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Not Even Past

Resources For Teaching Black History

Banner image for Resources For Teaching Black History By Alina Scott and Gabrielle Esparza

Since its creation in 2010, Not Even Past has published a wide range of resources connected to Black History written by faculty and graduate students at UT and beyond. To mark Black History Month, we have collected them into one compilation page organized around 11 topics. These articles showcase groundbreaking research, but they are also intended as a concrete resource for teachers and students. This is an evolving compilation that is continually updated.

This list was originally compiled by Alina Scott and Gabrielle Esparza. It was subsequently added to by Atar David.

Topics
  1. Economy of Slavery
  2. Slavery & the Family
  3. Urban Slavery
  4. Key Figures
  5. Medicine & Healthcare
  6. Civil Rights & Black Power
  7. On #BlackLivesMatter
  8. Gender & Sexuality
  9. Diasporic Blackness
  10. Primary Sources
  11. Reviews

Economy of Slavery

White slave-owning women were not the only ones to insist on their profound economic investments in the institution of slavery; the enslaved people they owned and white members of southern communities did too. The testimony of formerly enslaved people and other narrative sources, legal documents, and financial records dramatically reshape current understandings of white women’s economic relationships to slavery, situating those relationships firmly at the center of nineteenth-century America’s most significant and devastating system of economic exchange. These sources reveal that white parents raised their daughters with particular expectations related to owning slaves and taught them how to be effective slave masters. These lessons played a formative role in how white women conceptualized their personal relationships to human property, imagined the powers that they would possess once they became slave owners in their own right, and shaped their techniques of slave control.

STEPHANIE E. JONES-ROGERS

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. 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.

JOANNA BATT

Slavery & the Family

I wasn’t looking to find a story of abounding love when researching violent episodes of Texas history. Then I ran across a Texas newspaper article that shed a brief light on the lives of a Black woman and a Mexican man who had lived as husband and wife in the 1840s, twenty-five miles northeast of Victoria, Texas. She was a woman forced to live in bondage in Jackson County, near the town of Texana, in present day Edna, Texas. Her husband was a Mexican man who was likely indentured, employed, or a peon in that same vicinity.

MARIA ESTHER HAMMACK

The challenge that teachers face is aggravated by a lack of primary sources. The teaching of slavery often centers on documents and accounts created by the enslavers rather than by enslaved people themselves. Plantation records document the productive and reproductive labor enslaved people were forced to perform. Slave auction broadsides, runaway advertisements, wills, deeds, and mortgages attest to their commodification—all from the perspective and through the voices of their enslavers…This erasure from the historical record means that the lives of the enslaved remain largely unknown, and their stories of separation and struggle are untold. So, how can teachers overcome these obstacles?

SIGNE PETERSON FOURMY

Urban Slavery

This hotel was one of the many businesses in Austin using enslaved labor, a commonplace practice that extended to every part of Texas. However, urban slavery in Austin differed substantially from slavery on the vast plantations that stretched across Texas’ rural geography. Unlike rural planters, urban slaveholders were largely merchants, businessmen, tradesmen, artisans, and professionals. The urban status of these slaveholders in Austin meant that enslaved people performed a wide variety of tasks, making them highly mobile and multi-occupational. Austin property holders, proprietors, and city planners built enslaved labor not only into the city’s economy, but into its very physical space to meet local needs. This examination of the Stringer’s Hotel provides a brief window for looking into Austin’s history of slavery and perhaps the history of enslaved people in the urban context.

CLIFTON SORRELL III

Key Figures

Lucy Parsons’s biography offers several overlapping narratives— a love story between a former slave and a former Confederate soldier, the rise and decline of radical labor agitation, the evolution of race as a political ideology and social signifier, and the trajectory of social reform from Reconstruction through the New Deal. She was a bold, enigmatic woman. Her power to inform and fascinate is enduring and her story, in all its complexity, remains a remarkable one for its useful legacies no less than its cautionary lessons.

JACQUELINE JONES

In 1921, while reflecting on the height of the cattle drive era, between 1865 and 1895, then President of the “Old Time Trail Drivers’ Association” of Texas, George W. Saunders, estimated that “fully 35,000 men went up the trail with herds . . . about one-third were negroes and Mexicans.” Eminent historians of African Americans in the West such as Kenneth Porter argue that, “twenty five percent” of all cowboys who participated in cattle drives out of Texas were Black. Yet, this is just the beginning. Some Black cowhands never journeyed to Kansas, driving herds of 2000 to 5000 cattle. Some of these women and men, stayed to work on ranches throughout Texas rather than “go up the trail.” They were cooks, and cowboys, horse breakers and trainers. There was more to being a cowboy than eating dust and crossing swollen rivers.

RONALD DAVIS

Medicine & Healthcare

Civil Rights & Black Power

One has to only look at a few headlines to see that many view black women organizers as important figures in combating today’s most pressing problems. Articles urging mainstream America to “support black women” or “trust black women” such as the founders of the Black Lives Matter Movement are popular. Publications, such as Time, laud black women’s political leadership—particularly when they mount a challenge to the status quo such as Stacey Abrams’ victory in the Georgia Democratic Governor primary. At the core of these sentiments is the recognition that black women have developed and sustained a liberal democratic politics that is conscious of and responsive to the interconnected effects of racism, capitalism, and sexism and that their approach can offer insight into current socio-political issues. The media often frames these and other women’s efforts as a manifestation of the current political moment divorced from the longer tradition of black women agitators and organizers to which they belong. Many of the black women making headlines today for their work in advancing civil rights and social justice ideals draw from these earlier traditions, including from the Black Power Movement of the 1960s and 70s.

ASHLEY FARMER

Campaigns around the cases of Black draft resisters like Collins also reveal the particular ways in which civil rights activists engaged in anti-war organizing. Collins’ supporters constructed a large and diverse coalition, and in the process, they developed a critique of the draft as a weapon against movements for social and racial justice. Their campaign blurred the line between foreign policy and domestic politics, revealing how thoughtfully Black civil rights activists situated themselves on the world stage during the 1960s and 70s.

SARAH PORTER

On #BlackLivesMatter

In less than a month, our nation will commemorate the 150th anniversary of the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery. This should be a time of celebratory reflection, yet Wednesday night, after another grand jury failed to see the value of African-American life, protesters took to the streets chanting, “Black lives matter!” As scholars of slavery writing books on the historical value(s) of black life, we are concerned with the long history of how black people are commodified by the state. Although we are saddened by the unprosecuted deaths of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Eric Garner and countless others, we are not surprised. We live a nation that has yet to grapple with the history of slavery and its afterlife. In 1669, the Virginia colony enacted legislation that gave white slaveholders the authority to murder their slaves without fear of prosecution. This act, concerning “… the Casual Killing of Slaves,” seems all too familiar today.

DAINA RAMEY BERRY AND JENNIFER L MORGAN

Gender & Sexuality

Black is beautiful.  The Black Power movement of the 1960s and 1970s popularized this slogan and sentiment, but almost half-a-century earlier, black beauty companies used elaborate advertisements like the one pictured here to sell their vision to uplift and beautify black women.  African American women like Madam C.J. Walker produced beauty products and trained women to work as sales agents and beauticians. and in the process, developed an enduring enterprise that promoted economic opportunities and connections with African descendant peoples throughout North and South America.

TIFFANY GILL

Diaspora

Primary Sources

Reviews in Black History

Fuentes’ work contributes to the historical knowledge of early America through her focus on violence and how it operated during slavery and continues today through archives. She cautions scholars to avoid traditional readings of archival evidence, which are produced by and for the dominant narratives of slavery. Instead, she calls for a reading “along the bias grain,” of historical records and against the politics of the historiography on a given topic. In other words, she pushes historians to stretch fragmented archival evidence in order to reflect a more nuanced, complex understanding of enslaved people’ lives. 

TIANA WILSON

Joseph draws on his personal experience as a Haitian and a first-generation Black American to understand the Third Reconstruction in the present-day. He also shows what it means to grow up Black in the United States through intertwining stories from his own life with ones that trace Barack Obama’s path to the presidency. Through these stories, he also tracks a shift in American culture, which has contributed to a misleading “post-racial” understanding of American society.

DANIELLE SANCHEZ

Ibram X. Kendi’s exploration of the historical roots of racism provided a timely lens through which to understand and address contemporary racial issues during this pivotal period. In addition, it offers an invaluable lens through which contemporary policymakers can confront and dismantle systemic inequities. As a historian and scholar of race and discrimination in America, Kendi takes readers through the annals of American history and reveals the insidious evolution of racist ideologies from their inception to the present day.

MADDIE (WILLIAMS) SHORMAN

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.

Preservation and Decay as Public History at the Moon-Randolph Homestead

Preservation and Decay as Public History at the Moon-Randolph Homestead

By Gwendolyn Lockman

Past the local dump and the interstate, and separated by foothills from the nearby historic neighborhoods of Missoula, Montana, the Moon-Randolph Homestead can be found, steeling itself against the modern world but not quite stuck in the past. It is an unusual historical site where the ecological and the human, and the past and the present melt into one another.

Figure 1: Entrance gate for the Moon Randolph Homestead Site, June 2019. Photo by Gwen Lockman.

Before U.S. westward expansion and federal homesteading efforts, Indigenous people traversed the North Hills of Missoula on the Trail to the Buffalo. They passed through nearby Hell Gate Canyon, named both for the cold, rough waters of the river and for the ambushes between tribes that occurred at the canyon. Once the U.S. seized the land in the late nineteenth century, homesteaders in the Missoula valley tried to raise subsistence crops and livestock there. These small parcels of land had little of the potential for profit that large, thousand-plus acre ranches enjoyed.

Ray and Luella Moon came to Missoula from Minnesota staking their homestead claim in 1889. They came to “prove up,” sell the land, and move on. Ray Moon sold his land to his relatives, George and Helen Moon, the same day he acquired the deed to the property in 1894. Then Ray and Luella left Missoula. George and Helen Moon had moved to Seattle by 1907. William and Emma Randolph came to Missoula from White Sulphur Springs, Montana to buy a farm so Emma could raise chickens and get William to settle down. The Randolphs tracked down the Moons in Seattle and wrote to them to purchase the land.[1]

William and Emma lived the rest of their lives in Missoula, alternating between the homestead, which they called the Randolph Ranch, and a home in town. They raised their three sons there and often let extended family stay with them for long stretches of time. William and Emma passed away in 1956 within months of each other. Their youngest son, Bill, continued living at ranch until his death in 1995. In 1992, Bill put a conservation easement on his land, which protected it from development after his death. The City of Missoula purchased the nearly 470 acres in 1997 and created the North Hills open space and trail system. Of those acres, 13 became the Moon-Randolph Homestead site. The North Missoula Community Development Corporation, a local nonprofit, created the Hill and Homestead Preservation Commission in 1998 to advocate for the Moon-Randolph Homestead. [2]

Figure 2: Panorama of the Moon Randolph Homestead Site from the Barn looking South and West, August 2019. Photo by Gwen Lockman.

In 1998, the city began a program to house caretakers on site to oversee the Moon-Randolph Homestead, raise livestock, host events, and interface with the public. The Department of Interior listed Moon-Randolph on the National Register of Historic Places in 2010. It is open to the public on Saturdays from 11 am to 5 pm, May through October, and is used by several groups during the week, including the Montana Conservation Corps, Opportunity Resource, Youth Homes, and Parks and Recreation Homestead Camps.[3] Dr. Caitlin DeSilvey, Associate Professor of cultural geography at the University of Exeter, was the first caretaker for the Moon-Randolph Homestead. She wrote her dissertation about her work in the late 1990s and early 2000s cataloging the Randolphs’ belongings.[4] DeSilvey’s scholarship contemplates the role of decay in heritage sites. She advocates for what she calls “encounter[s] with the debris of history,” allowing deterioration to proceed as a mode of historic interpretation.[5] Her approach to Moon-Randolph was to interfere as little as possible with anything on site. Though DeSilvey catalogued all of the artifacts and documents at Moon-Randolph, the decision to curate decay combined with a lack of dedicated city resources left much of what was on site to erode away or be eaten by the mice that inhabit the site.

Figure 3: Photos of decay at the Moon Randolph Homestead Site, June 2019. Photos by Gwen Lockman.

DeSilvey acknowledged in her dissertation the virtual impossibility that the city-managed property be allowed to totally decay. She suggested that, “Future management of the site will have to find a compromise between a celebration of entropic heritage and the conservation of material traces.”[6] As an intern for the City of Missoula Historic Preservation Office and Department of Parks and Recreation, the priority for my summer job at the Homestead was to help the preservation and interpretations methods for the site to evolve.

Figure 4: Photo of winch, still standing after original Mining Shed Collapse in 2014. Photo from Moon Randolph Homestead/City of Missoula.

My duties included the curation of the reconstructed Mining Shed. The Mining Shed had been entirely reconstructed, out of both new and salvaged materials, after collapsing in 2014, and exists in direct contradiction with the decay at the Homestead. The original Mining Shed stood from around 1900 until its collapse in 2014. It sheltered a hoist for the small-scale coal mining operation that William Randolph maintained on his land. Coal mining was not an especially profitable venture in Missoula, though at least one company, Hell Gate Coal, successfully mined the North Hills in the early 1900s. The naming of the Coal Mine Road, which led to the family ranches of the North Hills, Randolphs’ included, suggests Missoulians knew the area to bear coal. One must still use Coal Mine Road to get to Moon-Randolph and its neighbors, the city dump included.[7] Coal at the Homestead was likely found by George Moon, if not Ray Moon. Mining was a special interest for William Randolph, who was more of a dreamer and tinkerer than a farmer. The Randolphs’ quaintly named “Little Phoebe” mine produced low-grade coal, mostly traded with neighbors or used at home. They hired men to work in the mine, signaling either some profit or William’s financial dedication to his side projects. Robert, the middle Randolph son, wrote about the mine in his boyhood diary during the winter of 1916-1917. The Randolphs used coal from Little Phoebe until the 1930s, then let it fill with water to use to irrigate the pasture. In 1937, Robert wrote from Spokane, Washington to ask his father if he had given the coal’s use any further thought. William converted the building into a workshop but worked around the hoist, which still stands in its original place. Snow in the winter of 2014 caused the original building’s collapse. City and private crews completed the reconstruction in 2018. The new building is slightly larger than the original structure but is a close reproduction of the old shed.[8]

Figure 5: Photo of reconstructed Mining Shed, July 2019. Photo by Gwen Lockman.

My curation of the Mining Shed sought to more formally interpret the space while maintaining the Homestead as a place both lost to time and still writing its history. The floor space must be kept free so that the building can be used as a gathering space in inclement weather. It is the safest and largest covered space on site, which will be slow to change, because historic site classification restrictions prohibit new permanent foundation construction. The Mining Shed interpretation does not recreate a specific year of its lifespan but instead illustrates the several layers of its use over time and restoration. We arranged artifacts from mining and shop work. We integrated elements of the original building into the structure of the new building. This protects the intact remains of the old shed and makes the reconstruction apparent through comparison. I wrote limited interpretative signage and selected for display original documents from the Moon Cabin archive related to William Randolph’s mining ventures away from the Homestead.

One of my goals for the Mining Shed was to connect the Homestead to Montana’s economic history from statehood in 1889 through the post-war era. The Moon-Randolph history connects Missoula’s river, trade, agriculture, timber, mining, and railroad economy and history. William Randolph’s investments and work in Montana and beyond call attention to the several ways he sought to make money outside of agriculture. His ventures included work for Standard Brick Company in Missoula, management of the Sibley timber property in Lolo, Montana, and attempts at placer mining in the Nine Mile Valley east of Missoula. Presenting this history highlights piecemeal economic survival in Montana prior to the 1960s and the survival of the Randolphs’ story through material and documentary evidence.

Figure 6 Photo of “Little Phoebe” Mining Adit, June 2019. Photo by Gwen Lockman.

These changes marked a shift toward formal curation at Moon-Randolph. However, we sought to maintain “The Spirit of the Homestead,” a term defined in the Moon-Randolph Strategic Plan Update for 2015-2024. The Spirit of the Homestead aims to maintain Moon-Randolph as “a living place, where historic activities continue and new uses are established, and a place where natural processes of aging and ecological renewal can be appreciated.”[9] The idea of “living history” at the site is not produced as reenactment or period restoration. Rather, the Homestead is kept “alive.” Trees overtake metal refuse from rusty, repurposed farm equipment. There are mice, chipmunks, rabbits, songbirds, hawks, snakes, deer, and the occasional bear. Buildings collapse. Caretakers raise pigs and chickens, haul non-potable water for irrigation from a cistern, and tend to a 130-year-old orchard that still produces cider apples. There is almost no signage and very little written interpretation. The site is left to speak for itself, otherwise visitors must speak to a caretaker or volunteer to ask questions, enjoy a tour, or help with chores.

Figure 7: Photo of Summer 2019 curation in the Mining Shed, August 2019. Photo by Gwen Lockman.

And speak for itself it does: when I returned to the Homestead in May 2020 for a socially distanced excursion, the mining shed had new tenants. Magpies built their winter nests in the rafters of the reconstructed shed. Springtime bunnies darted in and out of the shed. Their curation enhanced ours. As much as there is curated decay at the site, there, too, is resplendent life. History and the present, decay, life, and curation, negotiate their coexistence in the North Hills of Missoula.

Figure 8: Photo of magpie nest in the Moon Randolph Homestead Mining Shed, May 2020. Photo by Caroline Stephens, Moon Randolph Homestead.

[1] DeSilvey, Butterflies and Railroad Ties; DeSilvey, Salvage Rites; Moon-Randolph Homestead, “History,” https://www.moonrandolphhomestead.org/history; Montana Association of Land Trusts, “About Conservation Easements,” http://www.montanalandtrusts.org/conservationeasements/; North Missoula Community Development Corporation, “Moon Randolph Homestead,” http://www.nmcdc.org/programs/moon-randolph-homestead/; United States Department of the Interior, National Parks Service, National Register of Historic Places Continuation Sheet, Moon-Randolph Ranch, March 1, 2010, https://www.nps.gov/nr/feature/presmonth/2010/Moon-RandolphRanch.pdf; “Moon-Randolph Strategic Plan Update: 2015-2024,” 2-5. 

[2] Caitlin DeSilvey, Butterflies and Railroad Ties: a History of a Montana Homestead, second edition (Missoula, MT: Hill and Homestead Preservation Commission, 2002); Caitlin DeSilvey, Salvage Rites: Making Memory on a Montana Homestead, doctoral dissertation, Open University (2003); Moon-Randolph Homestead, “History,” https://www.moonrandolphhomestead.org/history; City of Missoula, North Missoula Community Development Corporation, and Five Valleys Land Trust, “Moon-Randolph Strategic Plan Update: 2015-2024,” Final, Adopted by Missoula City Council May 4, 2015, 7, https://www.ci.missoula.mt.us/DocumentCenter/View/31846/MoonRandolphHomestead_StrategicPlan_2015?bidId=. 

[3] Moon-Randolph Homestead, “History,” https://www.moonrandolphhomestead.org/history; North Missoula Community Development Corporation, “Moon Randolph Homestead,” http://www.nmcdc.org/programs/moon-randolph-homestead/; United States Department of the Interior, National Parks Service, National Register of Historic Places Continuation Sheet, Moon-Randolph Ranch, March 1, 2010, https://www.nps.gov/nr/feature/presmonth/2010/Moon-RandolphRanch.pdf; Moon-Randolph Homestead, “Welcome,” https://www.moonrandolphhomestead.org/.

[4] University of Exeter, “Professor Caitlin DeSilvey,” College of Life and Environmental Sciences, Geography Department, http://geography.exeter.ac.uk/staff/index.php?web_id=Caitlin_Desilvey; DeSilvey, Salvage Rites; “Moon-Randolph Strategic Plan Update: 2015-2024,” 4-5.

[5] DeSilvey, Salvage Rites, 10.

[6] DeSilvey, Salvage Rites, 176.

[7] City of Missoula, Historic Preservation Office, Moon-Randolph Homestead Records; DeSilvey, Butterflies and Railroad Ties; DeSilvey, Salvage Rites; National Register of Historic Places Continuation Sheet, Moon-Randolph Ranch, March 1, 2010; J.T. Pardee, “Coal in the Tertiary Lake Beds of Southwestern Montana,” Contributions to Economic Geology, Part II (1911);

[8] DeSilvey, Butterflies and Railroad Ties; DeSilvey, Salvage Rites; National Register of Historic Places Continuation Sheet, Moon-Randolph Ranch, March 1, 2010; Robert Randolph, Diary, 1916-1917, Moon-Randolph Archive; City of Missoula, Historic Preservation Office, Moon-Randolph Homestead Records.

[9] “Moon-Randolph Strategic Plan Update: 2015-2024,” 7.

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Unboxing the Saints: A Curious Case from Early Modern Milan

The second half of the sixteenth century witnessed a slow but steady shift in how saints and their remains were authenticated in the Catholic Church. In 1563, in its final session, the Council of Trent affirmed relics’ sanctity and due veneration against Protestant claims to the contrary, but also sought to ensure that relics really were worthy of veneration. Protestants like John Calvin had mocked not only the devotion paid towards religious relics, but also the vast quantities of fake relics in circulation. Trent stipulated, without specifying precisely how, that newly discovered relics had to be acknowledged and approved by the bishop. New practices emerged to ensure the authenticity of holy objects. At the opening of reliquaries and tombs, the local bishop brought witnesses, notaries, and even anatomists in order to detail what was found. This approach was quickly codified in local ecclesiastical legislation.

Letter from the Archivio Storico Diocesano di Milano
Archivio Storico Diocesano di Milano, VII A 25, fascicolo 1, fol. 2r. The letter in question. (With thanks to Fabrizio Pagani.)

One letter in the Milanese archdiocesan archive (Archivio Storico Diocesano di Milano) seems at first glance to offer a compelling story about how Carlo Borromeo, archbishop of Milan (d. 1584), identified the remains of his late antique predecessor, Milan’s fifth-century archbishop St. Benignus. Borromeo wrote to Egidio Bossi to explain how this ancient saint had been found with the Bossi family’s insignia:

Until we are able to grant firmer documentation, we do not refuse to attest with this letter that this signet ring—which is a small and very old iron signet ring, with the insignia of the Bossi family and the episcopal miter still whole, and the name of St. Benignus (although three letters are missing due to rust)— … was found by us in a box in which the aforesaid body of St. Benignus was found. At which time, in the church of San Simpliciano in Milan, some bodies of holy saints … were translated and gathered into a more dignified place.[1]

The ring itself, according to the letter, had been given to Egidio’s late uncle, Francesco Bossi, the bishop of Novara. Borromeo urged Egidio to take care of his uncle’s ancient ring “as a document of the nobility of your family.”

Anonymous 18th-century drawing of a ring owned by Carlo Borromeo
Anonymous 18th-century drawing of a ring owned by Carlo Borromeo (not the ring discussed in this letter, but another example of how a ring associated with a saint was documented). (© The Trustees of the British Museum)

When I first came upon this letter, I was thrilled. Here was Borromeo, Indiana Jones-like, hacking into a bishop’s tomb and emerging with a powerful ring, just legible enough to tie this long-dead saint to one of northern Italy’s leading families. I wondered how the ring had been described in the formal finding, or cataloguing, of the saint’s bones. Had those present immediately recognized the coat of arms of the Bossi? I had read a manuscript copy of this catalogue in a different library, so I returned to my notes. According to that record, Borromeo had opened the box with St. Benignus’ bones in 1581 and found “a few pieces of congealed blood” and nothing else.[2] Where was the iron ring? This description suddenly cast the letter in a different, and suspicious, light: it was in Latin, a language Borromeo rarely used in correspondence with his fellow Italians, and it was nestled among documents from the 1620s and 30s, not the 1580s.

Benignus “Bossi’s” signet ring was a fake: a later forgery created as part of a feud between Milan’s aristocratic Bossi and Benzi families. The ring had been produced in the early seventeenth century, decades after Borromeo’s actual encounter with St. Benignus in 1581 and Borromeo’s death in 1584. In 1617, in a formal judgment in Rome, this ring provided apparently ironclad evidence for the Bossi’s claim that St. Benignus was an ancestor of theirs. They alleged that the ring had been found in the formal opening of the saint’s tomb by Borromeo—who had just recently been canonized as a saint in 1610. As an eighteenth-century historian, Angelo Fumagalli, pointed out, this feud was one of several attempts in seventeenth-century Milan to make specious genealogical claims on the city’s earliest archbishop saints. Just as the Borri and Albigatti had skirmished over St. Monas, and the Beverate and Soresina over St. Simplician, so the Benzi and Bossi both asserted their kinship with St. Benignus.

The letter in the Milanese archive was forged—either around the same time as or perhaps after the 1617 judgment— to provide a believable context for the fake ring. I had been looking for documents about how Carlo Borromeo interacted with relics in the sixteenth century. But I found this seventeenth-century forgery useful nonetheless, because it illuminated Borromeo’s legacy in shaping the sacred landscape in Milan. Borromeo had legislated the proper process for authenticating and preserving relics quite carefully, with greater specificity than the general Council of Trent. Relics were to be described in order, and diligently written down, along with any further information from monuments or inscriptions. The seventeenth-century creators of the fake ring and accompanying letter clearly knew that an object like a saint’s ring found in the tomb would have been written about, as part of the relevant information gleaned from the saint’s surroundings. They also knew that Borromeo had translated (ritually processed and reburied) the bodies of St. Benignus and other early bishop saints buried in the Milanese church of San Simpliciano. Perhaps there was still a collective memory of this event, refreshed thanks to the ceremonies and printed biographies that celebrated Borromeo’s canonization in 1610. In some ways, the Bossi’s later efforts to coopt a fifth-century archbishop of Milan show how successful Borromeo was in making the city’s past archbishops and their relics an integral part of Milanese life. These kinds of families wanted to be associated with the saints whom Borromeo had honored.

Basilica of San Simpliciano
Basilica of San Simpliciano, Milan—the church where St. Benignus was “unboxed.”

And yet, ironically, the claims of the Bossi and other prominent families suggest that Borromeo’s reforms of the city failed in important respects. Borromeo sought to remove prominent and ornate individual tombs from Milan’s churches. He removed the sarcophagi of Milanese dukes hanging on chains from the ceiling of the Duomo, so that they would not compete visually with the main altar. In this period, bishops like Borromeo also worked to remove family-funded chapels from the perimeter of churches, and the family coats of arms that often decorated individual tombs as well as private chapels.

Decades later, the Bossi family found a creative workaround. By imagining that Borromeo had once found their family crest inside St. Benignus’s tomb, they effectively made the tomb of the saint into a family tomb, and even suggested that their coat of arms had been found inside that holy space. They used their knowledge of the regulations governing how evidence for relics was documented to then turn these on their head. The same protocol for unboxing the saints that was meant to provide a failsafe—careful documentation by bishops about the inscriptions and imagery found with saints’ remains— instead provided a how-to for successfully passing off a forgery. The Bossi had played by Borromeo’s rules, to a degree. And in so doing, they showed that there was greater continuity before and after the reformer’s episcopate than he would have liked. After all, family crests and the tombs of the nobility were still found in churches, and fake or misidentified relics still proliferated. But the forged letter and fake ring also show that denizens of seventeenth-century Milan had mastered the ways of looking at and documenting relics that Borromeo and the Council of Trent had introduced—enough, even to counterfeit them.

Giovanni Paolo Bianchi, 1638 etching showing Carlo Borromeo’s crystal sepulcher
Giovanni Paolo Bianchi, 1638 etching showing Carlo Borromeo’s crystal sepulcher (© The Trustees of the British Museum)

Madeline McMahon is a post-doctoral fellow in history at UT Austin. You can find her on Twitter @madmcmahon.

______

[1] The letter, in Archivio Storico Diocesano di Milano VII A 25, fasc. 1, fol. 2r, is reprinted in Aristide Sala, Documenti circa la vita e le gesta di San Carlo Borromeo, vol. 3, vol. 3 (Milano: Ditta Boniardi-Pogliani di Ermenegildo Besozzi, 1861), 555, https://books.google.com/books?id=t1AYAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q=egidio%20bossi&f=false

[2] Biblioteca del Seminario Arcivescovile di Bologna, MS Oppizzoni 4901, fol. 7v.

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

15 Minute History – History of the Second Ku Klux Klan

Guest: Linda Gordon, Professor Emerita of History at New York University

Host: Alina Scott, PhD Candidate in the History Department at the University of Texas at Austin

Historians argue that several versions of the group known as the Ku Klux Klan or KKK have existed since its inception after the Civil War. But, what makes the Klan of the 1920s different from the others? Linda Gordon, the winner of two Bancroft Prizes and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, writes in The Second Coming of the KKK The Ku Klux Klan: of the 1920s and the American Political Tradition that the KKK of the 1920s expanded its mission to include anti-Black racism, anti-Catholicism, and anti-Semitism, electing legislators and representatives in government, and were hyper-visible. “By legitimizing and intensifying bigotry, and insisting that only white Protestants could be ‘true Americans,’ a revived and mainstream Klan in the 1920s left a troubling legacy that demands a reexamination today.” With more than a million members at its peak, the Second coming of the KKK was expansive, to say the least.

Episode 132: History of the Second Ku Klux Klan
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15 Minute History – Climate and Environmental History in Context

Guests: Megan Raby, Associate Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin & Erika Bsumek, Associate Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin

Host: Alina Scott, PhD Student in the Department of History at the University of Texas at Austin

How do historians teach Environmental History in an age where stories of climate change and catastrophe fill the headlines? Megan Raby and Erika Bsumek, both History Professors and Environmental Historians discuss what drew them to the field, how they talk about environmental history with their students, and the 2021 Institute for Historical Studies Conference, “Climate in Context: Historical Precedents and the Unprecedented” (April 22-23). “Among many other questions, the conference will ask: Can history offer an alternative to visions of the future that appear to be determined by prevailing climate models, and help provide us with new ways of understanding human agency?”

Episode 131: Climate and Environmental History in Context
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Mentioned in today’s episode:

15 Minute History – Black Reconstruction in Indian Territory

Guest: Alaina Roberts, Assistant Professor in the Department of History at the University of Pittsburgh

Host: Alina Scott, PhD Candidate in the History Department at the University of Texas at Austin

Even before the Civil War, Indian Territory was home to a wide array of groups including Native American Nations, enslaved Indian Freed-people, African Americans, White settlers, and a host of others. In a conversation on Black Reconstruction in Indian Territory, Alaina Roberts discusses what Reconstruction might have meant for Black people in what is now called Oklahoma. Roberts’ new book, I’ve Been Here All the While: Black Freedom on Native Land (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021), ties African American and Native American history tightly together, revealing a western theatre of Civil War and Reconstruction in which Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek, and Seminole Indians, their Black slaves, and African Americans and whites from the eastern United States fought military and rhetorical battles to lay claim to land in Indian Territory (modern-day Oklahoma) that had been taken from others.

Episode 130: Black Reconstruction in Indian Territory
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Resources:

15 Minute History – Slavery in the West

Guest: Kevin Waite, Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Durham University

Host: Alina Scott, PhD Student in the Department of History at the University of Texas at Austin

In the antebellum years, freedom and unfreedom often overlapped, even in states that were presumed “free states.” According to a new book by Kevin Waite, this was in part because the reach of the Slave South extended beyond the traditional South into newly admitted free and slave states. States like California found their legislatures filled with former Southerners who hoped to see California and others align with their politics. “They pursued that vision through diplomacy, migration, and armed conquest. By the late 1850s, slaveholders and their allies had transformed the southwestern quarter of the nation – California, New Mexico, Arizona, and parts of Utah – into a political client of the plantation states.” But it didn’t end there. The “continental South” as Waite calls it, had visions of extending into Central and South America as well as the Pacific. In West of Slavery, Waite “brings to light what contemporaries recognized but historians have described only in part: The struggle over slavery played out on a transcontinental stage.”  

Episode 129: Slavery in the West
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15 Minute History – The Racial Geography Tour at U.T. Austin

Guest: Edmund T. Gordon, Associate Professor of African and African Diaspora Studies & Vice Provost for Diversity at the University of Texas at Austin

Host: Joan Neuberger, Professor of History, University of Texas at Austin

For almost two decades, Edmund (Ted) Gordon has been leading tours of UT Austin that show how racism, patriarchy, and politics are baked into the landscape and architecture of the campus.  According to the now digitized tour’s website, “What began as lectures about UT’s Black history turned into a more sustained research project about the broader racial history of the University—an approach less taken. Controversies around the Confederate statues that once lined UT’s iconic South Mall were key sites to explore the intersection of the physical and geographical campus with its racial history. This physical articulation became a framework for examining other parts of UT’s campus and history and thus, the impetus for the public history provided in the walking tour.” Today, in a special episode recorded in April 2019, founding host, Professor Joan Neuberger and Professor Gordon discuss the history of the racial geography tour at UT Austin, the history of campus landmarks, and even the origins of the Eyes of Texas song.

Learn more at racialgeographytour.org/ or read an illustrated transcription of this conversation at notevenpast.org/the-racial-geography-tour-at-ut-austin/

Episode 128: The Racial Geography Tour at U.T. Austin
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15 Minute History – History of the U.S.-Mexico Border Region

Guest: C.J. Alvarez, Assistant Professor in Department of Mexican American & Latina/o Studies at the University of Texas at Austin

Host: Alina Scott, Ph.D. Student, Department of History, the University of Texas at Austin

In recent years, conversations about the US-Mexico border have centered around the border wall. However, according to today’s guest, C.J. Alvarez, the wall is one of many construction projects that have occurred in the border region in the last 30 years. “From the boundary surveys of the 1850s to the ever-expanding fences and highway networks of the twenty-first century, Border Land, Border Water examines the history of the construction projects that have shaped the region where the United States and Mexico meet.”

Episode 127: History of the U.S.-Mexico Border Region
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15 Minute History–Postwar Lesbian History

Guest: Lauren Jae Gutterman, Assistant Professor in the Department of American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin

Host: Alina Scott, Ph.D. Student, Department of History, University of Texas at Austin

The stereotypes of the 1950s family generally include a hardworking husband, a diligent housewife, their children, and a white picket fence. However, research by Lauren Gutterman and others suggests a much more flexible family system that included Lesbian relationships. In today’s episode, we talk to Dr. Gutterman about the postwar family, her book, Her Neighbor’s Wife: A History of Lesbian Desire Within Marriage, the stories of the women who “who struggled to balance marriage and same-sex desire in the postwar United States” and how this new history expands the landscape of LGBTQ history in this period to include the “homes of married women, who tended to engage in affairs with wives and mothers they met in the context of their daily lives: through work, at church, or in their neighborhoods.”

Episode 126: Postwar Lesbian History

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