all2445, Author at Not Even Past

Explorations in Connected History: From the Tagus to the Ganges, by Sanjay Subrahmanyam (2004)

Sanjay Subrahmanyam is a historian of remarkable erudition and imagination. His personal itineraries over the years—from the New Delhi School of Economics to the École des Hautes Études in Paris, and from Oxford to UCLA, where he currently holds an endowed chair in history—mirror those of the early modern travellers who frequently take center stage in his historical work. The book reviewed here (the second volume of Explorations in Connected History, which includes a companion volume called Mughals and Franks) is a collection of eight incisive essays penned by Subrahmanyam between 1993 and 2003.

As Subrahmanyam notes in his introduction, these essays “had a rather complex evolution.” The first chapter, a previously unpublished reflection on the scope of “Indian history” as a field of study, began life as a lecture at the University of Oxford. Chapter two, on Asian perspectives on the Portuguese colonies in the Indian Ocean, is a translation from an edited volume published in Portuguese, while the third chapter previously appeared in an edited collection on the Bay of Bengal. Other chapters originally appeared in a range of scholarly journals. Although these chapters range extremely widely, they are bound together by Subrahmanyam’s methodological concern with what he calls “connected histories.”

The notion of “connected histories” is, for Subrahmanyam, a necessary corrective to at least three distinct historiographic trends. First, it seeks to move away from what Subrahmanyam regards as an overly simplistic, isolated, and “mechanistic” framework for writing global histories that has prevailed in the past: comparative history. Second, Subrahmanyam’s connected history methodology seeks to expand the geographic and thematic scope of what we mean by “the early modern period.” The societies that existed in the Old and New World prior to European imperial hegemony, he suggests, were participants in a nascent modernity that was taking place organically and chaotically on a global level, rather than being engineered by European states. And finally, Subrahmanyam marshals the notion of connected histories to challenge what he considers to be a submerged form of “exoticism” at work in post-colonial studies. Subrahmanyam, never one to shy away from a scholarly confrontation, takes special aim at the Subaltern School, which he critiques for “see[ing] the Indian role as one of largely reacting and adapting to European initiatives.”

A panorama of Calicut, on the Malabar coast, Georg Braun and Franz Hogenbergs atlas Civitates orbis terrarum, 1572. (Via Wikimedia Commons) — A panorama of Calicut, on the Malabar coast, Georg Braun and Franz Hogenbergs atlas Civitates orbis terrarum, 1572.

What, then, does a connected history methodology offer in place of comparative history, early modern European history, or post-colonial studies? Subrahmanyam is that rare historical writer who is equally skilled at intervening in big-picture historiographic debates and digging deeply in difficult archives and specialist bodies of knowledge. The work on display here amply demonstrates the promise of his methodology. Subramanyam engages closely with Portuguese chronicles of Indian conquest and the rather myopic Lusophone historiography that has built up around them, showing that a careful attention to alternative narratives—like texts written in Malay, Arabic, and Farsi—can challenge many of our prevailing assumptions about European colonialism. Crucially, Subramyam differentiates between the various imperial powers in the Indian Ocean—not only the Portuguese, Dutch, and British, but also non-European polities. This sets his work apart from other big-picture studies of what was once called “the Age of Expansion” (like Andre Gunder Frank’s ReOrient or Janet Abu-Lughod’s Before European Hegemony), which suffer from a tendency to sort the region’s actors into overly binary “European” and “non-European” camps.

Departure from Lisbon for Brazil, the East Indies and America, engraving from c.1592 by Theodor de Bry (Flemish, 1528-1598), illustration in America Tertia Pars. Location- Service Historique de la Marine, Vincennes. (Via Wikimedia Commons) — Departure from Lisbon for Brazil, the East Indies and America, engraving from c.1592 by Theodor de Bry (Flemish, 1528-1598), illustration in America Tertia Pars. Location- Service Historique de la Marine, Vincennes.

Although the essays in this book focus on south Asia, Subrahmanyam makes clear that the problems of Indian historiography—what he calls “an extravagant nationalism and crude ‘presentism’”—are not unique. From France to Java, historians have tended to reify contemporary distinctions between regions as if they were immutable historical facts. But if part of Subrahmanyam’s aim is to “complicate” (that favorite verb of historians) our understanding of nation and place in the early modern world, he also seeks to clarify. Subramanyam’s connected history approach, which shares a family resemblance to Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra’s “entangled empires” and Joseph Fletcher’s “integrative history,” is not a totalizing effort to explain all of world history à la Toynbee. But it is ambitious in both its geographic and linguistic scope. Marshaling his remarkably polyglot erudition, Subrahmanyam argues that the early modern world must be understood as a porous network of regions and local communities rather than as a patchwork of well-defined states. Although this framework demolishes facile comparisons between, say, “French” and “Indian” mentalities or cultural practices, it also allows us to think in a more theoretically well-defined way about the connections between the societies and regions of the early modern world.

Detail of India, from a 1630 Portuguese map of Asia, entitled General tables of all the navigation, divided and corrected by D. Jeronimo de Ataide, with all the ports and conquests of Portugal delineated by Joao Teixeira, cosmographer of His Majesty, Year 1630 (Via Wikimedia Commons) — Detail of India, from a 1630 Portuguese map of Asia, entitled General tables of all the navigation, divided and corrected by D. Jeronimo de Ataide, with all the ports and conquests of Portugal delineated by Joao Teixeira, cosmographer of His Majesty, Year 1630.

The advantages of such an approach are apparent in Chapter Five of this volume, which advances the startlingly original thesis that a “millenarian conjuncture… operated over a good part of the Old World in the sixteenth century.” In other words, a set of apocalyptic beliefs and concerns were shared between both Portuguese mariners and the South Asian merchants and courtiers with whom they interacted. Fears about portents, omens and signs, no less than currencies and gems, flowed between Europe and the Indian Ocean in this period. Although scholars of Reformation-era Christianity have written extensively on the apocalyptic currents of this era, Subrahmanyam’s mastery of Persian, Turkish, and South Asian sources allows him to connect this historiography to what he calls the “messianic pretensions” of the Persian ruler Isma’il, to various strands of Sufi mysticism, and to the medieval Alexander legends. It is a bravura display of learning that also sets up a bold new framework for thinking about religion as a factor in early modern globalization.

Portrait of Shah Ismail I of Persia (1487-1524) by an unknown Venetian artist. The original rendering is kept in the Uffizi Gallery museum in Florence, Italy. (Via Wikimedia Commons) — Portrait of Shah Ismail I of Persia (1487-1524) by an unknown Venetian artist. The original rendering is kept in the Uffizi Gallery museum in Florence, Italy.

One potential objection to Subramanyam’s connected histories framework arises from his own erudition. The promise of such an approach is obvious in his own work. But this work depends upon a mastery of a dozen languages and the kind of deep historiographic knowledge that takes decades to amass. Who else, besides Sanjay Subrahmanyam, is capable of working in the framework he advocates? History needs more historians who are able to cross national and linguistic boundaries, yet the North American and British academies continue to require historians to specialize on area studies or nationalist historiography. Scholars with the polymathic knowledge on display here are rare, and producing more of them may well require a new approach to how we train young historians.

Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Explorations in Connected History: From the Tagus to the Ganges, (Oxford University Press, 2004)

Great Books on Islam in American Politics & History

Four excellent books about Islam in modern western politics and history.

Ziad Elmarsafy, The Enlightenment Qur’an: The Politics of Translation and the Construction of Islam (2009). A history of European translations of the Qur’an and their impact on such luminaries as Voltaire, Rousseau , Goethe, and Napoleon.

Kambiz GhaneaBassiri, A History of Islam in America (2010). A path-breaking survey of American Muslims, documenting their diversity and importance as citizens, from the colonial era to the present.

[Reviewed on Not Even Past by Reem Elghonimi here]

Andrew F. March, Islam and Liberal Citizenship: The Search for An Overlapping Consensus (2009). A political scientist’s “study of Muslim citizenship in non-Muslim liberal democracies as a religious problem for believing Muslims,” in which the author does identify an actual Islamic and liberal “consensus” about Muslim citizenship.

Nabil Matar, Islam in Britain, 1558-1685 (1998). A portrait of English intellectual, diplomatic, and military contact with Islam, including the first English translation of the Qur’an in the seventeenth century and the introduction from the Middle East of “the Mahometan berry,” also known as coffee, which resulted in the spread of coffee houses in London long before Starbucks.

UT Gender Symposium: Women’s Bodies and Political Agendas

By Julia Gossard and Shaherzad Ahmadi

The Symposium on Gender, History, and Sexuality has been a fixture in the Department of History at The University of Texas since 2002, offering a forum for graduate students and faculty to present papers and works-in-progress for discussion in a relaxed and collegial atmosphere.

This year, Not Even Past will be providing a summary of the presentations and a list of further reading on their subjects. We will also be live tweeting the presentations on our Twitter feed. For a schedule of Fall 2013 events see their page on the History website.

The Gender Symposium kicked off the Fall semester with a roundtable discussion on Friday, September 13, entitled, “Historicizing Women’s Bodies as Political Platforms and Agendas.” Inspired by the recent Texas bills restricting abortion and Wendy Davis’s filibuster opposing those bills, the roundtable provided a historical context for the use of women’s bodies as political platforms and agendas. The politicization of women’s bodies and reproductive issues has been a permanent fixture in US history, and they have been at the forefront of state and social concerns throughout history in other parts of the world as well. For example, Chinese women in the Tang dynasty had their feet bound in a literal physical subjugation; Early Modern European coverture laws made women the physical property of their husbands or fathers; and minority women were forcibly sterilized in twentieth-century America. Roundtable presenters included History graduate students Luritta Dubois and Jessica Luther. Professor Lisa Moore of the UT English Department and Interim Director of the Center for Women’s and Gender Studies provided commentary and a reading of her poem, “Cowgirl Filibuster.”

The roundtable began with Jessica Luther discussing her activism as part of the “Orange Shirts” movement during the summer of 2013. Luther was present at Democratic Congresswoman Wendy Davis’s filibuster and commented that it represented a particular moment of history “in the making.” With the use of social media, Luther was able to connect globally to those desperate for news “from the Capitol floor.” Her activism and role in “creating” history this summer coincides with her dissertation that examines the English empire, slavery, and the history of the body in Barbados. Women’s bodies, Luther argued, represent sites over which politicians attempt to exert control. Where some contemporary social commentators are surprised at the attention to abortion rights during an economic recession and politically divided period, Jessica said this is exactly what one would expect during times of crisis if one examines the historical record.

Luritta Dubois shifted the discussion to the shared and complicated history of the forced sterilization of Chicana and Black women in twentieth-century Texas. The Black Liberation Movement saw women’s bodies as vessels through which new generations of black citizens would be born and women as this new generation’s mothers who could teach their children the ideals of black citizenship. Therefore, leaders like Malcolm X disapproved of contraception. Seeing this as a way to undermine minority groups’ power, the state not only made contraception available but also, under the auspices of programs such as Medicaid, American doctors sterilized 100,000-150,000 minority women – both black and Chicana – in the 1970s. Therefore, as Dubois’s project examines, women’s bodies and their reproductive capabilities were truly at the forefront of Texas politics; again proving the current issues in Texas are part of a larger trend in using women’s bodies to further political agendas.

Lisa Moore concluded the presentation by describing her own experience with the filibuster while away in California, where she followed Luther on Twitter, agreeing that this truly was “history in the making” and that these issues resonate throughout time across regional and cultural planes. Explaining that poets historically served as political commentators for the public, Dr. Moore read her poem, “Cowgirl Filibuster,” which was inspired by Texas battle over the anti-abortion bill and by Wendy Davis.

COWGIRL FILIBUSTER

Couplets for Heroic Texas Women

June 26, 2013

Madge kept our boys, the fruit of pregnancies

I loved, up late to watch the live feed

from the Capitol. Elated, they Minecrafted

fireworks: “We Stand With Texas Women.”

Word had gotten out about the bill.

Students on South Padre packed bikinis,

drove all night to Austin to explain:

we sometimes need abortions. Grandpas, gay men,

nurses, families with strollers poured

out of the neighborhoods. Seven hundred

by mid-afternoon. Story after

story for the record: citizen

filibuster. Three a.m.: The Speaker

tells the crowd he’s bored. They roar. State marshals

clear the floor. Now, Texas Democrats

don’t ever have the votes to win a thing.

Their only hope is filibuster, so,

another thirteen hours. It’s Wendy Davis,

Senator from Fort Worth, once-teenage mom,

tying on her snappy pink Mizuno

running shoes beneath her power suit

and big Texas hair. Can’t sit, can’t lean,

no food nor water, bathroom break, no “comfort

and assistance.” Wendy Davis reads

the ruled-out stories. Women with too many

mouths to feed already. One whose longed-

-for pregnancy became a fetus that

could not survive its birth. Middle schoolers.

Men remembering a sister’s or

a girlfriend’s botched pre-Roe abortion.

And many, many women pregnant

by someone who had raped them, hurt their kids.

Two thousand Texans swell the Capitol

by now, flow down the steps into the night.

At last, Republicans shut Wendy up.

They cite the rules to break them. Senator

Leticia Van de Putte, fresh from her dad’s

funeral, is ignored. Quarter to midnight.

“When,” she asks the Speaker’s turning head,

“when may a female senator receive

recognition from her male colleagues?”

The crowd ignores order, warnings, hollers,

bangs on chairs, sings UT’s football fight song.

Grannies are dragged out. Minutes go by.

Ten. Fifteen. Eighteen. The bill fails!

and Wendy Davis takes a drink and pees.

I thought of Brittney, at fourteen, who begged

me not to tell her mom, said “Seventeen,

that’s different, old enough to have a kid.”

Of Karen. When we both were seventeen

in 1981, you still needed,

in Canada, your parent’s permission.

We told them we were going skiing,

drove to Montana, skis strapped to the car,

and ended Karen’s pregnancy. Today

a teenage girl can’t get that in Montana.

[Selected as Split This Rock Poem of the Week, July 4 2013]

During the open discussion that followed, many more examples of the use of women’s bodies and reproductive issues as political platforms and agendas came to light and provided thought provoking questions. At the end of our discussion, the presenters and audience members agreed that the efforts of Congresswoman Wendy Davis, while extremely important, represent only one particular moment in the long history of the political use of women’s bodies as sites of control and subjugation. Historicizing the filibuster of the summer of 2013 allows us insight into one the most important political issues of our time.

Suggested Reading

Texas Abortion Bill and Wendy Davis Filibuster

Dan Solomon’s recap of filibuster night, “A Victory By the People,” The Austin Chronicle

Andrea Grimes, “Texas Senate Approves Omnibus Abortion Bill,” RH Reality Check

The problems faced by a network of clinics trying to implement the bill and challenge it in court are covered on Whole Woman’s Health Blog

Twentieth-Century Black Women’s Liberation, Contraception, and Chicana Women

Toni Cade-Bambara, “The Pill: Genocide or Liberation,” in The Black Woman: An Anthology, ed. Toni Cade-Bambara (1970)

Linda Gordon, Woman’s Body, Woman’s Right: Birth Control in America (1990)

Elena R. Gutierrez, Fertile Matters: the Politics of Mexican-Origin Women’s Reproduction (2008)

Elijah Muhammad, Message to the Blackman in America (1965)

Dorothy Roberts, Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty (1997)

Anne M. Valk, Radical Sisters: Second Wave Feminism and Black Liberation in

Washington D.C. (2008)

History of the Body

Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger (2002)

Kathleen Brown, Foul Bodies (2011)

Posted Monday, September 16, 2013

Great Books on Siberian Voices

Four great books and three great documentaries about the history and people of Siberia.

Benson Bobrick, East of the Sun: The Epic Conquest and Tragic History of Siberia (1992)

Bobrick’s East of the Sun is one of the most well-written and compelling narrative histories of Siberia in the broader context of Russian history. In an exceedingly accessible style, the book recounts the complex two-century process of conquest of the region by the Cossack warrior-traders, who first established Russian outposts in the 16^th century. This is followed by centuries of Russian economic and cultural integration of this vast region, before and especially after the completion of the Trans-Siberian Railway. A story as tragic as it is fascinating, Siberian history is ever shaped by its richness of resources and remarkable beauty, as well as its infamous link to exile and imprisonment.

Steven Marks, Road to Power: The Trans-Siberian Railroad and the Colonization of Asian Russia, 1850-1917 (1991)

Road to Power is a fascinating political and intellectual history of the construction of Russia’s Trans-Siberian railroad at the turn of the 20^th century. The book offers insights into Russian economic development in Siberia, as well as a greater understanding of the extension and contestation of Russian Imperial authority on n its most important peripheries.

Anna Reid, The Shaman’s Coat: A Native History of Siberia (2003)

Shaman’s Coat is a beautifully written account of the history of Siberia with an explicit focus on the indigenous peoples of the region, the Tuvans, Buriats, Evenkis, etc. Using her own journey through the region as a narrative thread, Reid devotes each chapter to a different Siberian ethnic group, including one on Russians, offering insights into the historical development of the region through the lens of Russian-native interaction. Finally she offers interesting impressions of the contemporary state of Siberian shamanism and native culture more broadly.

Ralph Leighton, Tuva or Bust!: Richard Feynman’s Last Journey (1991)

Tuva or Bust is a book about the extraordinary efforts of by Ralph Leighton and his teacher and friend, the prominent physicist Richard Feynman, to travel to the remote region of Tuva, then within the Soviet Union. Feynman died of cancer just before receiving his visa in 1988. The book aptly describes the culture, language and history of Tuva, including the unique phenomenon of Tuvan throat singing, in the context of this famed quest. The book is heavily referenced in the documentary film, Ghengis Blues.

Ghengis Blues (1999)

This documentary film directed by Roko Belicfocuses on the journey of American blues musician Paul Pena to the isolated Russian republic of Tuva. Pena, who was blind, became interested in Tuvan throat-singing after hearing it on shortwave radio. He taught himself to throat-sing (no easy task) over the next few years and eventually met Kongar-ool Ondar, a famous throat singer at a concert in the US. The film follows Pena’s journey to Tuva, where he sang in the triennial throat-singing festival.

Join Me in Shambhala (2002)

In Pursuit of the Siberian Shaman (2006)

Both of these documentary films, written and directed by visual anthropologist, Anya Bernstein, are focused on Buddhism and shamanism among the Buryat peoples of Southern Siberia. Join Me explores the revival of Buddhism (interwoven with local shamanism) among the Buryat peoples of the Russian Federation, as a new generation seeks training and inspiration from Tibetan masters. In Pursuit focuses on the activities of one shaman on Olkhon Island, in the middle of the famous Siberian Lake Baikal. It explores the role of the shaman among locals and tourists, interrogating the notion of the Siberian shaman as real or touristic sham.

Great Books on Modern Economic History

Joseph Schumpeter’s influence in modern economic thought cannot be overestimated and it turns up in some surprising and interesting places.

Hans Christoph Binswanger, Money and Magic: A Critique of the Modern Economy in the Light of Goethe’s Faust A senior professor of finance, Binswanger makes an important contribution to economic philosophy in this brilliant and popular interpretation of Goethe’s life’s work.

Fernand Braudel, The Perspective of the World. This is Volume III of Braudel’s magnificent trilogy, Civilization and Capitalism, 15^th–18^th Century. Markets and market economy were something very different from modern capitalism, as Braudel explores with a combination of marvelous detail and panoramic sweep. Many would vote Braudel the twentieth century’s greatest historian and Schumpeter the century’s greatest economist.

At first approach, Joseph Schumpeter’s own prose style is meandering and overfull with illustrations, asides, and historical qualifications. He is also sensitive to the aliveness of economic life and his new insights often emerge from the detail. His big three books are The Theory of Economic Development (1912; English edition, 1934), with its theory of innovation, capital creation, and development through cycles; Business Cycles (1939), with its historical vision of economic long waves; and his wartime essay Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy. Each book alludes only lightly to the theories developed in the others; when they are read together the whole vista of modern economic history opens up.

Schumpeter’s work inspires many others. One recent and important work is Chris Freeman and Francisco Louça, As Time Goes By: From the Industrial Revolutions to the Information Revolution, which focuses on waves of technological innovation, boom, and bust. Another, also highly readable, is Erik Reinert’s book, How Rich Countries Got Rich, And Why Poor Countries Stay Poor, which revisits the question of economic development by reference to an alternative canon of continental European thought, exemplified by Schumpeter. Schumpeter’s inspiration crops up also in some less expected places, including the cyclic vision developed by the ecologist C. S. Holling in Panarchy: Understanding Transformations in Human and Natural Systems.

Transpacific China in the Cold War

Helen Zia, Journalist; and Dominic Yang, Postdoctoral Fellow, UBC, and future IHS Fellow in 2013-14

Scholars, students, and guests from Hong Kong, Taiwan, England, the US, and Canada gathered at the University of Texas last week to attend the “Transpacific China in the Cold War” conference hosted by the Institute for Historical Studies. Randy Diehl, the Dean of Liberal Arts at UT, opened the conference and highlighted its interdisciplinarity, saying “This kind of work excites me. I think that some of the best work being done in academia is in the interstitial spaces addressed in this kind of conference.”

The two-day conference highlighted new research focusing on the cultural and social productions that emerged from diasporic Chinese communities during the Cold War. Madeline Hsu, Associate Professor of History at UT and the Director of the Center for Asian American Studies, organized the conference with Poshek Fu, Professor of History and Asian American Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Zijiang Professor of Humanities at the East China Normal University in Shanghai, and Hon Ming Yip, Professor and Chair of the History Department at The Chinese University of Hong Kong. Professor Hsu remarked in her opening comments that this conference was particularly significant because it painted a “more complicated picture of the various struggles to assert identity and belonging during the Cold War. In these struggles, Great Power conflicts shaped but did not determine intellectual formations and pursuits of belonging by Chinese communities.”

The conference included four panels which addressed issues and questions relating to diasporic Chinese communities:

In the first session of the conference, entitled “Orphans of Empire: Refugees,” the panelists explored questions affecting Chinese refugees during the Cold War, an issue often overlooked by diplomatic historians. Helen Zia, a journalist who was one of the first American travelers to the People’s Republic after Richard Nixon’s historic visit in 1972, discussed the mass exodus from Shanghai on the eve of the communist “liberation,” while Glen Peterson (UBC) examined the politics surrounding the Chinese refugees in Hong Kong after the communist takeover of the mainland. Madeline Hsu analyzed how the Aid Refugee Chinese Intellectuals, ostensibly an NGO yet funded by the State Department, politicized refugees by transferring Chinese intellectuals in Hong Kong to Taiwan in support of Chiang Kai-Shek’s efforts to retake the mainland. Finally, Dominic Yang (UBC), one of the new IHS fellows next year, demonstrated that the Rennie’s Mill Community, a refugee community in Hong Kong, was not only a product of the Cold War but also a reflection of British benign neglect to the hardship of refugees.

In the second session, “The Politics of Cultural Production,” the panelists examined the ways that Cold War politics imprinted itself upon literature, film, and literary criticism. Poshek Fu (U. Illinoia, Urbana-Champaign) analyzed Hong Kong film culture and argued that the “Mandarization” of Hong Kong cinema has to understood within the context of Cold War politics in Asia: as a battleground of the global competition between the U.S. and China in winning over the Chinese diaspora. Fu’s paper was read by Michelle I-hsiao Chen, Harrington Graduate Fellow in UT Austin’s Department of Asian Studies. Ping-hui Liao (UC San Diego) juxtaposed the works of two Chinese authors, Eileen Chang and Chen Ying-chen, to analyze their responses to Chinese Communism and American Neocolonialism. Chih-ming Wang (Academia Sinica) analyzed the works of Yan Yuanshu in order to explore how literary criticism reflected the ideological struggle of Cold War Taiwan.

“Propaganda and Discourse” was the third session. During this session, the panelists presented fresh ideas on how to examine the press and literature. In his discussion of leftist newspapers published in Hong Kong and their reporting of the anti-colonial riots in 1952 and 1967, Chi-kwan Mark (U. London) argued that Hong Kong was a contested space of Cold War rhetoric that was constantly redefined. Shuang Shen (Penn State U.) located Cold War discourse within Chinese literature, complicating the notion of the Cold War in the Pacific by arguing that refugee literature reveals intricate intra-Asian connections. Finally, Xiaojue Wang (U Pennsylvania) broadened the panel’s discussion by analyzing the rise of modern Chinese literature in the mid-twentieth century as an contested site during the Cold War.

Finally, in the last panel of the conference, “Negotiating Nonalignment during the Cold War: Hong Kong,” the panelists challenged current scholarship by placing Hong Kong in the center of Cold War dynamics. Peter Hamilton (PhD Candidate, UT) focused on Pop Gingle, an American veteran and entrepreneur who moved to Hong Kong in 1937 and successfully established a business in the British colony and revealed a vast Pacific network in Asia. Simon Shen (Chinese U of Hong Kong) examined the 1967 riot in Hong Kong, arguing that the riot needed to be examined in the international Cold War context that involved connections among China, Britain, the Soviet Union and the United States. Finally, Hon-Ming Yip (Chinese U of Hong Kong) used the 1940s Chinese Democratic Movement in Hong Kong to argue for the importance of Hong Kong as a node of Cold War politics.

The conference was an overwhelming success. One of the participants, Shuang Shen, commented that “Without exaggeration, this was the conference from which I have learned the most. The circulation of full-length papers ahead of time really gave me a chance to read and think about the other participants’ work while also forcing me to conceptualize more rigorously my own project.”

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.

“And really,” she concluded, “History is kind of the king.”

That’s what Rachel Maddow said at Stanford last month when asked what she looks for in a successful job candidate:

“…the popular television host and best-selling author, did not hesitate in her answer. ‘I look for people who have done mathematics. Philosophy. Languages. And really,’ she concluded, ‘History is kind of the king.'”

Read the whole story on the Stanford blog here.

When a Government Tells Historians How to Write and How to Teach

Yesterday, Russia Beyond the Headlines published an article explaining that President Vladimir Putin has ordered historians to write a single Russian history textbook for secondary-school students. Putin wants a textbook with no “internal contradictions,” or “different interpretations.”

We think readers of Not Even Past would be interested in this government effort to control the ways historians write and teach history, so we have republished the article in its entirety. The original can be found here.

New history textbooks may promote conservative values in Russia

March 22, 2013 Stanislav Kuvaldin, special to RBTH

A single textbook is being drafted in Russia, following Putin’s call for a single concept of Russian history.

The Russian government has tasked scholars with preparing a single textbook of the history of Russia, to replace the host of Russian history manuals on the market at the moment. Experts assume that the new textbook will most likely aim to uphold conservative values in society.

It is possible that, in just one year’s time, Russian secondary-school students will be learning their country’s history from a single textbook, Russia’s Education and Science Minister Dmitri Livanov recently announced.

In a previous development, President Vladimir Putin underscored the need to develop unified textbooks in Russian history for secondary schools.

According to Vladimir Putin, the new textbook must “be based on a single concept, drawing on the same logic of continuous Russian history, on interconnection between all its stages, and respect for all its milestones.” He also noted that the textbook must also be free of any “internal contradictions,” and it should not allow “different interpretations.”

Why is a single concept for the history textbook even considered necessary? Supporters of the move point to the fact that 82 history textbooks are currently recommended for schools by the Education Ministry, even though some of these texts cite unverified facts and controversial concepts regarding the history of Russia.

This argument is championed, among others, by the director of the Institute of Universal History of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Alexander Chubaryan.

He has expounded on his failed attempts to get authors of existing textbooks to reconcile the differences in the way they treat the origins of the Russian state (historians have been debating the extent of the Scandinavian influence on establishment of Russia’s national identity continuously ever since the 18^th century), the Great Patriotic War (with the key controversies here being the characterization of Soviet foreign policy following the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Non-Aggression Pact, as well as the beginning of the Great Patriotic War) and, finally, the post-Soviet phase (where assessments may be grounded in mass media reports and op-ed articles with varying degrees of bias).

In other words, authors of the numerous grade-school textbooks on Russian history have struggled to agree on how this history even started, where it has come to, and what the last world war meant for the country.

Some moves Putin made during his first two presidential terms — reinstatement of the Soviet anthem with different lyrics, for instance — clearly sent the message that the president was willing to make the Soviet period a respectful part of Russian history.

Meanwhile, the desire to take the edge off some turning points in the recent past is also obvious: take, for one, the public holiday celebrating the anniversary of the October Revolution.

The holiday — renamed the Day of National Unity and Reconciliation — was still there on the calendar up until 2005, when a different historical date in early November was offered. The new date corresponds to the liberation of the Kremlin by a popular uprising from Polish-Lithuanian invaders in 1612.

“The idea of a single history textbook stems from a desire to bring the society together around a certain symbolic center — a center that would justify the existing state of affairs,” Aleksei Titkov, associate professor at the Department of Political Theory and Political Analysis of the Higher School of Economics, believes.

According to Titkov, there was no urgency in such projects during Vladimir Putin’s first and (to a certain degree) second terms in power. “After the crisis of the 1990s, most of the population thought they were fortunate to have Putin anyway,” said the professor. By now, they have grown accustomed to him, so other methods are needed to persuade them that the existing state of affairs is the best possible option.”

“The main ideological message is also quite discernible: unconditional respect for any regime that ruled Russia during various periods of its history, mingled with respect for the traditional family and religion,” Titkov said.

Elena Galkina, a professor in the history department at Moscow State Pedagogical University, points out that this is far from the first attempt by the Russian authorities to commission a history textbook satisfactory for their purposes.

In 2007, such a textbook was effectively written on the order of then deputy head of the Presidential Executive Office, Vladislav Surkov — an official responsible, among other things, for ideology. “The textbook provoked an outburst among professional historians but eventually failed to make its way into schools — mostly because it was not written properly,” said Galkina.

Galkina expects the new textbooks to reflect the emerging trend toward promoting conservative values, which has been taking hold since the beginning of Vladimir Putin’s third term in power.

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Russia Beyond the Headlines is an internationally recognized source of political, business and cultural news and analysis. It offers original, on-the-ground coverage of Russia from professional, independent journalists who are passionate and knowledgeable about the country, and opinion pieces from commentators who hold a wide range of views about Russia’s leadership and direction.

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Sarin Over Aleppo

UT Grad Student, Jonathan Hunt, wrote an excellent blog essay — published in the Huffington Post — on the role of chemical weapons in recent US-Russian negotations over Syria.

New Partnership between Not Even Past and Teaching Texas

We are proud to announce that Not Even Past is now a partner with the Texas history site, Teaching Texas! A collaboration between the Texas State Historical Association, the University of North Texas Library’s Portal to Texas History, Texas Heritage Online, and the Texas State Library and Archives Commission, Texas Teaching is an online portal of free materials for educators, students or anyone looking for historical documents relating to Texas history: lesson plans, audio-visual material, primary and secondary sources, museum exhibits and online books, among other things, can all be found on this terrific site.

Don’t forget to check out some of the other great materials on site:

The Witte Museum’s Carpa Cubana and Sabino Gomez Photograph Collection, which documents the colorful Mexican American tent shows that traveled Mexico and the Southwestern United States in the early 20th century.

The Texas Maps Collection, a compilation of digitalized Texas maps from 1700 through 1915.

The Texas Archive of the Moving Image, a source for Texas films produced during the Progressive Era, the 1920s, the Great Depression, World War II and beyond.

Published on Wednesday December 19, 2012

Helen Zia, Journalist; and Dominic Yang, Postdoctoral Fellow, UBC, and future IHS Fellow in 2013-14

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