Henry Wiencek, Author at Not Even Past

The Latest from Longhorn PhDs

In November we wrote to everyone who received a PhD in History at UT Austin since 2000 to find out what they were doing. We are curious about our former students’ careers and adventures and we want to celebrate their achievements in whatever line of work they pursued.

And we still do! We hope everyone who didn’t write back immediately will send us news of their work, travels, lives.

Photograph of the front facade of Garrison Hall on the campus of the University of Texas at Austin

Greg Cushman (2003 PhD) is an Associate Professor at the University of Kansas and he has just published a new book called Guano and the Opening of the Pacific World: A Global Ecological History (2013). One of his UT professors, Bruce Hunt, said that the book got an absolute rave review in “Science” and added that “It’s the best book on bird crap you’ll ever read.”

Stuart Rockoff has become Executive Director of the Mississippi Humanities Council.

Matt Childs is an Associate Professor and Director of the History Center at the University of South Carolina where he started teaching in the fall of 2009. Matt is the author of The 1812 Aponte Rebellion in Cuba and the Struggle against Atlantic Slavery (2006), which was a finalist for the 2007 Frederick Douglass Book Prize, and he has co-edited with Toyin Falola The Yoruba Diaspora in the Atlantic World (2005) and The Changing Worlds of Atlantic Africa: Essays in Honor or Robin Law (2009). Most recently he co-edited with his former UT profs, James Sidbury and Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, The Urban Black Atlantic during the Era of the Slave Trade (2013), which was featured in the New Books series this spring at the UT Institute for Historical Studies.

David Imhoof wrote to say that he is an Associate Professor and Chair of the History Department at Susquehanna University and he has just published his first book: Becoming a Nazi Town: Culture and Politics in Göttingen between the World Wars.

Roger Martinez, is Assistant Professor of history and Director of the Sephardic and Crypto-Jewish Studies Program at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs.

Ken Aslakson let us know that he teaches at Union College in Schenectady, NY where he just got tenure. His book Making Race in the Courtroom: The Legal Construction of Three Races in Early New Orleans is just about to be published by NYU. He wrote to us from France where he was completing a month-long invited professorship at the University of Toulouse.

Lauren Apter Bairnsfather (PhD 2008) works in the Office of the Dean of the UT Austin College of Liberal Arts where she supervises Grants Services, conducts institutional research for the Dean, and serves as contact for Humanities Research Awards. She has written articles for the AHA newsletter Perspectives and for Not Even Past about careers for history PhDs outside the professorate.

Anju Reejhsinghani has been Assistant Professor of Latin American and Caribbean history at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point since Fall 2010. She recently saw fellow UT Latin American history PhDs Bonar Hernández (East Stroudsburg University) and Ben Narvaez (University of Minnesota-Morris) at the North Central Council of Latin Americanists conference she helped to organize on her campus in September 2013. In January 2013, she developed and led one of the University of Wisconsin System’s first for-credit, short-term study abroad programs to Cuba; she is repeating the program in January 2014.

Kristen Oertel was a professor at Millsaps College in Jackson, Mississippi, for ten years, where she won the Outstanding Young Faculty award in 2003. She left Millsaps in 2010 to accept the Mary F. Barnard Chair in 19^th-Century American History at the University of Tulsa. She published her first book, Bleeding Borders: Race, Gender, and Violence in Pre-Civil War Kansas with LSU Press in 2009. Her second book, Frontier Feminist: Clarina Howard Nichols and the Politics of Motherhood (Kansas, 2011) won the Armitage-Jameson Prize for the best book in women’s and gender history from the Council of Western Women’s Historians. She says that “It’s sometimes tough to wear my Texas Longhorns t-shirt while living in Oklahoma, but I never waste an opportunity to wax poetic about my time at UT.”

Matt Heaton (PhD 2008) has been an Assistant Professor in the History Department at Virginia Tech. He has published Black Skin, White Coats: Nigerian Psychiatrists, Decolonization, and the Globalization of Psychiatry. (2013) and edited with Toyin Falola, A History of Nigeria in 2008.

Miguel A. Levario is an Associate Professor at Texas Tech University. He published Militarizing the Border: When Mexicans Became the Enemy (2012). He has also recorded an episode for 15 Minute History on Mexican-American immigration.

Anna Taylor writes: “I am happy to share my news, since I had such an excellent experience in the PhD program. My advisors were Martha Newman and Alison Frazier, and they did a wonderful job of preparing me for the academic job market, as well as supervising the dissertation.” She recently published Epic Lives and Monasticism in the Middle Ages, 800-1100 (2013), and also received tenure in the Department of History at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where she teaches a variety of courses on western civilization, medieval history, religion, monsters, and animals.

Faik Gur teaches at Ozyegin University in Istanbul and has just published an article in Historical Research, the journal of the Institute for Historical Research in London: “Sculpting the nation in early republican Turkey” (vol. 86, no. 232 [May 2013]).

David M. Lauderback has taught history at Austin Community College since 1996. Dr. Lauderback has served as a Fellow for the ACC Center for Public Policy and Political Studies for many years and partnered on numerous events, such as Texas Independence Day Celebration, Constitution Debate Night, the Mock Hearing on Health Care, the Earth Fair, and numerous teach-ins and lectures for ACC students and the community. He earned the Rising Star and Guiding Star awards from ACCs Student Life for his work with the Center for Student Political Studies and the Silver Star Children’s Literacy project. And, just this spring, Dr. Lauderback received recognition as recipient of a John and Suanne Rouche Excellence Award from the League for Innovation in Community College instruction.

Frances (Franni) Ramos wrote to tell us that In June 2013, she was promoted to Associate Professor with tenure at the University of South Florida. In 2012, she published Identity, Ritual, and Power in Colonial Puebla, which was awarded the Rocky Mountain Council for Latin American Studies Michael C. Meyer Award for Best Book in Mexican History published over the past five years (2008-2012). In the spring of 2013, she spent five months researching at the John Carter Brown Library with the support of an NEH, and she just received an Outstanding Research Achievement Award from USF. In August 2012, she also had a baby girl named Ellie! And she says, “I miss UT.”

Andrew Falk sent us a long newsy note that says in part: “it’s great to hear from Austin again, and I’m glad to give you an update. I keep up with the UT History Department regularly, including the impressive Not Even Past site.”

[We just had to include that!] “The short answer to your question is this: things are great and UT prepared me very well, indeed!” [We couldn’t resist that either.]

“After earning my PhD from UT Austin in 2003, I got a postdoc at the University of Georgia. Then I received an academic appointment at Christopher Newport University. It’s a mid-sized liberal arts college focused on undergraduate education. Located in Newport News, Virginia, CNU is situated in the beautiful Hampton Roads area between Colonial Williamsburg and Norfolk….At UT I worked most closely with Michael Stoff and Mark Lawrence and, therefore, teach classes in the same areas: modern US politics, culture, and foreign relations. Like Mike Stoff, I’ve led my students on several study abroad trips, including to China and throughout Europe. My first book, Upstaging the Cold War: American Dissent and Cultural Diplomacy, 1940-1960 was published as part of the “Culture, Politics, and the Cold War” series of the University of Massachusetts Press in 2010…. In Virginia I’ve managed to find Stubbs sauce, Shiner beer, and Bluebell ice cream, but the homesickness endures….Hook ’em.”

Julie Hughes writes: “I’ve been at Vassar College as an Assistant Professor of History since Spring 2010. My book Animal Kingdoms: Hunting, the Environment, and Power in the Indian Princely States first came out in 2012 in South Asia, where it was published by Permanent Black. In 2013, Harvard University Press published their edition of Animal Kingdoms. I just had an article on the idea of wilderness in the Indian princely states accepted for publication in the journal Modern Asian Studies, and will have a chapter on wild boar hunting in a forthcoming volume, Shifting Ground:People, Animals, and Mobility in India’s Environmental History,edited by K. Sivaramakrishnan and M. Rangarajan, from Oxford University Press. In November 2013, I was an invited speaker in the Yale Agrarian Studies Program’s Colloquium Series and, in March 2014, I will be giving a talk at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi, as part of their public lecture series ‘Science, Society and Nature.’ I hope all is well down there in Austin – I must say I miss it, especially when the weather starts getting cold up here!”

Paul Rubinson wrote to say “Not sure how much detail you want about my career, but I got my PhD in 2008 (an ominous year to start the job search) and managed to luck out with a TT job.” He is an Assistant Professor of History at Bridgewater State University (Bridgewater, MA). He’s published 4 articles on international science:

“The Global Effects of Nuclear Winter: Science and Antinuclear Protest in the United States and the Soviet Union during the 1980s,” forthcoming in Cold War History (published online February 15, 2013.); “Internationalism in a National Security State: U.S. Scientists and the Cold War,” in Artemy Kalinovsky and Craig Daigle, eds., Routledge Handbook of the Cold War. Forthcoming from Routledge in Summer 2014; “‘For Our Soviet Colleagues’: Scientific Internationalism, Human Rights, and the Cold War,” in Petra Goedde, William Hitchcock, and Akira Iriye, eds., The Human Rights Revolution: An International History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 245–64; and “‘Crucified on a Cross of Atoms’: Scientists, Politics, and the Test Ban,” in Diplomatic History, Vol. 35, No. 2 (April 2011), 313–49.

Saheed Aderinto, (PhD 2010) is an Assistant Professor at Western Carolina University. His book, When Sex Threatened the State: Illicit Sexuality, Nationalism, and Politics in Colonial Nigeria, will come out in Fall 2014. He has edited another book and published over a dozen articles, and is working on a book about guns and arms control in Nigeria.

Stefanie Wichhart is an Associate Professor at Niagara University, near Niagara Falls NY, where she teaches both Middle Eastern and European history. She has recently published two articles, one on the Iraqi Kurds in World War II in the Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History and the other on democracy debates in Iraq during World War II in the Journal of Contemporary History.

Eric Meeks (PhD 2001) writes to say that he is currently the department Chair and Associate Professor at Northern Arizona University. His book Border Citizens: The Making of Indians, Mexicans and Anglos in Arizona was published in 2007. It won several book awards and one of his articles, entitled “The Tohono O’odham, Wage Labor, and Resistant Adaptation, 1900-1930,” earned the 2004 Bolton-Kinnaird Award as the best article in borderlands history that year from the Western History Association, and the Oscar O. Winther Award for the best article appearing in the Western Historical Quarterly in 2003. He added: “I must say, UT Austin gave me a superb education, which I am very thankful for!”

Photo: Garrison Hall, UT Austin (Wikimedia Commons/User Larry D. Moore)

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.

Domesticating Ethnic Foods and Becoming American

by Madeline Hsu

How to Cook and Eat in Chinese was the earliest popular, English-language guide to Chinese cooking. First published in 1945 and reprinted several times, it remains in wide use today. The author, Dr. Buwei Yang Chao, wrote the cookbook at the urging of fellow faculty wives in New Haven, in particular Agnes Hocking, wife if the idealist philosopher William Hocking. Trained as a physician, Dr. Chao reassured American housewives that she could teach them the complex and exotic art of Chinese cooking because she had learned as an adult herself while a student in Japan.

In addition to providing straightforward and simple directions together with suggestions for obtaining ingredients and alternatives, How to Cook and Eat in Chinese presents its guidance with wit and whimsy provided by Dr. Chao’s husband and translator, the famous linguist Dr. Yuen Ren Chao, who created terms now in common usage such as “stir fry” and “potsticker.” Footnotes add humorous asides that explain family disputes over translations and descriptions for Chinese cultural practices. For example, in the introduction, the language specialist Yuen Ren Chao cannot resist adding a footnote to the otherwise commonplace, “Really, you should not have put yourself to so much trouble!” to explain that this translation is inaccurate because Chinese lacks the “subjunctive perfect.”

Dr. Buwei Yang Chao’s cookbook was so successful that the well-known author, Pearl Buck, who wrote one of its prefaces from the point of view of an American housewife, urged Chao to pen the story of her life. Autobiography of a Chinese Woman appeared in 1947. With great charm, Chao made a persuasive case for the educated, cosmopolitan Chinese family to be accepted as American. The success of Dr. Buwei Chao’s publications bridging Chinese and American peoples underscores the intrinsic relationship between popularizing ethnic food and the assimilation of ethnic and racial minority groups. As Donna Gabaccia wrote in We Are What We Eat: Ethnic Food and the Making of Americans, after World War II, ethnic foods such as Chinese and Italian, would win broader appreciation as part of a more general expansion of the boundaries of mainstream American culture and society.

User-friendly ethnic cookbooks such as How to Cook and Eat in Chinese brought once alien cultures and foodways directly into the kitchens and homes of Euro Americans. According to Fashionable Food: Seven Decades of Food Fads by Sylvia Lovegren, family meal preparation was not only a commonplace form of domestic labor, but one that provides keen insights into broader historical trends. During the Cold War and the Civil Rights era, these shifts emerged in part through the growing popularity of ethnic foods and cookbooks. Dr. Buwei Chao was an early forerunner of the trends that by the late 1960s and early 1970s mobilized leading figures in the food publishing business, such as Judith Jones, Julia Childs’ editor at Knopfand Craig Claiborne, the New York Times food critic, to recruit cooks with ethnic food expertise, personality, and writing ability to introduce general audiences to their cultures.

Jones’ discoveries, sometimes promoted in conjunction with Claiborne, included southern chef, Edna Lewis of Café Nicholson who authored The Edna Lewis Cookbook (1972) and The Taste of Country Cooking (1976); scholar Claudia Roden and A Book of Middle Eastern Food (1968); the late Marcella Hazan and The Classic Italian Cookbook (1973); and restaurant owner Irene Kuo with The Key to Chinese Cooking (1977). Claiborne’s entry into the Chinese cookbook field was The Chinese Cookbook (1972) which he co-authored with Virginia Lee. Both Hazan and Lee attracted Jones and Claiborne’s attention when they began offering cooking lessons out of their homes.

America’s immigrant population and the broad acceptance of ethnic cultures and communities have boomed along with the popularity of ethnic restaurants, cookbooks, cooking shows, and personalities. For an understanding of the early roots of this business and cultural phenomenon, revisit Buwei Yang Chao’s How to Cook and Eat in Chinese.

Parenting in Hard Times: Child Abandonment in Early Modern Europe

by Julie Hardwick

Look at any firehouse in Austin and you will see a yellow sign on the exterior marked “Safe Baby Site.” These signs date from 1999 when a rash of discoveries of dead newborns in and around Houston, led Texas to pass a “safe haven” law. Anyone who abandoned a baby younger than sixty days at a designated “safe” spot, where the newborn would quickly be found and receive appropriate care, was promised amnesty from prosecution. All 50 states subsequently passed similar laws.

The practice of child abandonment and efforts to manage it have a long history and I recently encountered a series of surviving artifacts from about 250 years ago that provide us with a rare window into the abandoned and the abandoners. In France, as in other European countries, the frequency of abandonment led to the development of institutional responses to protect the children with the establishment of foundling hospitals in towns and cities across Europe. Contrary to what we might expect from modern laws which envisage child abandonment as a crisis response by a teenage single mother with a newborn, children were abandoned in early modern Europe at all ages by parents who were married and by various extended kin as well as by young single mothers.

Reminders of these municipal refuges survive today in the landscape of modern cities, like Coram’s Fields in London’s Bloomsbury neighborhood, site of the original London Foundling Hospital and today home to a wonderful playground interlude for any travelling family as well as for local children.

In the archives of the city of Lyon, home of one of France’s largest foundling hospitals from the mid-sixteenth century, records survive for each child admitted, often with a record of the circumstances of the abandonment (where, at what time, and a careful description of what the child was wearing) as well as any note left with the child. Many notes were written on scraps of paper apparently just torn from whatever might be to hand, others were written on playing cards, a few on saints cards. Some parents were smooth writers and some had barely functional literacy. They were written by fathers and by mothers.

Each one of these scribbled notes tells a capsule story that offers us a tangible connection with a long ago moment of family crisis. They briefly allow us to see the decision to abandon a child from the parents’ perspective. These are decisions working people faced with economic desperation and religious sensibility.

About 10 pm one evening, a cook found a young child of about 4 in the square in front of the city’s cathedral. She was wearing two skirts, a shirt and coverlet and black shoes. The cook found a note “on the child” that said under a small hand drawn cross, “Josette Pellotieux It’s necessity that makes me expose her She is only four I beg you to have someone take care of her She is called Josette Pellotieux.” The cook duly took Josette to the foundling hospital where the admissions clerk recorded that the note “appeared to have been written in a woman’s hand.” Josette’s mother was probably a textile worker, the most common job for women in Lyons where textile manufacturing dominated the economy. She was probably a widow, like many women who abandoned their children, unable to make ends meet without the income of two adults.

What did the future hold for Josette? She may have stayed in the hospital until she was 16, before being placed as a servant like many children. Perhaps she died there as mortality rates were exceptionally high in these institutions. She may have been retrieved by her mother later when resources allowed. One widow, Jeanne Gachet, abandoned two children in 1757 after the death of her husband, a shoemaker, at a time when she was so ill that she was unable to work as a silk spinner and feared she would die.. She retrieved Pierre first in 1760 and Genevieve two years later, promising in each instance to raise them as good Catholics, teach them to read and write, and to raise them so that they could earn a living. A shoemaker-cousin, a family friend, and a textile producer who Jeanne had been working for at the time of the babies’ abandonment attended the return of Genevieve to her mother.

Some parents wrote their notes on playing cards and we can wonder whether they were making specific statements in such choices. Did parents mean to indicate they were gambling that their child would be better off in the care of an institution than in their care?

The most telling and touching of all of these artifacts for me is a pink ribbon attached carefully to a baby’s wrist and embroidered with the message: “I am going away but remain close.” Likely embroidered by the baby’s mother with the fine skills of Lyonnais textile workers, this tiny memento gives us a material connection to a world of terrible choices and elided emotions.

Photo Credits:

A note written for Jeanne Masson, aged one day, 21 April 1725 (Image courtesy of Archives Municipales de Lyon HCL Charité G288)

The note found on Josette Pellotieux by a Lyon cook (Image courtesy of Archives Municipales de Lyon HCL Charité G288)

An embroidered pink ribbon bearing the phrase, “I am going away but remain close.” (Image courtesy of HCL Hotel-Dieu G85)

***

You may also like:

Julie Hardwick examines the daily life of Early Modern French families

“The Die is Cast”: Early Texans Face the Comanches

This article is part of an occasional series of articles highlighting the fascinating collection of historical documents in the Briscoe Center for American History at UT Austin.

by Nathan Jennings

The Telegraph and Texas Register was the most influential newspaper in the region between colonial settlement and the Civil War. Based in Houston and intended for popular consumption, the nationalistic editorials in this publication offer a window into how the newly formed Lone Star Republic viewed the challenges of rapid territorial expansion into contested territories along the lower Great Plains.

One editorial in the Telegraph, published on November 3, 1838, provides a particularly revealing view of the new republic’s reaction to increased conflict with the Penateka Comanche people. This specific time in Texas’s history represented a transitional stage between the Texas Revolution of 1836 and the Anglo-Indian Wars that exploded across the plains between 1839 and 1841. Though the Anglo-American colonies of Mexican Tejas had frequently grappled with smaller tribes east of the Colorado River, they had yet to decisively engage the massed cavalries of the Plains Indians. The Telegraph article by Francis Moore was written in response to a recent Comanche victory over a group of settlers, and focused on the confrontation emerging in the San Antonio region.

Page from the Telegraph and Texas Register newspaper from Nov. 3, 1828

Moore’s editorial sheds light on three ways Anglo-Texans perceived the Comanche and the threat of their power. First, the article emphatically stated that “war with this tribe has become inevitable” and called for mobilization by the Texas government. This enthusiasm for large-scale warfare represents a transition from the Texans’ historical reliance on localized militia to a society-wide engagement with national armies. Second, the editor admits the culpability of “rash men” who have “aided in plunging the whole country into a murderous conflict” in order to seize western property, but then fatalistically disregards this causality, shifting blame onto the Native population: “The die is cast — the tomahawk is uplifted, and the hundreds of helpless mothers and children call aloud for protection.”

The third point reveals a tactical shift in ideas about defeating the Native American warriors. Moore suggested that the republic launch the offense with an “expedition” of “mounted men” to “penetrate into the very heart of the Comanche country.” This shows that by 1838, Anglo-Texans had fully embraced the cavalry culture of the region. They also apparently understood that their own defensive strategies were insufficient against arguably the most lethal raiders in North America, who were defending their territory against European settlers who were seizing and occupying it.

The editorial’s prescriptions –to mobilize the army and population for a large-scale, cavalry war — would soon become tragic reality. Over the next three years the Texan and Comanche peoples clashed in an unprecedented scope of ethnic warfare to decide the fate of West Texas. While both peoples launched massive and destructive invasions into each other’s heartlands, the Anglo-American sustained use of expeditionary methodology suggested by the Telegraph proved decisive. By 1845 Texas broke the power of the southern Comanche for a generation and the Lone Star Republic solidified its control of the territories between the Red River and the Rio Grande.

The full text:

We trust this mournful event will serve to convince those who are entrusted with the reins of government, that a war with this tribe has become inevitable. Further apathy on the part of the Executive will be regarded, by the suffering citizens of the west, as criminal in the extreme. It is useless now to waste time in idle speculation, relative to the causes of the war, and to declaim against those rash men who have aided in plunging the whole country into a murderous conflict in order that they might secure a few square leagues of land. Whether they or their savage opponents are most to blame, is no longer of importance. The die is cast-the tomahawk is uplifted, and the hundreds of helpless mothers and children call aloud for protection. We trust they will not call in vain. We look to the executive with confidence for one last, prompt, decisive and energetic effort, that shall arouse the slumbering energies of a gallant people, and display to the is miserable, cowardly, unarmed tribe of cannibals, the true character of that nation the affect to despise, and so foolishly threaten to exterminate. The present is a most opportune season to carry on an expedition into the Comanche country-the Buffalo are returning from the north-the air is mild and bracing, and the mesquite grass offers an inexhaustible supply of pasturage. The Mexicans, who have undoubtedly instigated them to this measure, can afford no and, as they are compelled to concentrate all their disposable force on Vera Cruz and the sea coast, to prevent the expected attack of the French. A small figure of mounted men could, therefore, at this time, easily penetrate into the very heart of the Comanche country, and extort from them a peace that would be proof against Indian treachery.

More amazing finds at the Briscoe Center:

Standard Oil writes a “history” of the old south

And Stephen F. Austin visits a New Orleans bookstore

Great Books and a Film on the Amazon

by Seth Garfield

For more on the Amazon and its resources in the twentieth century, take a look at these selections.

John Tully, The Devil’s Milk: A Social History of Rubber (2011)

In a social history that spans several centuries and continents, John Tully chronicles the central role of rubber in shaping the modern world through its multiple uses in industrial machinery and consumer goods, as well as its devastating toll on the global workforce that has produced and manufactured it.

Greg Gandin, Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford’s Forgotten Jungle City (2009)

A finalist for the Pulitzer prize, Fordlandia chronicles how Henry Ford’s megalomaniacal efforts to create rubber plantations and a model American-style company town in the Amazon— to circumvent the British and Dutch colonial Asian monopoly in supplying tires for his automobiles—was doomed by hubris and ignorance toward Amazonian ecosystems and social mores.

Susanna B. Hecht and Alexander Cockburn, The Fate of the Forest: Developers, Destroyers, and Defenders of the Amazon (2011)

A sweeping, historically-informed account of the Amazon that traces the longstanding and varied efforts by outsiders to transform human populations and natural landscapes in the region. The period of authoritarian rule (1964-85) is particularly spotlighted as a watershed in the destructive development of the Amazon: Brazil’s military government, guided by geopolitical doctrines and alliance with both industrial capital and traditional oligarchs, spearheaded highway construction and population resettlement, subsidized the expansion of cattle ranching, and oversaw vast mining operations which would have highly deleterious consequences for the natural environment and traditional populations.

Antonio Pedro Tota, The Seduction of Brazil: The Americanization of Brazil During World War II (2009)

The cultural politics of the Good Neighbor Policy undergirding the Brazilian-American alliance during World War II are explored in this diplomatic and cultural history by Brazilian historian Antonio Pedro Tota. While primarily focused on the public relations activities of Nelson Rockefeller’s Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs — established in 1940 and tasked with improving U.S. relations with Brazil and other Latin American countries — the book underscores the agency of Brazilian officials in selectively adopting or adapting wartime programs and propaganda for nationalist ends.

David Grann, The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon (2009)

The unsolved mystery of the disappearance of British explorer Percy Fawcett and his son in the Amazon in 1925, while in search of an ancient lost city, is delightfully recounted by journalist David Gann in an account that blends the genres of biography, detective novel, and travelogue. Fawcett’s “personal” obsessions are historically contextualized within an age of Victorian exploration, scientific racism, and the enduring allure of the Amazon as El Dorado. Although the book’s suspenseful climax does not resolve the enigma surrounding Fawcett’s death, it does suggest that the explorer may ultimately not have been misguided in pursuing the remnants of a great cultural civilization in the Amazon.

Cinema, Aspirins, and Vultures (2005) Directed by Marcelo Gomes

Set in the parched backlands of Northeastern Brazil in 1942, this poignant Brazilian feature film captures the historical saga of hundreds of thousands of residents of the outback confronting natural disaster, economic privation, wartime nationalism, and newfound opportunities to tap rubber in the Amazon, by following the personal odysseys of a German pharmaceutical salesman and a drought refugee.

Dallas Chaos: Art and the JFK Assassination

By Ann Merkle

Peter Dean, Dallas Chaos, 1981, oil on canvas, 68 x 72 3/16 in., Blanton Museum of Art, Gift of Lorraine Dean and Gregory Dean, 1994

How do we remember? When asked, “Where were you when President John F. Kennedy was shot?” those who lived through that momentous time recall it vividly and often emotionally, even though they may not have been in Dallas on that fateful day. For those too young to remember first-hand, movies or documentaries may inform their impressions. As we approach the 50th anniversary of JFK’s tragic assassination on November 22, 1963 and the days that followed, the Blanton Museum of Art offers yet another lens through which to view this dark chapter in American history – two paintings by American artist Peter Dean (1934-1993), Dallas Chaos (1981) and Dallas Chaos II (1982). In them, Dean composes a rewrite of history in his own expressive language, challenging collective memory and forcing viewers to reconsider what they may have previously accepted as fact.

Dallas Chaos presents the instant of President Kennedy’s assassination in a claustrophobic yet dynamic scene. A flurry of policemen, Secret Servicemen, military members, and others swirl around JFK’s central figure, his head drooping towards his lap, splattered with blood. It’s initially a struggle for the viewer to identify who is who amidst the sea of patriotic imagery, with American flags fluttering in the wind and in the hands of onlookers. Individual motives in the painting become increasingly confusing – are the police protecting, or are they threatening the president? The viewer is left to wonder who is good and who is evil, or if there is a distinction to be made at all.

In the companion painting, Dallas Chaos II, Dean confronts his audience with similar imagery, this time focused on the murder of JFK’s presumed killer, Lee Harvey Oswald. Unlike JFK’s assassination, the event presented here is an act of violence that many Americans witnessed in real time on live television. The majority of figures wear disguises, with Oswald in a jester’s motley garment, fierce dogs with the heads of pigs, one policeman in a Klansman hood, and another resembling a Nazi. Members of the media clamor to record the scene with their cameras and video recorders as a gangster-like Jack Ruby swoops in and fires the fatal shot. In response, Oswald contorts, a cascade of masks tumbling down from his face. In this confusing narrative, it is once again nearly impossible to differentiate between heroes and villains.

Peter Dean, Dallas Chaos II, 1982, oil on canvas, 83 9/16 x 96 1/16 in., Blanton Museum of Art, Gift of Lorraine Dean and Gregory Dean, 1994

Why are works such as these significant for us now, fifty years after JFK’s assassination? Dean once said, “The murder of John Kennedy was the beginning of violence for my generation.” Having served on a Grand Jury that tried over 30 murder cases in one month in 1980, the artist became interested in representing everyday murders as well as assassinations of public figures. His subsequent “Little Murders” series, of which Dallas Chaos and Dallas Chaos II are part, offered a critique of violence in contemporary society. Dean drew attention to these and other historical events in order to raise questions not only about violence but also about truth and reality.

Dallas Chaos and Dallas Chaos II encourage a reconsideration of what our media-inspired memory tells us is fact. Dean’s paintings complicate accepted historical narratives and suggest chaos behind the media’s reports, prompting, perhaps, closer consideration of the myriad conspiracy theories regarding President Kennedy’s assassination. For the millions of Americans born after JFK’s death, popular culture and media archives may provide their only familiarity with the events surrounding November 22, 1963. Consequently, paintings such as Dean’s offer important reminders to interrogate our assumptions about historical moments, critically consider what we think we know, and remember that, as the artist hints, there are always more questions to be asked than what we have been told.

Image Credits:

1994.38: Peter Dean, Dallas Chaos, 1981, oil on canvas, 68 x 72 3/16 in., Blanton Museum of Art, Gift of Lorraine Dean and Gregory Dean, 1994

1994.39: Peter Dean, Dallas Chaos II, 1982, oil on canvas, 83 9/16 x 96 1/16 in., Blanton Museum of Art, Gift of Lorraine Dean and Gregory Dean, 1994

The Deepest Wounds: A Labor and Environmental History of Sugar in Northeast Brazil by Thomas D. Rogers (2010)

by Elizabeth O’Brien

There is a vast historiography on worker strikes and resistance to economic exploitation in Latin America and Brazil, yet most scholars disregard the environmental backdrop to struggles over land, labor, and resources. Aiming to fill this lacuna, The Deepest Wounds is a combination of labor and environmental histories, and it has elements of commodity-chain and literary analysis as well. Examining over four centuries of sugar production in Pernambuco, Brazil, Thomas Rogers demonstrates that sugar monocropping not only changed the environment, it also altered the nature of politics, social dynamics, and labor mobilization in the region. Above all, Rogers claims that the exploitation of nature and labor shaped the power dynamics that harmed workers and damaged the land itself.

Rogers claims that discourses of landscape underscored the transition from slavery to a new paradigm that relied on old logic: the planter class still saw the landscape and the workers as objects to be controlled. Pointing to literature for evidence, Rogers proposes that novelist Joaquim Nabuco’s nostalgia for a landscape actually represented his longing for the paternalistic racism of slavery. José Lins de Rego and Gilberto Freyre, on the other hand, protested the havoc that cane monoculture wrought on humans and nature alike. Workers, for their part, allegedly used a language of captivity to describe post-slavery social conditions, and, by highlighting worker poverty and lack of opportunity, Rogers points to the persistence of slave-like exploitation throughout the twentieth-century.

Rogers chronicles the development of usinas (sugar mills), which grew immensely between the mid-1930s and the 1950s. Powerful families still controlled the mills, but centralization and modernization occurred under the Vargas regime. For example, the use of fertilizer in the 1940s led one producer to increase sugar output by 220% in just a decade and a half. The establishment of the Institute of Sugar and Alcohol (IAA sparked economic and labor reforms. Yet rationalization was patchy in these decades and worker-patron relations still functioned as patronage. By paying close attention to agricultural processes, Rogers shows that modernization altered systems of work without eliminating oppression. Agrarian reform laws, for example, required bosses to pay workers by the task instead of by the day. Patrons manipulated this system so that it did not result in higher wages: instead, workers labored in tasks for longer periods of time.

Many laborers resisted abuse and exploitation, and their struggles evoked solidarity from union organizers, communists, and Church groups. Overt politicization of the sugar fields began in the 1940s, and the first rural union emerged in 1946. Communist leaders organized a conference of rural workers in 1954. Shortly thereafter, 550 “suspected militants” were arrested and the regional committee collapsed. Peasant leagues soon spread throughout the region, and the Sociedade Agro-Pecuária de Pernambuco (SAAP) gained particular prominence. Governor Sampaio selectively acquiesced to union demands, eventually distributing land to members of the peasant league. Not surprisingly, some mill-owners resented the mobilizations and retaliated by shooting and killing union delegates. As a result of continued agitation and struggle, November 1963 saw the biggest strike in Brazil’s rural history: an estimated 90% of the region’s workers (200,000 people) halted production in order to protest abuses in the cane fields.

By focusing on environmental history, Rogers shows that the 1960s was an important decade for additional reasons. Scientists and mill owners introduced CO 331, a strain of sugar cane known as 3X, with the goal of increasing cane output. By 1963, mill owners were mono-cropping the strain, and 3X accounted for about 80% of state’s harvest. The per-hectare weight of yields rose, but the amount of sugar per ton of cane fell dramatically — by as much as 20 kilograms per ton between the mid-1950s and 1964. The combination of economic pressure and worker strikes weakened production, and enhanced state opportunities for intervention. Wielding the language of science and technocracy, the military regime stepped in to assert control over sugar production in 1964.

Under the military regime, agricultural workers experienced new forms of state control. The state issued identification cards designed to transform anonymous workers into “fichados,” or documented employees. Women often secured cards instead of working alongside men without their own proper wages. Characterizing worker incorporation into the state as proletarianization, Rogers points out that laborers could benefit from new legal channels and use them to challenge patrons. Nevertheless, oppressed and underpaid workers continued to organize strikes in order to protest labor abuses, and the state began to repress workers to a greater degree than before.

State incorporation did not free workers, and sugar cane production continued to pollute the environment and generate proletarian struggle.

Photo Credits:

A Brazilian worker harvests sugar cane (Image courtesy of Webzdarma.cz)

A mills worker in Moema, Brazil puts out fires in a sugar cane field. To reduce labor costs, the leaves of the plants are burned off prior to harvest (Image courtesy of the United Nations, Photo # 160780)

Images used under Fair Use Guidelines

***

Further Reading:

Eyal Weinberg writes about the Brazilian government’s efforts to promote “social peace” among the working class

And Darcy Rendón explores the origins of Brazil’s lottery, jogo do bicho

“12 Years a Slave” and the Difficulty of Dramatizing the “Peculiar Institution”

By Jermaine Thibodeaux

Historian Annette Gordon-Reed often describes slavery studies as the “crown jewel of American historiography.” For Gordon-Reed and others, the historical scholarship on slavery that has emerged over the past sixty years has provided a far more nuanced and complex understanding of America’s “peculiar institution” and of American history as a whole. Much of what we now understand about slavery and its central characters has largely resulted from the diligence, resourcefulness, and dedication of historians determined to demystify perhaps the central episode in this nation’s history. Yet, historians have not labored alone.

The challenge of informing an inquisitive American public about the nation’s own two-hundred year old tragedy—slavery—has not fallen squarely on the shoulders of historians and other scholars. Artists, and particularly filmmakers, have played a central role in helping the larger public grapple with the horrors and indeed, aftershocks of human bondage. The Blaxpoitation-tinged slavery films of the early and mid-1970s unquestionably paved the way for the groundbreaking 1977 television mini-series Roots: The Saga of an American Family and a handful of subsequent slavery dramas. Roots author, Alex Haley, treated millions of American television viewers to a seven-day run of an emotionally raw and mostly well-researched dramatization of one family’s experience in slavery and freedom. It was through Roots that many Americans of all races first confronted slavery in a meaningful way. As a testament to its growing power, television, and not books, history classrooms, or even scholarly conferences, then served as the most effective medium for educating Americans about slavery. Undoubtedly, the Roots miniseries and subsequent television spinoffs not only whetted the appetites of curious publics, but these visual, dramatic renderings of slavery also generated much needed conversations about race and inequality in America. Those conversations were central to the embrace of multiculturalism in the 1970s-80s. And at the same time, the public’s response to these slavery dramas compelled many trained historians to ask even bolder and more sophisticated questions about the institution of slavery in their own work. By the 1980s, a flurry of influential and field-defining slavery studies emerged. Jacqueline Jones and Deborah Gray White, for example, exposed slavery’s sweeping impact on black women, their families, and their labor in their respective works Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow (1985) and Ar’n’t I a Woman (1985). Explorations of so-called slave culture, questions about slave agency, and even interrogations of slavery’s connections to other age-old American institutions and values soon filled library bookshelves. The rush to know could not be stopped, and again, media was there to assist.

Television and cinematic portrayals of slavery often seem to thrust that sensitive topic to the fore of the public’s consciousness and in so doing, expose contemporary (mis)understandings of the institution and the era not too long past. Within the last two years, Hollywood has risked potential revenue slumps and produced two major films about slavery. Quentin Tarantino’s fictional Django Unchained exploded onto movie screens on Christmas Day 2012 with its characteristic Tarantino stamp. Though not an historical adaptation of slavery, the film garnered praise for its daring vision and originality, and on the other hand, it invited well-deserved criticism for its highly graphic display of wonton violence and its borderline comedic portrayal of the day-to-day brutality endemic to the Slave South. Django managed to get some things right about slavery, and the public devoured the so-called “spaghetti western” slavery film, but its very premise pushed the historical envelope a bit too far for many historians. In what U.S. South would one find an enslaved bounty hunter working alongside a German immigrant to capture fugitive criminals? But despite its historical absurdity, Django seems to have paved the way for what was to follow in slave genre films.

This year’s critically acclaimed Twelve Years a Slave stands in stark contrast to Django Unchained. Shaped primarily by the non-fictional 1853 memoir by Solomon Northup—a freed black man from upstate New York who falls prey to money-hungry kidnappers and is eventually enslaved for twelve years in the Deep South—this film attempts to transport viewers back into the dark and cruel world of American slavery and expose the perilous experience of quasi-freedom for freed blacks. British film director Steve McQueen brilliantly achieves this most fundamental task within minutes of the film’s opening. As Solomon Northup (Chiwetel Ejiofor) peers up and out of his dank holding cell, the viewer is immediately reminded of slavery’s most defining element—its barbarism. Not only is Northup beaten until blood stains his once crisp white shirt, he has his fundamental identity—the one thing that he truly owns, his name—beaten out of him. From this point on in the film, Northup loses his familiar and free self and becomes an enslaved man, renamed Platt. Gone, too, are his respectable black family and all of the trappings of success and respectability that his life in upstate New York afforded him. After a torturous boat ride down river, his previous free life gradually disappears into his past and a new, darker future awaits him. Furthermore, any hope that Northup had of slavery’s abolition seems crushed by his now unfortunate, spirit-crushing predicament. The former “slave without a master,” to invoke Ira Berlin’s characterization of antebellum freedmen, would now experience a similar fate endured by millions of blacks in the Slave South. Branded a slave, Platt must adapt to a brave new world. Ultimately, it is the uniqueness of Northup’s story and his liminal status that makes Twelve Years a Slave a gem of a film. And for historians, the original source material provided in Northup’s memoir remains an amazing historical find, especially for scholars of Louisiana slavery.

Using smart camera work, McQueen again capitalizes on the early minutes of the film to indict slavery as a national institution and not merely as a distinct southern problem. Herein lies the beauty and power of the film. The cinematography and imagery tell the story of American slavery and human suffering in ways that enhance the script. A whipped-slashed back, a blood-stained eye, an inconsolable mother and even Northup’s own defeated hanging body collectively provide viewers with a rudimentary, visceral education about the role of violence—both physical and psychic—in maintaining a system of human bondage and entrenching a hardened racial caste order, particularly in the American South. While screaming for help after his kidnapping, Northup gazes coldly into the gloomy Washington streets. And there, on the immediate horizon, sits an unfinished U.S. Capitol building. The now iconic statue “Freedom” had not yet found its way to the top of the Capitol dome. The irony and the symbolism of that shot, however, are profound. For right under the noses of the nation’s elite and powerful, were black men and women—entire families, or “lots”—ready to be bought, sold, or even stolen, all to fulfill the capitalist dreams of some and to assuage the racist fears of others. It is not until the Compromise of 1850 that embarrassed American politicians prohibit the domestic slave trade within the nation’s capital while simultaneously reinvigorating the system of slavery throughout the rest of the Union with the passage of a stronger Fugitive Slave Law. By this time, being a freed black in the North could have potentially posed problems for men and women like Solomon Northup, as it was not uncommon for unscrupulous slave catchers to circumvent personal liberty laws and round-up freed blacks in the North and attempt to sell them into southern slavery. Thus, the threat of enslavement for blacks knew no regional bounds; being black alone was enough. Social standing, personal connections, or even highly regarded talents were rarely sufficient protections, and certainly none of these factors mattered for Northup.

To its credit, McQueen’s Twelve Years a Slave does not shy away from the ugliness of slavery. And unlike Tarantino, he captures the disturbing physical and emotional violence inflicted on blacks by sticking to documented history rather than resorting to fantastical exaggeration. One can hardly describe the violent scenes in Twelve Years a Slave as gratuitous. Most prominently, McQueen foregrounds the very real and pervasive pattern of female sexual exploitation on southern plantations. Patsey (Lupita Nyong’o), perhaps the real breakout star of this film, endures years of rape and humiliation at the hands of the drunken Louisiana slaveholder, Mr. Epps (Michael Fassbender) and his diabolically jealous wife. Mrs. Epps (Sarah Paulson) is by far one of least likeable characters in this drama: outspoken, uncaring, self-righteous, and ruthless in her treatment of Patsey and the other slaves. The southern belle stereotype of the plantation mistress seen in so many films is thrown out the window the minute Mrs. Epps reveals her knowledge of her husband’s ongoing sexual relationship with Patsey. Though she faults her husband for this marital transgression, reminding him at one point that he is too filthy to sleep in her “holy bed,” she harbors most of her resentment and venom for the slave woman. She foolishly believes that Patsey, like so many bondwomen, had the authority to resist the illicit and unwelcomed advances of powerful white men. In one of the film’s most poignant scenes, Mrs. Epps strikes the slave woman on the side of her head with a heavy crystal decanter after she is convinced that Patsey has glared at her with contempt while she is being forced to dance in Mrs. Epps’s parlor. And it is Mrs. Epps who ultimately demands that her husband publicly punish Patsey after she wanders off without permission to a neighboring plantation, seeking soap and communion with another black woman, who is also in an equally problematic interracial ‘relationship.’ That woman, Mistress Shaw (Alfre Woodward), reveals to a much younger Patsey that she must resign herself to the unavoidable sexual predations on southern plantations. In fact, Mistress Shaw speaks candidly about her “rise” to common-law-wife status with her white husband. She tells the curious Patsey that her new position has afforded her a life far removed from the fields and the whip. Now, she lives in relative leisure and luxury, though it is clear that she has been emotionally, if not physically scarred by her messy experience with Mr. Shaw. To the filmmaker’s credit, portraying such a wide range of human relationships—across the colorline and of varying degrees of complexity—makes this film a certifiably American story, no matter how troubling.

The film’s emphasis on Patsey’s tumultuous relationship with Mr. Epps indicates McQueen’s dedication to the veracity of Northup’s memoir, and at the same time, it attests to his knowledge of scholarly studies of southern women—enslaved women and to some extent, plantation mistresses. Following the lead of historians Daina Ramey Berry, Thavolia Glymph, and Elizabeth Fox Genovese, misconceptions about southern white women in general and in particular, bondwomen’s abilities to negotiate sexual advances and handle rigorous field labor are put to rest. It is Patsey who emerges as the “queen of the fields” both in Northup’s memoir and in the film. Patsey picks more cotton than any other man or woman on the plantation, despite her rather thin frame and sex. Her skill and expertise set the standard for work on the plantation. When Patsey outpicks Northup and others, they suffer daily lashings for their inability to meet such a lofty picking goal. Thus, Patsey’s performance in the fields challenges conventional notions of skilled and unskilled labor and at the same time, forces viewers to rethink the stale, male-centered iconography of slavery. Not only were women omnipresent in slavery, they also proved to be ferocious workers right alongside some of the men.

With its adherence to Solomon Northup’s words and its obvious attention to slavery scholarship, Twelve Years a Slave succeeds in bringing the ruthlessness of slavery to film. Still, one can always ask if film has the power to present such human trauma in a most authentic and respectful manner. Or, one can ask if film is the appropriate medium for presenting slavery. Many viewers will continue to grapple with this dilemma, just as historians themselves will continue to question if their works most accurately and respectfully get at the hearts of the people, places, and times they study and the questions they ask. Just as no piece of historical scholarship is without fault, no historical film will ever “tell it like it was” or be able to convey completely what it felt like to be Solomon Northrup.

In Twelve Years a Slave, the faults are few but still worth noting. Those viewers unfamiliar with Northup’s story would be surprised to know that Northup was enslaved for twelve years. Save for the film’s name, the movie does not adequately reflect a clear linear progression of time. In fact, Northup’s agonizing twelve years on various Louisiana plantations are compressed into one long, single-note experience. Only graying hairs and a few visible wrinkles indicate the passage of time. The viewer is carried from 1841 to 1853 with very little historical context along the way; the growing abolitionist movement and raucous national political debates over slavery do not make an appearance in the film. Likewise, even the bustling city of New Orleans, with its large free black population, appeared to be an afterthought.

Additionally, the film could have taken more pains to recognize or even highlight the distinctive nature of sugar planting versus cotton cultivation. Historians continue to emphasize that there were many slaveries existing side-by-side throughout the South, but cotton has maintained its hold as the singular, dominant symbol of southern slavery. All southern slaves did not labor exclusively in the cotton fields. Sugar most certainly dominated the world of southern Louisiana slavery. Its unique growing conditions and labor demands unquestionably affected the nature and rhythm of slavery in that region. Men typically outnumbered women on most sugar plantations and, therefore, both labor and leisure looked markedly different from slave life on cotton plantations. The work Northup did on sugar plantations and the people he met along the way deserved more attention in the film. For example, Northup served as driver, or manager of other slaves on a sugar plantation. As a driver, he wielded the whip and capitalized on his intellect and skill to vie for greater privileges and status among the other slaves. It was also here in sugar country that Northup developed many of his closest relationships with other bondsmen and earned his Sunday money. Though he writes at length about numerous interactions and friendships with blacks and whites during his stint in slavery, in the film Northup is strangely isolated from the other slaves except Patsey,. His friendship with Mr. Bass (Brad Pitt), however, stands out, as it proves instrumental to his ultimate freedom. Surprisingly absent, though, are those homosocial bonds (close interactions between men, in this case) Northup formed with an interesting and diverse cast of male characters in sugar country. A sharper focus on this aspect of Northup’s slave experience would have added more depth to his rather flat portrayal. One thing about Northup that was abundantly clear in his memoir was his ability to adapt and make do. If anything, viewers are left wanting to know more about this side of Northup. More attention to his associations during slavery, and certainly, his life as an abolitionist once freed would have certainly rounded out the picture of this exceptional character. That story definitely warrants more attention. Yet, as is typical in some social histories of slavery, a fully developed portrait of the bondsman never truly emerges.

Ultimately, Twelve Years a Slave marks a watershed moment in slavery studies and film history in this country. While the film falls short in developing Northrup’s individual complexity, its boldness and vivid imagery in depicting fundamental experiences of slavery definitely suffice. Making historical films is a tough business and bringing a thoughtful portrayal of American slavery to big screens is especially tough. The stakes are high and the expectations are often beyond standard filmmaking requirements. Still, there is so much to learn about America’s “peculiar institution” from this film. Its warm reception might just encourage other filmmakers to continue tackling slavery and other controversial historical topics—with empathy and accuracy.

Photo Credits:

Promotional poster for Twelve Years a Slave

A scene from the 1977 miniseries, Roots: The Saga of an American Family (Image courtesy of Warner Bros. International TV)

Jamie Foxx in Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained (Image courtesy of Salon)

Actors Michael Fassbender and Chiwetel Ejiofor in a scene from Twelve Years a Slave (Image courtesy of Slate)

Illustration from the 1855 edition of Solomon Northup’s Twelve Years a Slave (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

Lupita Nyong’o portraying the enslaved Patsey in a still from Twelve Years a Slave (Image courtesy of The Artsy Film Blog)

Enslaved African Americans hoe and plow the earth and cut piles of sweet potatoes on a South Carolina plantation, circa 1862-3 (Image courtesy of Library of Congress)

An enslaved family in Beaufort, South Carolina, 1862 (Image courtesy of Library of Congress)

Chiwetel Ejiofor and Lupita Nyong’o in a scene from Twelve Years a Slave (Image courtesy of The Artsy Film Blog)

Images used under Fair Use Guidelines

***

Further Reading:

Historical reviews of the films Lincoln and Django Unchained

UT historians reflect on the many meanings of the Emancipation Proclamation

Solomon Northup’s memoir in its entirety

An 1853 New York Times article on Northup’s remarkable life

Stalin’s Genocides by Norman Naimark (2011)

by Travis Gray

Stalin’s Genocides provides an in-depth analysis of the horrendous atrocities — forced deportations, collectivization, the Ukrainian famine, and the Great Terror — perpetrated by Joseph Stalin’s tyrannical regime. Norman Naimark argues that these crimes should be considered genocide and that Joseph Stalin should therefore be labeled a “genocidaire.” He presents four major arguments to support this claim. First, the previous United Nations definition of genocide has recently been expanded to include murder on a social and political basis. Second, dekulakization—the arrest, deportation, and execution of kulaks or allegedly well-off peasants—was a form of genocide that dehumanized and eliminated an imagined social enemy. Third, during the Ukrainian famine in 1932-1933, victims were deliberately starved by the Soviet state. Fourth, The Great Terror was designed to eliminate potential enemies of the Soviet Union. Overall, Naimark’s arguments are persuasive, presenting a chilling portrait of Joseph Stalin as a sociopath bent on destroying his own people.

Naimark begins with a brief consideration of “genocide” as a legal term in international law. Although the UN’s Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide does not apply to political or social groups, he shows—rather successfully—that the original UN definition of genocide had included these groups, but that the Soviet delegation had prevented this language from being adopted. This definition, however, has been challenged since the fall of the Soviet Union. Indeed, there have been recent cases in the Baltic states where individuals have been convicted of genocidal crimes for deporting and murdering social and political groups. Because these cases are bound by the precedents of international law, they provide historians with an opportunity to analyze Stalin’s crimes within a broadened definition of genocide that includes political and social groups.

Using this broader definition of genocide, Naimark proceeds to analyze instances of mass killing in the Soviet Union. His chapter on dekulakization is particularly persuasive as an instance of genocidal extermination both planned and implemented by the state to control its rural population. He makes the important distinction that although “the kulaks” were not a conventional social group, they “became an imagined social enemy” whose members experienced the same forms of violence and dehumanization faced by other ethnic and national groups (56). In this regard, dekulakization was similar in both form and function to internationally recognized instances of genocide in Germany, Rwanda, and Yugoslavia.

Naimark’s last two arguments regarding the Ukrainian famine and the Great Terror are less convincing. Although there is a lot of evidence to indicate that Stalin and his lieutenants were directly responsible for generating both the famine and the terror, neither of these events seems to have been intentionally designed to eliminate a particular group. Repression during the Great Terror, for example, was often applied randomly throughout the Soviet Union with little consideration given to the victim’s political, social, national, or ethnic identity. Likewise, it can be argued that the famine was used as a weapon against Ukrainian nationalism, but Naimark offers no convincing evidence to suggest that Stalin used the famine as a way to destroy the Ukrainian peasantry.

In sum, this book provides the reader with deep insight into the nature of Stalin’s crimes. It helps characterize one of history’s greatest mass murderers in a new light—as a genocidaire whose crimes should be condemned in the harshest terms. Even though the term genocide may not be appropriate in all the examples cited by Naimark, the book prompts historians to discuss the issue of genocide outside the confines of the Holocaust—a topic that many scholars have been eager to avoid.

Photo Credits:

Ukrainians in Kharkiv pass by a starving man during Holodomor, the Ukrainian famine, 1932 (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

Mug shot of Russian theater director Vsevolod Meyerhold after being arrested in 1939 amidst Stalin’s Great Purge of artists and intellectuals (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

Joseph Stalin at the Congress of the Young Communist League with two “famous” collective farmers: Praskovya Angelina (left), founder of a female tractor team and Maria Demchenko (right), an innovative beet grower (Image courtesy of Russian International News Agency (RIA Novosti) / RIA Novosti archive, image #377427 / Shagin / CC-BY-SA 3.0)

***

George Orwell: A Life in Letters (2013)

by Benjamin Griffin

Peter Davison’s careful selection and annotation of George Orwell’s personal correspondence in provides an engrossing autobiography of a man whose work continues to resonate globally in significant ways. A Life in Letters covers the breadth of Orwell’s life and provides an intimate and detailed look at his personality, influences, and beliefs. Davison is enormously successful in allowing the letters to improve our understanding of a broadly misunderstood man and to tell the story of a truly remarkable life.

Orwell’s letters are of particular value in depicting the changing way the world defined communism and socialism. Orwell’s dispatches from Spain show his personal, if accidental, involvement in the battle between Stalin and Trotsky. The ideological purge of the International Brigade forced him to depart Spain or face execution by Soviet proxies. Upon return, his letters demonstrate frustration with the refusal of traditional socialist journals to publish his works due to this perceived ideological taint. Later, Orwell finds he is unable to publish Animal Farm during World War II in part due to the British desire to maintain the positive image of Stalin and the Soviet Union, who were allies against Hitler. Despite finding success with Animal Farm and 1984, his letters also reveal a frustration with those who feel he is defending the status quo of western life, which is a perception of his work that still exists. Orwell claims that these people are “pessimistic and assume that there is no alternative except dictatorship or laissez-faire capitalism.” Elements of Orwell’s alternative democratic socialism are scattered throughout his correspondence, and the reader comes away from A Life in Letters with a good sense of how Orwell defined the responsibilities of government. Orwell’s letters reinforce his other writings that advocate political reform to eliminate class-based inequalities, such as access to education and medical care, while still guaranteeing individual freedoms.

Throughout the letters the mundane sits in close proximity to the profound. A notable example comes in a letter to working-class novelist Jack Common, in which Orwell first advises him on the proper thickness of toilet paper for use at Orwell’s country home before delving into a withering criticism of the “utter ignorance” of left wing intellectuals who believed they could use the upcoming Second World War to start a violent revolution in Britain. It is the mundane details that reveal Orwell’s personality. He was generous to friends and strangers alike, but was generally pessimistic about himself, his writing, and the future, and his chauvinism destroyed several friendships. Contrasts like these serve to humanize Orwell, and separate the man from the prophet.

Davison works diligently throughout A Life in Letters to ensure that the reader never loses track of the context in which Orwell wrote. Many of Orwell’s letters are indecipherable without Davison’s frequent and detailed footnotes identifying literary references, personal connections, and world events. Likewise, the inclusion of brief biographies of recipients in the bibliographical summary illuminates the broad variety of people with whom Orwell corresponded. The division of Orwell’s life into eight eras, and inclusion of a brief overview ahead of each part also helps shape the readers focus and makes finding specific letters easy. The main flaw in A Life of Letters is one of repetition. Davison often includes multiple letters from a brief period which contain the same content. There is also little correspondence from Orwell’s time in Burma, a key period in the development of his anti-imperialism. Whether this is due to a lack of available content or editorial decision is unclear.

Orwell’s writing in letters is as thoughtful and enjoyable as his prose. They show Orwell as unwilling to merely comment on the injustice he sees and his focus on tangible actions keeps the readers’ interest as easily as any thriller. The result is a detailed and intimate account that touches on the defining issues of international relations in the twentieth century and questions on the role of the state which remain topics of intense debate.

Photo Credits:

1950s dustcover for George Orwell’s 1945 novel, Animal Farm (Image courtesy of Michael Sporn Animation)

Orwell at his typewriter (Image courtesy of Getty Images)

Images used under Fair Use Guidelines

***

You may also like:

William Wilson’s review of Homage to Catalonia, George Orwell’s 1938 memoir of his experiences in the Spanish Civil War

« Previous Page

Recent Posts