Alina Scott, Author at Not Even Past

IHS Panel: Postcolonial Socialisms in Perspective (Socialist and Collectivist History Series)

Thursday February 20, 2020 • GAR 4.100

3:30 PM – 5:00 PM

From the 1940s to the 1970s, as part of the project of decolonization, leaders and thinkers in late colonial or postcolonial states developed strikingly new conceptions of socialism – conceptions that were distinct and often at odds with European ones. The panel will explore this phenomenon as it emerged in three contexts: the Arab world, Latin America, and sub-Saharan Africa.

Panel features:
“The Life and Times of Arab Socialism”
Yoav Di-Capua
Professor of History
University of Texas at Austin
https://liberalarts.utexas.edu/history/faculty/yd386

“A ‘Popular Option for Development’? Imagining Democratic Socialism in Salvador Allende’s Chile”
Joshua Frens-String
Assistant Professor of History
University of Texas at Austin
https://liberalarts.utexas.edu/history/faculty/jf36427

“Tanzania’s Socialist Experiment and the Politics of Postcolonial Development”
Priya Lal
Associate Professor of History
Boston College
https://www.bc.edu/bc-web/schools/mcas/departments/history/people/faculty-directory/priya-lal.html

Indrani Chatterjee, moderator
Professor of History
University of Texas at Austin
https://liberalarts.utexas.edu/history/faculty/ic2396

The event is part of the Institute’s 2019-2020 series on “Agency and Action: Chapters in Socialist and Collectivist History.”

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 Talk: The Problem of Newness: Art Cinema in India

Monday October 28, 2019 • GAR 4.100

12:00 PM – 1:30 PM

How do we think about newness in an aesthetic and commercial medium such as cinema? This talk explores this question with attention to the Indian new wave of the late 1960s-1970s. There is much controversy around the point that the body of films referred to as the Indian new wave were different from mainstream films as well as art films that preceded them. Yet, contemporary critics and film scholars acknowledge that there was a ferment in Indian cinema during this period not witnessed before or since. Taking a historical approach, and with close attention to some key films, I lay out a history of the Indian new wave.

Dr. Rochona Majumdar is associate professor of South Asian Languages and Civilizations, and Cinema and Media Studies, at the University of Chicago. A historian of modern India, her interests span histories of Indian cinema, gender and marriage in colonial India, postcolonial history and theory, and intellectual history.

Majumdar’s first book, Marriage and Modernity: Family Values in Colonial Bengal (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009; New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2009), challenges the assumption that arranged marriage is an antiquated practice. During the late colonial period Bengali marriage practices underwent changes that led to a valorization of the large, inter-generational family as a revered, ‘ancient’, social institution, with arranged marriage as the apotheosis of an ‘Indian’ tradition. Marriage and Modernity documents the ways in which these newly embraced ‘traditions’—the extended family and arranged marriage—entered into competition and conversation with other emerging forms of kinship such as the modern unit of the couple, with both models participating promiscuously in the new ‘marketplace’ for marriages, where matrimonial advertisements in the print media and the payment of dowry played central roles.

Her second book, Writing Postcolonial History (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2010), is the first book to comprehensively analyze the impact of postcolonial theory on history writing. The book covers an array of historical writings ranging from histories of the Middle Ages to contemporary empires, from settler colonialism to issues of race, gender, and migration.

Currently, Majumdar is engaged in writing a history of Indian art cinema. She focuses on the ways in which filmmakers like Satyajit Ray, Ritwik Ghatak, and Mrinal Sen, reflected on their practice as ‘good’ ‘meaningful’ cinema. These conceptions were often at odds with the ways in which their films were received. Majumdar pays close attention to the film society scene in India as a densely documented space to study film reception.

Anti-Semitism in Poland after the Six-Day War, 1967-1969

By Alexander Bala

On September 28, 1967, a special report was sent to the U.S. Director of Central Intelligence, Richard Helms, that detailed ongoing attempts in Poland to have Defense Minister Marian Spychalski removed from his post. The efforts to oust Spychalski came from within the Polish Armed Forces and were largely orchestrated by chief political officer General Józef Urbanowicz. According to the special report, Spychalski’s expulsion was part of a greater effort to purge Jews from high-ranking military and government positions. Most importantly, Jews would be purged from the Central Committee of the Polish Communist Party (PZPR). Władysław Gomułka’s government launched a full-on anti-Semitic campaign in 1968. This campaign was spurred by the Six-Day War in June 1967, during which Israel invaded neighboring Arab territories that were backed by the Eastern Bloc. Following the Israeli offensive, both Poland and the Soviet Union severed their diplomatic ties with Israel.

Before the Second World War, over 3 million Jews lived in Poland. An estimated 90% lost their lives in the Holocaust. In 1948, an estimated 88,000 Jews remained, after Jews who fled to the Soviet Union during the war were repatriated, and after many left as a result of pogroms. By 1967, after years of sustained emigration, this number was further reduced to 25,000-30,000 (the total Polish population in 1967 was 32 million).

Defense Minister Marian Spychalski via Wikimedia Commons

The wave of anti-Semitism that gripped the entire country by 1969 initially began as an anti-Zionist campaign. It attempted to frame Jews as enemies of the state. There were concerted efforts to remove top-ranking Jewish and Stalinist-era officials from their key positions in the military and government, especially those who were believed to be sympathetic toward Israel or the Zionist cause. The Arab-Israeli crisis generated a pretext for the purging of Jewish officials, which then snowballed into a larger anti-Semitic campaign that continued until 1969. Not only were Jewish officials removed from their key positions and forced to resign from the PZPR, but discriminatory measures were enacted that removed Jews from important positions in all areas of Polish society. Jews were prevented from seeking any sort of gainful employment and were pressured to leave the country, resulting in an exodus of around 13,000 Jews from Poland by 1969.

Urbanowicz’s attempts to oust Spychalski from the Defense Ministry occurred before the Sixth Trade Union Congress on June 19, 1967. It was during this event that Władysław Gomułka, who was the First Secretary of the PZPR, labeled Polish Jews as a “fifth column.” He accused them of having ties with Israel that undermined the security of the Polish state. This included the supposed divulging of military secrets to the Israeli government. Before Gomułka’s speech, PZPR Politburo members gathered to decide whether or not Polish Jews should be branded as “traitors.” According to the special report, most Politburo members, with the exception of Ryszard Strzelecki and Edward Gierek, voted against Gomułka’s hard stance. Gierek later succeeded Gomułka as First Secretary of the PZPR in 1970.

Image 25 of “Poland: A Country Study” (Via Loc.gov)

The special report claims that Spychalski’s wife was in Israel during the Arab-Israeli conflict. She was accused of having ties with both Israel and the West due to the amount of time that she and their daughter–who studied fashion design in Paris–spent abroad. The special report states that the Arab-Israeli conflict rekindled an “anti-Semitic wave” in which “some high-ranking military officials have been caught up in a purge.” This, combined with Spychalski’s supposed link to Israel via his wife, made him an easy target. Party meetings regarding Spychalski’s position resulted in a resolution stating that if in fact his wife had been in Israel, “then Spychalski is not to be trusted.” The actual motivations for ousting Spychalski from the Defense Ministry, though, might have simply been that the “conspiring officers” did not believe that he was a good Defense Minister. Apparently, neither did the Soviets.

The special report indicates that Interior Minister Mieczysław Moczar worked “behind the scenes” to promote Gomułka’s hard stance against Polish Jews, maneuvering to get the rest of the Politburo on board before the Trade Union Congress. Moczar was the leading Politburo member who was responsible for fomenting the anti-Semitic campaign within the party leadership. Edward Ochab, who was the Chairman of the Council of State and First Secretary of the PZPR before Gomułka, resigned from his government duties and retired from politics in protest of the party’s anti-Semitism.

Implicated within the special report are various high-ranking officials who were embroiled in the events surrounding Spychalski’s removal from the Defense Ministry. The report concludes by stating that by July 20, 1967, “at least 80 officers have been dismissed” from the Polish Armed Forces. At this point, Urbanowicz and Moczar’s anti-Zionist/anti-Semitic campaign had not yet trickled down into the rest of Polish society.

Beginning with Urbanowicz’s efforts to remove Spychalski from the Defense Ministry and continuing with Moczar’s anti-Semitic campaign that saw top-ranking Jewish officials purged from the PZPR along with other areas of Polish society, Gomułka’s government was responsible for a mass migration of Jews. What began as an anti-Zionist campaign within the Polish government resulted in a larger wave of anti-Semitism that forced a majority of remaining Jews to leave the country.

Kraków- photo by Maciej Kraus via Flickr

At the time, many historians believed that this anti-Semitic campaign and the resulting migration of Polish Jews was the final chapter for Jewish life in Poland. The estimated Jewish population in 1989 was 5,000-10,000. This latter figure is difficult to gauge due to the fact that many Jews who remained post-1968 choose to conceal their identity. But, after the fall of the communist system and Poland’s entry into the European Union in 2004, the Jewish community began experiencing a cultural resurgence. Festivals and educational initiatives reintroduced Jewish culture into the public sphere. The world’s largest Jewish culture festival was launched in Kraków in 1988. Polish Jews, as well as Israeli Jews of Polish heritage, are reengaging with the past and reinvesting in their former communities. The Jewish community in Poland is finding new ways to express its identity, and to resist the efforts of the twentieth century that attempted to destroy its life.

Source:
Box 201 National Security File Country File Poland – Folder 3
LBJ Presidential Library

You might also like:
A Small Country Lost in the Files: Albania’s Absence in an American Archive
Ayka (Dir: Sergei Dvortsevoy, 2018)
On the “Polish Death Camps” Law

America for Americans: A History of Xenophobia in the United States by Erika Lee (2019)

by Sheena Cox

In March 2020, an art dealer in New York emailed a Vietnamese art curator named An Nguyen and revoked his participation in an upcoming event. A “high level of anxiety” surrounding COVID-19, and concerns that Asians carried the virus might discourage audience attendance, she explained. When reports of the Coronavirus first hit the mainstream media, rumors about how the virus originated began to circulate. Soon, headlines named Wuhan, China’s wet food market as the epicenter. Heightened Asian xenophobia and racial stereotyping quickly ensued as many blamed Chinese behaviors and habits for spawning a previously unknown virus. Experts explain that in times of increased social or economic panic, targeted campaigns against foreigners increase. The results include violence, exclusion, extermination, internment, and deportation. To historians aware of this past, the scapegoating of Asians following the emergence of the Coronavirus sounds dangerously familiar. For Americans unaware of these trends there is no better time than now to understand the country’s history of immigration.

Immigration expert and historian Erika Lee defines xenophobia as the “fear or hatred of foreigners.” The ideology perceives outsiders as a threat and drives a fear of others that sometimes provokes a military response. In her book, America for Americans: A History of Xenophobia in the United States, Lee connects the experiences of many groups across time to show the longstanding tradition of American xenophobia. Masterfully, she shows how xenophobia works with racism and race making and adapts and flourishes in different contexts. Lee argues that war, demographic change, and economic uncertainty (among other things) provoke heightened xenophobic behavior. This powerful concept influences elections, legislative policies, and justifies violence and dispossession. Beginning with Native American settler colonialism and the institution of slavery, Lee shows how each xenophobic episode builds on the next becoming intertwined with American racism, white superiority, and nationalism.

Lee begins in colonial Pennsylvania where German immigrants settled in large numbers in the mid eighteenth century. British settlers labeled German immigrants as threatening to the Pennsylvania colony. They argued that too many of them were coming in, and that their religious views, divergent politics, and distinct ethnicity clashed with those of British colonists. However, the Seven Years’ War, 1754-1763, provided German immigrants with an opportunity to prove their loyalty to the British. The conflict caused the nature of xenophobia to shift. The Germans took part in expelling Pennsylvanian Native American tribes and the French in the region. Their participation in the war allowed them a newfound whiteness which increased their political power and social status. Meanwhile, Native American tribes became the targeted other, foreignized in their own land.

Lee shows how xenophobia evolved as the American Republic expanded into a powerful nation. The xenophobic slander used against the Germans and Indian tribes in the Northeast was then applied to different Indian nations and the Mexican Republic. Newspapers, scientific journals, and popular literature drove ideas of the “savage” native and the “lazy” Mexican, which influenced public opinion and justified targeted actions. Lee shows how the ideology of xenophobia changed with demographic shifts like American westward expansion, and economic divisions brought on by the emergence of democratic capitalism and industrial progress. To distract the working-class from growing domestic social and economic divisions, xenophobia now targeted immigrants, most notably the Irish-Catholics. Building on the rhetoric used against Native American tribes, Americans stereotyped the Irish as a “dirty,” “savage,” “Celtic” race of people. This form of xenophobia promoted American nativism, nationalism, and religious discrimination. Further, Lee shows how the American, or Know Nothing Party, which formed during these years, politicized xenophobia and promoted hatred and violence against Irish immigrants. The Know Nothing platform gave a political foundation to future xenophobic movements.

Economic shifts and regional developments continued to transform America during the last half of the nineteenth century. Growth in the transportation and communication sectors led to increased immigration while social and economic divides grew deeper during the so-called Gilded Age. Lee reveals that like the Germans in colonial Pennsylvania, the Irish gained whiteness by finding a new target: Chinese immigrants. Building on her work in At America’s Gates: Chinese Immigration During the Exclusion Era, 1882-1943, Lee links another important and consequential shift in American xenophobia. “Asian” became a new racial category, but the rhetoric directed towards the Chinese reveals a xenophobic continuity. Chinese slander mimicked the language used against previously targeted groups. Arguments claimed that the Chinese were stealing American jobs and that they refused to adopt American ways of life. Americans characterized Chinese women as diseased prostitutes and described the men as feminine. However, more like Native Americans and enslaved peoples, the Chinese could not claim whiteness like the Germans or Irish eventually did. Instead, an anti-Chinese movement that lasted until 1943 began, starting with the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882.

The Chinese Exclusion Act set a precedent for future federal immigration policies. In 1889 the Supreme Court voted to uphold the law, and as Lee shows, both parties supported these decisions. This is the moment, she claims, when America became a “gatekeeping nation,” by legalizing xenophobia. Still, as she explains, there were loopholes. Elite Chinese travelers and immigrants continued to enter, while laborers could not, creating what Lee refers to as a two-tiered system of exclusion that distinguished between race and class. The federal government moving forward could and did restrict immigration based on race, class, national origin, and ethnicity. World War I exacerbated these efforts and in 1921, the federal government passed the Emergency Quota Act, followed by the Immigration Act of 1924, which successfully decreased European immigration. This caused an upsurge in Mexican immigration to help replace lost labor, but the great market crash in 1929, followed by the Great Depression, resulted in new targeted attacks against Mexican immigrants. As Lee argues, once again xenophobia shifted to meet the new circumstances. America entered a new phase of deportation to rid the nation of all Mexicans whom officials argued were “dirty,” “diseased,” “criminals” that stole American jobs. The same type of stereotypical rhetoric deployed against previously target groups continued to justify targeted action in the twentieth century.

Lee’s timely historical synthesis offers a new approach to immigration histories. Linking many cases over time shows the continuity of xenophobia, and in the process, we see connections missed with single histories of immigration. This larger narrative shows how xenophobia crosses regional and ethnic boundaries and works as a weapon to combat social upheaval amid domestic catastrophes. During times of crisis, projecting blame onto a distinct group of people supplies both a distraction and an emotional outlet. However, the fallout is violence, hatred, and at times the loss of innocent lives. As Americans, and the world, now enter a new phase of social and economic uncertainty, Lee’s work offers important context. The issues masked by xenophobia are structural and intimately intertwined with American nationalism, white supremacy, and racism. As COVID-19 continues to test our nation in new ways, everyone can learn from the history lesson on immigration provided in America for Americans.

A Forest of Symbols: Art, Science, and Truth in the Long Nineteenth Century by Andrei Pop (2019)

by Rodrigo Salido Moulinié

Can art really say anything? Although it may seem like a childish question, raising it triggers some unsettling thoughts. Much of what we usually think about artists and their work, the role art plays in our worlds, and even the possibility of writing its history relies on the answer to that question. If art cannot say anything—as many writers, historians, and even artists argue—then viewers project only their feelings, ideas, values, or attitudes onto a painting or a song. Meaning becomes private. Russian composer Igor Stravinsky, for example, wrote in his Autobiography that music, by its very nature, did not express anything. The idea of art as a vehicle for meaning is, then, nothing more than an illusion.

But if the answer is yes—art can convey meaning—new problems and questions arise. When we look at Van Gogh’s Starry Night, how can we know what it says? Or should we read what Vincent tried to say? How can one know if we are even looking at the same picture: is my blue your blue? In A Forest of Symbols, Andrei Pop explores how artists, writers, and scientists in the late nineteenth century approached these questions. Blurring the lines between art history, the history of ideas, and the history of science, Pop argues that this diverse group of people—painters, poets, mathematicians, logicians, philosophers—may share the label of symbolists because they had a common interest: the problem of subjectivity, of how to make ourselves understood to others despite the privacy of our consciousness.

The broad scope of the book reflects the complexity of the symbolist movement and its intellectual context. Pop’s explorations begin with Stéphane Mallarmé’s translation of The Raven and Édouard Manet’s illustrations (or better: interpretations) of the famous poem in the 1870s. The possibility of separating the subject and the object, of grasping the meaning of those words beyond what they literally say, poses several problems to the translator and the illustrator. They need to know what Poe really meant and how to express that meaning through other media. They need a method. While Mallarmé’s translation is almost literal, Manet rejected a rigid, exact depiction of what the poem describes. He rearranged his drawings, distorting the scenes and elements of the poem, to convey a visual thought, the idea the poem shows but declines to spell out.

Pop then moves on to examine Ludwig Wittgenstein’s arguments on representation and the impossibility of a private language: a means of expression to which one alone has access. The phrase “my ankle hurts” only makes sense through the projection of shared experiences. I cannot know how her ankles feel, I cannot feel that pain, but I have felt it on my own. The possibility of understanding this process lies at the core of the symbolist project. (Ray Monk offers a wonderful introduction to these debates in his book How to Read Wittgenstein, 2005.) These vivid discussions reveal the links between art, science, and philosophical reflections that Pop untangles. The process of meaning-making — of sharing experiences or ideas with others — concerned painters and mathematicians alike. The analysis of their methods and solutions in A Forest of Symbols unpacks the paradoxes, labyrinths, and limitations involved in showing others what we see, in telling others what we think.

The symbolist project of understanding how images, ideas, and minds work remains relevant today and its implications go beyond the writing of art history. In this book, Pop suggests that the current state of the humanities (he calls it a crisis) resembles the predicaments the symbolists addressed—and the study of their solutions may offer some useful clues for the future of our worlds. Symbolism entailed an effort in rethinking objectivity, not as a rejection of what the “hard sciences” can see, but as an exploration of what they miss.

Indelibly Inked: Bodies, Tattoos, and Violence during Guatemala’s Civil War

Sitting in a humble home in Huehuetenango, Manuel Alvarez told me the story of his near execution at the hands of the Guatemalan military. It was 1982 when the soldiers, under the direction of a Pentecostal dictator, first shoved his helpless body to the pavement and then placed an ice-cold muzzle against his back. “They told me that I better believe in Jesus,” he said softly, “because only Dios could save me from their bullets.” While Alvarez miraculously survived this encounter, he returned home that night deeply disturbed by the soldiers’ threats. He knew that his country’s military frequently killed, mutilated, and disappeared civilians. Yet he never before experienced how swiftly his body could be seized without repercussions or retribution. If he were to die on that pavement, he imagined, his family was unlikely to identify him and they would be forever haunted by not knowing what happened. In the wake of this terror, Alvarez called his brother Felipe to his bedroom and asked him to tattoo both his arms, to identify his body if need be.

As Alvarez rolled up his tee-shirt sleeves, his brother cautioned him that marking his arms was “not going to be good.” Nobody carried tattoos during those days and Felipe worried that his older brother would be judged harshly at church that Sunday. Despite this warning, Alvarez pressed his younger sibling to gather a pen, black ink, and a needle from the kitchen. Felipe listened, returned, and hesitantly began to sketch a blurry outline of a bear on his brother’s left arm. At that moment, Alvarez did not care what the tattoo was of, he simply implored his brother to “just do something here.” After the first tattoo was finished, Alvarez thought about what other indelible ink could identify him in the event of his death. He considered his childhood nickname, “canche,” which his friends lovingly called him because of his unusually light hair. He remembered the American missionaries he befriended in the 1970s who called him “blondy,” canche’s English variant. Following the soldiers’ threats to his body, it was this name that Alvarez felt could best distinguish him if he were discovered dead on the streets of Huehuetenango.

*Manuel Alvarez Tattoo* by Jana Wallace. March 22nd, 2020. Los Angeles, CA

After this haunting evening, Alvarez’s brother also went on to tattoo a small circle on one of his own bare knuckles. His best friend Alberto, who was similarly menaced by the Guatemalan military, came over later to ask Felipe to brand his body. The young man requested an image of a wolf, or lobo in Spanish, which was his nickname throughout the town. During a time of ever-present violence in Guatemala’s western highlands, all three Huehuetecos decided to tattoo their own bodies.

In voicing this history, Alvarez prompts us not only to reassess our understanding of Guatemala’s bloody Civil War, but authoritarianism writ large. For one, his story lays bare the immense corporeal costs of the Guatemalan military’s counterinsurgency strategy. In deploying terror tactics to pacify the population, the ejercito (army) not only murdered thousands of civilians but prompted men like Alvarez to mark their own bodies. In this way, one may interpret Alvarez’s tattoo as participation in his own discipline, as the physical embodiment of the fear the government sought to instill. Alvarez even suggests this at the end of his testimony when he states that, looking back, “it was not really my choice because I just did it out of fear.”

However, if we understand Alvarez’s decision to tattoo as a direct response to the soldiers’ threats, his story elucidates the limits of state power. Where death squads in Guatemala repeatedly executed civilians and deprived their families of closure, Alvarez’s tattoo might have thwarted such efforts had he died. If the army killed him, or Felipe, or Alberto, their markings might have rendered them more recognizable to their families regardless of the military’s brutality. Their mothers and fathers could then recite the Lord’s Prayer and give them a proper burial. In this sense, Alvarez’s tattoo embodies rebellion against the Guatemalan government’s authority to deprive families of the ability to grieve. His indelible ink, even in death, may have prevented the state from terrorizing his people and denying them this right. By sharing his story, Alvarez not only reveals these bodily costs of war, but illuminates the power of a few, defiant marks.

Citations And Further Readings:

Interview with Manuel Alvarez, December 28th, 2019, Huehuetenango
Manuel Alvarez Tattoo, Photos by Jana Wallace. March 22nd, 2020. Los Angeles, CA
Garrard, Virginia. Terror in the Land of the Holy Spirit: Guatemala Under General Efraín Ríos Montt, 1982-1983. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2011.

15 Minute History – The “Spanish” Influenza of 1918-1920

Guest: Dr. Christopher Rose, Postdoctoral Fellow, Institute for Historical Studies, The University of Texas at Austin

Host: Augusta Dell’Omo, Doctoral Candidate, Department of History, The University of Texas at Austin

In the age of coronavirus and COVID-19, comparisons are being made to an unusually long-lived and virulent epidemic of influenza that occurred a century ago. The so-called “Spanish” flu went around the world in three waves, claiming more than fifty million lives–more than perished in the just-ended First World War. What was the Spanish flu? Why was it called that? And can we learn anything about what’s in store during the coronavirus pandemic of 2019-20 by casting our eyes back a century?

This Land is Their Land: The Wampanoag Indians, Plymouth Colony, and the Troubled History of Thanksgiving by David J. Silverman (2019)

“We do ourselves no good by hiding from the truth,” a Wampanoag elder told David Silverman as he prepared This Land is Their Land. In upward of 400 pages, Silverman suggests that, by “we” the elder was referring to those who would prefer to cling to heartwarming narratives of turkey and peace, rather than grapple with the details of the historical record, and the devastation the “first thanksgiving” left in its wake.

Silverman’s previous academic works, including Red Bretheren (2010), Faith and Boundaries (2007), and Thundersticks (2016), are at the intersection of Native political and religious history. This Land Is Their Land examines the well-known story of the “first Thanksgiving,” yes, the one where the peaceful Natives and generous Pilgrims put aside their differences if only briefly, to sit down to a spread of turkey, cranberry sauce, and pumpkin pie à la J.LG Ferris’s 1930 painting. Silverman refers to this narrative as the “myth of Thanksgiving,” a myth that is both one dimensional and shortsighted.

In order to challenge this myth, Silverman takes seriously calls of Native scholars and leaders to recognize Native tellings of events. This manifests in an extended chronology of the First Thanksgiving event in two directions, before and after 1621. This structure allows Silverman to address the often false, unspoken assumptions about the Thanksgiving origin story. The first of these was the assumption that “this land” (the land Plymouth colony claimed for itself) was in fact “their” (Wampanoag) land, and was neither unoccupied nor uncultivated. Silverman begins by addressing longstanding interactions between Europeans (English, French, and Dutch) and tribes of Wampanoag, Massachusett, Narragansett, and other peoples. He describes the changes Europeans brought to Native land, and the ways Native peoples attempted to circumvent European intentions. By the time the Pilgrims arrived in 1620, the Wampanoag people and their land had been devastated by disease, which caused long-lasting pain in their communities. Aware of the English presence, Wampanoags occupying land on Cape Cod watched the Pilgrims for months before approaching them. This did not stop the colonists from entering Wampanoag land, desecrating gravesites, and claiming the land at Plymouth as their own.

The wood engraving shows Massasoit and warriors marching into the night. One of several illustrations showing early settlers of New England (via Library of Congress)

As the historical record suggests, the meeting that occurred on the “First Thanksgiving,” while significant, was neither as significant as popular culture remembers it, nor as definitive as the narrative implies. Preceded by decades of interactions with Europeans, particularly the English, Sachems like Ousamequin (or Massasoit) weighed their options and thought carefully about what peace, if only temporary, would mean with the settlers. The decision to sit down with the Plymouth settlers was the result of a series of intense intratribal negotiations, politics, and cultural practices. And, they both needed allies.

The Thanksgiving holiday as we know it only emerged when Abraham Lincoln declared a day of “Thanksgiving and Praise” in 1863 and became an official holiday in 1870. However, the association between the Thanksgiving holiday and that particular harvest meeting in 1621 where Pilgrims and Wampanoag diplomats and representatives met to share a meal after decades of tension, did not emerge until the twentieth century.

While I won’t elaborate here the dozens of differences between the historical record and the typical Thanksgiving Story, I will recommend This Land is Their Land as important introductory reading. The text is approachable, succinct, and historically grounded. What this book does well is bring the origins of Thanksgiving back into the public spotlight. However, Silverman is transparent in the work’s shortcoming, stating, “this book operates under the premise that imperfect histories of Indian life are better than no histories” (18).

I, like Silverman, would encourage readers to read similar histories written by Native scholars specializing in this history. Scholars of Native studies, led by Indigenous scholars, continue to generate a rich historiography addressing the “problems” Silverman identifies. I would recommend Lisa Brooks’ Our Beloved Kin, and Jean O’Brien and Lisa Blee’s Monumental Mobility, to name a few.

Statue of Massasoit in Plymouth. Photo by Jesse Hodge(via *Flickr*)

As the 400^th anniversary of the meeting between the Pilgrims and Ousamequin approaches, it would be prudent to reflect on the legacy of the holiday and the important work generated in the field of Native studies. The national holiday to celebrate thankfulness for many Americans serves as a reminder for Native peoples (also Americans) of generations of historical trauma caused by settlers in their homelands and continued efforts to displace them. Thanksgiving is a reminder of colonization, disease, and the numerous treaties broken and still unresolved by the United States. One solution might be to reorient ourselves and, rather than viewing history from the perspective of the Pilgrims, tell the story of Thanksgiving by “grounding ourselves in Indian territory and watching the Mayflower and its inhabitants arrive on their shores” (Richter) and continuously encroach on Wampanoag lands.

Another solution might be following the lead of Native scholars and activists who simply call for “land back.”

Further reading:
Native Land
Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Philip’s War by Lisa Brooks
Monumental Mobility: The Memory Work of Massasoit by Jean O’Brien and Lisa Blee
Facing East From Indian Country by Daniel Richter
The Invention of Thanksgiving Massacres, myths, and the making of the great November holiday.
Thanksgiving holiday masks history of violence, systematic oppression of indigenous peoples

You might also like:
Native Literatures and Indigenous Peoples’ Day: A Brief Historiography
Cynthia Attaquin and a Wampanoag Network of Petitioners

A Small Country Lost in the Files: Albania’s Absence in an American Archive

by Jonathan Parker

Research projects don’t always go as planned. When venturing into the archives, historians are confronted with mountains of documents – boxes upon boxes of government memos, letters, records, etc. Knowing what you want to find can help, but the task of finding is still the proverbial needle in a haystack. This is especially true at the LBJ Library, an archive that contains more than 45 million pages of documents from the political career of President Lyndon Baines Johnson. There are plenty of materials for those interested in the Cold War and the United States’ relations with the Soviet Union and its satellite states in Europe, like Poland and Czechoslovakia. However, other countries, despite being part of the communist bloc, are far more difficult to find in the archive.

LBJ Presidential Library (via Flickr)

Approaching the LBJ archive, I thought it would be interesting to read about Albania since it seems to receive little attention here in the U.S. I duly looked Albania up in the Country Files of the archive and requested the relevant single box of papers. Some countries like Czechoslovakia have documents spread across several boxes, but Albania only merits one. This box arrived at my desk and I was intrigued when I noticed how heavy it was, apparently full of papers. I opened the box and quickly discovered, with a sinking feeling in my stomach, that while the box was indeed quite full with seven folders of documents, there was but a single folder labelled, perhaps optimistically, “Albania, Vol. 1.” Opening the folder I was even more disappointed to discover that it contained a single, two-page (really a page and a half) memo from October 10, 1966, by Nathaniel Davis, with the all-too-appropriate subject line “A Brief Rundown on Albania.”

Feeling a little silly (I had hoped to write a research paper on Cold War Albania), I nonetheless read through the memorandum in the space of a few minutes. Several things struck me as I sat there in the archives. First, the memo consists of mostly unconnected fragments of information. Each paragraph jumps from one topic to another, mostly dealing with Albania’s foreign relations. Second, much of this “information” could be characterized, for lack of a better word, as hearsay or diplomats’ gossip. Nothing came directly from the Albanian government, only through diplomatic backchannels and third-parties. At this point it might be worth mentioning that the U.S. and Albania had no formal diplomatic relations from 1939 (when the country was occupied by Fascist Italy) until the collapse of communist rule in 1991.

Enver Hoxha via Forrásjelölés Hasonló/ Wikimedia Commons

This lack of formal relations probably explains the absence of other documents. However, it is not clear that this was due to an isolationist attitude on the Albanian side. Enver Hoxha, the communist leader of Albania from World War II until his death in 1985, was famously paranoid and ideologically rigid even by Stalin’s standards. Among other things, this paranoia has left a very physical mark on the Albanian countryside in the form of 173,000 concrete pillbox bunkers, for an average of nearly 15 such bunkers per square mile (5.7 per square kilometer). On the other hand, this 1966 memo from the LBJ archive claims that “Albania is casting out some lines toward the West.” For evidence, the memo’s author, Davis, cites Albania’s establishment of relations with Turkey, a series of talks with West Germany, and “vague proposals” to the Austrian government for “coming nearer to the West.” In addition, Davis reports that early in 1966 “an Albanian Vice Foreign Minister asked the Italian ambassador how relations with the U.S. might be established.” The Albanian government was also perturbed that its UN representative had not been invited to President Johnson’s reception for UN delegates.

Given the apparent interest on the Albanian side for formal relations with the U.S. and its European allies, why are there not more documents in the LBJ archive’s Albania folder? It seems that there was little appetite at the U.S. State Department for extending relations. The memo lays out the reasons why various people in the State Department were unenthusiastic about Albania while also dismissing most of them out of hand. In general, the main concern seems to have been the impact that establishing relations with Albania would have on other foreign relationships, particularly regarding the Soviet Union since Albania had recently sided with China in its quarrel with the Soviets. There were also fears of inter-communal violence (between whom exactly is unclear) backed by Albania’s neighbors (namely Greece, Yugoslavia, and Italy), with explicit comparisons to the Greco-Turkish confrontation in Cyprus from 1960 to 1964. The memo also mentions Greek apprehension at the prospect of Albania reaching out across the Iron Curtain, at least in part due to the Albanian decision to side with Turkey over the Cyprus issue.

Map of Albania via Library of Congress Geography and Map Division Washington, D.C.

Far from being isolated and obscure, Albania appears tangled in a web of contentious international relations involving both its neighbors and powers further afield. In fact, it is this very web that prohibited U.S. relations with Albania, for fear of upsetting more than one delicate element of the status quo. Consequently, if paradoxically, Albania is largely absent from LBJ’s files. In other words, just because Albania does not appear among these files, does not necessarily mean that it was doomed to be a hermit on the international stage, holed up in a fortress overlooking the Adriatic and Ionian Seas. Albania’s obscurity in these papers is rather a product of the contentious position it carved out for itself on the world stage.

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Old Orthodox Icons in Communist Bulgaria

by Terry Orr

In 1963, the magazine Bulgaria Today, published by the communist government, surprisingly published an article showing a small selection of ancient Bulgarian Christian icons. At that time a large number of icons from as early as the tenth century through the seventeenth century were being displayed in the National Art Museum, the Ecclesiastical Museum, and the Archaeological Museum, all in Sofia; others were preserved in Bachkovo, Ohrid, and McInik. Although the magazine approached the religious works from the standpoint of art history, the icons themselves do not fail to show the spirituality they contained even in reproduction. The authors emphasized the early Church frescos as examples of the originality and independence of the artistic heritage of old Bulgarian art. The article, again separating artistic from the spiritual, states that early Bulgarian icon painting contained elements of human expression that distinguished it from the typical medieval Byzantine art of the eleventh and twelfth centuries characterized by abstract, empty, and gloomy images. Bulgarians, in contrast, were able to create images full of humanity, gentleness, and even spiritual life.

The very earliest of the stand-alone icons included in Bulgaria Today dates from the tenth or eleventh century and is a relief described as old Thracian Horsemen transformed into Christian Saints Georgi and Dimiter, two of the most recognizable military Saints of Christianity. Saint Georgi (St. George) is generally the most recognizable of the two, almost always depicted slaying a dragon. Saint Dimiter, better known in the West as Saint Demetrios of Thessalonica, was an Orthodox saint, martyred in the early fourth century and reported to reappear on the walls of the city in subsequent centuries to defend it from attacks of barbarians and protect the inhabitants from plague and famine. These figures are usually shown mounted on chargers with St. George riding a white horse and St. Demetrios a red one.

Two of the published icons depict the Virgin and Child in different poses. An icon of the fourteenth century shows the Theotokos (Mother of God) cradling the Christ Child, who is touching the face of his Mother in a style known as Tender Mercy or Eleusa. The second, from the seventeenth century, is posed in the Hodigrita style, with the Theotokos framed by the Prophets and holding the Child pointing toward God as a guide to salvation.

In addition to those icons shown in Bulgaria Today, other early Bulgarian icon paintings have been found in the ninth and tenth-century churches of Preslav. Icons were discovered in the church of St. Theodor, for example during excavations of 1909-1914 of the Monastery of Patleiena which was destroyed in 971. That icon has become a symbol of medieval Bulgarian heritage and is now held at the National Archaeological Museum.

The magazine describes the style of these icons as linear and primitive but profoundly expressive and the basis of the folk icon-painting of later centuries This type of folk icon-painting is prevalent throughout the Balkans and can be seen at such places as the Orthodox Monastery in the small village of Voroneț in Romania. The monastery has icons exhibited on both the interior and exterior, somewhat reminiscent of the earlier twelfth-century Roman Catholic Cathedral at Chartres in France with its statuary of both Old and New Testament figures prominently placed on the exterior and the interior flooded with the light of its numerous stained glass windows.

Two of the icons in the collection represent events in the New Testament rather than individual figures. The first is a sixteenth-seventeenth century icon from the Prissovo monastery near Turnovo depicting the Baptism of Christ in the Jordan by St. John the Baptist. The icon is fully descriptive with the Christ figure, the Baptizer, the river, and the witnesses. Unfortunately, the image is truncated and fails to fully show the Descent of the Holy Spirit usually represented as a dove contained within the star ray above the head of the Christ figure. The second icon shows all the elements of the Lucan portrayal of the Nativity: birth within a cave, the Child in a manger with Mary and Joseph, Angels singing on High, the Three Magi bearing gifts, shepherds minding their flocks, and cattle lowing, with the Star from the East shining over it all. An ancient icon clearly telling an even more ancient story.

Fortunately, the governing bodies of Bulgaria did not neglect, or even worse destroy these early medieval icons. Perhaps they recognized their value, possibly through their artistic dimension rather than their spiritual reflection and if so, well and good. Today the icons are among the treasures of Bulgaria which, alongside Orthodox churches and monasteries, are featured as Bulgaria’s major tourist attractions. The small number of icons published in the article revealed the existence of a much larger collection that had nourished the spiritual needs of Bulgarian Christians for centuries and continued to exist within a non-religious form of government to survive until a time when their spiritual dimension can again be relevant and meaningful in a freer civil society.

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