Joan Neuberger, Author at Not Even Past

The Countess’s Cats

by Douglas Cushing

Francesca Consagra, curator of In the Company of Cats and Dogs at the Blanton Museum of Art, has observed that felines and canines in art are rarely mere props. More than decoration, their presence serves a meaningful purpose. These creatures may represent human endeavors, moralities, values, and behaviors. Alternately, their image may signify the lives and conditions of individual animals themselves, or entire categories of such animals, existing in domestic relationships with humans, as suppliers of labor, or even as a sources of food. Animals in art offer novel and useful ways to understand historical trends and events. Within this exhibition, an excellent example of how cats provide charged and multifaceted meanings in a work of art, is a hand-colored, soft-ground etching by James Gillray entitled The Injured Count, S. __ (c. 1786).

James Gillray, The Injured Count S. ____, (c. 1786). Hand-colored soft-ground etching. Blanton Museum of Art (used with permission).

The print depicts the buxom Countess of Strathmore, Mary Eleanor Bowes, blithely suckling two greedy cats as she drinks wine or liquor with a pockmarked companion. A child at her side bawls, “I wish I was a cat / my mama would love me then.” Despite its curious scenario, the print reflects the tendency towards pet keeping that emerged in Enlightenment England. It also points to the Western historical-symbolic relationship between femininity and felinity, the status of women in late eighteenth-century England, and the machinations of power that played out in arenas of class and gender.

Gillray was a satirist working in a field that frequently burlesqued Georgian women, especially prominent ones.. The last four decades of the eighteenth century, when he was at work, are frequently thought to be the high point of English satirical printmaking. Here, the artist—something of a hired gun in the day—was likely fulfilling a commission that joined a series of attacks leveled against the countess. At the far left margin of the print, Gillray depicts her forsaken husband, Andrew Robinson Stoney, surveying a map of the countess’s estate. Stoney later changed his surname to Bowes, fulfilling the wishes of his wife’s father as expressed in his will. This name change traded the military associations with his family name for the more politically and socially recognized Bowes name, ultimately helping him to gain a position as M.P. for Newcastle. Stoney, however, was actually a fortune seeker, who, coveting the Countess’s wealth and social advantage, had tricked her into marriage. Widowed by John Lyon, the Earl of Strathmore, the lady’s dowager status gave her the right to own property—something denied to married women. This included the sizable inheritance she had brought into the marriage, which attracted Stoney. Staging a duel against a libelous newspaper editor in defense of the countess’s honor, Stoney emerged wounded. Under the pretense of a dying wish, he asked the countess’s hand in marriage. She agreed, and once married, Stoney recovered miraculously.Unbeknownst to him, however, her fortune had been deeded into the care of trustees. Stoney soon began to abuse his new wife physically and mentally. In time, the countess sought a divorce. She won preliminarily in an ecclesiastical court, but Stoney conspired to kidnap her and keep her hidden. Stoney also employed mendacious newspaper stories and satirical prints in an attempt to sway public opinion against the countess. When she eventually escaped and continued proceedings, the utter reprehensibility of Stoney’s actions secured a divorce.

The cats in this print likely represent the countess’s actual pets, Angelica and Jacintha. Tellingly, Stoney had lamented in a courtship letter that he was not one of her cats, musing, “. . . were I Proteus, I would instantly transform myself, to be happy that I was stroked and caressed like them, by you.” Gillray twisted Stoney’s sentiment in order to depict Mary Ellen Bowes as a bad mother who preferred her cats to her children. In truth, both Stoney and her previous husband’s family had cruelly separated her children from her at length. In addition to the accusation of being a poor mother, the presence of the licentious footman, beckoning her to bed, suggests that she is an adulterous wife. Infidelity was one of the reasons argued for divorce in eighteenth-century England, though marriage was generally held to be inviolable. The best that most people wishing a divorce could expect from the ecclesiastical courts of the day was a legal separation allowing a couple to live independent lives without dissolving the marriage itself. Full annulments were rarely granted to men, and almost never to women. Occasionally, after the ecclesiastical courts refused to dissolve certain marriages, special dispensations from Parliament (in the form of acts) permitted individual-case divorces. Such legislation was usually aimed at safeguarding fortunes from “bad” women and illegitimate children.

The lives of Andrew Robinson Bowes, Esq. and the Countess of Strathmore, written from thirty-three years professional attendance, from letters, and other well authenticated documents. By Jesse Foot Published 1810 for Becket and Porter, and Sherwood, Neely, and Jones, by J. Bryan in London. Available from Open Library

As symbols, cats reiterate these social constructions of femininity that is motherly if it is good, and morally negligent—wanton, desiring, willful, chaotic, and vicious—if it is ill. Cats often connoted immoral femininity, following a tradition that emerged from the concatenation of felines, Satan, and witchcraft from at least by the early thirteenth century until the Enlightenment in the eighteenth century. Above the countess in the print, Gillray places a painting of Messalina, one of antiquity’s most scandalous women, so as to reinforce the negative characterization of the countess. .

Gillray’s anthropomorphized cats also stand for what they are—pets. By the eighteenth century, the former luxury of keeping pets was practiced at all levels of society. And by the middle of the following century, cats would easily eclipse dogs as favorite pets in London. In this regard, the countess’s cats reflect the real tendencies of keeping pets and the growing popularity of felines in Georgian England.

Yet, in Gillray’s Injured Count, S., both woman and cat represent ideas of illicit femininity. A woman’s proper role in the day, enforced by a male-governed society, was foremost as a wife and mother, and in the late eighteenth century, breastfeeding was a sign of a good mother. Gillray’s 1796 The Fashionable Mamma,—or—the Convenience of Modern Dress lampoons an aristocratic woman, who, dressed in a skimpy, high-fashion gown, dispassionately suckles her child while her coach, visible through a window, waits to shuttle her away. A painting above her head entitled “Maternal Love” offers a foil, depicting a peasant woman who lovingly nurses her child in a natural landscape. The distinction between the dispassionate aristocratic mother, authentic natural mother, and the countess unnaturally suckling her cats, speaks volumes.

Listen to Francesca Consagra discuss the exhibit and the roles of cats and dogs in history on a podcast episode of 15 Minute History.

Read more about pets, marriage, and satirical prints in early modern England:

Anna Clark, Scandal: The Sexual Politics of the British Constitution (2004)

Adrian Franklin, Animals and Modern Cultures: A Sociology of Human-Animal Relations in Modernity (1999)

Richard Godfrey, James Gillray: The Art of Caricature (2001)

Draper Hill, The Satirical Etchings of James Gillray (1976)

Linda Hults, The Witch as Muse: Art, Gender, and Power in Early Modern Europe (2005)

Cindy McCreedy, The Satirical Gaze: Prints of Women in Late Eighteenth-Century England (2004)

Wendy Moore, Wedlock (2009)

Oliver Ross McGregor, Divorce in England, A Centenary Study, (1957)

Walter Stephens, Demon Lovers: Witchcraft, Sex, and the Crisis of Belief (2002)

Douglas Cushing earned his BFA at the Rhode Island School of Design and his MA in art history at the University of Texas at Austin. His master’s thesis, written under the supervision of Linda Dalrymple Henderson, examines Marcel Duchamp’s relationship with the writings of the Comte de Lautréamont. Douglas is currently a PhD student in art history at the University of Texas at Austin and the Andrew W. Mellon Fellow in Prints and Drawings, and European Paintings at the Blanton Museum of Art.

Episode 53: Cats and Dogs in History

Our first episode of season 3 features the curator of the exhibition In the Company of Cats and Dogs. We consider some of the inherent personalities and temperaments of these animals as well as those imposed or projected by humans onto them. Throughout history, these animals have been viewed and represented as family members, hunters of prey, strays, and as figures and symbols in mythological, religious, political, and moral images.

Guest Francesca Consagra helps us make connections across centuries and genres and underscores our complex relationships to these animals, revealing the many ways in which they say as much about us as we do about them.

Carved in Stone: What Architecture Can Tell Us about the Sectarian History of Islam

By Stephennie Mulder

Syria – birthplace of civilization, home of the first alphabet and the earliest cities, land that bears the spectacular architectural imprint of empires from the ancient Hittites, to Alexander, to Rome, to the Ottomans – is now a country synonymous with civil war, fanaticism, and unspeakable brutality. The stories coming out of contemporary Syria are horrifying and heartbreaking, and, we’re often told, have their roots, in part, in a primeval sectarian conflict between Islam’s two main sects, the Sunnis and the Shi’is. Sectarian conflict, it is said, has raged for 1,400 years, since the founding of Islam in the 7th century. This truism is usually accepted uncritically by the media, is common in popular discourse about the Islamic world, and, as we’ve seen in recent months, is also one embraced by violent extremist groups like the Islamic State (IS), who use it to justify heinous acts of cruelty against minority groups. But it’s worth pausing for a moment to imagine how it would look if a similar narrative were applied elsewhere: if today’s tensions between, say, Turkey and Europe were said to stem from an ancient conflict between the Holy Roman Emperor Charlemagne and the Byzantine Empress Irene. Attributing modern sectarian conflict in the Middle East to events that transpired in the 7th century is every bit as nonsensical.

One reason for the continuity of this narrative of unending conflict is that it’s a tale frequently told in the medieval Arabic texts themselves. In this version, the key moment was the Battle of Karbala in Iraq in AD 680, when Sunnis martyred al-Husayn, the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad and leader of the early group of Shi’i partisans, and took his head and his family members in chains back to Damascus, capital of the triumphant Sunni Umayyad Caliphate. The Sunnis prevailed and the Shi’is became a persecuted minority, devoted to the Prophet’s family, which they marked by the proliferation of a culture of shrine building and veneration. Another pivotal episode in this text-based narrative occurred between the 11th and 13th centuries. The Arabic sources call this the era of “Sunni Revival,” for it saw the demise of the last Shi’i caliphate and the final entrenchment of Sunnism as the predominant sect in most regions of the Islamic world.

But architectural historians don’t rely only on texts alone, and in this case, the history of architecture in Syria reveals a somewhat different tale. If we let the buildings speak, some vivid contradictions to the familiar narrative arise. For example, we learn that the period of Sunni Revival in Syria was, counterintuitively, the one in which the largest number of “Shi’i” shrines were built, some 40 of which survive into the contemporary period. And, we find that these “Shi’i” shrines were endowed, patronized, and visited by both Sunnis and Shi’is: in many cases, by some of Islam’s most illustrious Sunni rulers. Far from being vanquished during the Sunni Revival, Shi’ism may well have been the dominant sect in northern Syria in the 11th-13th centuries. Although episodes of conflict are certainly part of the sectarian history of Islam, it would seem there’s another tale too. Looking at architecture reveals an equally important past marked by cooperation and accommodation.

Magnificent 12th century shrine, Mashad al-Husayn, in Aleppo surrounded by modern buildings. The red-roofed structure in the shrine’s courtyard was built to provide shade for today’s pilgrims.

Let’s take as an example a shrine in northern Syria and read it through the eyes of an architectural historian. The building in question is the Mashhad al-Husayn, dedicated to the Prophet’s martyred grandson, who was also one of the Imams, the perfect and infallible religious leaders of the Shi’a. On aesthetic grounds alone, the Mashhad al-Husayn is one of the most spectacular buildings of the 12th-13th centuries, but despite its magnificence, it has rarely been studied. Imagine for a moment that Chartres Cathedral had been largely ignored by architectural historians, and you’ll get a sense of how peculiar this is. The reason probably has something to do with the fact that the standard, conflict-driven narrative had no room for the construction of such a monumental “Shi’i” building during the era of Sunni revival.

Interior, Mashhad al-Husayn

The story of this shrine begins in the year 1177, when a shepherd sat on a high hill overlooking the medieval city of Aleppo in northern Syria. His name was Abdallah and he was from a poor neighborhood of immigrants. Abdallah had just returned from the noon prayer at the mosque and, from his perch in the warm sun atop the mountain, he could see his sheep and hear their tinkling bells as they cropped the green shrubs and yellowing grass that grew down the hillside. On the horizon, inside the stout medieval walls newly rebuilt by the son of the great Saladin – the Sunni Muslim general who would soon recapture Jerusalem and evict the Crusaders from the Holy Land – the towering mass of the ancient fortified Citadel shouldered its way toward the sky. Below the Citadel, the vast, labyrinthine suq (market) sprawled for miles in colorful, chaotic splendor under shady, vaulted-stone passageways, testimony to Aleppo’s long history as a vibrant and cosmopolitan trade entrepôt, a key terminus of the Silk Route that linked China to the ports of the Mediterranean.

Ancient Citadel, Aleppo (Memorino via Wikipedia)

In the heat of the afternoon, Abdallah began to doze off. As he slipped into a dream, he had a strange vision. Nearby, a man emerged from a cleft in the rock and ordered in a commanding voice: “Tell the people of Aleppo to build a shrine here and call it the Mashhad al-Husayn (a grandson of the Prophet Muhammad)!” Abdallah awoke, and, awestruck at the miraculous vision, dropped his shepherd’s staff and ran to the suq, where he began recounting the miracle and exhorting the city’s inhabitants to come build a shrine. Excited crowds quickly gathered and, inspired by the vision of the humble shepherd, organized themselves for the task. Within days, groups of volunteers were created, workdays were assigned, and soon, the merchants of Aleppo had arranged a surcharge on their goods to provide funding for the project. Not long afterwards, the shrine gained some more illustrious patrons. The mayor of the city of Aleppo himself built an elaborate portal and, a few years later, in 1196, that portal was torn down and replaced by an even more spectacular one built by Aleppo’s Sunni governor, al-Malik al-Zahir, the son of Saladin. Thus, even the Arabic textual sources reveal much that complicates the narrative of perpetual conflict. We learn, for example, that the shrine was an intra-sectarian project, and that it was built by elites and commoners alike. What more can we deduce using the methods of an architectural historian?

Portal of al-Zahir, Mashad al-Husayn

We can begin by observing some formal elements of the building. The portal built by al-Zahir was higher and taller than almost every other medieval architectural portal in Syria and it was ornamented with a particularly exquisite kind of radiating, inlaid-stone interlace pattern on the outer face, married with a complex type of three-dimensional, interlocking, faceted stone ornament called muqarnas on the interior. In other words, al-Zahir’s portal was a monument meant to awe and astonish. Above all, it was something that the Sunni ruler, al-Zahir, was proud to sponsor and build alongside the Shi’i residents of Aleppo, and as if to confirm this, he emblazoned his name over the entrance on a large, square foundation plaque. Thus we can already see that al-Zahir wanted to emphasize that through the process of its construction and ornamentation, the Mashhad al-Husayn became not a “Shi’i shrine,” but rather a monument to pragmatic cooperation centered on a sentiment shared by both sects: reverence for the Prophet’s family. Indeed, as if to drive the point home, al-Zahir left yet another inscription.

Detail, Inscription Praising Rightly-Guided Caliphs

This one wrapped around the portal’s entrance façade and was located just under the heads of visitors entering the shrine. It bore a remarkable message, for it named the twelve Imams of the Shi’a alongside the four Rightly Guided Caliphs of the Sunnis, and, by using calligraphy of similar size and style and directly juxtaposing the two inscriptions, it visually equated the two groups of holy men. At the end, in clear, bold script, he wrote an unambiguously worded entreaty: “May God be pleased with all the Companions of His Prophet.” And with these words, al-Zahir carved in stone a sentiment that powerfully reflects the nuanced, negotiated sectarian history of Islam in Syria and elsewhere in the Islamic world.

Stephennie Mulder is Assistant Professor in the Department of Art and Art History at UT Austin. This essay comes from her new book, The Shrines of the ‘Alids in Medieval Syria: Sunnies, Shi’is and the Architecture of Coexistence

Photographs are by the author, except where noted.

Further reading on the history of Islam and on sectarian co-existence in the Middle East may be found here.

Previous articles on Not Even Past on the history of Islam are listed here.

Medieval Islam and its Monuments

Want to learn more about the monuments, beliefs, and lives of medieval Islam?

Here are Stephennie Mulder’s suggestions for further reading.

Ross Burns, Monuments of Syria: A Guide

Ross Burns also has a website, Monuments of Syria, with a list of recently damaged monuments:

Alain Chenevière, Syria: Cradle of Civilizations

Jonathan Berkey, The Formation of Islam: Religion and Society in the Near East, 600-1800

Yasser Tabbaa, Constructions of Power and Piety in Medieval Aleppo

Najam Haider, Shi’i Islam: an Introduction

Teresa Bernheimer, The Alids: First Family of Islam

Tariq al-Jamil, Power and Knowledge in Medieval Islam

Usama ibn Munqidh: The Book of Contemplation: Islam and the Crusades

Show & Tell: The Video Essay as History Assignment

From the editor: As our thoughts turn back to teaching, Not Even Past turns back to some of our posts from 2013-14 about new and best teaching experiences. (August 15, 2014)

As the school year comes to a close, we end our series of monthly features on teaching history with a creative assignment devised by one of our US History professors. Instead of assigning only written or oral work, Robert Olwell was one of a handful of History faculty who asked their students to make video essays on specific topics related to the course. On this page, Olwell tells us about the assignment and we include some of the best of the videos his students created. Below we link to the instructions Olwell gave to the students. And throughout the month of May, we will post video essays our students produced in other History Department courses. (May 1, 2014)

By Robert Olwell

In the fall of 2013 I taught the first half of the US history survey course (HIS 315K), which offers a treatment of the major themes of American History from 1492-1865. There was nothing unusual in this. I have taught 315K at least once a year (and often twice) since I came to UT twenty years ago. The course is designed as a lecture course, with assigned readings, and four in-class essay exams. The enrollment is generally 320 students. This time however, my enrollment was capped at only 160. The relatively small number allowed me to conduct a pedagogical experiment. In addition to their individual written essay exams, I assigned each of my students the task of working with three classmates to create a short “video essay.” Their task might fairly be described as a producing a brief research report in which they present their findings not on paper but on the screen. My hope was to enlist students’ familiarity and fascination with digital media in the cause of history and pedagogy.

In order to keep control of the project, I made several command decisions. First, I divided the class into forty teams of four students each. I allowed students no choice of partners but simply used the class roll and the alphabet to make the groups (hence team members’ last names often start with the same letter). Second, I gave the groups no choice as to their topic. I created a list of forty topics that I deemed suitable (i.e., could easily be presented in a four-five minute video) and assigned one topic to each group.

As the rubric that I posted for the assignment indicates, by far the most important part of their task was the first one: writing the “script.” In late October, my Teaching Assistants and I poured over the forty, ten-page- long scripts. (Each TA looked at ten scripts and I looked at all of them.) Our aim was to offer historical critiques and suggestions, and to make sure the students were on the right track as regards sources, bibliography, and so on. We acted more as “historical consultants” to their projects than as producers. Having never made or posted a video myself, I could offer them little or no assistance in that regard. Instead, I relied on the students’ own facility with visual and digital media to carry them through. (Having watched my two teen-aged daughters produce videos both as school projects and for fun, I rightly suspected my students would be more than capable of fulfilling this part of the assignment on their own.)

Overall, I would judge the “video essay” project to have been a great success. In their peer evaluations most students agreed; some wrote that it was the most interesting thing they had ever done in a history class. The standard of the finished videos was quite high (the average grade was a B+). There were some difficulties, of course. Some of the groups did not work well together and some students did not pull their weight. The final part of the assignment, peer evaluation, was included to address this possibility. However, most groups did cooperate effectively and I used the peer evaluations as often to reward those students acknowledged by their teammates to have been project leaders, as to punish the slackers.

Would I do it again? Yes, but. Next time, I would probably make the project optional (perhaps replacing one of the written exams), and allow students to make their own teams and choose their own projects.

Here is the assignment sheet and rubric that I handed out to the students.

And here are the six video essays that I deemed the best of the forty produced by my students last fall.

Cahokia
By Valerie Salina, Jeffrey A. Sendejar, Victor Seth, and Sharmin Sharif

The 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry Regiment (1863-65)
By Madeline Christensen, Nathan Cliett, Rebecca Coughlin, and Corbin Cruz

Anne Hutchinson
By Justin Gardner, Rishi Garg, Yanni Georghiades, and Rachelle Gerstner

The Book Of Negroes
By Will Wood, Anfernee Young, Qin Zhang, and Sally Zhang

Dr. Josiah Nott
By Salina Rosales, Felipe Rubin, and Hunter Ruffin

New Amsterdam
By Evan Taylor-Adair, Oliver Thompson, Kimberly Tobias, and Reynaldo Torres Arellano

Watch for more student videos in the coming weeks.

In the meantime, revisit Blake Scott’s examination of the coming of tourism to the Panamanian rain forest: I am Tourism/Yo soy Turismo

And check out other stories on teaching and learning:

Also by Robert Olwell, You Say You Want a Revolution? Reenacting History in the Classroom

Video assignments by Jacqueline Jones, Students Debating History: Another Look at the Video Essay

Penne Restad and Karl Hagstrom Miller on Teaching

Why We Don’t Go to the Moon Anymore: The Space Program and the Challenge to Scientific Thinking

by Matthew Tribbe

This month marks the forty-fifth anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. To understand Apollo’s place in history, it might be helpful to go back forty-four rather than forty-five years, to the very first anniversary of the event in 1970. That July, several newspapers conducted informal surveys that revealed large majorities of Americans could no longer remember the name of Neil Armstrong, the first man to walk on the moon. This does not mean they forgot the event — few who watched it ever forgot the event — but it suggests that we need to reconsider what Apollo meant to Americans at the time, and what it can tell us about the history of the 1960s and 1970s.

Dave Eggers’s new novel, Your Fathers, Where Are They? And the Prophets, Do They Live Forever?, opens with a disturbed man peppering an astronaut he has kidnapped with questions about why the United States has not revisited the moon since the early 1970s. America, Eggers’s protagonist complains, is not living up to its promise — a failure seen clearly in its betrayal of the space program. This is a common complaint among the many Americans who yearn to return to an aggressive program of human exploration, and to whom it makes no sense that the United States called it quits after the Apollo program ended in 1972.

The truth is, sending men to the moon in 1969 did not make sense to a majority of Americans in the first place, let alone continuing with an ambitious effort to send astronauts on to Mars or permanent space colonies, as advocates urged. In fact, with the exception of a brief period following Apollo 11, poll after poll in the late 1960s revealed a public that disapproved of the high cost of the moon race, the rush to complete it before 1970, and the misplaced priorities it represented. Beneath all the celebratory rhetoric and vague notions that Apollo somehow changed everything, was a realization that it really had not changed much at all. It certainly did not inaugurate any “new era” in history, as many assumed it would. Instead, Americans grew indifferent to the program shortly after the first landing, as the rapid dismissal of Armstrong from the national consciousness indicated. In 1970, the final three planned Apollo missions — what would have been Apollos 18, 19, and 20 — were cancelled, and few Americans complained.

Space advocates in the 1970s envisioned a near future of Mars missions and permanent space colonies, like the one pictured here. With public and political support dwindling, however, NASA had to settle for the technologically impressive but much less ambitious shuttle program. Courtesy NASA Ames Research Center

What happened? Why didn’t Apollo even complete its original plan of ten moon landings, let alone fundamentally alter history? There are some obvious reasons. The Cold War, Apollo’s original impetus, had eased considerably by the late 1960s, and with the moon race won there was little interest in continuing an expensive crash program of exploration. There were also more pressing social issues (and a divisive war) to deal with at the time, eroding NASA’s budget and scuttling any ambitious post-Apollo agenda.

But there is another significant reason why human space exploration not only waned after Apollo but also why Apollo itself failed to have the impact most expected it would: cultural changes in the late 1960s undermined interest in the kind of progress Apollo symbolized. By 1969, the Space Age values that were associated with Apollo — faith in rational progress, optimism that science and technology would continue to propel the nation toward an ever brighter future — were being challenged not just by a growing skepticism of technology, which was expressed throughout popular and intellectual culture, but by a broader anti-rationalist backlash that first emerged in the counterculture before becoming mainstream by the early 1970s.

This anti-rationalism, and its penetration into mainstream culture, can be seen in the reaction to Apollo of one well-known American: Charles Lindbergh. Life — the magazine of Middle America — in 1969 asked Lindbergh to pen a reflection on Apollo. He refused, and instead sent a letter that Life published in which he claimed he no longer believed rationality was the proper path to understanding the universe. “In instinct rather than intellect lay the cosmic plan of life,” he wrote, anticipating not further space travel of the Apollo variety, but, in language reminiscent of the mystical ending of the contemporaneous 2001: A Space Odyssey, “voyages inconceivable by our 20th century rationality . . . through peripheries untouched by time and space.” “Will we discover that only without spaceships can we reach the galaxies?” he asked in closing, and his answer was yes: “To venture beyond the fantastic accomplishments of this physically fantastic age, sensory perception must combine with the extrasensory. . . . I believe it is through sensing and thinking about such concepts that great adventures of the future will be found.”

Lindbergh was far from alone with these sentiments, as evidenced by the overwhelmingly positive letters to the editor they drew. American culture by 1969 was moving away from the rationality that undergirded the Apollo missions, as Americans began investing more importance in non-rational perspectives — in religion and mysticism, mystery and magic; in meditation or ecstatic prayer rather than in shooting men to the moon, in journeys of personal discovery over journeys to other planets. Apollo was thrilling to most who watched it, but it failed to offer sufficient deeper meaning in a culture that was beginning to eschew the rationalist version of progress it represented.

So, why didn’t Apollo make a bigger splash? Why did it mark the end of an era of human exploration rather than the beginning? In short, “the Sixties” happened, and the space program has never recovered. It is entirely possible that, when viewed from its 100th or (if we last so long) 1000th anniversary, Apollo will indeed be considered the beginning of a space-faring era that is yet to come. In the meantime, understanding the retreat away from the Space Age’s rationalist culture not only helps us understand what happened to the space program after Apollo, but also what happened to the United States in that maelstrom we call “the Sixties.”

Matthew Tribbe is a Visiting Assistant Professor of History at the University of Connecticut, and the author of No Requiem for the Space Age: The Apollo Moon Landings and American Culture.

This essay was originally posted on the Oxford University Press Blog

UNESCO Designates Costa Rica’s Ancient Stone Balls a World Heritage Site

by Emily Jo Cureton

Costa Rica’s iconic stone spheres have been recognized for their value to World Heritage by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), bringing more international attention to the southern region’s mysterious past, as well as its contentious future.

No one knows who made a single one of the pre-Columbian stone spheres, let alone why more than 300 were sculpted to near geometric perfection more than 1,000 years ago. Like Stonehenge and Easter Island, the petrospheres have piqued archaeological inquiry and fantastical supposition since the first examples were unearthed by banana plantation workers in the mid-19th century.

Ranging in size from a child’s fist to a wrecking ball, some arrangements suggest that the spheres aligned with the stars or served as monumental compasses. Local lore has it that they were the playthings of a god hell-bent on controlling the weather, still other theories contend they make perfect instruments for ancient alien air traffic control. The truth is, no one really knows what the original sculptors had in mind or even exactly when they lived.

A Costa Rican stone sphere at the Museo Nacional in San José (Wikipedia/user: User:matanya)

A Costa Rican stone sphere at the Museo Nacional in San José (by Connor Lee via Wikipedia user: WAvegetarian)

The endurance of mystery may be just another reason for Las Bolas to join UNESCO’s elite list of sites thought to exemplify human heritage, so often defined by desperately wanting to know, rather than actually knowing. Officially, the qualifying criteria for the sphere sites is that they “bear a unique or at least exceptional testimony to a cultural tradition or to a civilization which is living or has disappeared.”

(With La Sele’s historic upset advance to the quarter finals of the World Cup, I can bear witness to the fact that ball-centrist culture has anything but disappeared.)

The stone balls of yore were probably hand-carved by ancestors of the Boruca, Téribe and Guaymi peoples in Southern Costa Rica. Some believe ancients formed the rocks by dissolving them with a plant-based potion, though many scholars refute this. The exact timeline of production is also a point of debate. Unlike organic materials, rock cannot be carbon-dated. The ages are based on associated materials, usually sediments and pottery shards found at the installation site, which indicated that they could have been made during an 1,800 year period. (For some perspective: that’s considerably longer than the Spanish Monarchy has even existed).

Stone spheres at the Museo Nacional in San José (Wikipedia/user: User: Axxis10)

Some of the bolas are thought to weigh more than 15 tons. Others have been pocketed and used as mantle decorations. The UNESCO listing only applies to balls with a diameter of 70 cm or larger and its unclear how or if it will affect the many spheres that have been removed from Costa Rica. Of more than 300 recorded petrospheres found in the southern region about a dozen remain in their original context, according to an educated estimate by John W. Hoopes, an archaeologist whose research contributed to the UNESCO listing.

“The main that this listing does is draw worldwide global attention to this site and others. The conservation of the site is ultimately the responsibility of the country in which its found,” Hoopes said via Skype.

Most if not all “in situ” spheres left are at the four locations recognized as international patrimony by UNESCO this week: Finca 6, Batamba, El Silencio and Grijalba 2. A new museum at Finca 6, a former banana plantation, gives the public a chance to the spheres as they were originally arranged.

An ancient stone sphere in a new context at Plaza Democracia in San José, Costa Rica. Of more than 300 known spheres, all but a dozen or so have been moved from their original locations in the southern zone (Photo by Emily Jo Cureton)

The rampant damage and dispersion of the spheres began after United Fruit Company workers uncovered the first examples while clearing banana fields in 1940. Since then many spheres have been rolled into gullies and ravines. Others were burned and cracked by fire when land was cleared for plantations and farms. Still others were dynamited, or sent to faraway lands and used as prized lawn ornaments. Paris has one, so does Harvard. Some were stolen, others sold to the highest bidder. The predominate human impulses upon encountering these testimonies to human heritage seem to be: a) dig it up, b) roll it away or c) blow it up and hope gold falls out. (It doesn’t).

The solid rock used to make most of the spheres came from the Talamanca Mountains and was probably naturally flooded to the lowlands down the Térraba River to the Diquís valley, where boulders would have been collected and transported upwards of 50 miles to some installation sites. Today the Diquís valley is the planned site for the largest hydro-electric project ever in Central America, a dam on the Superior General River between Buenos Aires, Osa, and Pérez Zeledón. In the works for more than 40years, construction began in 2009, but was stalled in 2011 by a lawsuit over indigenous rights and remains delayed by the construction of an associated pipeline. The El Diquís project would flood 6815 ha (27 sq mi) to create 631 megawatts of power for 1 million consumers, according to the Institute for Costan Rican Electricity ICE. It would inundate protected indigenous territories, displacing at least 1,500 people and “irremediably affecting” 150 archaeological sites, according to an impact summary by the University of Costa Rica.

This essay was originally posted on the website of the Academia Tica Spanish Language School in Costa Rica.

For more about the World Heritage site designation, check out this article en español.

Emily Jo Cureton is an artist and writer who graduated from UT Austin with Honors in History and now lives in Costa Rica. You can see more of her work on her website.

Students Debating History: Another Look at the Video Essay

Like Robert Olwell, Jacqueline Jones assigned video essays in her US History survey this year. Her assignment asked the students to enact debates between real historical figures on opposite sides of controversial issues. These four paired Betty Friedan and Phyllis Schafly, Emma Goldman and A. Mitchell Palmer, Andrew Carnegie and Eugene V. Debs, and Victoria Woodhull and Anthony Comstock. The debates are lively and well-researched. The reenactments are creative and entertaining.

BettyxPhyllis
by Janet Russell, Steven Swank, Jacqueline Juengst, and Jessica Resco

Goldman meets Palmer
by Kathryn Anderson, Rory Fulton, Damon Freitag, and Garrett Wilson

Carnegie vs. Debs
by Nic Cool, Paola Sigala, Nathalie Audrey, and Amrita Chopra

Woodhull v Comstock
by Ally Triolo, Julia Aikman, Leigh Alice Clark, and Katie Bott

More student video essays can be viewed here: Show & Tell

You can read more about teaching history at UT Austin here:

Penne Restad & Karl Miller on Teaching History

Robert Olwell on reenacting history in the classroom: “You Say You Want a Revolution?”

You Say You Want a Revolution? Reenacting History in the Classroom

By Robert Olwell

Two students stand back-to-back in the center of the room. At my signal, they step in opposite directions, turn, and shoot. Afterward, one crumples to the floor dead while the rest of the class erupts in cheers of glee or howls of outrage. This scene took place in my classroom last fall. My students were all “in character,” acting the part of historical figures. The duelists were Abraham Brasher, a New York City silversmith and member of the “Sons of Liberty,” and Christopher Billop, a Staten Island farmer loyal to the king. Although Brasher and Billop were both genuine historic figures and real political foes, their fatal meeting never actually took place. The student playing Billop had provoked the duel, gambling that if the dice fell his way (the projectiles they each “shot” were not bullets but dice), Brasher’s death might prevent the New York Provincial Congress from voting for independence.

Such fictitious events and “unhistoric” outcomes are an integral part of a class that I have taught for the past few years called “Debating the American Revolution.” The class was first inspired by the book Patriots, Loyalists, and Revolution in New York City, 1775-1776 written by William Offutt (a history professor at Pace University in New York City). This book is part of a series called “Reacting to the Past” launched in the late 1990s by Professor Mark Carnes of Barnard College. Each of books in the series focuses on a particular historical event or debate. Carnes believed that students would be more engaged with history if they encountered it as a participant rather than as a spectator. In the case of Offutt’s book, the chosen setting was New York City in the period between the start of the revolutionary war in April 1775 and the passage of the Declaration of Independence fifteen months later, and the historical debate was whether or not New York should join the American Revolution.

As soon as I read Offutt’s book I knew that I wanted to try it. However, as I became more excited about the idea, I also became convinced that I would need an entire semester, and not merely the five weeks he allotted, to do the job properly. I believed the students’ role-playing would be more historically accurate if they were given a deeper background in the ideas and material life of late colonial New York before the “game” began.

In my course we devote the first half of the semester to background research. We begin by discussing things colonial New Yorkers would have, or at least could have, read. These include extracts from “classics” of early modern political theory (Locke, Hobbes, and Montesquieu) as well as from less well remembered writers such as Lord Bolingbroke, and John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon’s “Cato’s Letters.” From there we progress to reading the pamphlets published on both sides of the Atlantic during the imperial crisis of the decade prior to 1775. We finish with political tracts written by colonial New Yorkers themselves. Students read an essay by the loyalist parson, Samuel Seabury, writing under the pseudonym the “Westchester Farmer,” and the robust rebuttal penned by Alexander Hamilton, then a twenty-year-old student at Kings College (now Columbia University).

From the world of political ideas, we move on to the nitty-gritty of daily life. To give students a sense of the physical landscape of colonial New York City, we pore over a wonderful map of the southern end of Manhattan Island made by an officer in the Royal Engineers on the eve of the revolution. On the map, the city sits on the southernmost tip of the island, occupying an area about the same size as UT’s campus. Colonial New Yorkers still lived in close proximity to the countryside. On the engineer’s map, Greenwich village was still literally that, a rural hamlet separated from the city proper by a mile and a half of fields and forest.

Yet, despite its small size, colonial New York City was a surprisingly urban place. With approximately 25,000 inhabitants, the city was the second largest in the colonies (after Philadelphia). Crowded together into such a confined space, in buildings only three or four stories tall, all colonial New Yorkers, rich and poor, black and white, lived in close proximity to each other. They walked the same broad streets or narrow alleys and often slept beneath the same roofs (although the poor – or enslaved – were likely to be relegated to cramped and unheated attics, or dank basements).

Lastly, each of my students is tasked with reading one month’s worth of a newspaper printed in New York City between July 1773 and March 1775. Digital versions of these and many other Early American newspapers are available online through the UT library web-site. Then as now, newspapers are written for the moment; yesterday’s newspaper is used to wrap the fish. Everything you read in the paper speaks to immediate concerns. We will never know if the runaway slave advertised for by his master escaped or was caught and returned for the reward. In the woodcut that accompanies the advertisement, he is caught in mid-stride, perpetually on the run. My students are naturally appalled by such notices, but they also are intrigued by the minutiae of a distant time and place whose fervent desires (for wealth, good health, fashionable attire), and fears (illness, debt, death) seem surprisingly familiar.

Besides writing papers on their newspaper reading, the students present their findings to the rest of the class. Because each student reports on a different month between July 1773 and March 1775, listening to their presentations in chronological order encapsulates the last stages of the imperial breakdown as it was happening. This sense of the impending crisis ends in April 1775, the first meeting of the New York Provincial Congress, and the start of the “game.”

At last, midway through the semester, comes the moment everyone has been waiting for. From a tri-cornered hat, each student draws the name of his or her character. I leave the room for five minutes and anyone unhappy with their “lot” can try to persuade someone to trade with them. I then give every student a sealed envelope containing secret information about their character which they are not to reveal to anyone and which they should use to guide their conduct in the game.

Each character belongs to one of four larger groups or in 18th-century language “factions.” Five students are patriots, charged with promoting the revolution and declaring independence. Four students are loyalists, tasked with preventing the same. Another four classmates are “moderates,” members of the Provincial Congress who have yet to decide between the first two options. This moderate bloc forms the “swing vote” whose support the patriots will need to win if they are to prevail. The tri-partite division of our in-class Congress echoes John Adams’s post-war calculation that at the start of the revolution Americans were evenly divided between patriots, loyalists, and neutrals.

The patriots’ challenge of winning over the moderates is made harder by the last and largest segment of the class representing the great majority of colonial New York’s inhabitants: those people who were not permitted to vote or sit in the Provincial Congress. In our class, this group consists of two poor men, two women, two slaves, and a clandestine Catholic. In class, we call the politically disenfranchised the “People-Out-of-Doors” (or PODs). This was a polite 18th-century term for people more often called “the lower sort,” the “mob,” “crowd,” or, in Edmund Burke’s memorable phrase: “the swinish multitude.” In modern political parlance, we might call them “the street.”

Pulling Down the Statue of King George III by William Walcutt (Wikimedia Commons)

In the early modern era, however, people excluded from the formal political process could still make their opinions known by means of popular protest. Once each class session, I ask the back of the classroom where the PODs gather if a mob is forming in the city’s streets, and if so, who is the crowd’s target and what is their demand? Those confronted by a mob have three choices: capitulate to the mob’s demand, flee (in which case they cannot vote in that game session), or resist. The latter choice could end in tar-and-feathers or even death.

Although their power lay in numbers, each of the PODs also has an individual agenda. Slaves want to gain their freedom. One of the women seeks the right to divorce her absent ne’er-do-well husband. All of the PODs would like political rights, and a chance to vote in the class’s ultimate vote on independence. To this end, they must persuade the Congress to remove the disqualifications, whether of property, gender, or religion that barred them from having political rights in the colonial period. Both the patriot and loyalist factions fear the mob’s wrath, but they also see it as a weapon that can be used to threaten their opponents and whose actions might be swayed by promising to support some of the “liberal” reforms.

With the possibility of adding members to the Congress (as individual PODs gain the vote), as well as the likelihood of subtracting them (either permanently by death, or temporarily by flight), you can see how complicated the political calculus and game strategy can become and why the weekly game sessions of the class as well as the weeks between classes were filled with intense negotiations and intrigue.

At the start of each week’s game session students meet briefly with the members of their group to plan and plot. Afterwards comes the most formal item on the agenda: speeches. In the course of the game, each student has to write and present two ten-minute-long speeches. Although everyone speaks from the same podium at the front of the classroom, members of the Congress are presumed to be speaking before that assembly, while the PODs pretend to address the tavern-table-democracy at the “Bunch O’ Grapes” tavern, located across the street from the statehouse I am always pleased (and, to be honest, surprised) by the earnestness and skill students display in portraying their characters and presenting their opinions to the rest of the class. Nor does the rest of the class sit idle while the speeches were being made. I encourage the audience to interject freely with cheers, and table-pounding when they approve of what the speaker says or with hisses or cries of “rubbish!” when they disagree with the sentiments being expressed.

Besides speaking and voting, students’ are also required to submit two anonymous (or pseudonymous) letters to our in-class newspaper. The letters allow for a great deal of mischief (the Billop-Brasher duel began when the former planted a letter falsely accusing the latter of beating his wife), but the assignment also reflects a historical reality, for the print culture of the 18th-century was filled with pseudonym and imposture. Famous examples in early American history include young Benjamin Franklin’s “Silence Dogood” letters, or the contributions made to the New York newspapers by “Publius,” (a composite of James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay) which urged ratification of the Constitution and which are now collectively known as the “Federalist Papers.”

Students first send their letters to me (so I know who wrote what and can assign grades), and I remove their actual names before publishing the letters in the our newspaper, “The New York Gazette and Weekly Mercury” that I distribute before each week’s meeting.

(View a full issue of “The New York Gazette and Weekly Mercury” below)

Our in-class newspaper also provides students with a short reminder of the previous week’s class and what was scheduled to happen this week. Most importantly, the paper advances the hands of time. Each weekly session of the game is set three months after the previous one from April 1775, until our sixth and final session: July 1776. Each issue of the newspaper informs the students what had happened in England and in the other colonies since the last game turn. These “outside” events, decisions, and declarations, drawn verbatim from the actual historic record, force students to react to the changing political and military situation as events in America and Britain spiral toward revolution.

It is this ongoing “course of human events” (to quote from Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence) that drives the game. For example, if the main item on the patriots’ agenda in the April 1775 session was to get New York to join the economic boycott of Britain, by the next week’s session (July 1775), the war has begun and the patriots are charged with answering the call of the Continental Congress to raise troops for General Washington’s new Continental Army. By the winter of 1775, New Yorkers read of the royal governor of Virginia’s call to arm slaves who agree to fight for the King against their patriot masters. In the spring of 1776, the newspaper includes extracts from Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense,” then hot-off-the-press.

My loyalist students find the rising revolutionary tide vexing. Often, when they read the latest issue of the newspaper they learn that their carefully negotiated agreement with the moderate faction has been undermined not by the radicals in Philadelphia, but by the hard-liners in London, and by a British policy that becomes increasingly militaristic and intransigent as the year wears on.

Eventually, the middle ground erodes, and everyone must choose sides. Most of the moderates reluctantly join the patriots. Those PODs who have gained the vote, also tend to lean patriotic, reasoning that their new found liberties depend on the success of the American cause. All my classes thus far have voted to declare independence and join the revolution when the push finally comes in July 1776.

But what I find fascinating is that no two classes have arrived at that destination by the same route. John Adams once famously remarked that getting the Congress to declare independence was like trying to “make thirteen Clocks, Strike precisely alike, at the Same Second.” As Adams’s remark suggests, until July 1776, the American Revolution consisted of thirteen closely related but distinct crises. Each colony followed its own peculiar political path to independence, shaped in part by the colonies’ own particular histories and circumstances, but also by the choices made by individual actors. No two of these thirteen revolutions were exactly alike.

In trying to make the revolution happen in our class, my patriot students often unknowingly follow the actual historical paths that lead one colony or another to join the revolution. For example, when one class voted to print paper money in order to pay for the troops required by Congress (risking inflation and the wrath of the poor), they inadvertently adopted the same course their historic predecessors chose in the New York Provincial Congress. In another case, the class-appointed commander of New York’s Continental Brigade ordered his troops to purge the Congress and declared New York to be independent by something like a military coup-d’etat, (which parallels what actually happened in Pennsylvania).

Playing historical characters based on real historical sources immerses my students in ideas, events, and drama of the American Revolution. Better than any class I have ever taught, this format teaches students how history is woven from the interaction between structure and contingency, between the warp of the larger forces of economics, politics, and culture and the weft of immediate consequence of events and of individual choice. In “Debating the Revolution,” my students learn about history by helping to make it.

As to what my students feel they get out of the class, perhaps the best way to illustrate this is to let one of them speak for herself. Sara Gordon shared this description of her experience in the course, written for another purpose, with me:

“Every week, I temporarily become Bathsheba Spooner, an impoverished laundress who supports women’s civil rights and the Patriot cause. As Bathsheba, I yell my opinions and pleas through the windows of the Colonial Assembly, I argue with my fellow people-out-of-doors regarding what the best course of action for our colony of New York would be, and I march through the streets with the Daughters of Liberty.

I am able to become Bathsheba through my History 350R seminar class entitled “Debating the American Revolution.” Though this class began with a . . . study of British and early American political theory and a detailed summary of the years leading up to the American Revolution, it was not long before my professor, Dr. Robert Olwell, assigned us each a character from the colonial time period, and as a class, we began historical role-playing.

I must admit, I was at first skeptical and hesitant about this aspect of the class. I have such a deep interest in the study of the American Revolution that I was inclined to prefer a more traditional lecture and discussion based class. This class, however, has made me incredibly glad and grateful to be a history major. When my peers and I enter the classroom, we take on our assigned character’s identities. We have set aside time for faction meetings, for congressional discussion and voting, for court, and even for mobs. Each class period is intense, and we must each be able to truly represent our character and argue, debate, and vote as if we are he or she.”

In “Debating the American Revolution,” history comes alive for my students, and, in the end, that is what I hope to achieve in all of my classes.

The New York Gazette and Weekly Mercury (A full issue of the course newspaper.)

More books in the series, Reacting to the Past

#BringBackOurGirls: A History of Humanitarian Intervention in Nigeria

by Brian McNeil

#BringBackOurGirls has become ubiquitous on the internet, with a wide gamut of politicians and celebrities taking up the cause of the nearly 300 Nigerian schoolgirls kidnapped by the terrorist organization Boko Haram. While the efficacy of this sort of hashtag activism, or slacktivism, has been questioned by scholars—and openly mocked by some conservatives—there can be little question that more people are aware of the plight of the captured Nigerian girls than before.

Public awareness is no doubt a good thing, but that alone won’t bring the Nigerian girls back home. This has left many Americans asking what they and their government can do to help. Under public pressure, President Barack Obama has already sent a group of U.S. officials to Nigeria to aid the search. The United States has even sent drones to patrol Northeastern Nigeria, although it’s unclear how useful the unmanned aircraft will be.

But some very influential Americans are calling for more. “If they knew where they were,” Senator John McCain said when discussing the crisis in Nigeria on May 14, 2014, “I certainly would send in U.S. troops to rescue them, in a New York minute, without permission of the host country.” This is a “crime against humanity,” the senator continued, and the United Nations Charter “gives any nation the license if they can stop a crime against humanity.” The United States, McCain is arguing, has both the legal and moral power to intervene in Nigeria in order to find the missing children.

The United Nations Charter actually doesn’t provide that kind of unilateral authority. After all, the words “crime against humanity” are nowhere to be found in the document, and it is unclear whether appealing to human rights, or the even vaguer notion of dignity, would win him any more supporters on the side of unilaterally involving the American military in Nigeria.

Still, the senator raises an important issue: the historical relationship between state sovereignty and humanitarian intervention. The concept of state sovereignty was codified into international law at the end of the Thirty Years’ War. By creating a system in which states agreed not to interfere in the internal affairs of other states, the Westphalian Peace acted as a humanitarian safeguard. In addition to ending countless years of religious wars, it provided protection to the citizens and subjects of sovereign states.

But Senator McCain’s understanding of sovereignty and humanitarian intervention in Nigeria is a product of a much more recent past. It was during another conflict in Nigeria—the Nigerian Civil War—that the moral and legal framework for violating state sovereignty in the name of humanitarian relief came to the forefront of international politics.

The Nigerian Civil War was a thirty-month struggle that became famous, or perhaps infamous, in the summer of 1968 because of the images of starving women and children and the concomitant accusation that the Nigerian government was committing genocide against the people living in the secessionist state of Biafra. As in the current situation unfolding in northeastern Nigeria, many Americans saw those pictures and asked how they could help people living half a world away. Their efforts were stymied, however, because both sides of the war wanted to control the relief effort — in effect to claim sovereignty over humanitarian aid — which meant that large stock piles of food never reached the neediest until the war ended in January 1970.

Protest in New York City in 1969 calling for international intervention in Nigerian Civil War (Photos by Maury Englander and Brad Lyttle, Swarthmore College Peace Collection)

The historical comparisons between the Nigerian Civil war and the present crisis are of course not exact. No one, for example, discussed placing American boots on the ground during the Nigerian Civil War and the conditions that created the civil war were different than the present problems. We can nonetheless draw three broad parallels about how Americans viewed themselves in relationship to humanitarian intervention then and now.

The first is that state sovereignty has become largely viewed as an impediment to humanitarianism rather than a fulfillment of a humanitarian promise. During the Nigerian Civil War, with relief at an impasse, Americans founded over 200 non-governmental and voluntary organizations that pressured the United States government to intervene. Like many other groups, the American Committee to Keep Biafra Alive argued that the United States had a right to intervene in the civil war. In September 1968, committee members presented a brief to State Department officials that argued the violation of sovereignty had a long legal tradition that could be invoked in the case of the Nigerian Civil War. In the end, however, the committee offered not a legal justification for humanitarian intervention but a moral one: “If we cannot perfect, as a minimum, a system of humanitarian intervention, we have lost our humanity. If we sit passively by while the [Biafrans] suffer genocide, we have forfeited our right to regain it.”

This might sound good, but then as now American leaders were skeptical about how this would work in practice. Even if we all agreed that in certain cases sovereignty should be violated for humanitarian relief, who makes that determination? Individual governments? Surely not. The United Nations? Maybe, but even then the violation of sovereignty for the noblest of purposes would be a tough sell to the international community, especially to the developing world who for centuries had been victims of European imperialism. In the 1960s, U.S. officials dismissed the idea of humanitarian intervention in the Nigerian Civil War precisely because it would set an uncontrollable precedent. “One requires no Calvinist predilections to see that governments are not essentially good enough to be trusted with a rule which allows them to exercise force against another country when they believe it would serve the ends of human rights to do so,” one State Department representative said. Senator McCain, for his part, said “I wouldn’t be waiting for some kind of permission from some guy named Goodluck Jonathan,” referring to the current Nigerian president, before sending American troops. There is no doubt that President Obama would receive President Jonathan’s permission before the United States does anything more in Nigeria.

President Goodluck Jonathan (2nd from left) on a state visit to South Africa (Photo: GCIS via Flickr CCA)

The second conclusion builds on the first, which is the unquestioned assumption that American humanitarian intervention has a long past and is always welcomed. During the Nigerian Civil War, Senator Edward Kennedy demanded that President Lyndon Johnson create a special coordinator to facilitate relief in Nigeria. Kennedy offered the examples of two Herberts, Hoover and Lehman, as Americans who had gone to Europe and had broken through diplomatic logjams to feed starving people. “The United States has always found a way to make its weight felt in the affairs of others when our political self-interest and national security have been at stake,” Kennedy wrote to the president. “In the historic tradition of our nation, I would also hope that we can still exert our powerful influence when great human tragedy strikes our fellow man.”

There is little doubt that McCain feels the same way today about finding the kidnapped girls as Kennedy did about using American resources and manpower to save lives in Biafra. “I would not be involved in the niceties of getting the Nigerian government to agree,” McCain said, “because if we did rescue these people, there would be nothing but gratitude from the Nigerian government.” Yet in the 1960s, Roger Morris, a staff member on the National Security Council, warned against this type of thinking. “Here I think we have to remind [Kennedy] once more that black post-colonial Nigeria is not white post-war Europe.” In the era of decolonization, Morris said, Nigerians “regard the Hoovers and Lehmans as unwanted alien intruders, rather than angels of mercy.” American-led humanitarianism, regardless of motive, undermines the authority of governments and wasn’t welcomed during the Nigerian Civil War. It certainly wouldn’t be welcomed today in the way that Senator McCain believes.

Finally, McCain’s response to the kidnapped girls demonstrates the historical link between modern neo-conservative foreign policy and the liberal moral foreign policy reawakening that occurred during the 1960s. Supporters of humanitarianism in Biafra—liberals being the most prominent and vocal—claimed that a vision of morality should infuse and guide American foreign policy. Norman Cousins, editor of the Saturday Review, said that for too long the United States misplaced its priorities in pursuit of winning the Cold War. “Why is the national interest so often associated with power plays and not with those great thrusts of the moral imagination that in then end determine a people’s place in history?” Cousins asked. Indeed, humanitarianism during the Nigerian Civil War was not just a guiding light for the future but a way of atoning for the Cold War sins of the past.

While McCain doesn’t explicitly mention morality and American foreign policy in relation to the current Nigerian situation, we can see how his opinion has been shaped by a unique, neo-conservative view of the past that has its origins in the 1960s. Whether in Iraq, Syria, or Ukraine, McCain has repeatedly called for the use of American power to enforce moral norms—a “weaponization of human rights” put forward most openly by current U.N. Ambassador Samantha Power. Of course, these ideas have been challenged, and since the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan Americans have been favoring a less interventionist foreign policy. Nevertheless, humanitarianism as a guide for American foreign policy historically emerges during periods when the soul of American foreign policy seems in flux, and in many ways the same conditions that allowed for the emergence of humanitarianism and human rights to become attractive alternatives to the foreign policy status quo during the late 1960s and 1970s have reemerged in the aftermath of the wars Iraq and Afghanistan.

It is still unclear what new alternatives will emerge. Perhaps human rights will again provide a path toward a utopian future. The problem, as I see it, is that appealing to normative legal and moral standards have so far produced mixed results at best. For the United States, however, the greatest factor limiting American foreign policy in enforcing humanitarian and human rights is the gap between its rhetoric and its intentions. Even if we can give Senator McCain the benefit of the doubt and believe that he has nothing but pure and altruistic motives for violating Nigerian sovereignty, the real history of American intervention in the world is one of using moral language and rhetoric to serve its own geopolitical interests. Nigerians would be right to be skeptical of American motives here, especially the kind of unilateral intervention envisaged by Senator McCain. Let’s hope that Nigerians are peacefully able to bring back their own girls. And if the United States does help, let’s hope it’s because President Obama first received the request from President Goodluck Jonathan.

Brian McNeil can be found on twitter, where he posts regularly on international history: @mcneilbriane

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