Adam Clulow, Author at Not Even Past

Picturing My Family: Wartime Weddings and a People’s War

From the Editors:

“Picturing My Family” is a new series at Not Even Past. As a Public History magazine, we aim to make History more accessible by publishing research features and other articles. But of course, History doesn’t reach us solely through words. It lives on in images, too. A good photograph transmits as much information as a line of text, and it does so in an extraordinarily evocative way. Dispensing with description, photography brings us face to face with the past. Visual cues can stimulate our sensory imagination and present us with surprising new details, encouraging us to ask questions, to dig deeper, and to think like historians.

Our concept is simple. We invite Not Even Past readers to:

• Send us a photograph of a family member or ancestor. The photograph doesn’t have to be old; it could be from any period. The subject can be one of your grandparents, a cousin, a distant relative – anyone whom you count as part of your family.

• Tell us in less than 250 words what the image shows and why it’s meaningful for you and your family. If you wish, you can set the photo in historical context, too. But that isn’t necessary.

If you are interested in submitting something for this series, please click here.

In this instalment of “Picturing My Family,” historian David Crew shares two photographs that highlight different aspects of life on the home front during World War II. Crew’s contributions remind us that the impacts of war reverberate far from the front lines, creating profound disturbances and opening new opportunities for civilians as well as soldiers.

A Wartime Wedding

By David Crew

This is a photograph of my parents’ wedding in London in September 1939. The Second World War had just begun with the German invasion of Poland, but this was still the period known as the “Phony War” with no major land battles in Western Europe and an uneasy quiet. It was not until May 1940 that the Germans invaded and subsequently defeated France. Britain had counted on the formidable French Army being able to halt the German Blitzkrieg. But when the French sued for an armistice just six weeks after the invasion, the British Expeditionary Force had to retreat across the Channel. It would be almost four years (June 6th,1944) before British soldiers could set foot on French soil again, now as one component of a huge multi-national invasion force.

When I first saw this photograph, I was struck by how normal it all seemed—until I asked my aunt Joan, shown here at the front left, what was in the square, white bag she was holding in her left hand. She told me that it was a gas mask. In the 1930s, many Europeans feared that in the next war enemy planes would drop poison gas on major cities, killing large numbers of civilians. By the time this wedding photograph was taken, the British authorities had distributed millions of gas masks to the population. But the Germans never dropped poison gas on British cities.

A People’s War

By David Crew

World War II was a People’s War in which millions of women and men around the globe were mobilized to produce massive numbers of planes, tanks, and guns as well as to fight. This photograph shows my mother’s brother who worked as a welder in British war industry. To escape the German bombing of London, the firm that employed my uncle was evacuated to Melton Mowbray, a small town in Leicestershire. The photograph was probably taken by a professional photographer.

An artist then used this photograph to draw the following still-incomplete sketch of my uncle. It may have been intended as the first step in the development of a poster to support the war effort.

David Crew is a Distinguished Teaching Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin. He has taught at UT since 1984 and has been a faculty member of the Frank Denius Normandy Scholar Program on World War Two since 1993. His current book project is Disturbing Images: Photographing Hitler’s Third Reich,1933–1945.

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 Resurrecting the Granary of Rome: Environmental History and French Colonial Expansion in North Africa (2007) by Diana K. Davis

banner image for Review of Resurrecting the Granary of Rome: Environmental History and French Colonial Expansion in North Africa (2007) by Diana K. Davis

This is an important revisionist work. In Resurrecting the Granary of Rome, Diana K. Davis makes a compelling argument that existing evidence and recent research in arid land ecology do not support many of the claims regarding deforestation, overgrazing, and desertification in North Africa. This argument challenges the French environmental narratives of North Africa, which aided them in the colonization of the Maghreb (Algeria, Libya, Mauritania, Morocco, and Tunisia). Davis discusses how the French colonial regime used environmental narratives to enable them to exploit the Maghreb from the 1830s to the end of colonial rule in French North Africa.

Divided into three chapters, Davis’ book begins by providing a historiographical context for the work. The book begins by exploring the existing literature on the environmental history of North Africa while locating a lacuna that provides the focus of the work. She argues that the French environmental narrative of North Africa was episodic; it only captures the environmental decline of the Maghreb after the Arab invasion in the eleventh century. However, deforestation and desertification predate the invasion of the Arabs. Research indicates that these processes occurred for millennia in North Africa. Hence the need to put the environmental narratives in a more appropriate context, acknowledging both indigenous (colonized) and foreign (colonizer) agencies.

Davis discusses the differences between the ways precolonial and postcolonial North African narratives describe agricultural fertility. During the pre-colonial period, the natural environment was pictured as pristine, not degraded, deforested, or ruined. Precolonial narratives about the environment also presented the local population as passive and thus unable to exploit the potential of the land. By contrast, colonial narratives presented the “Arab invasion” of North Africa in the eleventh century as a singular force in the degradation of the environment. Together with other factors such as trade and politics, French colonial narratives became instrumental in the colonization of the Maghreb starting from Algeria between 1830 and 1848.

After exploring the colonization of the Maghreb, Davis examines how French narratives were vital to the administration of colonies in North Africa. The narratives encouraged and expanded the French occupation of Algeria as indigenous populations were removed from their best lands to make way for colonial agriculture. The period witnessed the establishment of forestry serves to deal with deforestation and desertification in Algeria. Two environmental theories emerged: the theory of deforestation and the theory of desiccation. According to Davis, the latter informed much of Algeria’s forestry policies during the colonial and postcolonial periods, as the French believed that planting trees would attract and increase rainfall.

Davis explores the patterns of change in narratives about environmental decline between 1870 to independence. The pattern of change in the narratives served three purposes. The declension narratives were key in the appropriation of land and resources. French colonizers premised their occupation of the Maghreb on the need to avoid further deterioration of the environment. Also, the narrative served as a means of social control, also controlling the provision of labor. The French narratives created conservatory laws to protect the environment. These laws restrained the local populations from Indigenous agricultural practices such as bush following and shifting cultivation. Lastly, declensionist narratives led to the transformation of subsistence farming into commodity production. This sought to make lands more profitable.

a vendange (grape harvest) in French Alegria — *This undated picture postcard from the early twentieth century depicts a* vendange (grape harvest) in French Alegria. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Through its analysis of the Maghreb, this book makes a valuable methodological and analytical contribution to the study of the North African environment. Davis drew upon extensive primary documents in Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco, and France, which she skillfully blended with other secondary sources. The sources are woven into six chapters with a brief but insightful conclusion. However, the book has some limitations. The book is largely silent on the resistance of indigenous Algerians to French occupation. Under the leadership of Abdul Kadir, most of the fertile lands were held by the resistant groups. By 1839, he controlled more than two-thirds of Algeria, having most of the fertile lands. It was after his capture that the French had control of Algeria. It is interesting to note that Abdul Kadir’s name is not featured in the entire narrative on land occupation in Algeria. Kadir’s green (which stands for the field) and white standard was adopted by the Algerian liberation movement during the War of Independence and became the national flag of independent Algeria. A further description of the resistance group, led by Kadir, would have given more agency to indigenous Algerians in the narrative. However, these are minor reservations in a refreshingly creative and revisionist work.

Resurrecting the Granary of Rome significantly contributes to the growing body of environmental history in North Africa and Africa. It points to new avenues of research on the relationship between colonialism, environmental narratives, and history in Africa. Focusing on Maghreb’s environmental history, Davis addresses the mistaken notion that the indigenous people of North Africa are to be blamed for the degradation of the environment. The book forcefully compels its readers to reject French colonial declensionist environmental narratives and instead support the environmental story of the nomads who have been largely misperceived and misread over the years.

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

Review of Guaraná: How Brazil Embraced the World’s Most Caffeine-Rich Plant (2022) by Seth Garfield

Guaraná: How Brazil Embraced the World’s Most Caffeine-Rich Plant is a luminous social biography of a single Amazonia fruit. Historian Seth Garfield re-invigorates the abiding relevance of the history of commodities as an entry point into Latin American history. As a history of consumption, science, and national mythology, the book invites readers into new terrain in the social life of things. Garfield explores guaraná’s many meanings and pathways over three centuries as it was transformed through Indigenous knowledge, European colonization, modern state-building, and the story of capital. By the mid-twentieth century, guaraná had become Brazil’s iconic national soda, famous for its golden hue and energetic punch. Garfield traces the many transnational dynamics and flows that shape guaraná’s uses and meanings. But the book as a whole keeps Brazil and Brazilians center stage.

Guaraná is a gem of a read, as exuberant as Guaraná Espumante champagne. Elegantly written and immensely interdisciplinary, Garfield seamlessly weaves anthropology, history of science, food systems analysis, feminist scholarship, cultural theory, and ethnic studies together. His narrative is peppered with ironic and often humorous insights alongside somber accounts of exploitation and loss. Who knew that guaraná had so many uses? At different times and places, it appears as a cosmic history of the gods, a sexual stimulant, a smart pill for children, a cure for “lady headaches,” and an on-ramp for women to enter public spaces. Lizzie Borden was high on guaraná tea when she allegedly axed her parents in the 1890s. Brazilian soccer teams relied on guaraná soda to fuel victories over Argentina in the 1950s. By the 1990s, Guaraná diet supplements promised lean and toned bodies ready for the beach.

A singular achievement of this book is the way in which Garfield centers Indigenous knowledge and practice in the history of food and consumption. Very few histories of commodities do this, and I know of no book that does it so well. The monograph opens and closes with chapters on the Sateré-Mawé. The particularly insightful first chapter provides a rich discussion of Native production and use, sexual divisions of labor, Indigenous discovery, experimentation, and innovation. The author elaborates both an ethnography and an intellectual history of Sateré-Mawé meanings that makes a strong case for Indigenous knowledge as science. Garfield attributes the same explanatory power to Sateré-Mawé exploration and story-telling of guaraná as he does to eighteenth-century Jesuit plant collectors and nineteenth-century botanists who interpellated tropical plants within Western networks of knowledge.

Other chapters argue that Indigenous knowledge formed a basis of modern medical and pharmaceutical development, even as Brazilian and American scientists elaborated racial hierarchies that occluded that truth. Garfield insists that modern-day scholars recognize Indigenous people as “colleagues” not mere “informants” of Western biochemistry and foodways.” He underscores that Indigenous people should be afforded similar intellectual property rights and centrality in the history of science. These arguments come to the fore in the book’s last chapter on “Indigenous Modernity,” where Garfield circles back to the insights of his own first monograph, Indigenous Struggle at the Heart of Brazil: State Policy, Frontier Expansion, and the Xavante Indians, 1937-1988 (2001). In Guaraná, Garfield highlights how Sateré-Mawé are politically savvy and modern in their own ways, despite the horrific violence and material loss that Indigenous people of the Amazon suffered during military rule. By the late twentieth century, the Sateré-Mawé were tapping into global discourses about Native sovereignty and Indigenous environmentalism to assert land rights and to forge a commercial presence in marketing their own guaraná as eco-friendly Fair Trade products for the Global North.

A second major contribution of Guaraná is the way it reverses the gaze of more conventional histories of commodities and consumption. Garfield asserts the importance of a plant and commercialized food product that never became a global hit. Despite the best efforts of advertisers and scientists, guaraná never had as much of a market outside Brazil. Histories of Latin American coffee, sugar, and other fruits like bananas and grapes, stake their importance on the fact that U. S.-Americans and Europeans consume these goods. Garfield shows that the commodity-subject need not circulate in the North Atlantic to be significant, even foundational, to Latin American histories. In this story, it is Brazilian actions and their impacts that matter most. Guaraná was transformed by international dynamics of colonialism and capitalism, science and technology, but why guaraná matters is a Brazilian story. The ‘transnational turn’ has produced many fine histories of how goods, people, and ideas circulate. Yet Garfield’s global framework emphasizes the effects of Brazilian agency and knowledge on Outsider Others: German Jesuits, Harvard scientists, U.S. corporations. He highlights Brazilian innovation in pharmacology and beverage manufacturing. All of this de-centers Europe and the United States within the history of commodities. If Brazil’s popular Brahma-brand guaraná soda built on German technologies for producing carbonated water or borrowed Coca-Cola’s marketing strategies, it was fundamentally a Brazilian invention, the taste for which did not originate in, or appeal to, the U. S. A.

book cover for indigenous struggle at the heart of Brazil by Seth Garfield

A third contribution is Guaraná’s emphasis on the history of meaning. As a historian of labor and commodities myself, I appreciated that Garfield places his main analysis of agrarian capitalism late in the book in chapter seven, which details guaraná’s economic boom during the military regime’s destructive “green revolution” in the Amazon. This important chapter underscores just how much the “economic miracles” of neoliberalism depended on authoritarian states that sought to conquer “final frontiers” of Indigenous and peasant lands. Historians of Chile, Peru, Colombia and elsewhere will recognize the pattern. But Garfield’s placement of this more familiar history of capitalist production near the book’s end stems from more than just historical chronology. Guaraná is imbricated in other forms of capitalist production long before the Cold War boom-years.

The late staging of political-economy in this history foregrounds knowledge-production and the history of cultural meanings as necessary antecedents to capitalist development. In this story of capital, guaraná had to first be imagined as desirable in the minds of scientists and doctors, Brazilian industrialists, a state longing for national symbols, women and men out on the town. This inverts the logic of most other histories of commodities that more often begin with what and how capitalism is producing, and then backs into a discussion of the social use and cultural meaning. As the logic goes, capitalists produce stuff to make money, and then figure out how to sell it; economic base begets the superstructure of cultural systems. Garfield flips that script and foregrounds the history of ideas and aspiration.

Finally, Garfield’s attention to how guaraná produces hierarchies of gender, race, and region deserves special praise. His analysis ranges from guaraná’s original “discovery” by a Sateré-Mawé woman and the strict sexual divisions of labor in which Native men cultivate the fruit and women prepare it as food, to later associations of guaraná champagne and dietary supplements with whiteness and urban cosmopolitanism, to guaraná’s modernization of patriarchy. Garfield chronicles how guaraná soda allowed women to sip non-alcoholic beverages in public, while men continued to have license to get soused on beer. Black bodies were associated with serving guarana to others, or, for Black men, to signify prowess in sports and music. Exotic spice for a more fundamentally white color of modernity. Garfield reminds us that “mass consumption” can both empower and subordinate. It is a terrain of struggle and constant transformation.

Heidi Tinsman, University of California, Irvine

Review of Wild by Design: The Rise of Ecological Restoration (2022) by Laura J. Martin

In Wild by Design, historian Laura Martin points to an irony at the heart of our contemporary ecological moment: in the face of human-made threats to the earth’s biosphere, it is only through further intercession into the workings of nature that humankind may remediate the harm that it has already caused. The notion that through conscious action, people have the potential to revivify or enhance natural systems is not, however, new. The assumption rests at the heart of the field of ecological restoration, whose history within the United States during the 20th century Martin seeks to recount.

Martin writes that historians have typically presented the history of 20th-century environmental management as a duel between environmental conservation and preservation. The former asserts that certain designated lands should be actively managed to guarantee the long-term availability of economically desirable natural resources. Environmental preservation, on the other hand, has sought to protect lands from any human footprint whatsoever. The logic of ecological restoration has long existed as a middle ground between these two poles, but its history, when it has been written of, has been traced back only as far as Aldo Leopold’s 1949 Sand County Almanac. In her book, Martin casts her gaze farther down the well of the past to the early 1900s, and beginning there, she traces a deeper and longer history of ecological restoration in the United States.

Martin begins her narrative with the American Buffalo Society in the early 20th century and its ambition to create game reservations in order to repopulate portions of the Great Plains after they had been depleted of buffalo. From there, Martin advances chronologically up to the present moment. She concludes her monograph with a discussion of the practice of off-site mitigation, the contemporary approach to minimizing environmental harm that attempts to compensate for destruction done to one ecosystem by restoring another. As a whole, the book traces how efforts to revitalize United States wilderness areas have evolved from attempts to restore only a single species to now much grander schemes that aim to guard the resiliency of entire ecosystems. Martin successfully shows in clear prose how ecological restoration evolved from the pursuit of many small, private organizations into an institutionalized scientific field whose knowledge shapes the majority of federal ecological management policy today. Martin reconstructs this history by working through government documents, published and unpublished scientific papers, news clippings, and other sources.

As Martin weaves her narrative together, she is at pains to show how the evolving understandings of nature’s workings that lay at the heart of restoration efforts interfaced with contemporary material, political, and cultural circumstances. Thus, Martin emphasizes how the studies and conceptual frameworks that have advanced ecological restoration as a field have also benefitted from and furthered the harm done to historically oppressed groups within the United States. In addition, Martin shows that at the heart of ecological restoration’s history lie shifting understandings of what constitutes “wildness” and frequent debates around what should be the baseline against which an ecosystem’s current health is measured.

A photograph of a "government buffalo herd" in Yellowstone National Park from the American Bison Society's 1907 Annual Report. — *A photograph of a “government buffalo herd” in Yellowstone National Park from the American Bison Society’s 1907 Annual Report. Source: Wikimedia Commons.*

Martin’s ability to construct narratives from primary sources and, in the process, chart an intellectual, political, and cultural history of ecological restoration is extremely impressive. However, as is typically the case with histories that cover long lengths of time, any one of her chapters feels like it could be expanded into its own book. Furthermore, in limiting its scope to the United States during the 20th century, Martin’s work begs the question of whether the history of ecological restoration can be geographically and temporally broadened beyond one country.

Finally, Martin’s narrative focuses exclusively on the knowledge and actions of an extremely limited number of actors and official institutions. Given her concern with environmental justice and the deleterious effects that restoration efforts have had on oppressed groups, it is curious that Martin does not devote more space to recovering their voices. Ultimately, the book invites a richer genealogy of the knowledge and experiences that fed and were informed by the development of ecological restoration.

Such comments are, however, not meant to detract from the value of Martin’s work. Her book adeptly situates, both politically and culturally, the development of ecological restoration in the United States during the 20th century. Wild by Design constitutes a well-crafted, clearly written work defined by sharp analysis. As such, it is suited to everyone from informed general readers to specialists in environmental history and the history of science.

Gaal Almor is a 2nd-year PhD student in the History department at UT Austin. His research centers on questions of legal rights and epistemology in the early modern Atlantic.

A Taste of Brazil: How Guaraná Soda Became a National Icon

The story of guaraná, the key ingredient of Brazil’s “national” soda and the centerpiece of a multi-billion dollar industry, may start here:

“In the ancestral village there lived a virtuous couple who had a young son. A performer of wonders, the boy, by the age of six, was revered by many. Like an angel of peace, surrounded by an aura of joy, the child put an end to feuding, maintaining the unity of his people. Abundant rain nourished plants that had once withered, begging for water. The sick were healed with the touch of his young hand.” So begins the Sateré-Mawé Indigenous community’s origin tale, set in the Amazon forest, as recorded by Brazilian military engineer João Martins da Silva Coutinho and published in Rio de Janeiro in 1870.

Roused by jealousy, however, the bad angel Jurupary plotted the young boy’s murder. One day, when the child climbed a tree, Jurupary transformed into a snake, grabbed him by the neck, and killed him. When the villagers found the boy, his visage was serene. Eyes wide open, he appeared to be laughing. But despair soon mounted as the boy’s death seemingly condemned the community to “eternal misfortune.” A sudden lightning bolt stilled the people’s cries. Then the boy’s mother spoke: “Tupã, the beneficent [God], has come to console us from this great affliction, repairing the loss we have suffered. My son will be reborn as a tree that will be our source of food and union, curing us of all bodily ills as well. But it is necessary for his eyes to be planted. And I can’t do this, so you must, as Tupã has ordered.” With the villagers reluctant to tear out the child’s eyes, the elders drew lots. The community’s tears watered the planting as the elders stood guard. Several days later, the guaraná bush bloomed.

The plant’s eyeball-like berries signified the boy’s resurrection and the genesis of a Native Amazonian people. The Sateré-Mawé refer to themselves as the “children of guaraná,” a botanical creeper native to the Brazilian Amazon that the Indigenous people first domesticated, as recounted in their creation myth, and whose seeds chemists have shown to contain between two to five times more caffeine than Arabica coffee seeds.

Smoked guaraná stick and dried tongue of pirarucu fish. From the nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, the central western state of Mato Grosso was the primary destination for commercial guaraná, where it was transported in the form of smoked sticks, rasped with the dried tongue of the pirarucu fish or a metal file, and mixed with cold water for consumption. Photograph by Jose Miguel Martinez-McIntosh of materials in author’s collection.

My book, Guaraná: How Brazil Embraced the World’s Most Caffeine-Rich Plant, charts the evolution of guaraná from a pre-Columbian cultivar and ritual beverage of the Sateré-Mawé in the Lower Amazon region to the headline ingredient of Brazil’s beloved “national” soda. Although guaraná is an icon of Brazilian national identity, we have lacked a monograph in either Portuguese or English dedicated to the history of the plant and beverage. A longue durée account of the plant’s domestication, appropriation, and circulation can elucidate the complexity of Brazilian history and society and the resilience of its Indigenous populations.

Book cover for Guaraná: How Brazil Embraced the World's most Caffeine-Rich Plant by Seth Garfield.

With their analeptic qualities, stimulants have long been valued commodities worldwide, yet psychoactive substances have their own distinct trajectories, applications, and cultural meanings. Guaraná is commercially grown only in Brazil, although no longer primarily in the Amazon region. Its principal market is the soft drink industry. It is also consumed as a syrup (notably, mixed with another Amazonian superfood, açaí) and in powdered form serves as one of many traditional phytotherapies embraced by Brazilians unable to afford or trust industrial pharmaceuticals–with an added popular reputation as an aphrodisiac.

The mass consumption of guaraná in Brazil stems in part from its high caffeine content, but also from the boosterism of missionaries, government officials, scientists, physicians, and marketers who touted the plant’s therapeutic benefits, “exotic” Amazonian origins, and nationalist cachet. Guaraná possessed, so they claimed, a dazzling array of attributes.

Botanical line drawing of Paullinia cupana, the scientific name attributed to guaraná in the early nineteenth century. — *Botanical line drawing of* Paullinia cupana, the scientific name attributed to guaraná in the
early nineteenth century, in Karl von Martius’s Flora brasiliensis (1874–1900). Although
illustrations of plants are ancient, Linnaean-style drawings aimed to depict the discrete
parts of a plant for the purpose of comparison and botanical classification. Such images
facilitated the exchange of knowledge of guaraná in scientific networks. Peter H. Raven
Library/Missouri Botanical Garden.

In the late seventeenth century, Jesuit João Felipe Bettendorff provided the first written account of guaraná’s physiological effects. The documentation reflected the missionary order’s oversight of Indigenous resettlement and intercultural exchange in the colonial Amazon and the Portuguese empire’s prominence in the global commercialization of medicinal plants in early modern history. In the nineteenth century, engineer Silva Coutinho moralistically touted guaraná as a commercial crop needed to secure the sedentarization of Indigenous peoples and the ”orderly” development of the Amazon. Positivist physician Luis Pereira Barreto, who devised a method to extract the syrup from the dried seeds for use in Brazil’s budding soft drink industry in the early twentieth century while adding his voice to the nation’s temperance and eugenics movements, hailed guaraná’s capacity to extend life through the prevention of arteriosclerosis and protection of the gastrointestinal tract. Merchants in the Amazonas Trade Association extolled guaraná as a prophylactic against “the pollution of food and modern lifestyles.”

During the mid-twentieth century, advertisers and food columnists pitched guaraná soda as the beverage for the “modern” woman and homemaker, the delight of children, a remedy for physical vigor, and a marker of leisure. For city dwellers in the rapidly urbanizing nation, guaraná sodas offered not only a cool refreshment and quick energy boost, but also an alternative to risky water supplies. At the same time, the consumption of mass-produced branded goods signaled a new form of identity and communal belonging, a way of being “modern” and Brazilian. Indeed, for decades, advertisers pitched guaraná soda as an “authentic” Brazilian beverage, the fruit of a native Amazonian plant and the product of the nation’s multicultural heritage. This was in stark contrast with Coca-Cola, the Yankee interloper whose domestic manufacture dated to World War II and the provisioning of U. S. troops stationed in the geographically strategic Northeast region.

Companhia Antarctica Paulista trucks in front of São Paulo factory, 1930s. — *Companhia Antarctica Paulista* trucks in front of São Paulo factory, 1930s. Like beer, sodas were industrial beverages whose growing popularity reflected the growth of consumer markets and shifting household dynamics in a rapidly urbanizing Brazil. Courtesy of Acervo Histórico, São Paulo Antiga.

The historical itineraries of guaraná also offer an important lens onto Brazil’s Indigenous past and present. Over centuries of sustained Luso-Brazilian contact, the Sateré-Mawé were victimized by slavers, militias, and missionaries. They were cheated by traders swapping overvalued goods for guaraná for sale in frontier mining towns, and their control of the trade undercut by colonists who came to produce and market the drug, albeit of inferior quality. Indigenous scientific know-how was obfuscated or disparaged by botanists and chemists, who claimed that their quantifiable, standardized form of knowledge alone could establish the “universal” truths regarding the natural world. Pharmaceutical firms and soft drink manufacturers capitalized on Indigenous knowledge to make windfalls profits.

Yet the history of guaraná also reveals the Sateré-Mawé, like other Indigenous Brazilians, as more than victims. Consumption of their traditional guaraná beverage (known as çapó), linked to rites of passage, communal ceremonies, and political conciliation and decision-making, maintained the Indigenous people’s distinct sense of being in the world, while facilitating the acquisition of outside goods and knowledge that enabled them to weather the traumas of colonialism. They participated actively in the historical processes of exchange and integration between Indigenous and non-Indigenous populations that have co-produced scientific knowledge of the natural world. In 2014, the Sateré-Mawé population numbered 13,350, one of the largest of the 255 Indigenous groups in Brazil, who total 896,917 individuals, or approximately 0.47 percent of the nation’s population, according to the 2010 census. Defying Brazil’s agribusiness model and the global industrial food system, Sateré-Mawé communities market their guaraná today in Europe through Fairtrade and organic food networks and the support of Slow Food International.

Given that nationalist symbols of Brazil’s so-called racial democracy such as soccer, samba, and Carnival have generated ample scholarly attention, guaraná’s historiographical sidelining is noteworthy. Because guaraná never formed part of the slave-plantation complex, nor featured as a large-scale export commodity, the crop did not generate the trove of documentation of other Brazilian agricultural products, such as coffee and sugar. Unlike cocaine, opium, or marijuana, guaraná was never criminalized, sparing its consumers stigma and arrest, but excluding the drug from the vast documentation of state bureaucracies implicated in the coercive biopolitics of industrial capitalism and the racialized construction of vice in modern societies. And while the ingredient features today in energy drinks worldwide, guaraná soft drinks have not attained the fame of Coca-Cola, whose global brand recognition owes to U. S. political and corporate hegemony.

It is also the case that Brazilian historiography long marginalized or folklorized the nation’s Indigenous populations through narratives of cultural blending and physical disappearance. My book relies on environmental archaeology, missionary chronicles, naturalists’ accounts, nineteenth-century Brazilian government reports, biographies, Brazilian and U. S. pharmaceutical journals, proceedings of scientific symposia, newspaper columns, popular advertisements, and Indigenous myths and oral testimonies.

With mass production, what countless Brazilians have come to know as “guaraná” bears slight resemblance to the taste or function of the “real” thing. Or does it? Surely, nobody would confuse the flavor or the mode of consumption of the Sateré-Mawé çapó with guaraná soda. Yet, as I argue, the dominant society in Brazil likewise endowed a stimulating beverage with the imposition of order and meaning, the mediation of social contradictions and paradoxes, and magical powers of transformation. Consider a 1971 ad headlined “A soda free from the world’s evils” that reassured consumers: “In a world as artificial as this one, it’s incredible that there still is a soda this natural. Preserve what’s authentic in you. Drink Guaraná Brahma. The child of the jungles.” Or that from the underside of bottlecaps materialized refrigerators, bicycles, radios, and cars for a lucky winner.

Guaraná Brahma ad, 1953. Ads for soft drinks typically depicted beverage consumers as white, reinscribing the social hierarchies in Brazil that linked notions of comfort, health, beauty, leisure, and progress to whiteness. O Cruzeiro 6 (November 21, 1953): 42. Hemeroteca Digital, Biblioteca Nacional, Rio de Janeiro. Courtesy of Arquivo O Cruzeiro/EM/D.A Press.

My book subjects the belief systems, socioeconomic structures, and technoscience of Brazil’s non-Indigenous populations to the core cultural analysis traditionally reserved for Indigenous societies. As advocated by Bruno Latour, a “symmetrical anthropology” questions the so-called conceptual divides between nature and society, objects and humans, and things and signs said to distinguish “modern” from “premodern” societies. Conjuring an imaginary, non-material world in transforming commodities into signifiers of glory, advertisements are a particularly rich historical source. If magic in “traditional” societies tends to the unaccountable or the adverse, in “modern” societies advertisers channel feelings of anxiety and fantasy, firing the imagination through particular formulas and rites and inducing transformations to overcome uncertainty and perceived risk. Heeding Lévi-Strauss’s claim that the “civilized” and “savage” mind share the same basic structures of thought and classificatory disposition, the book further contemplates Latour’s insight: the “moderns” in Brazil merely have more specialists, resources, platforms, and networks to adapt and disseminate their guaraná product and its shape-shifting stories.

Histories of food and other day-to-day material objects have a unique way of reaching readers. This is in part, I believe, due to their immediacy. Moreover, they can open up multiple windows onto the past and contemporary daily life: on the realms of production, distribution, consumption, representation, affect, and identity formation. In other words, they enable historians to look at questions of embodied experience, status, hierarchy and power in society from varied perspectives. The many histories animating the “social life” of guaraná–as a feature of the anthropogenic landscapes, scientific experimentation, and cultural patrimony of Indigenous Amazonia; as a therapeutic treatment and object of commercial exchange for colonial Jesuit missionaries and nineteenth-century Western science and biomedicine; as a symbol of industrial food systems, mass consumption, and the nutrition transition in developing countries; and as a basis of myth and identity for the Sateré-Mawé and the dominant society–offer a taste of Brazil.

Picturing My Family: Fathers and Sons

From the Editors:

Our concept is simple. We invite Not Even Past readers to:

If you are interested in submitting something for this series, please click here.

In this instalment of “Picturing My Family,” our Founding Editor, Dr. Joan Neuberger, presents a photograph of her father, a veteran of World War II, and reflects on its profoundly personal significance.

Fathers and Sons

My father fought in North Africa and Italy during the Second World War. He didn’t like much of anything about being a soldier but he was proud to have helped to defeat Hitler.

This photograph hung in our house and a painting of it hung in my grandmother’s apartment in New York City. It is the picture of my father that I carry around in my head. To my eye he looks old enough here to be my father, but yesterday, when I was scanning the photo and trying to figure out what year it was taken and how old he must have been, I realized that in this picture he is almost exactly the same age as my older son is now.

Note: This article first appeared online on January 23, 2014.

Review of After the Flood: Imagining the Global Environment in Early Modern Europe by Lydia Barnett (2019)

Lydia Barnett’s first book, After the Flood, examines how early modern Europeans sought to understand the relationship between human activity, morality, and the environment through narratives of Noah’s flood. Barnett frames her post-Medieval history through the modern concept of an Anthropocene, or an era in which humans are a dominant influence on the environment. Although this term was coined to describe how man-made greenhouse gases have altered the planet since the Industrial Revolution, Barnett’s anachronous use of the term reveals a previously unexplored throughline in environmental history.

As a historian of science and religion, Barnett analyzes European texts from the 1570s to 1720s to expand upon two decades of scholarship on the advent of environmental consciousness in Europe and the relationship between religious and scientific knowledge. She contributes to academic conversations on the advent of the Anthropocene, arguing that a theological concept of man’s impact on nature and climate preceded the geological concept proposed in the twentieth century. Barnett also engages with foundational texts on the role of scale in environmental history—exploring early modern ideas of the flood on local, national, transnational, and global scales. Barnett argues that the search for evidence of a universal flood collapsed early modern Europeans’ conceptions of time and space and reflects prominent scholars’ acknowledgment of the human capacity “to instigate geologic change on human timescale” (21).

In the first chapter, Barnett explores different dimensions of gender in early modern Europeans’ conceptions of the biblical flood. Scholars of this time would often cite the flood as the end of the Edenic period of Earth, during which men were giants who lived for hundreds of years and fathered many children. Thus, the flood epitomizes the era’s focus on the effects of sin on male bodies and masculinity. Barnett highlights the rather obscure work of Camilla Erculiani, the only woman known to have published a text on natural philosophy in Renaissance Italy. A Paduan philosopher and apothecary, Erculiani conceived of both supernatural and natural explanations of the biblical flood and suggested that the disaster’s moral implications apply only to men. Barnett argues that, paradoxically, Erculiani’s gender allowed her to voice controversial opinions about sacred texts during a time of religious persecution but also limited her ability to fully engage in European scientific communities.

Next, Barnett investigates the motivations behind the desire to globalize the flood—both in a geographical and a moral sense—as part of the European imperial project and Christian evangelism. Early modern Europeans fixated on reconciling a universal flood narrative with a perception of their own moral and racial superiority. Efforts to collect fossil evidence of a universal flood provided both Protestant and Catholic scholars a mode of participating in a diverse (though primarily European) exchange of fossils across the Republic of Letters, a transnational community of intellectuals. Barnett’s synthesis of scholarship on the Republic of Letters, the biblical flood, and European environmental consciousness demonstrates a unique approach, as it falls somewhere between environmental history and the history of knowledge.

Deluge (anonymous, after Hans Bol, 1579), a print from an illustrated sixteenth-century Bible. Source: Rijksmuseum

Finally, the end of After the Flood returns full circle to Italy—where Erculiani was one of the first scholars to merge natural and supernatural explanations of the flood—to describe how scientist Antonio Vallisneri combined theories from Swiss Protestants and Italian Catholics to challenge English scholars and deemphasize a natural explanation for the biblical flood.

An expert of early modern European history, Barnett deftly weaves different European narratives of Noah’s Flood together over the span of a century and a half. Although beyond the scope of this text, Barnett’s analysis would benefit from a contextualization of the ways in which other forms of Christianity across the globe—such as the Egyptian Coptic Church and Ethiopian Orthodox Church—and other Abrahamic religions depicted Noah’s flood around the same time. Contrasting flood narratives between European and African Christians would yield more nuanced insights into Protestant and Catholic Europeans’ motivations for debating the scale and significance of the biblical flood, which Barnett herself acknowledges in her introduction. Furthermore, Barnett sometimes sacrifices broader accessibility of her book in favor of obscure Latin words and religious terms, potentially excluding readers less familiar with early modern Europe and Christianity. But overall, she has crafted a sophisticated argument with highly readable prose. After the Flood has wide appeal to historians and graduate students from different fields—such as geography, ecology, theology, gender studies—and deftly explores the intersection of these different disciplines.

Emily Cantwell is a Master’s in Global Policy Studies Candidate at the University of Texas at Austin’s LBJ School of Public Affairs.

Introducing Picturing My Family: A New Visual Archive by Not Even Past

Not Even Past aims to make History more accessible. That usually entails thinking carefully about the way we write about the past. Since our inception in 2010, we’ve published more than 1.5 million words – all written, we hope, with a clarity that helps us speak to a broad audience.

But History doesn’t reach us solely through words. It lives on in images, too. A good photograph transmits as much information as a line of text, and it does so in an extraordinarily evocative way. Dispensing with description, photography brings us face to face with the past. Visual cues can stimulate our sensory imagination and present us with surprising new details, encouraging us to ask questions, to dig deeper, and to think like historians.

Engaging with historical photographs models the way scholars engage with archives. At Not Even Past, our written content frequently explores archives and their collections, whether across the UT campus and across the world. But nearly all of us have access to our own visual archives in the form of treasured family photographs, primary source documents that reveal intimate family history and suggest intersections with broader historical themes. In order to tap into these ubiquitous but oft-overlooked resources, we’re launching “Picturing My Family,” a new visually-oriented public history project.

Our concept is simple. We invite Not Even Past readers to do the following:

We’re keeping text to a minimum for a reason. Our aim is to use “Picturing My Family” to build our own visual public history archive anchored by a gallery of family photos. We’d love your help in accomplishing that goal, and if you’re interested, we’d be thrilled to give you space to tell your family’s story.

If you are interested in submitting something for this series, please click here.

Archive Overview

Fathers and Sons — by Joan Neuberger

Joan Neuberger, the Founding Editor of Not Even Past, presents a photograph of her father, a veteran of World War II, and reflects on its profoundly personal significance.

Click here to view the photograph

Wartime Weddings and a People’s War — by David Crew

Historian David Crew shares two photographs that highlight different aspects of life on the home front during World War II. Crew’s contributions remind us that the impacts of war reverberate far from the front lines, creating profound disturbances and opening new opportunities for civilians as well as soldiers.

Click here to view the photographs

A World War II Odyssey — by John Gleb

Current Not Even Past Associate Editor John Gleb presents a photograph of his paternal grandfather. The photograph helps illuminate the sweeping global context of World War II; the accompanying texts tells a moving family story.

Click here to view the photograph

Waiting for a Fox – by Atar David

Atar David shares the story of how his paternal grandfather spent WWII waiting for the Nazis, who, luckily, never showed up.

Click here to view the photograph

Keep an eye out for the next installment of Picturing My Family!

This article’s banner image incorporates a photograph by Suzy Hazelwood.

Celebrating George Forgie

From the editors:

The Department of History at the University of Texas at Austin has been honored by its association with groundbreaking scholars, teachers, and public intellectuals. George Forgie, who retired recently, is one of them. He is an extraordinary historian, a truly remarkable teacher, and a beloved colleague who influenced generations of students. Here, we present three tributes from colleagues who know George well.

On research – by Robert Olwell

On teaching – by Michael B. Stoff

On George – by Jacqueline Jones

Reminiscences of Professor George Forgie on His Retirement

By Michael B. Stoff

It is a pleasure to feature my colleague and friend George Forgie. George has been a valued member of our department for nearly half a century. He’s served as associate chair, law advisor, and committee member. His award-winning scholarship has earned him the admiration of his colleagues both at UT and across the nation. He’s also been a careful reader and editor of the scholarship of others, who’ve looked to him for his vast knowledge, his studied eye, and his relentless logic for advice. As important, he’s won virtually every teaching award at the University of Texas at Austin as well as the system-wide Regents Outstanding Teaching Award. In recognition of that record, he was part of the inaugural group of inductees in the Academy of Distinguished Teachers, an honor reserved for those very few professors considered by students and colleagues as the University’s finest. There is no better teacher here and, I suspect, anywhere else.

George’s scholarly work first focused on explaining why and how the pre-Civil War generation ended up in a fight that broke the republic to which they had dedicated their lives. Based on his dissertation, which won the Allan Nevins Prize, Patricide in the House Divided: A Psychological Study of Lincoln and His Generation remains one of the most creative and insightful studies of how the Union came undone. Prodigiously researched, cogently argued, and deftly employing psychological theory, the book examined the generation of leaders born in the early days of the Republic and by the 1850s in control of the national house as it crumbled around them. In his New York Review of Books essay, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David Brion Davis called it “one of the most ambitious, ingenious, and sophisticated works of psychohistory yet to appear” and rightly saw it as challenging “an entire tradition of American historiography.” George’s current work, soon to be published by Oxford University Press, continues to explore the Civil War by trying to explain why the North cared if the South left the Union and fought a war to bring it back. After all, not every national parting of ways has led to civil war.

A professor’s job is not only to research and write but to teach as well, and here George was a master. In a department that prides itself on teaching, George Forgie defines pedagogical excellence. More than a few members of the history department have confessed to me their envy of his talents in the classroom. I myself have attended some of his lectures, sometimes to evaluate his teaching, other times simply to see him work—and to learn from him as well. Sitting in a packed hall (and his classes were usually packed), hearing his commanding voice, recognizing his easy grasp of the complexities of history was to be in the presence of a classroom virtuoso. His lectures were an elegant brew of information and insights that reflected the historian’s passion for specificity and the undergraduate’s need for order. Each one had its own symmetry and, more important, a clear, sophisticated point. He barely looked at his notes, with the result that his lectures always seemed fresh. It may well have been so, for he worked not from detailed outlines but from piles of notes that he assimilated before each lecture. And he was forever adding to those notes, shifting emphasis, stressing new scholarship, searching for the telling anecdote that could breathe life into an abstraction. (I made a point of attending the same lecture for two years in a row. To my surprise the lectures were different, even though they covered precisely the same topic!)

A quick glance at his teaching evaluations reveals the esteem in which his students held him. “Excellent,” “superb,” “the best lecturer I’ve ever had,” and, perhaps the highest undergraduate compliment of all, “Forgie rocks” regularly could be found among the hand-written comments on these evaluations and on other, more informal assessments that used to appear on what students call the “Slam Table” on the West Mall. Forgie, I should add, was never slammed but lionized. Students acknowledged that he was as demanding as he was rigorous. They nonetheless flocked to his courses, whether they were history majors or not. Once there, they stayed, often after class to continue discussions begun during it. He regularly reserved the last 15 minutes of class for discussion and released those students not interested in talking or listening to anyone other than Forgie. Many remain behind.

There was no razzle or technological dazzle in Forgie. Instead, we had a professor in the classical tradition whose clarity, personal charisma, learnedness, scholarly balance, and provocation of genuine thought marked him as a master teacher. Thank goodness! We were fortunate to have had him at our university.

One further note: I know George not simply as an esteemed colleague, an admired teacher, and a sagacious scholar but as a treasured friend. Over the years, we’ve had countless dinners and endless conversation about topics as varied as contemporary politics, old and new films, historical conundrums of all kinds, teaching at every level and—always—who’s going to pay the dinner bill. His careful accounting of the latter never left a doubt over who owed what. And on that score, I can say that I owe him more than I can ever repay for decades of friendship, laughter and support. Enjoy your retirement, old friend. You deserve it!

Michael B. Stoff, Associate Professor of History Emeritus, UT Regents & University Distinguished Teaching Professor

Fathers and Sons: An appreciation of George Forgie’s Patricide in the House Divided: A Psychological Interpretation of Lincoln and his Age

By Robert Olwell

In my first semester in graduate school I took a colloquium on early American Political history. Among an armload of rather dry political studies, George Forgie’s Patricide in the House Divided was a breath of fresh air (or perhaps a guilty pleasure). Rather than a chronicle political treatises and speeches, George drew evidence from literature, history, and philosophy as well as, of course, politics, and wove a provocative and wholly original interpretation of pre-civil politics perceived through the prism of psychology. George’s key insight was that the ambitious men of Lincoln’s cohort faced a peculiar predicament. By the time they came of age in the second quarter of the 19th century, the heroic work of winning independence and creating the American republic was completed. They were left with the decidedly unheroic chore of being the caretakers of what their predecessors had built. The members of this “post-heroic” generation mouthed the filiopietistic homilies that were expected of them. But, George argued, because they could see no outlet for their own ambition, they also repressed an almost oedipal resentment at their “fore-fathers” for having taken all the glory. Seen through this lens, the familial and domestic metaphors of the era, such as calling the revolutionary generation the “founding fathers,” and likening the nation to a “house,” take on new meaning, and the political strife of the period becomes a psychodrama.

George makes Lincoln the central figure in his study. Not only was he the most significant politician of the era, but many of his writings are extremely revealing about his (and his generation’s) inner conflict. A rich vein is a talk Lincoln gave to a “Young Men’s Lyceum” when he was still an obscure member of the Illinois state legislature. In the speech, young Lincoln laid out the conundrum faced by ambitious men of his generation. A frustrated desire for distinction and achievement could tempt the “sons” to rebel against their “founding fathers,” Lincoln declared (obviously describing himself), just as the revolutionary generation had once rebelled against their own tyrannical father, the king. But, Lincoln warned, by destroying what the fathers had built, such a course of action would lead not to fame but to infamy. However, by resisting against his brothers’ rebellion, a dutiful son could earn renown (perhaps even equaling that of the “fathers”) by preserving and restoring the national “house” for a grateful posterity.

Applying this script to the political events of the 1850s and 1860s casts Stephen Douglas and the proponents of secession in the roles of the “bad” siblings and Lincoln as the “good” son. Events then play out like a Greek tragedy. In 1854, when Douglass, a Senator from Illinois, pushed an act through Congress that allowed slavery in the remainder of the Louisiana Purchase, many northerners were outraged. Lincoln, a one-term congressman since become successful lawyer, reentered politics to combat what he described as a betrayal of the “fathers’” intent to contain the expansion of slavery and set it on the road to extinction. As a leader of the new Republican Party, Lincoln first worked to prevent Douglas from becoming president and then was eventually elected to the White House himself. Afterwards, when secessionists in slaveholding states sought to pull down the house the fathers had built, Lincoln took actions that helped to ignite the civil war and then led the nation through a bloody conflict often described as a fight of “brother against brother.” By 1865, a virtuous fratricide had defeated the attempted patricide (although in this case, it was Abel who murdered Cain). The nation had a “new birth of freedom” (with Lincoln as the father) and the “house divided” was repaired and saved. In psychological terms, ego had conquered id.

My brief encapsulation of the book cannot do justice to the originality of George’s argument, the breadth of his sources, the brio of his prose, and his many ingenious connections and conjectures. After reading his book, I never read the Gettysburg Address, or Lincoln’s speeches at his first and especially, second, inaugurals in the same way. Likewise, it is astonishing how often the language and metaphors of fathers, families, and households appear in the discourse of the period once you start to notice them and infuse them with meaning. George’s book is still on my office bookshelf. It continues to shape my understanding of how Americans in the mid-19th-century, from Lincoln and Douglas to Emerson and Thoreau, imagined themselves in relation to time and to history as well as to their families and fathers (both actual and metaphorical).

Some things you might not know about George Forgie

By Jacqueline Jones

Here are some things about George Forgie that you might not know:

–He was a regular runner at the annual ten-mile Austin Taco Trot. Catching a glimpse of George in the race has been known to prompt other runners to start up an animated discussion about him as the best professor they ever had at UT—and to continue that discussion, trading stories, as they dash down the street. These FoGs (Fans of George) inevitably leave older, more winded runners behind, somewhat envious of his extraordinary success in the classroom.

–He was a finalist in the New Yorker‘s September 2018 cartoon caption contest.

–He starred in a promotional spot for the new UT Longhorn Network c. 2011. The short video featured George lecturing to a hall full of student-actors. When he asked a question about the American Revolution, a student stood up and proudly answered correctly. It was the cue for some portion of the UT marching band to enter the hall playing a rousing “Eyes of Texas” at full volume–presumably to celebrate the brilliance of this particular student, and of all UT students.

Shooting this spot took a full day. In the morning, a professional make-up artist (who had worked with several Hollywood celebrities, including Johnny Depp) applied George’s make-up (though he had no cinematic close-up). Eventually the video was whittled down to a mere 15 seconds or so, but George had achieved Longhorn stardom to rival any celebrated quarterback.

And no wonder. George snagged this gig in a high-values-production video (if not a feature film) because he is a beloved UT teacher. I never attended one of George’s lectures, but the reasons he inspires such admiration are clear from any casual conversation with him. He has a droll, dry wit. He is engaged, curious to hear what you have to say and eager to hear more. He has an encyclopedic knowledge of American political history and is quick to offer precedents, analogies, and quotes from past luminaries relevant to whatever is going on in the world today.

George’s courses on the American Revolution and the Civil War are legendary. On the latter topic, he has immersed himself in a truly impressive amount of material. Which brings me to his current research.

We all know that over the generations, the American Civil War has remained an enduring subject of fascination for historians. Authors of an estimated 60,000 (and counting) books and countless articles have considered virtually every conceivable topic related to the conflict. It is the rare scholar indeed who can offer a fresh perspective on the war’s overall meaning; but George is doing just that.

He is in the process of looking at the unfolding of the war years from the viewpoint of people who lived through that terrible time. Too often we assume that the way the war was won—with the Confederate states reintegrated into the Union, and the institution of slavery destroyed—conformed to the wishes and expectations of Union politicians, military leaders, writers, clergy, and other opinion-makers. However, from 1861 onward in the North, debates raged over what “saving the Union” should or could mean, given the South’s stubborn determination to preserve the institution of slavery.

Northerners produced massive amounts of written material in the form of political speeches and debates, campaign harangues, newspaper editorials, sermons, magazine articles, diaries, correspondence, and pamphlets. By sifting through this material George can discern wartime objectives, variously defined in the moment. Several competing groups tried to sort out the territorial, political, economic, and moral dimensions of the conflict, with some groups emphasizing one of these factors more than the others. Could the Union survive with its territory intact, the Confederates chastened, but slavery preserved? Was the war worth fighting if the white South agreed to surrender but made peace contingent upon their ability to nullify federal policies and laws?

By delving into these debates, George reminds us that the outcome of the conflict was contingent on many complicated factors that we tend to elide today in favor of a more linear narrative of Union triumph.

My work has benefited from George’s scholarship in specific ways. To cite one example: While I was writing about southern planters who forcibly removed their enslaved workforces to Texas during the Civil War, he reminded me that not all Americans at the time saw President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation as a sign that the purpose of the war was now to end the “peculiar institution.” Some argued that the proclamation was a military measure that Congress could easily reverse if and when the South won the war. Others suggested that the Supreme Court could and would declare the measure unconstitutional. And there were some Texas slaveholders who believed that regardless of the victor, the U. S. federal government would remain too weak to interfere with the institution of human bondage in the Lone Star state.

It’s clear to me that George is in the process of making an extraordinary contribution to Civil War history. As a researcher, he has proved indefatigable in ferreting out a vast number and variety of printed and archival sources. As a scholar, he has proved insightful in categorizing and analyzing a cacophony of Northern voices, men and women seeking to capture the attention of the public and of Lincoln himself.

One of the reasons George is such a great teacher is his command of an extraordinarily rich body of material related to American history. Another is his profound respect for his students—indeed, for all his listeners and conversationalists, whether students, friends, or colleagues. George represents the best in teaching and in humanistic pursuits in general, friendship included. Congratulations on your retirement, George!

Review of The Health of the Country: How American Settlers Understood Themselves and Their Land (2002) by Conevery Bolton Valencius

banner image for Review of The Health of the Country: How American Settlers Understood Themselves and Their Land (2002) by Conevery Bolton Valencius

Both detailed environmental and medical histories of the Antebellum South are rare. Works that combine the two even more so. In The Health of the Country: How American Settlers Understood Themselves and Their Land, Conevery Bolton Valencius does just that. She argues that 19th-century American settlers saw an important relationship between the “health” of the landscape they were settling and that of their own bodies. She asserts that most histories of Western expansion have overlooked this dimension of the Antebellum settler mentality, and in doing so have not accurately represented the thoughts and practices of the time.

White settlers in the Antebellum South saw the human body and the natural environment as connected, having similar “balances,” and undergoing similar processes. Naturally, this changed the way settlers viewed and used the land. They anthropomorphized landscapes, ascribing levels of “health” to the land, airs, and waters of their environments. Much of the Antebellum settlers’ logic about the health of landscapes mirrored the logic of their medical studies and practices. Stagnant water and air were seen as inherently sickly, just as blockages or a perceived lack of flow of fluid in the body was. Understanding this association between the way Antebellum settlers perceived human biology on the one hand and environmental landscapes and processes on the other provides valuable insight into patterns of medicinal practice, land use, and natural resource extraction during the period of American westward expansion.

Valencius’ thoughtfully constructed narrative highlights the extent to which white settlers and the enslaved Black populations they forcibly transported were vulnerable to environmental factors when migrating west in the Antebellum period. She describes in detail the difficulties settlers encountered during the initial period of “seasoning” or acclimation to the “foreign” new landscapes, climates, and illnesses of the Mississippi Valley and the western U. S. While they were armed with preventative measures and remedies for diseases, settlers commonly understood that their lives were ultimately at the mercy of the natural world. Additionally, settlers believed the process of clearing and cultivating land exposed them to the miasmas supposedly contained within natural environments. Migrants did not exercise full control over preventing and healing disease or altering the landscape, making colonization of new environments especially daunting.

In writing this history, Valencius diverges from the triumphant progress narratives often associated with the history of American westward expansion. She does not do so to downplay the centuries of horrific violence committed by European settlers against Black and Indigenous populations. Rather, this history is meant to disrupt the idea that white settlers were all-powerful and to represent their thoughts and fears of migrating west with more accuracy and nuance. Part of the explanation for the distinctiveness of Valencius’ Western expansion narrative lies in its unusual and diverse primary sources. Valencia does not rely solely on reports from white men in positions of power, such as political or military figures, who often had a vested interest in promoting “triumphant” frontier narratives. Instead, she analyzes the personal writings of white settlers through letters, diaries, and stories. She also makes use of medical exam documents produced by practitioners of “medical geography” and “Southern medicine,” many of whom were not formally educated doctors. Additionally, by incorporating the stories of enslaved people like Solomon Northup, as well as carefully engaging with the interviews of formerly enslaved people, Valencius highlights how Black populations conceptualized and experienced human and environmental health differently than their white oppressors.

A panel (Section 11) from John Egan's Panorama of the Monumental Grandeur of the Mississippi Valley (ca. 1850) — *A panel (Section 11) from John Egan’s* Panorama of the Monumental Grandeur of the Mississippi Valley *(ca. 1850). Source: Wikimedia Commons.*

Valencius also outlines the connections between nineteenth-century American medical geography and the formal political process of settling, using, and acquiring land. She argues that coming to know a place by observing weather patterns, classifying natural resources, and charting areas with higher risk of illness contributed to the physical process of western expansion and settlement. These documents provided vital information about new territories that assisted military and economic operations and influenced the migrations of other white settlers. After all, as Valencius notes, “ambitious families moved to healthy places, not sickly ones” (6). Additionally, she describes how at times the “health” of landscapes was not only related to the perceived risks of illness but was closer to a description of the discomfort settlers felt in such an unfamiliar landscape. In labeling environments as unhealthy, or even “wild” or “savage,” settlers expressed an innate desire to “improve upon” new territory. “Improving” or “taming” the landscape, Valencius shows, contributed to a connection between farming and virtue, and almost always involved some form of environmental destruction.

The Health of the Country reveals that the medical and environmental histories of the Antebellum South are inseparable. Moreover, it provides important context to the political and cultural history of the same period. Valencius urges readers to look beyond present-day distinctions between physical health, environmental conditions, and nation-building imperatives in order to better understand the language and experiences of migrants in the expanding American west. Her book pushes us to understand Antebellum medical and environmental histories as not only interconnected with each other, but also as deeply linked to the politics of colonialism and expansion.

Francis Russell is a doctoral student in the Department of Geography and the Environment at the University of Texas at Austin. They study the social and environmental resilience and vulnerability of coffee farmers in Puerto Rico. In their work, Francis uses both quantitative geospatial and qualitative ethnographic analyses.

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A Wartime Wedding

A People’s War

Fathers and Sons

Archive Overview

Fathers and Sons — by Joan Neuberger

Wartime Weddings and a People’s War — by David Crew

A World War II Odyssey — by John Gleb

Waiting for a Fox – by Atar David

On research – by Robert Olwell

On teaching – by Michael B. Stoff

On George – by Jacqueline Jones

Reminiscences of Professor George Forgie on His Retirement

Fathers and Sons: An appreciation of George Forgie’s Patricide in the House Divided: A Psychological Interpretation of Lincoln and his Age

Some things you might not know about George Forgie

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