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Not Even Past

Professor Toyin Falola: Living and Globalizing the Humanities

On Tuesday, October 11, 2022, at State House, Abuja, Nigeria’s President Muhammadu Buhari conferred one of the nation’s oldest and highest merit honors, the Member of the Order of the Niger (MON), on University of Texas at Austin professor of history, Toyin Falola. Professor Falola is University Distinguished Teaching Professor and Jacob and Frances Sanger Mossiker Chair in the Humanities at UT Austin. Falola is also one of the foremost humanities scholars today. As Africa’s most decorated and celebrated academic at home and abroad, with over thirty lifetime achievement awards, sixteen honorary doctorates, eight festschriftens in his honor, seven teaching awards, three chieftaincy titles, book awards named after him and several honorary conferences, Falola is at home with achievements, accolades, awards, and unparalleled distinction.  

Last year, on November 17, 2021, Nigeria’s premier university, the University of Ibadan, awarded an academic Doctor of Letters (D. Litt.) degree to Dr Falola, exactly 40 years after the award of his PhD by the University of Ife in 1981. The University of Ibadan is the first African academic institution ever to award the academic D. Litt., an epochal event, and to none more deserving than to such a distinguished global humanities scholar. Falola is a teacher of teachers, a mentor of mentors, an academic leader, astute administrator, writer, poet, polymath, and, without doubt, a far-ranging genius. These recent conferrals provide, therefore, a good occasion to recognize and reflect yet again on his towering contributions to the academy and global scholarship.  

Toyin Falola in 2011. Source: Wikimedia Commons. Licensed by Creative Commons.

Falola is the preeminent African-born academic of our times, with a sprawling breadth of publications and contributions unrestrained by disciplinary boundaries, transcending all the traditional fields of the humanities and social sciences combined and covering a truly global geographical and cultural scope. It is a somewhat daunting task for anyone to attempt to distill and parse his oeuvre, which comprises so many published books—thirteen in the last year alone, hundreds of journal articles, book chapters and essays, countless keynotes and distinguished lectures delivered in countries on every continent, and so much more. In this age of renascent intellectual and activist movements to decenter hegemonic knowledge and reinscribe the contributions, experiences, and perspectives of non-Western and Global South peoples within entrenched knowledge production systems, Falola’s body of work is pioneering, even prescient, and is a compass for what it means to truly achieve the knowledge transformation aims of this movement. While the humanities have been criticized as partial and incomplete, having been built on an essential image of Man and humanity that is discernably western, Falola’s work boldly destabilizes established canons, consolidates knowledge from the margins, centers these within mainstream theoretical, academic, and policy conversations, and ultimately globalizes the humanities. It is, quite simply, an extraordinary achievement.

Such is his stature that Toyin Falola needs no introduction—but permit me to highlight some key biographical moments. Forty-one years ago, in 1981, he was awarded his PhD in History, completed in record time, from the prestigious University of Ife, Nigeria. What is remarkable here is his journey up to this point which marked a triumph over monumental life challenges, including childhood poverty, dropping out from high school, becoming a child street hawker, and then a self-motivated and self-sponsored student. His young years in Ibadan, southwestern Nigeria, are captured in his award-winning memoir, A Mouth Sweeter than Salt, and his teenage years of drifting, in its sequel, Counting the Tiger’s Teeth. Fellow students at the University of Ife called him “indigo,” short for “indigent,” his public badge of circumstance, and yet, those fellow students, some of whom would become his colleagues as lecturers, were already calling him “prolific writer” by the time he graduated with his PhD. By all accounts, Falola was already a prodigy, having published in leading journals in the field early in his career and even before many of his teachers. This phenomenal intellectual productivity has marked his career, as has his prodigal generosity, by which he combats the demons of a difficult past.  

Nigeria of the 1980s was a very troubled nation, and Falola’s story closely parallels that of the nation at this point. The monumental wealth of the oil boom of the 1970s had been squandered, while the deep fractures of a multi-ethnic nation that had fought a bitter civil war had led to the abandonment of cohesive values and the reification of a gluttonous elite that would preside over the exploitation of public office for personal and parochial gain. The 1980s would see a return to military misrule, unprecedented human rights violations perpetrated by the state, a national debt crisis, and enforcement of IMF debt conditionalities, in particular, devaluation of the naira and the imposition of structural adjustment programs which rang the death knell of social infrastructure and state welfare programs.

Prestigious Nigerian universities such as Ibadan, Ife, Nsukka and Zaria, which had debuted in the 40s and 50s at the rank of similar institutions globally were hard hit by the socioeconomic and political crises of the 80s and became part of the national decline. Many academics who refused to be coopted were hounded and arrested for their opposing views and labor union activities—including Falola. This combined with their rapid impoverishment and the deterioration of teaching and learning facilities caused many professors to take the exit option, heralding an unprecedented era of brain drain. Similar travails beset other African countries in this gloomy period of the continent’s history.

Here Falola’s path would diverge from that of his beloved nation when things fell apart at Ife and the center could no longer hold. In pursuit of a more productive academic environment for his vaulting talent, creative energy and innovative scholarship, he left Ife, first as visiting fellow at Cambridge in the UK, then York University in Canada, before finally settling at UT Austin in 1991 as a full professor of African history.

It was in this phase of his work that Falola surpassed his own established record of high-quality scholarship to join the rarefied pantheon of globally recognized scholars and thought leaders from every continent. His wide-ranging scholarship placed him at the zenith of the global academy. It made him keenly sought after from Australia to Europe and South America, and across the length and breadth of Africa and the United States. His capacious penchant for seeking out, recognizing, promoting, mentoring, supporting countless other scholars along the way, and extending compassion and hospitality to humanity in all its shades and colors would quickly turn him, literally, into an orisa, one of the gods, affectionately revered by multitudes of his protegees, friends, and colleagues.  

I have refrained from pigeonholing Falola’s scholarship into any specific academic field or specialty as I firmly believe it would be diminishing to refer to him as merely an African historian. To do so would be to affirm Eurocentric assumptions of modern knowledge systems that consider Western-originated systems of thought as the center, the norm, the legitimate locus of knowledge, and all other scholarship as peripheral, liminal and merely contributory or reactive to Western thought. Contrarily, Falola’s lifelong work, overturns these assumptions in two major ways: by reshaping global knowledge systems by the breadth, depth, originality, and pluriversality of his work, and by creating his own intellectual constellations, forging alternative paths. Let me examine each in turn.

For the first pillar of intervention, reshaping global knowledge systems, the breadth of themes that have emanated from Falola’s pen bestride the disciplines of history, philosophy, international relations, cultural studies, literature, languages, the visual and performance arts, religion, politics, sociology, technology, education, and many more. He has refused to be contained within one discipline, redefining multidisciplinarity and interdisciplinarity in his work. He has researched African worlds, as well as those of its diaspora, flung far and wide across the globe from Europe to the Americas and beyond. But even more so must be the recognition that Falola’s work has been about humanity, in all their diversities and locations, unearthing and celebrating their unique qualities but also commonalities, rehumanizing the minimized, animalized, brutalized, and minoritized peoples of the world, uncovering and reconstructing systems of knowledge disappeared by colonial structures, interpreting subordinated cultures, probing hegemonic politics, forecasting futures.

Falola’s oeuvre actively and conscientiously rejects the notion of a universe of knowledge from which all other kinds of knowing are rendered derivative and secondary, merely the “other,” and thereby made powerless. Rather, he embraces and canvasses pluriversalism, not just as the title of one of his riveting essays but as the sum of his ontology, epistemology, and methodology. Pluriversalism maps out a world of knowing, of being, and of becoming whereby the epistemological standpoints of peoples and societies are taken as sui generis, original unto themselves, and complete, in a world of mutually existing epistemologies, a pluriverse, not an artificially hierarchized universe of ostensibly subordinate and superior systems of knowledge. In taking this path, he actively combats the epistemicide, decimation, and relegation of African and other non-Western systems of knowledge and seeks to restore them to their rightful place in society.

Falola distills these foundational ideas in several of his metatheoretical works that help us understand the hundreds of other books and essays where he presses these ideas into intellectual service in exploring varied subjects. In his 2016 lecture (now published) presented as the Kluge Chair of the Countries and Cultures of the South at the US Library of Congress, titled “Ritual Archives,” Falola shifts the ontological focus towards African texts, symbols, shrines, rituals, images, performances, art, objects, which in their agglomeration expand our knowledge of multiple bodies of philosophy, literature, languages, histories and more in our world. In this ground-breaking conceptualization, he asserts a redefinition of the central idea of the “archive” in extant historical studies to a methodological embrace of an unbounded world of data encompassing the natural and supernatural, secular and non-secular, human and non-human objects and species, dismantling the existing canon.

In his recent book, Decolonizing African Studies: Knowledge Production, Agency and Voice (University of Rochester Press, 2022), Falola takes on colonial hegemonic knowledge, as well as the decolonization and decoloniality movement. In this brilliant book, Falola demonstrates he is the doyen on global intellectual traditions and the master of the protocols of knowledge production. Falola skillfully deconstructs Western philosophies and epistemologies, dissecting how they have positioned African and Global South experiences as subaltern and silenced their voice and agency in a historical continuum that persists into the present, dominating every facet of life including development prospects. But beyond this, he does what a master does: he turns the critique inwards, explaining the failure of the decolonization and liberation movements of the last century to achieve the emancipation needed for progress, and its implications. The book provides a magisterial synthesis of diverse and divergent decolonial perspectives from across Africa and the Global South, reinstating their authority, affirming their relevance, projecting their voices, reconstructing their world, globalizing the humanities. As if this were not enough, the sequel, Decolonizing African Knowledge: Autoethnography and African Epistemologies (Cambridge University Press, 2022), unveils the mechanics and methodologies for engaging the self as an archive, and the vast pluri-disciplinary potentials of mainstreaming these subaltern methodologies into the annals of global humanities.

Importantly also, the texts described above advance a thesis of the humanities that undercuts its conservative underpinnings as a field essentially preoccupied with Western elite concerns relating to aesthetics and arcane subjects, to one that is actively bent and shaped to provide the good life by practical epistemological and policy interpolations that deliver progress and development for societies that would otherwise be left behind. His mode for doing this has been varied, from using his membership of the governing boards of universities to advocate for transformative humanities curricula and pedagogy to breaking through the barriers of conventional texts and media to initiate his own digital dialogues platform, the Toyin Falola Interviews, to facilitate the conversations that must be had.

For Falola’s second major intervention in the humanities, creating new constellations, we must understand that the majestic intellectual offerings discussed so far have not taken place in a narcissistic bubble. In personal decolonial praxis, he has actively sought to demystify, democratize, and dismantle the colonial intellectual gatekeeping that had hitherto obfuscated and denied many scholars from marginalized and precarious contexts worthy publication and academic advancement opportunities. For decades now, he has strategically created initiatives that opened up the humanities to global contributions. He founded several book series with top international presses, such as Cambridge, Palgrave, Routledge, Bloomsbury, Rowman and Littlefield, and the University of Rochester, to create avenues for the publication of a broader range of humanities scholarship than would have been possible otherwise. Presently, Falola actively manages nine book series and is substantive editor/co-editor of at least five journals while serving on the editorial board of at least five dozen others. About five years ago, he persuaded Palgrave Macmillan to establish a series of major reference texts to bring global studies of Africa up-to-date with innovative developments for another generation of scholars—and the result was twenty Palgrave Handbooks on Africa, including three on African women’s studies that I had the privilege of co-editing with him.

Not satisfied with all these pathways to enlarging humanistic studies, Falola created a consortium of African presses under the Pan-African University Press to open even more paths for subaltern voices to emerge. His annual Africa conference in Austin, has for more than twenty years served as a talent incubator that has pushed the careers of many junior scholars to stardom, including the publication of dozens of edited volumes from the conferences which started so many scholars on their publication and promotion trajectories. These efforts make Falola personally responsible for curating and producing humanistic knowledge outputs numbering in the hundreds every year, outside his own prolific writing. His constant quest for collaboration and mentorship of others on these projects have propelled many hitherto unknown scholars to shared prominence with him. A restless spirit, a courageous pathfinder, Falola exists without limits to his creativity, compassion, and optimism.

Professor Falola is the living embodiment of the loftiest objectives of humanistic studies. His extraordinary life and achievements speak to the unending capabilities of a life of the mind, of the limitless potentials inherent in all of humanity beyond borders and boundaries. Just as he has resisted the restrictive compartmentalization of humanities fields and geographies, he has personally invited and warmly welcomed colleagues from literally the entire globe as co-travelers on the academic journey. A pan-ethnic Nigerian, a true Pan-Africanist, and a global cosmopolitan, Falola is as at home in the ghettos of Lagos as in the presidential palaces in Pretoria and Lusaka. Despite his extremely lofty position in the academy, Falola can be found engaging the street trader, the lowly undergraduate, and the junior professor with the same keen interest, humility, and enthusiasm as he would royalty. And he would regularly turn the spotlight on others, extolling their achievements, as in his book, In Praise of Greatness: The Poetics of African Adulation (Carolina Academic Press, 2019), in which he deploys poetry and prose to pay homage to other scholars, artists and intellectuals for their impact and ideas, a rare phenomenon.

At UT Austin, Falola has been bestowed many major teaching awards the institution has on offer, seven of them, and he is often called upon to train teachers at other universities. Unassuming and always approachable, he goes out of his way to seek out budding talents and promising scholars, to provide opportunities for them to develop and grow, and makes the time to help them navigate the stages of climbing the academic ladder. At the same time, he finds time to advise kings and presidents, provide scholarships for needy students, share drinks with friends, and be committed to family. It is confounding how he is so deftly able to seamlessly integrate scholarship, pedagogy, mentorship, professional service, family, and community leadership.

Ultimately, on account of his generous habit of promoting and celebrating others, and returning his achievements as greater service to Africa and all of humanity, we celebrate Toyin Falola as our own, one of the best to have come out of the womb of Africa, who has fought difficult epistemic battles on our behalf and come out not just undaunted but indeed victorious. We rejoice with him. We are proud of him. Falola, rise still.

Olajumoke Yacob-Haliso is Associate Professor of African and African American Studies at Brandeis University, Massachusetts.

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.

This article’s banner incorporates a modified version of an image originally published on Wikimedia Commons and licensed by Creative Commons.

Roundtable Review of Jeremi Suri’s Civil War by Other Means

Roundtable Review of Jeremi Suri’s Civil War by Other Means

From the editors:

Historical scholarship is underpinned by rigorous investigation of sources and archives. But historians can also leverage their knowledge of the past to think critically about the present. Jeremi Suri, the Mack Brown Distinguished Chair for Leadership in Global Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin, exemplifies this practice. In October, Dr. Suri published his fifth book, entitled Civil War by Other Means: America’s Long and Unfinished Fight for Democracy. As its title suggests, the book reinterprets the history of the American Civil War in order to shed new light on the ongoing struggle for racial justice in the United States.

To mark the publication of Civil War by Other Means, Not Even Past invited three scholars of American history, each with unique expertise, to review the book. Their reviews are published below.

book cover

banner image for Brandon Render's review

As a teaching assistant for a United States history course at the University of Texas at Austin, I would ask my students a simple question: who won the Civil War? The students, after sharing confused glances with each other, would often respond with “The North?” or “The Union?” I assured them that it wasn’t a trick question before describing the history of our campus. In 2015, the university moved a statue of Confederate President Jefferson Davis from the South Mall to the Briscoe Center for American History, a museum and archive also located on campus. The Davis statue was commissioned by university benefactor George Littlefield and dedicated in 1933 – almost seventy-years after the Civil War ended. In 2017, during my first week of graduate school, the university removed four more statues commemorating Confederate figures and took down the Confederate flags throughout the campus. The students were of course correct that the Union defeated the Confederates on the battlefield, but as the physical landscape of campus suggests, many of the Southern symbols and ideals lived on. Students walked past these Confederate monuments each day, yet they did not fully grasp how the campus connected past and present.

After reading Jeremi Suri’s Civil War by Other Means, I’m considering another question: when did the Civil War end? According to Suri, the Civil War has continued into the twenty-first century. Through political posturing, racial terror, and disenfranchisement, Suri argues that the late 1860s and ‘70s did not represent “a culmination but a continuation” of the Civil War. In the January 6th Riot and the Insurrection at the Capitol Building in Washington, D. C., the same ideas that motivated Confederate leaders to secede from the Union also pushed white nationalists to storm the halls of Congress and physically intimidate elected officials. Rioters invoked the memory of the Confederacy through symbols, including the Confederate flag and a noose – two images with deep connections to white supremacy. In Civil War By Other Means, Suri’s adept interpretation of the explicit and subtle forms of division after the military struggle between the Union and Confederacy offers valuable perspectives in how we view the conflict today.

Beneath cloudy skies, a noose hangs from a makeshift gallows erected by rioters during the Insurrection at the U. S. Capitol on January 6th, 2021. The Capitol dome is visible in the background, farmed by the gallows.
A gallows in front of the Capitol during the Insurrection on January 6th, 2022. Source: Flickr/Tyler Merbler. License: Creative Commons 2.0.

Suri’s book blends popular narratives with often overlooked events to illustrate the depths of the political and ideological battle that took place before, during, and after the Civil War. While standard understandings of the conflict establish a clear ending with Robert E. Lee’s surrender to Ulysses Grant in April 1865, Suri takes an alternative approach by examining the continued efforts to maintain a “Southern way of life.” For example, it is well-known that Andrew Johnson’s preferential treatment of secessionists played a role in his impeachment in 1868. Yet, many people are unaware of the Confederates that traveled further south into Mexico and formed an alliance with Mexican Emperor Maximilian I in an attempt to develop a Confederate colony near the U.S.-Mexico border. Former Confederate supporters and politicians held fast to notions of forced servitude, developed memorials and symbols to honor soldiers, produced conditions that led to the formation of the Ku Klux Klan, and reinforced white supremacy in the two decades following the military conflict. There is ample evidence not of the end, but the extension of the Civil War.

Suri’s Civil War by Other Means deftly captures the evolution of historical interpretation. As our collective memory of the Civil War changes, the views of the people dedicated to remembering the conflict – for better or worse – evolve as well. This is particularly important in the current political climate. In addition to the Insurrection at the Capitol, racial justice protests demanded the removal of Confederate memorials. In many cases, protestors refused to wait for public officials to take action and, instead, engaged in the destruction or removal of monuments themselves. As Suri argues, this is integral to the contemporary culture wars that can be traced back to the decades following the Civil War and how policies, practices, and ideas shaped the “Lost Cause” of the Confederacy. Since then, an ideological struggle has taken shape in classrooms, courtrooms, and the general public based on interpretations of the Civil War.

Americans’ collective memory of the Civil War, as evidenced through the January 6th Riot, continues to influence contemporary society, politics, and culture. Suri’s important study of the two decades following the military conflict is necessary for how we teach and remember the Civil War – not only in the South, but beyond the former Confederacy. Now that I’m teaching outside of the South for the first time, I’m aware that historical memory of the Civil War is not only dependent on what we learn in the classroom, but what we also see in our daily lives. Although I haven’t encountered Confederate symbols where I currently live and work in Utah, there are remnants of the white supremacist ideologies that motivated secession in 1861 and resonates with groups of people in the American West – an area of the U.S. with a problematic racial history itself.

Suri’s engaging and accessible writing style makes Civil War by Other Means a critical addition to the growing body of scholarship on historical events and collective memory. This book stands out for its simple but thought-provoking questions, which forces readers to wrestle with the meaning of history and how it shapes our day-to-day lives. Whether in the classroom or around the kitchen table, Suri’s Civil War by Other Means will spark hard conversations about history, memory, and citizenship.

Brandon James Render is an assistant professor of history at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. His current book project, Colorblind University: A History of Racial Inequity in Higher Education, explores the intellectual genealogy of racial colorblindness throughout the twentieth century

banner image for Jon Buchleiter's review

Two sequential survey courses covering the full arc of US history undergird historical education at nearly every university in the country. Programs disagree, however, about which year should divide the two courses. Many schools draw the line at 1865, highlighting the surrender of Confederate forces and the end of open hostilities in the Civil War. Others split their courses in 1877, using the ostensible end of Reconstruction as a bookend. Jeremi Suri’s Civil War by Other Means shows why delineating between the two “halves” of American history is so difficult no matter where the cut is made. Suri dispels the notion that the Civil War ended with Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox. He instead explains how the war moved from “muddy battlefields to the marble halls of Congress, various statehouses, a theater, and a train station.”[1] The war’s transmutation underscores the challenge of periodizing this juncture in American history.

In this nineteenth century portrait by Karl Wilhelm Wach, a smiling Carl von Clausewitz sports a row of medals and a blue military uniform with a high red collar and large epaulettes. Trees and church spires are visible in the background.
A nineteenth-century portrait of Carl von Clausewitz by Karl Wilhelm Wach. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

The book’s title is a subtle nod to the German military theorist Carl von Clausewitz, who famously asserted that “war is the continuation of politics by other means.” Suri’s argument inverts this observation to elucidate how political struggles, from 1865 onward, constituted a continuation of war by other means. In depicting these various means, Suri traces the lionization of John Wilkes Booth, follows former Confederates to the failed colony of Carlota, illustrates the intrigues of Andrew Johnson’s impeachment, and recounts the withdrawal of federal troops from their postbellum occupation of the American South – effectively ending Radical Republicans‘ efforts to establish a multiracial democracy. As with so many good histories, the strength of this narrative comes from the striking characters whom Suri profiles. Figures ranging from Matthew Fontaine Maury, a celebrity scientist and ardent defender of white supremacy, to Henry Adams, an indefatigable Black community organizer, to Charles Guiteau, the poster child of fragile masculinity, populate an absorbing account of the battle between exclusive and inclusive visions of democracy.

Suri centers his first five chapters on key groups who emerged from Civil War battlefields with unfinished business. The first two chapters contrast the martyrdom of President Abraham Lincoln and Booth, his assassin. The commemoration of both serviced a renewed “mobilization” of men and women on the opposing sides of the unresolved conflict.[2] The next chapter follows Confederate exiles, who refused to accept defeat and migrated to Mexico with ambitions to regroup and relaunch the “Lost Cause.” Meanwhile, newly emancipated African Americans sought to secure the rights and opportunities promised them by the reconstruction amendments. In this postwar period, fissures within the Republican Party emerged as Southern resistance tested the resolve of Lincoln’s party to realize his vision of a multiracial democracy.

The final five chapters detail several of the new battles of the enduring Civil War. The first presidential impeachment pitted Republicans against the defiant accidental president Andrew Johnson. Former Confederate states witnessed recurring outbursts of vigilantism that occupying Union forces struggled to curb. The next battle took the form of the contested election of 1876, finally “resolved” through the withdrawal of federal troops from the South and the election of a “caretaker” executive in Rutherford B. Hayes. Finally, the assassination of James Garfield marked a defeat for Republicans that left African Americans more “repressed than at any time since Appomattox.”[3]

Civil War by Other Means demonstrates how contemporary experiences can generate fruitful new examinations of moments already richly chronicled by earlier generations of historians. While this account does not tread much new scholarly ground or unearth unexamined sources, it eloquently provides a succinct framework for thinking about the long-standing struggle for democracy and inclusivity. Events of the past several years have laid bare how incomplete this struggle remains today. It’s a dismaying state of affairs, but it also underscores the value of reexamining our past to help inform efforts toward improving our democratic society. To this end, Suri’s closing chapter addresses “our troubles today,” identifying historical lessons and proposing ways to pull up the “intricate roots” of racism and white supremacy.[4] These ideas define Suri’s scholarly activism, which he cites as an inspiration for his book. They also strike a much-needed optimistic note to close an often dispiriting description of the United States’ democratic deficiencies.

Suri has crafted a book with appeal for a broad audience. It can simultaneously speak to young adults seeking to understand the historical origins of the United States’ ongoing dialogue on race as well as scholars looking for a concise account that explains how debates about race infused U. S. politics during the era of Reconstruction and beyond. Regardless of the perspective from which readers approach Civil War by Other Means, we can only hope they heed its call to take up the task of building a better democracy. As Suri closes this excellent book, there’s “lots of good work to do.”

Jon Buchleiter is a graduate student in the Department of History at the University of Texas at Austin. He studies the institutionalization of nuclear arms control and disarmament efforts as an important element of US foreign policy during the Cold War. At UT, Jon is a graduate fellow with the Clements Center for National Security.

banner image for Sarah Porter's review

During the 1950s and 1960s, following the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board, white Southerners opposing school integration used Confederate symbols, alongside violence and intimidation directed toward Black students, to express their defiance. In 1957, for instance, the local school board in Tyler, Texas, decided to rename the city’s new, all-white high school after Robert E. Lee. Students adopted “the Rebels” as their mascot, and they proudly displayed the Confederate flag at school events. In Tyler and elsewhere, young people born generations after the Civil War resurrected these images as a way to articulate their own politics. According to Jeremi Suri, these incidents were not merely efforts to cling to the past but actually represented a continuation of the war in the American political imagination.

Three football players run onto a playing field applauded by a large group of spectators; a cheerleader leads the charge. Two very large Confederate flags fly overhead.
Cheerleaders and football players at Arlington State College–now the University of Texas at Arlington–run onto the field beneath Confederate flags in this undated photo. Source: University of Texas at Arlington Photograph Collection, University of Texas at Arlington Libraries. “Arlington State College (A. S. C.) football players running under Rebel flags.” UTA Libraries Digital Gallery. n.d. Accessed October 25, 2022.

In Civil War by Other Means, Suri examines the tumultuous decades immediately following the Civil War. Unsettled debates over democracy and citizenship resurfaced with renewed strength during this period, and they “created a pattern for exclusion, violence, and coup plotting that repeated in the twenty-first century.”[5] The political compromises that Republicans and Democrats brokered between 1865 and 1885 left many of the war’s underlying issues unresolved. Most notably, Republicans’ desires for moderation and national reconciliation encouraged politicians, from Andrew Johnson to Rutherford Hayes, to exercise leniency toward the white South at the expense of freedpeople. Drawing from a large body of secondary literature, along with presidential papers, congressional records, and periodicals, Suri demonstrates how these “lingering embers” have erupted at key moments in U.S. history.

Perhaps one of the most powerful examples that Suri uses is the literal continuation of the war by Confederate generals who refused to admit defeat. Following the official surrender at Appomattox, groups of Confederate soldiers traveled south into Mexico in hopes of recreating a Southern planter aristocracy. Upon returning to the United States, these “exiles” did not abandon their visions for society. Instead, they worked to reinscribe racial hierarchies as architects of the New South. They served as state legislators, funded Confederate monuments, joined historical associations, and accumulated wealth through various business ventures. Alexander Watkins Terrell offers one example. After returning to Texas, Terrell became a state legislator and authored a slate of restrictive voting bills passed during the early twentieth century. Designed to disenfranchise Black voters, these bills established the state’s direct primary system, extended poll tax requirements to primary elections, and permitted political parties to prescribe qualifications for voters. Terrell’s biography supports Suri’s conclusion: “The men who fled the American South after Appomattox were also the men who made the American nation in the next decades. They converted the treachery of their exile into a narrative of courage, loyalty, and commitment.”[6]

While Terrell and his colleagues worked to undermine federal civil rights legislation and restrict voting rights, Black Americans consistently pushed for more expansive visions of citizenship as voters, soldiers, and elected officials. Debates about American democracy did not only take place in the national capital and state legislatures, however. They also materialized at the local level, in the churches, schoolhouses, and other community institutions that formerly enslaved people built following emancipation. While Suri explores how Black men redefined citizenship through military service and political participation, his emphasis on formal politics sometimes obscures Black women’s contributions. In addition to serving as nurses, educators, and caretakers, Black women who lacked access to traditional political channels sought other ways to assert their visions for society. They played active roles in advocating for individual and collective restitution. For instance, in 1870, Henrietta Wood filed a suit against her former enslaver in a federal court and, after a decade of litigation, won her case. Later, during the 1890s, Callie House mobilized people across the South through the National Ex-Slave Mutual Relief, Bounty, and Pension Association. House and her colleagues lobbied for pensions for ex-slaves and eventually filed suit against the federal government, inspiring many subsequent efforts for reparation. Including these often-overlooked struggles in the narrative would strengthen Suri’s argument and expand our understanding of how these conflicts played out on multiple levels.

A black-and-white photograph of Callie House, who wears a ruffled dress with a lace collar.
A photograph of Callie House, a leader of the national movement to provide pensions to formerly enslaved people. Source: Wikimedia Commons. Original image in the collections of the Department of Veterans Affairs, National Archives Record Group 15.

Suri does many things well in this book. His conceptualization of ongoing debates about American democracy as a continuation of the Civil War “by other means” is compelling, and it offers a useful framework for people interested in exploring contemporary U.S. politics through an historical lens. Suri’s engaging writing style also makes the book appealing to a wide audience. He manages to make complex political history not only accessible but actually enjoyable to read. Finally, this book provides a timely and important critique of several key features of the U.S. political system. In Suri’s words, Southern resistance “thrived [because] it had many advantages in the American democratic system.”[7] By identifying some of these features—including the structure of the electoral college, election certification procedures, and longstanding efforts to restrict voting rights—Suri challenges his reader to think critically about the future of American democracy.

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

[1] Jeremi Suri, Civil War by Other Means: America’s Long and Unfinished Fight for Democracy (New York: Public Affairs, 2022), 261.

[2] ibid., 27.

[3] ibid., 256.

[4] ibid., 270.

[5] ibid., 9.

[6] ibid., 65.

[7] ibid., 259.

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.

Ghosts over the Water: How we designed a historical video game that takes players into 19th century Japan

“It happened during the sixth month of the sixth year of Kaei, on a windless summer day; I was only a little over twenty. For over two hundred years, Edo had stood as our political center. For over two hundred years, Japan had been in peace and prosperity… At least on the surface. No foreigners. No chaos. And then, all of that peace—or the illusion of it—dissipated into thin air.”

The story of Ghosts over the Water: Changing the Tides of Japan’s Future, a visual-novel-style indie video game created by Studio Unagi, a team of undergraduate students working as part of UT Austin’s JapanLab, begins with these words. In Ghosts over the Water, players assume the first-person perspective of Tsumaki Naoharu, a fictional 20-year-old samurai official living in Edo in the summer of 1853. Commodore Matthew C. Perry had just sailed into the city’s harbor with a fleet of black ships, breaking Japan’s long period of international isolation. Working on behalf of Abe Masahiro, one of the most powerful men in Japan in this period, Naoharu is tasked with carrying out a series of investigations that will influence how the Tokugawa government (bakufu) interacts with Perry, the development of new policies towards foreign incursions and indeed the country’s future.

Poster for Ghosts over the Water, original art by Eric Doddy, Studio Unagi

By making a series of individual choices, players help Naoharu navigate the sweltering heat of the Edo summer and the dangerous complexities of samurai politics. In the process, they encounter several factions, some loyal to the existing structures and some not; some welcoming foreigners and some not; some arrogant and condescending, some violent and reckless. Each dialogue option that players select will influence Naoharu’s affiliation with those factions, and impact his political career—that is, if he lives to see it. Indeed, Naoharu’s very life is at stake. In more than half of the possible outcomes, Naoharu dies, meaning that players do not even have the chance to proceed to the second part of the story. For this reason, players need to be especially careful in securing the favor of the prominent Edo figures they come across. Ghosts over the Water is as much of a survival game as it is a strategy game.

The game was officially released on itch.io, the major platform for independent games, in August 2022 after months of hard work. The final games team comprised four undergraduates from two institutions, UT Austin and Yale, that had decided to partner together to produce this game. It consisted of our narrative leads, Isabella Yang (Yale ’22) and Alexis Wu (UT Austin ’23), our chief coder Benjamin Brown (UT Austin ’22) and our artist Eric Doddy (Yale ’24).

Screenshot of gameplay, original art by Eric Doddy, Studio Unagi

The development of Ghosts over the Water is tied to the rapid growth of the gaming industry and the capacity of video games to take students deep into the past. It emerges from Dr Adam Clulow’s JapanLab project, which aims to produce a pipeline of historical videos. This was the second game developed after Ako: A Test of Loyalty which was released in summer 2020.

We wanted Ghosts over the Water to be ambitious. Its script totals more than 130,000 words, features multiple chapters with different ending and is built in Unity, the industry standard for such games. Rather than the visual novel development engine Ren’py, we decided to use the more powerful and complex Unity, as it gave us more artistic freedom and programming versatility. Aside from engine choices, the team had to make a few other hard decisions—deciding to focus the game on Japan’s reaction instead of stories from the American side, and choosing to foreground intriguing characters from the past, both well-known and more obscure. For our art style, we moved away from pure realism to a more vibrant, contemporary style that felt more like a game than a historical documentary.

Characters in Ghosts over the Water, original art by Eric Doddy, Studio Unagi

As a team we met constantly, devoting hundreds of hours to constructing the story, refining the gameplay, and fixing dozens of bugs. As project manager and lead narrative designer, I can proudly say that this is one of the projects I’ve devoted the most time to during my time in college.

We were lucky to have plenty of help along the way. We worked closely with Haley Price (now a PhD student at Brown), who sat in every team meeting, commented on the story, and even personally bug-hunted from line to line with the rest of the team towards the end of the development process. We also met weekly with our historical consultant, Dr. Clulow, who helped us make the game as historically accurate as possible and ready for use in a high school or college classroom. We were especially excited to collaborate with Clay Carmouche, a Narrative Director of XBOX Publishing, who held a series of in-person narrative sessions in Austin in March, where he reviewed and revised the story with the rest of the team. There were also many playtesters along the way who tracked bugs and provided feedback, including students from Dr. Clulow’s “Age of the Samurai” lecture class at UT Austin. We owe them all a big thank you.

The game emerged from countless hours of hard work from all the members of Studio Unagi. With a narrative exceeding 130,000 words, three fully independent character-specific routes, fifty character sprites and eight fully illustrated endings, it hopes to provide players with an experience that will intrigue them, showing how the issues of the past resonate today and the turbulent nature of this period in Japanese history. With the game released on itch.io, Studio Unagi is preparing the next step of bringing the game to a wider audience. A release on Steam, the major commercial platform, is scheduled for November 11th, and we plan to promote the game heavily in the coming months.

Due to the pandemic, we met online until March when we were all able to come together – with much excitement – in Austin to work with Clay Carmouche. For me, as well as for every member of the team, this was an incredible opportunity: to learn new skills, to take our interest in game design further, and to blend history with digital storytelling.  

In developing this game, we set out to show that History departments can become games studios and that teams of undergraduates can produce and release immersive, engaging and fully formed games. We believe such games are immensely powerful tools for learners, ones that can help them better understand the nuances of the past. We hope it’s just the start and that we’ve created a template for more games like Ghosts over the Water.

Isabella Yang was the project manager and narrative co-lead for Ghosts over the Water. She graduated magna cum laude from Yale in 2022 with distinction in the History major and received both the Robert E. Gries Prize in History and the Williams Prize in East Asian Studies for her thesis, “Wang Xitian and the Chinese Experience in Imperial Tokyo, 1899-1923: Class, Violence, and the Formation of a New National Consciousness.” She has interned in the gaming industry and is currently working in Management Development in California. In the future, she plans to continue creating historical video games that are of educational value, and perhaps eventually head back into the gaming industry and create games full-time.

Rompiendo paréntesis: Erika Pani y el arte de la excepción Breaking Parentheses: Erika Pani and the Art of Exceptions

Una pintura enigmática cuelga en el Kunsthalle Mannheim en Alemania: Édouard Manet retrató un grupo de hombres en uniformes azules fusilando a tres figuras, un emperador de México caído entre ellos. Aunque el pintor francés despreciaba la “pintura histórica,” la fuerte imagen de un Hasburgo muriendo frente a un pelotón de fusilamiento en México pedía una excepción. Pintó tres versiones de L’exécution de Maximilien entre 1868 y 1869, cada iteración incorporando los detalles que la prensa publicaba: el color de los uniformes, la posición de los ejecutados, la distancia entre el muro y los rifles. Para destacar la importancia histórica del evento, Manet no firmó sus pinturas con la fecha de cuando las terminó, sino con el año de la ejecución, 1867—otra excepción.

A firing squad of six unfirmed soldiers discharges its weapons at three men standing at very close range in this famous painting by Édouard Manet. One of the three men--dressed in black, wearing a wide-brimmed hat, and sporting a long beard--is Maximilian Habsburg, the deposed Emperor of Mexico. A crowd of onlookers watches the execution from behind a stone wall, while a seventh soldier adjusts his weapon at right.
Édouard Manet, L’exécution de Maximilen. Fuente / Source: Wikimedia Commons.

El Segundo Imperio Mexicano pareciera ser también una anomalía. Hasta hace poco, historiadores de México escribían el breve período entre 1864 y 1867 entre paréntesis: demasiado corto para cambiar las bases estructurales de México y el mundo, demasiado escandaloso para merecer otro libro u otra pintura, demasiado cerca del corazón patriótica de la historia mexicana para leerse en sus términos. Pero sus ecos y legados son desproporcionados en la historia oficial. México había conseguido una victoria enorme: una nación inestable venció al imperio más poderoso del mundo; el republicanismo triunfó sobre el imperialismo; la avenida principal de la Ciudad de México, el Paseo de la Emperatriz trazado por Maximiliano, recibió un nuevo nombre: Paseo de la Reforma. Surgió un gran paréntesis: nació la República. Y aun así, Erika Pani—Profesora-Investigadora de El Colegio de México, antes directora del Centro de Estudios Históricos (ceh), y oradora invitada a la XVI Reunión Internacional de Historiadores de México (30 de octubre al 2 de noviembre)—desdibuja esos paréntesis y muestra las continuidades que conectan este período con otras historiografías más amplias.

Erika Pani llegó a Dartmouth en un momento de duda. “Estaba completamente perdida,” me dijo en su oficina en El Colegio de México, “y mi papá me dijo que en las universidades de Estados Unidos te podías especializar después.” Posponer la decisión parecía, desde luego, la opción más razonable. Fue feliz en Hanover y, cuando llegó el momento, tomó la decisión correcta: ciencia política, que era lo más cercano a historia—“una historia mal hecha”—sin ser inútil para el mundo. Pero la opción correcta no siempre es la mejor, y después de un tiempo trabajando en la administración de Salinas en la década de los años noventa atendiendo los caprichos de la burocracia mexicana, Pani decidió probar su suerte en El Colegio. Había hecho las paces con la inutilidad.

Bajo la dirección del historiador mexicano Andrés Lira, Pani emprendió un proyecto de investigación siguiendo una vieja pista que le dio su querido abuelo húngaro. A pesar de ser un hombre moderno, progresista, pensaba que la gobernanza imperial en México había sido algo bueno. La caída de Hungría empezó cuando dejó de ser parte del Imperio, solía decir. Desconcertada por la paradoja, Pani ahondó en la historia de los hombres (eran casi todos hombres) que hicieron posible y apoyaron el Imperio en México. No eran idiotas o traidores, Pani arguye en sus primeros libros, sino un grupo diverso de políticos talentosos y experimentados que apostaron por un joven miembro de la Casa de Habsburgo-Lorena.[1] Entender estos hombres y su tiempo implicaba romper con los corchetes históricos en los que están inscritos, cuestionar las etiquetas que explican sus ideas y acciones.[2]

Ten suited men--six standing, four sitting--pose for a photo around a small table. The men are commissioners from Mexico, dispatched to invite Maximilian Habsburg to become that country's Emperor.
Comisión Mexicana en Miramar, Trieste, para ofrecer la corona de México a Maximiliano / A Mexican commission at Miramar Castle in Trieste (once part of the Austrian Empire) to offer the crown of Mexico to Maximilian. Fuente / Source: Wikimedia Commons.

También significaba ir más allá de los límites geográficos de México. Estos procesos de conflicto, construcción de Estado endeble, y guerra civil exceden los bordes de estados y naciones, y para historiarlos se requiere desenredar las conexiones y relaciones entre varios lugares. Al estudiar a México, la idea-lugar que más le interesa, Pani reafirma la contingencia de la idea de nación. “Aunque es todo inventado, no tener pasaporte es como no tener nariz,” dice Pani. Desnaturalizar el estado-nación se volvió, pues, central en sus escritos y sus clases, como muestra su libro Una serie de admirables acontecimientos: México y el mundo en la época de la Reforma 1848-1867.[3] En el libro, Pani usa excepciones solo para destruirlas. Expande la periodización desde el turbulento 1848 hasta la muerte de Maximiliano en 1876. Contra la corriente, su trabajo hace legibles las anomalías, hace de lo extraño algo más cercano.

Su último libro trata una de las excepciones historiográficas más grandes: Estados Unidos. En su Historia mínima de Estados Unidos de América, Pani compacta la historia larga y compleja de ese “país sin historia,” de trece colonias insignificantes que se convirtieron en una superpotencia, todo en menos de 250 páginas.[4] En el espíritu de la Colección Historias Mínimas del Colegio de México (sin notas, sin jerga especializada), cada capítulo usa la rica historiografía de las últimas décadas para deshacer los mitos que opacan la historia de Estados Unidos: la colonización de una tierra vacía, una independencia limpia y certera, o el ascenso ininterrumpido de una nación moderna durante los siglos XIX y XX. Encontró una ventana de creatividad en el pragmatismo de esa historiografía, su falta de enredos filosóficos, y enseñarla a estudiantes en la Ciudad de México reforzó su interés. No es una historia de Estados Unidos “visto desde México,” admite Pani, o una historia mexicana del vecino del norte, sino una historia escrita por una observadora curiosa. “Una inconsciencia y arrogancia absoluta,” le llama Pani—pero una que vale la pena escribir.

El trabajo de Erika Pani se nutre de demoler excepciones, de mostrar cómo las anomalías no son lo que uno piensa, aunque ella sea parte de una de ellas: El Colegio de México. Fundado por Daniel Cosío Villegas y Alfonso Reyes (in absentia), El Colegio surgió de La Casa de España, una institución cultural que refugió a exiliados españoles de la Guerra Civil (1936-1939). Con el apoyo del presidente mexicano Lázaro Cárdenas (1934-1940), se convirtió en una institución educativa permanente, dedicada a la investigación y docencia de alto nivel en las humanidades y ciencias sociales aún en pie en el sur de la Ciudad de México. José Gaos, antes presidente de la Universidad de Madrid y uno de los primeros exiliados que llegaron a México, entrenó a Andrés Lira y otros historiadores que acarrearon una larga tradición de historia rigurosa, detallada, con fuerte inclinación filosófica: una tradición que mantiene viva Erika Pani.

Las cosas no cambiaron mucho desde la publicación en 2015 de “Soft Science: The Humanities in Mexico,” un ensayo donde Pani historia el estado de la educación en México. Optimista pero realista, ofrecía una advertencia: “Poco se logrará si [filósofos, escritores, críticos literarios, historiadores, y antropólogos] se quedan separados en sus trincheras disciplinarias, ensimismados, extrañando una época de oro cuando el estado era menos torpe y más sensible, y pretendiendo que son tan buenos como las ciencias duras, aunque distintos.”[5] Pero Pani rechaza la idea de amoldar las humanidades de acuerdo con nuestro mundo moderno, concentrándonos siete segundos en cada cosa, o la de ofrecer una versión rebajada de la historia a estudiantes fuera de las humanidades. Estudiar historia es un riesgo, como todo, y aun así ella nos invita a tomárnosla en serio como alguna vez ella lo hizo—a enfrentar la incertidumbre, a aceptar ser inútiles.

Erika Pani Bano dará la conferencia magistral, “Crisis republicana y guerra civil. México y Estados Unidos a mediados del siglo XIX. ¿Una historia compartida?,” en la XVI Reunión Internacional de Historiadores de México, Austin.

También participará en la mesa redonda,“Beyond Empire and Borderlands: How to Write a Connected History of the 19th-Century Mexican and U.S. Republics?,” que se celebrará en el Instituto de Estudios Históricos.

Programa e información: https://xvireunion.utexas.edu/programa/

Entrevista: Rodrigo Salido Moulinié (estudiante de doctorado, UT-Austin)

Breaking Parentheses: Erika Pani and the Art of Exceptions

An enigmatic painting hangs in the Kunsthalle Mannheim in Germany: Édouard Manet’s portrayal of a group of men wearing blue uniforms shooting three standing figures, a fallen emperor of Mexico among them. While the French painter deeply despised “historical painting,” the striking image of a Habsburg dying in front of a firing squad demanded that he make an exception. He painted three versions of L’exécution de Maximilien between 1868 and 1869, each iteration shifting according to the historical details released by the press: the color of the uniforms, the position of the executed, the distance between the wall and the rifles. To underscore the event’s historical significance, Manet did not sign his paintings with the date he finished them but with the year of the killing, 1867—another exception.

 The Second Mexican Empire itself seemed to be an anomaly. Until recently, historians of Mexico wrote many books placing the brief period spanning the years 1864 to 1867 between parentheses: too short to change the structural underpinnings of Mexico and the world, too scandalous to deserve another book or painting, too close to the patriotic heart of Mexican history to be read in its own terms. But its echoes and legacies dwarf its place in official history. Mexico had achieved an enormous victory: a troubled nation defeated the world’s most powerful empire, republicanism triumphed over imperialism, Mexico City’s main street, Paseo de la Emperatriz, charted by Maximilian, received a new name: Paseo de la Reforma. The parentheses were really historic: within them the Republic was born. Erika Pani—Professor of History, former director of the Centro de Estudios Históricos (ceh) at El Colegio de México, and keynote speaker at the XVI Meeting of International Historians of Mexico (October 30-November 2)—blurs those parentheses and shows the continuities that connect this period with broader historiographies.

A smiling Erika Pani, photographed while speaking at a lecturn.
Erika Pani.

Erika Pani arrived in Dartmouth after a period of doubt. “I was completely lost,” she told me in her office at El Colegio de México, “and my father told me that universities in the United States offered students the chance to specialize later.” Postponing the decision seemed like the sensible thing to do. She was happy in Hanover and, when the time came, she made the ‘correct’ choice: Political Science, which was the closest thing to history—“una historia mal hecha”—without being useless to the world. But the correct choice is not always the right one, and after a brief time working for the Salinas administration in the 1990s, indulging the meaningless demands of Mexican bureaucracies, Pani decided to try her luck in history at El Colegio. She had embraced uselessness.

Under the directorship of Mexican historian Andrés Lira, Pani undertook a research project following an old clue her beloved Hungarian grandfather gave her. Despite being a modern, progressive man, he thought that imperial governance in Mexico had been a great thing. The downfall of Hungary began when it ceased to be part of the Empire, he used to say. Puzzled by the apparent contradiction, Pani delved into the history of the men (they were mostly male) that enabled and supported the Empire in Mexico. They were not idiots or traitors, Pani argues in her first books, but rather a diverse set of experienced, talented politicians who placed their bets on a young member of the House of Habsburg-Lorraine.[6] Understanding these men and their times entailed breaking the historical parentheses that entrapped them, destabilizing the labels that explained their actions.[7]

It also meant going beyond Mexico’s geographical boundaries. These processes of conflict, failed state-building, and civil war exceed particular nations and states, and historicizing them therefore means unpacking relations and connections between various places. Studying Mexico, the place that most interests her, Pani’s work asserts the contingency of nations. “Although it is all invented, not having a passport is like lacking a nose,” Pani said. Denaturalizing the Nation-State thus became a central part of her writing and teaching, as shown in her third book, Una serie de admirables acontecimientos: México y el mundo en la época de la Reforma 1848-1867.[8] In the book, Pani uses exceptions only to destroy them. She expands the timeframe from the turbulent year of 1848 up to the death of Maximilian. Against the grain, her work aims to naturalize the anomalies, to make the strange familiar.

Her latest book tackles one of the biggest historiographical exceptions: the United States. In Historia mínima de Estados Unidos de América, Pani compacts the long, complex history of “a country without history,” of thirteen unimpressive colonies that became a global superpower, in a short book.[9] In the spirit of the Colección Historias Mínimas from El Colegio de México (no footnotes, no jargon), each chapter uses the rich historiography of the last decades to debunk the many myths that obscure American history: the colonization of an empty land, the clean-cut process of independence, or the almost uninterrupted rise of a modern nation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She found the lack of theoretical conundrums in American history invigorating, and teaching the subject to undergraduates in Mexico City reinforced her interest. It is not a history of the United States “seen from Mexico,” she admits, or a “Mexican history of the United States,” but rather a history written by a curious observer. “A product of absolute arrogance and unawareness,” she calls it, yet a project worth writing.

Erika Pani’s work thrives on tearing down exceptions, showing how anomalies are not what one may think, yet she embodies one of them: El Colegio de México. Founded by Daniel Cosío Villegas and Alfonso Reyes (in absentia), the Colegio grew out of La Casa de España, a Mexican cultural institution that sheltered exiles from the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939). With the backing of Mexican president Lázaro Cárdenas (1934-1940), it became a permanent educational institution dedicated to high-level teaching and research in the humanities and social sciences that still stands today in the south of Mexico City. José Gaos, the former president of the Universidad de Madrid and the first Spanish exile to arrive in Mexico City, trained Andrés Lira and other historians who would carry on the long tradition of rigorous, philosophically inclined history that Erika Pani and others maintain at El Colegio.

Not much has changed in Mexico since the publication in 2015 of “Soft Science: The Humanities in Mexico,” an essay in which Pani historicizes the state of Mexican education. An optimistic realist, she offered a warning: “Little will be accomplished if [philosophers, writers and literary critics, historians, and anthropologists] remain in compartmentalized disciplinary trenches, looking inward, yearning for a golden age when the state was less clumsy and more sensitive, and claiming to be as good as, but different from, the sciences.”[10] Yet Pani refuses to shape the humanities according to our modern, fifteen-second-attention-span world, or to offer a watered-down version of history to students outside the humanities. Studying history is a risk, and yet she invites us to take it seriously, as she once resolved to do—to face the uncertain, to embrace uselessness.

Erika Pani Bano will give the keynote lecture, “Crisis republicana y guerra civil. México y Estados Unidos a mediados del siglo XIX. ¿Una historia compartida?,” at the XVI International Meeting of Historians of Mexico, Austin.

She will also be speaking at the Institute of Historical Studies round table, “Beyond Empire and Borderlands: How to Write a Connected History of the 19th-Century Mexican and U.S. Republics?”

Program and further information: https://xvireunion.utexas.edu/programa/  

Interview: Rodrigo Salido Moulinié (Ph.D. student, UT-Austin)

[1] Erika Pani, Para mexicanizar el Segundo Imperio. El imaginario político de los imperialistas, México, El Colegio de México-Instituto de investigaciones Dr. José María Luis Mora, 2001; El Segundo Imperio. Pasado de usos múltiples, Ciudad de México, CIDE-Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2004.

[2] Tratando de desdibujar la línea entre liberales y conservadores que permea la historia del siglo XIX, Pani sostenía que, en esos años, los imaginarios políticos de cada bando no eran tan distintos. Con algo de perspectiva histórica, imperialistas y republicanos compartían, de cierta manera, un amplio ideario liberal. Véase “El imaginario político de los imperialistas: liberal y conservador,” en su libro Para mexicanizar el Segundo Imperio, op. cit., pp. 22-54.

[3] Erika Pani, Una serie de admirables acontecimientos: México y el mundo en la época de la Reforma 1848-1867, México, Ediciones EyC-Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla, 2013.

[4] Erika Pani, Historia mínima de Estados Unidos de América, Ciudad de México, El Colegio de México, 2016.

[5] Erika Pani, “Soft Science: The Humanities in Mexico,” American Historical Review, 120 (2015), p. 1342.

[6] Erika Pani, Para mexicanizar el Segundo Imperio. El imaginario político de los imperialistas, Mexico, El Colegio de México-Instituto de investigaciones Dr. José María Luis Mora, 2001; El Segundo Imperio. Pasado de usos múltiples, Mexico City, CIDE-Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2004.

[7] Aiming to blur the hard line between liberal and conservatives that permeated the history of the period, she argued that, during those years, their “political imaginations” were not so distinct. Seen from afar, imperialists and republicans shared, in some ways, a broad liberal tradition. See “El imaginario político de los imperialistas: liberal y conservador,” in her book Para mexicanizar el Segundo Imperio, op. cit., pp. 22-54.

[8] Erika Pani, Una serie de admirables acontecimientos: México y el mundo en la época de la Reforma 1848-1867, Mexico, Ediciones EyC-Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla, 2013.

[9] Erika Pani, Historia mínima de Estados Unidos de América, Mexico City, El Colegio de México, 2016.

[10] Erika Pani, “Soft Science: The Humanities in Mexico,” American Historical Review, 120 (2015), p. 1342.

Introducing Texas Student Digital Humanities (TSDH)

In Liberal Arts colleges across the country, the field of Digital Humanities is steadily gaining prominence. Even for those scholars and students who are keenly aware of this digital renaissance, a poor understanding of the field sometimes deters sustained engagement. The term’s proliferation has reduced it to a nebulous buzzword in the eyes of many skeptics. Part of this uncertainty stems from the word’s disorienting multivalence. It can mean nothing more than using a digital archive or it can involve a maze of linear equations and eigenvectors. The capacious nature of the category explains in part the decentralized web of digital humanities initiatives operating at UT. The University has a wide range of disparate Digital Humanities efforts, including but not limited to programs in Germanic Studies, Rhetoric, English, History and Latin American Studies departments. 

UT is clearly excited about digital humanities. As students, so are we! However, with so many digital projects and resources to choose from, students can feel lost. At the same time, there are comparatively few introductory resources, and, with some notable exceptions like library guides, those learning tools that are available are often geared more towards graduate students than undergraduates like us.

In order to bridge this gap between resources and knowledge, we are creating a new student organization called Texas Student Digital Humanities (TSDH). We are three students in the College of Liberal Arts with double majors including History and other disciplines. We were all exposed to the Digital Humanities in different ways and have worked on our own substantial projects. After meeting, we realized that there are few opportunities for students involved in the Digital Humanities to meet and work together. TSDH aims to introduce students to digital humanities and help them learn skills. We also plan to work on collaborative projects designed to put our skills to concrete use.

Employment card for a leased convict laborer working on the construction of the Texas State Capitol in 1886. It reads: "Wilson, Ike. Laborer, Convict Roll, Capitol Pay Rolls, 1886."
Employment card for a leased convict laborer working on the construction of the Texas State Capitol in 1886. Thousands of cards like these are housed in the Texas State Archive, demonstrating the scale of labor necessary to the construction of the Capitol. Source: Card number 6754, Capitol Building Payroll index cards, 1882 to 1888. Archives and Information Services Division, Texas State Library and Archives Commission.

Our first collaborative project stems from a series of introductory digital humanities tutorials. The project uses little-studied employment cards from the 1880s construction of the Texas State Capitol to tell a story about the forces of labor and racial violence in Texas. Using web scraping and optical character recognition (OCR), we are converting these historical records to workable text. Then, we will cross-reference the workable text with contextualizing information in the 1880 Census. The census will serve to uncover personal stories of individuals as well as offer insights into wider geographic trends. Finally, using geographic information systems (GIS) techniques, we will then map the residences and birthplaces of those individuals who quite literally had a hand in building the state. This project will help participating students develop skills in OCR, web scraping, Python, and GIS. It will also help us uncover the spatial dimensions of a fascinating, important and often disturbing history of foreign labor, convict-leasing, and union-busting in Austin, Texas.

Captured by an unknown photographer, this image of the State Capitol Building under construction was likely taken between 1887 and 1888. The photograph shows the eastern side of the building as well as the scaffolding for the soon to be completed dome.
Captured by an unknown photographer, this image of the State Capitol Building under construction was likely taken between 1887 and 1888. The photograph shows the eastern side of the building as well as the scaffolding for the soon to be completed dome. Source: PICA 08590. Austin History Center

Although these skills may sound daunting, students with absolutely no digital skills are welcome into this group. We aim to make the wide breadth of digital humanities tools accessible to all humanities students. We hope to align with the Department of History’s wider initiatives in Digital Humanities and we’re advised by the Editor of Not Even Past, Dr. Adam Clulow, who is helping us integrate with other digital efforts in the department. Ultimately, we hope to grow beyond one department and involve students from across the entirety of the College of Liberal Arts.

If you’re interested in joining or supporting this organization, email us at texas.digitalhumanities@gmail.com.

Amy Shreeve is a junior History and Rhetoric & Writing double major from Austin, Texas. Her interests lie in African American and Jewish life in the United States around the turn of the 20th century. Amy owns every National Geographic published between 2000-2013 and many non-consecutive issues since.

Benjamin Brown is a senior at UT studying History, Government, and Computer Science. He currently works as a data analyst in the Department of Government, where he uses machine learning techniques to facilitate political research. Through JapanLab, a collaborative initiative of the Department of History and the Department of Asian Studies, he is designing an educational video game focused on the 1853 Perry expedition to Japan. He has also worked on projects involving natural language processing and game development. Outside of the Digital Humanities, Ben is wrapping up an honors thesis on the ideology of northern Democrats in the 1840s.

John Erard is a junior at UT Austin studying both History and Geography. He is currently a member of the Academy of Undergraduate Researchers Across Texas (AURA-Texas) where he researches the use of spatial analysis and geoprocessing in history. His historical GIS work largely focuses on the agrarian history of Latin America, with his most recent project being an upcoming honors thesis on the privatization of mission ranchlands in Texas.

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

Una conversación con la Dra. Silvia Arrom/ A Conversation with Dr. Silvia Arrom

Note: This bilingual article appears first in Spanish and then in English.

Silvia Arrom, profesora emérita de Estudios Latinoamericanos de la Universidad de Brandeis, es presidenta de la XVI Reunión Internacional de Historiadores de México (Austin, 30 de octubre al 2 de noviembre). Arrom ha tenido una larga y distinguida carrera académica, publicando ampliamente sobre la historia social de México, con libros que incluyen su más reciente publicación, La Güera Rodríguez: Mito y mujer (México: Turner Noema, 2020), así como numerosos libros y artículos sobre la mujer, el género, el bienestar social, y los pobres.[1] Conversó con Madeleine Olson, estudiante de posgrado de la UT-Austin.

Madeleine Olson: La Reunión Internacional de Historiadores de México lleva más de setenta años celebrándose en Norteamérica—su primera reunión tuvo lugar en Monterrey en 1949. Cuénteme más sobre su experiencia e historia con la conferencia.

Silvia Arrom: La Reunión Internacional de Historiadores de México fue una de las primeras conferencias profesionales a las que asistí como doctora de nuevo cuño, cuando se celebró en Chicago en 1981. A lo largo de los años, he visto como la organización ha crecido, se ha vuelto más acogedora para las mujeres, y ha incluido cada vez más historia social, lo cual refleja unos cambios saludables en el campo. Siempre me ha impresionado la variedad y la calidad de los trabajos sobre la historia de México.

Olson: El tema de este año para el congreso, “Los federalismos en la historia de México y del Texas mexicano,” se centra en la manera en que México y sus vecinos han intentado poner en práctica las promesas de un federalismo unido. ¿Cuáles son algunas de las lecciones que nosotros, como historiadores, y principalmente como historiadores sociales, podemos tomar al centrarnos en este tema, y cómo podemos aplicarlas en la actualidad?

Arrom: Un tema preeminente para el periodo republicano de México (1824-1857) es el conflicto entre el federalismo y el centralismo. La narrativa de los historiadores enfatiza la debilidad del Estado mexicano, que trataba de unir el país pero sin mucho éxito – un paso adelante, pero dos para atrás. Los historiadores suelen afirmar que la Constitución de 1857 y la Reforma permitieron la fusión del regionalismo en México, por lo que a partir de ahí, la narrativa dominante gira en torno a la consolidación y el fortalecimiento del Estado central. Sin embargo, me parece que nosotros los historiadores no le hemos hecho bastante caso al regionalismo. Lo que yo he aprendido, especialmente al investigar la asistencia social, es que el Estado fue mucho más débil y fragmentario de lo que solemos suponer durante el porfiriato (1876-1910) y luego durante el periodo posrevolucionario (1917 en adelante). De hecho, había muchas regiones donde tenía muy poca presencia.

Petronilo Monroy, Alegoría de la Constitución de 1857 / Allegory of the Constitution of 1857 (1869). Fuente / Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Al observar cómo funcionaba el sistema de asistencia social en la práctica, se hace evidente que las instituciones públicas de bienestar eran muy escasas, dispersas y lamentablemente inadecuadas. Las organizaciones privadas, muchas veces religiosas, llenaban el vacío, sobre todo fuera de las grandes ciudades. Pero los historiadores han creído la narrativa del Estado como Padre de los Pobres, en que la beneficencia pública reemplaza la caridad, y han ignorado las contribuciones de las organizaciones privadas y religiosas.

Hoy, cuando observamos el resquebrajamiento del estado de derecho en muchas regiones de México, deberíamos cuestionar la narrativa de la consolidación continua del Estado. Parte de esa narrativa es cierta, pero se enfoca demasiado en la mitad del vaso medio lleno, y yo creo que debemos concentrarnos en la parte medio vacía, o sea, que debemos reconocer las debilidades del Estado, su presencia desigual en el territorio mexicano, sus ausencias, y cómo ha funcionado a través de actores locales. Estos actores son fundamentales ya que, con frecuencia, el Estado les ha delegado la autoridad, lo que da la apariencia de que hay una presencia estatal en esa zona. Me refiero, por ejemplo, al funcionamiento de las fuerzas policiacas de voluntarios (las defensas rurales) en muchos pueblos durante todo el último siglo.

En vez de fijarnos tanto en la legislación y las altas esferas del gobierno, los historiadores deberíamos estudiar cómo se ve el Estado desde la base, a nivel local, para entender cómo ha impactado la vida de individuos. Esto nos obligará a resucitar parte de esa antigua narrativa de un Estado débil e incompleto que lucha, pero no siempre logra unir a las regiones diversas, y que tampoco reemplaza progresivamente a la Iglesia o las organizaciones privadas. En resumen, los estudiosos debemos cuestionar más la propaganda del Estado liberal y luego del revolucionario.

Olson: Su libro más reciente, La Güera Rodríguez: Mito y mujer, abarca el periodo federalista en México y sigue no solamente la vida de la legendaria heroína María Ignacia Rodríguez de Velasco, sino también el uso de su historia en la cultura popular después de su muerte. ¿Cuál fue su experiencia durante la Independencia y su esperanza para el futuro de México?

Silvia Arrom, profesora emérita de Estudios Latinoamericanos de la Universidad de Brandeis, es presidenta de la XVI Reunión Internacional de Historiadores de México

Arrom: Mi libro sobre La Güera (como siempre se le conocía porque era muy rubia) examina tanto su vida como su trayectoria póstuma en las artes y letras mexicanas. Durante su vida fue conocida como una bella y encantadora dama. No fue hasta el siglo XX que se convirtió en una heroína de la independencia, que es uno de muchos mitos que circulan sobre ella.

En realidad, ella no parece haber sido una gran heroína. Nunca se manifestó abiertamente a favor de la independencia y nunca fue juzgada o castigada por insurgente, como fueron muchas otras mujeres. Además, nos quedan muy pocas cartas de su puño y letra. Así que casi no tenemos documentos que aclaren sus posiciones políticas o sus deseos para el futuro de México.

Sin embargo, sabemos que en 1808 formaba parte de un grupo de criollos centrado en el ayuntamiento de la ciudad de México que favorecía un autogobierno provisional hasta que los invasores franceses abandonaran España y Fernando VII pudiera volver al trono. Este grupo quería la autonomía, pero todavía no la ruptura con la madre patria. En 1809, la Güera estuvo involucrada en una conspiración contra el líder del Golpe de Yermo que había socavado ese proyecto, lo que la llevó a ser desterrada de la ciudad de México durante unos meses y a exiliarse en Querétaro. Los archivos muy detallados sobre este incidente no mencionan que ella quisiera la independencia. Solamente dicen que la intriga se basó en resentimientos personales y que, al difundir demasiados rumores, La Güera exacerbaba las tensiones en la capital. Por lo tanto, parece que ella era un nexo crítico en la red de información de la época que iba de boca en boca, porque era muy sociable y chismosa.

Después de regresar a la Ciudad de México, vivió discretamente y se cuidó de meterse en problemas. Después de todo, en 1810 La Güera era una viuda con cinco hijos y no podía arriesgarse a un nuevo castigo. No obstante, sabemos que por lo menos en una ocasión dio dinero a los rebeldes que ocupaban sus valiosas haciendas, probablemente para protegerlas más que por simpatía a la causa. Fue en vano, porque los rebeldes las dejaron en la ruina y ella perdió su principal fuente de ingresos.

Su historia representa, creo, la de muchas personas que vivieron los años de guerra como una época de crisis e inseguridad económica, que no sabían qué posición tomar, y que trataron de quedar bien con todos los bandos para proteger a su familia y patrimonio ante todo. Esta narrativa contrasta con la historia que a los historiadores les gusta contar sobre el periodo de la independencia porque no todo es tan claro, más bien se trata de una historia de ambivalencias, de vacilación y sufrimiento. No es la típica historia triunfalista, sino algo mucho más complicado.

Solamente fue en 1949, cuando Artemio del Valle-Arizpe escribió una novela histórica sobre La Güera, que ella captó de nuevo la atención pública. Al inventar muchos datos y manipular otros, el autor creó el mito de que ella fue heroína desafiante y liviana seductora quien tuvo amoríos ilícitos con los hombres principales de la época de la independencia. Sus cuentos eran tan atractivos que han sido repetidos—y engalanados—para crear la figura legendaria de una mujer fuerte y liberada que también era una patriota intrépida.  

  • “Portrait” of the mythical Güera Rodríguez
    “Retrato” de la Güera Rodríguez del mito
    Fuente / Source: Wikimedia Commons.
  • Only known genuine portrait of la Güera Rodríguez
    Único retrato genuino que se conoce de la Güera Rodríguez
    Unknown artist, c. 1794. Reproduced in the catalog, Veinte mujeres notables en la vida de México. Mexico City, Instituto Mexicano Norteamericano de Relaciones Culturales, 1974.  
    Artista desconocido, c. 1794. Reproducido en el catálogo, Veinte mujeres notables en la vida de México. México: Instituto Mexicano Norteamericano de Relaciones Culturales, 1974. 

Olson: Dice que empezó a pensar este libro siendo estudiante. ¿Cómo ha cambiado la investigación como proceso a lo largo de su carrera y en relación con su idea de lo que debe ser el papel de la historia social en la academia?

Arrom: La Güera me ha fascinado desde que, en un seminario universitario, leí La vida en México, de Fanny Calderón de la Barca. Este libro cambió el rumbo de mi vida. Siempre estuve interesada en Latinoamérica porque mis padres eran cubanos, pero este libro me convirtió en mexicanista y me abrió los ojos a la historia social. En una época en que los textos de historia se enfocaban en los eventos políticos y militares, aunados a un poco de historia económica e intelectual, este libro hablaba de las mujeres y la familia, los pobres, y las relaciones sociales. Ahora me doy cuenta de que he dedicado toda mi carrera a estudiar esos temas, en el mismo lugar y periodo al que me introdujo Fanny.

Entonces, de estudiante de doctorado, recorría los puestos de libros usados en la ciudad de México y descubrí el libro La Güera Rodríguez, de Artemio del Valle-Arizpe, que pinta un cuadro inolvidable—aunque en gran parte ficticio—de este maravilloso personaje. Y cuando escribía mi tesis sobre las mujeres en la Ciudad de México, encontré algunos documentos que la mencionaban. Entre ellos estaba el pleito de divorcio eclesiástico en que su primer marido demandaba una separación, y en 1976 publiqué una selección del largo juicio en mi libro sobre el divorcio eclesiástico.

De modo que la he tenido en mente por muchos años, pero no pudiera haber escrito este libro entonces. Durante los primeros años de mi carrera yo era una historiadora social militante, por lo que estudiaba grupos sociales que habían sido en gran medida invisibles en las narrativas históricas. Nunca hubiera escrito la biografía de un individuo—nada menos de una mujer aristocrática—ni le hubiera dedicado casi la mitad del libro a su recorrido desde la historia al mito. Estos enfoques reflejan cambios que se produjeron en el mundo académico desde finales de la década de los 1980, a saber: lo que llamamos la Nueva Biografía y el Giro Cultural.  

Las Nuevas Biografías retratan personas que no eran famosas, muchas veces mujeres; examinan su vida privada además de la pública; y las representan con todos sus defectos en vez de elevarlas al nivel de arquetipo. Y han demostrado lo mucho que podemos aprender sobre la vida diaria tanto como sobre los grandes procesos históricos al estudiar un individuo, especialmente porque la biografía puede combinar la historia social, cultural, política, económica y legal.  

El Giro Cultural ha enseñado a los académicos a repensar la historia, no sólo como una colección de hechos, sino como una narración que debemos tratar como un cuento. Y también que deberíamos observar a los propios narradores que cuentan esos cuentos, así como a sus relatos, para obtener una comprensión más completa del pasado. Esa fue la inspiración para la segunda parte del libro que analiza la aparición y diseminación de los datos falsos y cuentos apócrifos que construyeron su leyenda.  

Otro factor que influyó en la forma de escribir este libro fue querer llegar a un público más amplio que el que lee una monografía tradicional. He aprendido que cuando los estereotipos persisten en la historiografía, a menudo se debe a que los especialistas sólo se hablan entre ellos. Por ejemplo, en mi libro de 1985 sobre las mujeres de la ciudad de México demostré la falsedad de muchos estereotipos, como de que la mujer tuviera el mismo estatus legal que los menores, lo que no es verdad. Pero ese mensaje no ha alcanzado a bastantes lectores. Espero que una biografía bien escrita, que no sea demasiado larga o complicada, pueda educar al público sin ser pedante. Esa fue mi meta.  

Olson: Usted describe a su libro como una meditación sobre la construcción de la historia y las diferencias entre la memoria histórica y la historia. ¿Puede hablar más sobre esto?

Arrom: Lo que he visto en mis años de docencia es que los estudiantes suelen creer todo lo que leen, sobre todo si el profesor lo asigna. Por lo tanto, en mis clases pretendo que los alumnos evalúen lo que están leyendo, preguntando quién lo escribió, cuándo, porqué, en base de qué fuentes, y cómo este contexto pudiera influenciar el argumento. Estas discusiones fueron un factor importante que me llevó a escribir la segunda parte del libro, que examina la política de la memoria.

O sea, que examino cómo la figura de La Güera se transforma constantemente de acuerdo con las ideas de cada narrador sobre el género, la raza, la política y la nación – y según sus fantasías del pasado que hubiera deseado. De modo que el libro tiene un propósito didáctico, porque quiero mostrar al lector cómo separamos los hechos de la ficción, una habilidad muy útil en esta época en que estamos inundados por datos falsos que toman vida propia.

Silvia Arrom dará el discurso presidencial, “Reflexiones sobre una vida en la historia,” en la XVI Reunión Internacional de Historiadores de México, Austin. Programa e información: https://xvireunion.utexas.edu/programa/

Entrevista: Madeleine Olson (estudiante de doctorado, UT-Austin)

A Conversation with Dr. Silvia Arrom

Silvia Arrom, Professor Emerita of Latin American Studies at Brandeis University, is the honorary president of the XVI Meeting of International Historians of Mexico (Austin, October 30-November 2). Arrom has had a long and distinguished academic career, publishing widely on Mexican social history, with books including her newest release La Güera Rodriguez: The Life and Legends of a Mexican Independence Heroine (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2021), and numerous other works focusing on women, gender, social welfare, and the poor.[2] She spoke to Madeleine Olson, a UT-Austin graduate student.

Madeleine Olson: The Reunión Internacional de Historiadores de México has been convening for over seventy years across North America—with its first meeting held in Monterrey in 1949. Tell me more about your experience and history with the conference.

Silvia Arrom: The International Meeting of Historians of Mexico was one of the first professional conferences I attended as a newly minted Ph.D. when it was held in Chicago in 1981. Over the years, I have watched the organization grow, become more welcoming to women, and include more social history, reflecting salutary changes in the field. I have been consistently impressed with the variety and high quality of the work on Mexican history.

Olson: The conference theme this year, “Federalisms in the History of Mexico and Mexican Texas,” focuses on how Mexico and its neighbors have attempted to achieve the promises of a united federalism. What are some lessons we, as historians, and primarily social historians, can take from focusing on this subject, and how can we presently apply them?

Arrom: A prominent theme for the republican period of Mexico (1824-1857) is the conflict between federalism and centralism. Historians’ narratives emphasize the weak and fragmentary Mexican state, one that is trying to unite the country but doing so fitfully and not very successfully—one step forward, two steps back. Historians often claim that the Constitution of 1857 and the Reforma solved these problems, and from there on out, the dominant narrative emphasizes the strengthening of the central state and downplays regionalism. What I have learned, especially in studying social welfare, is that we’ve gone too far in that direction. The state was much weaker than we usually assume during the porfiriato (1876-1910) and the post-revolutionary period (1917-onwards). There were, in fact, many regions where it had very little presence.

When we look at how the welfare system worked in practice, it becomes evident that public institutions were few, far between, and woefully inadequate. Private organizations, often religious, stepped in to fill the gap, especially outside major cities. But historians have believed the narrative of the state as the Father of the Poor, with public welfare replacing private charity, and have overlooked the work of private and religious organizations.  

Today, when we look at the breakdown of law and order in many regions of Mexico, it becomes clear that the narrative of state consolidation can be misleading. That narrative emphasizes the glass half full, but I believe we need to look at the glass half empty, that is, to recognize the Mexican state’s uneven presence, its absences, and how it worked through local actors. These local actors are critical, as the state has frequently delegated responsibility to them, thus appearing to have a presence in that area. For example, that is how volunteer police forces have worked in many small towns over the past century.

Historians need to study how state actions played out on the bottom, at the local level, in the lives of individuals, instead of focusing on legislation and the upper echelons of government. This will require us to resurrect some of that older narrative of a weak state struggling but not always succeeding in uniting Mexico’s disparate regions and not progressively supplanting the church or private organizations either. In sum, scholars should question the propaganda of the liberal and then the revolutionary state.

Olson: Your newest book, La Güera Rodriguez: The Life and Legends of a Mexican Independence Heroine, covers the federalist period in Mexico and tracks not only the life of the fabled heroine, María Ignacia Rodríguez de Velasco, but also the use of her story in Mexican lore after her death. What was her experience during the Independencia and her hope for the future of Mexico?

Arrom: My book on La Güera (as she was usually called because she was very fair) explores both her life and her afterlife in Mexican arts and letters. During her lifetime she was known as a beautiful and charming socialite. However, only in the mid-twentieth century did she become an independence heroine, one of the many myths circulating about her.

She was not, in fact, a major heroine. She never came out publicly in favor of independence and she was never tried or punished as an insurgent, as many women were. We have very few of her private letters either. So we don’t have many documents that show her political convictions or her hopes for the future of Mexico.

We do know that in 1808 she was part of a criollo group centered around the Mexico City ayuntamiento (city council) that favored provisional self-government until the French invaders left Spain and the rightful king, Fernando VII, could return to the throne. This group wanted autonomy but not yet a break from the mother country. In 1809—a full year before the Grito de Dolores—La Güera was involved in a conspiracy against the leader of the Yermo Coup that had squelched that project, and she was banished from Mexico City for a few months and exiled to Querétaro. The very detailed files on this incident do not mention any link to the independence movement. They only say that the intrigue was based on personal resentments and that, by spreading too many rumors, La Güera was exacerbating tensions in the capital city. She thus appears to have been a critical node in the mouth-to-mouth information network of the time because she was a great gossip and very sociable.

After she returned to Mexico City, she was careful to maintain a low profile. After all, as a widow with five children, she couldn’t risk another punishment. However, we do know that on at least one occasion she gave some money to the rebels who occupied her valuable haciendas, probably to buy protection for those properties rather than out of sympathy for the cause. In vain, because the rebels left the estates in ruins and she lost her main source of income.

Her story represents, I believe, that of many Mexicans who experienced the war years as a time of crisis and economic insecurity, who were unsure of what position to take, and who tried to play all sides in order to protect themselves and their families above all. This narrative contrasts with the story that historians like to tell about the independence period because it is not clear-cut, but a story of ambivalence, vacillation, and suffering. It is not the standard triumphalist story but much more complicated.

It was only in 1949, when Artemio de Valle-Arizpe wrote a historical novel about her, that she was catapulted back into public consciousness. By inventing many facts and manipulating others, he created the myth of La Güera as an intrepid heroine and sex pot who had affairs with the leading men of the independence period. So appealing was his story that it has been endlessly repeated—and embellished—to create the legendary figure of a strong, liberated woman who was also a bold patriot.   

Olson: You talk about how this book has been in the making for nearly half a century. How has the research process changed throughout your career and in relation to your evolving understanding of the role of social history in the academy?

Arrom: I first met La Güera as an undergraduate when I read Fanny Calderón de la Barca’s lively travel account, Life in Mexico. This book changed my life. I was always interested in Latin America because my parents were Cuban. This book made me a Mexicanist and opened my eyes to social history. At a time when my courses emphasized political and military events, with a smattering of economic and intellectual history, Life in Mexico included women and the family, the poor, and social relations. In retrospect, I realize that I’ve devoted my entire career to studying those subjects, in the same place and time as Fanny’s book.

Then, as a graduate student wandering the used book stalls in Mexico City, I found a battered copy of Artemio de Valle-Arizpe’s book, La Güera Rodriguez, which paints an unforgettable—though I now know largely fictional—portrait of this marvelous personage. In doing my dissertation on women in Mexico City I found several documents about her, including the fascinating judicial records of her first husband’s suit for a separation, and I published an excerpt of that case in 1976, in my book on ecclesiastical divorce.   

So she’s been at the back of my mind for a long time. But I could not have written this book until recently. During my early career, I was a militant social historian who studied groups of people who were largely invisible in the historical record. I would never have written the biography of one individual—let alone an aristocratic lady—nor would I have devoted nearly half my book to tracing her posthumous journey from history to myth. These approaches reflect changes in the field beginning in the late 1980s, namely the emergence of the New Biography and the Cultural Turn.

The New Biographies study less famous people, often women; examine their private as well as public lives; and portray them warts and all, rather than elevating them into archetypes. And they have shown how much you can learn about daily life as well as big historical processes by studying an individual, especially because biographies can combine political, economic, cultural, and legal as well as social history.

The Cultural Turn led scholars to think about history not just as a collection of facts but as a narrative that we should treat as a story. And it showed that we need to study the historians telling the stories as well as the stories themselves to gain a fuller understanding of the past. This was the inspiration for the second part of my book that analyzed the emergence and dissemination of the false facts and apocryphal stories that made her a legend.    

Another factor that influenced how I wrote this book was that I wanted to reach a broader audience beyond the scholars who read traditional monographs. I have found that stereotypes about the past often persist because specialists are mainly talking to one another. For instance, I challenged many stereotypes in my 1985 book The Women of Mexico City, such as that women had the same legal status as minors, which I showed was not true. But that message didn’t reach enough readers. I hope that a well-written biography, if it’s not too long and complicated, can educate the public without being terribly pedantic. That was my goal.  

Olson: You describe your book as a meditation on the construction of history and on the differences between historical memory versus history. Can you talk more about that?

Arrom: In my decades of teaching I’ve learned that many students believe everything they read, especially if the professor assigns it. However, in my classes I try to get students to evaluate each text by asking who wrote it, when, why, and on the basis of what sources, and to consider how this context might shape the argument. These class discussions were a major factor that led me to write the last part of my book, which examines the politics of memory.  

In other words, I study how La Güera’s story is constantly reworked to fit the present, according to each author’s views of gender, race, politics, and nation, and according to their fantasies about the past they wished had existed. The book thus has a didactic purpose, to show the reader how we can separate fact from fiction—a very useful skill in this age when we are bombarded by “fake facts” that take on a life of their own.

Silvia Arrom will deliver the presidential address, “Reflexiones sobre una vida en la historia,” at the XVI International Meeting of Historians of Mexico, Austin. Program and information: https://xvireunion.utexas.edu/programa/  

Interview: Madeleine Olson (Ph.D. student, UT-Austin)

[1] https://brandeis.academia.edu/SilviaArrom

[2] https://brandeis.academia.edu/SilviaArrom

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.

Complicated Inclusion: Exploring the Reception of Nigerian Immigrants in the United States

From 2017 to 2021, the United States witnessed a dramatic expansion of its immigration policy restrictions. Approximately fourteen countries were placed on what was popularly known as the Trump Travel Ban list (Executive Order 13780). The ban largely prevented nationals from countries such as Nigeria, Eritrea, Myanmar, and others from entering or obtaining legal permanent residency in the United States. The travel ban was one of many restrictive immigration policies the Trump administration implemented, with the supposed goal to “Make America Great Again.” The loaded slogan advocated for a return to earlier understandings of American nationalism which championed racial exclusion and cultural homogeneity—even though in many political circles, the United States refers to itself as a “Nation of Immigrants.”

Nigerian immigrants were arguably the most affected by the ban, considering that Nigerians represent the largest sub-Saharan African population in the United States, with over 70,000 residing in the state of Texas alone.[1] Despite this large population, Nigerian immigrants occupy a unique, and often difficult, position within the United States’ ethno-racial caste system. Since the passage of the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act (Hart-Cellar Act), which prioritized the entry of highly-skilled educated immigrants, Nigerians have largely benefited from highly selective immigration policies. Consequently, Nigerians, much like educated Chinese and Indian migrants, are sometimes regarded as “model minorities” because their educational and professional attainments surpass that of many other racial and ethnic group including whites. [2]

Even as the Biden administration eliminated the Trump Travel Ban, immigration policies have continued to serve to maintain America’s ethno-racial hierarchy regardless of which federal administration is in power. The preference for highly-skilled, educated Nigerians and Black Africans overall does not make them immune from experiencing racial discrimination and anti-Black xenophobia.

An jet airliner stands on the empty tarmac at an airport in Abuja, Nigeria. The aircraft is painted white and displays the logo of Aero Airlines. In the foreground, a blue low-floored bus is visible.
An aircraft on the tarmac at Abuja airport in Nigeria. Photo by Ayyub Jauro.

The context of reception is defined by the ways in which immigrant groups are received and incorporated in the host society based on the policies of the receiving government, the character of the host labor market, and the features of their own ethnic communities.[3] The context of reception can be either positive or negative.[4] In a positive context of reception, immigrants are generally welcomed and have access to opportunities such as stable employment and supportive social networks.[5] In a negative context of reception, immigrants experience isolation, have difficulty finding jobs, and experience discrimination and perceived hostility.[6] Moreover, this framework acknowledges that not all immigrants are treated equally resulting in migrant groups reporting different levels of perceived feelings of acceptance and belonging.  

For example, the context of reception among white Cubans and Black Haitians in South Florida is different. Scholars found that Cuban migrants reported a positive context of reception because of the “wet feet, dry feet policy” implemented by the Clinton administration, which guaranteed legal permanent residency to Cuban migrants after one year of living in the United States.[7] In contrast, Haitian migrants, most of whom are Black, reported experiencing a negative context of reception because of the United States government’s long-standing reluctance to grant Haitian migrants the same level of asylum or refugee status as Cuban migrants.[8] The differences in reception experienced by both migrant groups illustrate which migrant populations the host government deems worthy of benefiting from its laws and policies. Furthermore, the characteristics of each migrant group (characteristics like level of cultural capital, language proficiency, racial identity, and so on) play a significant role in the type of reception its members will receive in the host society.[9]

Blackness and Migration

While Nigerians who migrate to the United States are identified and/or categorized as Black, the preferences awarded to highly educated Nigerian immigrants as a result of post-1965 immigration policies places Nigerians in a unique position within the United States’ ethno-racial hierarchy. Both active governmental and employer recruitment of highly educated Nigerians to occupy educational and employment settings created a pathway for them to be regarded as “model minority” or a “Black model minority.”[10]

The model minority designation can, in theory, act as an example of a positive context of reception. The model minority concept is used to refer to a minority (typically a racial or ethnic group) whose members are seen as high achieving on measures such as education and income, while also reporting low rates of crime.[11] Additionally, some employers and university admissions counselors report viewing Black African immigrants as more disciplined and hard-working and thus deem them to be worthy of being granted additional opportunities.[12] Racist cultural explanations have been used to explain the outcomes of model minorities, but the outcomes of “successful” migrant groups actually rest on the economic, social, and cultural capital they bring with them when they migrate to the United States.[13]

Various U. S. immigration documents, including a Permanent Resident's "Green" card and a pamphlet reading "Welcome to the United States," sit in a pile on a table.
U. S. immigration documents. Photo credit: USCIS

Although Nigerians in many educational and occupational settings are viewed as a “model minority,” that does not prevent them from experiencing discrimination. Comparative studies that examine the experiences of migrant groups continue to illustrate how race plays a significant role in their integration in the United States. For second-generation Nigerians, many report experiencing perceived anti-Black discrimination such as racial profiling, feelings of isolation at work/school due to their country of origin, and having their intellectual abilities questioned.[14] These experiences differ widely from second-generation Armenians, who are categorized as white and report benefiting from the unearned advantages that come with being white.[15] As has been well documented, Blackness is falsely associated with imagined deficiencies or poverty, and since Nigerians migrants are categorized as Black, experiencing interpersonal and institutional discrimination becomes an unfortunate reality.[16] Therefore, Nigerians experience a combination of positive and negative contexts of reception. The preference for their highly-educated backgrounds presents a positive context of reception but their Blackness and the consequences that come with it, leaves them with a negative context of reception which make their positioning in America’s ethno-racial hierarchy unique.

Immigration policy in the United States continues to be one of the most highly politicized topics in the nation’s political landscape. The United States has a complex relationship with immigration, simultaneously viewing immigration as a threat to American national identity but an asset to America’s competitiveness in the global economy. As migrant populations continue to grow and establish communities and families all throughout the United States, especially in states like Texas, we must consider how the reception of migrant communities can both facilitate and complicate their incorporation into the United States. Exploring the unique experiences of Black migrant groups will allow us to enhance our understanding of racial inequality and should prompt scholars, organizers, and policymakers to develop comprehensive policies that redress longstanding inequality so that all populations can achieve an optimal quality of life.

[1] Oyebamiji, Sunday and Adekoye, Ambibola. “Nigerians’ Migration to the United States of 

America.” Journal of African Foreign Affairs 6, no. 1 (2019): 165-180. (Accessed on Oct 3, 2021). www. jstor.org/stable/10.2307/26664092.

[2] Hsu, Madeline. The Good Immigrants: How the Yellow Peril became the Model Minority. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015.

[3] Portes, Alejandro and Rumbaut, Ruben. Immigrant America: A Portrait (4th Edition). Oakland: University of California Press, 2014.

[4] Seth J. Schwartz, Jennifer Unger, Elma Lorenzo-Blanco, Sabrina E. Des Rosiers, Juan A. Villamar,

Daniel W. Soto, Monica Pattarroyo, Lourdes Baezconde-Garbanati, and Jose Szapocznik, “Perceived Context of Reception among Recent Hispanic Immigrants: Conceptualization, Instrument Development, and Preliminary Validation,” Cultural Diversity & Ethnic Minority Psychology, 20no. 1 (2014):1–15, accessed on October 12, 2020,  https://doi.org/10.1037/a0033391. 

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Greer, Christina. Black Ethnics: Race, Immigration, and the Pursuit of the American Dream. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013.

[11] Ibid.

[12] Ibid.

[13] Imoagene, Onoso. Beyond Expectations: Second-Generation Nigerians in the United States and Britain. Oakland: University of California Press.

[14] Ibid.

[15] Van Tran, V. C., Jennifer Lee, Oshin Khachikian, and Jess Lee, “Hyper-Selectivity, Racial Mobility, and the Remaking of Race,”. RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences, 4 no. 5 (2018):188-209, accessed on March 11, 2021,  https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7758/rsf.2018.4.5.09.

[16] Hamilton, Tod. Immigration and the Remaking of Black America. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2019.

Photo credit: : https://www.pexels.com/photo/flight-landscape-vehicle-vintage-12686397/

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 Ruan Lingyu: Her Life and Career (2022)

Review of Ruan Lingyu: Her Life and Career (2022)

A child of poverty, luckless in love, her hour upon the stage mostly lost to history, and dead before the age of 25: all too true for Chinese silent film star Ruan Lingyu. Yet there was also a prophecy that “her artistry will one day serve all mankind,” and this too has proved true. The slim yet thorough and persuasive new book Ruan Lingyu: Her Life and Career by Patrick Galvan explains the contradiction, the tug-of-war between tragedy and imperishability that defines so many of the 20th century’s great artists. After reading it, no one could exclude Ruan Lingyu from the pantheon.

book cover

Galvan’s study follows the parallel paths of Ruan Lingyu, born Ruan Fenggen in 1910 to Cantonese migrant workers, and the Shanghai-based film industry of the young Republic of China. There were growing pains for both. The Ruan family grew and then shrunk, wounded by toil and illness. Young Lingyu found work as a movie actress, not an entirely respectable profession, but one poised to come into its own as the medium grew in popularity and matured in technique. Chinese films struggled to compete with more popular Hollywood imports, and Chinese directors struggled with low budgets and capricious government censorship. What got audiences hooked was not so much the martial arts spectacles and romantic melodramas, but the stunning actresses who appeared in nearly every movie from their respective studios. Popular polls consistently ranked Ruan Lingyu near the top of the list of Chinese starlets, and after her untimely death in 1935 she became a bonafide legend, her story inspiring movies (see 1991’s Center Stage) and TV miniseries (in 1985, 1988, and 2005) decades later.

“Growing pains” is not quite the phrase to describe the tumult in Ruan’s short life and in the Chinese silent film industry. One grows out of growing pains; neither Ruan nor her kind of cinema outlived their moment, as Ruan died young and once-powerful studios folded amid the shift to talkies and political upheavals that truncated many creative careers. Yet their painful and ultimately fatal struggles were rewarded with growth of a sort. Galvan expertly recounts the dense years of the late 1920s and early 1930s, specifically the effects of internal Chinese politics and the Japanese invasion on the nation’s movies. In the wake of the patriotic May Fourth Movement of 1919, domestic film studios gained ground against foreign-owned studios. By the mid-1920s up to 60 production companies of varying size operated in Shanghai, collectively releasing hundreds of shorts and ever-more features per year, but the 1930s brought economic and political crises that radically changed China’s film landscape. While telling this larger story Galvan summarizes of each of Ruan’s films, a great many of which are lost, with close attention to how their fictional narratives reflected and challenged prevailing ideas about gender, class, and nationhood.

Ruan Lingyu poses against a stucco wall next to an open French door in this color photograph, which appeared on the cover of a Chinese magazine in December 1934. Ruan is smiling with her head cocked to one side; she wears a long green patterned dress.
Issue 99 (1 December 1934) of the the Chinese magazine Liángyǒu–called The Young Companion in English–displayed this photo of Ruan Lingyu on its cover. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Concerned about leftist content in popular media, the government of Chiang Kai-shek provided studios with a list of prohibited themes, and censorship became more strict after 1931 when the Nationalist government contended with both an internal communist threat and an external Japanese one. Depicting social problems was acceptable as long as movies did not suggest solutions or issue calls to action, since this would be tantamount to supporting revolution. Even with such restrictions, directors and cinematographers became more confident in their craft, and their stories tended to become more ambitious and nuanced. Ruan and her costars became more sophisticated performers, and Ruan in particular reached such heights that later critics compared her to Brando in terms of her ability to convey depth and authenticity.

Galvan’s book is primarily a work of history, not film criticism, but he does not shy away from assessing the merit of Ruan’s work, which varied depending on the studio, director, and subject matter. 1934’s The Goddess and 1935’s New Woman receive especially detailed attention befitting these films superior quality and messaging. Director Wu Yonggang’s The Goddess is “a hauntingly emotional portrait” of a Shanghai sex worker and her child that features creative camera work and Ruan’s most harrowing extant performance. New Woman is based partly on the short life of novelist and screenwriter Ai Xia, the second woman to author a Chinese feature film, and its critiques of social injustice make it “the most aggressively left-wing film in Ruan Lingyu’s career.”

Galvan is passionate when writing about the relationships in Ruan’s life. They were the source of the tabloid controversies that dogged her in her final months, and they likely played a key role in her two suicide attempts, the second of which was successful. She had two common-law marriages, the first of which fell apart due to financial stress brought on by her partner’s gambling addiction. Her second partner was violent and jealous and reportedly falsified Ruan’s suicide notes. Galvan’s notes and wording are precise, but one may still wonder about facets of Ruan’s life that never entered the written record and whether it is fair to speculate, as the tabloids did, on the circumstances of her death. Still, Galvan’s evidence-based assessments feel correct.

Ruan Lingyu: Her Life and Career is divided into chronological chapters with subheadings for her over two-dozen films. The subheadings note if films are lost, making the book an easy-to-use guide for readers who want to familiarize themselves with Ruan’s filmography. Most of her surviving films are easy to access in the internet age, and Galvan helpfully notes when this is not the case. His chosen images are generally high-quality or highest-available quality, and they depict a range of Ruan performances while also centering the particular aesthetic that made her stand out from her cohort. Galvan finds opportunities to contextualize Ruan’s career in comparison to some of her leading peers, many of whom shared remembrances of her over the years. The book also points to larger themes in Chinese film history, such as the challenges of being a Cantonese-speaker (as Ruan was) in a Mandarin-oriented industry as it shifted to sound in the 1930s, how the center(s) of Chinese-language filmmaking shifted to Hong Kong and Taiwan after the communist victory in 1949, and the effect of the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s on the old guard of mainland filmmaking.

And what of the prediction of one Chinese critic, who used the pen name “Yun,” that Ruan’s talent would one day benefit all humanity? Yun likely hoped that the actress would promote social change through her powerful performances in topical movies that spotlighted social problems and national crises. Whether Ruan or her films actually affected the trajectory of history is one measure of success, but as we approach the centennial of Ruan’s 1927 big-screen debut there is another, equally important legacy to consider. Ruan’s work now serves as a window to the past, a body of evidence about what hardworking filmmakers wanted people to know and think about at crucial, contested moments in Chinese history. Thanks to Ruan’s talent, it is a window we can enjoy gazing through.

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 Beatriz Allende: A Revolutionary Life in Cold War Latin America (2020), by Tanya Harmer

banner image for Review of Beatriz Allende: A Revolutionary Life in Cold War Latin America (2020), by Tanya Harmer

At about nine o’clock on the morning of September 11, 1973, Beatriz Allende, the daughter of Socialist President Salvador Allende, arrived with her younger sister Isabel at the Chilean presidential palace in the heart of downtown Santiago.[1] The military coup that would end her father’s presidency, and Chile’s dream of a peaceful revolution, had begun around dawn that day. Though seven months pregnant at the time, Beatriz had come to join forces with the presidential bodyguard to defend, by force of arms if necessary, the legitimate presidency of her father and her country’s democratic transition to socialism.

Beatriz had acted as her father’s right hand on the executive team since he took office. But in recent months, as signs of an imminent overthrow became clear, President Allende had begun to pull his daughter back from the political front lines in order to protect her. That morning, in spite of her resistance, he ordered Beatriz to leave, along with her sister and five other women. In the words of Tanya Harmer, author of Beatriz Allende: A Revolutionary Life in Cold War Latin America, Allende’s effort to shield his daughter from the impending attack “amounted to an act of betrayal from the person Beatriz loved most,” and he did it “because she was a woman” (212). Harmer’s recent monograph provides serious readers of history with a riveting close-up of how Chileans experienced their revolutionary years, focused especially on how leftist longings for a more just and equitable society challenged culturally-determined presuppositions. Like Harmer’s acclaimed masterwork, Allende’s Chile and the Interamerican Cold War (2011), this book prioritizes local agency and conflict over international interference to show how Chileans struggled to define their own history. 

The primary subject of this volume, Beatriz Allende, shines in public memory as Allende’s favorite child, the middle daughter who became the son he never had. Educated in revolutionary politics from an early age, Beatriz followed in her father’s footsteps, first into the medical profession and then into Socialist Party militance. Though not outright wealthy, the family belonged to Chile’s comfortable intellectual middle class. They vacationed at the upscale seaside town of Algarrobo and, like any Chileans of means, they had domestic servants who did all their cooking and cleaning. The Allende clan could not be called armchair socialists, by any means, but they did not actually belong to the masses of working poor their political cause championed.   

A large crowd marches along a tree-lined street in Santiago in this black-and-white photograph from 1964. Members of the crowd are holding aloft several large banners, all of which indicate support for Salvador Allende. Two banners are easily legible; they read "Telefonicos con 1 Allende" and "Trabajadores municipales con Allende."
Supporters of Salvador Allende’s 1964 presidential campaign parade in the streets of Santiago. Allende lost the election of 1964 but would go on to win the presidency six years later. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

As a medical student at the University of Concepción, Beatriz grew close to the Enríquez brothers, Luciano Cruz, and Bautista Van Schouwen. Together with Beatriz’s first cousin, Andrés Pascal, they would become founding members of Chile’s most radical leftist organization, the Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria, usually remembered by its acronym, MIR. After some training in Cuba, and in opposition to her father’s lifelong commitment to the peaceful road to socialism, Beatriz embraced MIR’s option for armed insurrection as the only path to a meaningful revolution. She never made the switch to MIR, instead acting as a permanent go-between, informally linking MIR with Salvador Allende’s leftist coalition. In 1967, she did become a part of a very secret armed faction of the Socialist Party, called Organa, that mobilized in support of Bolivia’s ELN—Ejército de Liberación Nacional—as it attempted, in vain, to revive Che Guevara’s ill-fated insurrection there. Committed to actual armed participation, she found that the elenos (as ELN members styled themselves) protected her, partly because she was a woman, but mostly because she was Salvador Allende’s daughter and more valuable to their cause if she managed to stay alive.

Beatriz married a Cuban intelligence agent, Luis Fernández Oña, in 1970. Through him, she had already become a backchannel liaison between Allende’s coalition and the Cuban high command. After the coup in 1973, Beatriz fled to Cuba with her husband. She had her second child in Cuba, and she found herself thrust into a very public role, representing the exiled Chilean left, and the many victims of the military dictatorship back home. As the government of General Augusto Pinochet became an international pariah, Beatriz became an international celebrity, but it was not a role she wanted.

Though fascinated by Cuba, Beatriz found no peace there. Cuban authorities detained Loti, her long-time housekeeper—who had been caught in a lesbian relationship—and sent her off for reeducation. Fidel’s revolution considered homosexuality, and even feminism, to be capitalist vices that would naturally fade away in the socialist utopia of tomorrow. Moreover, classless revolutionary Cuba could offer no replacement for Loti. As a consequence, in her early thirties, with her fine medical training and her unfulfilled revolutionary aspirations, Beatriz Allende found herself isolated in a foreign land, facing the unknown challenge of traditional feminine domesticity for the first time (249). To make matters worse, news of the assassinations of former comrades, including Miguel Enríquez and Orlando Letelier, began to trickle in, making Beatriz feel increasingly helpless. That fatal combination drove her into a severe depression. She died by her own hand in 1977.

While Harmer’s work is rich in personal details and human drama, she did not set out to write a biography. Her study focuses on the catalytic agency of an extraordinary person pivotally situated in the unfolding of many previously untold historical connections. In the process, she reveals many previously unrecounted historical connections. The author’s sensitivity to the particularities of Chilean revolutionary culture is unparalleled. Elegantly written and abundantly sourced in memoirs, letters, and periodical sources—much of them from Cuba—Harmer’s skillful treatment of extensive personal interviews makes this work unique and remarkable. Harmer has created a rigorous, unbiased, but very gendered study, showing how the patriarchal patterns of even the most revolutionary movements consigned Beatriz Allende and others like her to a very particular kind of evolving agency. Ultimately, the author attributes her protagonist’s untimely demise to the internal contradictions and unviability of that gendered but revolutionary role.

Through the lens of this one conflicted revolutionary life, Harmer shines light on the many contingencies that contributed to the Chilean revolutionary phenomenon. Her study examines, for example, the growing influence of Chilean youth in the long decade of the 1960s. Compounded by the disruptions of an enormous earthquake in 1960, which united young people in massive solidarity efforts, sheer numbers, a fact that can be attributed to the post-war baby boom, made Chilean twenty-somethings a new and powerful contingent. Universities became the room where it happened. As Harmer observes, “university student numbers rose from 7,800 in 1940 to just over 20,000 in 1957, and 120,000 by 1970” (10). That university experience, as Beatriz knew it, represented a quantum leap in the political potential of the younger generation.

But even that giant leap would not be enough. In the most hopeful early days of the Popular Unity experiment, Harmer observes that “the opposition was strong and united. Indeed, the Left’s defensive measures . . . paled in comparison with the Right’s organization, resources, and propensity for violence” (196). Right wing women, as historian Margaret Power observed in her foundational study from 1998, formed the ideological bedrock of that opposition.[2] But there were left wing women, too, with unique struggles, decisive agency, and an untold story. Harmer has opened a new window on them.  

A black-and-white photograph of Salvador Allende and his Minister of Labor and Social Welfare, Mireya Baltra, in the midst of a large crowd of people wearing suits. Both Allende and Baltra are smiling; the President is handing his minister a document.
President Allende photographed with his Minister of Labor and Social Welfare, Mireya Baltra, a member of the Communist Party of Chile. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Despite its many strengths as a work of multilayered analysis, the book has some flaws. One is a simple editorial failure: a propensity to reproduce grammatical and orthographic errors in the Spanish language. Población, a Chilean settlement of the urban poor, has an accent mark in the singular form. Poblaciones, in the plural, does not, but Harmer’s work consistently maintains that telltale accent mark. This kind of defect does not detract from the overall argument, nor from the English reader’s appreciation. Chilean scholars, on the other hand, ever mindful of their legalistic traditions, especially when it comes to proper Spanish grammar and spelling, may be frustrated by these minor orthographic failings.

A second misunderstanding goes deeper. The author observes that, in her mid-thirties, Beatriz didn’t even know how to fry an egg. This is by no means an overstatement, but the author leaves it at that, as if to say, it would only occur to the unjust patriarchal universe to expect that women should be frying eggs (185, 233). In making such statements, Harmer elides over the fact that an ignorance of domestic skills in Chile often revealed more about social class than about gender roles. This was especially true for the revolutionary left. What good was a revolutionary who could shoot an AK-47, but then needed to be fed by someone else at the guerrilla hideout?

Among pobladores, Chile’s shantytown dwellers, anyone who could not buy fresh bread, fry an egg and slice a tomato would be esteemed pituco—haughty or snobbish—a fish out of water. In the informal economy of extreme poverty, where women could earn cash frying the eggs uptown, their unemployed menfolk often took care of housekeeping by default. Egg frying, a fact of life for the poor, became an asset and a virtue for a true guerrilla fighter.

Harmer recognizes that with regard to gender equality, it would be “unfair to expect the Left to have adopted practices not found anywhere else in society” (14). In fact, it would be anachronistic. And Beatriz Allende never identified as a feminist, but as a revolutionary guerrilla fighter. But cultural presuppositions allotted her only a supporting role. In exile after the coup, travelling between solidarity events, she commented to a friend that she had grown tired of being “Allende’s daughter” (260). She wanted to be Tania, the legendary compañera of Che Guevara, who supposedly died fighting by his side in the Bolivian altiplano (257). Though Beatriz Allende never achieved that dream, her experience made it possible for other women to dream it, too. Her prominence helped to shape a vocabulary that, as Harmer points out, contributed to “a searing call to end gender violence” during the 2019 protests in Chile (274). That call went viral worldwide.

[1] Isabel Allende, the daughter of the President, should not be confused with her second cousin, Isabel Allende, the acclaimed author of the novel The House of the Spirits (1982).

[2] Margaret Power, Right Wing Women in Chile: Feminine Power and the Struggle Against Allende, 1964-1973 (New York: Routledge, 1998)

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.

Teaching Slavery, Possibilities for Historical Restitution, and the Papers of Indigenous Enslaver Rebecca McIntosh Hawkins Hagerty

You cannot find the Muscogee Nation in most state-standardized social studies curricula. Take it from an educator who taught high school history in Buffalo, NY for seven years. The sovereign nation, which recently dropped the settler-dubbed “Creek” from its official title, is one of the largest in the country, with a membership of nearly 90,000.[1] The Muscogee controlled millions of acres in what is now Georgia, Alabama, and Florida, built staggering earthen pyramids, adopted a constitution, and produced Poet Laureate Joy Harjo .[2] Yet in most schools, they have been rendered virtually invisible.

Of all state curricula, New York state educational materials come closest to mentioning the Muscogee, and only by inference: “Students will examine Jackson’s presidency . . . including the controversy concerning the Indian Removal Act and its implementation.”[3] The Trail of Tears is alluded to only in terms of a political “controversy,” when in fact it is one of the most egregious human rights violations to have taken place on American soil. In the state’s 9–12 social studies framework, it is cited as a post-law “implementation” instead of an act of genocide involving the forced removal of some 100,000 Indigenous people that killed 3,500 Muscogee and thousands more from Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, and Seminole tribes.[4] If these war crimes are missing from the historical record and deemed non-essential to teaching history in New York State (along with any representation of post-19th century Muscogee historical life, let alone of its agency, resistance, and joy), it may not come as a surprise that the closest Texas gets to naming Muscogee people is by calling Populist-era “Indian policies” a “political issue.”[5] Georgia and Oklahoma standards detail more Indigenous history than most, but still do not name the Muscogee or the Trail of Tears.[6]

The absence of the Muscogee Confederacy from state-sanctioned educational narratives obscures a complex history of suffering but also exploitation.[7] For example, the narratives do not mention the fact that the tribes of the Muscogee Confederacy enslaved Africans and African-Americans. In fact, the Muscogee—along with the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, and Seminole (known as the “Five Civilized Tribes”)—practiced slavery, bought and sold enslaved peoples, and both defended and deplored slavery’s morality alongside the rest of the nation as pre-Civil-war-era sectionalism splintered the divided house of the United States. State educational narratives also do not discuss how the violent expulsion of these five tribes from their Southeastern lands meant a westward expansion of slavery. This expansion would later fan the flames of slavery-based conflicts such as the Texas Revolution, the Mexican-American War, and the Civil War.[8]

I didn’t learn this fact until I read it in a textbook, my life-raft for content, in my first year of teaching 16 and 17 year olds U.S. history. I was stunned by the realization. How had I never been taught that some Indigenous nations participated in chattel slavery? How had my undergraduate degree, exclusively centered on how to be a U.S. historian, skipped that chapter?

Finding Rebecca McIntosh Hawkins Hagerty

Years later, as a history educator and doctoral student, I was given a class assignment to research and transcribe a little-known document related to slavery at the Dolph Briscoe Center archives. Sifting through dusty archive files, I encountered the papers of Muscogee enslaver Rebecca McIntosh Hawkins Hagerty. 

A photographic portrait of Rebecca McIntosh Hawkins Hagerty. The photograph is faded and grainy but appears to show a solemn-faced woman, not young, who has tightly-parted dark hair.
Rebecca McIntosh Hawkins Hagerty, born 1815, died 1888. Photo, originally from Charles Steger’s booklets, retrieved from paulridenour.com/mcintosh.htm.

Hagerty was a three-quarters Muscogee woman who owned over 150 enslaved people. She was worth upwards of $112,000 in 1860, close to $4 million today. She died as one of the wealthiest Texans—let alone women—on Muscogee land in Oklahoma at age 73.[9] Her detailed estate inventories, as well as her frequent visits to court to advocate for land holdings as a woman, leave an extensive record of her life.

There is a rich history on Hagerty, with sources naming her as a “legendary pioneer,” bootstrap nods aplenty. But very few sources delve into the complexities, gender identity, and values of a woman who was an enslaver to hundreds of enslaved people, including fellow women with mixed ancestry who shared her Muscogee blood. Even fewer examine the complexities, genders, and human identities of the people she enslaved.

A photograph of what may be Hagerty's gravesite, surrounded by trees and weathered headstones in an Oklahoma cemetery.
Possible gravesite of Rebecca McIntosh Hagerty, as marked by Charles Steger, in Fame Cemetery, Oklahoma. Image retrieved from paulridenour.com/mcintosh.htm

However, one document included in the Briscoe’s Hagerty papers sheds light on this complex story. It is from 1841, or rather seems to be a copy of a document from 1841 that may no longer physically exist. It is a bill of sale for enslaved persons but is not marked as so, in a folder labeled “‘Miscellaneous papers’ (Unknown, 1841).”[10] Below is my 2019 transcription of the document, which I have named Bill of Sale for Five Enslaved Persons.[11] It was signed in Alabama, Hagerty’s second husband’s birthplace and business hub.[12]

Reed. From [?] Stone One Thousand Dollars for the following described slaves to wit a negro fellow named Jack about 40 years of age also a Negro girl about 18 yrs of age named Cintha also a negro girl about 13 yrs of age named Molly – also a negro girl about 11 yrs of age named Rachael- also a negro girl about 8 yrs of age named Wilm[a] which property I warrant for from all claim or claims whatsoever – and also [the] Health of said property Given under my hand [&] seal this first day of April One thousand Eight hundred & Thirty five attest his

Edward Bird                            (signed)           The [Haw? Micco?] x [?]

John S. Brooks            Mark                                                                                          

State of Alabama Montgomery County              I. E.C Sandend Notary

Public for Said County do hereby certify that the above is a true copy of the origin[al] bill of sale as presented by Edward Han[sict?]

In testimony where of I have hereinto [???] my hand [&] affixed my [Notarial] seal this [?] day of January 1841

                                                                        E.C. Sandend

                                                                        Notary Public

The document reads that a sum of $1,835.00 was paid for five humans (roughly $63,000 today). The description starts with a “negro fellow Jack, about 40 years of age,” and then the remaining four persons seem to be women. Curiously, three of the women’s names are underlined, and their ages get progressively younger, the oldest being Cintha, 18, and the youngest Wilm[a], 8. Eight years old. The rest of the document uses cold, legal language followed by a bevy of male signatures—with an x, perhaps denoting their illiteracy—for a now-notarized April 1841 dated copy of a sale that seems to have originally taken place in January of that same year.

A photograph of the handwritten Bill of Sale for Five Enslaved Persons. See the author's transcription for the text.
Bill of Sale for Five Enslaved Persons, from the Briscoe Center’s Rebecca McIntosh Hawkins Hagerty Papers, ‘Miscellaneous Papers, 1841, 1890.’ Image courtesy of the author.

However brief, the document irrevocably changed the lives of the five human beings listed. What would it mean to speak the names of this man and these four young women out loud? To wonder aloud in a book, or a classroom (where elementary, middle, and high school students cannot claim their ages would save them from similar treatment) just who Jack, Cintha, Molly, Rachael and Wilm[a] were? To probe the historical psyche of a Muscogee woman like Hagerty who enslaved people of both African American and Indigenous descent? Who made so much money that she ordered lobsters and brandied cherries by the barrel thanks to work from girls like Molly, age 13, and Rachael, age 11, who probably never tasted one cherry?[13]

This document complicates the Black/white binary of slavery, showing that a mixed-blood Muscogee woman enslaved people who were African American, and possibly Muscogee themselves.[14] It also troubles the dominant idea of male-only enslavers, showing that women were enslavers as well, with some like Hagerty having property rights and buying enslaved peoples, including eight-year-old girls. So much historical research of female enslaved persons focuses on the physical and sexual abuse from male enslavers. These horrific stories of sexual violence need to be told. But what of the relationships between female enslavers and female enslaved persons?[15] What of the women who bought other women and children so their own legacy and children could profit—women of color enslaving other women of color? And what of the buying and selling of people by the Cherokee, Muscogee and other Southeastern Indigenous nations, in hopes that assimilation and profit would save their way of life and land, only then to be subject to the Trail of Tears decades later?

This document complicates slavery’s dominant historical narrative, a narrative that must be complicated, mostly because it is never quite gone, never quite past. If students today actually do learn of the Trail of Tears, very few learn that thousands of enslaved Black people marched alongside their enslavers as they walked the same path from the Southeast to Oklahoma.[16] An awareness of this aspect of history should not in any way diminish our understanding of the acute and traumatic violence unleashed against Indigenous communities, or reduce our focus on the cruelty of white enslavers. Rather, we must understand how tangled the past is, and how slavery’s toxic influence extended into unexpected places.

Atoning for the Past

Last year, the Cherokee nation launched the Cherokee Freedmen History Project in an effort to atone for their past role in slavery, and to honor some 8,500 Cherokee enrolled citizens who are of Freedmen descent. These Freedmen, as the formerly enslaved, were excluded from full tribal citizenship until a 2021 Cherokee Nation Supreme Court ruling.[17] Cherokee Nation principal chief Chuck Hoskin, Jr. explained the tribal effort to acknowledge Black descendants: “The act of slavery, which was condoned by a Cherokee law, was wrong and a stain on the Cherokee Nation . . . . [A]s chief, I apologize that we did that . . . . [W]e’re taking affirmative steps to remedy that.”[18] As they take these steps, the Cherokee Nation has begun to examine their own culpability in the system of slavery and has encouraged Freedmen’s stories from family oral histories, artifacts, and other sources to be shared. They are including and centering those who were wronged as they engage in the process of remembering with an active, reparational conscience. In the nation’s current battle for historical and cultural memory, with U. S. classrooms as a central battlefield, the Cherokee Nation’s contemporary attempts to atone for their history of slavery provide an example for educators and students of how to reckon with complex, difficult history. They prove that present-day restitution and healing can be powerful acts.

As a white woman, it is not my place to weigh in on how communities of color are seeking to right any of their historical wrongs. But as an educator, I believe the current-day actions of the Cherokee Nation have much to teach us about how we can wrestle with the complicated legacies of the past. The Cherokee Nation’s response to their slavery past and the racial, gendered layers of Hagerty’s story are narratives of precious information key to understanding the historical reckonings playing out around us. The Cherokee Nation’s actions show that those who have had a hand in committing past historical violence such as slavery must de-center themselves and feature the voices and experiences of those who were oppressed in the process, even as they leave room to acknowledge the reality that there are many layers of that oppression.[19]       

Yet in order to begin such work, a diversely-researched and multi-sourced history must be unearthed from archives, including documents such as Bill of Sale for Five Enslaved Persons. Doing so would bring these historical complexities into sharp relief—not just for new research, literature, and college courses, but also for K–12 curricula. This is essential—because if primary sources about Black experiences and Indigeneity are introduced in K–12 classroom settings at all, they are most likely presented separately and not in context, with a low probability that women of color and children are featured.[20] Furthermore, if colonization and slavery are taught in K–12 schools, the likelihood that they are presented as systems in connection to each other, let alone as linked to capitalist systems of whiteness still causing collective destruction, is low indeed. But documents like Bill of Sale make nuanced, primary-source anchored conversations on these themes possible, conversations that can delve into how whiteness harms BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and people of color) communities, and how such communities can harm each other because of whiteness, too.

A history like Hagerty’s, and a response like the Cherokee Nation’s, calls upon all of us to wade into the confounding, deeply traumatic, maddening, and messy elements of what history really is. History makes us grieve, seethe, and feel when it presents us with narratives of Indigenous peoples enslaving Black people, with women of color buying and selling women who share their blood, with white supremacy and colonization doing unthinkable things to communities, to ways of life, and to people like Jack, Cintha, Molly, Rachael, and Wilm[a]. We have to keep finding, listening to, teaching, and talking about these histories, over and over again, until the day comes when the names of the enslaved are uttered just as much, if not more, than the names of enslavers in the annals of history.

[1]David Overall, “The Muscogee Nation is dropping ‘Creek’ from its name. Here’s why,” Tulsa World, May 6, 2021, https://tulsaworld.com/news/local/the-muscogee-nation-is-dropping-creek-from-its-name-heres-why/article_3bf78738-adcc-11eb-823d-438cbdefaf21.html; Jeanette Centeno, “10 Biggest Native American Tribes Today,” March 19, 2021, https://www.powwows.com/10-biggest-native-american-tribes-today/

[2]  http://www.fivecivilizedtribes.org/Muscogee-History.html; https://www.nps.gov/ocmu/learn/historyculture/the-muscogee-nation.htm

[3] New York State Grades 9-12 Social Studies Framework, pg. 36, http://www.nysed.gov/common/nysed/files/programs/curriculum-instruction/ss-framework-9-12.pdf

[4] National Park Service, “What Happened on the Trail of Tears?”, https://www.nps.gov/trte/learn/historyculture/what-happened-on-the-trail-of-tears.htm#:~:text=Between%201830%20and%201850%2C%20about,and%20on%20their%20westward%20journey

[5] Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills for Social Studies, High School, pg. 4, https://tea.texas.gov/sites/default/files/all_HS_TEKS_2ndRdg.pdf

[6] Georgia Standards of Excellence (GSE), Grade 9 – Grade 12, https://lor2.gadoe.org/gadoe/file/38de4e22-a6ad-4a1c-a19f-5a22aa9f83f3/1/Social-Studies-High-School-Georgia-Standards.pdf; Oklahoma Academic Standards, Social Studies, https://sde.ok.gov/sites/default/files/documents/files/Oklahoma%20Academic%20Standards%20for%20Social%20Studies%205.21.19.pdf

[7] Sandy Grande, Red Pedagogy: Native American Social and Political Thought (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015).

[8] “The federal government’s expulsion of the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, and Creek (Muscogee) tribes opened the door to the rapid growth of plantation slavery across the “Deep South”. But Indian removal also pushed chattel slavery westward, setting the stage for future conflicts over the expansion of slavery.” Barbara Krauthamer, Black Slaves, Indian Masters: Slavery, Emancipation, and Citizenship in the Native American South (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2013), 8.

[9] Hagerty was the daughter of a Muscogee mother, Susana Rowe, and a mixed Scottish-Muscogee father, William McIntosh—who was murdered by his own people for ceding Muscogee land to the U.S. government. She was then the wife of Benjamin Hawkins, who was also murdered after business with Sam Houston towards a new Muscogee settlement in Texas. She married Spire Hagerty in 1838 and went on to build a massive plantation empire, which included multiple plantations of her own and her children’s (especially after her abusive, taken-to-drink husband whom she was in the process of trying to divorce, died in 1849). Among these properties was the Phoenix Plantation, which would be sold to Mrs. Lyndon “Ladybird” Johnson’s father in 1915. It remained in their family until 2002. Most of the people Hagerty enslaved had Muscogee blood. Charles A. Steger and Patricia Adkins-Rochette, “Rebecca McIntosh Hawkins Hagerty: The Richest Woman in Texas,” https://www.bourlandcivilwar.com/RebeccaMcIntosh.htm; “Falonah Plantation, Drew Cemetery, and Refuge Plantation,” http://www.paulridenour.com/mcintosh.htm; J. N. McArthur, “Reality, and Anomaly: The Complex World of Rebecca Hagerty,” East Texas Historical Journal, 24(2) (1986); J. N. McArthur, “Hagerty, Rebecca McIntosh,” June 15, 2010, https://tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/fhacv.

[10] Scholars may contest whether this bill of sale was actually Hagerty’s, since it does not legibly bear her name. However, its inclusion in this folder and the origin of sale in Hagerty’s home state point to multiple connections.

[11] Unknown (signed by an Edward Bird and John C. Brooks), (January 1841), Miscellaneous Papers, 1841, 1890, Rebecca McIntosh Hawkins Hagerty Papers (OCLC 23175508, Box 3U4, Folder 11), Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, Austin, Texas, United States.

[12] McArthur, “Reality, and Anomaly,” 7. Where I was unable to read the markings, I placed a question mark. Spacing and lines were imitated to appear as they did in the document.

[13] Ibid.

[14] Ibid.

[15] A notable exception that has blasted the door open on this overlooked-for-too-long section of slavery history is Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers, They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2020).

[16] Nicole Chavez, “Native Americans weren’t alone on the Trail of Tears. Enslaved Africans were, too,” https://www.cnn.com/2021/05/09/us/tulsa-massacre-native-history-alaina-roberts/index.html [17] Russell Contreras, “Cherokee Nation wants info on Black descendants linked to slavery,” Axios, February 13, 2022, https://www.axios.com/cherokee-nation-black-descendants-slavery-63b74d3b-b23b-409b-8ecc-8e5e190a051e.html; “Cherokee Nation Supreme Court issues decision that ‘by blood’ reference be stricken from Cherokee Nation Constitution,” Anadisgoi, February 22, 2021, https://anadisgoi.com/index.php/government-stories/512-cherokee-nation-supreme-court-issues-decision-that-by-blood-reference-be-stricken-from-cherokee-nation-constitution.

[18] ibid.

[19] Colonization and the oppression of Indigenous people by settlers led to Indigenous oppression of Black people via the survival-driven assimilation of colonial practices, which included slavery. In the way we talk about and teach power, it is important to keep tracing the origins of systems of oppression back and back to their deepest roots, and then pull up there the hardest. Process is also important here: accountability is essential, but who is leading the charge and how they lead it both matter. Just as the Cherokee Nation is collecting Freedman stories and (hopefully) letting them speak the loudest in their restitution efforts, the Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition (NABS) just reminded the Catholic Church that while their atonement for past boarding school atrocities is appreciated, the story belongs to Indigenous people, who need to lead investigations and have their voices—not those of the perpetrators—heard the loudest. They stated, “Churches . . . need to understand that in this process of truth and justice a basic principle is not to cause any further harm—this includes being self-serving in seeking absolution. This is a time for survivors, Tribal Nations, and Indigenous people to lead on this issue and center their own healing, so we urge extreme caution in churches reaching out to survivors, beginning healing initiatives, recording stories, or centering their perspectives and interests on this history. The churches are perpetrators in these genocidal crimes against humanity, so they should act as such in all their communications with the victims and survivors.” As quoted in Jenna Kuze’s “Tribal Leaders Weigh in on the Catholic Church’s Effort to Engage over Indian Boarding Schools,” January 12, 2022, Native News Online, https://nativenewsonline.net/sovereignty/tribal-leaders-weigh-in-on-the-catholic-church-s-effort-to-engage-over-indian-boarding-schools

[20] This is why accessible primary sources and curriculum for teaching these topics is so essential. For examples on Indigeneity and colonization, see the National Archives’ Native American Heritage Primary Sources, the Library of Congress collections on the same subject, and the Library of Congress’ blog, which includes updated boarding school primary source sets. For examples on slavery, see the Teaching Texas Slavery Project and Learning for Justice.

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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