Joan Neuberger, Author at Not Even Past

Great Books on Women’s History: Crossing Borders

Not Even Past asked the UT Austin History faculty to recommend great books on women and gender for Women’s History Month. The response was overwhelming so we will be posting their suggestions throughout the month.

A number of people suggested books about crossing borders: about people traveling or emigrating to countries foreign to them or about people creating new hybrid identities in the places they lived. Since they don’t fit into our usual geographical categories –and raise interesting questions about those categories — we are lumping them together here in Crossing Borders.

Madeline Hsu recommends:

Emma Teng, Eurasian: Mixed Identities in the United States, China, and Hong Kong (2013)

Teng traces mixed race Chinese-white families in a number of societies and political and social circumstances to complicate presumptions about racial hierarchies and the porosity of racial border-keeping in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries. By tracking mobilities through north America, Shanghai, and Hong Kong, Teng demonstrates that intermarriages occurred at higher rates than previously acknowledged, and that intermarriage with Chinese could be vehicles for upward, and not just downward, mobility depending on local circumstances.

Sam Vong recommends:

Lynn Fujiwara, Mothers without Citizenship: Asian Immigrant Families and the Consequences of Welfare Reform (2008)

Fujiwara’s study uncovers the detrimental effects that welfare reform in the 1990s had on immigrant women, particularly President Clinton’s authorization of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act in 1996 that aimed to end welfare programs. This book offers a trenchant analysis of the ways welfare reform policies redefined immigrants as outsiders and how immigrant women resisted these attempts at denying their claims to U.S. citizenship and belonging.

Michael Stoff recommends:

Susan Glenn, Daughters of the Shetl: Life and Labor in the Immigrant Generation

I’ve used this book in classes and like it a great deal. Here’s a blurb from Cornell University Press:

“In this fascinating portrait of Jewish immigrant wage earners, Susan A. Glenn weaves together several strands of social history to show the emergence of an ethnic version of what early twentieth-century Americans called the “New Womanhood.” She maintains that during an era when Americans perceived women as temporary workers interested ultimately in marriage and motherhood, these young Jewish women turned the garment industry upside down with a wave of militant strikes and shop-floor activism and helped build the two major clothing workers’ unions.”

Jeremi Suri recommends:

Mary Louise Roberts, What Soldiers Do: Sex and the American GI in World War II France (2014).

This deeply researched book artfully examines the interaction of race, sex, and gender in the conduct of American soldiers stationed in France and their interactions with French civilians during World War II.

Lina del Castillo recommends:

Magical sites: Women Travelers in 19th century Latin America, edited by Marjorie Agonsin and Julie Levison

This collection brings together several travel narratives written by women brave enough (and wealthy and educated enough) to travel through different parts of Latin America. Some of these writers, like Mary Caldecott Graham and Flora Tristan, found a measure of liberation from a feminine imperial mindset that justified their prescriptions for reform of the societies they encountered. Others, like Nancy Gardner Prince (a free born African American woman who traveled to Jamaica and Russia) tell their experiences from very different perspectives. The narratives these women wrote about the places they moved through show them as women who both threw off the chains of domesticity and convention and nevertheless, were in many ways still bound by them.

For more books on Women’s History:

Great Books (Europe)

Indrani Chatterjee, On Women and Nation in India

Our 2013 list of recommendations: New Books on Women’s History

Great Books on Women’s History: Europe

Not Even Past asked the UT Austin History faculty to recommend great books for Women’s History Month. The response was overwhelming so we will be posting their suggestions throughout the month. Since today is International Women’s Day, a celebration that began in Europe, we will begin with some terrific book recommendations on women and gender in Europe.

In no particular order:

Philippa Levine recommends:

Alison Light, Mrs. Woolf and the Servants: An Intimate History of Domestic Life in Bloomsbury (2008)

In a brilliant reading of the great modernist novelist Virginia Woolf, Alison Light compares the absence of servants in Woolf’s published fiction with the constant references to them in her correspondence with friends and family. Woolf was still employing servants at the moment when what had been a veritable army of available female domestic labour began to shrink as women rejected the constraints of such work and sought better paid and less intimate work elsewhere. In detailing Woolf’s fraught relationship with her long-time live-in servant, Nellie Boxall, with whom she fought constantly, Light reveals the class and gender tensions that continued to shape British culture in the early twentieth century in elegant prose and with really sharp insights. A fantastic read!

Tracie Matysik and Yoav di Capua recommend:

Kate Evans, Red Rosa: A Graphic Biography of Rosa Luxemburg (2015).

A compelling book, that introduces the reader to the passionate life and convictions of Rosa Luxemburg. And the illustrations are beautiful, even moving. Along the way, you’ll get a good glimpse of the aims and challenges of revolutionary thought in Europe in the early years of the twentieth century.

Tatjana Lichtenstein recommends:

Janina Bauman, Beyond these Walls: Escaping the Warsaw Ghetto – Young Girl’s Story (2006).

In this book — part diary, part memoir — Janina Bauman tells the fascinating story of how three Jewish women escaped the Warsaw ghetto and, assisted by a small network of courageous and devoted Polish helpers on the “Aryan” side, survived the war in hiding and by passing as non-Jews.

Mary Neuburger recommends:

Jelena Batinić, Women and Yugoslav Partisans: A History of World War II Resistance (2015)

This book traces both the fascinating phenomena of women’s role in the largest resistance movement in Europe during World War II, and women’s postwar memory of the changes in gender roles caused by the war and the communist period that followed.

Andy Villalon recommends:

Vera Brittain, Testament of Youth.

The most moving memoir (male or female) to come out of the Great War. Highly readable and easily obtainable, this is the story of love and unfathomable loss by a woman who saw all of her close male friends, including her fiancé and her brother, slaughtered in the holocaust of 1914-18. The book also sheds considerable light on the trials women faced in pursuing an education during the decades just before the conflict. It is the story of the making of a great crusader for pacifism. I have read Testament of Youth several times and have never been able to avoid crying at various passages.

Miriam Bodion recommends:

Elisheva Baumgarten, Mothers and Children: Jewish Family Life in Medieval Europe (2007)

This thoughtful, often surprising work makes use of a broad array of sources, from theoretical works on gender to ancient and medieval rabbinic texts, to explore how medieval Jews thought about birth, infant care, and the raising of children.

Julie Hardwick recommends:

Judith Bennett, History Matters: Patriarchy and the Challenge of Feminism (2006)

A leading medievalist takes a brilliant, lively, provocative, and very accessible look at the persistence of gender inequality and insists we can only understand that pattern by looking back — well back. Her topics range from work to sexuality, and she makes a very important and compelling argument.

Digital Teaching: From the Other Side of the Screen: A Student’s View

By Abigail Griffin

When most college students think of online courses, they often imagine basic, boring classes that are convenient and easy A’s. Online classes often require little effort and minimal time commitment, while still satisfying a graduation requirement. So, students drudge aimlessly through the mandatory course, get their completion grades, and move on with their lives, without actually gaining anything from the experience. Dr. Suri’s online course, however, is so much more than a mark off of an undergraduate’s to-do list. Professor Suri revolutionizes this old, bland style of online coursework and provides a unique and active learning experience to students anywhere—from the comfort of their own beds to a quaint coffee shop down the street to the studio classroom in Mezes.

Going into the course, I was skeptical. Not because I didn’t have full faith in Professor Suri’s ability to make the course the best it could be, but because I was worried that even the best online class could not beat traditional, classroom-style learning. I had been unimpressed by the reputation of online classes in the past, and I never previously had the desire to take one. I always preferred a classroom setting because it just seemed more “right.” But boy, was I wrong.

Not only is Professor Suri an incredibly energetic and knowledgeable professor, but he makes his lectures engaging, informative, and entertaining. The online setting does not take away from the education at all, in fact, I think it enhances the learning environment. Students are more willing to participate in class through applications like “Class Chat” and “Ask the Professor,” and the TA’s and Prof. Suri actively respond to their comments, which would be nearly impossible in a huge lecture hall. When students take an active role in their learning like this, they benefit significantly more from the lecture. I know from experience that there is practically no class participation in a 300-500 person lecture hall, but having the same class size online encourages significantly more student involvement.

For example, Dr. Suri uses images in his lecture every class period, and the pictures pop up on our video screens so we can easily see them. When he asks us to comment on the images, students begin contributing to the discussion in a matter of seconds. In a normal classroom setting with the same number of students, almost no one responds to the professor’s questions, and never that quickly and eagerly. So the online forum actually makes the lecture easier for the students, the professor, and his assistants. It is also wonderful because the slides and images that come up on our screen are clear and easy to understand and interpret, whereas, it would be more difficult for some of the students to evaluate the images in a lecture hall.

Overall, I am incredibly impressed by what Dr. Suri has done with his online course. Obviously, it isn’t perfect. Sometimes the technology doesn’t work correctly or people get off track in the class chat. But as a whole, the class is a lot of fun. I think that the online and in-person office hour options are great, the class pings ensure that students are paying attention (and are super easy participation points), and the lectures are always interesting.

Plus, I have never been a morning person, so it’s great to be able to wake up 5 minutes before class and still make it on time.

Abigail Griffin is a second-year Plan II Honors and Government double-major with a minor in Arabic. She graduated high school in St. Louis and her family currently resides in Elizabethtown, KY. She is an Arabic Flagship and Forty Acres scholar at UT , an Agency Co-Director within Student Government, and a Camp Texas counselor to incoming freshman. Abigail also volunteers as a KIPP tutor and as an AISD tutor to Arabic-speaking students. Additionally, she is passionate about sports and has played on the Women’s Club Soccer team In the future, she intends to pursue a career in foreign service and counterterrorism.

Episode 79: Fishmeal—The Superfood That Never Was

After World War II, international aid and food agencies were looking for a way to fertilize land and quickly increase the nutritional value of crops around the world that had been devastated by war and climactic conditions. They found an unlikely suspect in fishmeal, and with it, lit up the economies of South America along the Humboldt Current. But the fish, as it turned out, had other ideas.

Guest Kristin Wintersteen has worked on the history of industry subject to the temperaments of on-again off-again current cycles in the Pacific, and how the boom and bust of one of the first superfoods has led to new discussions about global nutrition.

Childhood Has a History

By Steven Mintz

Why is knowledge of the history of childhood valuable?

First, because history defamiliarizes the present, reminding us that concepts, practices, and ideas that we take for granted are in fact problematic. Take, for example, the Freudian notion that early childhood determines a child’s future development, shapes their personality, and leaves a lasting imprint on their future relationships. Few thinkers would have accepted these ideas prior to the twentieth century. Thus in his 1749 novel The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling, Henry Fielding dismissed the title character’s childhood in six words: “nothing happened worthy of being recorded.”

Or take the assumption that very young children are incapable of performing sophisticated chores. In most past societies, children took on work responsibilities from extremely young ages, often as young as two or three. Abraham Lincoln, for example, assisted his father in clearing fields when the future president was only two years old.

Mill children in Macon, Georgia in 1909 (Photo by Lewis Hine via Wikipedia).

Or the view popularized by attachment theorists that proper child development requires secure attachment to a single mothering figure and a stable household environment. In fact, many, and perhaps most, children in the past had multiple nurturing figures and shifted frequently among households.

Or, more controversially, consider the current medical advice that co-sleeping arrangements, where a mother and her infant share the same bed, puts the child at risk. From a historical perspective, it was highly unusual for mothers and infants to sleep apart, and even in the United States, reliance on cribs is a relatively recent development, dating to the early twentieth century. Separate sleeping arrangements for infants appears to reflect this society’s emphasis on cultivating individualism from a very early age.

Then, too, history rebuts myths and misconceptions that distort public understanding. For example, take the myth of the carefree childhood. We cling to a fantasy that once upon a time childhood and youth were years of carefree adventure, despite the fact that for most children in the past, growing up was anything but easy. Disease, family disruption, and early entry into the world of work were integral parts of family life into the early twentieth century. The notion of a prolonged childhood, devoted to education and free from adult-like responsibilities, is a very recent invention, a product of the past century and a half, and one that only became a reality for a majority of children after World War II.

Margaret Gibson (far right) described a happy and carefree childhood in her middle-class home in Scotland. This photo was taken in 1932, two months before she died of scarlet fever (via Portal to the Past).

Another myth is the home as a haven and bastion of stability in an ever-changing world. Throughout American history, family stability has been the exception, not the norm. At the beginning of the twentieth century, fully a third of all American children spent at least a portion of their childhood in a single-parent home, and as recently as 1940, one child in ten did not live with either parent—compared to one in 25 today.

Percentage of Children 0-14 living in single-parent households in 2010 (via The Atlantic).

A third myth is that childhood is the same for all children, a status transcending class, ethnicity, and gender. In fact, every aspect of childhood is shaped by class—as well as by ethnicity, gender, geography, religion, and historical era. We may think of childhood as a biological phenomenon, but it is better understood as a life stage whose contours are shaped by a particular time and place. Childrearing practices, schooling, and the age at which young people leave home—all are the products of particular social and cultural circumstances.

A fourth myth is that the United States is a peculiarly child-friendly society when, in actuality, Americans are deeply ambivalent about children. Adults envy young people their youth, vitality, and physical attractiveness. But they also resent children’s intrusions on their time and resources and frequently fear their passions and drives. Many reforms that nominally have been designed to protect and assist the young were also instituted to insulate adults from children and insure smooth operation of the economic order.

Lastly a myth, which is perhaps the most difficult to overcome, is a myth of progress, and its inverse, a myth of decline. There is a tendency to conceive of the history of childhood as a story of steps forward over time: of parental engagement replacing emotional distance, of kindness and leniency supplanting strict and stern punishment, of scientific enlightenment superseding superstition and misguided moralism. This progressivism is sometimes seen in reverse, i.e. that childhood is disappearing: that children are growing up too quickly and wildly and losing their innocence, playfulness, and malleability. Both the myth of progress and the myth of decline are profoundly misleading. Historical change invariably involves trade-offs; all progress is achieved at a price and involves losses as well as gains. We are certainly the beneficiaries of dramatic declines in rates of infant and child mortality and increased control over childhood diseases. But it is also apparently the case that more children than ever suffer from disabilities and chronic conditions than in the past.

History also refutes any simplistic linear theories about upward and onward progress and any assumptions about inevitability. One striking example involves child abuse. Although the physical and sexual abuse of children appears to have declined in recent years, other forms of abuse remain prevalent. These include the violence of expectations – the assumption that children are able to achieve certain markers of maturity before previous eras deemed them physiologically or psychologically ready; the violence of labeling – of attaching pathological labels upon normal childish behavior; the violence of representation – the sexual exploitation of images of girls in advertising; and the violence of poverty, which exposes children to extraordinary stressors and limits their future possibilities.

Children doing yoga in New York City to reduce school-related stress (Via DNAinfo New York).

In addition, history lays bare certain long-term trends, developments, and processes that we are otherwise blind to. Examples include the long-term shift from an environment in which children were expected to love their parents to one where parents seek to earn their children’s love; or the triumph of a therapeutic discourse, which uses psychological categories to understand children’s behavior and focuses on children’s emotional interior.

History also offers valuable lessons: That even very young children are more competent than our society assumes or that ideas about the nature of the child or how best to rear children have always been hotly contested.

Perhaps most important of all, history offers a fresh perspective on life today. It allows us to view present-day concerns and controversies from a novel vantage point. History offers dynamic, diachronic, longitudinal perspectives that are quite different from those generally advanced by the disciplines of psychology or sociology. By treating concepts and behavior patterns as constructs, history underscores the radical contingency of all social arrangements and modes of thought. In addition to stressing the importance of change over time, history also emphasizes the significance of social and cultural context, which has been always been crucial in shaping the nature and timing of key life course developments, indeed, more important, in my view, than any innate states of psychological or physiological development. History reminds us that conceptions of childhood and children’s essential nature, theories of child development, and approaches to childrearing – all have shifted profoundly over time.

The history of childhood is of more than antiquarian interest. Too often, history is regarded as preface – that is, as a source of fascinating anecdotes – or as mirror – a stark contrast to our supposedly more enlightened present. But history, including the history of childhood, is of more than antiquarian interest. With its emphasis on four C’s – change over time, the significance of context, the role of contingency in shaping historical development (and rejection of teleology), and the ever-present reality of conflict – greatly enriches, and, at times, challenges, the insights gleaned from other social sciences.

Steven Mintz, Huck’s Raft:A History of American Childhood (2006) and The Prime of Life: A History of Modern Adulthood (2015)

Want to read more about childhood? Here are Steven Mintz’s picks for further reading.

Top photo: Russian playground (public domain)

History of Childhood

Here are Steven Mintz’s suggestions for more reading on the history of childhood.

Howard Chudacoff, Children at Play: An American History (2008)
Chudakoff demonstrates that children’s play has always been a subject of contention, with adults seeking to control the way that children spend their time and kids using play for their own purposes: as a physical and emotional release and a form of resistance and subversion.

Gary Cross, Kids’ Stuff: Toys and the Changing World of American Childhood (1999)
Cross traces a shift from toys that sought to educate children and prepare them for the adult world to toys that create a fantasy world separate and apart from the adulthood.

David F. Lancy, The Anthropology of Childhood: Cherubs, Chattel, Changelings (2015)
By uncovering children’s lives in diverse cultures, this book challenges narrowly, culture-bound conceptions of childhood.

Peter Stearns, Childhood in World History (2006)
Stearns places childhood in global-historical perspective and shows that the contemporary Western ideal of childhood–as a period devoted to play and schooling, sharply segregated from the adult world–is a historical anomaly.

Episode 78: The U.S. and Decolonization after World War II

Following World War II, a large part of the world was in the hands of European powers, established as colonies in the previous centuries. As one of the nations that came out on top of the geo-political situation, the United States was looked to with hope by aspiring nationalist movements, but also seen as a potential source by European allies in the war as a potential supporter of the move to restore the tarnished empires to their former glory. What’s a newly emerged world power to do?

Guest R. Joseph Parrott takes a look at the indecisive position the United States took on decolonization after helping liberate Europe from the threat of enslavement to fascism.

Ordinary Yet Infamous: Hannah Mary Tabbs and the Disembodied Torso

The discovery of a headless, limbless, racially ambiguous human torso near a pond outside of Philadelphia in 1887, horrified area residents and confounded local authorities. From what they could tell, a brutal homicide had taken place. At a minimum, the victim had been viciously dismembered. Based on the circumstances, it also seemed like the kind of case to go unsolved. Yet in an era lacking sophisticated forensic methods, the investigators from Bucks County and those from Philadelphia managed to identify two suspects: Hannah Mary Tabbs, a black southern migrant, and George Wilson, a young mulatto that Tabbs implicated shortly after her arrest. The ensuing trial would last months, itself something of a record given that most criminal hearings wrapped up in a week or so. The crime and its adjudication also took center stage in presses from Pennsylvania to Illinois to Missouri.

Examining the torso to determine its race. “The quadroon’s comparison," “Coon Chops,” National Police Gazette, March 5, 1887. — Examining the torso to determine its race. “The quadroon’s comparison,” “Coon Chops,” National Police Gazette, March 5, 1887.

The nature of the case allowed otherwise taboo subjects such as illicit sex, adultery, and domestic violence in the black community to become fodder for mainstream public discourses on race, gender, and crime. At the same time, the mixed race of the victim and one of his assailants, George Wilson, would further inflame public anxieties about shifting notions of race and power in the Post-Reconstruction era, especially in regard to miscegenation and passing. The investigation itself and the treatment of the African Americans involved also afford a rare window onto early bigoted police practices such as racial profiling and issues of police brutality as well as sketching a nuanced portrait of intraracial violence. The murder and its investigation shed rare light on the legal responses to urban violence and show how those responses fundamentally contributed to crime in the black community.

Equally important is that a wealth of records and press coverage of the case allows for a richer understanding of the life of the infamous Hannah Mary Tabbs, the otherwise ordinary black woman at the heart of the story. What makes Tabbs such a provocative figure is that her life encompassed an extreme combination of the mundane and the extraordinary—a range that more wholly elucidates the complexities of black urban life. In many respects, Tabbs embodied those traits most common to the city’s black southern migrants. Like nearly fifteen percent of the city’s black residents, she migrated from Maryland roughly a decade after the Civil War. In accord with ninety percent of working black women in Philadelphia, she labored as a domestic—first for a Center City attorney and later for wealthy farmers in Eddington, where the torso would be found.

Domestic servant, Willemstad, Curacao. — Domestic servant, Willemstad, Curacao

But Hannah Mary Tabbs also possessed a darker side. She had an adulterous affair with the victim, a man ten years her junior and, at the very least, participated in his murder. The home that she shared with her husband doubled as the scene of the crime. John Tabbs had an airtight alibi. Hannah Mary, however, could not account for her whereabouts and during the investigation, several witnesses would come forward and testify to her long history of violence. In addition to threatening her immediate family members, including her husband, she was reputed to have routinely and “violently insulted inoffensive persons.” The range of victims knew few boundaries, young and old, male and female alike—yet she never attacked whites. Tabbs undoubtedly knew all too well of the inadequacy and injustice of police protection for the black community, as well as the severity of the consequences she would face if she deigned to assault a white citizen.

Yet Hannah Mary’s violence also had practical functions. Black women were especially vulnerable to violent crime and had little recourse with respect to justice. Being an all-around tough customer could serve as its own protection—people in the neighborhood knew that Hannah Mary was not someone to be messed with.

Mary Fields: “…a two-fisted, hard-drinking woman who needed nobody to fight her battles for her. She smoked homemade cigars & carried a six-shooter plus a shotgun.” Source: Wikipedia

These aspects of her life, when taken together with Hannah Mary’s experiences in Philadelphia’s justice system, distinguish her from many of her peers. But where Hannah Mary Tabbs’s life diverges from the “norm” effectively maps the typography of black daily life as well as urban social strife. Her relationships offer an unusual glimpse of domestic violence—one that challenges customary definitions. Tabbs’s skirmishes with the victim, her neighbors, and family members provide a broader view of social tensions and the kinds of violence that occurred within black families.

Her erotic pursuits, too, afford a different understanding of how black women in the nineteenth century navigated sexuality. Most historians interested in black sexuality point to black women dissembling their sexuality in an effort to stave off potential sexual attacks. While certainly true, this phenomenon has made it difficult for historians to get a sense of how African Americans engaged in sexual pleasure. Tabbs’s passionate affair along with how she used violence to safeguard the relationship move us past silence about black women’s desire for sexual gratification at the same that it points to the lengths that some might have had to go to obtain it.

This case, this story, and the black woman at the heart of it forces us to move past binary notions of race, gender, and sexuality but also, too, it resists snap judgments about who exactly is good or evil and calls into question the validity of standard notions of justice.

This piece was adapted from Kali Nicole Gross’s new book: Hannah Mary Tabbs and the Disembodied Torso: A Tale of Race, Sex, and Violence in America (Oxford University Press, 2016).

For further reading, see:

Anne Butler, Gendered Justice in the American West: Women Prisoners in Men’s Penitentiaries (1997).
A seminal examination of women’s experiences in the penal system in the West in late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Butler unearths the unending violence women, particularly women of color, were subjected to in custody. At the same time, it gives voice to figures that rarely speak in history.

Mara Dodge, “Whores and Thieves of the Worst Kind”: A Study of Women, Crime, and Prisons, 1835-2000 (2006).
Dodge provides an exhaustive study of the histories of women incarcerated from the early nineteenth century to the twenty-first. She meticulously examines the gendered treatment of female inmates punished for bad manners, fighting, and lesbian relationships. The book shows how race and gender collided with the criminal justice system.

Cheryl D. Hicks, Talk with You Like a Woman: African American Women, Justice, and Reform in New York, 1890-1935 (2010).
This work is a rich examination of the experiences and views of black working-class women who found themselves enmeshed in the criminal justice system in early-twentieth-century New York. In addition to exploring the impact of urban and penal reform on those black women, Hicks critically contrasts the racial uplift agendas of both middle-class black and white female reformers.

Talitha L. LeFlouria, Chained in Silence: Black Women and Convict Labor in the New South (2015).
Dr. LeFlouria’s riveting work powerfully unearths the experiences of Georgia’s exploited and often overlooked labor force, namely black female convicts. Through painstaking research, she portrays black women as sentient beings (humans who had lives, loves, triumphs, and sorrows) and as prison laborers brutalized by convict leasing.

LaShawn Harris, Sex Workers, Psychics, and Numbers Runners: Black Women in New York City’s Underground Economy (University of Illinois, 2016).
Dr. Harris’s extraordinary book offers an unprecedented account of African American women’s employment outside of the customary realms of domestic service and agricultural work. It is a provocative examination that compels readers to interrogate notions of labor through an intricate, incisive intersectional lens.

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.

Episode 77: The Paris Commune

For four months in 1871, angry citizens of Paris seized control of the city after a humiliating defeat against the Prussian Empire and the collapse of the Second Empire. The radical and revolutionary government and its brutal suppression was the inspiration for Karl Marx’s “dictatorship of the proletariat.” Although the experimental regime met a violent end, it has become part of the French national narrative. John Merriman, Charles Seymour Professor of History at Yale, has just published a book about the Paris Commune that takes a new look at how a radical government managed to find support from rich and poor, conservative and liberal, to try to regain dignity in the face of France’s brutal defeat.

Two Bowies, One Knife

Bowie was a “tall, raw-boned man with deep-set eyes, fair hair, and an open and frank disposition.” Convivial and generous, he was a man, it was said, who loved music. That Bowie was James, not David.

Born in 1796, Jim Bowie was a speculator, a soldier, and an adventurer who worked smuggling slaves with his brothers. Bowie was ambitious and scheming. He gambled at cards and knew how to fight. His weapon of choice, a very large hunting knife, secured him a reputation as the South’s most formidable knife fighter. He famously disemboweled one opponent in a brutal fight. Noah Smithwick, who was with him at the Battle of Concepción, called him “a born leader.” He eventually made his way to Texas and, like other legendary figures, died in 1836 defending the Alamo.

Even if Jim Bowie could have known that his name would live on, associated with the long blade he favored, he could never have imagined that his name would be adopted nearly two centuries later by a luminary of pop music—David Bowie. David took the frontiersman’s surname as his own and sought to create, as he told Terry Gross in a 2002 interview, “the 21st century in 1971.”

While David Bowie never killed anyone, he did subtitle his concept album, “Outside: the Ritual Art-Murder of Baby Grace Blue: A non-linear Gothic Drama Hyper-Cycle.” As the album title reveals, the two Bowies’ sensibilities and histories could not have been more different. Yet, the two men share much. Both were pioneers, fighters, adventurous, collaborated with their equally famous peers, and were political. Both Bowies are still controversial. And both were adept with the Bowie knife.

*David Bowie, c. 1974. Source: Wikimedia Commons*

David Bowie was born David Robert Jones. He played with several name changes, in part to avoid association with Davy Jones of The Monkeys. In 1966, he settled on Bowie. As he explained to Rolling Stone, the name came from the Bowie knife. “I was into a kind of heavy philosophy thing when I was 16 years old, and I wanted a truism about cutting through the lies and all that.” In any case, to Bowie—David—the Bowie was “The ultimate American knife. It is the medium for a conglomerate of statements and illusions.”

In considering the connection between Jim Bowie and David Bowie, we might reflect on how legends are made, die, and reborn. James’ out-sized life was commemorated in books, movies, and action figures, along with Davy Crockett and Col. William Travis, as the lore surrounding the Alamo grew to epic status. Jim Bowie was transformed into a cultural icon, a symbol of the gritty determination of the American spirit. He lives on now as a hero to those who wish to restore an older, whiter version of Texas’ past. David Bowie, master of alter egos, couldn’t have picked a more ironic choice for a namesake.

2010-06-11_085553 — Western Tales (#32, March 1956). The Jack Kirby Museum.

By appropriating the name Bowie, he did what he set out to do. A bold adventurer, he slashed through cultural norms. He repeatedly created new identities and genres. He startled popular culture with his public declaration as gay in 1972 and, a few years later, as bi-sexual. His choices and changes in music were equally daring. He embraced hybridization and androgyny. He mixed genres and did so self-consciously. David Bowie made his own legend, lived up to it, and then he remade it—numerous times over: Ziggy Stardust, the man who fell to earth, the sexual adventurer, glam rocker, fashion icon, Off-Broadway lyricist. He saw rock – and life — as theatre. In so doing, he showed those of us who grew up with his music how to be the hero of our own stories.

screen-shot-2016-01-13-at-12-50-19-pm — A street sign for Bowie St., Austin, Texas, was changed by a fan on the week of January 10, 2016, when David Bowie died.

Perhaps, then, we’ve reached the logical end to an age of heroic action. After all, if each of us has become our own hero, how can we hope to become more than we already are? David Bowie’s life suggests that we might reach beyond our own imagination. Although he apparently had a fascination with American culture, there’s no indication that he particularly looked for meaning in the life of James Bowie and the heroes of the epic Battle of the Alamo. David Bowie instead chose the knife as his talisman — Jim Bowie’s frontier weapon — and remade it into a cultural weapon. As it turns out, it is a dramatically effective one.

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