Emily Whalen, Author at Not Even Past

A Historian’s Gaze: Women, Law, and the Colonial Archives of Singapore

On the eleventh floor of the National Library of Singapore, I sit with a pile of large, gray boxes stacked high on a trolley. I am hoping to be transported to the island’s past. The boxes are filled with legal documents from the British colonial era, mainly affidavits, writs of summons, bills of costs, and occasionally testimonies from witnesses in the Straits Settlements. The pages are sepia-colored, some speckled with mold – a reminder of the gulf of time that separates me from the people who produced these very documents I now hold in my hands. To be a historian is almost always to be cognizant of the passage of time and the changes that accompany it.

Koh Seow Chuan Donor's Gallery Courtesy of National Library, Singapore

Koh Seow Chuan Donor’s Gallery (via National Library, Singapore).

For historians, archives are portals into the past. They offer tantalizing, if partial, glimpses of a different era; snapshots of those who inhabited a world different from our own. Engaging with primary sources, in the words of historian James Warren, entails the experience of “’passing over’…a crossing over to the standpoint of another culture, another way of life, another human being” and to return with a deeper understanding of the past. Of course, historians know that our sources are not unmediated versions of history nor do they contain self-evident truths about the lived experiences of others. Nonetheless, we search longingly for that one document, one photograph, or one artifact that we hope will bring us closer, back in time, to the worlds we study.

The papers I rifle through are part of the Koh Seow Chuan Collection, named after its donor, a retired Singaporean architect. Koh was one of the founders of DP Architects, a company responsible for the design of the famous Esplanade Theaters by Marina Bay. He also happened to be an avid collector of stamps, art, and historical artifacts. In 2009, he donated 1,714 heritage items to the National Library Board of Singapore, consisting of rare maps and photographs, old letters and envelopes, and legal documents dating back to the early nineteenth century. The legal documents in Koh’s personal collection include records from the Straits Settlements Supreme Courts and District Courts, filling over four hundred boxes. In them, historians can locate the records of many prominent members of the Straits Chinese community, including Lim Boon Keng, Lim Nee Soon, and others.

The_Esplanade,_Theatres_on_the_Bay_(3751455311)

The Esplanade, Theatres on the Bay, Singapore (via Wikimedia Commons).

I am, however, using these documents to search for traces of Chinese migrant women who sailed across the South Seas and settled in British Malaya in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Far from the thrilling adventure I had anticipated, the process feels tediously dull. Combing through the dense law cases and reading the highly formulaic legal rhetoric for evidence of migrant women can feel like searching for a needle in a haystack. In the first week, I encountered a gamut of historical characters: planters and traders, merchants and bankers, manufacturers and small shopkeepers, pineapple preservers and cake-makers. While some of their stories offered delightful anecdotes, I could not help but notice the absence of women. It made me wonder, were these documents appropriate sources for my research or did I need to change the questions I was asking altogether?

With time and patience, the women in these documents gradually became visible to me. At first, their appearances were elusive: a woman sued by her father-in-law for jewelry; a sister embroiled in a legal battle with her half-brother over the administration of their father’s estate; and six women petitioning the court to be legally recognized as the wives of one Chinese man. These were exciting discoveries, but I was baffled by how I would piece together these scraps to construct a coherent narrative of the past. How could I make sense of the “smallness” of these stories within the broader context of a rapidly changing regional maritime economy and of Chinese labor migrations into and around the British Empire in Asia?

Bil of goods - transaction between a trader and opium shopkeeper, 1913 Source: Koh Seow Chuan Collection, National Library, Singapore

Bill of goods; transaction between a trader and opium shopkeeper, 1913 (via Koh Seow Chuan Collection, National Library, Singapore).

The fragments of these women’s stories emerged slowly, but collectively they gathered momentum. A marked pattern became clear: women almost never appeared in colonial Supreme Court records, either as plaintiffs or defendants, unless they were widows. Of course, the colonial records of the Police or District Courts in the Straits Settlements tell a different story. But, in the colonial Supreme Court, women were first and foremost recognized by the state as conjugal subjects. In case after case, the marital statuses of Chinese women were meticulously recorded: “married woman,” “widow,” or “spinster.” Not all women, however, had equal access to legal recourse via the Supreme Court. Lengthy legal battles, expensive civil litigations, and the practical challenges of serving writs of summons to individuals in a highly transient and mobile colonial society meant that only the very wealthy could take their disputes to court. As such, the women in these records were almost always propertied individuals with substantial wealth.

Chinese Lady-in-Waiting Attending to Her Chinese Mistress’ Hair, c.1880s (Courtesy of the National Archives of Singapore).

In Koh Seow Chuan collection, I encountered widows who appealed to the colonial state for maintenance; others who sued for outstanding debts owed to their husbands; some who battled one another for the distribution of the family estate. Their stories reveal a fascinating and complicated relationship between conjugality and wealth, gender and colonial law. Collectively, they demonstrate how migrant Chinese women increasingly utilized colonial legal institutions as one way of resolving transnational family disputes concerning inheritance, succession, and property rights. At the same time, their stories also shed light on their vulnerability within the colonial legal process itself – a process that was in many ways arbitrary and precarious.

Statement of claim by a Chinese widow 1893 Koh Seow Chuan Collection National Library Singapore

Statement of claim by a Chinese widow, 1893 (via Koh Seow Chuan Collection National Library Singapore).

Historians often dream of finding that one treasure trove that will unveil the secrets of the past; that one document from which we could write a whole chapter. Sometimes, we are given four hundred boxes instead. Their contents, which at first appear to be “run-of-the-mill,” require us to scour through them carefully. Only then does the past come momentarily into focus. In the digital age, we are often tempted to shuffle through our sources quickly for relevant finds and discard those that don’t “fit” the scope of our research; there’s a temptation to photograph first and read later. But, practicing patience in the archives and learning to sit still with the sources we are given can yield surprising rewards. It enables us to “pass over” to the other side and to see patterns that arise only when we attend to both the absence and presence of women’s lives in the colonial legal archive.

You may also like:

History faculty recommend Great Books on Women’s History: Crossing Borders.
Isabel Huacuja reviews The Forgotten Armies: The Fall of British Asia, 1941-1945 by Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper (2006).
Mark Lawrence discusses a CIA Study: “Consequences to the US of Communist Domination of Mainland Southeast Asia,” October 13, 1950.

Antonio de Ulloa’s Relación Histórica del Viage a la America Meridional

By Haley Schroer

Nineteen-year-old Antonio de Ulloa set sail for the Americas in the spring of 1735. Ulloa was traveling as one of two assistants to a contingency of French scientists appointed to South America. The observations Ulloa and his counterpart, Jorge Juan, made on the excursion culminated in Relación Histórica del Viage a la America Meridional. The Relación Histórica is a five-volume work published in 1748 that provides in-depth cultural descriptions of the Spanish colonies’ major cities. As a traveler’s account, Relación Histórica made the colonies accessible for the considerable literate Spanish population who knew little of the empire’s overseas territories. For contemporary readers, it proves fundamental to understanding the socio-racial caste hierarchy that defined the colonies.

Antonio de Ulloa y de la Torre-Giral became a general of the navy and a colonial administrator. He was later the first Spanish governor of Louisiana (via Wikimedia Commons).

By the eighteenth century, Spanish colonial society comprised a diverse socio-racial landscape. Intermarriage and sexual unions among Indigenous, African, and Spanish populations produced a society that could not easily be categorized according to conventional European social and economic privileges. Establishing a sociedad de castas (caste society), elite Spaniards recognized upwards of twenty racial castes with behavioral qualities unique to each group. Implementing the hierarchy relied primarily on public forms of social control, such as the prohibition of certain castes from administrative and commercial positions and laws that excluded certain fashions from non-Spanish castes. Colonial elites, however, faced challenges in enforcing strict racial stratification, and, as Ann Twinam has shown, loopholes broke down the efficacy of the racial hierarchy. Traveler’s accounts of the Spanish colonies offer key outside perspectives on these inconsistencies that allow us to evaluate how deeply socio-racial limitations permeated through colonial society.

Antonio de Ulloa’s fifth chapter, “Understanding the People of Quito; the Castes Found; Their Customs, and Riches” addresses the realities of implementing the caste system in a complex urban environment. Immediately, Ulloa asserts a high level of stratification found within society, noting that noble families “have kept themselves in their luster, connecting themselves with each other and not mixing with the people of low birth.” Ulloa further defines “low birth,” describing “four classes: that are Spanish, or whites; mestizos; Indians, or Naturals; and Blacks with their descendants” (363). While Ulloa’s racial classification affirms the presence of racial separation, the description of only four racial castes points to larger questions of the racial demography found in Peru. Ulloa presents Africans as a distinct group in society, but they are “not as abundant, as in other places in the Indies,” suggesting that Quito did not rely as heavily on African slave labor as perhaps other colonial cities.

A casta painting from ca. 1770. It depicts a Spanish father and an indigenous mother with their mestizo baby (via Wikimedia Commons).

Ulloa deepens his discussion of the socio-racial dynamic found in Quito by describing stereotypical behavior associated with the most prominent racial groups. Ironically, he condemns Spaniards as “the most unhappy, poor, and miserable; because the men do not apply themselves to any business” due to their superior racial quality (365). He praises mestizos who “work with perfection,” but ultimately fall prey to “the defect of Laziness and sloth, of which dominates them strongly” (365). These observations of work ethic mimic popular conceptions of how race influenced personality and behavior. Finally, Ulloa evaluates the visual appearance of Quito’s inhabitants, claiming, “people dress ostentatiously; and fabrics of gold, silver, fine scarves, and other types of silk and wool are not uncommon” (366).

800px-Paisaje_periferico_de_Lima_en_1744_-_AHG

An illustration from Relación Histórica del Viage a la America Meridional of the peripheral countryside of Peru (via Wikimedia Commons).

Ulloa’s account also addresses larger questions concerning the conceptualization of race in both colonial and peninsular Spanish society. His depiction relies heavily on exterior evaluations of race, such as status, behavior, and appearance, suggesting that society largely defined racial classification through overt visual markers. Ulloa’s description demonstrates that implementation of the racial caste system had some influence in Quito. For example, according to Ulloa, mestizos frequently worked in artisanal occupations such as “painters, sculptors, silversmiths, and others,” demonstrating a sense of racial occupational organization (365). He reinforces ideas being produced within the Spanish colonies by proving that racial stratification was clearly noticeable to foreigners.

Despite confirming widespread stratification in daily society, Ulloa’s account proves even more valuable for the inconsistencies that it records. He writes that, “many mestizos appear to be of the same color as legitimate Spaniards, being white, and blonde; and they are considered as such, even though in reality they are not.” (353) In this one brief sentence, Ulloa recognizes a fundamental weakness in the socio-racial hierarchy. Despite the creation of at least twenty racial castes in society, ambiguous physical markers allowed some social mobility along the racial spectrum. Mestizos with European complexions could sometimes assimilate into the Spanish demographic, which undermined the rigidity of the caste system.

Bust of Antonio de Ulloa in modern day Quito, Ecuador (via Wikimedia Commons).

Traveler accounts such as Ulloa’s are useful to historians in determining how colonial society presented itself to foreigners, but authors of such accounts carried preconceived notions of the Spanish colonies. Ulloa’s account inherently reflects peninsular prejudices and preconceptions of the colonies. Historians must determine to what extent Ulloa imposed peninsular ideologies upon the colonial social structure. As an outsider, for example, since Ulloa most likely only gained access to public society, he can demonstrate the racial stratification seen in public but cannot speak to the intimate realities that occurred in private.

Antonio de Ulloa’s analysis of Quito’s residents exists within a broader attempt to categorize and identify the unique racial make-up of the Spanish colonies. Colonial society continuously tried to grapple with its own racial ambiguity, often relying on public campaigns like casta paintings that depicted mixed race families and the racial variety of the caste society and whitening decrees that attempted to regulated social structures. However, travelers’ accounts like that of Ulloa offer an outsider’s perspective to the multi-colored reality. Answering key historical questions about race in Peruvian society while raising further inquiries into the realistic validity of the caste system, Relación Histórica del Viage a la America Meridional places modern readers in the thick of colonial Quito society.

Sources for this article and for further reading:

Magli M. Carrera, Imagining Identity in New Spain: Race, Lineage, and the Colonial Body in Portraiture and Casta Paintings. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003.

Jorge Juan and Antonio de Ulloa, Relación Histórica del Viage a la America Meridional. Madrid: 1748. The Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection Rare Books and Manuscripts Division, University of Texas Libraries.

Irving A. Leonard, Introduction to A Voyage to South America, by Jorge Juan and Antonio de Ulloa. Translated and Abridged by John Adams. Tempe: Arizona State University, 1975.

Ann Twinam, Purchasing Whiteness: Pardos, Mulattos, and the Quest for Social Mobility in the Spanish Indies. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015.

You may also like:
Ann Twinam disucssers her book Purchasing Whiteness: Race and Status in Colonial Latin America.
Susan Deans-Smith explains how casta paintings described the racial hierarchy of Colonial Latin America.
Adrian Masters reviews The Disappearing Mestizo, by Joanne Rappaport (2014).

Digital Teaching: A Mid-Semester Timeline

By Chris Babits

Last March, students in Dr. Erika Bsumek’s Introduction to American Indian History took their midterm exam. Most students earned good grades, but on a mid-semester assessment, a large number expressed interest in some form of extra credit. Students also indicated that since the material was very new to them (secondary curricula rarely emphasizes the American Indian past), they felt that they didn’t have a good grasp on the sequence of events covered in the class. Although Professor Bsumek, the other teaching assistant, and myself were shocked at the overwhelming request for additional work, we thought we’d try something new: a digital timeline in order to improve students’ research and writing skills.

A screenshot of the timeline.

Digital history projects have grown more popular over the past decade. Professors, instructors, and history educators have increasingly recognized the limitations of traditional assessments. Exams, quizzes, analytical essays, and book reviews — each of these can measure student learning. Exams and quizzes, for example, challenge students to recall a wide-range of information. This can include students crafting and proving original arguments, using the course’s source material in order to support one’s position. Writing essays, on the other hand, provide students the opportunity to work on their writing skills. Recent reports show how this crucial part of literacy is lacking in the workplace. History papers can play a crucial role in developing students’ analytical and writing skills, preparing them to be better in the business world and as engineers.

What these traditional assessments are missing, however, are the twenty first century skills our students need. The teaching team for Introduction to American Indian History wanted to create an extra credit assignment that combined the best parts of history education with the core components of digital humanities pedagogy. When we reflected on the midterm exams, we noticed a few things that were lacking. Most importantly, the students were right. They lacked a strong sense of chronology. How would we better equip them to understand sequence and change over time? They needed some tool to help them see these important parts of historical inquiry. A digital timeline seemed like the best way to go. Utilizing course development funds, Dr. Bsumek agreed to compensate me for the extra time this would require.

The initial step was determining which online timeline generator to choose for the project. With the growing interest in digital humanities, there are many timeline generators. After less than an hour of research, and after further consultation with Dr. Bsumek, I decided on Knight Lab’s TimeLineJS because of its user-friendly interface. My former colleague, Dr. Julia Gossard (now an Assistant Professor at Utah State University) helped me make this decision as well since she had successfully implemented several assignments in her courses with the program.

Knight Lab has created a template from which one could create their own timeline. I was initially wary of the template but, as one can see below, Knight Lab describes what type of information should be placed in which column.

Knight Lab Template (click to enlarge).

After deciding on the digital tool for the timeline, we created the instructions for students. Students could write a 150-200 word timeline entry for any person, place, event, movement, or piece of legislation from the midterm on. Before writing an entry, students had to write to me to receive approval for the entry they wished to write. Upon approval, I then asked students to find and email me an outside academic source. Only after clearing this hurdle were students approved to write their extra credit timeline entry.

The result was a collaborative study tool that students could use on the final exam. Thirty seven students out of the 156 registered for the class contributed to the timeline. I proofread each entry not only for content accuracy but also for writing style, proper grammar, and spelling errors. If students wanted the full points they could earn for extra credit, they usually had to revise one or two times.

Most students earned additional points that were added to their final grade. Twenty one students submitted two entries, markedly increasing their chance of earning a better grade in the course. More importantly, they collaborated on a project that addressed the weaknesses they identified when studying for their midterm exams. The final exams displayed a much more sophisticated understanding of sequence and change over time. Students crafted better in-class exams that highlighted a more nuanced interpretation of the history of American Indians.

The Works of Steven Hahn

By Jacqueline Jones

This week on February 15 and 16, the Littlefield Lecture Series in the Department of History presents Dr. Steven Hahn, Pulitzer Prize Winning Historian and Professor of History at New York University. (Details on the lectures below).

Here, Prof. Jacqueline Jones, Chair of The Department of History and regular contributor to Not Even Past, offers a short review essay of Dr Hahn’s major works.

In all his works, Steven Hahn, Professor of History at New York University, seeks to challenge, or at least de-center, prevailing historical narratives especially for the period 1830 to 1920 or so. The results are invariably provocative and fresh.

His first book, The Roots of Southern Populism: Yeoman Farmers and the Transformation of the Georgia Upcountry, 1850-1890 (1983) took us away from the great planters of the South, and examined small, non-slaveholding farmers. Before the Civil War, these family farmers were self-sufficient, growing corn, instead of cotton, and relying on the spinning and weaving skills of their wives and daughters. The war caused severe damage to these homesteads and, in order to repair and rebuild, farmers had to secure loans from local banks and other credit institutions. To get these loans, they had to promise to grow cotton, which could be sold reliably in foreign and domestic markets. Bad harvests meant that increasing numbers of these small farm owners lost their property to the bank, causing tremendous resentment and paving the way for the Populist Party of the 1890s.

His second book, A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration (2005) was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for History, the Merle Curti Prize in Social History, and was also a finalist for both the Lincoln and Frederick Douglass Prize. In this book, Hahn seeks to account for black political organization before and after the Civil War, looking not to the cities or to the North, but to the rural South. Here he finds resistance to slavery before the war and a variety of proto-political organizations after the war. These include extended kin networks, the Republican Party, emigrationist schemes (to go out West or to Africa), and, in the 1920s Garveyism, a movement for black empowerment and pride organized Marcus Garvey. Hahn locates the sources of these organizations in families, churches, and workplaces, and suggests that during Reconstruction and after, black men and women offered up an expansive view of American citizenship—one that highlighted the role of work, family, and schools in defining equality for all citizens. The result of this organizational activity was a nation within a nation—that is, a sense of heighted black collective consciousness–that paved the way for the civil rights struggles of the twentieth century and beyond.

Hahn’s most recent book, A Nation Without Borders: The United States and Its World in an Age of Civil Wars, 1830-1910 (2016) offers a fresh overview of U.S. history during this period. Hahn chronicles the growth of a centralized U.S. government that was the agent of both industrial capitalism and expansionism of various kinds. He considers the land grab in Mexico (the War of 1848), the destruction of native tribes in the West during the last third of the nineteenth century, and imperialist designs on Hawaii, Cuba, and the Philippines in 1898. He argues that these wars of conquest and relentless expansionism had wrenching effects on various groups—not only blacks and Indians, but also New England farmers and others who lost out when the circuits of international trade came to dominate the American economy. He shows how different groups reacted to these developments, fighting back against employers, landowners, and government officials. This book offers a counter-narrative to the conventional view, which highlights “progress” in the form of technological innovations, the growth in foreign immigration, and the spread of the factory system after the Civil War—all supposed to be ingredients in the forging of a “modern” nation.

In all these works, Hahn brings to the fore groups that have not received their due as political and proto-political actors (small family farmers, slaves and freedpeople, Indians, and industrial workers), in order to provide a fuller, more nuanced picture of the development of industrial capitalism and the role of the state in promoting expansionism (in the form of conquest over vulnerable groups) at home and abroad.

The Littlefield Lectures:

Day 1 | Wednesday, February 15

The United States from the Inside Out and the Southside North
4:00 PM | AT&T Center, 1900 University Ave. | Amphiteater 204 on Level M2
liberalarts.utexas.edu/history/events/41026

Day 2 | Thursday, February 16
Reconstruction and the American Political Tradition
4:00 PM | AT&T Center, 1900 University Ave. | Amphiteater 204 on Level M2
liberalarts.utexas.edu/history/events/41028

Directions: http://www.meetattexas.com/page/directions
Parking: http://www.meetattexas.com/page/parking

Free and open to the public. No RSVP necessary to attend.

More from Jacqueline Jones on Not Even Past:

History in a “Post-Truth” Era.
On the Myth of Race in America.
On Civil War Savannah.

Virtual Auschwitz

By David Crew

Ralf Breker wearing the VR headset in front of his VR view of Auschwitz (via BBC News).

The Bavarian State criminal office (LKA) in Munich, Germany has developed a 3D virtual reality model of the infamous Auschwitz concentration and extermination camp to be used in trials of Nazi era war criminals who still remain alive. Drawing upon original blue prints, laser scans of remaining buildings and contemporary photographs, this VR model allows prosecutors, judges and lawyers to view Auschwitz from almost any angle. The digital imaging expert, Ralf Breker, who developed this technology says that it can be used, for example, to determine whether someone who was a guard in Auschwitz in a specific watchtower could or could not see crimes committed in another part of the camp. Breker thinks the technology he developed will soon be used in other types of criminal proceedings because it allows investigators to re-create crime scenes that no longer exist as they were when the crime was committed. He hopes, however, that when the German legal system no longer needs his 3D model of Auschwitz, it will be given to a museum so that it does not fall into the hands of anyone wanting to turn it into a computer game.

For further details and an interview with Ralf Breker, see

Marc Cieslak, “Virtual reality to aid Auschwitz war trials of concentration camp guards”

Also by David Crew on Not Even Past:

The Normandy Scholar Program on World War II.
The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945 by Saul Friedländer (2007).
Normal Pictures in Abnormal Times.

My Alternative PhD in History

By Ben Weiss

A recent piece in The Economist claims that, “One thing many PhD students have in common is dissatisfaction. Seven-day weeks, ten-hour days, low pay and uncertain prospects are widespread. You know you are a graduate student, goes one quip, when your office is better decorated than your home and you have a favourite flavour of instant noodle.”

(via Pexels)

When I was considering enrolling in the University of Texas History PhD program, I heard similar sentiments from peers and discovered many analogous articles. Despite the deluge of criticism I found myself wading through during application season, stubbornness and ambition persevered, and I entered the program in August of 2013. I decided to get a PhD in History as training for pursuing a career in government policy making. Many people making policy decisions lack significant contextual knowledge about their fields, which has a negative impact on overall policy effectiveness. Nearly three and a half years later and having experienced many of the drawbacks associated with grad school, I am still content with my decision.

During my undergraduate years at UT, I took a course with the highly regarded historian Tony Hopkins. Though I often find myself remembering his stirring lectures and exceptional oration skills, one moment in the course especially resonated with my ambitions. One day, he mournfully stated that the last of the generation of economists who were well versed in history recently retired or passed away. His words deeply echoed my feelings about the profound lack of historical and cultural understanding among the vast majority of contemporary policymakers.

The distinguished economic historian A.G. “Tony” Hopkins taught at UT from 2002-2013 (via Wikimedia Commons).

I work on the history of sexual health politics during the colonial period in southern Africa with the goal of doing policy work for American HIV/AIDS relief efforts in the same areas. Historically, western medicine frequently has produced traumatic and violent experiences in African societies, where perspectives on sexual health and sexual education norms differ from western views and health relief campaigns have a history of becoming politicized within neo-colonial and nationalist power struggles, making American foreign health policy and its reception in Africa problematic. Many policymakers lack the historical background necessary to develop effective policy. For all the discourse on indigenous partnership that occurs as a part of American relief efforts in my focus regions, partnership occurs within the cultural and ideological framework of American public policy. For example, policymakers do not legitimately account for indigenous healing practices within their policy frameworks – either in discourse or practice – because the vast majority of policymakers fail to recognize just how much sociocultural value local medical practices hold while simultaneously overlooking the ways in which Western medicine possesses its own country specific cultural values. Americans have contributed to the tremendous progress made in fighting HIV/AIDS, but we could be doing better by integrating real historical training.

I have made this argument multiple times to potential employers as I look beyond my dissertation defense toward a career in policy making. My contentions have not fallen on deaf ears. Think tanks and other policy research institutes have indicated that my historical training really does bring valuable expertise to the table that few other candidates with other types of degrees possess.

030926-F-2828D-307 Washington, D.C. (Sept. 26, 2003) -- Aerial view of the Washington Monument with the Capitol in the background. DoD photo by Tech. Sgt. Andy Dunaway. (RELEASED)

Historical knowledge and training can inform policy from the local to the federal levels (via Wikimedia Commons).

When considering whether a PhD – and specifically one in History – is worth it, I would consider asking what such a degree can add both to one’s personal goals and to making one competitive on the professional job market. When I was thinking about graduate school, I reflected on Tony Hopkins’ words and realized that I could not, in good conscience, work in HIV/AIDS relief (something I have been passionate about for close to a decade) without acquiring the knowledge that was lacking in the field. I also believed that a PhD would enhance my employment prospects if I articulated the validity of my trajectory in the right way.

There is a tangible void in public policy and I firmly believe that history PhDs could have a critical role to play in filling that void in the coming years. To those who are skeptical of the decision to put so much time, money, and energy into a PhD education, I contend that the versatile PhD holds more weight now than at any other time in recent memory.

More by Ben Weiss on Not Even Past:

Slavoj Žižek and Violence.
The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective, by Robert C. Allen (2009).

Examining Race in Appleton, WI

By Isaac McQuistion

A story published on Quartz.com shortly after the election proclaimed that history classes are our best hope for teaching people to question fake news and beat back the narrative of “Make America Great Again” and the white nationalism inherent in it. The study of history encourages the use of critical thinking and the questioning of received narratives, to ask why certain things are the way they are.

A historical blind spot of mine for a long time was my local community. It might stem from the teachers I had or the narrative we were given, but I could never find much to get excited about when the subject was state or local history. I grew up in Wisconsin, a state best known for cheese, the Packers, and dull monotony. I looked around my hometown and all I heard were stories about the paper mills and the occasional French fur trader. Everything looked the same, including the people. Especially the people.

Appleton, WI, the author’s hometown (via Wikimedia Commons)

My hometown is overwhelmingly white. That includes me. According to the 2010 census, only 1.7% of people in Appleton, a city of about 75,000, reported themselves as African-American. That translates to about 1,200 people. The entire time I lived there, I had never bothered to ask why there were so few African-Americans in Appleton. I simply accepted it as the way of things.

Fox River watershed (via Wikimedia Commons).

It was my father who forced me to think about the historical roots of why this was. He’s a pastor in Appleton, and he’s probably the person most responsible for giving me my love of history. While talking with him recently, he mentioned that he went to something called a “plunge,” an event organized by a local organization that aimed to get community leaders together and have them explore, in-depth, a particular issue. The topic for this plunge was “being black in the Fox Cities” (the loose conglomeration of towns that sprung up around the Fox River, and of which Appleton is the largest).

Prior to this, my father admits that he hadn’t given much thought to Appleton’s African-American population. For one, the population is incredibly small. For another, Appleton seems to exude a kind of neighborly warmth, that stereotypical feeling of simple Midwestern friendliness that lulls some into idolizing the area. To most appearances, Appleton does not have a problem with race relations, not in the same way that other cities, like Milwaukee, do.

This, my father quickly realized, was a lie. Several minority students from the local college shared their experiences living in Appleton. They told about how they’d been tailed in stores and stopped multiple times by the police on the flimsiest of pretenses. How they felt like they were constantly being surveilled. How most days when they’ve been walking down College Avenue, the main thoroughfare in the city, they’ll have a racial slur hurled at them.

The low number of African-Americans in the city also isn’t incidental. As part of the event my father attended, a curator from the local history museum gave a presentation on the black experience in Appleton. He described widespread institutional racism that decimated African-American population in the area.

Up until the 1920s, the black population in Northeast Wisconsin was small but stable. Precise numbers are hard to come by, since census workers didn’t bother to take account of many of the working poor in the towns and cities. It was by no means an idyllic time or one free of racism, but it also wasn’t unusual to see black-owned businesses and a few African-Americans were even elected to public office.

Segregation was not limited to the Jim Crow South (via Pixabay).

Following World War I, however, growing racism forced much of the black population in the Fox Cities to leave for larger black communities in urban areas. An anti-vagrancy ordinance allowed police to freely discriminate against the black population, as well as others who were thought of as “undesirable foreign elements.” Though some black people could buy homes after the Civil War, in the 1920s subdivisions began specifically excluding blacks.

“Sundown Towns,” that breed of municipality that dictated that all black people leave the city by sunset, sprang up around the country. Appleton had no official ordinance designating it as such, but many supported the custom, to the point where it became one by default.

1925 saw a nation-wide resurgence of the KKK (via Wikimedia Commons).

At the same time, membership in the resurgent Ku Klux Klan grew. A photo of a 1925 Klan rally from the Oshkosh Public Museum shows a crowd of thousands gathered together not under cover of night, but in the middle of the day, packed into a baseball stadium. Churches specifically encouraged Klan members to attend their services and openly recruited from the pulpit.

The net effect of all of these different forms of discrimination was that, according to the 1930 census, the black population in Appleton had plummeted to zero.

Governor George Wallace (via Wikimedia Commons).

For years, discriminatory practices continued in many establishments, despite the passage of anti-discrimination laws. Black athletes and performers would often avoid the city outright. Alabama Governor George Wallace found the environs friendly enough to launch his 1964 presidential campaign at the Appleton Rotary Club, using his speech to decry what would become the Civil Rights Act of 1963 as “The Involuntary Servitude Act of 1963.”

It’s only been in the past few decades that Appleton’s African-American population has begun to recover. As late as 1980 it stood at only 31 people. Now, it’s about even with what was seen in the years after the Civil War. It wouldn’t be until the 2000s that African-American politicians would again hold local office.

My father, previously unaware of this history and ignorant of the racism prevalent in his community, found himself in a position to do something. He met with another pastor in the city who led a majority African-American congregation. They decided to have their churches team up to volunteer around town, worship together, and attend each other’s fellowship gatherings. They’ve worked with a local Christian youth camping organization to provide day camp and summer camp opportunities for local kids. The idea, more than anything, is to start a dialogue, to have the two congregations get to know each other and to see a little bit of the world through the others’ eyes.

These are small steps, to be sure, but they are a start. My father often talks of growing up in rural Ohio and hearing those around him espouse racist views and use racial slurs. He counts himself as a conservative and has lived most of his life in majority-white areas. He mentions that he took every course on African-American history that was offered at his college to try and free himself from the patterns of thought that characterized his upbringing and surroundings. But there’s an immediacy that comes with knowing the history of the place you live. This knowledge has opened his eyes to an experience completely different from his own, to the way racism has shaped his town and what he can do to help. This, a historical knowledge of our local communities, is what can drive change. And if there ever was a time when we needed to think historically about our local communities and our nation as a whole, it’s now.

An illustration of Appleton from 1874 (via Wikimedia Commons).

History isn’t some abstract thing. It doesn’t just happen at a national or global level, and its effects aren’t remote to us. History is what shapes our daily lives. Once we realize that, once we start thinking historically about where we are, we can see that nothing just happens. Things are not just as they are; they are always as we’ve made them to be. A fuller reckoning of our past helps us determine what we want to build for the future. This, then, is what thinking historically ultimately does for us: it helps us see that what we do today will one day become history.

All information about Appleton’s black population is drawn from A Stone of Hope: Black Experiences in the Fox Cities, an exhibit put together by The History Museum, owned and operated by the Outagamie County Historical Society.

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The Prague Spring Archive Project

By Mary Neuburger and Ian Goodale

The Prague Spring Archive project, a collaboration between the Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies (CREEES) and UT Libraries, is now live. This open access online archive is the first step in a longer-term initiative by CREEES Director Mary Neuburger to digitize significant collections of primary documents from the the Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library that shed light on the Cold War. While select documents from the LBJ collection can already be found online, CREEES is working to digitize National Security country files from the former Eastern Bloc in their entirety. Because these documents are open record, the LBJ Presidential Library has allowed unlimited scanning and open access presentation of such documents. The hope is that they will appeal to a wide and inclusive audience of students, instructors, scholars, and the general public.

Phase One of this project, largely comprised of National Security Files on Czechoslovakia, is nearly complete. The bulk of the documents in this collection focus on the so-called “Czechoslovak Crisis,” otherwise known as the Prague Spring, and its aftermath. The Prague Spring was one of the most dramatic and popular experiments in Communist Party reform, which took place in Czechoslovakia beginning in January 1968, only to be crushed by an invasion of Soviet and Warsaw Pact troops on August 21 of the same year. This event was a major turning point in the Cold War and the history of communism more generally as the wave of reforms brought such a high degree of hope and enthusiasm and its suppression precipitated such deep disillusionment in the region and among the global left. It was the end, in a sense, of any hope for the communist system to be reformed and as such could be seen as the beginning of the end for the system itself.

The LBJ Library documents on Prague Spring are a treasure trove for historical research as they chronicle the event through detailed intelligence reports and day-by-day commentary by US policy makers. They include briefs on global reactions to the crisis, which many at the time thought could precipitate World War III. These documents are valuable both from a US policy standpoint and for a deeper understanding of the events and developments within the region itself. As the documents are all in English, they have the potential to be used for everything from academic historical research to student research.

Helsinki demonstration against the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 (via Wikimedia Commons).

Ian Goodale, the new Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies & Digital Scholarship Librarian, worked closely with graduate students from the School of Information at UT Austin and undergraduate students from CREEES to photograph the documents in the reading room at the LBJ. He then collaborated with the UT Libraries to process the images into archival-quality PDFs for ingestion into Texas ScholarWorks, the university’s digital repository. These PDFs were made machine-readable so that they are full-text searchable in the repository and Ian worked to create extensive metadata for each document to make the collection more discoverable. Finally, the students in Mary Neuburger and Vlad Beronja’s Graduate Seminar on Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies worked with Ian over the last semester to create a guide to the collection. Ian did an amazing job of building a Scalar website as a portal for the guide, which provides summary descriptions of most of the folders and specific links to some of the most interesting documents.

Careful attention was paid to making the site accessible both to academic researchers and to patrons conducting personal or non-academic research, with additional features planned that will extend the breadth of the site’s audience. A module that will include materials aimed at high school and middle school teachers and students, including sample lesson plans and educational activities, will be added in the future. For researchers who would like to explore what is available in the physical collections of the LBJ Library, the finding aid for the entire archival collection is also available on the site.

UT CREES is located in Burdine Hall (Zug55 via flickr).

The Prague Spring Archive portal is a resource that will continue to grow, with new content and features continually added and expanded upon. By providing open access to important primary source materials, the project will continue to contribute to international scholarly communities, utilizing practices and tools of the digital humanities to freely share its content in an attractive, easily navigable portal.

Digitization work on the larger Cold War project is ongoing, with new materials currently being photographed, processed, and added to Texas ScholarWorks by graduate student Nicole Marino and Russian, East European, & Eurasian Studies and Digital Scholarship Librarian Ian Goodale.

More by Mary Neuberger on Not Even Past:
Balkan Smoke: Tobacco & Smoking in Bulgaria.
The Museum of Sour Milk: History Lessons on Bulgarian Yogurt.

Before Hamilton

By Peter Kunze

In a recent interview with Fusion about how Hamilton (2015) “revolutionized” Broadway for performers of color, the Tony Award-winning lead, Leslie Odom, Jr., recalled,

“I saw a reading of Hamilton at Vassar. There’s four men of color on stage, singing a song about friendship and brotherhood, and it undid me. I had never seen anything, anything like that. And I just knew that this thing was so special, and that the world needed to see it.”

obama_greets_the_cast_and_crew_of_hamilton_musical_2015

Members of the Hamilton cast greet President Barack Obama in 2015, Leslie Odom, Jr. is in the center, in a blue coat (via Wikimedia commons).

There’s no denying that the decision to cast Hamilton with actors of colors—save King George—was an important decision worthy of praise. (The show has also faced criticism, though, for leaving real-life people of color out of the musical retelling.) Odom’s comment, however, should be treated with a healthy skepticism, because it unintentionally obscures the long history of musicals by, about, and for people of color. While Odom celebrates the representational politics of Hamilton, he overlooks the long history of people of color writing, producing, directing, and starring in a theater of their own, on and off Broadway. From the Chitlin’ Circuit to El Teatro Campesino, people of color have long found creative expression on stages across the United States, often when they were excluded from more mainstream venues. Diversity on Broadway remains an important issue and it’s hardly the progressive beacon one may hope. Nevertheless, several key shows and performers paved the way for Hamilton, including Lin-Manuel Miranda himself.

lin-manuel_miranda_philippa_soo_leslie_odom_jr-_and_christopher_jackson_white_house_march_2016

Lin-Manuel Miranda, Philippa Soo, Leslie Odom, Jr., and Christopher Jackson perform at the White House, March 2016 (via Wikimedia Commons).

Musical theater historians note that the Broadway musical is one of only two native-born art forms; the other is, of course, jazz. The defining moment of musical theater’s maturation for many such scholars is the 1927 premiere of Show Boat, Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II’s adaptation of Edna Ferber’s bestseller. Perhaps the most iconic moment in the show is when Joe, the African American stevedore, looks out over the Mississippi and bellows, “Ol’ Man River,” a moment immortalized on screen by Paul Robeson. Show Boat’s legacy rests upon its status as an “integrated musical”—that is, a show that seamlessly integrates the spoken dramatic portions (the “book”) with the music. Rather than musical interludes, characters break into song at moments of dramatic tension or comic relief. Sixteen years later, in 1943, Oscar Hammerstein II, now partnered with Richard Rodgers, produced Oklahoma!, which furthered the efforts to unite songs, lyrics, book, and choreography to create a serious work of dramatic literature. Critics at the time praised the arrival of a new American art form—one, of course, that was years in the making and deeply indebted to various European and American cultural traditions.

This narrative of artistic progress, promoted in large part by Oscar Hammerstein II himself, has been challenged in recent years. Last theater season, George C. Wolfe staged Shuffle Along, or, the Making of the Musical Sensation of 1921 and All That Followed, not so much a revival as a metamusical about the making of the original show (the Tony Award nominators recognized the show in the Best Musical rather than the Best Revival of a Musical category.) Wolfe argues this popular show was an important forerunner of the “integrated musical,” but equally important, it reminds us of the rich tradition of African American theater and people of color theater more broadly.

pearl_bailey_moms_mabley_the_pearl_bailey_show_1971

Moms Mabley and Pearl Bailey performing on The Pearl Bailey Show, February 1971 (via Wikimedia Commons).

The African American musical, in particular, has a long and storied history dating back before and including Shuffle Along. Performers like Moms Mabley, the Nicholas Brothers, and Lena Horne were featured in Broadway revues, and while Porgy and Bess (1935) was developed by white creators, the opera had an all-black cast and remains a landmark in American music. The late 1960s into the 1970s saw several all-black musicals, including Hallelujah, Baby! (1967), Raisin (1973), Your Arms Too Short to Box with God (1976), and Ain’t Misbehavin’ (1978). The most popular was The Wiz (1975), running for over 1600 performances and serving as the basis for the Diana Ross film (1978). Pearl Bailey led an all-black revival of Hello, Dolly! in 1975, furthering the practice of non-traditional casting that has sparked a good deal of debate on Broadway in recent years. In the 1980s, August Wilson began writing the “Pittsburgh Cycle,” a series of ten plays documenting black life during each decade of the 20th century. Of course, some of these shows had creative teams including or dominated by white talent, but the effort to stage black lives should not be dismissed. Many of these shows introduced or showcased the leading black talent of their respective eras.

Screenshot from The Wiz, 1978 (via Youtube).

The early 1990s saw shows like Once on This Island (1990), Five Guys Named Moe (1992), Jelly’s Last Jam (1992), and Bring in ‘Da Noise, Bring in ‘Da Funk (1996), showcasing the talents of performers like Gregory Hines, Savion Glover, and LaChanze. It also saw the debut of Audra McDonald, perhaps the pre-eminent Broadway star of her generation, having won six Tony Awards for her work in plays and musicals—more than any other stage actor ever. Shows with multiethnic casts, including Rent (1996), The Lion King (1997) and Ragtime (1998), offered a more inclusive theater and vision of America. Nevertheless, Latinx and Asian American performers on Broadway unfortunately remain less visible than their white counterparts. In recent years, the romanticized stereotypes and misguided multiculturalism found in The King and I (1951), West Side Story (1957) and Miss Saigon (1991) have been countered by a musical theater about and by people of color, including Allegiance (2015), Fela! (2009), and Miranda’s earlier effort, In the Heights (2008). Miranda also translated the lyrics of the Puerto Rican characters into Spanish for the 2009 bilingual revival of West Side Story, directed by the show’s original book writer, Arthur Laurents. Unable to compete with the spectacle and backing available to megamusicals, these shows often had relatively short runs. Hamilton, however, may be the first contemporary show to weather the storm and emerge as a long-running success on par with The Producers (2001) or The Book of Mormon (2011). In fact, Hamilton was the highest grossing show last year, followed closely by The Lion King.

In the Heights won the Tony for Best Musical in 2008 (via Playbill).

At this point, it has become nearly impossible for mainstream critics and commentators to discuss Hamilton without resorting to hyperbole. It has received winning endorsements from President Obama to Oprah Winfrey as well as Tonys, a Grammy, and a Pulitzer Prize for Drama. To be sure, these accolades for creator Lin-Manuel Miranda, his production team, and the cast were well-deserved. Yet in appreciating the original contribution of Hamilton, we must not forget the shows that paved the way—shows Miranda has acknowledged in interviews and in Hamilton itself—to understand the rich, albeit complex, history of representation on the boards and behind the scenes of Broadway.

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Women’s March, Like Many Before It, Struggles for Unity

Originally posted on the blog of The American Prospect, January 6, 2017.

By Laurie Green

For those who believe Donald Trump’s election has further legitimized hatred and even violence, a “Women’s March on Washington” scheduled for January 21 offers an outlet to demonstrate mass solidarity across lines of race, religion, age, gender, national identity, and sexual orientation.

The 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom (The Center for Jewish History via Flickr)

The idea of such a march first ricocheted across social media just hours after the TV networks called the election for Trump, when a grandmother in Hawaii suggested it to fellow Facebook friends on the private, pro-Hillary Clinton group page known as Pantsuit Nation. Millions of postings later, the D.C. march has mushroomed to include parallel events in 41 states and 21 cities outside the United States. An independent national organizing committee has stepped in to articulate a clear mission and take over logistics. And thousands of local organizations, many of them formed just in the last month, have already chartered buses to bring demonstrators to the National Mall region, where the march is scheduled to kick off at 10 a.m. at the intersection of Independence Avenue and 3rd Street SW.

Despite its “Women’s March” moniker, the national organizing committee’s striking diversity signals an increasing emphasis on defending “human rights, dignity, and justice,” as the event’s official website states, by unifying across difference. The organizing committee includes four national co-chairwomen—Tamika Mallory, Carmen Perez, Linda Sarsour, and Bob Bland—who are African American, Latina, Palestinian American, and white, and who all have extensive backgrounds as social justice organizers and professionals with local, national, and global experience.

Linda Sarsour, Carmen Perez, and Tamika Mallory serve on the Women’s March national organizing committee (via Huffington Post).

Still, neither the march, scheduled for the day after Trump’s inauguration, nor its organizers can pretend to possess perfect harmony and clarity on the direction of this nascent movement. For example, the initial organizers dropped the original moniker, the “Million Women March,” in response to criticism that it was disrespectful to African American women who had participated in a Philadelphia march by that same name in 1997. The latter had taken place two years after the iconic Million Man March. This year’s initial organizers also faced criticism that the name “March on Washington” failed to show deference to the historic role of black activists in the 1963 March on Washington, recognized as a high point of the civil rights movement. The new national committee explicitly describes its mission as one that builds on earlier movements for social justice.

Women in attendance at The Million Woman March on October 25, 1997, in Philadelphia, Pennyslvania.

Women in attendance at The Million Woman March on October 25, 1997, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (via Idealistic Ambitions).

Such internal tensions are par for the course in the history of marches on Washington, whether they involved racial justice, women’s rights, or political protest. The several thousand women who paraded down Pennsylvania Avenue in the 1913 Woman Suffrage Procession, the day before President Woodrow Wilson’s inauguration, were not as unified as they might have appeared. Participants included immigrant women sweatshop workers, who linked the right to vote to their movement to organize against deadly factory conditions and piecework wages. But noticeably absent from the front of the march were black women’s organizations, who supported the effort but whose participation was spurned by the militant young suffragist Alice Paul, who feared it would jeopardize support from Southern white women. These African American women ended up participating, but they were required to march behind all the other women. All the women who marched down Pennsylvania Avenue stood up to jeers and violence, but they themselves were divided by an ugly racism rooted in political pragmatism.

By contrast, some historic marches on the Capitol demonstrated racial unity against all odds. The largest convergence on Washington prior to 1963 was the 1932 Bonus Army March, which brought together World War I veterans at the height of the Great Depression. In 1924, these veterans had been honored with the promise of an old-age “bonus” redeemable in 1945. But times were desperate, and the men wanted their bonuses early. An estimated 20,000 unemployed veterans hopped freight trains, caravanned in automobiles, or walked to the capital from as far away as California, and vowed to stay put until the government delivered. Their protests placed them in a direct confrontation with President Herbert Hoover. Things came to a head on July 28, 1932, when General Douglas MacArthur ordered soldiers wielding machine guns, bayonets, and tear gas to evict the veterans from their encampment and torch their tents. The debacle, which featured news coverage of government troops attacking unarmed veterans, is thought to have helped Franklin Roosevelt beat Hoover by a landslide that November.

Bonus marchers in 1932 (via Wikimedia Commons).

On the surface, the Bonus Army March may appear to have little relevance for organizers of this month’s march. But the gathering was actually a show of unity that brought together both men and women, both whites and blacks. In 1932, not only the veterans but also their wives and children poured into Washington, forming a genuine community. And despite the fact that the U.S. military had maintained racially segregated units during World War I, white and black veterans caravanned to the capital together. For two months, they and their families squeezed in beside one another as their children played between the rows of tents. They experienced MacArthur’s onslaught together, an early demonstration of racial and gender solidarity not unlike what the Women’s March expects to deliver this year.

The Bonus March was still fresh in the minds of another group of protesters, this time comprised only of African Americans, who used the threat of a mass demonstration to pressure the government for racial justice in 1941. It was the eve of the nation’s entry into World War II, and a labor organization known as the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters initiated a March on Washington Movement that threatened to bring 100,000 African American protesters to the capital on July 1 unless President Roosevelt moved to desegregate the military and order an end to racial discrimination in the burgeoning defense industry. Anxious that reports of racial injustice would damage his credibility with the Allies, Roosevelt blinked on June 25, and this march never took place. In the end, Roosevelt failed to desegregate the military; but he did prohibit discrimination by defense contractors, and established a Fair Employment Practices Committee to mediate disputes.

After Roosevelt desegregated the armed forces, Howard Perry became the first African American US Marine Corps recruit in 1942 (via Wikimedia Commons).

The role of women in this World War II–era movement holds a lesson for the women rising up to oppose Trump’s presidency today. It may be widely known that the 1941 protest was a direct precursor of the 1963 March on Washington. But less well-known is that the full, official name of black union in question, led by A. Philip Randolph, was the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and Maids. The avid participation of maids, as well as of the union’s Ladies’ Auxiliary, which included porters’ wives, enabled Randolph to up his original participation projection from 10,000 in January of 1941 to 100,000 just a few months later.

Just as significantly, even though Randolph ended up canceling the demonstration, it spawned a March on Washington Movement, with chapters across the country, that persisted until 1946. Women continued as leaders in both the local and national organizations, and drew particular attention to discrimination against black females in the defense industry and other employment sectors. Women organizing this month’s demonstration at both the local and national levels are drawing on the historic organizing role of women—even those who have been forgotten—to create a lasting movement.

Anna Arnold Hedgeman (via Hamline University).

Perhaps the most famous march on Washington in the 20th century took place in August of 1963, when a quarter of a million people united to demand black civil rights. The march brought together white liberals who turned out to support African Americans, as well as Puerto Ricans, Mexican Americans, and Native Americans, in an extraordinary show of unity against racial oppression.

Nevertheless, yearly commemorations of this historic march fail to note unsettling backstories involving women leaders, whose important roles have been largely forgotten. Its top organizers, A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin, did not invite a single woman to speak, not even Rosa Parks—despite strong criticism from prominent black female civil rights advocates, including the one woman on the central organizing committee, Anna Arnold Hedgeman. Ultimately, organizers did arrange for six women, including Parks, to sit on the dais and be honored as women. But as the program shows, none of the ten keynote addresses heard that day was delivered by a woman.

Most Americans remember only one: Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech. Often forgotten is the full name of the event: the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Photographs of the event show hundreds of women bearing signs calling for everything from higher wages and jobs for all to better schools and voting rights. Many are union members. Female domestic and agricultural workers, the backbone of Southern activism since the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott, also marched, at a time when federal law excluded them from minimum wages, Social Security, and from union-organizing protections.

Those photographs are testament to the role of women workers in organizing public protests. One thread running through all of these major 20th-century marches is the way civil justice issues involving race, gender, jobs, wage equity, and immigration all tended to intertwine. In the wake of the bitter election of 2016, post-election analyses have focused disproportionately on “the white blue-collar worker,” “the middle class,” or “the 1 percent.” Overlooked are the economic security and job concerns of Latina, black, and other women who toil in service, agricultural, and manufacturing jobs, at wages so low they qualify for food stamps. Such women would be devastated by the social-services restructuring proposed by GOP House Speaker Paul Ryan, of Wisconsin.

As women and men march on Washington once again, the demonstrations of 1913, 1932, 1941, and 1963 hold important lessons. The outward show of “unity” at the Woman Suffrage Procession masked its racism. The 1932 Bonus Army March speaks to the potential for diverse groups to come together in the face of extreme adversity—just as progressives are unifying today in the face of Trump. The 1941 march illustrated how organizing for a demonstration can plant the seeds for a sustained movement. And the solidarity celebrated in 1963 hid the relegation of women leaders to second-class citizenship. Ideally, the Women’s March on Washington will both avoid some of these pitfalls and help women forge new alliances that will last well beyond the event itself.

More by Laurie Green on Not Even Past:
1863 in 1963.
Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600 – 2000.

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