Joan Neuberger, Author at Not Even Past

Episode 60: Texas and the American Revolution

What role did Texas play in the American revolution? What–Texas? It wasn’t even a state yet! And yet, Spain and its empire–including what is now the Lone Star State, did play a role in defeating the British Empire in North America. New archival work is lending light on the ways that Spain, smarting from its loss of the Floridas to Britain in the Seven Years War, backed the American colonists’ push for independence. Ben Wright of UT’s Briscoe Center for American History has been working with the Bexar archives and documents how Spain’s–and Texas’s–efforts to divert sources of food and funding to the American troops helped to tip the balance of power in North American forever.

#Blacklivesmatter Till They Don’t: Slavery’s Lasting Legacy

The historical value of black life and the casual killing of Eric Garner.

by Daina Ramey Berry and Jennifer L. Morgan

This article first appeared in The American Prospect (December 5, 2014).

In less than a month, our nation will commemorate the 150th anniversary of the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery. This should be a time of celebratory reflection, yet Wednesday night, after another grand jury failed to see the value of African-American life, protesters took to the streets chanting, “Black lives matter!”

Shippensburg University student Cory Layton, a junior from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, paints his face with the slogan “Black Lives Matter” at the ‘Fight for Human Rights and Social Equity’ rally at Shippensburg University in Shippensburg, Pennsylvania, on Thursday, December 4, 2014. (AP Photo/Public Opinion, Ryan Blackwell)

As scholars of slavery writing books on the historical value(s) of black life, we are concerned with the long history of how black people are commodified by the state. Although we are saddened by the unprosecuted deaths of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Eric Garner and countless others, we are not surprised. We live a nation that has yet to grapple with the history of slavery and its afterlife. In 1669, the Virginia colony enacted legislation that gave white slaveholders the authority to murder their slaves without fear of prosecution. This act, concerning “… the Casual Killing of Slaves,” seems all too familiar today.

This legislation declared that a grand assembly [jury] could “acquit” those who killed their slaves during a “correction” because a slaveowner could not be guilty of a felony for destroying “his owne property.” Given such laws, the history of commodification before 1865 is clear: The enslaved were chattel—movable and disposable forms of property valued only as long as their labor produced wealth for their owners. A slave in need of “correction” could be destroyed with impunity. Black life existed on a pendulum, either valued or worthless according to the vagaries of the marketplace. With the abolition of slavery, it appeared that black life would no longer be determined by the starkness of a racial marketplace; however, in the aftermath of slavery, the devaluation of black life continues.

The abolition of slavery did not do away with the commodification of black people. Instead, in a nation founded on the idea that black life was only of value when it produced wealth for the elite, free black people became associated with sloth and violence. Slavery meant that black people had no intrinsic human worth, but were only of interest for the monetary value that they could convey. Apparently, freedom could not dislodge the fundamental belief that casual killing could be excused. Free or not, black men and women have remained disposable.

In 1886, in the heart of the Jim Crow South, Hal Geiger, an African-American attorney and prominent leader of the black community from Texas, was shot five times in court. The prosecuting attorney and confirmed shooter, O.D. Cannon, did not like the way Geiger spoke to him. Taking the law into his own hands, Cannon pulled out a pistol and shot Geiger, who died a month later. It took 10 minutes for a jury to acquit Cannon of this “crime.” Twenty years after slavery, the state exonerated the murder of an African American, killed in full view of a judge and jury in a courtroom. Clearly Geiger’s life, and the lives of the black women he was defending, had no value in the eyes of the jury. Black death was deemed the legitimate and justifiable response to a black man who’d transgressed the boundaries of his proper place.

We live at a moment when many black men and women have secured our economic and social standing in this country—a moment at which black men and women occupy positions of prominence, influence and wealth. And yet this spate of murders at the hands of law enforcement clearly tells us that, on a fundamental level, black life does not matter. What does it mean that in 2014 we must warn our children that any one of us can be recast as dangerous monsters, whose pleas for breath, ignored on camera, might awaken the sleeping giant? We must say to ourselves and our children that, for many people, our lives, no longer associated with the accumulation of wealth for others, now do not matter at all.

How could this happen?” This is the question our own children asked us in the wake of the grand jury decisions regarding the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Gardner. This is the question reverberating in our communities. This is the question we ask ourselves. And yet, as scholars of slavery we know the answer. It happened because life that is bought and sold is life that can be reduced to surplus. Life that can be disposed of. Life that can be dismissed.

We are appalled by these deaths. But we are equally appalled by our ability to make sense of them. We live embedded in the afterlife of slavery. We are a nation that has failed to grapple with our past.

When the Virginia House of Commons argued that no one could be charged with committing a felony for a homicide that amounted to the destruction of their own property, it set in motion a racial logic in which we are still entangled. No one will be punished for the taking of black life. Darren Wilson’s actions are understood by the grand jury and many members of his community as unfortunate—but justified. The only valuable thing lost during those four hours as Michael Brown’s body lay uncovered in the street was Officer Darren Wilson’s peace of mind. Million-dollar war chests and speaking engagements will compensate Wilson. Because in the current racial marketplace, the only people compensated for the loss of black lives are those who take them. Black life is only valued when it’s harnessed to white capital.

What we are left with is a perversion of value. A society in which the taking of black life—in public, on camera—is of no consequence. Black men and women appear to be disposable to all but the families and communities who mourn them. We are reduced to the fury and loss and pathos encompassed in our screaming assertion that black lives matter.

Daina Ramey Berry, an associate professor of history and African diaspora studies at the University of Texas at Austin, is a Public Voices Fellow with the Op-Ed Project.

Jennifer L. Morgan, professor of social and cultural analysis and history at New York University, is currently a member of the Institute of Advanced Studies in Princeton.

Episode 59: John D. Rockefeller and the Standard Oil Company

Perhaps no individual in American history has achieved such meteoric heights as John D. Rockefeller, who embodies the image of the self-made man who rose from humble origins to become one of the richest and most powerful men in the world. He has also become the archetype of the ruthless capitalist, singlehandedly crushing competition and ignoring attempts to restrict or regulate his activities. Love him or hate him, his name casts a long shadow over the early 20th century.

Guest Henry Wiencek explores the deep contradictions and equally varied representations of John D. Rockefeller, the self-made millionaire whose name became synonymous with industry and free enterprise.

Catholic Borderlands: Further Reading

by Anne M. Martínez

For more on the Spanish past in the United States and how it has been treated in U.S. and Spanish historiography and nation-building, see Interpreting Spanish Colonialism, edited by Christopher Schmidt-Nowara and John Nieto-Phillips.

Jason Ruíz’s Americans in the Treasure House traces the economic and cultural place of Mexico in the U.S. imagination in the late nineteenth century, providing context for the Mexican Revolution in the United States.

Alejandro Lugo, borrowing from Serge Gruzinski, frames Juarez, Chihuahua, Mexico as the intersection of the Iberian Century and the American Century, which informed my conception of Catholic borderlands. See Lugo’s Fragmented Lives, Assembled Parts on the maquiladora factories in Juárez, and Gruzinski’s The Mestizo Mind on mestizaje and culture, for more on these entangled histories.

Catholic Borderlands

By Anne M. Martínez

In the fall of 1913, the Second American Catholic Missionary Congress took place in Boston, Massachusetts. Catholic priests, bishops, and laypeople from across the country met for three days to discuss Catholic home missions—that is, missionary work within the United States.

Archbishop John Baptist Pitival of Santa Fe, New Mexico represented the leadership of what he referred to as the “wild and wooly west.” In a speech repeatedly interrupted by bursts of applause, Pitival compared the ornate cathedrals he had seen in Boston with the sacred buildings that surrounded him in the Southwest. “It is the picture of another glorious edifice, hoary with age, cemented with the blood of many martyrs, with the sweat of countless apostolic men—the picture of the older Church in our great country, but now crumbling into ruin, disintegrating pillar by pillar—nay, stone by stone, moreover exposed to the fierce attacks of a relentless foe. It is our Catholic Church in the Southwest.” Echoing Lamentations 4:4, he continued, “‘Behold, our children are crying for the bread of God’s Word and there are none to break it to them.’ Behold, we are being dispossessed of our lands; we are a doomed and vanishing race.” Pitival feared that the Church in the Southwest was vanishing due to the rapid encroachment of Protestant proselytizers attempting to convert Mexican American Catholics. Pitival was not Mexican, or even American, but seemingly represented Mexicans in the southwest by claiming that we were being dispossessed of our land. “The white man,” he continued, referring to Eastern Protestants, “is enjoying the fruit of the land that we inherited from our fathers.” With this, the archbishop subtly transitioned from the Mexican “we” to the Catholic “we,” thereby reclaiming the American Southwest for American Catholics. “After being robbed of our earthly heritage, are we to be deprived of our heavenly birthright also?”

Pitival began by invoking the familiar image of the West in the mind of the Northeasterner but ended by reminding his audience that this territory, in fact, had a Catholic past. His embrace of the Spanish Catholic past was an important part of building an American Catholic missionary ethos in the early twentieth century.

Catholic borderlands were the areas like Pitival’s New Mexico where the Spanish Catholic past and the U.S. Catholic present were layered to create a uniquely American Catholic phenomenon. Father Francis Kelley, founding president of the Catholic Church Extension Society, was the main architect of this American Catholic spirit. He built on the legacy of the Spanish Catholic friars who founded the missions dotting the southwest centuries earlier, and risked life and limb tending to the souls of the indigenous not only on the North American continent, but in Puerto Rico and the Philippines as well. Kelley and the Extension Society provided financial support to Catholic missionaries from all over the world – Pitival was French – to carry out the American civilizing mission at the rugged edges of the American national landscape.

Extension Magazine Cover — Extension magazine cover. May 1907

This activity reaffirmed what they saw as the inherent Catholicity of theses places. At the same time, their projects conferred “Americanness” to those funding them: urban, Euro-American Catholics. In the early twentieth century, many Catholics were still treated as foreigners or as questionably American due to their presumed loyalty to the Pope before the President. Their participation in these mission projects, however, allowed American Catholics to assert their claim to Americanness by taming the West and far-off U.S. territories in the name of Catholicism and American empire.

motorchapels — The Extension Society purchased Motor Chapels for priests in far-flung territories. The rear of the chapel car opened up to provide an altar and sometimes a canopy to shade parishioners during Mass. The priest not only traveled from mission to mission in this vehicle, but could also sleep in it. Motor Chapels like these allowed priests to cover large mission fields in the US south and west. Top: Belto’s Mine, Texas, n.d. Bottom: Salado, Texas, 1913.

This vision of the borderlands recognizes that it is more than a single geographic space along the U.S.-Mexico border. Rather, the borderlands encompasses a wider swath of American interaction with Spanish peoples in asserting influence and control. The United States coveted Spanish and former-Spanish territories in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The link between American expansion and Protestantization guaranteed that religious tensions would ensue as American government and Protestant religious bodies established themselves in these predominantly Catholic spaces. Francis Kelley orchestrated an American Catholic intervention in Mexico that addressed these issues: protect Mexican Catholics from the Protestant poachers moving in to corrupt vulnerable Catholic souls and restore the natural order – Catholicism – to this space on the fringe of the American empire.

Father Kelley’s project gave Catholics a complicated role in American empire in the early twentieth century. Wielding Mexico’s religious crisis as a sword, American Catholics simultaneously benefited from and sought to undermine various aspects of American expansion. Catholics were pleased with formal and informal annexation of former Spanish territories through the Spanish-American War and interventions in Mexico. However, they resisted cultural aspects of American empire, in particular the spread of Protestantism, and they fought to sustain Catholic souls in the face of Americanization and proselytizing efforts.

Photos like this one, in Aguado, Puerto Rico, were shown in Extension Magazine to remind readers – Catholics all over the United States — that if they did not attend to Catholics in remote areas of the American empire, their churches might end up like the earliest Spanish Catholic Churches in the New World – abandoned and crumbling, just as Archbishop Pitival had described. Kelley used Extension Magazine to urge relatively well-off Catholics, mostly in the Northeast and Midwest, to support their less fortunate brethren in the South, West, and throughout the American empire.

Anne M. Martínez, Catholic Borderlands: Mapping Catholicism onto American Empire, 1905-1935.

Anne Martínez taught US Borderlands and Mexican-American history at the University of Texas at Austin. She is now in the Department of American Studies at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands.

For more reading on the Catholic borderlands, look here on our books page.

Featured image:A procession of Mexican Catholics in Benavides, Texas in 1915, likely celebrating a saint’s day.
All photographs courtesy of University Archives and Special Collections, Loyola University of Chicago.

Digital History: Resources

Would you like to learn more about Digital History?

Don’t know where to start?

Here are some ideas:

General Books:

Daniel Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig, Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving and Presenting the Past on the Web (2006)
Roy Rosenzweig, Clio Wired: The Future of the Past in the Digital Age(2011)
Jack Dougherty and Kristen Nawrotzki, eds. Writing History in the Digital Age (2012)
Toni Weller, History in the Digital Age (2013).
Daniel J. Cohen and Tom Schienfeldt, eds., Hacking the Academy: New Approaches to Scholarship and Teaching from the Digital Humanities(2013)
Matthew K. Gold, editor, Debates in the Digital Humanities (website version) and book version
From Ben Schmidt’s blog

Data Visualization.

Mia Ridge’s DV workshop. There are many good intros, but this one includes ways to teach DV in the classroom.
Free tools for DV (one of many sources: here’s another)
Ben Schmidt’s Historical Data Visualizations (and his blog, one of the best for learning about what you can do with D for H)
Caleb McDaniels’ Digital History Tools

3. A couple Digital History projects

Digital History at Stanford: one of the pioneers in digital history projects, mostly mapping.
Vincent Brown, Slave Revolt in Jamaica
The New Archive on Not Even Past (articles on interesting digital projects)
Maria José Afanador-Llach recounted her experiences at the Digitalization Workshop in Venice

“Keep up!” Follow Recent Developments in DH.

Digital Humanities Now (another project of the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason. Here is the center’s homepage).
h + d insights is a weekly newsletter of the HyperStudio, the Digital Humanities program at MIT.
Twitter: Not Even Past’s “List” of Digital History accounts on Twitter

Conferences and Summer Programs

Digital Humanties Summer Institute: (Univ of Victoria) (they have scholarships too)
That Camps (self-organized, “un-conferences”) AHA THATcamp (January 2015)
UCLA (2014) Summer Seminar
UCBerkeley (2014)

LOTS MORE READING

Joan Neuberger’s intro to DH: “Digital History: A Primer (Part I)” and “Digital History: A Primer (Part 2).”
(includes lists of blogs and websites doing Digital History of various kinds)

Kelly O’Neill’s syllabus (Harvard, 2013): Digital History from 101 to 3.0
(google “Digital History Syllabus” for many more)

Episode 58: Islam’s First Civil War

In 7th century Arabia, the Islamic community was nearly torn apart by a civil war over the assassination of the third caliph, Uthman ibn Affan (d. 656), and the accession to the caliphate of Muhammad’s adopted son Ali, supported by Uthman’s assassins. The events of the first fitna, as it is known, are often portrayed as a struggle over the right to rule the Islamic community, but it was much more—a power struggle between Muhammad’s wife Aisha and Ali, and a dispute over who had the right to avenge the murder of Uthman.

In picking up where Episode 57 left off, guest Shahrzad Ahmadi describes this tragic turn of events that sent shockwaves through the nascent Islamic community, and that continue to reverberate today.

International History and the Global United States: More to Read

by Mark A. Lawrence

Dennis Merrill and Thomas G. Paterson, editors, Major Problems in American Foreign Relations (Houghton Mifflin, 5^th edition, 2002). This pathbreaking collection, widely assigned in undergraduate classes, blends primary-source documents with excerpts from scholarly works that take contrasting positions on key interpretive questions. In this way, the book gives students a sense of scholarly debates along with a small amount of original material to use in assessing them.

Jussi Hanhimäki and Odd Arne Westad, editors, The Cold War: A History in Documents and Eyewitness Accounts (Oxford University Press, 2003). As the title suggests, this collection has a relatively narrow chronological focus – just the Cold War years from the 1940s to 1989. But it is admirably broad in other respects, collecting material from numerous countries and blending high-level policy documents with reminiscences by ordinary people.

Michael D. Gambone, editor, Documents of American Diplomacy (Greenwood Press, 2002). This collection contains an impressive 167 documents reaching from the Declaration of Independence to the Clinton presidency. All of the classics of American decision-making are here, making it an excellent choice for anyone trying to track down documents of indisputable significance.

Mark Atwood Lawrence, editor, The Vietnam War: An International History in Documents (Oxford University Press, 2014). Compiled by UT-Austin’s Mark Lawrence, this book collects documents from just a single episode in the history of U.S. foreign relations – the Vietnam War. But it brings together material from the United States with documents from Vietnam, China, and elsewhere.

Jeremi Suri, editor, Foreign Relations of the United States Since 1898 (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010). Compiled by UT-Austin’s Jeremi Suri, this book collects approximately 50 documents, nearly all of them American. It’s one of the best brief collections for classroom purposes.

The Global United States

By Mark A. Lawrence

For many students, the most exciting thing about history is not the scholarly monographs that we spend years researching and writing and they are often expected to read. Rather, many students are most intensely drawn to the study of the past by reading and analyzing primary sources – the original documents that constitute the raw material of history.

Primary documents can sweep us into the past, giving us direct access to the words, cadences, biases, insights, and passions of remote historical actors. History comes alive, and voices whisper across chasms of time, space, and perception. In the best case, such material can enable students to make their own judgments about the past and to weigh the claims of scholars.

To promote the study of primary source material in my field, the history of U.S. foreign relations, I teamed up with two colleagues over the last few years to compile a volume of documents that we hope will inspire students to delve further into the subject.

The book, America in the World: A History in Documents from the War with Spain to the War on Terror, encompasses about 125 years of history. It charts the rise of the United States from a peripheral, comparatively weak power in the late nineteenth century to the pinnacle of its military, diplomatic, and cultural influence in the early twenty-first. How and why did this momentous transformation occur? Who resisted and why? What were the attitudes of foreign nations as the United States became a great power of the first order and then surpassed them all?

Via 228 documents, the book helps answer these questions by inviting readers to consider the opinions and pronouncements of some of the people who took part in American policymaking and witnessed the American rise to power. Other historians have published collections of primary-source material on American foreign relations before. But our collection is new and different in at least three respects.

800px-The_Administration's_Promises_Have_Been_Kept — 1900 campaign poster celebrating American imperial expansion

First, the book covers a relatively long period of time. Whereas most document collections focus on particular segments of this period, especially the Cold War, our book reveals and explores continuities across the larger flow of time, including the recent post-Cold War years. In fact, the collection features two chapters on the period since 1989, enabling readers to consider contemporary dilemmas faced by the Bush and Obama administrations in light of historical experience.

Second, the collection reflects key recent trends in the study of U.S. foreign relations. In recent decades, diplomatic historians have increasingly called into question the tendency among an older generation to write histories of U.S. policymaking on the basis of U.S. sources alone. Scholars should strive for a truly international kind of history that sets U.S. behavior within an international context and, by making use of foreign archives, views the United States through the eyes of foreign governments and peoples. Diplomatic historians in recent years have also called into question the field’s traditional focus on elite policymakers. Increasingly, scholars have recognized the need to take account of popular opinion and the influences of powerful people outside of government.

ellington6b — Duke Ellington in the Soviet Union, 1971. Ellington and his orchestra encountered a vibrant – if still partially underground – jazz scene and played with Russian musicians in both official and unofficial capacities. The band leader’s Soviet tour followed the announcement of the upcoming and historic trip to the USSR by President Richard Nixon, a pianist and avid jazz fan.

Our book takes account of both of these critiques of diplomatic history. To be sure, we include many documents reflecting the views of elite American policymakers – presidential declarations, policy memoranda, diplomatic dispatches, are still important sources. But we intermingle this kind of material, which has been the sole focus of nearly all the existing document readers in U.S. foreign relations, with two other kinds of documents: some reflecting foreign perceptions of the United States and others reflecting the opinions of Americans outside policymaking circles – clergymen, cartoonists, musicians, novelists, polemicists, and others.

Third, the book features relatively tight thematic coherence. There is, of course, an infinite number of documents that could reasonably have gone into our book. We handled the problem of over-abundance partly by building each chapter around a single interpretive question that guided our selections. Our chapters are not, that is, mere compilations of important documents related to a general topic or time period – the usual approach in document books. Rather, the chapters contain documents reflecting various perspectives on an interpretive problem that scholars have identified as crucial to understanding U.S. foreign relations. For example, the chapter on the great Cold War crisis of the early 1960s asks why the East-West conflict became so dangerous at that particular time. The chapter on the 1990s, asks how the United States reoriented its foreign policy following the collapse of the enemy that had given shape and purpose to American diplomacy for decades.

Coca-Cola_Morocco — Coca Cola in Morocco

Following this approach, we place conflicting points of view in dialogue with one another to show the development of particular sets of ideas over time. While this approach means that we pass over some important questions, it does, we hope, enhance the book’s appeal by giving the chapters a clear logic and flow.

Whether we have achieved our goals is for readers to decide. But one thing that I and my co-editors – Jeffrey A. Engel of Southern Methodist University and Andrew Preston of Cambridge University – can say for sure is that the book was no small undertaking. Although all three of us pursued other projects at the same time, locating, selecting, editing, and writing introductory material for 223 documents took far longer than we had anticipated – nearly a decade, in fact.

But we’re pleased with the end result, and we hope that innumerable students – and perhaps other readers interested in America’s foreign relations – will use it in the years ahead to find inspiration for the study of history.

Jeffrey A. Engel, Mark A. Lawrence, and Andrew Preston, eds., America in the World: A History in Documents from the War with Spain to the War on Terror

Mark Lawrence’s suggestions for Further Reading can be found here.

Episode 57: The Succession to Muhammad

Nearly every world history textbook on the market explains the origins of sectarianism in the Islamic world as a dispute over the succession to Muhammad. Sunnis, they say, wanted an egalitarian society in which the leader was chosen from the people; the Shi’a, however, wanted the leadership of the nascent Islamic community to remain within Muhammad’s family. It seems simple—but is it really?

In the first of a series on the origins in Sectarianism in Islam, UT’s Shahrzad Ahmadi expands on this vastly oversimplified version of the story to introduce us to the key players involved—and to the intense rivalry between Aisha, Muhammad’s favorite wife, and his adopted son Ali.

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The historical value of black life and the casual killing of Eric Garner.

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