Joan Neuberger, Author at Not Even Past

Episode 24: European Imperialism in the Middle East (part 2)

World War I had a profound impact on the Middle East and North Africa. With the breakup of the Ottoman Empire, European powers carved the region into mandates, protectorates, colonies, and spheres of influence. Just a few decades later, however, World War II, however, left the colonial powers bankrupt and looking to get out of the empire business as quickly as possible, regardless of the consequences.

In the second half of a two part podcast, guest and co-host Christopher Rose from UT’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies discusses the lingering effects of 20th century European imperialism in the region and the transition to independence.

Episode 23: European Imperialism in the Middle East (part 1)

The relationship between European, North African, and Southwest Asian nations that border the Mediterranean stretches back to antiquity and reflects a long tradition of trade, colonialism, and acculturation. Yet, by the end of World War II, Europe had come to dominate the region politically and militarily. When did this long-symbiotic relationship transform into one of imperialism and colonization?

In this first of a two part podcast, guest and co-host Christopher Rose from UT’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies walks us through the beginnings of European imperialism in the Middle East.

Episode 22: Causes of the U.S. Civil War (Part 2)

In the century and a half since the war’s end, historians, politicians, and laypeople have debated the causes of the U.S. Civil War: what truly led the Union to break up and turn on itself? And, even though it seems like the obvious answer, does a struggle over the future of slavery really explain why the south seceded, and why a protracted military struggle followed? Can any one explanation do so satisfactorily?

Historian George B Forgie has been researching this question for years. In the second half of this two-part podcast, he’ll walk us through five common–and yet unsatisfying–explanations for the most traumatic event in American history.

Episode 21: Causes of the U.S. Civil War (part 1)

Historian George B Forgie has been researching this question for years. In this two-part podcast, he’ll walk us through five common–and yet unsatisfying–explanations for the most traumatic event in American history.

Episode 20: Reconstruction

After the chaos of the American Civil War, Congress and lawmakers had to figure out how to put the Union back together again–no easy feat, considering that issues of political debate were settled on the battlefield, but not in the courtroom nor in the arena of public opinion. How did the defeated South and often vindictive North manage to resolve their differences over issues so controversial that they had torn the Union apart?

Historian H.W. Brands from UT’s Department of History reflects on this issues and how he has dealt with them in his thirty years of experience in teaching about Reconstruction: “It’s one of the hardest parts of American history to teach, in part because I think it’s the hardest to just understand.”

Great Books on Eugenics in World History

by Philippa Levine

The best overview of the history of eugenics is the classic study by Daniel J. Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity (1998).

Nancy Stepan, The Hour of Eugenics: Race, Gender, and Nation in Latin America (1991) offers a fascinating analysis of the eugenic practices found throughout Latin America. Latin American eugenics was often markedly different from the policies found not only in its neighbor to the north, but in much of northern Europe as well.

Martin S. Pernick, The Black Stork: Eugenics and the Death of ‘Defective’ Babies in American Medicine and Motion Pictures since 1915 (2000) looks at the Harry Haiselden case. After he was expelled from medical circles, Haiselden made a film about his crusade, the ‘Black Stork’ of Pernick’s title.

Alexandra Minna Stern, Eugenic Nation: Faults and Frontiers of Better Breeding in Modern America (2005) Its focus is mostly on the west, and especially on California which was one of the most active eugenic states in the nation.

Paul A. Lombardo’s Three Generations, No Imbeciles: Eugenics, the Supreme Court, and Buck v. Bell (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010)

Stefan Kühl,The Nazi Connection: Eugenics, American Racism, and German National Socialism (1994) lays out the ties between American and German eugenics in the inter-war years.

Robert N. Proctor’s Racial Hygiene: Medicine Under the Nazis (1988) details the work carried out in the camps and beyond.

A Tale of Two Murders: Passion and Power in Seventeenth-Century France by James Farr (2005)

by Julia M. Gossard

With all of the components of a riveting murder-mystery, including a baffling disappearance, a set of gossipy characters, a love triangle, conflicting evidence, and a scandalous trial, A Tale of Two Murders: Passion and Power in Seventeenth-Century France by James R. Farr is a fascinating read. Farr chronicles the investigation and subsequent trial of Philippe Giroux, a wealthy nobleman in Dijon. The trial enthralled Dijon’s inhabitants and the whole of French noble society from 1639 to 1642.

In the growing city of Dijon, France on September 6, 1638 Pierre Baillet and his valet, La Valeur went missing. Immediately after learning of the men’s disappearance, maidservants, apprentices, shopkeepers, and other workers began to gossip in the streets about what had happened to Baillet and La Valeur. Some argued Baillet simply left town unexpectedly while others spread more sinister rumors of foul play and murder. After six months of petty gossip a formal investigation finally began. Soon Jean-Baptiste Lantin, the investigation’s leader, found a primary suspect: Philippe Giroux, Baillet’s first cousin. As a président of the Burgundy Parlement, Giroux was a powerful and prominent member of society. However, when it became known that Giroux was involved in a passionate and secret affair with Baillet’s beautiful wife, Marie Fyot, and that Baillet and La Valeur had dined at Giroux’s house on the night of their disappearance, Giroux became the focus of Lantin’s investigation. News of Giroux’s arrest sent shockwaves through the community, creating another firestorm of gossip and speculation that greatly influenced the course of the subsequent trial.

In addition to providing a captivating narrative, A Tale of Two Murders investigates the ways in which power, justice, law, and society all intersected and, at times, conflicted with one another in seventeenth-century France. Farr shows the conflicts between the formal powers of the judicial system and the informal powers of the nobility’s patronage networks and sketches in the community’s role as both witness and arbitrator. Informal institutions were paramount in determining not only which cases went to trial, but also the outcomes of those trials. A defendant’s reputation, as determined by the community, was of utmost importance in establishing whether or not an individual was capable of committing a certain crime. The judicial system in early modern France was a complex institution that favored those at the top of society. Vast patronage networks protected the nobility, making it very difficult for people to bring accusations against the nobility in court. But these patronage networks were not indestructible as the community could work to destroy an individual’s reputation by spreading rumors and accusations of particularly heinous acts.

A Tale of Two Murders produces a vivid illustration of the early modern French legal system, power dynamics, and society while providing the reader with a spellbinding story of mystery, gossip, love, lies, deceit, and murder. Readers who enjoy murder-mysteries will surely find Farr’s A Tale of Two Murders a captivating and informative read.

Death is a Festival: Funeral Rites and Rebellion in Nineteenth-Century Brazil by João José Reis (2007)

by Felipe Cruz

Death and the dead were omnipresent in nineteenth century Salvador da Bahia, Brazil. Exuberant funeral processions marched festively in the streets and graves filled the church floors where parishioners stood. Since so many died, death was incorporated into many aspects of life in the city – and the living spent considerable effort in preparing for their own deaths and the deaths of others. In explaining why a crowd of over a thousand people revolted against and destroyed a cemetery in 1836, João Reis’ Death is a Festival brings to life the act of dying in Salvador.

Unlike the numerous revolts that broke out in the preceding two decades, the Cemiterada rebellion in 1836 was not carried out specifically by slaves, federalists, or soldiers. Although people of varying classes and colors took part, it was spearheaded by religious brotherhoods. They revolted against a law forbidding burial in churches and within city limits, a law that granted a burial monopoly to a cemetery on the outskirts of the city. Distancing the dead from the living did not sit well with brotherhood members who wanted to be buried in their own churchyards and provoked all other parties involved in the business of dying.

The government had an arguably legitimate reason for passing such an explosive law: miasma. Miasma, or the gas emanating from putrefying organic matter, was considered dangerous and the subject was all the rage in the medical literature of the time. Doctors in Bahia’s Medical School, trained in France, were appalled by the burial of corpses emanating miasma in church floors. In their medical journals, they often described the dangerous odors of corpses in poorly ventilated churches, and much worse, the mass graves where slaves were buried, as the cause of the high mortality rate in the city. According to the medical profession, the dead in the church’s floor brought death to the city – while to many of its residents, being buried in sacred dirt (even if miasmatic) was crucial to a good afterlife.

João Reis sketches the colorful world of Bahian death and makes a good case for understanding the motives of the rebels on other than financial grounds. Analyzing estate, brotherhood and parish records as well as travelers’ accounts, wills and testaments Reis shows where people preferred to be buried, how they paid for numerous masses to avoid purgatory, and then redeemed their consciences by freeing slaves and paying debts. Wakes brought together great numbers of people, known and unknown to the deceased, including professional prayers and wailing women. Funeral marches were as extensive as one could afford, some including dozens of priests, orchestras and beggars paid to add to the procession. In unearthing the details of funerals, the book also shows how death reaffirmed social distinctions: whether one was carried to the afterlife in a hammock or sumptuous coffin, buried in the hospital’s graveyard or the main cathedral, such differences spoke volumes about class and race. Death is a Festival is a truly seminal work, elegantly written and skillfully translated, and a great read for those interested in the history of medicine and the practices associated with death in Brazil.

The Old Man and the New Man in Revolutionary Cuba

By Frank A. Guridy

The forces that created the Cuban Revolution often get lost in polarizing debates about Castro’s Cuba. Two very different films highlight the changes that ripped through Cuban society in the 1950s and early 1960s and created the Cuban Revolution. The first is Tomás Gutierrez Alea’s Memories of Underdevelopment (Memorias del subdesarrollo) released in Cuba in 1968 and the second is Steven Soderbergh’s 2008 Hollywood biopic Che.

Memories of Underdevelopment, based on Edmundo Desnoes’s 1967 novel, is perhaps the best-known film in Gutiérrez’s long and productive career. The film dramatizes the forces rapidly transforming Cuban society in the early years of the Cuban Revolution through the eyes of Sergio (skillfully played by Sergio Corrieri), a member of the old Cuban elite that was overthrown by the revolution. Sergio is a frustrated intellectual who, unlike his elite and middle-class contemporaries, decides to stay in Cuba rather than flee to the United States. In Gutierrez’s masterful depiction of Sergio, made evident in the scenes of the coat and tie wearing Sergio aimlessly wandering the streets of Havana, one sees the rapid decline of an older civilian model of Cuban masculinity, one that was predicated on affluence, consumption, and affiliation with the United States, as well as sexual predatory “machismo.” Sergio is in many ways a prototypical “ladies man” who manifests his own alienation by preying upon young women. Yet, Corrieri’s performance evokes sympathy for a character who is lost, yet, keenly aware of the changes that are happening all around him.

Steven Soderbergh’s Che can be read as a completely different meditation on Cuban manhood. While ostensibly about Ernesto “Che” Guevara, one of the revolution’s key leaders, the film also explores the emergence of the “new man” of 1950s-60s Cuba, the new socialist individual that Guevara hoped to create in the Cuban Revolution. Soderbergh’s lengthy 4-hour movie is divided into two parts: the first portrays Che’s involvement in the guerrilla war against Cuba ruler Fulgencio Batista and the second explores his ill-fated guerrilla campaign in 1967 in Bolivia. Unlike Sergio, who relishes his class privilege, Che (brilliantly played by Benicio del Toro) is a selfless doctor who rejects the benefits of bourgeois existence to devote his entire life to becoming a career revolutionary motivated by “profound feelings of love,” as Che himself put it. Soderbergh’s depictions of Che’s encounters with Cuban peasants, his tending to wounded soldiers, and his fearlessness as a commanding officer in the guerrilla war underscore the model of revolutionary masculinity celebrated by the triumphant Cuban Revolution. While many have criticized the film’s glossing over of Guevara’s involvement in the execution of counter-revolutionaries, viewers who do not give the film a chance will miss an opportunity to gain insights into the factors that explain the triumph of the Cuban Revolution.

Both films satisfy the historian’s desire for accurate representations of the past. Memories gives us a taste of 1960s Cuba not only because it was made at the time, but also due to Gutiérrez’s skillful insertion of archival footage throughout the film. Soderbergh’s beautiful costume and set design, most evident in his attentiveness to the architecture of Cuban provincial towns in the decisive scenes of the Battle of Santa Clara, show that the film was based on solid research. One may quibble with each director’s political choices, but both films are brilliantly executed and provide valuable portrayals of monumental events in Cuban history. Each highlights, in different ways, competing models of Cuban male identity that are in tension with each other to this day.

History Underfoot

by Erika M. Bsumek

History can sometimes surround us – sometimes it’s even underfoot. This rug, from the Art and Art History Library Collection at the University of Texas, represents the kind of textiles that were made by skilled Navajo weavers and sold on the Navajo reservation from the late 19th into the early 20th century.

The attractive geometric designs of such creations corresponded with other fashion forward styles of the era and they became popular additions to dens and “Indian corners” across the U.S. Navajo rugs have had a lasting influence on interior design ever since. Consumers currently spend millions of dollars every year for antique rugs and blankets, newer rugs still being created by Navajo weavers, or even the less expensive “American Indian style” rugs made in Mexico or India.

So, what’s the history of a rug like this one and why should we care about it? One view is that after the arrival of the Spanish and the introduction of sheep in North America, weaving became central to the development of trade goods throughout the Southwest. Thus, Navajo textiles reflect Spanish influence and cultural exchange. When Anglos began settling in the region, they developed a taste for woven goods and further altered the trade. Traders encouraged weavers to include borders, like the Greek key style design found in this rug, similar to those found on Persian rugs.

In the 1880s, the white traders who encouraged these changes knew that the beautiful Navajo textiles could be sold to white consumers – if marketed correctly. Another view, the Navajo view, is that Spiderwoman (a key spiritual figure in Navajo cosmology) gave Navajo women the skill they needed to fashion cotton and wool into beautiful creations to trade and feed their families.

Traders like Lorenzo Hubbell, who ran the Ganado Trading Post in Ganado, Arizona, turned their attention to selling Navajo rugs as a way to generate income for the post. Hubbell’s first step was to convince famed hotelier Fred Harvey to stock his hotel gift shops with Navajo blankets and rugs. Harvey also used Navajo rugs as decorative accessories throughout his hotel. This meant that railway tourists to the Southwest could simply stroll into the hotel’s lobby, see the beautiful the rugs used throughout the hotel, enter the store, and purchase a rug to take home. Beyond Harvey’s gift shop sales, traders like Hubbell also published catalogues that they shipped to potential customers or curio stores throughout the United States. The text and advertisements that appeared in trader catalogues promoted the traders as much as, if not more so, than the weavers.

This kind of marketing made Navajo textiles part of an emerging fascination with “primitive’ peoples. By the early 1900s, Americans across the United States were collecting goods from Africa, Asia, and the American Southwest. Just as painters like Picasso began to include elements of indigenous art in modernist art forms, consumers could buy goods that reflected similar design elements: geometrical, bold, abstract.

As consumer fascination with Navajo rugs took hold in the marketplace, rugs grew in value. But, where were the weavers who made the products? How were they treated? Ironically, although Navajo textiles took on social value, Indians were being de-valued in society. Government efforts to assimilate Indians remained strong well into the twentieth century. In response, Navajo weavers, in particular, have worked to preserve their culture through their weavings. So, the next time you see a Navajo rug, you might want to consider its history – and more importantly, the history of the people who made it.

Read more about the marketing of Navajo crafts:

Erika Bsumek, Indian-Made: Navajo Culture in the Marketplace, 1868-1940

« Previous Page

Recent Posts