all2445, Author at Not Even Past

A New History Journal Produced by Students

The first issue of a new student-oriented online journal, History in the Making, was launched this month in Sydney, Australia. The journal is available free-of-charge at the History in the Making website.

The fact that it is run by students for students makes History in the Making an exciting addition to the array of historical journals in production today. A collective of history students and alumni from the University of SydneySt are responsible for the journal’s production. University students wrote all ten articles featured in the first volume of the journal. Freshmen, juniors, seniors, and graduate students are all represented amongst the authors of these essays. The journal’s peer review process was carried out by a number of student volunteers, giving undergraduate and graduate students alike an early insight into how this important process works. Stephanie Mawson, editor of the journal and member of the History in the Making Collective said “When we conceived this initiative a year ago, our aims were ambitious – we wanted to contribute to maintaining high quality education, while connecting aspiring young historians with senior students and graduates. We see our mission as facilitating a strong mentoring program while giving students an experience of the academic peer-review process.”

The ten essays published in this first number encompass a wide variety of historical approaches. Peter Harney’s essay considers historical memory and public monuments. Julia Miller presents an environmental history of drought in the state New South Wales in the 1960s. Cultural history is also represented by Julia Bourke’s depiction of comedy within Witch Hunts of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries and Timothy Blum’s examination of the Cape Dutch movement and its promotion of Dutch culture in nineteenth century South Africa.

The collection is also geographically diverse, spanning from Chi Chi Huang’s examination of Jesuit missionaries and British traders in seventeenth and eighteenth century China, to Aden Knaap’s discussion of nineteenth century Russian imperialism and James Lesh’s analysis of euthanasia and other forms of cultural genocide in Nazi Germany.

Interestingly three articles sit in dialogue with one another over post World War II American political life – with Benjamin Brooks writing about the top-down articulation of American nationalism during the Cold War, Sabina Peck examining the role of women in the Civil Rights Movement, and Elaine Lay seeking to explain the rise of American Conservatism in the 1970s and 1980s.

The scholarship presented here is original and engaging. Current history students and history professors alike should make sure to read History in the Making. The journal can be appreciated as an excellent learning resource, providing current history students with examples of high quality work written by their peers.

We look forward to the next volume of History in the Making!

You can go “like” History in the Making on Facebook

Posted Tuesday, April 4, 2012

Great Books on Science & Technology – Light & Power

During the nineteenth century, technology and science changed the world more rapidly and more profoundly than ever before.

Ben Marsden, Watt’s Perfect Engine: Steam and Age of Invention (2002)

The best brief account of the beginnings of the Age of Steam. Marsden paints a lively picture of James Watt in his own time, and also recounts the mythologizing of the heroic inventor that set in even before his death.

Iwan Rhys Morus, When Physics Became King (2005)

During the nineteenth century, physics moved from the periphery of the scientific world to its core. Using the tools of cultural history, Morus shows how the new community of physicists managed to make their discipline “king” and explores the effects this new status had physics itself and on other disciplines that sought to model themselves on it.

Crosbie Smith, The Science of Energy: A Cultural History of Energy (1998)

Energy has become one of the central concerns of the modern world, yet the whole idea that there is something called “energy” dates only from the mid-nineteenth century. Focusing on a group of “North British” scientists and engineers, Smith shows how steam technology, Calvinist religion, and personal ambitions combined to produce the new science of energy, and explores how deeply the new concept reshaped our conceptions of the world.

C. W. F. Everitt, James Clerk Maxwell, Physicist and Natural Philosopher (1975)

This short book is the best place to turn for a clear and accessible account of the life and work of the Scottish physicist whose work revolutionized our understanding of both thermodynamics and electromagnetism. Maxwell is little known to the general public today, but physicists consistently rank him behind only Newton and Einstein. Everitt’s book will show you why.

Jill Jonnes, Empires of Light: Edison, Tesla, Westinghouse, and the Race to Electrify the World (2003)

Most of us give little thought to the electric power system that surrounds us—until it breaks down and plunges us into darkness. Building her story around three striking personalities, Jonnes tells how that vast system came to be built and why it took the shape that, for the most part, it still has today.

Early Modern Classics

Three histories, two novels: a selection of great works on early modern Europe

by Julie Hardwick

Natalie Z. Davis, The Return of Martin Guerre (1984)

A now classic work by the prominent historian exploring a sensational early modern family drama and how it played out in court in a village in southern France

Stephanie Coontz, Marriage, A History: From Obedience to Intimacy, or How Love Conquered Marriage (2005)

A provocative look at the changing expectations and practices of marriage in American history

Scott Sandage, Born Losers: A History of Failure in America (2006)

A lively counter narrative to the usual histories of capitalism that highlights the centrality of risk, struggle, and failure as key features of the individual and family struggles involved in the transformation of economic practices.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile: or On Education

An eighteenth-century bestseller, Emile criticized “traditional” families and advocated for a new mode of modern companionate, child-centered marriage that could be the literal cradle of citzens for democracies.

Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall: A Novel (2009)

A twenty-first-century bestseller and the 2009 Booker Prize winner, Wolf Hall includes a wonderful representation of family life in Tudor London intertwined with its better known narrative of the rise of Thomas Cromwell as a key adviser to Henry VIII

From Baseball to Politics

New works on Afro-Cubans and African-Americans by Frank Guridy

Michael Gomez, Reversing Sail: A History of the African Diaspora (2004).

Gomez’s survey of the history of Africans and descendants from continental origins to the end of the twentieth century is an excellent introduction to the history of the African Diaspora from a global perspective.

Arnold Rampersad, The Life of Langston Hughes: I, Too Sing America, 1902-1941, Vol. 1 (1986).

This biography by the distinguished literary scholar is still the definitive study of the life and work of the famous American poet.

Alejandro de la Fuente, A Nation for All: Race, Inequality, and Politics in Twentieth Century Cuba (2001).

De la Fuente’s study examines the question of racial discrimination in Cuban politics before and after the triumph of Fidel Castro’s revolution.

Lisa Brock and Digna Castañeda Fuertes, ed. Between Race and Empire: African-Americans and Cubans before the Cuban Revolution (1998).

A pathbreaking collection of essays by Cubans and American scholars that illustrates the various realms of African-American engagements with Cubans, from the baseball diamond to music and politics.

Adrian Burgos, Jr. Playing America’s Game: Baseball, Latinos, and the Color Line (2007).

The definitive study of Latinos in major league baseball before and after Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in 1947. Many of these Latinos were Cubans. Those defined as white could play in the major leagues while those who designated black were relegated to the Negro Leagues.

UT History at the AHA Annual Meeting

Each January, hordes of historians descend on a big conference hotel somewhere in the US to present their research, hunt for very scarce new jobs, and to hang out with each other. UT was well represented this year.

Prof Frank Guridy won the Wesley-Logan Prize for his book, Forging Diaspora: Afro-Cubans and African Americans in a World of Empire and Jim Crow.

And one of our second-year graduate students, Yana Skorobogatov, who also happens to be our Assistant Editor here at Not Even Past, had her paper featured on another history department blog, Tropics of Meta, at Georgia State University. Here’s what they said about Yana’s paper (scroll down for a list of other UT presenters and topics):

Yana Skorobogatov, “‘The Higher Circles”: The Western Intellectual Community and the Campaign for Human Rights in the USSR, 1968–84″
Skorobogatov, a PhD student at the University of Texas, revealed an untold chapter in the history of both Western relations with the Soviet Union and the human rights movement. Focusing on “intellectuals as nonstate actors,” Skorobogatov looks at how members of the intelligentsia in the US and Europe tried to develop a coalition with Soviet dissidents to defend the rights of persecuted intellectuals in the détente era. In the process, NGOs (non-governmental organizations) and professional organizations in the sciences and academia set transnational values above national identity. Their efforts ran up against predictable resistance from Soviet authorities, who cited a 1932 act banning voluntary organizations as a pretext for suppressing human rights activism among scientists and other scholars. In response, dissidents argued that they were more like a group of co-authors than a formal organization.

Skorobogatov explained how Western scientists were haunted by the memory of corrupt and abusive science under the Nazis and sought to prevent the same abuses from occurring in the Soviet Union. They also identified with their counterparts in the USSR, who were increasingly accused of mental illnesses such as schizophrenia in order to incarcerate them under gruesome conditions and silence their dissent. (Such a maneuver avoided the need for a show trial and successfully impugned the integrity of the deviant scholar by discrediting their most valuable quality—intellect.) When one accused individual cited the Soviet Constitution to defend his right of free speech, one judge responded with incredulity. “Who takes Soviet laws seriously?” he said. “You are living in an unreal world.” (Enough said.) In response to such abuses, Western scholars decided to employ their “intellectual capital” as a weapon, Skorobogatov said, refusing to participate in or lend their own prestige to important scientific conferences in the Soviet Union. The efficacy of this tactic is hard to determine on the basis of the talk alone, and at least one audience member raised the question of whether Western scientists worked hard only to defend their “own kind,” as opposed to the many ordinary Soviet citizens who suffered oppression. In any case, though, this talk offered an intriguing window into the politics of science, international organizations, and human rights, as well as the internal tensions of détente itself

UT History AHA participants

Graduate Students

Stephen Dove: Redefining Primitive: Mayan Interpretations of Early Christianity, 1900-44
Renata Keller: Building a Revolutionary Community: The 1961 Latin American Peace Conference and the 1966 Tricontinental Conference in Comparative Perspective
Franz Hensel Riveros: Moral Therapeutics: Thrift and Temperance in Colombia’s Fin-de-Siècle
Bryan S. Glass: Education and Empire: Representations of the British Empire to Scottish Schoolchildren, 1945–65
Yana Skorobogatov: “The Higher Circles”: The Western Intellectual Community and the Campaign for Human Rights in the USSR, 1968–84
Karin Sanchez-Manriquez, University of Texas at Austin: The Chilean Catholic Church and the Social Question: Changes and Continuities in Catholic Thought in Chile, 1891–1935

Faculty:

Jeremi Suri: International Perspectives on American Democracy, Growth, and Expansion

Jeremi Suri: The Past and Future of American Nation-Building
Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra: The Typological Universe of the Spanish Hapsburgs

John McKiernan-Gonzalez: Puro Cuento: Everyday People and Transnational Public Health Formations at the Texas-Mexico Border, 1848-1942

Wm. Roger Louis (Chair): Historians, Journalists, and the Challenges of Getting it Right, Part 3: Interpreting the Arab Spring

Jeremi Suri (Chair): Historians, Journalists, and the Challenges of Getting it Right, Part 4: American Intervention

Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra (Chair): The Social Worlds of Devotional and Moral Discourses in Colonial Mexico and Guatemala

Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra (commentator): The Promise of De-centering National Histories: America, Germany, and Spain

Jacqueline Jones: Interviewing in the Job Market in the Twenty-First Century

Allan Tully: The Department Chair as Negotiator: Challenges Faced by History Department Chairs in These Perilous, Budget-Cutting Times

More on the AHA Annual Meeting can be found here

Great Books on Early Twentieth-Century Popular Music

by Karl Hagstrom Miller

Recent years have seen a real flowering of scholarship about the popular music of the early twentieth century. Here are a few of my favorites—and a little something extra.

David Suisman, Selling Sounds: The Commercial Revolution in American Music (2009).

An essential book for anyone interested in the history of popular music in the United States, Selling Sounds charts the emergence of a cohesive—and ubiquitous—music industry in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The fascinating characters that populate Suisman’s story are no lovers of music. They are savvy business men who learned how to transform disembodied sound (whether on sheet music or phonograph records) into hard cash. They also set the template for how music would be marketed for the next 100 years. No book tells the story better.

Elena Razlogova, The Listener’s Voice: Early Radio and the American Public (2011).

Radios became common in American homes during the 1920s. They brought the world into the family room in unprecedented ways. While much of scholarship on radio focuses on the establishment of major national broadcasting networks, The Listener’s Voice reveals the rollicking world of US radio before the majors seized control. Early radio often depended on its listeners to provide content. Through phone calls and letters, listeners created thriving participatory communities over the air. It was more akin to the vibrant world of early internet forums than to the homogenizing, on-way transmissions of later radio and television networks.

John W. Troutman, Indian Blues: American Indians and the Politics of Music, 1879-1934 (2009).

This wonderful book addresses some of the themes I explore in Segregating Sound—music, race, folklore, and money—from a different angle. Indian Blues tells the fascinating story of the struggle over music and musical meaning between government officials, teachers, and Native Americans in the early twentieth century. While government sponsored programs on reservations and in Indian boarding schools used music as a means to suppress Native resistance and collective memory, many Native Americans used music—be it traditional, new commercial pop styles, or combinations of both—to assert Native autonomy, escape the confines of government proscriptions, and get paid. Fresh, innovative, and well told, Indian Blues offers a story you won’t find anywhere else.

Carl Wilson, Celine Dion’s Let’s Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste (2007).

This is a slim book about pop diva Celine Dion’s top-selling album featuring “My Heart Will Go On,” better known as the theme from the movie Titanic. It is also one of the best pieces of music writing I have read in years. Wilson, the pop music critic for the Toronto Globe and Mail, admits he is not a Dion fan. He then systematically explores her global appeal to discover what he might be missing. The result is brilliant meditation on aesthetics, taste, cultural politics, and pop music history. At times touching and often hilarious, this beautifully written book changed the way I hear music.

Great Books on La Violencia in Guatemala

Two unusual books on civil war violence in Guatemala

Daniel Wilkinson, Silence on the Mountains: Stories of Terror, Betrayal, and Forgetting in Guatemala (2002)

This book originated when Wilkinson, a young human rights worker in Guatemala, began to look into the arson burning of a coffee finca (plantation) of a prominent family. Through a series of interviews and eventually some archival research, he learns not only the history of the finca itself, but also about how the people in the area were both involved with and deeply affected by the civil violence of the late 1970s and early 1980s in Guatemala. Trained as both an academic and as an activist, Wilkinson effectively weaves together the ways in which labor exploitation, terror, violence and the tyranny of silence conspire to render the experience of ordinary people silent.

Francisco Goldman, The Long Night of White Chickens (1992)

This novel, which takes place in Guatemala in the late 1980s, is a mystery in which a young woman, Flor de Maya Puac, is murdered, presumably by Guatemalan security forces. Her stepbrother, Roger, comes from the US to repatriate her body and investigate her death, only to find himself lost in a labyrinth of lies, rumors, and willful delusions about her demise. The charges against her—that she had been involved in a kidnapping ring of sell the organs of adopted children, that she has been killed by a death squad or by criminal associates, all reflect some pernicious current of Guatemala reality. The author, Francisco Goldman, is himself Guatemalan-American, and this award-winning book, his first novel, conveys the eeriness and dis-ease of that era better than any other.

Garrard-Burnett reviews two documentaries about civil war violence in Guatemala, here in WATCH.

Great Books on Enslaved Life and Labor in the US

Classic studies, the newest works, and a few novels on labor and gender and the institutions of slavery in the United States.

by Daina Ramey Berry

Deborah Gray White’s book, Ar’n’t I a Woman? (1985) broke new ground in the field of slavery studies. The book ushered in the beginnings of well-focused and sustained attention to the lives of American bondwomen. White takes on enduring stereotypes of black women that have their roots in racial slavery. She locates the origins of the mammy and Jezebel myths, for example, and thoughtfully discredits them both. By exploring the interior and workaday lives of slave women, White reveals the complexity and dynamism of southern plantation slavery. This short, yet powerful monograph remains the obvious starting point for anyone interested in the lives of enslaved women.

Brenda Stevenson’s Life in Black and White (1997), is a microhistory of Loudon County, Virginia from the revolutionary period to the Civil War. Stevenson reaches across the color line to explore how a diverse mix of people lived among each other in this old southern town. Tackling a variety of issues—from ‘race,’ gender, class, family and politics—Stevenson challenges much of what we thought we knew about the inter-racial dynamics of southern living. Her treatment of enslaved life, however, is the crown jewel of this work. Stevenson revises almost everything we thought we knew about family life among US slaves, by showing us that the nuclear family was both impractical and less than ideal for many slave families, particularly since the institution of slavery did so much to destroy what small possibilities existed to build strong, enduring black families. Life in Black and White also provides an excellent model of scholarship for students, especially those interested in producing regional studies on slave life.

Jennifer Morgan’s Laboring Women (2004) is a highly original study of the construction of racial and gender ideologies in the Americas. By examining the lives of enslaved women in West Africa, Barbados, and the early British American colonies, Morgan reveals the interconnected, mutually constitutive nature of gender and racial formations. She reminds us that enslaved women were ultimately valued for their physical labor and for their reproductive capacities. Morgan also illuminates the interior lives of bondwomen and concludes definitively that their ability to provide “double labor” was central to their exploitation. This work provides an excellent example of how a solid theoretical framework can offer new and fresh ways to examine slavery, gender, and race.

William Dusinberre’s well-researched study, Them Dark Days: Slavery in the American Rice Swamps (2000), examines slave life on three large rice plantations in coastal Georgia and South Carolina. Its detailed archival research and well-exectued comparitive history offers a fine study of both slaveholder and the enslaved perspectives about life in antebellum America. Altogether, this work is important because Dusinberre emphasizes the harsh, often-ignored exploitative side of American capitalism and the ways it negatively affected the lives of the enslaved. Them Dark Days forces a reconsideration of the scholarly obsession with ‘agency’ in slavery scholarship, as it shines a light back onto the pervasive brutality of American slavery that disappeared from some more recent accounts.

Ira Berlin and Phillip Morgan, Cultivation and Culture: Labor and the Shaping of Slave Life America (1993). The introductory chapter of this edited volume on slave labor and culture by seasoned historians Berlin and Morgan outlines a strong case for the centrality of labor to studies of slavery. This introduction is a must read for anyone interested in the ways labor helped define the contours of enslaved life and contributed to the growth and expansion of slavery in America. It also provides a rich, though abbreviated, general history of slavery in the United States.

Walter Johnson’s Soul by Soul (2001) shifts our gaze from large southern plantations and farms and takes the reader on a harrowing ride inside a New Orleans slave pen. These pens, where the enslaved were appraised, bought, and sold, provide a fresh look at the inner-workings of slavery and capitalism. Johnson shows not only how slave sales ruptured black families but also how the institution of slavery tampered with the psychological and moral core of slaveholders themselves. In this three-way saga between the enslaved, the buyer, and the seller, Johnson also illuminates how each group played an important role in the meaning-laden spectacles of human consumption.

Novels
Wench (2010) by Dolen Perkins-Valdez

This novel, based on a true story, examines the phenomenon of southern slaveholders taking enslaved domestics to a summer retreat in Ohio during the 1850s. None of the men brought their wives with them–just their enslaved mistresses. Written from the perspective of one bondwoman, readers find a compelling account of the internal thoughts of women exploited by their slaveholders, and the complicated relationships they forged with one another. Perkins-Valdez reminds us that the sexual exploitation of enslaved women did not just happen on plantations and farms, right under the mistresses’ noses. Sometimes, this sexual and psychological violence manifested itself in various settings away from “home.”

Property (2003) by Valerie Martin

Novelist Valerie Martin transports her readers to antebellum Louisiana in this dark and often violent look at the corrosive effects of slavery and patriarchy in one woman’s home. Manon Gaudet, the white protagonist and mistress on a Louisiana sugar plantation, finds herself at odds with her abusive and philandering husband. Manon, childless herself, comes into daily contact with Sarah, an enslaved woman who produces two children with Manon’s husband. Not only is Sarah the Gaudets’ slave, she’s a live-in domestic. For this reason, Manon and Sarah endure a volatile relationship, largely as a result of Manon’s husband’s infidelity and Sarah’s inconsolable anger. When a slave rebellion results in Manon’s husband’s death and her own injuries and widowhood, she engages for the first time in serious introspection about her family’s and her own complicity in the evils of slavery. This novel is a worthy read for those interested in the complex relationships between white slaveholders and their enslaved domestics.

The Book of Night Women (2009) by Marlon James

Marlon James paints the Night Women as six hate-filled enslaved women who are fed-up with the dehumanizing, brutal, and gruesome forces of slavery. Set in nineteenth-century Jamaica on a sugar plantation, these women all find themselves deformed and debilitated by the perversity of the system. Hoping to gain their freedom and seek retribution for lives of turmoil, they meet clandestinely every night to plot a bloody slave revolt on the island. A story drenched in blood and the savagery that was slavery, Night Women attends to tensions among the women as well. Lilith, a green-eyed mulatto who strives to be anything but the commonly evoked tragic mulatto figure, often misbehaves and angers the other women in the group, but in the end, they appear determined not to allow internecine strife to obfuscate their larger aim. This story is powerful, suspenseful, and indeed violent, but it forces us to reckon with the everyday realities of some enslaved people in Jamaica and even here in America.

Two films about slavery are reviewed on NEP’s WATCH page, here and here.

Great Books on Science Myth-Busters

A variety of books skewering myths about science and scientists.

by Alberto Martinéz

Ronald L. Numbers, ed., Galileo Goes to Jail, and Other Myths about Science and Religion (2009). Twenty-five historians write twenty-five brief but incisive chapters debunking famous myths mostly about Christianity and the sciences. It addresses well known claims, such as the assertion that the medieval Christian Church suppressed the growth of science, that medieval Christians taught that the Earth was flat, that Copernicanism demoted humans from the center of the universe, and that Darwin reconverted to Christianity on his deathbed.

John Waller, Einstein’s Luck: The Truth About Some of the Greatest Scientific Discoveries (2004). Historian John Waller thoughtfully writes about various heroes in the history of science, to debunk famous claims about their discoveries. His examples are mostly from the history of the lifesciences, including discussions on Darwin, Louis Pasteur, Joseph Lister, Alexander Fleming, and others. For example, Waller rehearses historian Robert Olby’s arguments that Gregor Mendel did not really discover the laws of heredity. Thus this is essentially a popular book, as Waller relies mostly on accounts by other historians, and therefore, some of its claims have eroded. For example, it follows a famous article in arguing that eclipse expeditions of 1919 hardly confirmed Einstein’s theory of gravity, that the data was misrepresented in favor of Einstein, but actually, more recent and very thorough historical analysis by Daniel Kennefick has shown that the observations really were analyzed fairly in 1919.

Tony Rothman, Everything is Relative, and Other Fables from Science and Technology (2003). Physicist Tony Rothman writes nineteen sections discussing a broad variety of topics, some of which involve myths in science. This popular book is well written and very engaging, though it lacks enough use of primary sources and therefore it echoes stories by writers that one might assume to be reliable but which have some defects, for example, it too highlights the false myth about Einstein and the eclipse of 1919. Nevertheless, Rothman’s book is insightful and worthwhile, including lively discussions about discoveries and inventions such as telephones, light bulbs, and penicillin. For Rothman’s excellent account of the myth that the young mathematician Évariste Galois feverishly formulated group theory on the night before he died in a pistol duel, see Rothman, Science à la Mode: Physical Fashions and Fictions (1989).

An engraving depicting the nineteenth-century idea about medieval beliefs that the world is flat. The Flammarion engraving is a wood engraving by an unknown artist that first appeared in Camille Flammarion‘s L’atmosphère: météorologie populaire (1888). The image depicts a man crawling under the edge of the sky, depicted as if it were a solid hemisphere, to look at the mysterious Empyrean beyond. The caption translates to “A medieval missionary tells that he has found the point where heaven and Earth meet…”

Seeing 9/11: The Falling Man Photograph

This article, published by Esquire magazine is a very striking (although not brand new) piece about 9/11. It concerns the famous photo of a man falling from one of the towers, which is stuck in my memory very clearly. Not only did that image epitomize the horror of it all, but I was one of the (apparently innumerable) people who called The New York Times to complain about the publication of this photograph. And I have never called any media organization to complain about anything else. At the time, when so many families were looking for the missing, I was mortified by the idea that the person’s family could recognize him in this photograph, but apparently the identification has turned out to be very elusive. So perhaps a decade later, it now works only to bring us back immediately to the horror of that day. For me it does still have that impact.

Julie Hardwick

Other iconic photographs taken September 11, 2001 and in the weeks afterwards

Monday, September 12, 2011

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