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The past is never dead. It's not even past

Not Even Past

Harper’s Weekly’s Portrayal of the Civil War: The New Archive (No. 11)

By Charley S. Binkow

Images of war surround us today.  We see high-definition photographs and videos of violence on our televisions, smartphones, and laptops almost constantly.  But what was living through war like when people didn’t have instant videos or photographs? George Mason University’s Virginia Civil War Archive gives us a glimpse into the American media’s portrayal of the war at a time when ink-prints dominated the newspapers.

During the Civil War, Harper’s Weekly was one of the authoritative voices in news, both in the North and the South.  What set them apart from their competition? Their prints brought the war to the people and illuminated a world far removed from our own.  You can see Fredricksburg, Virginia before it saw battle, a map of the Battle of Bull’s Run, and a portrayal of rebels firing into a train near Tunstall’s Station.

 A Band of Rebels Firing Into the Cars Near Tunstall's Station, Virginia, June 13, 1862 (George Mason University Libraries)

A Band of Rebels Firing Into the Cars Near Tunstall’s Station, Virginia, June 13, 1862 (George Mason University Libraries)

The collection is quite well organized.  You can browse by titles, subjects, people, and more.  A Civil War historian trying to find primary visual documents concerning Richmond during wartime can do so with a click of a button.  An art historian can explore the different landscapes and figures expertly drawn by Harper’s staff—some of America’s best illustrators of the time worked for Harper’s. Almost anyone can find something interesting in this collection.

Harpers Weekly's map of the Battle of Bull's Run (George Mason University Libraries)

Harpers Weekly’s map of the Battle of Bull’s Run (George Mason University Libraries)

My personal favorite pieces are those that depict war scenes and their aftermath, like this dynamic, busy drawing of Colonel Hunter’s attack at the Battle of Bull Run or this poignant one of soldiers carrying away the wounded after battle.  A lot of people relied on Harper’s Weekly and other newspapers to give them information about the Civil War.  Seeing what these artists chose to portray, what they chose to omit, and how they created their scenes is fascinating.

Carrying the wounded at the Battle of Bull Run (George Mason University Libraries)

Carrying the wounded at the Battle of Bull Run (George Mason University Libraries)

This collection is one of many quality archives in the George Mason database.  Eager history enthusiasts should take advantage of these primary documents.  They’re informative, detailed, and just downright interesting.

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More discoveries in the New Archive:

A website that charts the demographic, geographic and environmental history of the slave trade

And newly declassified government documents that tell the story of Radio Free Europe

Filed Under: 1800s, Politics, Reviews, United States, War Tagged With: digital history, history, New Archive, Not Even Past, The Civil War, United States, US History

Reagan on War: A Reappraisal of the Weinberger Doctrine, 1980-1984, by Gail E. S. Yoshitani (2012)

by Simon Miles

Few presidents have left as complicated and politically charged a legacy as Ronald Reagan. Hailed as a pioneer of conservatism by some and reviled as an enemy of the middle class and a supporter of dictators by others, Reagan’s legacy has largely been shaped by debate between partisan pundits. Gradually, however, a limited body of more moderate of “Reagan revisionism” has begun to emerge. Historians and political scientists, writing with the benefit of temporal distance from events and increased access to sources have begun to produce more nuanced accounts of the 51uDzi5S1DLReagan administration – especially in the realm of foreign policy – that acknowledge the administration’s shortcomings and its successes.

Gail Yoshitani’s Reagan on War is one such book. Yoshitani, a professor of history at the US Military Academy at West Point, offers an in-depth look at the Reagan administration’s development of a strategic doctrine for the use of force based on extensive archival research. She demonstrates how a doctrine for the use of force emerged, but also how the Reagan administration, and the president in particular, chose to either adhere to or eschew these doctrines depending on Reagan’s goals Throughout Reagan on War, Yoshitani asks two important questions. First, what role did Reagan personally play in shaping his administration’s foreign policy? Second, to what extent did Reagan’s advisors, neoconservative and otherwise, influence the administration’s foreign policy?

Yoshitani’s account of US foreign policy during the early 1980s places Reagan at the center of events. As president, Yoshitani argues, Reagan set the course for US Cold War strategy. His perception of American resources as infinite and his determination to rebuild not only US military and economic strength, but also the country’s morale, guided policy during the 1980s. Reagan firmly believed that the solution to America’s “Vietnam syndrome” was strong presidential leadership (which he felt had been particularly lacking during the preceding Carter administration) and “peace through strength.” Yoshitani is clear, however, that Reagan’s advisors were responsible for developing policies to achieve these goals.

President Ronald Reagan and First Lady Nancy Reagan view the caskets of the 17 US victims of the 1983 attack against the US Embassy in Beirut (The Reagan Library)

President Ronald Reagan and First Lady Nancy Reagan view the caskets of the 17 US victims of the 1983 attack against the US Embassy in Beirut (The Reagan Library)

The key question faced by the Reagan administration in Yoshitani’s analysis was not only how to deal with the Soviet Union, but also when the United States should use military force overseas in the aftermath of Vietnam. Reagan’s advisors had differing policy prescriptions for this dilemma and Yoshitani examines the various doctrines proposed by Director of Central Intelligence William Casey, the Pentagon (in particular Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General John Vessey), Secretary of State George Shultz, and finally Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger. Casey’s approach to the use of force centered on proxy forces, usually the militaries of right-wing governments in Latin America, to repel communism. Proxy forces would bear the brunt of combat and create a permissive context for any future American military involvement, if desired, by cultivating a local perceived ally that the United States could support. Vessey and his Pentagon colleagues favored direct and decisive US engagement with limited, realistic goals, such as the removal of Palestinian Liberation Organization fighters from Lebanon. Shultz saw the military as a tool to be deployed in support of diplomacy. Deploying troops was a clear sign of resolve, he argued, but should be done sparingly to ensure that the Soviet Union would not feel compelled to become involved to counterbalance American involvement around the world. Weinberger, synthesizing these approaches, outlined six litmus tests for US policy-makers to govern the use of force: necessity to US or allied national interest; wholehearted commitment; defined political and military objectives; correlation between objectives and forces committed; public support; and the absence of a non-military alternative. Though Reagan did not always adhere to the Weinberger Doctrine, Yoshitani argues, it formed the heuristic framework in which the administration considered the use of force.

President Ronald Reagan at his desk in the Oval Office (Library of Congress)

President Ronald Reagan at his desk in the Oval Office (Library of Congress)

Yoshitani makes a valuable contribution to the historiography of Reagan’s foreign policy by exploring Reagan as an individual, his advisors, and their approach to policy-making and the Cold War. The 1980s are already fertile ground for historians, with ample material accessible at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, the National Archives and Records Administration, and in smaller repositories such as the Hoover Institution Archives. This valuable and insightful book will be of considerable interest to students of the Cold War.

More on the presidency of Ronald Reagan:

Joseph Parrott’s review of The Rebellion of Ronald Reagan: A History of the End of the Cold War

Dolph Briscoe’s review of The Age of Reagan: A History

Jonathan Hunt looks back on the 1986 Reykjavík Summit between Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev

 

Filed Under: 1900s, Cold War, Periods, Regions, Reviews, Topics, Transnational, United States, War Tagged With: 20th Century, book review, Cold War, history, Mikhail Gorbachev, Not Even Past, Ronald Reagan, United States, US History, USSR

Shores of Knowledge: New World Discoveries and the Scientific Imagination, by Joyce Appleby (2013)

by Jorge Cañizares Esguerra

616lI-4KMRLShores of Knowledge has gotten its share of uncritical, rave reviews from Bill Moyers to the Washington Post. I wrote the following review for a small academic, European journal, Centaurus. There it will be read only by a handful of specialists, if I’m lucky. I want to make this review available to a wider public in Not Even Past in the hopes of engaging a general conversation about aspects of the book that I find troubling and that most likely will go unmentioned in most reviews. We need a raucous discussion about our shared notions of progress and modernity. And we need to ask: who got to be curious?

The ancient Greeks were curious. Superstitious folks in the Middle Ages were not. The Renaissance untethered curiosity from the clutches of theology. Curious men then turned their attention onto America and other newly found lands to bring about modern science. This is the argument of Joyce Appleby’s Shores of Knowledge. Appleby, a distinguished historian and a former president of the American Historical Association, manages to turn an incredibly messy story, and even messier historiographies, into a neat, yet extremely old-fashioned narrative. In the 1590s the Flemish engraver and painter at the service of the Medici, Jan van der Straet (Stradanus), produced a series of prints, Nova Reperta (New discoveries), that could have summarized the spirit animating Shores of Knowledge : curious explorers, like Christopher Columbus, with the help of new technologies (compass, gunpowder, and printing press), opened up a continent, America, so rich in new creatures and natural products, to transform knowledge about the world forever.

Stradanus, Nova Reperta, or "New Inventions of Modern Times" (The British Museum)

Stradanus, “Nova Reperta” (The British Museum)

Appleby begins with Columbus and ends with Alexander von Humboldt and Charles Darwin. In between these bookends a host of figures, all male, come in for entertaining vignettes: sixteenth-century Spanish conquistadors cum naturalists-ethnographers; Renaissance editors of travel accounts; amateur sixteenth- and seventeenth-century curiosity collectors and naturalists; early eighteenth-century emerging experts and specialists on insects, plants and ethnography; mid eighteenth-century state- sponsored French astronomer-academicians measuring the earth; late eighteenth-century British and French naval naturalists and ethnographers cataloguing the islands and peoples of the Pacific. To assemble her book, Appleby relies exclusively on English editions of authors whose works remain mostly untranslated from Latin, Italian, Spanish and French, and Nahuatl, including figures like Columbus, Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo, Bartolomé de las Casas, Antonio Pigafetta, Peter Martyr, Giovanni Ramusio, Richard Hakluyt, Theodor de Bry, Ulisse Aldrovandi, Francis Bacon, Robert Boyle, Carl Linnaeus, comte de Buffon, Charles Marie de la Condamine, Pierre Louis Maupertuis, Louis Antoine de Bougainville, James Cook, Humboldt, Darwin, and a host of other minor figures.

This is not a book of original scholarship but of popularization, and it shows. Take for example the case of the alleged lack of medieval ‘curiosity’ in understanding nature. Historians of medieval natural philosophy would take issue with Appleby’s bold, sweeping assertions: Medieval Franciscan nominalists, for instance, transformed the Muslim science of optics and created a bold new discipline. The geometry they developed to interpret the behavior of light rays, in turn, was the foundation upon which Galileo and Newton mathematized uniform and uniformly accelerated motion. Medieval scholastic alchemical practices and theories of matter laid the ground for the empiricism of Boyle and Newton. In short, the Middle Ages were not the Dark Ages that Petrarch, Voltaire, and, now, Appleby suggest.

Roger Bacon’s "Perspectiva" on the study of optics, late 13th century (British Library)

Roger Bacon’s “Perspectiva” on the study of optics, late 13th century (British Library)

Although Appleby seeks to give intellectuals of the Spanish Monarchy their due, the way she goes about doing it reflects centuries of accumulated historiographical biases and leaves out decades of recent historiographical correctives. Amidst bouts of barbarism and superstition, a few curious Spanish conquistadors and missionaries make cameo appearances in chapter one; then, they disappear. Appleby deals with the usual suspects: Oviedo, Las Casas, Hernandez and Bernardino de Sahagún.

Bernardino de Sahagún, and others, "Florentine Codex, On birds and fish," Book 11. Natural History (Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Florence, Italy)

Bernardino de Sahagún, and others, “Florentine Codex, On birds and fish,” Book 11. Natural History (Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Florence, Italy)

The role of Spanish and Spanish American naturalists in La Condamine’s expedition is limited to a sentence or two. José Celestino Mutis appears in the chapters on Linnaeus and Humboldt in a couple of paragraphs only to suggest that his late-eighteenth-century collecting efforts went to waste due to the neglect of ignorant bureaucrats.

“Justicia.” Mutis Expedition. (Real Jardín Botánico CSIC. Madrid. DIV. III A-1679)

“Justicia,” a naturalist document from the Mutis Expedition. (Real Jardín Botánico CSIC. Madrid. DIV. III A-1679)

Humboldt, the hero, appears traversing countless Spanish American kingdoms, gathering long-neglected statistics from the obscurity of offices and libraries, and, in the process, illuminating locals, including Bolivar, on the potential of political and economic freedom they had not yet grasped.

We know from Maria Portuondo’s  Secret Science: Spanish Cosmography and the New World (2009), for example, that the modernity Appleby attributes to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France and England was fully possible in sixteenth-century global Spain without the need of the  printing press. Portuondo demonstrates that cosmographic works (including Copernicus’s) circulated widely in manuscripts among students in academies and universities and among secretive bureaucracies on both sides of the Atlantic. The absence of a public, created by the circulation of scientific materials in print, did not stop the development of the things Appleby associates with modernity:  the full mathematizing of the world; the development of the Baconian category of fact; the pragmatic embrace of the idea of moving earth to make sense of tides and calculate longitudes; the development of countless machines and astronomic techniques to map out longitude. The case of La Condamine is even more jarring because Appleby cites Neil Safier’s Measuring the New World  (2008) throughout. Safier’s argument is that La Condamine was not the naturalist hero Appleby puts forward but an entrepreneur of self-promotion. Much of La Condamine’s work was not empiricist collecting by a daring philosophical traveler. It was plagiarism and recycling of the work of others, including Jesuits and local creole scholars.  That La Condamine today could still pull off his act of self-aggrandizement before Appleby’s eyes speaks volumes about the endurance of imperial, geopolitical misleading distribution of epistemological authority.

How Appleby deals with Humboldt is equally striking. Humboldt was not the first to correlate the earth’s climates onto vertical mountain heights. It was Jose de Acosta, whose extraordinarily influential sixteenth-century natural history Appleby completely ignores.

Acosta, "De Natura Novi Orbis," 1589 (Biblioteca Nacional de España)

Acosta, “De Natura Novi Orbis,” 1589 (Biblioteca Nacional de España)

In fact, I have argued in print that Humboldt’s remarkable output, including his 30 volumes on the New World, ought to be read as a synthesis of the Spanish American Enlightenment, not the product of a genius working in isolation.  Humboldt himself acknowledged that he was the beneficiary of the most generous eighteenth-century, state-sponsored policies of natural history collection in Europe as a whole: some 60 “Spanish” expeditions to the Americas and the Pacific. Appleby mentions every European state-sponsored scientific expedition into the Pacific but completely ignores the largest: Alejandro Malaspina’s, which happened to be “Spanish.”

Alessandro Malaspina. Anonymous Portrait. (Naval Museum, Madrid)

Alessandro Malaspina. Anonymous Portrait. (Naval Museum, Madrid)

My problem with the book does not stop with the interpretations. There are countless errors of fact throughout. The following is just a selection: The second and third parts of Oviedo’s Historia were not published in 1535 (33); Martyr Decadas were eight, not nine (78); it wasn’t the Mexican Revolution that brought the trade of the Manila Galleon to an end (186); the places Humboldt visited were not called Columbia (sic) and Ecuador (218); La Condamine did not ‘trail blaze through the Orinoco River basin’ (219); and so on.

Shores of Knowledge is an old-fashioned hagiographic treatment of knowledge as a liberating force. Like Petrarch and Voltaire, Appleby argues that travels of discovery in the age of imperial global expansion set us free from the clutches of medieval superstition.  Decades of scholarship on empire, power, slavery, plantations and the geopolitics of epistemological authority as constitutive of early modern natural philosophy and natural history evaporate.

Appleby’s review ultimately points to the potential and limits of popularization. How should historians reach wider audiences? My issue with her book is not with her style. Entertaining histories, vignettes, and anecdotes are helpful in illustrating complex issues of analysis and theory and Appleby uses them to great effect. My problem is that her strategies suggest that, for a book to be popular, historians ought to reinforce narratives the public expects. In her case these include such common tropes as medieval obscurantism, the power of America’s discovery in producing miraculous epistemological transformations, and the enlightened, heroic tale of “European” male naturalists triggering modernity juxtaposed to the one of cruel Spaniards, poignant yet marginal. Unfortunately those popular narratives are often little more than collections of shibboleths and stereotypes. How to craft historical narratives that are widely read but that at the same time rattle the public into jettisoning their historical parochialism?  That is the historians’ true dilemma.

And don’t miss Jorge Cañizares Esguerra’s review of Our America: A Hispanic History of the United States

 

Filed Under: Periods, Regions, Reviews, Science/Medicine/Technology, Topics, Transnational

Mapping The Slave Trade: The New Archive (No. 10)

By Henry Wiencek

Roughly 12 million Africans were forcibly transported to Europe, Asia, the Caribbean, and the Americas. It’s hard to conceptualize so many men and women being uprooted from their homes. But Emory University’s Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database helps users understand the vast proportions of this perverse exodus. The site pieces together historical data from 35,000 slave voyages between 1500 and 1900 and arranges them onto graphs and maps, offering readers a geographic, demographic, and even environmental context for the slave trade.

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Screenshot of “Overview of the slave trade out of Africa, 1500-1900” (Emory University)

While people may assume that one singular “slave trade” took place, the database maps demonstrate that many existed. And not just across the Atlantic, but around the globe. Overview of the slave trade out of Africa, 1500-1900 charts the routes slave traders followed from Africa to various international ports. But you might be surprised at some of their destinations—traders ventured from East Africa to Arabia, Yemen, the Persian Gulf, and even various ports in India. Although the largest number of slaving ships do land in Brazil or the Caribbean, this map demonstrates that Africa’s slave trade was very much feeding a world market. The variety of international ports participating in the trade is also striking. This was not a black market undertaken by a depraved few, but rather a thriving worldwide industry that brought ships, employment and wealth to numerous communities on both sides of the Atlantic. The maps make this point visually with striking impact.

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Screenshot of “Wind and ocean currents of the Atlantic basins” (Emory University)

The site also reminds readers that the process of moving enslaved Africans across the ocean was as much an environmental process as an economic one. The map, Wind and ocean currents of the Atlantic basins reveals how oceanic forces played a role in determining the travel routes for slave ships. Red and blue lines respectively denote winds and currents swirling between Africa and the Americas, facilitating particular geographic courses better suited for crossing the ocean. These natural forces effectively created two separate “slave-trading systems,” as the site identifies them: one originating in Europe and North America and the other originating in Brazil. Historians have certainly detailed the racism and greed motivating the slave trade, but comparatively little time examining the environmental processes that made it possible. Particular centers of trade emerged along the coasts of Brazil, the Caribbean and West Africa to meet an economic need, but also to harness the currents and winds essential to moving so many men and women such vast distances.  And here too, the visual character of the map makes it easy to see how natural forces worked to shape the historical events.

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Numerical timeline graphing the number of African captives in the trans-Atlantic slave trade between 1500 to 1866 (Emory University)

In addition to these visual aids, the site also includes a more quantitative rendering of this nefarious business. A timeline graphs the number of captives who embarked and disembarked between 1500 and 1867. Users can make the information even more precise by expanding or contracting the time frame or manipulating different variables, including sites of disembarkation, embarkation, and nationality of the slave ship. This visual tool reveals a steadily growing trade, with the number of embarked Africans peaking at around 115,000 in 1792. You will also find a chilling disparity between the number of “Embarked” and “Disembarked” Africans in the statistics—a powerful indication of the deadly voyages these individuals were forced to endure.

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A white slave trader inspecting an African male up for sale, ca. 1854 (Wikimedia Commons)

The sheer numbers documented in the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database are astonishing. With much of the globe participating, an elaborate network of ports, ships and trade routes uprooted millions of African souls with ruthless efficiency. Some users might find the site’s emphasis on graphs and maps to be sanitizing or dehumanizing to the enslaved individuals—too many numbers and figures, not enough people. But the story this site wants to tell is a big and highly important one. The African slave trade had a global reach; it was an environmental force as well as an economic one; and it displaced millions upon millions of men and women from their homes. Visualizing the statistics makes the global reach of their human toll palpable in new ways.

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Earlier editions of the New Archive:

Charley Binkow reads through declassified CIA documents relating to the creation of Radio Free Europe

And Henry Wiencek explores a new, more visual, way of understanding emancipation in America

Filed Under: 1400s to 1700s, 1800s, Africa, Atlantic World, Business/Commerce, Capitalism, Empire, Environment, Latin America and the Caribbean, Race/Ethnicity, Reviews, Slavery/Emancipation, Transnational, United States Tagged With: Africa, African American History, American Slavery, Colonialism, digital history, Europe, New Archive, Not Even Past, slavery, Transnational, US History, world history

Black Slaves, Indian Masters: Slavery, Emancipation, and Citizenship in the Native American South, by Barbara Krauthamer (2013)

by Nakia Parker

For decades, scholars peered at the painful and complex topic of American slavery through a purely “black-white” lens—in other words, black slaves who had white masters.  The sad reality that some Native Americans, (in particular, the Creek, Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Seminole, or “the Five Tribes”) also participated in chattel and race-based slavery, was rarely acknowledged in the historical annals. Only in the latter part of the 20th century did historians begin to address this oversight. Several groundbreaking studies recognized the momentous repercussions of this practice for Native and African American populations alike during the antebellum era and down to the present day.  Barbara Krauthamer, a professor of Native American and African American history at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, adds an exhaustive and compelling contribution to the research in this area. The first full-length monograph chronicling chattel slavery in the Choctaw and Chickasaw Nations, Krauthamer amply demonstrates how both before and after the era of Indian Removal in the mid-nineteenth century slavery also intersected with issues of race and gender in complicated ways.

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Krauthamer tracks white commodification and enslavement of Choctaw and Chickasaw bodies starting in the late seventeenth century and its transition to the commodification and enslavement of black bodies by Choctaw and Chickasaw slaveholders in the eighteenth century.  In addition, Krauthamer adroitly debunks the myth that the main cause for American Indian participation in chattel slavery stemmed from their desire for European, and later American goods, unable to resist the inescapable forces of the market economy and capitalism.  Krauthamer acknowledges the catastrophic economic consequences of the American seizure of Indian lands, of the racist rhetoric that Native Americans needed to be properly “civilized,” and of the exigencies caused by depletion of the deer population, which severely curtailed trade opportunities. But she persuasively argues that the decision to engage in chattel slaveholding resulted from a conscious and deliberate choice on the part of Indian slaveholders to embrace racial ideology that “degraded blackness and associated it exclusively with enslavement.” For some influential and wealthy members of the Choctaw and Chickasaw Nations, adopting race-based slavery provided the most efficient way to maintain an increasingly tenuous hold on political and cultural autonomy in the face of aggressive American expansion, while pursuing self-interested economic and diplomatic goals.

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Holmes Colbert, a prominent leader in the Chickasaw Nation and the owner of several enslaved African-Americans (Wikimedia Commons)

Krauthamer also addresses the “leniency thesis” that many early scholars of Native American history advocated — that life under the yoke of an Indian master was somehow more “benevolent” than enslaved life under whites — but that has been successfully challenged, by Tiya Miles and Claudio Saunt among others. By the mid-nineteenth century, laws existed in both nations that banned intermarriage between blacks and Indians: for example, Choctaw lawmakers allowed white men to achieve citizenship through marriage to a Choctaw woman, but forbade “a negro or descendent of a negro” from enjoying the same privilege; likewise, in the Chickasaw nation, the punishment for “publicly taking up with a negro slave” was a steep fine, whipping, or the ultimate punishment, banishment from the nation and the dissolving of all kinship ties. Krauthamer also cites accounts from WPA slave narratives detailing instances of physical and sexual abuse at the hands of Native American owners.

Chickasaw Freedmen filing for allotment in Oklahoma
Chickasaw Freedmen filing for allotment in Oklahoma (Oklahoma Historical Society)

Krauthamer also shows that despite horrific conditions, enslaved people living in “Indian country” engaged in covert and overt forms of resistance. One particularly compelling experience of slave resistance concerns the story of Prince, who, angered that his Choctaw owner Richard Harkins failed to give his slaves a Christmas celebration, brutally murdered him and then unceremoniously dumped the body into the river in 1858. Prince finally confessed, but implicated his Aunt Lucy in the crime. Although Lucy denied her involvement and no evidence existed to prove that she participated in the murder, Lavinia Harkins, the widow of the murdered man and thus also Lucy’s owner, demanded that Lucy be burned alive along with Prince. This harrowing tale highlights the intersections of race, gender, and power relations that informed the interactions between “black slaves and Indian masters” in Indian Territory.

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Peter Pitchlynn, or “Hat-choo-tuck-nee,” a Choctaw chief and later tribal delegate to Washington (LC-USZ62-58502, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, D.C.)

Even Emancipation and the end of the Civil War did not bring immediate relief to the enslaved living in the Choctaw and Chickasaw Nations. Although the Choctaw and Chickasaw sided with the Confederacy during the conflict, the United States considered them to be separate political polities; therefore, the abolition of slavery as stated in the Thirteenth Amendment did not apply in Indian Territory. Instead, the Choctaw/Chickasaw treaty of 1866 outlined the details of emancipation, citizenship, and land claims for the Freedmen, but inextricably (and problematically) linked these issues with Indian sovereignty, land rights, and annuities—one could not be obtained without the other. This knotty situation became further complicated with the passage of laws enacted by Choctaw and Chickasaw political leaders that seem eerily similar to the “Black Codes” of the Reconstruction era South. Former slaves in Choctaw country who did not have a work contract could be arrested for “vagrancy” by the lighthorsemen (police force) and then be auctioned off to the highest bidder—slavery by another name. Once again, the now emancipated slaves in Indian Territory, in particular African-American men, engaged in resisting these harsh measures and formed groups that lobbied for political and economic justice before the Freedmen’s Bureau and Indian leaders.

Riverside, the home of Benjamin Franklin Colbert at Colbert's Ferry
Riverside, the home of Benjamin Colbert in Colbert’s Ferry, OK (Oklahoma Historical Society)

Black Slaves, Indian Masters proves a much needed addition to African American and Native American histories of slavery.  Krauthamer uses an exhaustive number of sources to bolster her argument–slave narratives, government records, personal correspondence of Indian leaders such as diaries and letters, and official papers of the Choctaw and Chickasaw Nations. Her work not only expands the lens of the study of slavery beyond the “black and white,” but also can provide insight into the current tensions and issues of citizenship and identity existing between descendants of the enslaved and nations such as the Cherokee and Seminole today.

In 2011, Dr. Krauthamer was a fellow at The Institute for Historical Studies at UT-Austin. During this time, she delivered a workshop “Enslaved women and the Politics of Self-Liberation.”

You can find Black Slaves, Indian Masters here. And be sure to explore Envisioning Emancipation, a powerful collection of photographs portraying the lives of enslaved and freed African-Americans that Dr. Krauthamer compiled with renowned photographic historian Deborah Willis.

Filed Under: Business/Commerce, Periods, Regions, Reviews, Slavery/Emancipation, Topics, Transnational, United States Tagged With: book review, history, Native American History, Not Even Past, slavery, US History

No Mere Shadows: Faces of Widowhood in Early Colonial Mexico, by Shirley Cushing Flint (2013)

What would Mexico City—or Tenochtitan as it was known to its indigenous population—have looked like to ten year old Doña Luisa Estrada, when she arrived with her parents in 1524, three years after it fell to Spain?  What is clear is that her life soon intermingled in the early conquest society.  At thirteen she married 26 year old conquistador Jorge de Alvarado.  He also experienced the New World as young child: he had been participating in expeditions since he was nine.  After his death, Doña Luisa administered his grant of tribute Indians (encomiendas) and accumulated estates that stretched from Mexico City to Guatemala.  While unfortunately neither left what certainly would have been fascinating memoirs, tantalizing glimpses of their lives appear in Shirley Cushing Flint’s No Mere Shadows: Faces of Widowhood in Early Colonial Mexico. 

Flint was initially fascinated by the history of one of Doña Luisa’s sisters, Doña Beatriz de Estrada.  Doña Beatriz leveraged her fortune to finance the famous expedition of her husband, Francisco Vásquez de Coronado, to the American southwest.   As the author delved into the collective biographies of Estrada wives, husbands, and children she discovered how three generations accumulated and diversified forms of economic wealth and social status, acquired assets in the core and then the periphery, and constantly engaged in lawsuits to maintain them.

Spanish colonial map of Culhuacán, now in present-day Mexico City, 1588 (Benson Latin American Collection at the University of Texas at Austin)
Spanish colonial map of Culhuacán, now in present-day Mexico City, 1588 (Benson Latin American Collection at the University of Texas at Austin)

Separate chapters explore the ups and downs of the Estrada family’s marriages, widowhood, children, and finances.  These include the matriarch, Doña Marina  (Gutiérrez Flores de la Caballería), who arrived as the wife of the newly appointed royal treasurer Alonso de Estrada and who, on his death, managed the extensive properties of urban and rural real estate including a profitable mill. She arranged favorable marriages for her daughters, not only for young Doña Luisa and Doña Beatriz to conquistadors Alvarado and Coronado, but for her daughter Doña Francisca, whose husband possessed the most valuable grant of Indians for tribute after Hernán Cortés.  The fortunes of the next generation waned with the marriage of granddaughter Doña María to Alonso Ávila, as he was beheaded in 1566 over charges that he participated in a conspiracy to challenge royal hegemony.  She spent her later years in Spain attempting to recover the family fortunes.

Tracing these compelling personal vignettes of the lives of the Estradas provides rare insights into the challenges and opportunities of life for Spanish women in post-conquest Mexico.

Filed Under: 1400s to 1700s, Empire, Gender/sexuality, Latin America and the Caribbean, Periods, Regions, Reviews, Topics Tagged With: book review, history, Latin America, Mexico, Not Even Past, Womens History

Persuasion, Propaganda, and Radio Free Europe: The New Archive (No. 9)

By Charley S. Binkow

How does a nation fight a war of ideas?  When the battlefield is popular opinion, how does a state arm itself?  In 1949, the United States found its answer.  Their weapon: the airwaves.  The CIA launched Radio Free Europe in 1949 with the hopes of encouraging Eastern Europeans to defect from the Soviet bloc and weaken their countries from the inside.  The Digital Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty archive gives us a declassified, thorough, and incredibly interesting view of the radio’s peak years between 1949 and 1972.

Kennan

“George F. Kennan on Organizing Political Warfare,” April 30, 1948 (Wilson Center Digital Archive)

The RFE/RL collection of documents is among the many fascinating collections posted by the Wilson Center on its website: “Digital Archive: International History Declassified.”  It is a treasure trove of information. Memorandums, reports, and letters, all declassified by the Central Intelligence Agency, giving us an unseen history of the station.  You can see the beginnings of the program, when George Kennan (one of the architects of containment policy) stressed the need to inspire “continuing popular resistance within the countries of the Soviet World,” to its founding mission statement to “engage in efforts by radio, press and other means to keep alive among their fellow citizens in Europe the ideals of individual and national freedom.” The documents give us insight into uncertainties about the program as well.  Several statesmen had doubts, like Richard Arens, who claimed RFE was harboring Marxists and broadcasting socialist propaganda.  West Germany, where RFE was based, also felt a lack of control over the station and a sense of being used by the U.S.

George F. Kennan, 1947 (Wikimedia Commons)

George F. Kennan, 1947 (Wikimedia Commons)

My favorite part of the collection is its extensive collection of papers concerning the Hungarian Revolution of 1956.  RFE played an important role in the uprising, at least from the Hungarians’ point of view.  However, after the uprising failed, and public outcry blamed the United States and RFE for its inaction, the CIA tried its best to back peddle and “down play” the situation as much as possible.  Especially fascinating are the policy reviews after the Hungarian revolution (notably its concerns with Poland and Czechoslovakia).

Mission

“Understanding Between Office of Policy Coordination and National Committee
for Free Europe,” October 04, 1949, a document outlining the mission of the Free Europe Committee (Wilson Center Digital Archive)

This archive is easily navigable and well worth searching.  The Wilson Center also has a plethora of other digital archives, including documents on China, North Korea, Cuba, Brazil, and South Africa, as well as other archives on the Cold War in Europe and around the globe. But its collection on Radio Free Europe is an excellent place to start.

If you’re further interested in the Hungarian Revolution, you should also check out the Open Society Archives’ collection, which we featured here last week.

Filed Under: 1900s, Cold War, Europe, Politics, Reviews, Transnational, United States, War Tagged With: 20th Century, Asia, Cold War, Crimea, digital history, Europe, New Archive, Not Even Past, Russia, Transnational, Ukraine, USSR

The Texas State Historical Association Launches the Tejano History Handbook Project

History Professors Emilio Zamora, University of Texas, and Andrés Tijerina, Austin Community College, are co-directing the one-year project to increase the number of entries on Mexican Americans in Texas history in the Texas Handbook Online, the well-known and respected encyclopedia of the Texas State Historical Association (TSHA).  They are currently seeking academic and non-academic researchers to prepare essays on historically significant men and women, events, places, and themes in order to expand the breadth and depth of the Handbook.

The TSHA initiated the Handbook as a two-volume encyclopedia in 1952.  By 1999, they digitalized its contents, making them available to a wider readership online.  The Texas Handbook Online has become the nation’s preeminent state encyclopedia with well over 25,000 essays and more than 400,000 readers a month from more than 200 countries and territories from around the globe. Part of this growth involved a concerted effort in the 1980s by the TSHA to produce additional entries on Mexican Americans.  More than twenty-five years have passed since Dr. Cynthia Orozco and Teresa Palomo Acosta led this project.  Since then, researchers have made significant progress in Mexican American history and contributed to the expanded public and professional interest in the field.

Image of the Aims and Purposed of the League of Latin American Citizens document from c. 1927
Aims and Purposes of the League of Latin American Citizens. [ca. 1927]. (Special Collections, University of Houston Libraries. University of Houston Digital Library. Web. March 18, 2014. http://digital.lib.uh.edu/collection/perales/item/72.)

Existing essays include, for example, biographical pieces by Cynthia Orozco on such historical figures as Petra Vela de Vidal Kenedy, a rancher and philanthropist of the nineteenth century, and Alonso Perales, a co-founder of the League of United Latin American Citizens. Vela de Vidal Kenedy figured prominently in the development of the cattle industry in the Texas-Mexico region and in the story of international conflict and ethnic strife in south Texas.   She was also generous with her wealth: her obituary notes that “the poor never appealed to her in vain and their wants were often anticipated.”  Perales helped usher in an ethnic form of politics that made constitutional claims for equal rights during the middle of the twentieth century.  According to Orozco, he was “one of the most influential Mexican Americans of his time,  . . . a defender of la raza, especially battling charges that Mexicans were an inferior people and a social problem.”

The Tejano History Handbook Project intends to capitalize on the quality and growth of existing entries by identifying researchers to write new essays. The new entries will adhere to the high standards of scholarship evident in the Texas Handbook Online and they will be subjected to rigorous review.  Thanks to these entries, the general public as well as public school students and university researchers can come to understand the importance of Mexican Americans in Texas history.

Inquiries on the Tejano History Handbook Project should be directed to Dr. Emilio Zamora, e.zamora@austin.utexas.edu.

And read about Dr. Zamora’s book, Claiming Rights and Righting Wrongs in Texas; Mexican Workers and Job Politics during World War II


The views and opinions expressed in this article or video are those of the individual author(s) or presenter(s) and do not necessarily reflect the policy or views of the editors at Not Even Past, the UT Department of History, the University of Texas at Austin, or the UT System Board of Regents. Not Even Past is an online public history magazine rather than a peer-reviewed academic journal. While we make efforts to ensure that factual information in articles was obtained from reliable sources, Not Even Past is not responsible for any errors or omissions.

Filed Under: Education, Features, Teaching Methods, Texas, United States Tagged With: digital history, Tejano, Texas

The Fish that Ate the Whale: The Life and Times of America’s Banana King, by Rich Cohen (2012)

by Kody Jackson

The best stories teach us without our knowing.  The best way to illustrate this, of course, is with a story.  When I was in elementary school, I had to memorize the prefixes of the metric system: kilo-, hecto-, deca-, base, deci-, centi-, milli-.  And I could never get it right!  It always went something like this: Kilo…Hecto…something else…pass…deci…I forget…umm.  All I ever wanted was to go back to feet and inches.  And so it went, until our fifth grade teacher introduced us to the magical phrase, King Henry died by drinking chocolate milk.  My teacher’s little jingle changed everything: King Henry made that infernal metric system memorable.  It was a wonderful lesson on the power of a story, one that has stuck with me to this day.

I would like to think Rich Cohen had a similar experience in his fifth grade classroom, one where he too learned how to defeat the evil metric system, but I cannot be sure.  All I know is that he holds story in the same esteem in his The Fish that Ate the Whale: The Life and Times of America’s Banana King. In the first couple pages, Cohen introduces his readers to his compelling protagonist, Samuel Zemurray, a poor Jewish immigrant to the United States who later came to embody the American Dream.

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The book’s first glimpse of Zemurray shows him working hard in his uncle’s Alabama grocery store, sweeping and cleaning, stacking and shelving, and always looking for an opportunity to succeed.  His real break comes when a banana peddler arrives in town.  Fascinated by the sight, Zemurray sets out to involve himself in the trade.  He begins selling freckled bananas, the ones thought too ripe for long-distance transport.  He finds a partner; they invest in a company.  They purchase banana ships.  Zemurray takes sole control, buys banana land in Honduras, and profits enormously.  The story reaches its climax when Zemurray ascends to the presidency of the United Fruit Company, one of the United States’ most dominant and successful monopolies of the late nineteenth century.  Even from this perch, Zemurray still embodies the underdog, fighting to maintain his banana empire, championing the noble cause of Zionism, and struggling to be accepted by mainstream America.  The story ends as a triumph that, while acknowledging certain mistakes, largely celebrating the life of Zemurray.  He was a self-made man, a shrewd banana tycoon, and, most importantly to Cohen, a Jew who succeeded in a hostile and prejudiced world.

Cohen’s story, on the whole, proves successful.  As a reader, one becomes so engrossed by Zemurray and his work ethic that one almost does not notice the technical descriptions of banana planting, the history lesson on U.S. trust-busting, or the explanations of Central American politics.  These chapters pass like clouds on a windy day, quickly and without much notice.  Thus, in terms of story, Cohen presents his readers with a tour de force.

Samuel Zemurray, a Russian who rose to become a fruit magnate (Image courtesy of Peter Ubel)

Samuel Zemurray, the Russian immigrant who rose to become a giant in the American fruit industry (Image courtesy of Peter Ubel)

Stories, however, are never without their faults.  To accommodate his narrative structure, Cohen simplifies and whitewashes the actions of Zemurray and his fellow banana titans.  Rarely do abuse and corruption come up; even when they do, they are largely minimized.  In sum, Cohen tells a story of business decisions and individual effort, not exploitation and collective sacrifice.  Cohen falls most grievously into this trap when writing about Zemurray’s involvement in a Honduran coup.  With colorful mercenaries and crafty strategy, it starts to look more like a Wild West adventure than a violation of sovereignty.  Cohen gets so caught up in the romance that he forgets the other side of the story.  To neglect the Central American experience is like telling the Illiad without mentioning Priam’s grief or recounting the Crusades without mentioning the experiences of Muslims (or Byzantines, for that matter).  A more circumspect tale might have noted that triumphs for U.S. business, at least in this age, often played out as tragedies for a foreign people.

While The Fish that Ate the Whale oversimplifies the complex and glorifies the morally questionable, readers should evaluate it for what it truly is, a wonderful story.  Its quick pace and well-crafted characters make it exciting to read.  More than that, Cohen makes the history memorable, which is no small feat.  As such, it provides a great introduction to Central American history and a jumping off point for future research into the area.

You may also like:

Felipe Cruz’s review of Banana Cultures: Agriculture, Consumption & Environmental Change in Honduras and the United States

 

Filed Under: Business/Commerce, Capitalism, Latin America and the Caribbean, Periods, Regions, Reviews, Topics, Transnational, United States, Work/Labor Tagged With: 20th Century, book review, business history, immigration, Latin America, Transnational, US History, US-Latin America Relations

An Emotional Database: The New Archive (No. 8)

By Henry Wiencek

One of the core values of studying history is objectivity: an ability to weigh evidence, read documents and then dispassionately judge the actions of our ancestors. But let’s be honest, it’s impossible to study the past without feeling something. Confusion, fascination, excitement—this is what motivates historians to spend their days poring over obscure manuscripts.

fascinating goodIs it possible that emotions actually help to produce better history? Sweden’s Hagströmer Medico-Historical Library of medical arts thinks so. So when readers navigate its stunning online archive of medical, zoological and biological documents from the 15th-20th-century world, “Emotion” is literally a search option. In addition to place and topic, users can select a set of documents based on the feelings they evoke.

large_Bourgery_1832_anatomyAnd each category seems very appropriately titled. “Beautiful” cues a stunning collage of images from across time and space: a 17th-century Dutch anatomical display of the human skeleton, an early modern Italian etching of mythical beasts, and one Viennese botanist’s exquisite rendering of a strawberry. True to form, “Scary” turns toward the macabre, with gruesome surgical photographs of American Civil War amputees, a 16th-century doctor’s guide to battle wounds and a European naturalist’s perturbing bat exhibit. “Fascinating” lies somewhere in between. There are photographs of French psychiatry patients gawking at the camera as they’re examined, sublime—yet slightly unsettling—medical lithographs of the human form, and even a 19th-century physician’s guide to the miracle of life. Depending on your mood, you can also peruse the Artistic, the Colorful, the Instructive, the Marvelous, the Remarkable and the Strange.

large_Duchenne_1876_frontisp

The Hagströmer Medico-Historical Library of medical arts is a strange, colorful and captivating resource for scholars and the general public, especially those interested in the history of science, medicine and its visual portrayals. But its unorthodox design openly challenges the assumption that historians ought to leave their emotions at the archive door. Instead, it asks users to take a risk—to forgo the comforts of traditional categories and experiment. And perhaps most importantly, the site acknowledges that our own emotional reactions are of historical significance. By declaring 17th-century medical drawings to be “strange,” we reveal our own modern biases—arrogance, even—about the past. This is a subversive new form of research in which emotions do not distort historical understanding, but actually enable more of it.

Don’t miss the latest New Archive posts:

How does the 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary relate to the present crisis in the Ukraine?

And what does the local music in Carlistrane, Ireland sound like?

Photo Credits:

Screenshot of Wunderkammer’s “Fascinating” gallery (Image courtesy of the Hagströmer Medico-Historical Library)

Anatomical plate from Traité complet de l’Anatomie de l’Homme, 1867–1871. Found in Wunderkammer’s “Fascinating” section (Image courtesy of the Hagströmer Medico-Historical Library)

Portrait of a psychiatric patient from Mécanisme de la physionomie humaine, 1876. Found in Wunderkammer’s “Fascinating” section (Image courtesy of the Hagströmer Medico-Historical Library)

Filed Under: 1400s to 1700s, 1800s, 1900s, Reviews, Science/Medicine/Technology Tagged With: digital history, Early Modern Europe, History of Science, medicine, New Archive, Not Even Past, Transnational

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