csb2443, Author at Not Even Past

Humanitarian Intervention Before YouTube

Joseph Kony has been making waves across the Internet the past few days thanks to a slick, emotional video produced by Invisible Children, a nongovernmental organization based in San Diego, California. Who is Joseph Kony? He is the leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army, a brutal group from Uganda. The LRA has devastated Central Africa, destroying towns, raping women, and, most infamously, kidnapping children and forcing them to fight. In 2005, the International Criminal Court put out a warrant for Kony’s arrest, and Kony and his cronies currently have the dubious honor of sitting near the top of the Interpol’s most wanted list. Despite being sought by the ICC and Interpol for over six years, Kony remains at large.

It took only a matter of minutes for Invisible Children’s video to go viral after the organization uploaded the film to YouTube on March 6. The thirty-minute video has been viewed over 76 million times, and the number is climbing. Social media sites have helped to further Invisible Children’s goals of making Joseph Kony “famous.” Almost everyone on Facebook has seen a link to the video. #Kony steadily climbed to 2.83 percent of all of the traffic on Twitter at midnight March 7 and has yet to dip below .09 percent. With over 200,000,000 tweets a day, that’s a lot of discussion on a subject that almost no one had heard about the day before.

The success of Invisible Children’s video has been matched by criticism of the organization. Critics have attacked everything from Invisible Children’s finances, motivations, and understanding of what is actually happening in Uganda. Many have brought back to life an older Foreign Affairs article that claims that organizations such as Invisible Children “have manipulated facts for strategic purposes, exaggerating the scale of LRA abductions and murders and emphasizing the LRA’s use of innocent children as soldiers, and portraying Kony . . . as uniquely awful, a Kurtz-like embodiment of evil.” Slate is linking to an Al Jazeera article that claims the story told in the video about Kony is outdated, that his power has now dwindled and he no longer operates inside Uganda. And today Nicholas Kristof takes on the critics in The New York Times.

Constructing a good vs. evil paradigm to further a cause is, of course, nothing new. Invisible Children’s activism fits within a larger historical phenomenon of activists calling on governments to help downtrodden people on the basis of morality. The fight to end the African slave trade was one of the earliest and most successful examples. The patchwork quilt of twentieth-century activism is sewn together with a farrago of international disasters that paved the way for Invisible Children’s presentation of its subject. During the First World War, Brahmins assembled in Boston at Faneuil Hall to protest the Turkish government’s treatment of the Armenians. “Turkey might govern as she pleased,” one Bostonian appealed to his concerned friends, “but she was not permitted to outrage the sense of humanity.” During the 1980s, the same appeals to humanitarian morality rung like a church bell on our television sets with the fly-covered children of famine-wrecked Ethiopia; in the 1990s with the mass graves in Srebrenica; and in the late 2000s, with the gut wrenching pictures of what Colin Powell called “genocide” in Darfur.

Perhaps the most important piece of the quilt that set the stage for Invisible Children was activism during the Nigerian Civil War (1967-1970). The images of emaciated women and children coming out of the secessionist state of Biafra stirred people across the United States toward activism. Over 200 nongovernmental organizations sprouted in the United States alone, all calling for the United States to help with the relief effort in Biafra. The American Committee to Keep Biafra Alive, the largest and most influential group, took out ads in The New York Times asking American President Richard Nixon if Nigerian unity was worth the lives of ten million people. In the New York Post, the organization compared the Nigerian head of state Yakubu Gowon to Hitler. Much like Invisible Children, the American Committee sought out and got celebrity endorsements, as Jimi Hendrix, Joan Baez, Cliff Robertson, Michael Caine, and countless others spoke out over Biafra. They all agreed with Ted Kennedy, then a junior Senator, that “the essence of international law is humanitarianism,” and the United States should support humanitarian relief.

But this is where the similarities between these previous organizations and Invisible Children largely end. While all these previous groups wanted the United States to become involved in helping peoples of other nations, they believed that aid should be handled under the flag of the United Nations or other supranational or regional groups. Invisible Children has advocated for the United States to send its troops unilaterally into Central Africa under its own flag. This is an extraordinary demand given that the United States has just left a nasty intervention in Iraq and is currently struggling to extricate itself from Afghanistan. The historical trend had been for the American public to shy away from more use of the U.S. military after intervening in Vietnam, Somalia, and Iraq.

By suggesting that the United States military not only could, but should, send its own troops under its own mandate to help capture Joseph Kony and “save” Ugandan children, Invisible Children has inserted itself into a centuries old debate on America’s role in the world. John Quincy Adams warned in 1821 that while evil existed in the world, the United States should act alone and not go abroad “in search of monsters to destroy.” A century later, Woodrow Wilson argued that it was in the interest of the United States to seek out those monsters, but it should only be done in concert with a League of Nations. Invisible Children’s call for action, then, seems to be an interesting mix of the two: acting unilaterally with American military power to destroy monsters like Joseph Kony.

The blending of unilateral American force and moral concern should sound familiar because it was precisely the logic of the George W. Bush administration and its neoconservative foreign policy. The most striking aspect of the Invisible Children’s campaign is that the use of American troops to enforce moral imperatives has been almost unquestioned by its supporters. And judging by the money that is pouring in, the support for this foreign policy seems massive. Maybe to this younger—and judging from the video mostly white—generation, sending American troops on moral missions is not problematic and in fact should be the guide to America’s foreign policy in the future.

Are we witnessing a resurgence of neoconservative foreign policy? Probably not. Instead, we are seeing the ability of humanitarian morality to transcend politics and ideology and forge bonds amongst people across the globe. The Internet has amplified this process, not only making it easier and faster to share information about important issues, but fostering a sense of democratic connection that makes us feel as if Joseph Kony is our problem, too. Invisible Children has been successful for the same reasons that the abolitionists succeeded in persuading Parliament to end the slave trade: they portrayed their subjects as a human tragedy that rose above politics.

The danger, of course, is that by constructing the Ugandan situation as a fight between good and evil, Invisible Children’s advocates are supporting a military initiative that they might normally dissent against. It is not that Invisible Children’s supporters do not understand the alleged lessons of intervention in Afghanistan and Iraq. Rather, Afghanistan and Iraq are not seen as applicable to a moral situation like the eradication of Joseph Kony. This sounds eerily similar to the well-meaning American intervention in Somalia during the early 1990s. Let’s hope that this American intervention works out better than the last time the United States tried to destroy a monster in Africa or the Middle East.

Twitter for Historians

Atop My Hobby-horse, Twitter

by Rachel Herrmann

In his novel, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, Laurence Sterne describes the character Uncle Toby and his hobby-horse, the military. A hobby-horse, which the Oxford English Dictionary defines as “a favourite pursuit or pastime,” is something you’ve trotted out and ridden nearly to death. At the risk of losing the remainder of my friends, I am here to once again sing the praises of my hobby-horse, Twitter, and explain why you should be on it if you care about history.

Twitter is a website where users can “tweet” their statuses in 140 characters or less. Historians use it to start conversations, to follow people with like interests, and to keep abreast of history-related news and stories (links are automatically shortened so that there’s enough room to fit a comment and a link within the space of one tweet). When people want to talk about a specific topic, they use a hashtag—a phrase preceded by the “#” sign—which then becomes searchable. Basically, it’s a way to have all your history information in one place.

Twitter’s short, snappy platform for allowing people to communicate means that tweets have generated blog posts, conference papers, and articles. News travels fast on Twitter; when that earthquake hit Virginia in August 2011, I had friends in New York who read about it on Twitter before they felt the ground rumble beneath their feet. These possibilities for lightning-fast networking have engendered the rise of a group of historians on Twitter known as #twitterstorians. They’ve been around for over two years now. When you put that hashtag in front of the phrase “twitterstorians,” anything that the #twitterstorians are talking can be searched for on Twitter.

A growing group of professors and graduate students from UT’s history department are on Twitter. Our very own Not Even Past (@NotEvenPast) is on there, tweeting about recent blog posts, book reviews, podcasts, and short history articles. H.W. Brands (@hwbrands) is tweeting the history of the United States in haiku—he’s currently up to President Polk’s election. Jeremi Suri (@JeremiSuri) tweets about foreign policy blog posts, but he also posts links to current events stories and fellowships for students. Ben Breen (@ResObscura) can be counted on for tweets that share interesting, funny, and sometimes disgusting medical remedies in the Early Modern world. Bryan Glass runs the Twitter feed for the British Scholar Society, (@britishscholar), disseminating op-eds on British studies, and listing upcoming talks and lectures. Chris Dietrich (@C_R_W_Dietrich) is on there talking about twentieth-century history and foreign affairs. Brian Jones (@jonesbp) opines on new music, restaurant plugs, and getting writing done. Jessica Luther (@jessicaluther) can be trusted to post about her research on Barbados, with links to interesting pictures from her Tumblr blog. And oh, I’m on there (@Raherrmann), tweeting about research, writing, and food.

In case these glimpses aren’t enough to convince you that there are conversations happening on Twitter that are worth joining in on, I’d like to point out that Twitter is very useful for networking, conference-going, and researching. I’ve met people through Twitter that I’ve then connected with in real life. It’s comforting to arrive in a strange city, and to have a coffee date set up with someone you’ve never met, but have been talking to about history.

Historical organizations, including the American Historical Association (@AHAhistorians), the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing (@SHARPorg), and the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (@SHAFRConference), have used Twitter at their national conferences. Their tweets gave attendees logistical information before they arrived at the conference, and during the conference, hashtags covered what happened on the ground. Organizers set up a hashtag, and then conference-goers and non-conference-goers alike could follow along with what was happening at panels. Usually, people in attendance live-tweet the papers as people are presenting them—this conversation is called “the backchannel.” At the American Historical Association’s annual conference in Chicago, over 4,500 tweets hit the airwaves.

People who didn’t make it to the conference get to feel like they’re participating. And people who are there don’t have to worry about missing papers when panels are timed to happen simultaneously, because they can read what’s going on at a different panel from a few rooms away. Participating in the backchannel also gives conference-goers the ability to react to a paper as it’s being presented. Panelists can check the backchannel during their presentations so that they can anticipate questions, and they can read up on it afterwards to get almost instant feedback on their papers.

The fact that so many people are using Twitter at conferences has also been useful in getting me to think about those Twitter users when crafting my own conference talks. Gone are the days when I start a paragraph with a five-line long topic sentence. Now, I’m looking at my paper and wondering how listeners are going to condense my words into 140-character sound bites. My arguments come through a bit more forcefully, since I know that people will be multitasking as they listen to me speak, tweet about what I’m saying, and read what other attendees at other panels might be talking about.

The other venue where I’ve found that Twitter is useful is when I’m doing history, and I’m not alone in this respect. Public historians have argued that Twitter has been good practice for creating explanatory displays for museums and exhibits, where captions must be short, but informative. I love using Twitter when I’m off researching. Since I study a topic that demands that I cast a very wide net, I sometimes have days where I’m doing a whole lot of skimming with not much return. Having Twitter open is like having a group of colleagues in the room with you. You can use them to complain to, but you can also field a research question to them, and have five answers in as many minutes. It’s a fun way to share the joys of research; the same holds true for when I’m writing. There’s a group of people there, just waiting to support your recent attack on a bad paragraph, or to agree to write with you and check-in for a progress report every hour.

Black Amateur Photography

by Joan Neuberger

The passion for recording our lives, fostered today by the availability of simple digital cameras and posting sites like Flickr, has a long history. As early 1898, ten years after Kodak released its portable, automatic #1 camera, something like 1.5 million people had seized the ability to shape their own image of the world by purchasing their own cameras.

African American leaders very early on understood the uses of photography for both self-expression and political struggle. Leigh Raiford notes, in her book Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare: Photography and the African American Freedom Struggle, that Sojourner Truth supported her cause by selling photos of herself at lectures and Frederick Douglass wanted to use photography to portray black life more accurately.

Inexpensive cameras offered everyone in the twentieth century the ability to represent themselves, including people who felt misrepresented. One of the most interesting segments of the exhibition, “For All the World to See,” mentioned in a previous blog on African American online history, is devoted to everyday, amateur, photography, “In Our Lives We are Whole: Snapshots of Everyday Life. 1935-75.” The online exhibit begins by saying:

“As the popularity of increasingly inexpensive and easily accessible cameras swept the nation in the early twentieth century, black Americans, like their white counterparts, relied on the snapshot to record and commemorate their lives and achievements. In the end, millions of African Americans took cameras into their hands and used them as the ultimate “weapon of choice” against racism. Snapshot by snapshot, these amateur photographers did for themselves what decades of mainstream representation could not: made visible the complexity of a people.”

Historical amateur photography, African American family photo albums, individual shots and series can be found all over Flickr. For example, informal photos and professional portraits can be found on the Black History Month set on the Flickr site of the Florida State Library and Archives.

An extraordinarily rich collection of everyday photos can be found on Flickr’s Black History Album and its related website, Black History Album. This family photo above, of a grandmother and her grandchildren, labeled “Happy Family,” was taken in 1902 (used with permission). For Black History Month, this website posted a survey of the books by Black photographers, beginning with Picturing the Promise: The Scurlock Studio and Black Washington. The site includes everything from the Civil War, through the Civil Rights movement, such as this beautifully captured everyday scene of an African American man going in the “colored entrance” of a movie house on a Saturday afternoon in Belzoni, Mississippi in 1939 (used with permission).

Today, African American amateur photography is supported by a wide range of institutions. In Chicago, for example, a group of professionals and amateurs have founded the Chicago Alliance for African American Photographers. The mission of the CAAAP is to document, preserve, and exhibit photographs of African American life. You can take a look at one of their exhibits, “The Awakening.”

The Flu Epidemic, 1918-1919

by Joan Neuberger

[edited to replace broken links, March 12, 2019]

The “Spanish Flu” that dispatched poor Lavinia Swire on Downton Abbey last week killed more people in 1918-19 than died in World War I itself. The war took approximately 16 million lives, famously decimating an entire European generation of young men; the flu took 50 million and was truly a world phenomenon. In the US, the average life expectancy dropped 12 years as the flu ravaged the young and old alike.

You can read more about the flu in the US at the National Archives’ online exhibit, The Deadly Virus. The exhibit follows the spread of the disease and the public safety measures taken to contain it. Public servants, like mail carriers and police officers were especially vulnerable to the disease and helped spread it. The suffering the flu wrought on the Indian population is well documented because the federal government was supposed to administer reservations. Reports from doctors and government agents about the course of the disease reveal the horrific conditions in which Indians lived and died.

The Great Pandemic, a website from the US Department of Health and Human Services is no longer available but this page from the American Historical Association includes links to a wide range of related stories, documents, and photographs about the flu. The original site offered this advice: “If you became sick in nineteenth-century America, you might consult a doctor, a druggist, a midwife, a folk healer, a nurse or even your neighbor. Most of these practitioners would visit you in your home.” The advent of scientific medicine was greeted skeptically by many people. In some cases this is because traditional healers were more familiar; and sometimes they did a better job.

Most of these government sites play down differential effects of disease based on class and race, but in Texas, as elsewhere, medical care was segregated. This article about Texas quotes sources that show both the cost of the flu in the Mexican-American population and the official fears of popular unrest. And here is an excellent piece on African Americans and the flu epidemic.

African American History Online

by Joan Neuberger

If Digital History is “using new technologies to enhance research and teaching,” as the excellent website from the University of Houston puts it, then African American history is being well-served digitally. In honor of African American History month, I survey here one enormous and useful website that gives us all access to a very wide variety of materials.

Together, The Library of Congress, National Archives and Records Administration, National Endowment for the Humanities, National Gallery of Art, National Park Service, Smithsonian Institution and United States Holocaust Memorial Museum have constructed a wonderful site here for African American History Month, to “join in paying tribute to the generations of African Americans who struggled with adversity to achieve full citizenship in American society.”

This year’s theme, chosen by the Association for the Study of African American Life and History, is Black Women in American Culture and History. But the sources available on this extensive website don’t seem to focus on women (maybe we have to wait until Women’s History Month in March for that). But the offerings are wide ranging: texts, podcasts, photographs, and videos of everything from Art and Baseball to poet Yusef Komunyakaa and writer Zora Neale Hurston.

One of the things I like best about this website is that each link makes it possible to learn a little about a subject and move on or to learn much more by following links deeper into the public digital offerings of each of these great institution’s holdings.

In this blog post I can only scratch the surface of this rich site.

Beginning with the homepage, links will take you to a handful of featured collections including the Library of Congress’s collection of Carl Van Vechten’s photographs of people connected with the Harlem Renaissance and to the National Museum of African American History and Culture’s current exhibition on slavery at Jefferson’s Monticello. It also has a link to the National Park Service’s online exhibit about the Tuskegee Airmen.

The largest subsection linked from the homepage is list of Exhibits and Collections, where links will take you to collections in the Library of Congress, The National Archives, The National Park Service, and the Smithsonian. Some of these are themselves quite extensive. Under “Culture and Folklife”, one collection from the Library of Congress, links to an exhibit, “African American Odyssey: A Quest for Full Citizenship,” that includes dozens of full text books, including Phyllis Wheatley’s 1773 poems, an 800-page book on the Underground Railroad, several fugitives accounts of escape, recapture & re-escape, a number of works on the slave trade and slave revolts, songs and photographs from the abolitionist movement; photographs and newspaper articles dominate the twentieth-century section of the site. Each item can be easily followed into the Library of Congress collections for similar or related items. The African American Odyssey page also includes links to deep collections on Frederick Douglass, Jackie Robinson, Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers’ Project, African American pamphlets from the 1820s-1909, and the 18-19c history of Slaves’ experiences with the courts. And that is just one page in one section of the African American Odyssey.

This site now gives us access to hundreds of early sound recordings (and related photos and print materials). My favorite example (one of ten collections listed for African American History Month) is “‘Now What a Time’: Blues, Gospel and the Fort Valley Music Festivals, 1938-43.” Listen, for example, to Sonny Chestain playing “Po’ Boy, Long Way from Home.” Or listen and look through the “John and Ruby Lomax 1939 Southern States Recording Trip,” which Karl Miller discussed in his feature last month here on NEP. Here is Aunt Mollie MacDonald singing (and clapping) “Rosie.” That’s Mollie on the right in this fuzzy photo.

There are also eleven portal-links related to the history of slavery. A collection of materials on the transformation of Protestantism and construction of black religious experience from 1780-1925. Six sites on African Americans serving in the military. An exhibit about President Obama taking the oath of office on the Lincoln bible. Twelve sites listed under Culture and Folklife, that range from Florida to Chicago and Ohio and include 62 StoryCorps recordings of present-day interviews. Choosing at random, I listened to James Ransom and Cherie Johnson talking about their neighbor and Sunday School teacher, Miss Divine: “One of the things you prayed for, if you were in Miss Divine’s class, was ‘Lord, please let me get old enough, to get out of this class.’”

And even after all we’ve known and read and heard and watched about the impact of Hurricane Katrina, listening to Antoinette Franklin and Iriel Franklin talking about the strong women in their family brought me to tears.

Another fascinating set of sources is the collection of “First-Person Narratives of the American South, 1860-1920”, which includes more than a hundred diaries, autobiographies, memoirs, travel accounts, and ex-slave narratives, all scanned and easily readable right on the site. The travel accounts alone range from an AME Bishop’s voyage to Sierra Leone and Liberia in 1893, to the account of a young white woman, coming of age during the Civil War and moving through Mexico to Cuba where her family recreates the planation life they’d known at home.

There are thirteen sites on the Civil Rights movement, including some we have seen before here on NEP, like the beautiful NEH/PBS multimedia site to accompany the documentary on the Freedom Riders.

There is a link to the National Archives materials on the 1963 March on Washington and Martin Luther King’s famous speech, “I Have a Dream.” This page includes a list of discussion questions for teaching (or just thinking), youtube videos about the march, and links to other notable figures in African American history.

Visual images available for learning about African American history could be better represented here, but some searching and clicking reveals some very interesting materials. Most of the links I mentioned above have substantial visual components but the direct links to art exhibitions and to images are disappointing. The “Images” slideshow presents a fairly random selection of historical prints and photographs, an interesting introductory survey of sorts, but one that could have used more written descriptions of the images. And when you go down to “Images Used on this Site,” you only get links to a few individual shots from the very rich collections available deeper into the links listed under “Exhibits and Collections.”

The links under Art and Design are mixed. Several of the titles link to exhibits that are no longer available and most of the museums display only a tiny portion of their collections. Two of the links, however, are more satisfying. The Smithsonian’s African art museum offers a nice introduction to their collection with adequate historical and artistic descriptions. The National Museum for African American History and Culture has a couple nice exhibits (but not easy to find since the link is listed under the title of an exhibit that is gone). Eventually you get to “For All the World to See: Visual Culture and the Struggle for Civil Rights,” a wide ranging collection of images and material objects, accompanied by informative discussions of the role of the visual in inspiring activists and in providing evidence of atrocities that motivated others. Another part of the exhibit is devoted to the ambivalent images of African Americans broadcast on film and TV, and later, images produced by and for African Americans representing themselves in more complex ways, from the Black Panthers to ordinary people with snapshot cameras. I especially liked the exhibit of snapshots by ordinary people.

Back on the homepage, links to Audio/Video offers another extensive list of interesting things. There are videos of authors reading and discussing their own works, such as this one of Pulitzer Prize winning poet Komunyakaa from the 2011 National Book Festival. Lectures from the National Archives on a variety of historical topics. And music, poetry, and performing arts tapes of many other kinds.

Finally, this website offers a wide-ranging collection of materials organized specifically for teaching. The NEH has an excellent site, with the silly title, “Edsitement,” which offers teaching materials on the humanities broadly defined. Here there are links to targeted subjects like the NAACP’s challenge to D.W. Griffith’s film Birth of a Nation and JFK, the Freedom Riders and the Civil Rights Movement. The National Archives’ teaching sites also present a wide range of great topics: The Many Faces of Paul Robeson, The arrest records of Rosa Parks, and a special page with resources for middle and high school students preparing projects for National History Day.

After spending several hours (much more than I planned) exploring this website, and finding a surprising number of thoroughly enjoyable and informative sites, I should say that while there is an enormous amount of diverse and high-quality material, none of it is a departure from the traditional kinds of sources that historians have learned to consult. Photographs and songs certainly open up new corners of historical experience for our consideration, but they don’t fundamentally change the way we work. Ultimately digital history may change the way historians conceptualize the past, but for that we have to look elsewhere. Stay tuned.

Karl Hagstrom Miller on Segregating Southern Pop Music

Ralph Peer shook his head. A scout for the Victor Talking Machine Company in the 1920s, he could not believe the number of white southern singers who dug commercial popular music. “They would come in to me, people that could play a guitar very well and sing very well, and I’d test them. ‘What other music have you got?’ Well, they’d sing some song that was popular on record, some pop song,” he recalled. “So I never bothered with them. They never got a chance.” Dorothy Scarborough shared Peer’s impatience. After collecting African-American folk songs throughout the South in the early 1920s, the white scholar lamented, “How often have I been tricked into enthusiasm over the promise of folk-songs only to hear age-worn phonograph records,–but perhaps so changed and worked upon by usage that they could possibly claim to be folk-songs after all!—or Broadway echoes, or conventional songs by white authors!”

Black Mississippi guitarist Robert Johnson knew lots of songs by white authors. He played them whenever he could. “Robert didn’t just perform his own songs,” his friend Johnny Shines insisted. “He did anything that he heard over the radio. ANYTHING that he heard. When I say anything, I mean ANYTHING—popular songs, ballads, blues, anything. It didn’t make him no difference what it was. If he liked it, he did it.”

Southern musicians performed a staggering variety of music in the early twentieth century. Black and white artists played blues, ballads, ragtime and string band music, as well as the plethora of styles popular throughout the nation: sentimental ballads, minstrel songs, Tin Pan Alley tunes, and Broadway hits. They embraced pop music. Many performed any music they could, regardless of their racial or regional identities. Such variety could appear in the same set as a performer eased from one song to the next. Observers agreed that rural southerners loved all sorts of music. Yet they fought about whether that was a good thing. Scarborough and Peer were not pleased to discover Broadway in the backwoods. A southerner singing pop music was the last thing they wanted to hear.

The meaning and symbolic power of southern music was radically transformed between the 1880s and the 1920s, an era that saw the development of southern segregation, the globalization of US political and corporate empires, and the dissemination of commercial sheet music and phonographs across the nation. During this period, a variety of people—scholars and artists, industrialists and consumers—came to compartmentalize southern music according to race. A fluid complex of sounds and styles in practice, southern music was reduced to a series of distinct genres associated with particular racial and ethnic identities. Music developed a color line. The blues were African-American. Rural white southerners played what came to be called country music. And much of the rest of the music performed and heard in the region was left out. By the 1920s, these depictions were touted in folksong collections as well as the catalogs of “race” and “hillbilly” records promoted by the phonograph industry. Such simple links among race, region and music were new. They did not reflect how generations of southern people had understood and enjoyed music. Johnny Shines emphasized Robert Johnson’s broad repertoire in a repetitive cadence designed to overcome doubters. His insistence suggests how thoroughly the logic of segregated sound had become common sense—even while most observers acknowledged that it failed to reflect the music actually played and heard by southern people.

The musical color line stretched from the library shelf to the record catalog, from the tent show to the concert hall. The power of folklorists and phonograph companies to control public imagery and shape public perception was far more profound than the power of often-marginalized musicians to counter such claims. Moving from live to recorded performance, from local to national audiences, southern artists jettisoned the broad repertoires that had won them local success. They instead found favor by actively personifying the racial musical categories the academy and the phonograph industry associated with a southern culture defined through its primitivism, exoticism, and supposed distance from modern urban culture.

Artists responded to this conundrum in different ways. Some contested the images created around them, attempting to break their expressive culture out of the confines of commercial and scientific classifications. Others, however, embraced the role of pre-modern primitive. It expressed some of their own misgivings about a modernism based upon their exploitation. Many who came to represent traditional culture, in fact, were not pre-modern but had experienced modernization at its most brutal: sharecroppers, factory workers, and prison laborers. Playing the role of the pre-modern offered them both a voice with which to challenge their conditions and a possible ticket out. Many, however, remained aware that they were entering into a bargain that denied their human and artistic freedom. They stopped singing many of the songs that brought them joy. They pretended their lives could be contained by the categories that confronted them, knowing all along that they owned a world much larger than the one they portrayed. Unearthing their stories can lead us to visualize musical and cultural categories as points of contention rather than assumed points of departure, vibrant subjects for historical research rather than ways in which to limit one’s scope of inquiry. It also can help explain the joyful defiance of singers like Robert Johnson, who gleefully performed anything. And when I say anything, I mean ANYTHING.

Further Readin g

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 businessmen 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.

Photo Credits:

Bob Cole, James Weldon Johnson and J. Rosemond Johnson, “Louisiana Liz” (New York: Joseph Stern & Co., 1899).
Ethel Waters, Alberta Hunter and Fletcher Henderson, “Down South Blues” (New York: Down South Music Publishing Company, 1923).
Perry Bradford, “Crazy Blues,” (New York: Bradford Music Publishing Co., 1920).

Oil and Weapons in Gaddafi’s Libya

by Chris Dietrich

In a recent Wikileaks revelation, a secret U.S. cable revealed that Senators John McCain and Joe Lieberman promised to provide Muammar Gaddafi with military hardware in 2009. McCain and Lieberman were among the last high-level teams to have made such a promise, but they certainly weren’t the first. From the very beginning of the Gaddafi regime’s existence in 1969, western leaders have rationalized arms sales to oil-rich Libya. Often, these justifications were cast in stark Cold War terms, however, archival evidence from the United States and the United Kingdom points towards a different, more pragmatic explanation. Libyan arms sales represented an opportunity to reinvest petrodollars in western businesses.

This process began in the early 1960s, when Libyan oil emerged as a “safe alternative” to oil from the Persian Gulf. Then ruled by a pro-American monarch, King Sayyid Muhammed Idris, Libya was first suggested as a reliable alternative in a May 1959 meeting of the National Security Council. The Persian Gulf, the NSC concluded, “was in a position to exert too much economic and political leverage against Western Europe.” Libya’s newly-discovered reserves, on the other hand, were safely within the western bloc and ready for development. “The nub of the matter,” Vice President Richard Nixon said in that meeting, “was what to do about Libya.” Encouraged by a Libyan petroleum law written by a Palestinian nationalist lawyer imposing limits on concession sizes, smaller companies jumped at the chance to enter Libya and production increased in the following decade. At the same time, the State Department argued for the cultivation of closer political relations with all Arab oil producers, to help overcome the “ideological ferment” of their pan-Arabism and make them more “interdependent with the West.”

This policy was unsuccessful in Libya and on September 1, 1969 nationalist army officers deposed Idris. In an early report, the State Department described the new leader, 27-year-old Muammar Gaddafi, as “a man raised in the desert” with “the virtues and vices of a fundamentalist prophet” and “a strong sense of mission.” No one predicted that Gaddafi’s sense of mission would convert Libya into a pariah state by the end of the next decade, when it embarked on its continuous and spiteful interference in global affairs, culminating in the 1988 bombing of Pan Am flight 103. However, it was readily apparent by early 1970 that Gaddafi’s Libyan Revolutionary Command Council (RCC) would actively employ its control over the country’s vast oil wealth to increase its arms sales.

American arms-sale policy towards the new regime was initially cautious. The State Department reported that Libya showed no signs of “moderation in Middle Eastern affairs.” Gaddafi not only espoused armed conflict as the only means of settling Arab-Israeli problems, he also had just nationalized the holdings of British Petroleum. The State Department imposed a ban on all transfers, specifically cancelling permission for a Spanish company to sell Libya F-5 fighter planes.

The United States’ initial restraint soon wore away and the reality of arms profits superseded public concerns that the further militarization of the Arab world would retrench the Arab-Israeli conflict and give rise to what western officials had begun to describe as “international terrorism.” In his first report on the state of American foreign policy, President Nixon used aggressive Cold War rhetoric to present this broader policy to Congress. “We repeatedly made clear to the Soviet leaders our decision to limit the arms race in the Middle East on a reciprocal basis,” he began. He continued: the Soviet Union had responded by stepping up the shipment of air defense missiles, aircraft, and combat crews to Egypt. The United States had no choice, Nixon concluded, but to “help maintain the military balance.”

Military sales became immensely more profitable with oil price increases in the 1970s. After negotiations between the members of OPEC and the multinational oil companies, triggered by Gaddafi’s demands, ended in favorable conditions for OPEC, it became clear that oil producing countries would have far more funding for arms purchases, the CIA reported as early as March 1971. After the 1973-1974 oil price shocks, these funds increased astronomically.

Although official Libyan policy was to remain neutral in the Cold War, Soviet ships began to unload tanks and artillery there in 1970 hoping to establish Libya as what one U.S. official described as “an arms depot and a training sanctuary for all the Arab confrontation states.” In this Cold War context, the Nixon administration supported western arms sales to Libya, including an unprecedented $400 million French sale in 1970. U.S. policymakers believed such sales would keep the lines open to clients within Soviet clutches. The State Department believed that if the French did not fill the vacuum left by the cancellation of U.S. and U.K. sales, “the Soviets would.”

In this context, the State Department reconsidered its policy towards arms deals between American companies and the Libyan RCC in 1972. After receiving a letter from the president of Lockheed discussing his concern that his Marietta, Georgia plant was threatened with closure, the department gave the green light for the company to sell planes to Libya through Italy, reversing the Spanish F-5 decision.

As the French example demonstrated, the influx of petrodollars into the Libyan economy changed the scale of potential profits. The benefits of a new relationship with the Libyan government were clear to the British as well. The British also sought to lessen Soviet influence in Libya, but concerns about the domestic economy played the major role in the British decision sell more arms. In 1977, after the Defense and Overseas Policy committee decided to relax military sales restrictions, writing that restrictions had caused the British to “lag well behind the Germans, French and Italians.”

The British Army fought the decision. Libyan support for the IRA, one official wrote, “completely overshadowed” all other considerations. Given that “soldiers are being killed and wounded daily by the IRA,” he continued, “it would be indefensible…to supply equipment to the Libyans or worse to be seen to train them.” The Cabinet disregarded the army’s complaints. The Defense Secretary, Fred Mulley, told the Foreign Secretary, David Owen, that arms would provide the “key factor” in helping other British firms secure military and civil contracts in the growing petro-economy. The Secretary of State for Industry also approved increased sales, noting that they were “most welcome to British Aerospace” and “a much needed fillip to British Shipbuilders.”

In remarkably pragmatic considerations, the immediate prospects for lucrative business, not to mention long-term sales potential, made the risks acceptable to French, British, U.S. and other western policymakers. While we should be careful not paint the current NATO support for Libya as a mono-causal “War for Oil”, it is clear the oil money has long played an important part in Libya’s relations with the west. It remains to be seen what role it will play in the future.

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