The past is never dead. It's not even past

Not Even Past

Works in Progress: The Radical Spanish Empire

From the Editors: The Not Even Past Works in Progress series highlights groundbreaking new research that is not yet published. The idea is to give our readers a first look at current projects and upcoming publications. As the first in the series, we are fortunate to feature an important new work, The Radical Spanish Empire: Petitions and the Creation of the New World, under contract with Harvard University Press. 

The Radical Spanish Empire: Petitions and the Creation of the  New World (Harvard University Press, forthcoming) by Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra and Adrian Masters

Our book emerged from several years of conversations as Adrian was working on his dissertation on petitioning in 16th century Spanish America. Adrian demonstrated that hundreds of thousands of royal decrees were not just top-down fiats by a distant, overbearing, authoritarian monarch but the result of bottom-up petitions by vassals. Adrian proved that royal decrees were simply verbatim copies of letters sent by vassals of many social backgrounds (including male and female elites and commoners of countless ethnic backgrounds) to the King and his Council of the Indies. This unfolding insight led us to question the “liberal” historiography’s depiction of British America as a democratic, free-thinking, and modern foil to its downtrodden, corrupt, and medieval counterpart to the South. By following the ways the Spanish monarchy’s many vassals used petitions and litigation, we began to see patterns of radical social mobility and massive bottom-up participation that most major scholarship has failed to conceptualize.  

Codex Reese (Yale University-Beinke) ca 1565. Detail of Mexica (Aztec) land map. Hereditary nobility versus upstart lineages: with the Viceroy’s support, a commoner-judge (visitador) becomes the governor of the Mexica city of Tenochtitlan, unseating traditional Nahua Tenochtla nobilities. View Full Image.

The book is a detailed analysis of how the concept of “liberal modernity” works as cluster of cognates, including among them “print culture,” “public sphere,” “Protestantism,” “Scientific Revolution,” “parliamentary democracy,” and “Enlightenment,” that render invisible other potential combinations and paths of historical transformation. Spanish America appears always as the inverted mirror image of these clusters.

The Radical Spanish Empire explores in great archival detail the intense “democratic” social mobility triggered by the conquest. The category of “absolutism” as the antithesis of liberal modernity has rendered historiographically invisible the “participatory”, bottom-up, bitterly contested creation of all legal codes and categories (local, regional, and imperial) in colonial Spanish America. It has also blinded historians to the epistemological dynamism that shaped knowledge production, particularly in the sixteenth century. The sixteenth-century Spanish Indies were characterized by intense degrees of technological and scientific innovation that transformed the global economy. This massive transformation, akin to an industrial-cum-scientific revolution in the highlands of Mexico and Peru, was not the result of new “modern” forms of sociability (the public sphere and printing press) but of traditional forms of bottom-up (even secretive and thus coded) justice paperwork and vertical communication with regional and imperial authorities, both lay and ecclesiastical.

Our conversations and investigations gradually has developed a model which explains why the Spanish American context did not become an orderly ancien régime society between 1530-1570, and why, when it finally matured from 1570 to 1600, its social order was deeply alien to Iberia and much of Europe. Namely, we pinpoint how the Spanish Americas’ gargantuan bottom-up paperwork and local archives initially frustrated indigenous elites, powerful conquistadors, and friars. Gradually, a unique trinity of New World power emerged: royal favor, local archives, and wealth. Vassals of all backgrounds who mastered these three sources of power mastered a novel ancien régime built on paper, silver, and persuasion; those who did not faded slipped into anonymity. This dramatic century was thus not only one of violence and disease, but colossal bottom-up participation in imperial rule, radical political and conceptual invention, social mobility (both upwards and downwards), and wily questioning of the most cherished indigenous and Iberian mores. This model upsets the master narratives about Spanish America’s formative century, and exposes the myths underpinning British liberal exceptionalist scholarship.  

 The Radical Spanish Empire focuses on an early modern empire of paper, Spanish America, that experienced radical forms of social mobilization and governance that today we associate with “modernity.” Yet these very new forms of radical modernity led paradoxically to the constitution of hierarchical ancien regimes unlike any other in Europe.  Paperwork created Spanish America by first encouraging massive political participation in the business of government, collapsing through mediation and alliances European and Amerindian power elites. This same participation, however, led to the creation of top-down archives that not only slowed down the pace of change but also created a peculiarly resilient new ancien regime, neither indigenous nor European. By the late sixteenth century any individual who had royal favor, a robust personal archive, and money could secure status and generally overcome challenges about their status and ancestry. Our book seeks to explain this paradoxical trajectory of the early modern Spanish American polity, poised between radicalism (cultural, political, social and epistemological) and the immobility which we associate with societies of orders.

Indigenous petition-map (Cuaahtinchan Map #2 1540s dispute of commoners claiming they had been displaced by Mixtec-Nahua lords from original positions of power and they produced this map of history of conquest in the region near Chalco-Huexotzinco.

How to theorize the Conquest? In traditional accounts, a handful of Spaniards upended bewildered native rulers, and rapidly implemented a Catholic state modeled off of late medieval ideals, albeit with a new absolutist and authoritarian twist. Our book argues for a drastically different perspective. It begins by merging the New Conquest History, with its emphasis on indigenous politics and alliances with conquistadors, to fine-grained studies on the conquistadors’ drastic fall from power between 1530 and 1570. Quite unexpectedly, friars during this period stepped into the power vacuum caused by these twin collapses, often claiming the power to rule, judge, and even kill, only to lose power by the 1570s as well.  The few historians who do acknowledge the collapse of indigenous, conquistador, and monastic power tend to explain these groups’ misfortunes as products of the Habsburg state’s absolutism, which could not tolerate powerful elites. By contrast, we argue that this triple downfall was also due to the Habsburgs’ harnessing of two great but little-explored phenomena: a deluge of bottom-up paperwork against Indies strongmen, and the universal denunciations by subjects of their feudal lords as ‘tyrants.’ For four decades, then, an ancién régime did not take hold, as ‘tyrannical’ indigenous elites, local lords (caciques), conquistador-governors, lesser conquistadors, and friars repeatedly found themselves crushed by their rivals’ petitions, litigation, and witness statements. 

Our work calls attention to one to the most remarkable and little-known chapters of social mobilization and cross ethnic alliances through paperwork, namely, the emancipation of indigenous slaves and the rise of commoners. Drawing on a deep-seated moral and theological doubts within an Empire that assumed natives to be vassals, but that also promoted expansion by encouraging raiding, captivity, and vast internal indigenous slave markets, tens of thousands of slaves secured emancipation through petitioning via summary justice before indigenous and European judges and visitadores. Slaves often also secured some restitution and offers of resettlement. Indigenous commoners also mobilized though petitioning and paperwork, securing titles and establishing legal differences between cacique patrimonial property and community property. Commoners also wrestled political power away from old elites by either accessing political representation in indigenous municipal government or by simply separating themselves ethnically from multiethnic polities and neighborhoods and settling new lands. 

Codex Cuitzeo. Private archive. Britain.  1563 petition of Otomi slave, Francisco Quanbi, enslaved by Nahua lords and forced to work in mines in Cuitzeo, Michoacán. Quanbi (along with 12 other slaves) demand the return of lost property at the time of captivity: 40 bushels of corn, 11 plum trees, 14 pesos, and 2 baskets. Slaves – even the once-‘untouchable’ Otomíes – took advantage of their paperwork access to local officials, high judges, viceroys, and investigators to undermine their local overlords.  View Full Image

The Radical Spanish Empire seeks as well to explain how non-European knowledge and experimental science flourished through paperwork in the sixteenth century Indies. Scholars have widely regarded ‘grace’ or privilege paperwork as a conservative genre used by conquistadors to boastfully and repetitively assert their merit before the Crown. We argue this ostensibly ‘hidebound’ paperwork, considered broadly within its social context, could elicit profoundly non-traditional knowledge production – encouraging, for example, indigenous agents to produce and maintain proofs of individual, community, and regional privileges which reached back into the mists of time and used epistemological frameworks unintelligible to Spanish authorities.  

Here we contest the predominant post-colonialist perspective that the Spanish conquests universally sought the downfall of indigenous epistemologies. While many scholars have correctly noted that Catholic extirpations and other forms of violence often quashed non-European ways of thinking, there are no coherent models to explain why virtually all of the New World’s surviving non-European sources arose in the 1500s. Lastly, we tie privilege-seeking and gracia petitions not only to indigenous petitions, but to knowledge-production in general – including Spanish, part-Indian, and indigenous scientific endeavors. Both these non-European and scientific epistemological frameworks which emerged in the unsettled sixteenth century all acted as auxiliaries to a single master epistemology intelligible to all: the ‘conservative’ paperwork system of gracia. 

A fragment of an Andean court case between Domingo Sauli Chachapoya of Chupas, Peru and the would-be indigenous lord (cacique) from Chupas, the famous don Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala. While Guaman Poma claimed to be a cacique and produced substantial evidence in court that his family owned land since Inca times (his case also relied on this drawing of his ally don Guaman Malque), his local archives constituted insufficient evidence. In 1600, likely in a similar case, officials exiled Guaman Poma from Huamanga for fraudulently claiming to be a cacique. Guaman Poma went on to write the illustrated Nueva Corónica, a petition and chronicle which is widely considered one of the greatest artistic works in human history. His story shows the essential role of personal archives in the late sixteenth-century social order.

The Radical Spanish Empire argues that the Indies’ bottom-up paperwork, its distance from the royal court, its non-European epistemologies, and its feuding factions all produced a rich culture of textual skepticism. Scholars today frequently regard textual skepticism as an exclusively Northern European form of thought endemic among free-thinking liberals. Indeed, many suggest a tie between skepticism, democracy, and late modernity. We demonstrate that the furious paperwork battles of the sixteenth century Indies not only gave rise to a sustained culture of skepticism and doubt about the writing-and-word-based depiction of reality in the halls of Habsburg power, but that this skeptical culture was shared and encouraged by all Indies subjects, no matter how humble, as they sought to transform the world through paperwork. 

Yet, despite all the immense social mobility and cultural and epistemological radicalism triggered by European invasion of the Americas, roughly between 1570 and 1600, a new type of ancién régime began to emerge in the Indies that was alien to the indigenous, conquistador, and monastic feudalisms which arose and collapsed in the years 1530-1570. 

Scholars have identified two main reasons for this transition – the expansion of royal power in the Indies, and the replacement of feudal labor in the core regions for a complex, partly cash-based market economy. We add a third fundamental force to this model: archives. The rather innocuous boxes which all vassals’ filled with both royal privileges and money had been gradually accumulating in every household and corporation in the Indies, in the homes of the humblest Indian widow and the mightiest conquistador-governor. Major paperwork battles about wealth, jurisdiction, and social privilege hinged on these archives. The Crown, engaged in decades-long legalistic battles against its Indies rivals, began to build one of the world’s great archives by the late 1550s, ordering New World privileges, bureaucratically strangling its powerful foes, and bringing about legal standardization. Increasingly powerful royal officials – viceroys, bishops, and inquisitors – simultaneously deepened vassals needs for archives while often counteracting bureaucratization by creating their own patrimonial networks. These officials, hungry for revenue to compensate for Indian demographic collapse and expensive anti-piracy measures, allowed the commodification of status, trading money for privileges.  

Códice Coyoacán. Archivo de Simancas. Archives in mid-16th-century Mexico are breathtaking. Códice Coyoacán records some 30 years-worth of tribute contributions: different genders, property sizes, the landless, types of neighborhoods – rendered in pictographic information unlike Spanish or Mexica precedents. These texts reveal that even as Spanish rulers demanded indigenous cultures accept their domination, the everyday backs and forths of vassals and the Crown produced an array of new epistemological frameworks. View Full Image.

Money began to move entire archives, as Otomí peasants bought Moctezuma elites’ privileges, and Spaniards blackmailed rivals with Inquisition papers. Merchant families swallowed conquistador and indigenous elite branches, seeking to maximize others’ privileges to achieve greater revenues for themselves. All around, Indies textual production and society became increasingly ‘archival’ and commercial by the late 1500s. By 1600, then, vassals like the part-Tlaxcallan Diego Muñoz Camargo and others needed to master the Indies’ three cornerstones to survive and thrive: mastery of archives, royal approval, and wealth. A new ancién régime comprised of savvy vassals, rich bureaucrats, powerful officials, and merchants who consumed the privileges of anemic conquistador and indigenous lords, emerged. 

The Spanish New World’s ancien régime’s rocky evolution ensured that while the Indies did not meet liberal-democratic benchmarks, it excelled in stimulating massive participation in rule, a culture of anti-tyrannical agitation, radical politics, widespread skepticism, and profound questioning of previous social orders. Many of the elements so cherished by the exceptionalist liberal British historiography were, in fact, integral to the Spanish New World. When the ancien régime finally set root in the late 1500s, its more ossified structures now presented vassals with a challenging but sometimes attainable pathway to elite status: not through blue blood or money alone, but through deft exploitation of paperwork. This society was neither purely feudal and violent, nor fundamentally capitalistic. It was underpinned as well by an unlikely third force: millions of inert and innocuous pieces of paper.  

Dr. Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra is the Alice Drysdale Sheffield Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin. Dr. Adrian Masters completed his Ph.D. at UT in 2018 and is currently a post-doctoral fellow at Eberhard Karls Universität in Tübingen. 

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. 

IHS Climate in Context Roundtable Book Review: The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution (1980) by Carolyn Merchant

In 2020-21, the Institute for Historical Studies will convene a series of talks, workshops, and panel discussions centered on the theme “Climate in Context: Historical Precedents and the Unprecedented”. As part of that, we are delighted to publish this roundtable discussion consisting of three reviews focused on Carolyn Merchant’s The Death of Nature, a classic work in environmental history and the history of science. These reviews come out of Dr Megan Raby’s class, History Of Science And The Environment.

Nature’s Death or the Killing of Nature?

Caroline Merchant’s the Death of Nature (1980) challenges the heritage of progress often associated with the scientific revolution. Forty years since its first appearance, it is more relevant than ever. Rather than blindly accepting the fact that the scientific and intellectual developments of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries fostered progress for all, Merchant asks “progress for who?” as she examines how ideas about nature and scientific innovations brought, in addition to economic and intellectual development, social repression. She suggests an “ecosystem model of historical change,” which “looks at the relationship between the resources associated with a given natural ecosystem… and the human factors affecting its stability or disruption over a historical period” (p. 42-43). For her, nature and culture are deeply connected. Analyzing rich source material, ranging from fiction to scientific writing, Merchant reconstructs the process through which the scientific apparatus recognized alleged problems of disorder with both nature and women, subjugated and regulated the two, and finally institutionalized this intellectual tradition through modern science. 

Merchant begins her inquiry by identifying an intellectual tradition that began in ancient Greece, which associated the concept of “nature” with feminine qualities and projected a dual image of both nature and women. On the one hand, the earth was a “nurturing mother” who provided her children – humanity – with products and resources. Such was also the image of the mother/wife who held an important social role in maintaining the household and held key social positions in society. At the same time, nature/woman could be cruel, unpredictable, and chaotic, holding not only the power to build and nourish but to destroy. Some even went as far to  present women as witches. Both nature and women posed a challenge for those who aspired to reorganize society according to scientific principles. 

Merchant then moves on to describe how both nature and women were subjugated through the intellectual effort and the technological invasions of the scientific revolution. At the core of this revolution stood the idea that nature, which in the past was understood as a holistic organism, was actually a manageable system that can be taken apart and then reorganized to benefit human needs. The idea of a “mechanism,” according to which both nature and the human(feminine) body were seen as machines, allowed a reconfiguration of the two according to scientific as well as economic ideas and interests. The subjugation of nature reached its peak during the seventeenth century with Newton and Leibnitz, whose works helped institutionalize these ideas and created the basis of modern science. 

Highly acclaimed for her intervention in both environmental and feminist historiography, Merchant should also be praised for her unique contribution to understanding the power structures that fostered the scientific revolution. Her analysis begins with a Marxist reading of natural changes, where a capitalist struggle over the fenlands, farms, and forests of England (the means of production) resulted in the reconceptualization of “nature”, and later during the seventeenth century, of women as an economic resource. The realization that to maximize revenues and increase surplus value nature needs to be reconstructed and regulated was one of the main catalysts for the scientific revolution. The deterioration in the status of nature and the scientific/capitalist desire to control it was followed by attempts to subjugate women of various social classes. Scientific measures of experiment and regulation were used to control the behavior of lower-class women, while their middle- and upper-class contemporaries were stripped from their production and reproduction of social place and became passive, and therefore dependent on men’s support. 

For Merchant, the “death of nature”  was not only due to the dramatic ecological changes that followed the scientific revolution, where meadows turned into fields and forests to timber. Nature’s death was first and foremost the result of the collapse of the concept itself.  Nature, once a complex ecosystem built on interdependence and equilibrium, became an economic resource, stripped from its core values, turned into a machine in the service of men, a market worthy of man-made regulation. The process described in the book is not so much the “death” of “natural causes”, but rather the killing of it by the hands and minds of men and women who sought to subjugate it, transforming the once vivid system to a passive one. Merchant calls to restore equilibrium to the ecosystem and suggests possible solutions for some of our contemporary ecological and social challenges such as climate change and women’s oppression. The Death of Nature can be read not only as a description of the past, but also as a prescription for a better, more balanced and equal, future. 

Atar David is a Ph.D. student in the History department at the University of Texas at Austin. His research focuses on the socio-economic history of the modern middle east, with special emphasis on food, agricultural, and resource allocation.

A Predecessor to Intersectional Eco-Feminisms

Although Carolyn Merchant’s current research is focused on American Environmental history, her first and most influential publication had a much different geographic scope: 16th and 17th-century Europe. The Death of Nature is a text that remains at least as important today as it was following its original publication. Her scholarship explored parallels between women’s movements and ecological movements –both of which sought complementary kinds of liberation in the 1960s. It was also heralded by much more pointed events, like the Three-Mile Island reactor accident in 1979 Harrisburg, PA. More and more, it began to seem like the mastery over nature and women also meant their suffocation and demise. And so Merchant went to work. Her proto-ecofeminist arguments are perhaps even more relevant today, as the backdrop to both environmental activism and scholarship that foregrounds how the impact of environmental degradation is worse for different sectors of the population based on their gender and other forms of identity.

The book details the philosophical, political and economic transitions into modern capitalism and away from a more –to use her term– ‘organic’ understanding of nature. Merchant describes the dissection, control, management, capture and ultimate attempted mastery over nature that also paralleled an equally violent re-conception of women and their control, management, and subjection. Both nature and women, Merchant argues, have become increasingly (but never completely) subjected to man’s mind, his technology, and his theorization of their role in an ideal world. Her examples of violence to the (female) earth and women themselves range from mining to the execution of women accused of witchcraft and the use of forceps to do what men believed midwives could not. Notable men wrote philosophical treaties, supported them with (or used them to justify) capitalist economic systems, and developed physical and conceptual machines and instruments to achieve their progressive mastery over nature and women.

The scope of the book is wide. She foregrounds the role that the environment played in the history of European capitalist societies, like Dutch organic farming and early British technocratic farming during the 16th and 17th centuries. She also identifies the patriarchal philosophical traditions that envisioned organic quasi-egalitarian utopias (like Campanello’s City of the Sun) but also those with sexist and oppressive ones (like Bacon’s New Atlantis). Finally, she situates particular machines, like the clock, in the mechanization of nature. Through wide-ranging sources and methodologies, Merchant firmly establishes her argument within philosophy, environmental history and history of science.

The writing is detailed, but her sections are scaffolded and easy to follow. This makes the text both accessible to a more general audience and worthy of inclusion in any academic study. Some sections contain intriguing and powerful illustrations with historical woodcuts, etchings or drawings. The visual quality of these images provides bold visual references and forceful characterization to her subject: the patriarchal ideas about mastery of nature weren’t only abstractions, but realities experienced by women’s bodies. 

As a robust argument for the relationship between the domination of nature and the domination of woman, The Death of Nature paved the way for other kinds of histories of science vis-a-vis particular identities. For example, Merchant’s ‘historicizing ‘the theory of female passivity in reproduction’ during the 16th century, likely influenced –if not all together enabled– the histories that detail the medical experimentation on Black women slaves in the American south during 19th century (such as Deirdre Cooper Owens’ Medical Bondage: Race, Gender, and The Origins of American Gynecology (2017)). In summary, the text remains ambitious, rich in sources and approaches, and opened many doors for scholarship to follow its footsteps.

Khristián Méndez Aguirre is a theatre-maker and arts-based researcher, currently a second-year PhD student in Performance as Public Practice in the Department of Theatre and Dance. His research focuses on the relationship between theatrical performance and climate change in the Americas. He holds a B.A. in Human Ecology from College of the Atlantic (Bar Harbor, ME, USA) and an MFA in Performance as Public Practice.

Reviving The Death of Nature: Female presences in the configuration of the Early Modern cosmos

Forty years ago, Carolyn Merchant published The Death of Nature which aimed to critically reassess the Scientific Revolution by considering changes in the conceptions of nature in Renaissance Europe. Merchant embraced an ecofeminist perspective, associating images of nature with feminine allegories and metaphors that were popular in intellectual spheres. She linked the consolidation of mercantilist capitalism to environmental transformations and scientific reflections of an expanded canon of thinkers (including women, utopians, and magicians).  

She argued that precapitalist nature was understood as a living nurturing feminine organism before the Scientific Revolution, before being gradually transformed into a feminine wild or inert mechanism. That new conception of nature demanded to be controlled and exploited for human benefit and progress. The triumph of mechanism condemned to a secondary role the images of nature, earth, and cosmos as holistic or vital systems, although twentieth-century ecology tended to recover some of those ideas with a certain degree of reductionism.

This book lies halfway between the history of science and environmental history, carefully considering the discourses of thinkers and the concrete processes of land-owning, usage, and exploitation. Because of that, the author analyzed processes of farming, deforestation, famines, fens-drainage. Regarding Francis Bacon, she described how his works illustrate the triumph of mechanism and exploitation of nature, based on the development of crafts and sciences to know and claim power over the female nature. Merchant discovered that the “penetrations” and “inquisitions” of the new Baconian method were related to the language used in witch trials, observing the overlaps in their sexist biases. 

The book organizes its narrative and argument around the correspondences between nature and women. Thus, the changes in women’s reproductive and productive roles in a mercantilist world were analogous to the “death” or mechanization of nature. Notable examples of this were the subjugation of early modern women to housework and the end of traditional midwifery. Furthermore, she examined  alchemical and philosophical approaches to the conciliation of feminine and masculine aspects of the cosmos and charted the role of female thinkers in the preservation of holistic perspectives of nature. For instance, she studied Margaret Cavendish, a literate and naturalist closely related to the Royal Society of London, and Anne Conway, a cabalist and natural philosopher who was close to Leibniz.

This is a militant book that emphasized the normative condition of the relation between humans and nature. This in no way undercuts the strength and relevance of its purpose.  Merchant’s style and arguments were deeply empowered by ecofeminism, and her intentions were not merely descriptive. She was denouncing the moral implications of the transformation in the conceptions of nature and woman in modernity (which were still relevant to her and our time). In a late-Cold War age, she supported an ecological critique of capitalist progress and mechanist sciences from the academic sphere but also engaged as an intellectual in the effort to bring closer the social movements of environmentalism and feminism, very active during the second half of the twentieth century. 

Merchant engaged in a context of growing academic criticism toward the technical rationality of modernity, following the legacies of Heidegger and Marcuse. Besides, the influence of the Annales School (a historiographic trend) seems clear when it comes to her effort in connecting geographical and ecological concerns with social history. Additionally, she was committed to Bookchin’s anarchic-communism, shaping her analysis of late-medieval communal peasantry and their organic interactions with nature and also her ideological support to communitarian projects which understand nature as a holistic system rather than as a resource (Mitman, 2006). Nevertheless, she did not advocate for a return to premodern conceptions of nature. 

A few critiques can be suggested: she still believed in the existence of a modern Scientific Revolution (Park 2006) and overestimated the agency of intellectual sources to explain concrete environmental changes, instead of focusing on practices. Moreover, the relative omission of the Iberian discovery and conquest of the New World, seems glaring in retrospect (Park 2006). However, her work has brought new opportunities for the scholarship to reframe the relationship between Iberian naturalists and the New World starting from their considerations of nature as wild or profitable.  

This book is, despite the latter critiques, a milestone in ecofeminist approaches to the histories of science and the environment. This book should interest readers concerned with natural philosophy, political thought, feminism, and environmentalism. Merchant was important in reframing a predominantly patriarchal history of early modern science and providing a nuanced and source-rich testimony of how gender problems and real women were always present and active in this long story. 

Rafael David Nieto-Bello is a first-year Ph.D. student in the History Department. He holds a BA in Political Science and History from the Universidad de Los Andes (Bogota, Colombia). His research interests include the history of social knowledge, Latin America’s intellectual history, ethnohistory, and history of science in the early modern Atlantic. He is currently working on the Relaciones Geográficas’ concern on depicting Spaniards and indigenes’ customs and the configuration of social knowledge to “govern better” the Spanish Atlantic empire.

References

  • Mitman, Gregg. 2006. “Where Ecology, Nature, and Politics Meet: reclaiming The Death of Nature.” Isis, no 3 (September): 496-504.
  • Owens, Deirdre Cooper. Medical Bondage: Race, Gender, and the Origins of American Gynecology. University of Georgia Press, 2017.
  • Park, Katharine. 2006. “Women, gender, and Utopia: The Death of Nature and the Historiography of Early Modern Science.” Isis, no 3 (September): 487-95.

Image Credit | Image 1: Cover of Death of Nature; Image 2: Photo by Tom Fisk from Pexels; Image 3: Portrait of Francis Bacon via Library Company of Philadelphia.

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.

An Interview with Dr. Jeremi Suri and Zachary Suri, This is Democracy

This semester, Not Even Past announced a collaboration with This is Democracy, a podcast hosted and developed by Dr. Jeremi Suri and his son Zachary. Jeremi Suri holds the Mack Brown Distinguished Chair for Leadership in Global Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin. He is a professor in the University’s Department of History and the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs. NEP Associate Editor, Alina I. Scott sat down with the Suris to discuss the origins of This is Democracy, their reasons for selecting guests, and much more. Listen to the interview or read the transcriptions below.

AIS: So to start out our conversation. This is a really interesting time to be in the United States to be talking about democracy. And this podcast is incredibly timely. So I want to start out with just a basic introduction. What is This is Democracy? And how would you introduce this to someone who’s not necessarily familiar with the podcast?

JS: Thanks for the question, Alina. This is Democracy is a unique podcast. Our podcast is aimed at a wide range of listeners, in particular, younger listeners, as well as scholars and policymakers and experienced citizens. And our goal with This as democracy is to have conversations with people who are doing important work in our society today, drawing on the past to build a better future. So every episode is historically informed. Every episode is about actions, challenges opportunities today, and using historical knowledge and experience to build a better future. It’s very much about what Franklin Roosevelt who inspires this podcast, what he called the new chapters of democracy that are built based on knowledge of the old chapters, and addressing the concerns of our current moment. And I’m going to let Zachary say a little more, because he’s been instrumental in thinking about the substance and also the audience for this podcast.

Zachary Suri: Yes, so one of the things we try and do is we try and bring guests from across many different parts of society and academia. In particular, we try and highlight scholars at UT, and across the country who are doing important research that maybe doesn’t get the attention that it deserves. But every episode, we try and make it directly relevant for young people.  And we always conclude our podcast with the question, how should young people get involved in this? So that’s really one of the central themes of our podcast.

JS: And one other point I just want to make and I’m sure we’ll talk about this more one of the defining features of our podcast, Alina, is that we really embrace the arts. We believe that history and social change and democracy. These are arts, which is to say, they are constantly being remade in creative ways by new kinds of people with different backgrounds and different experiences. There’s no formula. And for that reason, we open every podcast with an original poem, we’ve now had 121 episodes, and 121 poems by by Zachary and the idea of the poem is to set the theme for the topic we’re talking about that week, but also to open us all up for discussions outside of our normal comfort zones outside of our routines to really address issues as artists, not as ideologues. Not even as traditional academics. But as people trying to make sense of a complex world. Zachary, do you want to say a little more about your poetry writing, which really is the defining moment it’s extraordinary. Alina people often when they tell us how much they like the podcast, they mentioned Zachary’s poems more than more than anything else.

ZS: Yes. So the goal of the poem is to frame the discussion. But also to bring a literary element podcast. I think that’s one of the things that makes our podcast special- we’re not just hearing about the news or current events or history. We’re also thinking about it from a literary perspective and perspective of ordinary Americans.

AIS: That’s fantastic. That was one of the first things that drew me to this podcast are those opening poems. They are so captivating, and every single one of them is so rich. And so that brings me to my next question on one of the many strengths of this podcast, which is the diversity of guests. There are academics, students, there was a presidential biographer, there are representatives from the city of Austin. And the topics you cover are just as diverse. I remember, as a TA for one of your classes, we were having a conversation in class with the students and by the end of the week, there were some students on the podcast as guests. And so I wonder,  was this choice intentional to include this wide range of guests and topics?

ZS: Yeah, that’s one of the great things about doing this podcast as a partnership is that each of us suggest new guests, and it’s not always easy, but we always come to a table compromise. And I think that’s part of the reason we’ve had such a wide range of guests. And I think that it allows us to look at these issues from many different lenses through a literary lens, a historical lens, an activist lens, a political lens. And I think that that really allows us to see the issues from from a new perspective.

JS: And, and one thing I’ll add, Zachary has been instrumental in forcing me to think beyond the usual suspects. One of the things we fall into, Alina, and I think in all professions, is that we end up with a closed circle, people we know people who we read, we have our subfields, we have our spaces of routine, and having Zachary as an instrumental part of planning each week’s episode, and we do an episode every week, really his input, and then the input from students, the input from graduate students, the input from listeners, I get a lot of emails each week suggesting guests, sometimes people suggesting themselves. But that multiplicity of influence every week reminds me that I shouldn’t just rely on the usual suspects. And that’s a really interesting intellectual opening. For me and Zachary, each week, we have interesting discussions about the topic we want to talk about, and the person we want to have on. And we don’t have an agenda, which is to say, we don’t have an ideological point of view. We don’t have a desire for people to say certain particular things. What we want are people of all walks of life, who are seriously thinking about democracy, about what democracy has been, in all its good and bad elements, what it has become today, and what we want it to become tomorrow. And beyond that we are open and some of our best discussions are with students, as you mentioned, or social activists, as well as policymakers or, or historians.

ZS: Yeah, I just want to say too, that one of the things that that quarantine and COVID-19 has forced us to do, and in many ways enabled us to do is to reach guests across the country and the world in a way we weren’t before when we were in the studio. With the technology that we have to use to record out of the studio, we’re actually able to reach people as far as Berlin this week. And a couple of weeks ago, we did one in Massachusetts and all across the world. And I think that’s actually a real strength of this moment. And I think that really makes our podcast special.

AIS: So to bring it back to the original idea for the podcast. How did it start? And what sort of need were you trying to meet in the podcasting realm?

JS: That’s a great question. So before we started this podcast, Alina, I had only intermittently listened to podcasts here or there. I was not an avid podcast listener before we started. And I remember the moment this podcast began, actually, Zachary and I were sitting at the counter kitchen, which is one of my favorite diners here in Austin. I miss not having been there now in six months. We were sitting there. In the afternoon, it was the late summer of 2017. And I had just published I was just about to publish my most recent book, The Impossible presidency. And Zachary said to me over some greasy cheeseburgers that we were eating, that we go there when mom and Natalie are not with us, so we can have greasy cheeseburgers. He said to me, you know, it’s really great that you’ve written another book. But if you really want people to engage in your work, you need to do a podcast. And we’ve had, we had a long conversation. And he at that time was listening to a really phenomenal podcast series. It’s not an ongoing podcast, but it’s a series that was produced by public radio in Chicago called the making of Obama. It’s just phenomenal because it goes back. It’s really not about Obama’s presidency. It’s about the history of Chicago, and how Chicago shaped Obama in his time as an activist there, and they talked to activists, politicians, civil rights workers, police others. And it just opened my mind listening to that, not simply to the topic, but to the way in which the podcast form, Alina, opens the conversation, how it’s less hierarchical, less authoritative, there still is an inequality between the producer and the listener. But it’s a much more open, artistic, creative space. And the informality allows for an interrogation of issues and the creation of civil conversation in ways that we don’t see enough of in our society, quite frankly, in ways that we often don’t do well enough in the classroom. And so the potential to reach a larger audience to do it in an informal meaningful way, in a way that’s substantive really attracted me to it, and we were working closely or I was working closely With the liberal arts Instructional Technology service at the University of Texas, I think you were actually ta for me at the time in the coming semester. Or maybe you would just ta for me, and my class and I talked to them about it. And they were super enthusiastic. And as always, the technical assistance we get it UT is just phenomenal. And it should be said that our podcasts succeeds in part because of the role that university plays in particularly liberal arts Instructional Technology Services and supporting the podcast and supporting its use in my classes. And that partnership has really been crucial, but we wouldn’t be doing the podcast if it hadn’t been for Zachary’s suggestion about it. Zachary, would you want to say more about that?

ZS: There’s not really much more to say but that, that one of the things we want to do as well is highlight all these scholars and activists around us who had really interesting things to say, but never really had a platform. And so try and keep the podcast, globally informed. But we also try and keep it locally grounded at the same time.

JS: And just to give a couple of examples, because Zachary is absolutely right. And he is he is focused on that every week, you know, we really try to showcase people who are doing interesting things, and newcomers, so we’ve had people like your colleague and fellow graduate student Augusta Dell’ Omo who was recently on CNN, so I guess she’s now made it to another level as well. We’ve had Chris Rose, another graduate student of ours, we’ve had young professors as well as more established professors, we’ve had young activists as well as more established activists. And I do want to say that in comparison, even to TV and radio, where there is a tendency to look for the established names, this podcast platform really allows us to showcase people who are not well known yet but perhaps have more interesting things to say. And many of them are connected to our university. Many of them are not, and that’s fine, too. We can do both.

AIS: Something else that really strikes me about this podcast is that it is multi-generational like you are doing it as father and son, but also collaborating together, and also engaging in issues in both the historical and contemporary realms. And so I’m wondering, why was that important, at the beginning of the podcast, to be engaging in issues, from historical to more contemporary topics?

ZS: Well, the entire impetus of the podcast was to try and make history and historical scholarship matter to young people. And so we’ve always tried to keep at its core, our podcast centered around bringing the voices of scholars and historians, to young people. And that’s why it’s so important that we do this in a multi-generational way. And even in our guests try to reach across generations, within fields and try to reach across continents even.

JS: And I’ll just build on that for a second Alina. I mean, you know, one of the one of the really important elements of this is that we approach this as a podcast about the history and future of democracy. But we think about it as historically interested in carrying people, but not people who are just speaking to historians. In fact, we are speaking to historians, but our goal is to bring the history to those who often don’t have a connection to it. And the multi-generational element there is crucial, because one of our operating principles is that there are a lot of young people out there who should be interested in history. But they’re not because it’s not presented to them in the way that connects to their own experiences to their own background. Maybe they’re from diverse backgrounds, and the history is being presented to them in a way that doesn’t speak to that diversity, or it doesn’t speak to their experiences, or it’s presented from a textbook alone, or it’s presented in a politically narrow way. And, and our goal is to reach beyond that. And our faith is that the history itself, the topics carry interest for people, we organize the podcast around the topics that we think will appeal to a wide range of people, particularly younger educated listeners, and the guest in a sense, that’s who the guest is, is secondary to that it’s not about the name of the guest, even though we sometimes have famous people on those aren’t always our best episodes. It’s about the topic and the substance of the history. What draws us as historians you and I and Zachary to these topics, but in a way that will draw people who don’t have the history bug or don’t know they have it yet.

AIS: So on that vein, what do you enjoy most about this podcast?

JS: Gosh, I enjoy everything about it. I’d say, first and foremost, I enjoy doing this with my son. It’s such a wonderful privilege for me to be able to spend time thinking about this each week with Zachary and to learn from Zachary. And to do this with him it is, it’s a joy beyond words, I have to say, I love talking to our guests, many of our guests are people I have talked to before many people I have not talked to before we’ve had people on whose work we read, or who we saw their activism, or somehow we came across them. And the first time we’ve talked to them is in preparation for the podcast. And I love meeting and connecting with people in a format where we get to learn deeply about what they do what they care about. And that is all contributed not only to the enjoyment and the wider sense of citizenship that I’ve developed from this, but it’s also changed my scholarship, Alina, it’s really widened my own lens on thinking about the history of democracy, a topic I’ve written a lot about, and I’m writing a new book about how a topic I lecture about and teach about. It’s really opened my lens to more voices, but also to a wider range of conceptual issues that I hadn’t thought about as deeply before. And I find myself going and doing research and reading more deeply on topics on the actual substantive talk topic, but also the conceptual architecture, in ways I wouldn’t have if I didn’t have these conversations. So at every level, it’s, it’s so much, it’s so much fun.

ZS: Yeah, I would say that what I find most fascinating about doing the podcast is, is sort of learning about something or coming across something in school or outside of school, or with my dad. And, and, and being able to immediately set up a podcast about that and to go into depth about a topic that that seemed interesting at face value. But it’s even more interesting when you start to get into it. And I think that has really broadened my horizons to so many different perspectives, and topics. And every week, I come out of the podcast, thinking about all these different things that really shaped my world that I never realized before. And I think that’s one of the really positive things that our podcast offers to young people.

AIS: Wow. I mean, maybe every historian should do a podcast. This is fantastic.

JS: I think so, you know, it was Carl Becker who writes in every person, is his own historian, I think every historian, her own podcast.

AIS: So we’re coming to the end of the interview. But I have a question about the podcast. What can we expect from This is Democracy going forward? Can you give us any insights into guests that you might have on in the future? What can we expect from the This is Democracy?

JS: That’s a great question. And one of the wonderful things about this podcast is, we’re always thinking about topics that need to be covered more, because there’s interesting work out there, but also because they’re relevant. And we’re not trying to catch up with the headlines. We’re trying to provide the historical background that people need to think about what’s going on in their world and think forward. So I’d say that we have been thinking long and hard in the lead up to this election and preparing as we all are, for the aftermath of this election, which hopefully will come soon. We’ve been thinking about how our podcast can provide people not simply with information, certainly not just with more opinions are going to be hearing lots of opinions. But with a historical framework for understanding what seems such a disorienting, chaotic time, we’re not going to be doing podcast episodes on Democrats or Republicans. But we are going to be talking about how democracy adjusts in periods of difficult transition. How have we adjusted in the past? What can we learn what have other societies done? We also are very committed, I think, to have more voices on from activists, one of the strange things about this moment we’re in is we’re hearing more and more, but the voices we hear tend to be overwhelmingly voices of established political figures arguing with one another. We really want to get a sense and showcase the multiplicity of actors in our societies who are doing creative things that in the long run will probably have more effects or I think of those involved in racial justice, those involved in dealing with economic inequality, and dislocation health activists, those really trying on the grassroots level to rethink how we deliver health care. All of these topics have a long history. And we’re going to be bringing in various thinkers and actors in those settings, to describe how that history influences their work today and hopefully to inspire listeners to use that history as they move forward in 2021, and other periods to rebuild democracy to remake democracy, we’re optimistic that there’s a creative, exciting future for democracy, but it’s going to look very different than it did even a few months ago. And we want to be providing some of the historical inspiration and background. For those who are doing this work going forward.

ZS: I would say that one of the things that I hope to do in the next few months, and I think that we’re really on the path towards, is bringing more of a literary lens into guests as well. I think oftentimes, we have a lot of activists or, people who are very engaged in politics. But I think we also need to recognize that there’s a cultural and linguistic lens to all of these things that we’re talking about. We’ve recently had a literary scholar from Amherst, a philosopher in Berlin, all sorts of really interesting guests, and I, and I hope we can continue that moving forward.

JS: And we have and Alina, you’re certainly one of these individuals, we have so many talented young scholars, and activists, and sometimes they’re one in the same emerging in our department in the Department of History, I think one of the preeminent departments in the country, and other departments at the University of Texas and other schools. And we will be showcasing, I think more and more young scholars because they need a platform, they need an opportunity to share their wisdom and their work. And I think our listeners will want to hear from them. In many ways. I think our listeners want to hear from people who are not showcased elsewhere, they can hear from established names and other venues. They look to us to bring interesting people to them who they haven’t heard from before.

AIS: I completely agree. That is so fantastic. And there’s so much to look forward to. So since we have a couple of minutes left, I do have another question. We are less than two weeks away from the presidential election last night was the final presidential debate of the season.

JS: Thank God

AIS: Yes, it’s over. And we’re recording this on Friday. So it’s all very fresh in our minds. And so I’m wondering what both of you would recommend for your listeners for first time voters for those who are not old enough to vote? How would you recommend they engage in politics in history during the season? And one of the most consequential elections for the state of democracy in recent history?

JS: That’s a fantastic question. I think about this a lot, Alina,  because students often ask me questions in this vein, not quite as eloquently as you put it, but they often ask I know that asked you to and I would say two things. But these are not perfect answers because it is a very difficult question. I think first, it’s really important to understand what elections have meant in American society, they’ve obviously meant a lot. But they’ve always been complex, messy, unfair, unjust. And, and that in no way makes us feel better about our moment today and in no way excuses all the dirty laundry of our history and our elections. But I think understanding this should buck one up to get more involved and to see the importance of quite frankly, fighting for what you believe in, and I don’t mean violently fighting for what you believe in, we write about and teach about our elections in high school classes, as if they’re these you know, orderly processes. People go and they fill out a ballot, and then we calculate the results. They’ve never really been that way. They’ve always been hard-fought battles with all kinds of anger, all kinds of efforts of cheating, and they only work. They only work when people are vigilant and involved and willing to fight for what they believe in to stand up for their rights. We talk a lot about civil rights activists in that context, we talk a lot about women’s suffrage, just in that active in that context. This is true for all groups for all immigrant groups, for all groups in our society. So seeing that history and seeing that one is part of a long history of fighting for democracy and again, nonviolently fighting and standing up for your democracy. That’s really important. I think that’s inspiring. I think that’s a sense of duty that we get from reading this history. It contextualizes our moment and then second, I still believe Alina, that we need a model, calling them heroines or heroes is probably not right. But we need models, we need people we can look up to people who remind us that there’s something noble in politics, that there’s a purpose. It’s not just a fight over power between angry old white men. There really is a deeper purpose in our politics. It’s not always evident. At certain moments, we see more purposeful politicians than others. But for us to see that there’s something new Noble and essential in what we’re doing, and to look back and find figures and I hope every citizen and I think every citizen, every person can find people in the past flawed people in the past sinful people in the past, but people in the past, nonetheless, who can be inspiring for many of my students, it might be a civil rights activist, it might be a suffragist. For some, it might be a secretary of state, it might be a military commander. Again, we’re not looking for heroes. We’re not looking for men of marble. But we’re looking for those who remind us of the nobility and purpose in what we’re doing for our podcast, to some extent, is Franklin Roosevelt. We were inspired, both Zachary and me, and many of my students who were forced to listen to my lectures about Franklin Roosevelt, you were one of them, you had to listen as the teaching assistant. I’m inspired by Franklin Roosevelt’s flawed, but still serious and deep commitment to making democracy work for citizens who had been disengaged for so long connecting them. And using the power of our democracy, to give people a chance and opportunity for them that they didn’t have otherwise, it was unequal. He did not think about citizens in equal and fair ways across racial groups across gender. But he did believe that all citizens should be involved in served by government and that inspires us because we want our podcast to engage everyone and to make everyone feel like they have a place and a role and an opportunity. So I think history helps in that sense, there is some idealism some hope we can find in history, if we don’t study history, we can get lost in and sometimes we all feel this way, lost in the mess of our time and lose sight of what’s really important and become disillusioned and cynical. And then the bad guys, when we have to see that there is a possibility in the past, there’s an alternative to what we’re living with now. And we can take the past as inspiration for that. Zachary, what do you think?

ZS: I was just gonna add that I think one of the things that comes through in our podcast is that all of the topics we talked about, no matter how tangentially related to politics, they are, are dependent on the protection of our democracy, and say in politics. So I think if you care about any of these issues that we talked about on our podcast every week, you can’t isolate yourself from politics or from our elections, you have to get involved.

AIS: Well, thank you both so much. And thank you for joining us today. I would encourage all of our listeners to keep an eye out for more crossover content from Not Even Past and This is Democracy. You can subscribe to This is Democracy wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you so much, Professor Suri and Zachary again.

JS: Thank you Alina.

ZS: Thank you.

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

The Purpose of a History PHD: Lessons Learned from Career Diversity

From the editors: Over the past 5 weeks we have been delighted to publish a new series, Navigating the PhD and Beyond: Lessons from the AHA Career Diversity Initiative. The series was presented and curated by Alejandra Garza as part of the AHA Career Diversity for Historians Initiative. As the 2018-20 graduate student fellow, Alejandra’s goal was to show graduate students and professors that the skills developed in a PhD program “are applicable no matter what we do when we leave.” Read more about her experience here. In this last article, we showcase the AHA Career Diversity Initiative and its results more generally. The article published below first appeared in AHA Perspectives on History on August 14, 2020. As preface for this last article in our Not Even Past series, we asked Alejandra Garza to summarize her overall experience and the importance of what was achieved.

AHA Career Diversity Concluding thoughts from Alejandra Garza

In June 2018, I sat in a meeting room at the American Historical Association headquarters in Washington, D.C as one of the nineteen other newly appointed Career Diversity fellows. James Grossman, executive director of the AHA, welcomed us with a question, “What is the purpose of a PhD in History?”  We stared back at him, not knowing what the “correct answer” was. Honestly, I don’t think there was just one. Rather, I think Dr. Grossman was planting a seed that the fellows and their faculty partners would water for the next two years. We were expected to leave D.C. after those few days with ideas, not solutions. How were we going to change the culture around career development in our departments? A room full of historians knew that changing the culture of something was not going to happen overnight. We needed to plant the seeds. Two years later, I see those ideas blooming across the universities that participated in this initiative. We are no longer satisfied with the idea that the purpose of a PhD in History leads to one type of job. The various ways twenty history departments used their time in this initiative shows that.

The purpose of a History PhD by the AHA Career Diversity Fellows

The AHA’s Career Diversity for Historians initiative is leading a national conversation to better align the purpose of doctoral education with the varying skills, values, and interests of graduate students and the changing professional opportunities for historians within and beyond the academy. In the spring of 2018, 20 PhD-granting history departments were awarded Career Diversity implementation grants to support a team of faculty and a graduate student fellow to collaboratively build sustainable cultural and structural change in their doctoral programs. After two years of work at our partner institutions, we asked the fellows to discuss what they’ve learned and share some of the innovative ways they are creating student-centered doctoral programs that prepare history PhDs for a range of careers.

In this post, the sixth of a six-part series, the Career Diversity fellows reflect on how two years of department-focused work has changed their views on the purpose of doctoral education in history, on higher education in general, and their own careers.

WHAT DO YOU THINK IS THE PURPOSE OF A HISTORY PHD?

Vanessa Madrigal-Lauchland (Univ. of California, Davis): Most folks interpret “What is the purpose of a history PhD?” as “What can one do with a history PhD?” The Career Diversity initiative has worked hard to answer that question with a resounding, “Anything you want.” However, the heart of the question, “What is the purpose of a history PhD?” is really asking about our goals as humanists in this world. This forces us to reflect on our values, relationship with our communities, and our impact on society. 

Derek Kane O’Leary (Univ. of California, Berkeley): I don’t know. But I would love to see my department bring together faculty, grad students, undergrads, and alumni to collaboratively craft an answer to that and publish it on our website.

Lillian Wilson (Wayne State Univ.): I worked in museums and as a community college and art college lecturer before beginning the PhD and understood that I needed the doctorate to advance in the museum world or in academia. My work for Career Diversity has revealed to me that I can have a meaningful career that merges my strengths as a teacher and mentor, museum administrator, and scholar.

Matt Reeves (Univ. of Missouri–Kansas City),: The PhD is a signifier of professional approval. What, precisely, that sign of approval means is up to faculty in PhD-granting departments. But those expectations can (and should) change as the nature of the work performed by PhDs changes. As graduate students have the freedom to make their degree work for their careers, faculty have the freedom to redefine doctoral degree requirements. If we believe that people with PhDs are a positive good for society both within and beyond academe, then it’s time that faculty accept diverse new comps fields and capstone projects beyond the traditional dissertation. 

Stephanie Narrow (Univ. of California, Irvine): The history PhD naturally attracts the intellectually curious, those who seek to find new perspectives on past and present issues. The PhD should foster this curiosity so that graduate students feel empowered to explore professionalization and career pathways with the same spirit of inquiry that they do their research agendas.

Trishula Patel (Georgetown Univ.): A PhD in history provides training not only in the traditional aspects of research, historiography, and pedagogy, but in the intellectual grounding that we’re given to articulate our work’s value beyond the academy. Many PhD students and faculty write for popular media outlets, teach outside the university, or engage with the public in ways that go beyond the occasional interview or op-ed. The ultimate goal, I believe, should be to give students the intellectual and practical tools to teach, research, and apply what we learn to policy, activism, and the greater good of society. 

Allison Faber (Texas A&M Univ.): The most challenging part of this question is to determine one purpose of a history PhD. Broadly, a PhD signals that one has completed the highest level of training in historical research methods and historiography. However, that training is fruitless without sharing the knowledge and tools gained during a doctoral program. So, I would say that the purpose of a history PhD is to give students the ability to effectively use historical thinking to shed light on historical problems and to communicate that knowledge to others.

The first article in the Not Even Past series

Brian Campbell (Univ. of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign): We need historical expertise now more than ever. Historians excel at explaining difficult concepts in the classroom, and such evidence-based historical learning should be a foundational part of any high school and middle school experience. We could better support graduate students who aspire to teach K–12, as well as in other educational spaces like prisons. Also more historians could be working as analysts and consultants, helping to inform decision-making that affects policy, governance, and culture.

DO YOU THINK ABOUT HIGHER EDUCATION DIFFERENTLY NOW?

Vanessa Madrigal-Lauchland (Univ. of California, Davis): The term “higher education” always brought to mind the image of a bar just out of reach. It’s in the name, right? “Higher.” It wasn’t created for me, the Xicana, the first-generation American, the girl who lived squished in a one-bedroom apartment with her giant family. Even as I earned my way into more advanced programs and became part of the system, the mass and momentum of higher education seemed alien and separate from my passive existence as a student. But this experience empowered me (and other students) to collaborate with faculty, cross-campus institutions, and administrators to make concrete and identifiable change. After this fellowship, I think of higher education as a system supported and driven by a passionate community of individuals committed to education and equality, who are willing to work toward changing a structure that was built to resist it. 

Stephanie Narrow (Univ. of California, Irvine): My work has opened my eyes to the complexity of universities and their administrative hierarchies, especially in a large system like the University of California. We’ve found success in navigating institutional channels by partnering with other campus organizations, and working through, rather than against, the university. 

Tim Herbert (Univ. of Illinois at Chicago): I’ll admit that I had a naive and privileged view of higher education before I started graduate school. (The Ivory Tower! Life of the Mind!) Participating in Career Diversity accelerated the shift in my views already under way and gave me a better framework for thinking about higher education. I also have a greater appreciation for the work faculty do, especially the committee and service work that is often invisible to graduate students. For instance, I’ve watched our department chair handle budgeting at a time when Illinois’s finances—and thus the University of Illinois at Chicago’s financial state—were emerging from total chaos (Illinois effectively did not have a complete budget for two years prior to 2018). 

Andrew Brown (Texas A&M Univ.): This fellowship has provided me with the opportunity to wade into the world of faculty politics and helped me learn more about department and college service than ever before. Service is not a small part of each faculty member’s job but it is probably the area most graduate students are unprepared for in the academy. I learned how decisions are made in our department and college, which helped me gain an appreciation for the people who do that work.

Matthew Villeneuve (Univ. of Michigan): We have a lot of “intergenerational” historical knowledge to draw on, and heeding that accumulated wisdom is one of the things that can broaden our sense of what historical thinking is, and where it happens.

Tyler Krahe (West Virginia Univ.): I’ve become even more convinced that higher education has a lot of room to grow. A department doesn’t have to be all things to all students and it is more than just the faculty within it. The expertise and skills of alumni are a way for a department to cater to the wants and needs of individual students. I hope that is the direction we are headed. 

WITH WHAT YOU KNOW NOW, WHAT WOULD YOUR IDEAL OF GRADUATE EDUCATION IN HISTORY BE LIKE?

Vanessa Madrigal-Lauchland (Univ. of California, Davis): Graduate education ought to be flexible, equitable, and diverse. Although social justice might not seem like a key aim of Career Diversity, the topic has been present in every conversation about sustainability, resources, and accessibility. If graduate programs are truly committed to diversity and equal access to education, we must create equitable solutions to facilitate student success. 

Tim Herbert (Univ. of Illinois at Chicago): I want graduate education to respond to students’ needs while offering them the proper material, emotional, and intellectual support. Ideally, doctoral programs would be fully funded at a living wage for four to five years in programs designed to be completed in that period of time (though Stacey makes an important point below about the potential problems with this limit). A more flexible education would encourage students to explore the discipline and learn about the different ways of being a historian. This might include teaching, working as interns, and new formats for dissertations. Finally, I’d like to see the “doktorvater” view of graduate advising replaced by a model promoting multiple mentors.

Andrew Brown (Texas A&M Univ.): Teacher training and teaching experience have to be a priority in every graduate program. I would also like to see departments find ways to promote a healthy collegial atmosphere and cohesion in program cohorts through social events and programming. This promotes the mental health of students and reduces the sense of isolation, which is too common in the academy. It takes a long time to finish a PhD and this period cannot be seen as a break from real life. Students need a healthy and friendly atmosphere to get through the rigorous process.

Stacey Murrell (Brown Univ.): Maybe it’s because I work in a premodern field (requiring three languages and travel abroad for research) but four to five years is next to impossible. So not treating the PhD as one size fits all would be ideal. I think that all courses should involve useful assignments that can help students further develop specific skills that are useful in multiple career paths and I second the need for diverse intern opportunities and more opportunities to teach. Finally, I think it’s incredibly important that students have the opportunity to provide feedback on their courses and the program. 

The second article in the Not Even Past series

Joseph Stuart (Univ. of Utah): I agree with everything said above about the importance of a living wage, more professional development, and a structure that rewards and incentivizes high-quality advisers. I’d also be interested in creating classes designed to orient students to graduate school, not just to the content and historiography of their field. We ask students to figure out too much on their own, like how to apply for conferences, figure out where to do research, and balance school, work, and life. We can do more to help students, particularly underrepresented groups succeed in graduate school. 

Hope Shannon (Loyola Univ. Chicago): Historians can and should be trained to bring historical thinking to wherever it might be most useful and valued. To center graduate programs around the idea that students should be trained to pursue meaningful work also requires providing students with the funding and resources necessary to explore those interests. Unfunded career diversity opportunities don’t help anyone, and they exacerbate the financial difficulties already faced by so many graduate students.

Ramya Swayamprakash (Michigan State Univ.): As an international student, I have raised the importance of thinking beyond the academy for those of us whose existence in this country is dependent on visas. Diverse, demonstrable skills would make any candidate more desirable for a variety of careers outside the professoriate. Graduate programs with large numbers of international students also need to make sure their career development programming takes their unique needs into account.

HAVE YOUR OWN CAREER ASPIRATIONS BEEN SHAPED BY PARTICIPATING IN THIS INITIATIVE?

Alejandra Garza (Univ. of Texas at Austin): I entered the graduate program at the University of Texas at Austin knowing what I didn’t want to do afterward, but I had no idea what I wanted to do. Now, I aspire to work in higher education administration, ideally an office like Texas Career Engagement, where I could help future graduate students see how their grad degree can help them be whatever they want to be. A graduate degree doesn’t limit you in any way, it does the exact opposite. 

Shuko Tamao (Univ. at Buffalo, State Univ. of New York): I graduated during the pandemic and am reassessing my career plans right now. As a fellow, I feel I should have some solid ideas for my career plans, but I have to be flexible right now. I have set a broad, long-term career goal, but I may not get to where I aspired a few years ago. But by participating in this initiative, I learned that I could allow myself to envision my career beyond the confinement of “I should,” encouraging myself to be creative and resourceful.

Matt Reeves (Univ. of Missouri–Kansas City): I credit my time as a career fellow with coming to fully accept the positive value of a career outside the academy. It’s easy to pay lip service to the “No More Plan B” talk; it’s harder to accept and believe it. I now know that I can use the skills I learned in graduate school to positive ends outside the academy. Two years ago, I was hired as a part-time librarian in special collections at the Kansas City Public Library. Within a year, I was promoted into a full-time education and outreach position. I credit the promotion to the entrepreneurial mindset I honed in graduate school: constantly improving programs and always making the case for the value of the humanities. 

Joseph Stuart (Univ. of Utah): I always knew that I needed to be open to a wide array of career opportunities. The Career Diversity initiative has given me a language and framework for how to use my historical skills to find meaningful employment that pays a living wage. If given the choice of any option, I still want to be a professor. But I know that I could succeed and be happy doing many things.

Matthew Villeneuve (Univ. of Michigan): After working on Career Diversity, I am recommitted to the broader effort of knocking down the walls of the academy—not just those artificial boundaries between historians and the public, but between historians themselves. That conviction makes me all the more committed to pursue a career in the academy. I’m confident that academic historians can continue to find common cause with everyone who uses rigorous historical thinking skills as a part of making their way in the world, and I look forward to being a part of that effort.

Leah Burnham (Georgia State Univ.): This initiative has opened my eyes to other career possibilities and I plan on applying to a variety of jobs. But it’s important to understand that a PhD does not automatically make one qualified for a job outside of academia. Those interested in other careers should participate in informational interviews through AHA Career Contacts and thoroughly research those careers to make sure they’re doing everything in their power to become qualified before applying.

More in this series:

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. 

IHS Climate in Context: How Do Pandemics End? History Suggests Diseases Fade But Are Almost Never Truly Gone

by Nükhet Varlik

This article originally appeared in The Conversation. It can be seen here. The article is republished here in connection with Dr Varlik’s talk in the Institute for Historical Studies.

When will the pandemic end? All these months in, with over 37 million COVID-19 cases and more than 1 million deaths globally, you may be wondering, with increasing exasperation, how long this will continue.

Since the beginning of the pandemic, epidemiologists and public health specialists have been using mathematical models to forecast the future in an effort to curb the coronvirus’s spread. But infectious disease modeling is tricky. Epidemiologists warn that “[m]odels are not crystal balls,” and even sophisticated versions, like those that combine forecasts or use machine learning, can’t necessarily reveal when the pandemic will end or how many people will die.

As a historian who studies disease and public health, I suggest that instead of looking forward for clues, you can look back to see what brought past outbreaks to a close – or didn’t.

Where we are now in the course of the pandemic

In the early days of the pandemic, many people hoped the coronavirus would simply fade away. Some argued that it would disappear on its own with the summer heat. Others claimed that herd immunity would kick in once enough people had been infected. But none of that has happened.

A combination of public health efforts to contain and mitigate the pandemic – from rigorous testing and contact tracing to social distancing and wearing masks – have been proven to help. Given that the virus has spread almost everywhere in the world, though, such measures alone can’t bring the pandemic to an end. All eyes are now turned to vaccine development, which is being pursued at unprecedented speed.

Yet experts tell us that even with a successful vaccine and effective treatment, COVID-19 may never go away. Even if the pandemic is curbed in one part of the world, it will likely continue in other places, causing infections elsewhere. And even if it is no longer an immediate pandemic-level threat, the coronavirus will likely become endemic – meaning slow, sustained transmission will persist. The coronavirus will continue to cause smaller outbreaks, much like seasonal flu.

The history of pandemics is full of such frustrating examples.

Once they emerge, diseases rarely leave

Whether bacterial, viral or parasitic, virtually every disease pathogen that has affected people over the last several thousand years is still with us, because it is nearly impossible to fully eradicate them.

The only disease that has been eradicated through vaccination is smallpox. Mass vaccination campaigns led by the World Health Organization in the 1960s and 1970s were successful, and in 1980, smallpox was declared the first – and still, the only – human disease to be fully eradicated.

So success stories like smallpox are exceptional. It is rather the rule that diseases come to stay.

Take, for example, pathogens like malaria. Transmitted via parasite, it’s almost as old as humanity and still exacts a heavy disease burden today: There were about 228 million malaria cases and 405,000 deaths worldwide in 2018. Since 1955, global programs to eradicate malaria, assisted by the use of DDT and chloroquine, brought some success, but the disease is still endemic in many countries of the Global South.

Similarly, diseases such as tuberculosis, leprosy and measles have been with us for several millennia. And despite all efforts, immediate eradication is still not in sight.

Add to this mix relatively younger pathogens, such as HIV and Ebola virus, along with influenza and coronaviruses including SARS, MERS and SARS-CoV-2 that causes COVID-19, and the overall epidemiological picture becomes clear. Research on the global burden of disease finds that annual mortality caused by infectious diseases – most of which occurs in the developing world – is nearly one-third of all deaths globally.

Today, in an age of global air travel, climate change and ecological disturbances, we are constantly exposed to the threat of emerging infectious diseases while continuing to suffer from much older diseases that remain alive and well.

Once added to the repertoire of pathogens that affect human societies, most infectious diseases are here to stay.

Plague caused past pandemics – and still pops up

Even infections that now have effective vaccines and treatments continue to take lives. Perhaps no disease can help illustrate this point better than plague, the single most deadly infectious disease in human history. Its name continues to be synonymous with horror even today.

Plague is caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis. There have been countless local outbreaks and at least three documented plague pandemics over the last 5,000 years, killing hundreds of millions of people. The most notorious of all pandemics was the Black Death of the mid-14th century.

Yet the Black Death was far from being an isolated outburst. Plague returned every decade or even more frequently, each time hitting already weakened societies and taking its toll during at least six centuries. Even before the sanitary revolution of the 19th century, each outbreak gradually died down over the course of months and sometimes years as a result of changes in temperature, humidity and the availability of hosts, vectors and a sufficient number of susceptible individuals.

Some societies recovered relatively quickly from their losses caused by the Black Death. Others never did. For example, medieval Egypt could not fully recover from the lingering effects of the pandemic, which particularly devastated its agricultural sector. The cumulative effects of declining populations became impossible to recoup. It led to the gradual decline of the Mamluk Sultanate and its conquest by the Ottomans within less than two centuries.

That very same state-wrecking plague bacterium remains with us even today, a reminder of the very long persistence and resilience of pathogens.

Hopefully COVID-19 will not persist for millennia. But until there’s a successful vaccine, and likely even after, no one is safe. Politics here are crucial: When vaccination programs are weakened, infections can come roaring back. Just look at measles and polio, which resurge as soon as vaccination efforts falter.

Given such historical and contemporary precedents, humanity can only hope that the coronavirus that causes COVID-19 will prove to be a tractable and eradicable pathogen. But the history of pandemics teaches us to expect otherwise.

More by Nükhet Varlık:

  • “The plague that never left: restoring the Second Pandemic to Ottoman and Turkish history in the time of COVID-19,” New Perspectives on Turkey 63 (2020): 1-14; open access: https://doi.org/10.1017/npt.2020.27 
  • Plague and Empire in the Early Modern Mediterranean World: The Ottoman Experience, 1347–1600 (Cambridge University Press, 2015)
  • Plague and Contagion in the Islamic Mediterranean (Arc Humanities Press, 2017)

Related Reading:

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.

Fifty Years On: Remembering Gamal Abd al-Nasser

By Yoav Di-Capua

On Monday evening, September 28, 1970, Egyptian radio and television abruptly began to broadcast recitations of the Quran. It was a familiar sign that something of great significance had gone horribly wrong. Egyptians had heard it before – when they lost the June 1967 war and again, eighteen months earlier, when a beloved Egyptian Chief of Staff died in battle. They had had enough of tragedies. As rumors began to circulate and fear rose, millions braced themselves for the worst as they waited for an official statement. Tens of thousands of people spontaneously took to the streets. Their bond to Gamal Abd al-Nasser ran deep. He had, they believed, given them life with dignity: something their parents could only have dreamt of. They loved him, and they believed in him. And as the radio kept broadcasting, they feared that the news might have something to do with Nasser. Anticipating the worst, some burst into tears. Others collapsed. They worried he had died. They knew he had. And later that evening, a broken and tearful Vice President Anwar al-Sadat appeared on television. Though he tried to say something meaningful, all he managed to say was that “Nasser was greater than words.”

Nasser was no ordinary head of state whose life could be summed up with a quick eulogy. At the height of his power, during the 1960s, he was known in the West mostly as a regional troublemaker, a gangster of sorts and a dangerous dictator. British Prime Minster Anthony Eden called him Hitler (he wasn’t) and others referred to him in the language that in future decades was reserved to depict the likes of Iraq’s Saddam Hussein and Usama Bin Laden. The true Nasser was no saint and certainly no stranger to the deployment of brutal state power against internal enemies, including the Muslim Brotherhood, Marxists, Communists, Liberals, and anyone else who defied him. But to stop at that would be to miss the story of one of the most fascinating, complex and idealistic figures of the twentieth century. The Arab world is used to the unexpected rise and fall of its unelected leaders. They move on quickly. But Nasser’s untimely death at the young age of 54, left them speechless. Five decades later, the painful legacy of Nasser and his movement still unsettles public life.

Nasser was not elected to his post. He was 32 when, along with an inner circle of officers, he seized power, put an end to a monarchy that had lasted from 1805 to 1952, dismissed the political parties, suspended the constitution, and effectively terminated Egypt’s decades-old liberal era. He inherited an exploitative agrarian economy that was in shambles. Replace cotton with sugar and tobacco and it looked much like pre-Castro Cuba. Most of the fertile land was committed to growing cotton, the main export staple and the biggest source of national income. A small group of 2,750 families owned most of this land which they leveraged in order to achieve disproportional political representation. Most Egyptians were landless, illiterate peasants. Working the cotton fields, they lived in a state of barely human existence; a condition that looked in some ways close to slavery with no end in sight. Life expectancy for men was less than 40 years on average. Women did slightly better. Industrialization was slow, inconsistent, and uneven the burgeoning middle class struggled. But beyond being economically vulnerable, the literate middle class struggled to provide an affirmative answer to the identarian question “who are we?” Are we Muslim, Arab, Egyptian or, perhaps, a mélange of all three in no particular order of importance? Should an Arabized version of European culture serve as the basis for communal life or perhaps a modernized Islamic version? 

Add to these identarian anxieties the constant British involvement in Egyptian politics and its continued military presence in the country, and you begin to understand the sources of Egypt’s misery and the depth of its cultural pessimism. In all aspects of life, nothing was really working properly.  The five governments that rose and fell during the first six months of 1952 alone reflected the collective sense of impasse. Egypt was ready for the coup and when it finally came, six months after the burning of downtown Cairo, nobody fought to defend the passing of its liberal democracy.

When he came to power, Nasser’s dramatic promise was life with dignity. And he began to design a new social contract to meet this promise. It took close to a decade to emerge but, once it did, Arab Socialism extended education, healthcare and employment opportunities to all sectors of Egyptian society via a program of massive state-lead industrialization. For the first time in their lives, millions of poor, sick, and marginalized citizens had a reasonable chance to improve their lives. But in return, they gave up their political freedom. It was bargain many had no issue with making. Given their wretched state of being under the liberal monarchy, most people had no problem exchanging liberal political rights for dignity. Nasser’s motto, “lift up your head my brother,” was a constant reminder of this new social contract.

However, to think of Nasser in terms of a single policy or reform is to miss the man and his mark on history as an Arab liberator or, in the eyes of fellow Arabs, as a modern-day Saladin; a man whose ideology was himself. Predicated on struggle, sacrifice and faith, Nasser’s bid for self-liberation first announced itself to the world with the audacious 1956 nationalization of the Suez Canal. Denied by the US the financial means of developing his country, Nasser exercised national sovereignty and, via personal and collective sacrifice, delivered a masterclass in self-liberation. Winning the Suez Canal, he further developed a new, modern politics of salvation and, slowly but surely, Nasser emerged as something of a postcolonial Messiah. Nasserism’s emancipatory message traveled as near as Palestine and as far as Latin America.

By the early 1960s, Nasser juggled various projects of enormous dimensions and magnitude ranging from ambitious infrastructure projects, including the construction of an enormous hydro-electric dam on the Nile to direct interventions in Cold War conflicts in Africa. Especially ambitious was the plan to unite the Arab world into a single unified state. That plan was meant to undo the post 1918 colonial borders which had fragmented the region and carved it into several unnatural polities, such as Syria and Iraq. Flying high, the banner of Pan-Arabism spoke not only of the mystical power of unity but also of the total transformation of self and country which Nasserism aspired to fulfil. Much of that vision was at play well before the likes of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara came onto the scene and began borrowing freely from Nasser’s political playbook. In fact, in 1958, when the young Che arrived in Cairo to introduce himself, he was met with a disinterested shrug.

The mid 1960s were not kind to the Nasserist project. Egypt got bogged down in an ideological war with Yemenite tribes and their Saudi backers. It resembled America’s Vietnam and Nasser knew it. As it faced the daily bureaucratic troubles of state-building, the pace of achievement and revolutionary momentum slowed down considerably.  Most painfully, amidst accusations of Egyptian paternalism, the Syrians abandoned the three-year-old United Arab Republic, thus casting doubt on the entire project of Pan-Arabism. With his reputation damaged, Nasser was in search of a new cause that would once again revitalize the revolution and mobilize millions. It became the liberation of Palestine. It was something of a tall order, as neither Egypt nor its neighbors were truly ready for the effort.  However, once proposed, the momentum was unstoppable and, as in the past, the people were once again ready to sacrifice for a worthwhile revolutionary cause. By late May 1967, just a few months before the war, it was unclear if Nasser was leading the masses to war or if was it the other way around. A cold analysis of the facts on the ground should have revealed to Egypt and its allies that the prospects of liberating Palestine were slim indeed.

Three days into the war, as Egyptian radio continued to assure its listeners that the combined forces of Egypt, Jordan and Syria were on their way to Tel Aviv, a shaken Nasser appeared on television and admitted defeat. He began by describing the colossal defeat as a Naksa. Naksa is a medical term that connotes a setback or a relapse. It was the first time that a term that is typically used to describe the human body was used in such context. But the name stuck and since then the ‘67 defeat has been referred to as the Naksa. In what followed, Nasser assumed the sole responsibility for the Naksa and announced his resignation. The people had been with Nasser through thick and thin, in good times and in bad times. And though facing the most devastating and humiliating defeat in living memory, they automatically rejected his resignation. After three days of mass demonstrations, Nasser retracted it. A transcendental figure such as Nasser could die in battle and become a martyr but, just like a Messiah, he could not resign.

We tend to think about the June 1967 war as a short six-day conflict that was over before it even began. Not for Nasser. For him, it lasted for another thousand days, and by the end of it, he was dead. Unknown to the Egyptian people, Nasser was sick. Very sick. Compounded by the stress of the war, his mild case of diabetes spiraled out of control. That was the true Naksa. By 1969 he was diagnosed with hyperinsulinemia, atherosclerosis, moderate obesity, hypercholesterolemia, lipedema, diabetic neuropathy and fibrositis. A heavy smoker, he was in constant pain, and in the midst of a war of  attrition with Israel. As the war intensified, he suffered a massive heart attack.

His many doctors kept this Naksa a state secret. The people knew nothing about it but also the Egyptian leadership, his close circle, his family and, initially, even Nasser himself, were kept in the dark. Trying hard to undo the war’s many consequences, Nasser’s last thousand days in power embodied a general collective malaise. Then came the awful September 1970, another stressful month in which Nasser mediated in a bloody conflict between the Palestinian PLO and King Hussein of Jordan. This last assignment to halt an Arab civil war left him dead.

In the days and weeks after Nasser’s shocking and untimely departure, anybody who could write or talk tried to make sense of this immense loss. One poet came close:

He is all of history in one man

He is everything in one thing

He existed from the heart of defeat

And entered the heart of victory

He came from the battle of Hittin and from Dir Yasin…

From here and from there he came to us

Did Abd al-Nasser die?

And still

Freedom will not die

Justice will not die

Unity will not die…

Indeed, under Nasser, the Arab world had experienced the two extreme ends of liberation and bitter defeat. Liberation was meant to deliver the people from a wretched state of barely human existence and constant humiliation. Defeat brought them full circle to once again to experience and re-live the painful sense of humiliation. Admittedly, Nasser’s emancipatory project of self-liberation and radical self-fashioning was in ruins – ruins that the magnetic muse of the revolution, singer Umm Kulthum captured in a song by the same name.  In the decades since his death Egypt and the Arab world has changed in profound ways. Arab unity was abandoned as a viable political project and inter-Arab cooperation declined and then almost entirely disappeared.  Nasser’s successor, Sadat, signed a peace treaty with Israel, thus leaving the vulnerable Palestinians to deal with Israel on their own. Other Arab states followed this trend. Internally, the Egyptian elite gradually shifted to capitalism, abandoning Nasser’s social contract and leaving the people to the mercy of market forces.  

Severing the bond to the people and undermining communal solidarity, the elite reigned through the application of raw power. By the mid 1980s Egypt was a full-fledged security state with no communal vision.

Of equal weight and consequence was the mass cultural shift toward religiosity. With the Nasserist system of state-lead salvation and rebirth defunct, faith-based societal projects formed a parallel state. By the mid-1990s Egypt was a transformed country with seemingly new challenges. And yet, every July 23rd, at the anniversary of the revolution, Egyptians embarked on a ritualistic debate about the legacy of Nasser. They disagreed about much of his record, including his personal responsibility for the 1967 defeat. However, they tended to agree about Nasser’s personal sincerity and about his commitment to improving the life of ordinary people. Mostly, they still shared Nasser’s original understanding of the problem of dignity. And though it seemed as if life with dignity had become a strictly idealistic aspiration, the 2011 revolution and its ubiquitous slogan “Bread, Freedom and Dignity,” as well as the oppressive state response and the military takeover that followed, had Nasser’s name written all over it.

Yoav Di-Capua teaches modern Arab intellectual history at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of Gatekeepers of the Arab Past: Historians and History Writing in Twentieth-Century Egypt (University of California Press, 2009). His new book, No Exit: Arab Existentialism, Jean Paul Sartre and Decolonization, was published  by the University Press of Chicago. He is currently writing a new book about sacred politics. His work was supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in Germany

Navigating the PhD and Beyond: Brian Stauffer

By Alejandra C. Garza, Ph.D. candidate, AHA Career Diversity Fellow 2018-2020

This is the fifth post in a wider series, Navigating the PhD and Beyond: Lessons from the AHA Career Diversity Initiative. The series is presented and curated by Alejandra Garza as part of the AHA Career Diversity for Historians Initiative. As the 2018-20 graduate student fellow, Alejandra’s goal was to show graduate students and professors that the skills developed in a PhD program “are applicable no matter what we do when we leave”. Here Alejandra interviews Dr. Brian Stauffer. He received his Ph.D. in 2015 with a dissertation entitled, “Victory on Earth or in Heaven: Religion, Reform, and Rebellion in Michoacán, Mexico, 1869-1877,” supervised by Dr. Matthew Butler. He is currently a Spanish Translator at the Texas General Land Office.

What motivated you to enter a PhD program? Did your motivations change over the course of the program? 

I entered the PhD program in Latin American History at UT Austin in the fall of 2009, after receiving an M.A. from the University of New Mexico. At the time, this felt like my adult life finally falling into place, since it seemed like a sure bet that a PhD in Latin American History from UT would yield a solid tenure-track outcome. And the truth is that it could have. The Latin American History program provided first-rate training: excellent faculty, access to the bibliographic and archival riches of the Benson Library, funding for archival research abroad, support for professional development, etc. Ph.D.s who graduate from the History Department have a strong record of earning good jobs, even as the profession as a whole has continued its decline. The problem is that despite all of this, many other well-deserving students at UT, and untold others outside it, are being left out or asked to endure exploitative and precarious placements until some brighter horizon appears. I decided I couldn’t do that. 

What was your experience with the initial entry into the job market? 

I entered the job market in 2014, during my write-up year, and received no interview requests. In 2015, during a much-needed and much-appreciated postdoctoral year at UT’s Institute for Historical Studies, I applied for dozens of jobs and was invited to phone interviews for two of them. Ultimately, I scored an on-campus interview once and received a single job offer from the same institution. Conventional wisdom says I should have taken that job—low salary, high living costs, grueling teaching load, and utter lack of research support and all—and waited for my chance to jump to something more desirable. But I have a partner and kids, and frankly I wasn’t sure my family would withstand any more instability and penury. So, I made the hardest decision of my life and declined the offer without any other prospects, and I began looking for non-academic jobs in Austin—where my kids had school and friends and some semblance of a life.  

How did you end up in the career you currently have? 

I applied for dozens of non-faculty jobs—school districts, libraries, non-profits, state agencies, etc. And even though I mostly got rejected by this market, too, the process itself was so much easier that it didn’t feel nearly as soul-crushing as the faculty job market. I was invited to interview at two different state agencies (the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board and the Texas General Land Office) before I had even technically finished my postdoctoral stint in the summer of 2016. Both places offered me the job, with the result that a small bidding war ensued. In fact, both initial salary offers were better than the one offered by my sole university suitor that year. 

Ultimately, I chose the Texas General Land Office, where I work in the Archives and Records program, because it offered me a crucial link to the discipline of History. And, yes, because they offered me a better salary. My job, which combines the roles of a translator, reference archivist, curator, and historian, is frequently rewarding on its own terms but has also allowed me to continue publishing and engaging in academic circles. Since it also requires no teaching and features few of the pressures of a faculty role, this is perhaps a better outcome than I could have imagined back in 2009 when I started this journey. Like most people in humanities doctoral programs, I had come to graduate school hoping it’d lead to a fulfilling career of researching, writing, discussing, and teaching about history. What I didn’t understand then is that I didn’t have to be a tenured professor to do that.  

If COVID-19 has impacted or even taken your job in these difficult months, please share that with us, too. 

Of course, the job is far from perfect: it comes with its own unique challenges, and there are limits on the kind intellectual work I can do. But on the whole I am very content, and since the COVID 19 crisis has not threatened my job, I count myself very fortunate to have it.  

What do you wish you had learned in graduate school? 

I suppose I mostly wish I could have been comfortable exploring non-faculty employment without shame. I get the feeling that the culture of shame is no longer the problem it was in my graduate years, and I’m thrilled to see History Department leadership taking a more proactive role in helping students obtain (paid) internships outside the university, such as the one I directed at the GLO in 2018 and 2019 (COVID killed this year’s internship but we hope it’ll return in the future). Incidentally, those former GLO interns are both UT alumni who are now off to incredible new jobs, one inside and one outside the academy. Of course, the internship wasn’t everything—they benefitted from the same excellent UT training as the rest of us and have loads of talent of their own. But, as I hope either of them could attest, internships are a really crucial way to develop skills and relationships that lead in new directions, especially for folks thinking of exiting academia. Funding and approval pending, I hope to see more UT doctoral students apply for internships at the GLO in the future.  

Any other advice you have for new PhDs entering the job market? 

PhD students entering the academic market today have only ever known crisis. Like me, many started on this path as a way to escape the post-2008 economic collapse, which rendered the undergraduate degree an insufficient guarantee against poverty. Today, they are graduating into a much worse calamity. In between collapses, moreover, long-running neoliberal restructuring and its attendant adjunctification meant that even the market’s “good years” were lean years, even for students from excellent programs like UT’s. The present moment is particularly bad, but things haven’t been good in a long time, successful UT placements notwithstanding.  

I say this not to foster despair but to encourage you cast aside any shame you might be feeling about the possibility—or even certainty—of not finding an academic job this year. This is not your fault.  

This is perhaps of little comfort, but your knowledge and skills and labor are inherently valuable even if the Job Market in its infallible wisdom has decided not to remunerate them. More comfortingly, I can assure those of you that leave the profession that there are institutions outside the academy that will see your value. I will admit to feeling somewhat bitter and ashamed when I left academia in 2016, but now I feel mostly gratitude. Mine is happy story, all things considered, and yours can be too, with or without a tenure-track job. 

This blog series was created by Alejandra C. Garza with assistance from Dr. Alison Frazier and Dr. Michael Schmidt as part of the AHA Career Diversity for Historians Initiative 2018-2020. 

Dr. Brian Stauffer received his Ph.D. in 2015 with his dissertation entitled, “Victory on Earth or in Heaven: Religion, Reform, and Rebellion in Michoacán, Mexico, 1869-1877,” supervised by Dr. Matthew Butler. He is currently a Spanish Translator at the Texas General Land Office.

More in this series:

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. 

Gender Symposium, Fall 2020

by Gabrielle Esparza and Gwendolyn Lockman


The Symposium on Gender, History, and Sexuality provides an interdisciplinary forum for the discussion of historical approaches to the study of gender and sexuality. We hope to build a community of scholars working together to consider the benefits and challenges of incorporating these issues into their research. We do not see gender and sexuality as narrowly defined topics and seek presenters who engage with a wide variety of subjects, methodologies, and approaches. The Symposium aims to explore the creative and scholarly potential of gender and sexuality as fields of inquiry.

We encourage diverse styles of presentation, including informal talks about research experience and/or primary sources, workshops that focus on a work-in-progress, critical discussion of a selection of readings, and formal presentations of conference papers or dissertation chapters. In addition to individual presentations, we accept panel discussions to contribute various perspectives of gender studies. During the 2020-2021 academic year, the Symposium will host all presentations on Zoom. Those interested in attending can register here.

Follow the Gender Symposium on Twitter and Like them on Facebook.

Navigating the PhD and Beyond: Eric Busch

By Alejandra C. Garza, PhD candidate, AHA Career Diversity Fellow 2018-2020

This is the fourth post in a wider series, Navigating the PhD and Beyond: Lessons from the AHA Career Diversity Initiative. The series is presented and curated by Alejandra Garza as part of the AHA Career Diversity for Historians Initiative. As the 2018-20 graduate student fellow, Alejandra’s goal was to show graduate students and professors that the skills developed in a PhD program “are applicable no matter what we do when we leave”. Here Alejandra interviews Dr. Eric Busch. He received his PhD in 2013 with a dissertation entitled, “City of Mountains: Denver and the Mountain West,” supervised by Dr. H.W. Brands. He is currently a Course Manager and Instructor of Record for History, Texas OnRamps.

What motivated you to enter a PhD program? Did your motivations change over the course of the program?

I was motivated to become a history scholar, as I dimly understood that job in my early 20s. I liked the idea of being paid to write and do research, but didn’t have a very deep grasp or understanding of what historians actually did, or how scholarly production in history really takes place.

During my time there, UT’s History Graduate Program was really good at introducing students into certain aspects of the profession—particularly as UT’s faculty perceived and experienced it. So the seminars and colloquia were usually lively and engaging, and gave students lots of opportunities to try on the role of successful academics.

Like many other R1 departments of the era, however, the UT history graduate program put comparatively few resources into training students how to actually get to that level, relying instead on individual thesis advisors to prepare their students for the various hurdles of the job market and pre-tenure. I came out during a series of “down hiring years,” which just turned out to be the new normal.

Near the end of my career as a graduate student, I largely dispensed with the idea of pursuing a tenure track job at any cost, and instead turned my focus to completing the degree and finding a job that I liked. 

What do you wish you had learned in graduate school?

Like many students, I did not land a tenure track job out of school. But I did develop a number of marketable skills—primarily self-taught—in order to complete my dissertation as I wanted to write it. I learned how to shoot and produce documentary film, and how to digitize and describe my sources consistent with archival standards—both skills that I use every day as a digital project manager at the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History. I learned to work with statistics and data visualization, and how to turn individual sources into a distance-readable corpora. I taught myself these skills for the most part, but there were a lot of ways/places to learn how to do these things at UT, and I think it’s perfectly fine to expect students to develop these kinds of ancillary historical skills on their own.

However, I really wish I’d had more opportunities to learn project and personnel management as a history PhD student. When I left graduate school and found myself on the non-academic job market in my mid-30s, I had years of graduate training on my resume and a fair number of technical skills, but absolutely no professional leadership experience of any kind. This is a knowledge area that employers care deeply about, and as a working professional, these are the skills l now use most frequently. We tend to dismiss managerial training as extraneous to the discipline, but really, these are areas for which the Department can and should do more to train graduate students. Give graduate students resources to make public-facing projects of various kinds that leverage top-level historical skills. Organize department-sponsored, graduate student-led public history projects, educational projects, historical consulting projects, etc. Partner and pool resources with the Texas Historical Commission, private humanities agencies, corporations, and museums to generate gigs. Go after private funding and public humanities grants to fund a “History+” training program. Give graduate students some undergraduate students to lead and manage. Partner with McCombs to expose them to leading management philosophies, techniques and tools. Then give them some training in how to “talk up” these skills in job interviews. None of this will hurt UT alums on the academic job market, and it can save a lot of time should they end up on a different career path. It’s also a possible route to preserving history as a discipline in what appears to be a permanent environment of scarcity and underfunding. 

What was your experience with the initial entry into the job market?

I didn’t really try. 

How did you end up in the career you currently have?

I was working in student learning support on campus when a job as a digital project historian came open at the Briscoe Center. I was lucky to land that job, and took over a very large digital project as a manager soon afterward, which is where I began to develop my skills as a supervisor and project leader. That led to additional opportunities both at the Briscoe Center, and at the job I currently have running the History course for UT OnRamps.  

If COVID-19 has impacted or even taken your job in these difficult months, please share that with us, too.

I’m lucky to still have jobs at both OnRamps and the Briscoe Center. So I don’t have much to add here, other than that I see Covid-19 as an accelerant to already existing market trends—none of which bode well for the financial future of the humanities. 

Any other advice you have for new PhDs entering the job market?

No. They get enough advice. My advice is for the current stewards of the discipline. We need to find ways to make this profession viable for an upcoming generation of students who want to practice and produce history, but who won’t ever see a fraction of the institutional resources that today’s faculty enjoy. That means transforming the institutional framework the underlies the discipline, from graduate training to single-author culture, the glacial pace of peer review, insane tenure and promotion practices, and much more. There will always be historians. But if our discipline doesn’t adapt, we probably won’t be the ones training them anymore.  

This blog series was created by Alejandra C. Garza with assistance from Dr. Alison Frazier and Dr. Michael Schmidt as part of the AHA Career Diversity for Historians Initiative 2018-2020.

Dr. Eric Busch received his Ph.D. in 2013 with a dissertation entitled, “City of Mountains: Denver and the Mountain West,” supervised by Dr. H.W. Brands. He is currently a Course Manager and Instructor of Record for History, Texas OnRamps.

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. 

New Books in Native American and Indigenous Studies You Need to Read on Indigenous Peoples’ Day

For decades Native American and Indigenous activists have advocated for a move away from Columbus Day. They argue that such commemorations are a reminder of the genocide of Indigenous peoples in the Americas that followed the arrival of Europeans in the region. Because of Indigenous peoples’ activism, legislatures across the US have started to replace the holiday celebrated on October 12th with Indigenous people’s day. This shift is about more than one day of the year. Instead, it encompasses a  broader discussion about sovereignty, recognition, and accountability.

In the United States, there are 574 federally recognized tribes and hundreds of others with varying levels of state or federal recognition (or no recognition at all). Earlier this year when the Supreme Court ruled that much of the Eastern portion of Oklahoma remains under Native American jurisdiction in McGirt v. Oklahoma (2020), many people were cautiously optimistic. The ruling was a major victory for Native people and upheld a treaty that outlined the boundaries of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation. However, just last week the EPA granted the State of Oklahoma regulatory control over Indian Country within the state and marked yet another reminder that Native sovereignty is constantly under threat. 2020 has also seen a watershed moment in protests by Indigenous peoples in Central and South America. In Chile, Mapuche activists continue to organize and protest for recognition and to regain control of their lands. In Honduras, on July 18, 2020, 5 Garifuna land rights advocates were kidnapped by individuals believed to be tied to the military. Their disappearance was followed by protests and outrage in the region. However, Alberth Centeno, Milton Martínez, Suami Mejía, Gerardo Róchez, and Junior Mejía have not been seen since.

At the University of Texas at Austin, Native American and Indigenous students in the NAIS program (Native American and Indigenous Studies) joined members of the Miakan-Garza Band of the Coahuiltecan tribe in lobbying for the return of ancestral remains currently housed at one of UT’s research labs, to their descendants. For four years, the Miakan-Garza Band has asked UT to return their ancestor’s remains, and in September, after a meeting between UT students and President Jay Hartzell, there was a breakthrough. President Hartzell wrote to the Miakan-Garza Band that the university planned to begin the process of returning the remains so they could be reburied. The process itself is ongoing. This week the Native American and Indigenous Studies Program is hosting a week of digital events to celebrate Indigenous people’s week. If you would like to support the work of the NAIS program or the repatriation efforts of the Miakan-Garza Band, I’d encourage you to visit their websites.

On Indigenous Peoples’ Day this year, we should all do the work. That means learning the Indigenous histories of our region, supporting programs that support Native students, and supporting Native authors, artists, and activists every day, not just October 12th. As a starting point, we compiled a list of 6 new books in Native American and Indigenous Studies written by and about Indigenous authors you absolutely should read this year.

  • Monumental Mobility: The Memory Work of Massasoit by Lisa Blee and Jean M. O’Brien (University of North Carolina Press, 2019)

“Installed at Plymouth, Massachusetts, in 1921 to commemorate the tercentenary of the landing of the Pilgrims, Cyrus Dallin’s statue Massasoit was intended to memorialize the Pokanoket Massasoit (leader) as a welcoming diplomat and participant in the mythical first Thanksgiving. But after the statue’s unveiling, Massasoit began to move and proliferate in ways one would not expect of generally stationary monuments tethered to place. The plaster model was donated to the artist’s home state of Utah and prominently displayed in the state capitol; half a century later, it was caught up in a surprising case of fraud in the fine arts market. Versions of the statue now stand on Brigham Young University’s campus; at an urban intersection in Kansas City, Missouri; and in countless homes around the world in the form of souvenir statuettes. As Lisa Blee and Jean M. O’Brien show in this thought-provoking book, the surprising story of this monumental statue reveals much about the process of creating, commodifying, and reinforcing the historical memory of Indigenous people. Dallin’s statue, set alongside the historical memory of the actual Massasoit and his mythic collaboration with the Pilgrims, shows otherwise hidden dimensions of American memorial culture: an elasticity of historical imagination, a tight-knit relationship between consumption and commemoration, and the twin impulses to sanitize and grapple with the meaning of settler-colonialism.”

  • These People Have Always Been a Republic: Indigenous Electorates in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands, 1598–1912 by Maurice B. Crandall (University of North Carolina Press, 2019)

“Spanning three hundred years and the colonial regimes of Spain, Mexico, and the United States, Maurice S. Crandall’s sweeping history of Native American political rights in what is now New Mexico, Arizona, and Sonora demonstrates how Indigenous communities implemented, subverted, rejected, and indigenized colonial ideologies of democracy, both to accommodate and to oppose colonial power. Focusing on four groups–Pueblos in New Mexico, Hopis in northern Arizona, and Tohono O’odhams and Yaquis in Arizona/Sonora–Crandall reveals the ways Indigenous peoples absorbed and adapted colonially imposed forms of politics to exercise sovereignty based on localized political, economic, and social needs. Using sources that include oral histories and multinational archives, this book allows us to compare Spanish, Mexican, and American conceptions of Indian citizenship, and adds to our understanding of the centuries-long struggle of Indigenous groups to assert their sovereignty in the face of settler colonial rule.”

  • The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies by Tiffany Lethabo King (Duke University Press, 2019)

“In The Black Shoals Tiffany Lethabo King uses the shoal—an offshore geologic formation that is neither land nor sea—as metaphor, mode of critique, and methodology to theorize the encounter between Black studies and Native studies. King conceptualizes the shoal as a space where Black and Native literary traditions, politics, theory, critique, and art meet in productive, shifting, and contentious ways. These interactions, which often foreground Black and Native discourses of conquest and critiques of humanism, offer alternative insights into understanding how slavery, anti-Blackness, and Indigenous genocide structure white supremacy. Among texts and topics, King examines eighteenth-century British mappings of humanness, Nativeness, and Blackness; Black feminist depictions of Black and Native erotics; Black fungibility as a critique of discourses of labor exploitation; and Black art that rewrites conceptions of the human. In outlining the convergences and disjunctions between Black and Native thought and aesthetics, King identifies the potential to create new epistemologies, lines of critical inquiry, and creative practices.”

  •  Reproduction on the Reservation: Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Colonialism in the Long Twentieth Century by Brianna Theobald (University of North Carolina Press, 2019)

“This pathbreaking book documents the transformation of reproductive practices and politics on Indian reservations from the late nineteenth century to the present, integrating a localized history of childbearing, motherhood, and activism on the Crow Reservation in Montana with an analysis of trends affecting Indigenous women more broadly. As Brianna Theobald illustrates, the federal government and local authorities have long sought to control Indigenous families and women’s reproduction, using tactics such as coercive sterilization and removal of Indigenous children into the white foster care system. But Theobald examines women’s resistance, showing how they have worked within families, tribal networks, and activist groups to confront these issues. Blending local and intimate family histories with the histories of broader movements such as WARN (Women of All Red Nations), Theobald links the federal government’s intrusion into Indigenous women’s reproductive and familial decisions to the wider history of eugenics and the reproductive rights movement. She argues convincingly that colonial politics have always been–and remain–reproductive politics. By looking deeply at one tribal nation over more than a century, Theobald offers an especially rich analysis of how Indigenous women experienced pregnancy and motherhood under evolving federal Indian policy. At the heart of this history are the Crow women who displayed creativity and fortitude in struggling for reproductive self-determination.”

  • Hip Hop Beats, Indigenous Rhymes: Modernity and Hip Hop in Indigenous North America by Kyle Mays (Suny Press, 2018)

“Expressive culture has always been an important part of the social, political, and economic lives of Indigenous people. More recently, Indigenous people have blended expressive cultures with hip hop culture, creating new sounds, aesthetics, movements, and ways of being Indigenous. This book documents recent developments among the Indigenous hip hop generation. Meeting at the nexus of hip hop studies, Indigenous studies, and critical ethnic studies, Hip Hop Beats, Indigenous Rhymes argues that Indigenous people use hip hop culture to assert their sovereignty and challenge settler colonialism. From rapping about land and water rights from Flint to Standing Rock, to remixing “traditional” beading with hip hop aesthetics, Indigenous people are using hip hop to challenge their ongoing dispossession, disrupt racist stereotypes and images of Indigenous people, contest white supremacy and heteropatriarchy, and reconstruct ideas of a progressive masculinity. In addition, this book carefully traces the idea of authenticity; that is, the common notion that, by engaging in a Black culture, Indigenous people are losing their “traditions.” Indigenous hip hop artists navigate the muddy waters of the “politics of authenticity” by creating art that is not bound by narrow conceptions of what it means to be Indigenous; instead, they flip the notion of “tradition” and create alternative visions of what being Indigenous means today, and what that might look like going forward.”

  • Paradoxes of Hawaiian Sovereignty: Land, Sex, and the Colonial Politics of State Nationalism by J. Kēhaulani Kauanui

“In Paradoxes of Hawaiian Sovereignty J. Kehaulani Kauanui examines contradictions of indigeneity and self-determination in U.S. domestic policy and international law. She theorizes paradoxes in the laws themselves and in nationalist assertions of Hawaiian Kingdom restoration and demands for U.S. deoccupation, which echo colonialist models of governance. Kauanui argues that Hawaiian elites’ approaches to reforming and regulating land, gender, and sexuality in the early nineteenth century that paved the way for sovereign recognition of the kingdom complicate contemporary nationalist activism today, which too often includes disavowing the indigeneity of the Kanaka Maoli (Indigenous Hawaiian) people. Problematizing the ways the positing of the Hawaiian Kingdom’s continued existence has been accompanied by a denial of U.S. settler colonialism, Kauanui considers possibilities for a decolonial approach to Hawaiian sovereignty that would address the privatization and capitalist development of land and the ongoing legacy of the imposition of heteropatriarchal modes of social relations.”

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.

Further Reading on Not Even Past:

Recent Posts

NOT EVEN PAST is produced by

The Department of History



We are supported by the College of Liberal Arts
And our Readers


Contact

All content © 2010-present NOT EVEN PAST and the authors, unless otherwise noted

Sign up to receive our MONTHLY NEWSLETTER