissions.

The Merchant, the Marriage, and the Treaty Port: Reassessing Ōura Kei

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Ōura Kei’s name is not widely known outside Japan, but she was one of Nagasaki’s most famous residents. One of the Japan’s first exporters of green tea, Ōura has become known as one of her home city’s three “heroic women” (女傑, joketsu), who are celebrated for their exploits during Nagasaki’s treaty port period, which spanned from 1858 to 1899. (Another of Nagasaki’s heroic women, physician Kusumoto Ine, has already been profiled in Not Even Past.)

Despite Ōura’s prominence as a historical figure, the documentary record she left behind is sparse, limited to information about some of her business activities and one particularly infamous fraud case. Because of this, research around Ōura’s life has primarily focused on her role in the tea trade and her struggles as a merchant and a woman in a system that was stacked against her. However, while conducting archival research in Nagasaki, I discovered something new: two international marriage petitions from 1883 that list her as a go-between for the marriages of young Japanese girls and older Chinese men. These petitions show that trade, and the social networks it produced, extended far beyond the import and export of physical goods. Taken into consideration with what we already know about Ōura Kei’s life, these petitions also reveal the way that unequal power dynamics were often an inextricable part of life in treaty port Nagasaki. As a successful merchant, Ōura Kei was deeply embedded in the transnational communities of the city, and she was both subject to and an enabler of the hierarchies they were built on.

Making (or Stealing) a Fortune in Treaty Port Nagasaki

Nagasaki was one of dozens of treaty ports in East Asia opened in the second half of the nineteenth century. The first treaty ports were the result of the unequal treaties signed between the Qing and British empires after the end of the first Opium War in 1842, which defended the right of British merchants to import opium into China under the banner of free trade. Those treaties became a model for diplomatic relations between American and European treaty powers on the one hand and East Asian governments on the other for most of the rest of the nineteenth century. In the case of Japan, the unequal treaties signed in the 1850s ensured that European and American residents of Japanese treaty ports were not subject to Japanese law, could rent property indefinitely within a designated foreign settlement, and were free to engage in trade (often tariff-free) with anyone that they wanted.

A panoramic photograph of the treaty port of Nagasaki.
A panoramic photograph of the treaty port of Nagasaki, date and photographer unknown. Source: Rijksmuseum.

These rights were protected not just by consular representation but also by the threat of gunboats and violent reprisals. Nagasaki had been an international entrepot for centuries before becoming a treaty port. In the seventeenth century, Japanese authorities retained almost total authority over European residents like the Dutch. The situation was reversed in the nineteenth century.

Elites who, in various factions and under different governments, remained in power locally and nationally throughout the early decades of the treaty port period. The clash of older domestic and new international hierarchies within Nagasaki created a dynamic environment for both opportunity and exploitation.

Ōura Kei was already thirty and the head of her merchant family when Nagasaki became a treaty port in 1858. Due to a rash of personal and professional losses, the Ōura family business was on the brink of bankruptcy, and the timing of the treaties could not have been better. The new treaty provisions meant that any merchant family, not just those designated by the ruling Tokugawa shogunate, could engage in international trade. Ōura took immediate advantage of this new freedom, abandoning her family’s old trade in rapeseed oil and venturing out into the surrounding countryside for samples of tea that she could sell to foreign merchants. Her enterprising work paid off when William Alt, one of the first English merchants to arrive in the treaty port, placed an order for 10,000 kin of tea (almost 1,300 pounds). Ōura and her employees, with no pre-existing agreements with local tea farmers, had to scramble to fulfill the order, buying a few pounds here and there across multiple farms from many different villages.[1] Ōura built on that first success to become one of the richest traders in Nagasaki, rebuilding her family home in the heart of the trading district into a beautiful compound renowned for its gardens.[2]

Left: A photograph of Ōura Kei from the 1860s. Source: Wikimedia Commons. Right: An 1863 woodcut by Japanese artist Utagawa Yoshitora depicting an English couple
Left: A photograph of Ōura Kei from the 1860s. Source: Wikimedia Commons. Right: An 1863 woodcut by Japanese artist Utagawa Yoshitora depicting an English couple. Source: Rijksmuseum.

The international trading boom that fueled Ōura’s fortune did not last—at least not in Nagasaki. In the early 1870s, after the Tokugawa shogunate was overthrown by Japan’s new Meiji government, the most lucrative international trade moved to the more centrally located treaty ports of Yokohama and Kobe, endangering the prospects of all merchants left behind in Nagasaki. In this moment of economic vulnerability, Ōura was caught up in a serious fraud case. Tōyama Ichiya, a samurai from Kumamoto prefecture, using forged documents, convinced her to stand as surety for a 3,000 ryō advance he negotiated with the English trading company Alt & Company in exchange for a delivery of Kumamoto-grown tobacco.[3] 3,000 ryō was a significant sum, somewhere in the range of $60,000 today.

Instead of securing the tobacco, Tōyama used the advance to pay back previous debts with another foreign merchant house and then ran away. Ōura and Henry Hunt, Alt & Company’s Nagasaki representative, spent months trying to chase him down. Ōura in particular was relentless, demanding the attention not only of Kumamoto officials but also the head of Tōyama’s clan, prompting at least one samurai to scold her for behaving “well outside appropriate boundaries.”[4] Despite this critique, it is clear from the surviving documentation on the Tōyama Incident that Ōura was consistently taken seriously as a merchant by both foreign firms and Japanese officials, and there is little evidence of gendered discrimination. She was referred to in the surviving documents exclusively as “the merchant Ōura Kei (商人大浦敬, shōnin Ōura Kei),” when it was much more common at the time in official documentation to refer to women in any social position with the character for women (女, onna) first, followed by their occupation or name.

In fact, in Japanese-language documents, Ōura is the only person to gender herself, and she does so strategically. In a letter to Nagasaki prefectural authorities, asking them to investigate, she claimed that it was “with the shallow intellect of a woman (joshi no asai chi,女子之浅智)” that she had put her seal on the contract with Tōyama. Since the documents surrounding the case in fact reveal the opposite, that it took considerable effort for Tōyama to dupe her, this was likely an attempt to get Nagasaki officials to treat her sympathetically and hopefully absolve her guilt.[5]

the Oura neighborhood.
A photograph of the Oura neighborhood, which lay on the edge of Nagasaki’s foreign settlement. Source: Rijksmuseum.

Ultimately, Tōyama could not provide the promised tobacco or return the advance, and Alt & Company finally brought the matter to court. In this official setting, Ōura Kei was at a disadvantage not as a woman but as a merchant, without special legal protection or well-placed advocates. The foreign trading firms caught up in the case could not be held responsible under Japanese law for receiving illicit, stolen money, and the English consul acted as an aggressive advocate for Alt & Company throughout the investigation and trial, urging the Nagasaki government repeatedly for a fast settlement rather than a just one.[6] The samurai involved (with the exception of Tōyama Ichiya) were protected by their status in Japanese society and at times actively aided by their peers in the Nagasaki and Kumamoto prefectural governments. For example, low-ranking samurai and translator Shinagawa Fujijūrō, a creditor of Tōyama’s who helped broker the deal with Alt & Company and was later paid with the same advance, avoided criminal charges completely after returning his share of the stolen money. Tanaka Kinbei, a merchant whose son’s seal Tōyama had used to create a forged document without his knowledge, was sentenced to sixty days in jail.

Without the privileges of the samurai status, Ōura Kei was at a disadvantage under both treaty-enforced and domestic power hierarchies, and there was no one in power to advocate for her. In the end, she was cleared of all wrongdoing, but she was still held liable for around half of the advance that Nagasaki officials could not otherwise recover. Given the sums involved, this was a significant loss in an already economically fraught time.

Even after this verdict, Ōura is often seen as a defiant figure in Nagasaki history, battling prejudice to succeed in the face of significant discrimination. Her name on newly discovered marriage petitions adds a wrinkle to this perception, however, as they reveal Ōura not only as a victim, but also as an enabler of unequal power relations.

Both a Merchant and a Marriage Broker  

Despite what Puccini’s Madame Butterfly would have you believe, we don’t know much about the ways in which international marriages were arranged in Nagasaki during the treaty port period. Official international marriages, which only became legal in 1873, required the head of household—the woman’s father or brother—to petition the Japanese government for permission. Even after it was made legal, official marriages represented only a small fraction of the international intimate relationships within the treaty port, most of which were informal and transactional relationships that were easy to dissolve. The surviving marriage petitions, collected in the Register of Contracts with Foreigners (内外人契約の部, Naigaijin keiyaku no bu) provide historians with important demographic data for understanding international marriage, but they do little to explain how the interested parties were introduced, what their previous histories were, or what happened to them after the petition was submitted.

Ōura Kei’s involvement in at least two marriages therefore provides important clues as to the nature of go-betweens and how they functioned in Nagasaki. Go-betweens—or the official acknowledgment of them in government records—were never very common. Only about 40% of marriage petitions from 1873-1886 listed a go-between, and their inclusion in petitions all but died out by the 1890s. Most go-betweens, like Ōura, were only registered on one or two marriage petitions, which indicates that they were not professional go-betweens, but instead connected foreign residents and Japanese women through pre-existing personal or professional networks. This is reinforced by the strong geographic tie between a go-between and the Japanese household requesting permission. Japanese women who married foreign men came from all parts of the city, and go-betweens almost always registered an address from the same neighborhood as the prospective wife. As a merchant, Ōura Kei was deeply embedded in the international trading market of Nagasaki, and that is likely the network she used when connecting the parties for these marriages. We don’t have enough evidence to say that all go-betweens in Nagasaki were somehow involved in mercantile activities, but there were few things that bridged inter-communal networks more effectively than trade in a treaty port.

Ōura Kei’s seal on the marriage petition for Masuda Tsuru.
Ōura Kei’s seal on the marriage petition for Masuda Tsuru as go-between (baikaijin, 媒介人), second from the left. Other signatories include Tsuru, her father, and a relative who also signed Koyanagi Tomi’s marriage petition. Photograph by the author.

The specifics of the marriages that Ōura arranged highlight the inequities that were inherent to even interpersonal intimate relationships within the treaty port. The two girls registered in the 1883 marriage petitions, Masuda Tsuru and Koyanagi Tomi, were only fourteen years old at the time of their marriage, and one of the prospective Chinese husbands was at least forty.[7] The girls were well below the average age of marriage in Japan at the time, and almost seven years younger than the median age of other women who petitioned to marry foreigners in Nagasaki (21.5 years old).[8]

Younger marriage for women was more common in the Qing Empire, where a demographic crisis made it difficult for large numbers of men to find wives, but extreme age differences between spouses were not inherently more normalized. There is no question that these two marriages were legal—there was no civil code yet, and when it was passed it only required women under 25 to have the permission of their household head to marry. Women at the time were considered legal dependents of their household head, be it their father, brother, or husband, so this large age gap would have only enhanced already existing social and legal power imbalances between these girls and their eventual husbands.

We do not know what happened to these girls, but their marriages would have had immediate consequences for their nationality and their ability to move freely in the city. All Japanese women who married foreign men lost their claim to Japanese nationality and were removed from their natal household register. This aspect of Meiji international marriage law was based on the French legal code and was a common provision internationally. Masuda and Koyanagi legally became Chinese subjects while still living in their hometown. Because Nagasaki was a treaty port, that meant that they were not allowed to live in the Japanese part of the city, and they had to live in the foreign settlement even when their husbands were away.[9] It is also unclear how long they would have stayed in Nagasaki. While Chinese residents were far more likely to settle semi-permanently in Nagasaki than European or American residents, the Sino-Japanese War in 1894, just over a decade after the marriage, caused a mass migration of Chinese residents back to China. Masuda and Koyanagi, now twenty-four, would likely have followed their husbands if they had not already left, moving out of the range of the support of their natal familial networks and the sphere of Japanese consular protection. Once gone, it was often difficult for families to maintain contact, especially after the death of the husband.[10]

Three Japanese women from Yokohama in the late-nineteenth-century.
Three Japanese women from Yokohama appear in this late-nineteenth-century photograph. Source: Rijksmueum.

Ōura Kei spent most of her adult life navigating social networks and official systems that were shaped by opposing and unequal power dynamics. During the Toyama Incident, as a Japanese merchant pitted against treaty-protected foreign merchants and domestic elite, she was at a disadvantage on multiple fronts. When she helped arrange Masuda Tsuru and Koyanagi Tomi’s marriages, however, she was a wealthy and influential local figure at the center of an extensive trading network. In this position of relative power, she facilitated deeply unbalanced marriages of two young girls to men three times their age.

These newly discovered marriage petitions serve as a reminder that in treaty port Nagasaki, where opportunity and exploitation went hand in hand, there was no easy distinction to be made between powerful and powerless, oppressor and oppressed, advantaged and disadvantaged. Ōura Kei was not a villain, and she was not a hero; she was an ambitious, driven woman who fought for everything she had and did not hesitate to use the power that she had earned. Her life and its complications helps us understand that inequality was not the exception in treaty port Nagasaki, it was embedded into almost every aspect of everyday life.

Archival Sources:

 Nagasaki Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Naigaijin Keiyaku no Bu (1873-1895), ID 14 364-3 to 14 567-2. Nagasaki Museum of History and Culture.

Nagasaki Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Tōyama Ichiya ikken Meiij gonen dō rokunen, ID 14 338 12. Nagasaki Museum of History and Culture.

Published Sources:

Honma, Yasuko. Ōura Kei joden nōto. Nagasaki-shi: Honma Yasuko, 1990.

Kawaguchi, Yoko. Butterfly’s Sisters: The Geisha in Western Culture. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010.

Koga, Jūjirō, Maruyama yūjo to tō kōmōjin. Nagasaki, Nagasaki Bunkensha, 1968.

Lundh, Christer, and Satomi Kurosu. Similarity in Difference: Marriage in Europe and Asia, 1700-1900. The MIT Press Eurasian Population and Family History Series. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2014.

Shigefuji, Takeo. Nagasaki kyoryūchi bōeki jidai no kenkyū. Tōkyō: Sakai Shoten, 1961.

[1]. Ōura Kei, Seicha no bu Meiji 17nen, ID 17 224-2-2, Nagasaki Museum of History and Culture.

[2]. For more information about Ōura’s early life, see Honma Yasuko, Ōura Kei joden nōto (Nagasaki-shi: Honma Yasuko, 1990).

[3]. The company the advance came from, Alt & Co, was founded by the same William Alt who bought Ōura’s first shipment of tea, but he sold the business and left Japan in 1871.

[4]. Nagasaki Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Tōyama Ichiya ikken Meiij gonen dō rokunen, ID 14 338 12, Nagasaki Museum of History and Culture. A printed copy of some documents can also be found in Shigefuji Takeo, Nagasaki kyoryūchi bōeki jidai no kenkyū (Tōkyō: Sakai Shoten, 1961).

[5]. Ōura Kei reprinted in Shigefuji, p. 233.

[6]. On June 11th, 1872, ten months before the final verdict was given, the English Consul Marcus Flowers wrote, “I understand Mrs. Ora Kei has sufficient means, and as it was solely and entirely upon her guarantee that the money was advanced upon this contract, I must beg you will kindly press her for immediate payment.” Nagasaki Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Eikoku Ōrutoshōkai yori, ID14-219-6, Nagasaki Museum of History and Culture.

[7]. Item 9 and 21 in Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Naigaijin keiyaku no bu, 1883, ID 14 467-2, Nagasaki Museum of History and Culture.

[8]. Nagasaki data is drawn from the marriage petitions found in the Naigaijin keiyaku no bu. For more information on Meiji marriage demographics, see Carl Mosk, “Nuptiality in Meiji Japan,” Journal of Social History 13(3) (Spring, 1980), p. 479.

[9]. There was a “health” clause by the late 1880s that any foreigner could use to stay temporarily outside of the foreign settlement. On at least one occasion, the British consul invoked this right on a Japanese woman’s behalf when her original petition to live with her family while her husband was abroad was denied. British Consulate, December 16, 1889, Raikan, Nagasaki Museum of History and Culture.

[10]. One father whose daughter left for China with her husband mentions trying to contact his daughter fourteen times without response. “My wife, Sada’s mother, is filled with melancholy morning and night and cannot eat or sleep,” he wrote. Item no. 7 in Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Naigaijin keiyaku no bu, 1880, ID 14 453-2, Nagasaki Museum of History and Culture.

The views and opinions expressed in this article or video are those of the individual author(s) or presenter(s) and do not necessarily reflect the policy or views of the editors at Not Even Past, the UT Department of History, the University of Texas at Austin, or the UT System Board of Regents. Not Even Past is an online public history magazine rather than a peer-reviewed academic journal. While we make efforts to ensure that factual information in articles was obtained from reliable sources, Not Even Past is not responsible for any errors or omissions.

Review of The Global Interior: Mineral Frontiers and American Power (2018) by Megan Black

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In The Global Interior, Megan Black uses the Department of the Interior’s (DOI) controversial history to examine how the U. S. government wielded political and economic power to access natural resources in the American West and influence international policy. The book’s title illustrates the irony of a department responsible for internal affairs being involved in foreign policy. Covering the Department of the Interior’s evolution over the course of two centuries, Megan Black examines its effectively colonial approach to securing access to resources and expanding U. S. power, from the occupation of the American West to the recent use of technologies such as Landsat satellites to map resources and open them to private American companies.

book cover

Created in 1849, the Department of the Interior’s initial objective was the development of the American West. In the wake of military-led expansion, control over territory passed into the civilian hands of the Interior, creating a benevolent cover-up that concealed a colonial enterprise. The Department of the Interior assisted in the colonization of territory expropriated after the Mexican-American War and facilitated the expansion of capitalism into Indigenous lands. However, the closing of the Western frontier in the 1890s forced the Interior to expand its activities overseas under the guise of national security and based on the colonial framework. Hence, the activities of the Interior supported cooperation with developing countries to trade and extract minerals essential to American industry during the 20th century. For instance, President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor Policy in the 1930s established relationships with Latin America in part through cooperative mineral ventures and land-use planning. The Department of Interior’s procedures for exploiting resources were replicated by the United States in Latin America, the Philippines, Japan, and other sites around the world.

Black analyzes both the hard and soft edges of Interior’s global strategy. The Department simultaneously supported the exploitation of natural resources and nature conservation programs, providing intelligence about natural resources in a way that would benefit US commercial exploitation. In the mid-1960s, Stewart Udall, a DOI official, promoted multiple conservation programs across Latin America while offering technical support to foreign governments interested in developing their mineral economies. Subsequent decades saw the Department of the Interior extend US influence into the developing world’s agricultural sector since modern farming depends on mineral fertilizers like phosphorus and nitrogen.

Stewart Udall (right) and Lady Bird Johnson touring Grand Teton National Park, August 1964
Stewart Udall (right) and Lady Bird Johnson touring Grand Teton National Park, August 1964. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Due to the geographical scale of its influence, the Department of the Interior’s work was often accomplished through support for private economic activity. However, President Reagan’s deregulation policies in the 1980s also had an impact on the Interior’s funding. Stigmatized as a costly middleman, Interior had to reduce its role. At this point (and towards the end of the book), Black turns her narrative back towards the heartland of the United States to examine an unusual organization: the self-styled “Indigenous OPEC.” Black shows how the Interior’s retreat and the emergence of a market system in its place led Indigenous communities to organize themselves as capitalist institutions in dialogue with private companies. Curiously, the wastelands allocated to Indigenous people by the Interior ended up being rich in minerals, including oil.

Using the tools of environmental history, The Global Interior contributes to debates about environmental politics and international relations, demonstrating the intricacies of cooperation and unilateralist policies. The Global Interior draws a connection between mineral policy, varying forms of colonialism, and international conservation. The book argues that U. S. environmental policies are designed to accrue economic benefits and ensure access to natural resources around the world. Black highlights the tension between environmentalism and economic production.

Daniel Silva is a Ph.D. student in Geography and Environment at the University of Texas at Austin. He conducts research on land use change, environmental policy, and agricultural economics. Co-authored policy briefs and papers with a focus on the Brazilian Amazon and the Cerrado biome.

The views and opinions expressed in this article or video are those of the individual author(s) or presenter(s) and do not necessarily reflect the policy or views of the editors at Not Even Past, the UT Department of History, the University of Texas at Austin, or the UT System Board of Regents. Not Even Past is an online public history magazine rather than a peer-reviewed academic journal. While we make efforts to ensure that factual information in articles was obtained from reliable sources, Not Even Past is not responsible for any errors or omissions.

Review of Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait (2019) by Bathsheba Demuth

Review of Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait (2019) by Bathsheba Demuth

“It was the whiteness of the whale that above all things appalled me. But how can I hope to
explain myself here; and yet, in some dim, random way, explain myself I must,
else all these chapters might be naught.”[1]

These few words show how difficult it was for Herman Melville, in his novel Moby Dick, to write from nature’s perspective in the 19th century. In the last decades, with the global climate change emergency in the background and enormous progress in scientific fields, this literary connection has been explored from a broader humanistic perspective. But most importantly, it can also be examined from a historical point of view, using the history of science, history of technology, and environmental history to understand extreme natural landscapes –in Antarctica, for example, or in Finland or Canada– and their relationship with extractivist, nation-state, and scientific knowledge. At the intersection of these diverse fields and research agendas can be situated the first book of the writer and environmental historian Bathsheba Demuth, Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait.

book cover

When Demuth was 18, she moved to an indigenous village in the Canadian Arctic and planned to stay there for 3 to 4 months. But instead, she ended up spending years training huskies for sled dogs. As she mentions in one of her interviews, to help to survive in this harsh and cold environment, her host family encouraged her to pay attention to the nonhuman world and how to imagine her actions from the perspective of the animals and natural spaces, such as the tundra, the ocean and the wind. As she remarks, this changed her perception and created two main questions for her research: “How do your ideas change nature?” and “How does nature change the way that we think about the world?”[2]. She recognizes that she wrote her book with these two questions in her mind.

Floating Coast, as Demuth defines it, is the history of the Russian and American sides of the Bering Strait, where Alaska and Siberia almost encounter one another. More specifically, it examines the historical evolution of ideas about landscapes over the course of 200 years. The ideas in question come from indigenous communities, including the Yupik and Chukchi in Russia and the Iñupiat and Yupik in Alaska, as well as from U. S. capitalism and Soviet communism. Demuth also describes extreme natural landscapes from the perspective of whales and foxes in addition to examining the viewpoints of many kinds of people. She defined her studies as a “historical guide to ways that we can imagine our relationships with environment in the present.”[3] Between 2020 to 2021, Floating Coast received numerous awards from the American Historical Association, the American Society for Environmental History, and the Western Historical Association. It also received several non-fiction literary awards due to its beautifully written narrative construction of time and historical space.

Demuth divides her book into five parts– “Sea,” “Shore,” “Land,” “Underground,” and “Ocean”–with two chapters each and one Epilogue. To write these ten chapters, she used three different types of primary sources. The first comprises oral history from indigenous communities, collected using ethnographic methods and from state records. The second, used to follow state ambitions, is composed of local, regional, and national records from Imperial Russia, the United States, and the Soviet Union. Finally, Demuth also used individual memoirs and scientific materials. Floating Coast analyzes these sources using techniques developed by a range of fields, including environmental and transnational history.

Demuth showcases two of environmental history’s most significant methodological contributions. First, Floating Coast uncouples its analysis from traditional understandings of time and from nation-state structures to focus on places and the historical interactions between the human and non-human world. Across the landscapes of “Sea,” “Shore,” “Land,” “Underground,” and “Ocean,” Demuth invites us to rethink the classic notions of linear time and economic progress. In such extreme spaces as Beringia, environmental historians (and different scholars) need to write about time in a way that isn’t always strictly chronological. In Floating Coast, the conception of time comes from places, animals, and seasons.

Second, this chronological approach constantly flows through a historical narrative because it follows material and imaginaries of energy. Demuth’s book shows how an ecological space becomes a source of commodities through the hunting of whales, bison, and walruses, as well as through gold extraction. Demuth explains how an imperial view of extreme landscapes and natural resources developed in the United States, Imperial Russia, and the Soviet Union. She concludes that capitalism and socialism are similar insofar as they both look for commodities in landscapes. The Indigenous narratives Demuth explores present a very different perspective. “History life in Beringia,” she explains, “was shaped partly by the ways energy moved over the land through the sea.”[4] This concept of energy, especially energy transition, is behind every chapter. Demuth describes energy moving, “from sea to coast, coast to land, land underground and finally back to the ocean.”[5] For example, her book shows how whales turn into light.

U. S. whaling vessels stand by while their crews hunt right whales in the Bering Strait
In this undated print, U. S. whaling vessels stand by while their crews hunt right whales in the Bering Strait. Source: Library of Congress.

To conclude, Demuth immerses us in a world extreme natural scenery and creates an atmosphere especially well-suited to talking about nature, desolation, and frozen areas. It is a beautifully written book that presents an incisive analysis of primary and secondary sources. It also invites historians from different fields to read and rethink the way history is written, showcasing the methodological and theoretical options environmental history offers. Demuth’s decision to write about time from a nature perspective is especially provocative and worthy of note.

Yohad Zacarías is a doctoral student in the Department of History at the University of Texas at Austin. She holds a B.A. and M.A. in History from Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile (Chile). As a Fulbright doctoral fellow, her current research interests focus on electrification’s urban, environmental, and technological impact in Chile and Latin America between the 19th and 20th centuries. In addition, she has received scholarships from the Latin American and Caribbean Society of Environmental History (SOLCHA) at Stanford University (CLAS) and the Erasmus Program at the University of Copenhagen. Before graduate school, Yohad worked as an Outbound International Mobility Coordinator in the International Relations Office at Universidad de Chile.

[1] Herman, Melville. Moby Dick: or the Whale. Minneapolis: First Avenue Editions, 2014, 232.

[2] Bathsheba Demuth, “Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait,” YouTube, WW Norton, August 1, 2019, https://youtu.be/K4G42JyunzY, accessed December 01, 2022.

[3] Bathsheba Demuth, “Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait,” YouTube, WW Norton, August 1, 2019, https://youtu.be/K4G42JyunzY, accessed December 01, 2022.

[4] Bathsheba Demuth, Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2019, 4.

[5] Demuth, Floating Coast, 5.

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.

Reimagining Reconstruction: Where Do We Go from Here?

Review by Danielle Sanchez

Joseph, Peniel E. The Third Reconstruction: America’s Struggle for Racial Justice in the Twenty-First Century. New York: Basic Books, 2022.

Reconstruction is often a topic of confusion for readers. When did it begin? When did it end? What did it entail? Peniel Joseph’s latest book, The Third Reconstruction: America’s Struggle for Racial Justice in the Twenty-First Century, divides Reconstruction after the Civil War into three distinct time frames, punctuated by watershed moments that spurred a realignment of political beliefs and viewpoints. The First Reconstruction encapsulates the period of 1865-1898, with its defining feature and watershed moment being summed up in the 13th Amendment. The Second Reconstruction spans the period of 1954-1968, essentially bookending the modern Civil Rights Movement with the Supreme Court decision of Brown vs. Board of Education and the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The Third Reconstruction is in the much more recent past, Joseph argues, citing Obama’s election in 2008 as the major watershed moment, and continuing into the age of Black Lives Matter.[1]Joseph’s thesis that Reconstruction was not a period that ended in the 19th century, and rather a cyclical progression that continues to the present, is central to understanding his inclusion of autobiographical anecdotes from his own life in this work. His analysis deals with the United States’ attempts to grapple with the full citizenship and enfranchisement of Black people, as well as how his own experiences support the claims he makes.

Joseph mixes an autobiography of sorts with an analysis of racial culture and political climate following the Civil War. He extensively describes anti-Black violence and the resurgence of blatant racism and the return of late 19th-century rhetoric following the election of Donald Trump in 2016. The election put Americans on the precipice of a decision: they could turn away from racism towards an equitable future by enforcing- rather than merely preaching inclusivity; or they could continue along the same path they had walked since before the Civil War. In his own words, “America had reached a moment of existential inflection. The latest hinge point in our Third Reconstruction offered all of us, collectively, an opportunity to transform American democracy by defeating institutional racism and eradicating white supremacy.”[2] The hinge point that Joseph refers to provides him with a reason and connection with which to include his own story in his analysis of modern-day America.

Joseph draws on his personal experience as a Haitian and a first-generation Black American to understand the Third Reconstruction in the present-day. He also shows what it means to grow up Black in the United States through intertwining stories from his own life with ones that trace Barack Obama’s path to the presidency. Through these stories, he also tracks a shift in American culture, which has contributed to a misleading “post-racial” understanding of American society. Joseph critiques the concept of American exceptionalism, stating that it rests on two core lies: first, that “Black people are not human beings”; and second, “that the first lie never happened.”[3] The centrality of this claim undergirds the middle-of-the-road path taken by Obama and other politicians, which Joseph critiques in his examination of an American dream that is still a nightmare for many Black Americans.

Community members gather for a Black Lives Matter demonstration outside the offices of the Police Officers Federation of Minneapolis, the Minneapolis Police Department’s union, on December 3, 2015. Caption and photo source: Flickr/Tony Webster.

Joseph also incorporates a discussion of what Black dignity means as examined through the lenses of different Black activists and leaders throughout history. His book draws strong parallels between the activism of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., Jesse Jackson, Angela Davis, and even Obama himself. While Joseph distinguishes between the activities and achievements of these figures, he makes it clear that each of them worked for the benefit of Black rights in their own time frame and context. By identifying what these figures had in common, Joseph paints the three Reconstructions as remaining remarkably similar throughout history, even though their individual goals and figures may have differed. By tracing a path from Martin Luther King Jr. to Obama, he circles back to his claim that American exceptionalism rests on the lie that Black people are not human beings. The same issues that powerhouse activists such as King and Davis grappled with in the mid-20th century are still being addressed today, and while “we have been collectively reluctant to acknowledge about how a living history has actively shaped our present and might impact our future,” with the collective message of activists remaining the same, we are ready to face up to our past and work with a living history to positively affect the future.[4]

[1] Peniel E. Joseph, The Third Reconstruction: America’s Struggle for Racial Justice in the Twenty First Century, (New York: Basic Books, 2022),13.

[2] Ibid, 169.

[3] Ibid, 57.

[4] Ibid, 224.

The photograph included in this article has been used under a Creative Commons 2.0 license.

From Nurslings of God to Soldiers of Christ: Gender and Childhood in Cistercian Spiritual Formation

The author of the Gospel of John wrote that Jesus told Nicodemus “Amen, amen I say to thee, unless a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.”[1] Nicodemus responded in bewilderment, “How can a man be born when he is old? Can he enter a second time into his mother’s womb, and be born again?”[2] Elsewhere, to teach the necessity of humility, the author of the Gospel of Matthew wrote that Jesus told his disciples that “unless you be converted, and become as little children, you shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.”[3]

The idea that one must be “born again” or become like a child to enter the kingdom of heaven has shaped Christian conceptions of conversion and spiritual development for millennia now. One scholar argues that the image of the child in early Christian texts appears as an important model “for explaining concrete qualifications for entering God’s kingdom.” That is, the “child” became a fundamental tool for imagining an ideal (adult) self.[4] This Christian image of childhood, however, is intwined with gendered conceptions of adulthood. We see this especially in the twelfth-century Cistercian conceptions of monastic maturation, as they imagined new adult recruits to mature from “children” to masculine monks.

A father giving his son as an oblate. Source: Douai, Bibl. Mun., MS 590, f. 59v. 1175-1200.

My book project, Making Monastic Men: Imagined ‘Childhood,’ Education, and Gender in Cistercian Formation, focuses on what would become the most famous and most successful new monastic group (in terms of numbers of monasteries) to spring out of the twelfth-century religious awakening, the Cistercians. The Cistercians began in 1098 when Robert of Molesmes and a group of followers left their monastery at Molesmes to start a new monastery at Cîteaux, just south of Dijon in the countryside of Burgundy, France. In this new monastery they aspired to a stricter observance of the Rule of Benedict (the foremost book of precepts for monastic living at the time) than what they had previously been practicing. This upstart group would institute substantial changes from traditional monastic customs. For example, in one of the most significant departures from conventional practices, they ended the custom of child oblation in their monastery, the practice whereby parents gave up their children to monastic communities as offerings to God. By ceasing this practice and accepting only adult recruits who had made a conscious decision to convert to the monastic life, the Cistercians not only jettisoned a traditional monastic responsibility of raising children, but also removed themselves from certain feudal responsibilities that often came with accepting children.

What has generally been missing in scholarly examinations of Cistercians and gender is the ways in which Cistercian conceptions of childhood shaped how they understood their masculinity. My work examines how the traditional Christian language about childhood changed during the twelfth century within a Cistercian monastic context. With the Cistercians only accepting adult men, usually clerics, knights from the minor aristocracy, and other monks, childhood became a useful metaphor for imagining these new recruits’ place in the monastic hierarchy and for conceptualizing the extent of their monastic abilities. It was at this time that Cistercian authors merged images of “childhood” with increasingly gendered and erotic metaphors used to explain a spiritual maturation intended to culminate in the experience of mystical union with God. For medieval Cistercian monks, becoming like a child entailed the first and perhaps the most important step in the process of maturing into a masculine, battle hardened monk ready for the Jesus’ mystical bedchamber. Rather than only the specter of “woman,” Cistercians often used childhood as a foil to conceptualize an ideal Christian masculinity.

A view of the Cistercian abbey church at Cîteaux, Burgundy, France, as drawn by th seventeenth-century artist Pierre Brissart. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

In the eleventh and twelfth centuries, a turbulent time that saw a ferment of religious enthusiasm, such language about the child became important for those trying to explain conversion and spiritual formation. In the midst of this period of religious enthusiasm, many Christians turned inward. With this emotional turn, medieval Christian thinkers began stressing the humanity, frailness, and emotions of Jesus and Mary in their devotions.[5] Similarly, new attitudes toward love entangled with a violent ethos emerged in the blossoming chivalric and Romance traditions. Such attitudes influenced and were influenced by Christian thinking.[6] Ecclesiastical authorities also attempted to enforce new ideals that separated the clergy from the laity, and enhanced clerical prestige. For example, many church officials made a concerted push to codify and enforce clerical celibacy and to end the buying and selling of church offices (simony).[7] In all of this, Christian authors increasingly turned to human relationships, especially those of the family, to model and conceptualize everything from church hierarchy and authority to ideal individual behavior.[8]

Celibate men, and especially new monastic groups, increasingly disentangled from family life and social obligations, and living in communities where they experienced few interactions with women, began re-imagining their masculinity as something flexible. Medieval Cistercians, in particular, are famous for their fluid use of gendered images. The Cistercians’ plumbed the allegorical depths of the Song of Songs, and in so doing stressed, in a more intense way than previous commentators, the individual feminine soul’s relationship to the male Christ. In this formulation the soul became the bride to Christ’s bridegroom. For example, the most famous Cistercian, Bernard of Clairvaux (d. 1153), in his commentary on Song of Songs 1:2, affectionately expounded on the sweetness of the kiss of Christ’s mouth.[9] Cistercians also have described themselves as pregnant and nursing mothers, authoritarian fathers, brides, little girls, children, and soldiers, while teaching with images of female soldiers, both male and female prostitutes, lascivious adolescents, and virgins. In the words of Jo Ann McNamara, “Celibacy freed men from women. It enabled the clergy to use elements from both [sic] genders to construct a new model of humanity in which men could play all the roles.”[10]

To experience the ecstasy of Christ’s bed, however, Cistercians usually needed to mature in their monastic life and practice. Cistercians imagined childhood as part of their model for maturing into a masculine monk. Aelred of Rievaulx (d. 1167), in his treatise Jesus as a Boy of Twelve (c. 1160-1162), succinctly explained this when he wrote: “In order that we who by disposition are little children . . . might be born spiritually and grow up and make progress through the distinctive spiritual ages. Thus his [Jesus] bodily growth is our spiritual growth; and the things that are said of him at every age [of his life] are to urge us through each step of progress spiritually . . . . Therefore, may his bodily birth be our spiritual birth.”[11]

Left: A medieval portrait of Bernard of Clairvaulx. Right: An illumination from Aelred of Rievaulx’s Mirror of Charity. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Aelred urged his monks to look to the childhood of Jesus as a model for their own spiritual growth. By implication, those new to the monastic life were like children who then metaphorically aged and matured as they progressed by gaining experience in their monastic practice. Elsewhere, Aelred describes this maturation as a progressive training of the feminine, childish flesh that resulted in the monk becoming rational and masculine as he learned to control his body and mind. In his work the Mirror of Charity written in 1142, which he composed for new monks, Aelred warns that when pleasure “contaminates the flesh, and effeminates the mind, whatever is honorable in the soul, whatever is beautiful, and at worst whatever is manly is equally crushed and destroyed.”[12] The Benedictine monk and, later, Cistercian convert, William of St.-Thierry (d. 1148), contrasts new recruits with mature monks by combining the language of age and gender. He suggests that the undisciplined are like the young; they are hot-blooded, have a fiery soul, are labile in their age, and full of restless curiosity. However, their opposite “possesses a manly maturity, a serious soul, [are] chaste, sober, [and] disgusted by outward things.”[13]

Bernard of Clairvaux fleshed out this idea in one of his sermons which he delivered to his monks in their daily chapter meetings. In the talk, which the medieval editors of Bernard’s sermons called “On the Various Affections or States by which the Soul is under God,” Bernard overtly explains monastic progression as maturation.[14] New converts, he says, are those “who are like little children in Christ who still long for milk, as if living under a teacher and a pedagogue.”[15] He goes on to explain that “just like children,” these novices “fear they might offend their teacher, lest they receive a beating or be cheated of a small present that that kind instructor uses to entice them.”[16]

New monks, eventually, ought to advance and mature past the need for consistent reassurance and correction. As novices became more adept at regulating and correcting themselves, everyday practices became easier, and they could turn their focus to heaven. Bernard suggests that novices, at this point, take on the status of sons of a “robust age,” the Latin robustae aetatis, conveys the masculine image of someone that is firm, solid, and, of course, robust.[17] No longer should monks be restless, easily moved to sin, or distracted. Monks of a “robust age” stand in contrast to those of the childish, “labile age” that William of St. Thierry described.

Another portrait of Bernard of Clairvaulx. Source: Rijksmuseum, RP-P-1907-3890.

Elsewhere, Bernard explains that this maturation happens through learning to fight. By doing battle against the flesh, that is the process of learning to overcome and control one’s urges, the monk becomes a masculine warrior. In a letter to the former archbishop Malachy of Armagh (d. 1148) in Ireland, Bernard writes that two new monks were not ready to leave his monastery to return to Ireland “until the battles of the Lord are taught to these new troops by combat.”[18] In a letter to a man named Fulk, who had abandoned his vow to join a religious community known as the Canons Regular, Bernard insults Fulk’s masculinity by claiming that, in a fit of youthful vacillation, he had succumbed to the feminine urges of his flesh by fleeing to the city, duped by his uncle and attracted by the city’s lewd and luxurious enticements. Trying to convince Fulk to honor his vow, Bernard calls him an “effeminate soldier (delicate miles)” and urges him to “Take up arms, man up, while the battle still rages.” If only Fulk will do this he will come to know Christ as a comrade in arms. Bernard writes, “If Christ recognizes you in the fray, he will recognize you in heaven.”[19]

In this nineteenth-century painting by Émile Signol, Bernard exhorts his followers to undertake the Second Crusade. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Returning to Bernard’s sermon on the soul, we find that there is a final stage in a monk’s maturation. In this stage the mature, masculine, battle hardened, virtuous monk’s soul experiences the ecstasies of Christ’s bedchamber. Bernard writes that the “whole soul proceeds into God, who is for her [the soul] the perfect and singular desire, so the king leads her into his bedchamber so that he can pull close to her and enjoy himself.”[20] Bernard sums up this progression from non-masculine child to masculine spiritual warrior, to bride and mystical lover of Christ (which Bernard insists is a rare experience for monks), succinctly in the beginning of his parable, On the Son of the King. In this short parable Bernard appeals to new Cistercian recruits using imagery they likely found familiar. He tells the salvation history of humankind using maturation, battle, and sex as analogies. He begins by saying that God made humankind his son, and gave this “delicate child” the pedagogues of the Law and Prophets until the time of his consummation.[21] The child (both a stand-in for humankind, but also presumably for new monks as well), however, like the prodigal son, succumbs to the desires of his flesh and must be rescued by the virtues. The virtues then teach him to fight the vices as part of their rescue mission. Eventually, the virtues and the boy reach Lady Wisdom’s walled city (the monastery) where Lady Wisdom meets him in the streets and whisks him off to her bed.[22]

As we have seen above, Cistercian authors used an imagined “childhood” to teach about what a mature, manly monk should be like. The image of the non-masculine “child” also shaped the ways the Cistercians thought and talked about hierarchy and authority. New recruits were like children, their seniors in the monastic life were their teachers, pedagogues, and seasoned warriors, and abbots were like fathers and mothers. Hopefully, by following their lead, the new recruit might mature into a masculine spiritual warrior fit to be a bride of Christ and experience the joys of Christ’s bed. All of these gendered articulations of monastic hierarchy, conceptions of authority, and expressions of elite practice, depend on the presence of a “child” for their analogical power.

When child oblates comprised a majority of monastic recruits, the need for maturation was apparent and experienced as a hierarchical reality in the monastery. By ending child oblation, however, Cistercians began deploying “childhood” as a powerful metaphor for adults progressing in the monastic life. In doing so, the Cistercians’ imagined the monastic “childhood” of the adult monk as a fundamental stage in their maturation into a masculine monk. The “child” became a non-masculine foil against which they defined masculinity. These metaphorical gendered formulations gained more force as monks, and later the friars, drew on them in their teaching and preaching to the laity as the papacy began stressing Christian education at the turn of the thirteenth century, thus solidifying this intwined understanding of gender and childhood in Christianity.

Jacob Doss is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Texas at Austin’s Institute for Historical Studies. Before completing his Ph.D. at the University of Texas he earned his B.A. with a double major in history and anthropology and a minor in religious studies from the University of Arkansas, and his master’s in church history from Boston College. He has published in Church History and Studies in Medievalism. His current book project, Making Monastic Men: Imagined ‘Childhood,’ Education, and Gender in Cistercian Formation, examines the emergence of “childhood” as a fundamental element in medieval monastic gender ideologies. This research has been supported by the American Historical Association, The Medieval Academy of America, The American Catholic Historical Association, The Hill Museum & Manuscript Library, and the University of Texas at Austin.

[1] John 3:3 (DRA). The Greek ἄνωθεν can be translated either as born “again” or “from above” and forms the basis of Nicodemus’ misunderstanding of Jesus in the text. The Latin in the Vulgate, the language of the medieval Christian Bible, is less vague than the Greek and translates into English as “born again.” The Latin reads “Amen, amen dico tibi, nisi quis renatus fuerit denuo, non potest videre regnum Dei.” On the ambiguity of the Greek and how it works in the context of Jesus’ conversation with Nicodemus, see Raymond E. Brown, The Gospel According to John (i-xii), The Anchor Bible (New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc.), 130.

[2] John 3:4.

[3] Matthew 18:3.

[4] Eunyung Lim, Entering God’s Kingdom (Not) Like A Little Child: Images of the Child in Matthew, 1 Corinthians, and Thomas (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2021), 3, 141.

[5] See for example Sarah McNamer, Affective Meditation and the Invention of Medieval Compassion (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), 2-7, et passim.

[6] Jean Leclercq, Monks and Love in Twelfth-Century France: Psycho-Historical Essays (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1979), 8-23.

[7] See Helen Parish, Clerical Celibacy in the West: c. 1100-1700 (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010). For the eleventh and twelfth centuries, see 87-122. For the relationship between simony and monasticism see Joseph H. Lynch, Simoniacal Entry into Religious Life from 1000-1260: A Social, Economic and Legal Study (Columbus, Ohio: Ohio State University Press, 1976).

[8] Megan McLaughlin, Sex, Gender, and Episcopal Authority in an Age of Reform, 1000-1122 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 5-15.

[9] See Bernard of Clairvaux, Sermons 1-4, in Song of Songs I, trans. Kilian Walsh (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1981), 1-24. For an overview of the Cistercian mystical tradition see Brian Patrick McGuire, “Bernard of Clairvaux and the Cistercian Mystical Tradition,” in The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Christian Mysticism, ed. Julia A. Lamm (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), 237-250.

[10] Jo Ann McNamara, “The Herrenfrage: The Restructuring of the Gender System, 1050–1150,” in Medieval Masculinities: Regarding Men in the Middle Ages, ed. Clare A. Lees (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 22.

[11] Aelred of Rievaulx, De Iesu puero duodenni, CCCM 1, 258-259.

[12] Aelred of Rievaulx, Speculum caritatis, CCCM 1, 43.

[13]  “What are these if not the young, naturally hot-blooded, and a fiery soul, a labile age, restless curiosity; and the other possesses a manly maturity, a serious soul, chaste, sober, disgusted of outward things and as far as possible hides himself within the self?” For the Latin see William of St.-Thierry, Epistola ad fratres de Monte Dei, CCCM 88, 268.

[14] In the collected works of Bernard this is Sermo 8, SBO 6-1, 111-117. An English translation can be found in Bernard of Clairvaux, “Sermon 8,” in Bernard of Clairvaux: Monastic Sermons, trans. Daniel Griggs (Collegeville, Minnesota: Liturgical Press, 2016), 49-57. Citations from Bernard of Clairvaux, Sancti Bernardi Opera, eds. Jean Leclercq, C.H. Talbot, and H.-M. Rochais. 8 vols. (Rome: Editiones Cistercienses, 1957-1977), will be abbreviated as SBO vol. no., pg. no.

[15] Sermo 8, SBO 6-1, 115.

[16] Sermo 8, SBO 6-1, 115.

[17] Sermo 8, SBO 6-1, 116.

[18] Epistola 341, SBO 8, 282–283.

[19] Epistola 2, SBO 7, 22.

[20] Sermo 8, SBO 6-1, 117.

[21] De filio regis, SBO 6-2, 261.

[22] De filio regis, SBO 6-2, 264-265.

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.

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