Joan Neuberger, Author at Not Even Past

Episode 106: The Blood Libel

In Kiev, in 1911, a Jewish factory manager named Mendel Beilis was indicted for murdering a young boy. Many believed that Beilis had carried out the murder as part of a ritual known as the “blood libel,” in which Jews used the blood of gentile children for baking Passover matzo. Where the idea of the “blood ritual” come from and why did people all over the world believe it? And what happened to Mendel Beilis?

Historian Robert Weinberg, who teaches Russian history at Swarthmore College is here to answer these questions.

The Public Archive

Doing History Online and In Public

by Joan Neuberger

Millions of tweets and millions of state documents. Intimate oral histories and international radio addresses. Ancient pottery and yesterday’s memes. Historians have access to this immense store of online material for doing research, but what else can we do with it? In Spring 2018, graduate students in the Public and Digital History Seminar at UT Austin experimented with ways to make interesting archival materials available and useful to the public; to anyone with access to a computer.

Links to their projects can all be found below on this page.

We built these digital, public projects in four main steps.

First, with the help of UT librarians, the students identified collections related to their research that were not yet available to the public. These collections of documents come from the many wonderful archives on our campus: the Harry Ransom Center, the Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library, the Perry-Castañeda Library, the Briscoe Center for American History, and the Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection. Then we digitized them.

Second, we each wrote a series of blog-essays to share our archival finds with the public. Each blog is meant to show something historically significant about our documents and to open them up in ways that any curious reader, without any background in the subject, can understand and appreciate.

Third, we wrote lesson plans based on our documents to allow educators at the K-12 and college levels to bring our archives into their classrooms.

Finally, we each built a website to introduce our topics, to share our digitized documents, and to make our blogs and lesson plans openly available.

Here are the results:

Qahvehkhaneh: Reading Iranian Newspapers: by Andrew Akhlaghi

The coffeehouse, qahvehkhaneh, was an important political and cultural institution in Iran. As men drank coffee, played backgammon, and discussed business, they also listened to impassioned pleas for democracy and reform from newspapers published in the Ottoman Empire, Russian Caucasus, and British India, smuggled into Iran and read aloud. This qahvehkhaneh is meant to spread the issues of one newspaper, Etella’at, to those curious about Iran.

Bureaucracy on the Ground: the Gálvez Visita of 1765: by Brittany Erwin.

This project examines the localized consequences and on-the-ground implications of the royal inspection, or visita general, administered by José de Gálvez in New Spain from 1765-1771.

After the Silence: María Luisa Puga and the 1985 Mexico City Earthquake by Ashley Garcia

María Luisa Puga (1944-2004) was a talented Mexican novelist from the Post-Boom movement whose personal notebooks, manuscripts, correspondence, and related documents are held in the Benson Latin American Collection. On this site you will find digitized selections from Cuaderno 118, which contains both Puga’s coverage of the earthquake that struck Mexico DF (now Mexico City) in 1985 and her reflections on those original pages, written in 2002.

Building a Jewish School in Iran: The Barmaïmon-Hamadan Manuscript by Isabelle Headrick

Where do you go when you want to change the world? For Isaac and Rebecca Bassan in 1900, the destination was Hamadan, Iran, to establish a French-language, Jewish school for the small Jewish community in that city. About fifty years another teacher at the school, Isaac Barmaïmon, wrote an 81-page manuscript that describes the first twenty years of the school’s existence.

Food Migrations: Texas Czech Culinary Traditions by Tracy Heim

Texans with Czech heritage have been able to preserve their culture in America through organizations, cultural events, church groups, and especially through food. Two books of recipes and other documents contextualize the process of migration into life in Texas and create a framework for understanding the Texas Czech culture.

Indian Revolt of 1857 by Anuj Kaushal.

South Asia witnessed an event during 1857 which altered the history of India, Britain, and the British East India Company. The event, known as a mere “mutiny” by the British and as an anti-colonial revolt by Indians, was reported in the English language press around the world.

The Road to Sesame Street by Peter Kunze

The Road to Sesame Street features government documents tracing the development of the Public Broadcast Act of 1967, the landmark legislation that established the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, PBS, and NPR. Using materials from the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library in Austin, this project provides a behind-the-scenes view of the power players, interest groups, and decisions that laid the groundwork for American public media.

Animating Italian Immigration: Sicilian-American Puppetry by Megan McQuaid.

Attending a puppet theatre performance with familiar characters acting out well-known stories gave some Italians living in New York City a regular taste of the homeland they had left behind.

Frederic Allen Williams: Citizen-Artist with a Magic Lantern by Jesse Ritner

Frederic Allen Williams (1898-1955) was a prominent sculptor, lecturer, intellectual, and rodeo rider based in New York City, where he became known for his talks on Native American art, illustrated with magic lantern slides, which he gave in his midtown studio near the then recently built Museum of Modern Art.

Woven Into History: Living Cultural Fabrics by Alina Scott

The nineteenth and twentieth-century Navajo rugs in this collection aims to provide a platform for respectful collaboration and discourse to recenter the discussion of Navajo culture and commodity production around them and to diversify traditional conversations about Navajo textiles and their communities.

Mercenary Monks by Jonathan Seefeldt

These texts are windows into a thriving monastic world whose varied activities included: raising mercenary armies, caring for widows and child brides, providing credit and other banking services, collecting tax revenue from farmers, providing merit and prestige to an emerging merchant class, and asserting a (short-lived) form of political independence.

Guards and Pickets: The Paperwork of Slavery by Gaila Sims.

The documents in this collection provide a glimpse into the paperwork created to control the movement and relationships of the enslaved, as well as the financial documentation used to make money off the institution of slavery.

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the following people for sharing their expertise in digital and public history with us: Dale Correa, Liza Talbot, Ian Goodale, Stephanie Malmros, Christina Bleyer, Albert Palacios, Andrea Gustavson, Elizabeth Gushee, Astrid Ruggaldier, Penne Restad, and Stacy Vlasits.

The Gods of Indian Country

by Jennifer Graber

In 1930, historian William Warren Sweet wrote that the “conquest of the continent” was America’s greatest accomplishment and its churches’ “greatest achievement” involved “the extension of their work westward.” Drawing on Frederick Jackson Turner’s thesis about the importance (and closing) of the American frontier, Sweet’s classic and oft-read textbook identified westward movement as fundamentally important to American religion.Historians of American religions have rightfully turned away from Sweet’s conclusions. Indeed, since the 1960s the study of American religions has been transformed from a sleepy corner of the historical profession to what commentators have identified as an increasingly popular subfield. The scholarship now includes excellent monographs on long-neglected groups, oft-overlooked sources, and is shaped by theoretical insights from critical work on religion, race, gender, ethnicity, and labor. During the field’s much-needed transformation, the frontier faded into the background, at least for a time.

A new generation of scholars has returned to the frontier, bringing with them all the critical tools now available in the subfield. Rather than asking how religion fueled American expansion, they have investigated how the experience of expansion reshaped American religions, those practiced by both settlers and Native people. It’s within this new mode of writing that I set out to study the religious transformations prompted by the invasion and defense of lands inhabited by Kiowa Indians and later designated Indian Territory (and eventually Oklahoma) by Americans.

Americans got their first long-term experiences on Kiowa lands and engagements with Kiowa ritual activity when Quakers were assigned to administer the Kiowa, Comanche, and Apache Reservation in 1869. Ready to engage their fellow humans trapped in “heathen darkness,” Quakers distributed food rations, organized schools, and held meetings for worship among the reservation’s more than 5000 Native occupants. Quaker workers frequently mentioned Kiowa “superstition” as the greatest obstacle to their acculturation of Euro-American habits and assimilation into American life.

National Archives, Bureau of Indian Affairs

Several years later, however, a Quaker administrator saw something he recognized as real religion. Kiowa elders and young men requested that he transcribe a petition for them. They were concerned that American buffalo hunters were devastating the herds. These hunters acted illegally and the Kiowa petitioners implored the federal government to stop them. In the petition, they claimed that Kiowas and the buffalo had been created together, to be like brothers. They argued that one could not live without the other. If the U.S. government failed to protect the herds, Kiowas would also die.

National Archives, Bureau of Indian Affairs

While Native claims about relations to other-than-human beings were hardly uncommon, the Quaker employee had no reference point for understanding such connections. But unlike dismissive attitudes he displayed earlier in his tenure, the Quaker seemed open to seeing something new. In his account of the proceedings, he referred to the “gravity” and “reverential feeling” of the smoking session held prior to the discussion. In a letter, he encouraged federal officials to act because the buffalo were a “matter involving [Kiowas’] traditional religious belief.” For years, this Quaker worker had witnessed Kiowa buffalo hunting, as well as their use of hides for tipis and meat for food. He had observed, and even sent troops to monitor, Kiowa Sun Dances, rites in which the people gave thanks for the buffalo. After these experiences, he eventually saw something “religious” where he had once seen only heathenish practices unworthy of the descriptor.

Similar to the Quaker’s change in perspective, American expansion shaped Kiowa ritual life. Around the same time as the buffalo petition, Kiowas struggled to maintain practices that had been central to them for generations. They held Sun Dances in summer, even as hunger beset them and federal officials sent troops to monitor them. Along with efforts to sustain older practices, Kiowas also considered new ritual options. While men who raided south into Texas and Mexico had long encountered Native peoples who engaged peyote as a source of sacred power, Kiowas had never adopted it as a regular practice. That changed in the 1870s. With their Sun Dances under scrutiny and people suffering from outbreaks of disease, Kiowas gathered for peyote meetings. Welcoming ritual specialists from other Indian nations, Kiowas brought the rites to the reservation and developed their own practices and songs. Within two decades, peyote practices were widespread among Kiowas.

The Ghost Dance of 1889-1891 by the Oglala Lakota at Pine Ridge. Illustration by Frederic Remington, 1890.

Eventually, Kiowas would consider two more ritual options from outside their own traditions. In the 1880s, the first Christian missionary arrived. Under the tutelage of a Kiowa man who studied in the East and received Episcopal deacon’s orders, a small number of Kiowas accepted baptism in the early 1880s. Affiliation with Christianity increased after a host of missionaries arrived in the 1890s. Around the same time, messages from Native neighbors told of a Paiute prophet who claimed the world could be renewed through dance. Called the Ghost Dance by Americans, the movement spread to reservations across the West. Kiowas adapted it their situation, using feathers to identify the movement, singing songs and dancing with the hope of restoring depleted buffalo herds and returning loved ones lost to hunger and disease. By 1890, Kiowas participated in older Sun Dance and healing practices, as well as peyote rites, Christian worship, and Ghost Dancing, all in the hope of sustaining their lands and people threatened by American occupation.

William Warren Sweet wrote that there was no more influential “fact” in the development of American religion than “continuous contact with frontier conditions and frontier needs.” No historian working today would make such grand claims. Events on the “frontier” must be considered in relation to American efforts to reconstruct the South, debates about Chinese immigration in California, labor disputes and unrest in the North, and legal conflicts over Mormon plural marriage and what constituted acceptable religious practice. Even so, encounters prompted by expansion played a significant role in reshaping the religious worlds of settlers and Native people. It lay at the heart of settler ideas about American civilization and it functioned as one more resource in the struggle for Native peoplehood, lands, and sovereignty.

Jennifer Graber, The Gods of Indian Country: Religion and the Struggle for the American West

and more on the book here.

Episode 105: Slavery and Abolition

Host: Brooks Winfree, Department of History, UT-Austin
Guest: Manisha Sinha, Draper Chair in American History, University of Connecticut

It’s well known in American history that slavery was abolished with the 13th amendment to the constitution, however, the debate over slavery and the movement to abolish it is as old as the American republic itself. Who were abolitionists? How did they organize? What were their methods? And, considering that it took a Civil War to put an end to slavery, did they have any real effect?

Yes, they did! Dr. Manisha Sinha from the University of Connecticut joins us to discuss her research on the deeper legacy of abolitionists–men and women, blacks and whites, Northern and Southern–and how the debate over slavery shaped American history from the Revolution to the Civil War.

Dagmar Lieblova, Survivor

Dagmar Lieblova, Czech Girl’s Home, Terezin, Czech Republic 2014

by Dennis Darling

Dagmar Lieblova was a child prisoner at Terezín, deported to Auschwitz, then dispatched as slave labor to Hamburg, a city then in the daily cross-hairs of Allied bombers. There she cleared the streets of debris from the previous night’s air raids. Dagmar was finally liberated, sitting among the dead, by British troops at the notorious Bergen Belsen concentration camp. The eighty-year old Lieblova died last month in Prague, beating the odds after having been forced as a teenager to dwell four desperate years in harm’s deadly way.

The ranks of the generation that lived through the horrors of World War II are rapidly thinning. Soon, all those who have experienced the war’s seminal events will be gone. For the past five-years I have photographed the remnants of a group that endured the unprecedented terror of Nazi Germany – survivors, like Dagmar Lieblova…prisoners of Terezín.

Why am I interested in survivors of this particular concentration camp, located forty miles north of Prague, above all others?

Of the more than 40,000 detentions centers, concentration, work and death camps located throughout German occupied Europe, Terezín was unique in a number of ways, most notably because of the large number of artists and creative types imprisoned there and the legacy of art and music they produced that survived. The camp also became known, although far from the truth, as the “country club” of German camps; a reputation gained partly due to the fact that the walled prison town was skillfully staged as a “model Jewish ghetto” by the Nazi propaganda machine to successfully fool the International Red Cross inspectors into believing that all Jewish camps resembled the sham they viewed at Terezín.

Although Terezín was not an extermination camp, death was far from a stranger. Terrible conditions of depravity and evil prevailed there as well. More than 30,000 inmates perished from exposure, malnutrition and disease while awaiting transport to the East. Nearly 90,000 others were eventually deported east to Auschwitz–the vast majority murdered. Of the 155,000 Jews who were processed and held at Terezín, less than 8 percent survived the war.

The portrait of Dagmar Lieblova was taken in the doorway of the Czech Girl’s Home located on Terezín’s town square. It was here that young Czech girls, including Lieblova, were housed, more than twenty-five to each small room, after they were deemed old enough to be separated from their mothers. The chalk drawing on the building’s wall, a butterfly (motyl in Czech), has become the symbol associated with Terezín because of a poem that survived the camp and an author who didn’t. The poem I never saw another butterfly was written by Pavel Friedman, a teenager imprisoned at Terezín and later murdered at Auschwitz.

When I first started the Terezín project I was timid about approaching the survivors to ask them to talk about their experience, then sit for a portrait. I found it hard to comprehend why they would be interested in speaking to a person from rural upstate New York, raised Irish Catholic and who, at the time, really couldn’t precisely express why he was interested in making their photograph.

I was even more reluctant to ask those survivors who lived in the vicinity of Terezín to accompany me for their portrait session to the place of such personal sorrow. Much to my surprise, nearly everyone I asked made that journey of forty miles and seventy years, including Dagmar Lieblova.

I later happened upon a 2010 editorial in the New York Times that put precisely into words not only the reason for the Terezín survivors’ willingness to be a part of my project but, why I was compelled to attempt the series as well. In that editorial, the author and Holocaust survivor Samuel Pisar lamented, ‘that after 65 years, the last living survivors of the Holocaust are disappearing one by one,’ and he points out that at best, ‘only the impersonal voice of a researcher will soon be left to tell the Holocaust story’. At worst, he warns, it will be told in the “malevolent register of revisionists and falsifiers.” He cautions that this process has already begun. “This is why those of us who survived have a duty to transmit to mankind the memory of what we endured in body and soul, to tell our children that the fanaticism and violence that nearly destroyed our universe have the power to enflame theirs, too.”

Reliable sources estimate that only a few hundred Terezín inmates still survive to tell their stories. To date, I have made more than 150 portraits, in eight countries. I am honored to have been the recipient of their trust and feel fortunate to have been able to make some of the last visual records of their unique histories–The last of living memory.

This Thursday, April 12, is International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

Dennis Darling has taught photojournalism, social documentary and graphic design in the School of Journalism at UT Austin since 1981. He has published two books of his work: “Desperate Pleasures” and “Chameleon With Camera.” Darling’s most recent documentary work, a photography series on Holocaust survivors entitled “Families Gone To Ash: Giving voice to the survivors of Terezin” was exhibited at the American Center of the American Embassy at Prague during June and July of 2014.

Episode 104: Foreign Fighters in the Spanish Civil War

During the Spanish Civil War (1936-39), which pitted a left-leaning Republic, suported by the Soviet Union, against right-leaning nationalists, supported by the Nazi, more than 35,000 people from more than 50 countries went to Spain to fight against fascism for the Republic.

Today’s guest, Lisa Kirschenbaum, talks about who some of those people were and what role the Soviet Union played in training them and welcoming them as exiles.

The Great Betrayal: Jean-Paul Sartre and the Arabs

It was the most intense intellectual and political love story that modern Arab intellectuals had ever had with a living European thinker and – even better – the sentiment was mutual. From the late 1940s to the late 1960s, Jean-Paul Sartre’s philosophy, and his political recipes for self-emancipation, guided the project of Arab liberation. From the very beginning, Middle Eastern intellectuals considered Sartre’s ideas rich, meaningful and appropriate for their needs. Their goal was ambitious: the invention of a new type of Arab man and woman: sovereign, authentic, self-confident, self-sufficient, proud, willing to sacrifice and therefore, existentially free. Tampering with existence was their key strategy for a smooth exit from the legacy of colonial dehumanization, and Sartre’s intellectual fingerprints were all over this strategy. By the late 1950s the Arab world could boast of having the largest existentialist scene outside Europe. Indeed, almost everything that Sartre said and wrote during these years was translated to Arabic as soon as it hit the French market.

Sartre too was infatuated. Frustrated with European political passivity of the 1960s, he was enchanted by the sheer energy and broad horizons of the Arab revolutionary project. At the peak of this affair, Sartre and his home-made diplomatic crew came, in person, to pay respect to the Arab revolutionary project. And for a brief moment, the alliance appeared to be indestructible. And yet, for all the high philosophical talk about existence and revolution, the affair ended bitterly and Sartre would be forever remembered as a traitor to the Arab cause. Not just a traitor but one of the worst kind: a former friend. Here is a brief account of this painful trans-Mediterranean affair, its promise, and its demise

As World War II drew to a close and colonialism was in full retreat, a small but influential circle of Arab philosophers identified the sphere of being as the most intellectually significant problem to reckon with. What does it mean to be a person after colonialism? After decades during which Arabs were struggling objects in the closed world of European consciousness, who and what dominated the definition of the self and the political community to which it belonged? To answer this question and produce ideal conditions for cultural rejuvenation, they turned to philosophy and, specifically, to phenomenology and its new branch, existentialism. Studying with the very best teachers Europe could offer, they slowly learned that the essence of their colonized being was not fixed. That is, that the Left Bank slogan of Parisian youth, “existence precedes essence,” carries a very special promise of liberation. They realized that their struggle to become free and modern had nothing to do with the purported “essence” of an Islam framed as antithetical to reason, science, democracy and individualism.

Rather, it was a simple relational issue. Just as existentialism made Simone de Beauvoir realize that “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman,” it made colonized people understand the very process that made them inherently and irredeemably inferior. Existentialism not only exposed the paradoxical impossibility of the colonial demand but also offered tools to transcend it through self-liberation. The groundwork had already been laid a few years beforehand, as young philosophers had labored over how Islamic mysticism could be reconciled with Heidegger’s philosophy of being for the sake of creating an authentic and free individual. When Sartre’s work arrived to the Middle East it interfaced with this already-established philosophical opportunity, perfecting and substantiating it in simple and actionable ways.

The first such attempt was to generate a local version of Sartre’s idea of commitment, or engagement. According to Sartre, because writing is a consequential form of acting and being, intellectuals must assume political responsibility for their work and the circumstances that condition it. That meant that old guard intellectuals who were comfortable with the cultural assumptions of colonialism should be marginalized and retired. In their place, a new cadre of writers began the tedious work of intellectual decolonization. Known in Arabic as iltizam, this call for responsibility joined to professional action reorganized the cultural sphere and came to determine the political viability and legitimacy of any new idea. It also launched the careers of young thinkers, destroyed those of the established intellectual guard and established the norm that in decolonization culture and politics are inseparable.

Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre meeting with Che Guevara in Cuba in 1960 (Wikimedia Commons).

Most influential, however, was Arab intellectuals’ engagement with Sartre’s anti-colonial humanism, a cluster of thought that meaningfully connected the Arab world to Third-Worldism and the big struggles of the 1960s. This body of thought was shared by Sartre, Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, Léopold Sédar Senghor, and many other, lesser-known intellectuals from the former colonies. Together, these intellectuals developed the foundations of post-colonial thinking about race and otherness as well as concrete concepts such as settler colonialism and neo-colonialism. These were not simply ideas but politics that translated to specific struggles for liberation in Cuba, Congo, Vietnam, Rhodesia and of course Algeria. It is the same body of thought that would eventually connect seemingly unrelated struggles such as those of the Black Panthers in the US with the revolutionary politics of Algerian freedom fighters. Today we call this intersectionality. Back then, there were no fancy words to describe the daily business of the Global South. Being the first global thinker to engage international politics on that level, Sartre was intellectually involved in all of these struggles. He readily acknowledged the oppression to which colonized people were subjected and his thought paved the way for self-liberation. The ultimate destination was global citizenship. In the service of this goal, Sartre weaponized ideas and mobilized metropolitan public opinion on behalf of all of these struggles.

Simone de Beauvoir and Sartre with local activists and intellectuals in the Egyptian village of Kamshish, February 1967. The village became famous as a site of successful grass-root socialist struggle to reclaim land from the hands of feudalist. Given the passivity of the European left and its practical complicity with capitalism, Kamshish was an example for the revolutionary spirit of the East (Courtesy of Ali al-Samman, the man sitting between Sartre and Beauvoir.)

That is, all of them except one – Palestine. Sartre’s silence on the conflict in Palestine mystified his Arab interlocutors. How could the person who contributed to the intellectual DNA of Arab decolonization – who had explained to them in no uncertain terms that they are the “collective others” of colonialism – not see that Zionists in Palestine were doing the exact same thing as French colonizers in Algeria and British ones in Rhodesia? What was unclear here? Was Sartre a crypto-Zionist? How could he turn his back on his own intellectual legacy to make such an exception? The truth of the matter was that Sartre’s political paralysis was due to an irresolvable philosophical conundrum. Yes, he was one of the first thinkers to reckon otherness and translate oppression into viable ethical frameworks that were clear and actionable. That was the basis for his position on Algeria, by which he went against his own motherland, and it was the basis for his support for anti-colonial violence. He could certainly see and recognize Arabs as the “Others” of colonialism and even of Palestinians as the victimized “Others” of Zionism. However, he had no idea how to reconcile two “others” that existed in the case of Palestine. Who was right? Who deserved what, and on which ethical ground? Who was a greater victim? Sartre could not resolve this question and the fact that his own society was instrumental in the destruction of European Jews did not help, either. Indeed, Arabs began to suspect that he was trading in ethical reparations for Zionists.

Responding to Arab and Israeli pressures to clarify his position (that is, to declare once and for all who was “right”), Sartre decided to visit Egypt, Gaza, and Israel. He did so on the late-night eve of the 1967 war, a war that would forever destroy the Arab project of liberation. The visit went relatively well, with both sides respecting Sartre’s request for time and space in order to formulate and then publish his opinion. The Israeli press called Sartre the philosopher of the Arabs and knew fairly well how instrumental he was for their liberation project. The Arab side suspected he was pro-Zionist but had no proof of it. For his part, Sartre was simply confused. As the visit ended and the chain-smoking philosopher returned to his Parisian apartment to write down his thoughts on the conflict, a full-scale Arab-Israeli war was already in the air. In the weeks prior to it, the general sense in Europe was that Israel would be forever destroyed. Sartre’s Jewish friends and their many acquaintances on the Left asked him to support their cause and avoid a so-called “second Holocaust.” He was reluctant to do so. After more pressure, he finally relented and, on the eve of the war, signed a petition on behalf of Israel. The who’s who of French culture, from Picasso to Marguerite Duras, signed the petition. His Arab interlocutors were stunned. But before they could even organize themselves to protest this signature, the war came, and destroyed everything for which they had struggled. Their project was in ruins, and Sartre was forever implicated in the most significant Arab defeat of modern times. So began, and so ended, a passionate intellectual and political affair, founded in visions of total freedom and concluded in heartache and infamy.

Yoav di Capua, No Exit: Arab Existentialism, Jean-Paul Sartre and Decolonization

Read more about existentialism and Arab history:

Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails (2016)

Ever wondered what was the existentialist hype all about but was never quite able to make sense of it? Give it another chance with Sarah Bakewell’s entertaining, engaging and highly lucid exploration of the philosophy and the people behind it. Voted one of the best books of 2016, At the Existentialist Café is a rare intellectual accomplishment that sets a new standard for popular intellectual history.

Eugene Rogan, The Arabs: A History (2009)

This international bestseller offers the most updated and fluent history of the modern Arab world. Rogan makes the daunting task of making sense of the last two centuries of Arab history much less intimidating and complex than initially assumed. Crucial reading for those who wish to quickly understand this foreign land and bring themselves up to date with the history of a people who is more often than not misunderstood.

Did Race and Racism Exist in the Middle Ages?

For generations, race studies scholars—historians and literary critics alike—believed that race and its pernicious spawn racism were modern-day phenomena only. This is because race was originally defined in biological terms, and believed to be determined by skin color, physiognomy, and genetic inheritance. The more astute, however, came to realize race could also be a matter of cultural classification, as Ann Stoler’s study of the colonial Dutch East Indies makes plain:

“Race could never be a matter of physiology alone. Cultural competency in Dutch customs, a sense of ‘belonging’ in a Dutch cultural milieu . . . disaffiliation with things Javanese . . . domestic arrangements, parenting styles, and moral environment . . . were crucial to defining . . . who was to be considered European.”*

Yet even after we recognized that people could be racialized through cultural and social criteria—that race could be a social construction—the European Middle Ages was still seen as outside the history of race (I speak only of the European Middle Ages because I’m a euromedievalist—it’s up to others to discuss race in Islamic, Jewish, Asian, African, and American premodernities).

This meant that the atrocities of the Medieval Period—roughly 500-1500 CE—such as the periodic extermination of Jews in Europe, the demand that they mark their bodies and the bodies of their children with a large visible badge, the herding of Jews into specific towns in England, and the vilification of Jews for putatively possessing a fetid stench, a male menses, subhuman and bestial characteristics, and a congenital need to ingest the blood of Christian children whom they tortured and crucified to death — all these and more were considered to be just premodern “prejudice” and not acts of racism.

Duccio di Buoninsegna, Christ Accused by the Pharisees, c. 1308-11.
Source: Wikimedia Commons

The exclusion of the medieval period from the history of race issues derives from an understanding of race that has been overly influenced by the era of scientific racism (in the so-called Age of Enlightenment), when science was the magisterial discourse of racial classification.

But today, in news media and public life, we see how religion also can function to classify people in absolute and fundamental ways. Muslims, for example, who hail from a diversity of ethno-races and national origins, have been talked about as if their religion somehow identified them as one homogenous people.

“Race” is one of the primary names we have for our repeating tendency to demarcate human beings through selected differences that are identified as absolute and fundamental, so as to distribute power differentially to human groups. In race-making, strategic essentialisms are posited and assigned through a variety of practices. Race is a structural relationship for the management of human differences.

Rather than oppose premodern “prejudice” to modern racisms, we can see the treatment of medieval Jews—including their legalized murder by the state on the basis of community rumors and lies—as racial acts, which today we might even call hate crimes, of a sanctioned and legalized kind. In this way, we would bear witness to the full meaning of actions and events in the medieval past, and understand that racial thinking, racial practices, and racial phenomena can occur before there’s a vocabulary to name them for what they are.

We can see medieval racial thinking in art and statuary, in maps, in saints’ lives, in state legislature, church laws, social institutions, popular beliefs, economic practices, war, settlement and colonization, religious treatises, and many kinds of literature, including travel accounts, ethnographies, romances, chronicles, letters, papal bulls, and more.

English Jew wearing the Jewish badge on his chest in the form of the tablets of the Old Testament (BL Cotton MS Nero, D2, fol.180, 13th century. British Library, UK, reproduced from The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages).

Accordingly, the treatment of Jews marks medieval England as the first racial state in the history of the West. Church and state laws produced surveillance, tagging, herding, incarceration, legal murder, and expulsion. A popular story of Jews killing Christian boys evolved over centuries, showing how changes in popular culture helped create the emerging communal identity of England. England’s 1275 Statute of Jewry even mandated residential segregation for Jews and Christians, inaugurating what would seem to be the beginning of the ghetto in Europe; and England’s expulsion of its Jews in 1290 marks the first permanent expulsion of Jews in Europe.

Similarly, Muslims in medieval Europe were transformed from military enemies into non-humans. The renowned theologian, Bernard of Clairvaux, who co-wrote the Rule for the Order of the Templars, announced that the killing of a Muslim wasn’t actually homicide, but malicide—the extermination of incarnated evil, not the killing of a person. Muslims, Islam, and the Prophet were vilified in numerous creative ways, and the extraterritorial incursions we call the Crusades coalesced into an indispensable template for Europe’s later colonial empires of the modern eras.

Even fellow Christians could be racialized. Literature justifying England’s colonization of Ireland in the twelfth century depicted the Irish as a quasi-human, savage, infantile, and bestial race—a racializing strategy in England’s colonial domination of Ireland that echoes from the medieval through the early modern period four centuries later.

Statue of the Black African St. Maurice of Magdeburg, at Magdeburg Cathedral, Germany, 1220-1250 (The Menil Foundation, Houston; Hickey and Robertson, Houston; and Harvard University’s Image of the Black Project, reproduced from The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages)

The treatment of Africans in medieval Europe tracks the pathways by which whiteness ascended to primacy in defining Christian European identity from the mid-thirteenth century onward. Sub-Saharan Africans were grimly depicted as killers of John the Baptist and torturers of Christ in medieval art. Africa also allowed European literature to fantasize the outside world, and imagine what the world outside could offer—treasure, sex, wealth, supremacy—and consider how to make the rest of the world into something that better resembled Latin Christendom itself.

After Greenlanders and Icelanders encountered Native Americans in the early eleventh century, when the Norse founded settlements in North America, Icelandic sagas gleefully show the new colonists cheating Native Americans in exploitative trade relations half a millennium before Columbus. The colonists also kidnap two native boys and abduct them back to northern Europe, where the children are Christianized and taught Norse—an account of forced migration that may help explain why, among the races of the world today, the C1e DNA gene element is shared only by Icelanders and Native Americans.

Europe’s evolving relationship with the Mongol race is traced in Franciscan missionary accounts, the famous narrative of Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa, Franciscan letters from China, the journey of a monk of the Church of the East from Beijing to Europe, and other travel narratives, that transform Mongols from a terrifying alien race into an object of desire for the West, once the Mongol imperium’s wealth, power, and resources became known. Mongols even offered a vision of modernity, of what that future might look like—with a postal express, disaster relief, social welfare, populace-maintained census data collection, independent women leaders, and universal paper money. Unlike the other races encountered by Latin Christendom—Jews, Muslims, Africans, Native Americans, and the Romani—Mongols were the only race representing absolute power to a fearful West.

Detail from the Catalan Atlas showing Marco Polo traveling the Silk Road. Source: Wikimedia Commons

Slavery in the medieval period was also configured by race: Caucasian slave women in Islamic Spain birthed sons and heirs for Arab Muslim rulers, including the famed Caliphs of Cordoba; the ranks of the slave dynasties of Turkic and Caucasian sultans and military elites in Mamluk Egypt were regularly resupplied by European, especially Italian slavers; and the Romani (“Gypsies”) in southeastern Europe became enslaved by religious houses and landowning elites who used Romani slaves as labor well into the modern era, making “Gypsy” the name of a slave race.

In the Middle Ages and today, it is the Romani—who consider themselves an ethnoracial group, despite considerable internal heterogeneity among their peoples—who best personify the paradox of race and racial identification. Romani self-identification as a race, despite substantial differences in the composition of their populations, suggests to us that racialization—by those outside, as well as by those who self-racialize—remains tenacious, well into the twenty-first century.

* Ann Laura Stoler, “Racial Histories and Their Regimes of Truth.” Political Power and Social Theory 11 (1997): 183-206

Geraldine Heng, The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages

Recommended reading:

Madeline Caviness, “From the Self-Invention of the Whiteman in the Thirteenth Century to The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.” Different Visions: A Journal of New Perspectives on Medieval Art 1 (2008).
A key study on the ascension of whiteness to centrality in European identity, as depicted in medieval art, with fifty-nine full-color images.

Jean Devisse, The Image of the Black in Western Art: From the Early Christian Era to the “Age of Discovery.” Trans. William G. Ryan. Vol. 2 Pt. 1: From the Demonic Threat to the Incarnation of Sainthood (2010).
An extraordinary, indispensable volume, with a vast collection of images of objects, illustrations, and architectural features depicting blackness and Africans in medieval European art. Part of an invaluable multi-volume series on blackness and Africans in art history, that ranges from antiquity to the modern period.

Ian Hancock, We are the Romani People (2002). A major study on the Romani, and Romani slavery, by a distinguished Romani studies scholar at the University of Texas in Austin.

Debra Higgs Strickland, Saracens, Demons, and Jews: Making Monsters in Medieval Art (2003).
An important study showing us the implications of the iconography that visualized Jews, Muslims, Mongols, and monstrous humans for medieval audiences. Strickland reminds us that the human freaks depicted in art, cartography, and literature—often celebrated as wondrous and marvelous—shouldn’t teach us that medieval pleasure is pleasure of a simply and wholly innocent kind.

John V. Tolan, Saracens: Islam in the Medieval European Imagination (2002) and Sons of Ishmael: Muslims through European Eyes in the Middle Ages (2008).
Two indispensable studies on portrayals of Muslims in medieval Christian Europe.

Header image: Alexander encounters the headless people —Historia de preliis in French, BL Royal MS 15 E vi, c. 1445.

The views and opinions expressed in this article or video are those of the individual author(s) or presenter(s) and do not necessarily reflect the policy or views of the editors at Not Even Past, the UT Department of History, the University of Texas at Austin, or the UT System Board of Regents. Not Even Past is an online public history magazine rather than a peer-reviewed academic journal. While we make efforts to ensure that factual information in articles was obtained from reliable sources, Not Even Past is not responsible for any errors or omissions.

Episode 103: French Child Ambassadors in the East

In the 17th and 18th centuries, France had its eyes on creating a worldwide trading empire. French merchant families began sending young men–teenagers by modern definitions–to the Ottoman Empire, India, and Southeast Asia, where they were expected to learn local languages and trading customs, while representing French values and serving as the vanguard of French imperialism. However, things didn’t always go according to plan.

Guest Julia Gossard shares her research into the fascinating world of child ambassadors who were expected to live in two worlds and create lasting relationships between France and a global network of allies.

The American “Empire” Reconsidered

by A. G. Hopkins

Whether commentators assert that the United States is resurgent or in decline, it is evident that the dominant mood today is one of considerable uncertainty about the standing and role of the “indispensable nation” in the world. The triumphalism of the 1990s has long faded; geopolitical strategy, lacking coherence and purpose, is in a state of flux. Not Even Past, or perhaps Not Ever Past, because the continuously unfolding present prompts a re-examination of approaches to history that fail to respond to the needs of the moment, as inevitably they all do.

This as good a moment as any to consider how we got “from there to here” by stepping back from the present and taking a long view of the evolution of U.S. international relations. The first reaction to this prospect might be to say that it has already been done – many times. Fortunately (or not), the evidence suggests otherwise. The subject has been studied in an episodic fashion that has been largely devoid of continuity between 1783 and 1914, and becomes systematic and substantial only after 1941.
There are several ways of approaching this task. The one I have chosen places the United States in an evolving Western imperial system from the time of colonial rule to the present. To set this purpose in motion, I have identified three phases of globalisation and given empires a starring role in the process. The argument holds that the transition from one phase to another generated the three crises that form the turning points the book identifies. Each crisis was driven by a dialectic, whereby successful expansion generated forces that overthrew or transformed one phase and created its successor.

The first phase, proto-globalisation, was one of mercantilist expansion propelled by Europe’s leading military-fiscal states. Colonising the New World stretched the resources of the colonial powers, produced a European-wide fiscal crisis at the close of the eighteenth century, and gave colonists in the British, French, and Spanish empires the ability, and eventually the desire, to claim independence. At this point, studies of colonial history give way to specialists on the new republic, who focus mainly on internal considerations of state-building and the ensuing struggle for liberty and democracy. Historians of empire look at the transition from colonial rule rather differently by focussing on the distinction between formal and effective independence. The U.S. became formally independent in 1783, but remained exposed to Britain’s informal political, economic and cultural influences. The competition between different visions of an independent polity that followed mirrored the debate between conservatives and reformers in Europe after 1789, and ended, as it did in much of Europe, in civil war.

“A Rival Who Has Come to Stay. John Bull – Good ‘evins! – wotever ‘ll become of my ship-building monopoly, if that there Yankee is going to turn out boats like that right along?” Puck magazine, July 24, 1895 (via Library of Congress)

The second phase, modern globalisation, which began around the mid-nineteenth century, was characterised by nation-building and industrialisation. Agrarian elites lost their authority; power shifted to urban centres; dynasties wavered or crumbled. The United States entered this phase after the Civil War at the same time as new and renovated states in Europe did. The renewed state developed industries, towns, and an urban labor force, and experienced the same stresses of unemployment, social instability, and militant protest in the 1880s and 1890s as Britain, France, Germany and other developing industrial nation-states. At the close of the century, too, the U.S. joined other European states in contributing to imperialism, which can be seen as the compulsory globalisation of the world. The war with Spain in 1898 not only delivered a ready-made insular empire, but also marked the achievement of effective independence. By 1900, Britain’s influence had receded. The United States could now pull the lion’s tail; its manufactures swamped the British market; its culture had shed its long-standing deference. After 1898, too, Washington picked up the white man’s burden and entered on a period of colonial rule that is one of the most neglected features of the study of U.S. history.

Columbia’s Easter Bonnet: In the wake of gainful victory in the Spanish–American War, Columbia—the National personification of the U.S.—preens herself with an Easter bonnet in the form of a warship bearing the words “World Power” and the word “Expansion” on the smoke coming out of its stack on a 1901 edition of Puck (via Library of Congress)

The third phase, post-colonial globalisation, manifested itself after World War II in the process of decolonisation. The world economy departed from the classical colonial model; advocacy of human rights eroded the moral basis of colonial rule; international organisations provided a platform for colonial nationalism. The United States decolonised its insular empire between 1946 and 1959 at the same time as the European powers brought their own empires to a close. Thereafter, the U.S. struggled to manage a world that rejected techniques of dominance that had become either unworkable or inapplicable. The status of the United States was not that of an empire, unless the term is applied with excessive generality, but that of an aspiring hegemon. Yet, Captain America continues to defend ‘freedom’ as if the techniques of the imperial era remained appropriate to conditions pertaining in the twenty-first century.

The signing of the NATO Treaty, 1949 (via Wikimedia Commons)

This interpretation inverts the idea of “exceptionalism” by showing that the U.S. was fully part of the great international developments of the last three centuries. At the same time, it identifies examples of distinctiveness that have been neglected: the U.S. was the first major decolonising state to make independence effective; the only colonial power to acquire most of its territorial empire from another imperial state; the only one to face a significant problem of internal decolonisation after 1945. The discussion of colonial rule between 1898 and 1959 puts a discarded subject on the agenda of research; the claim that the U.S. was not an empire after that point departs from conventional wisdom.

The book is aimed at U.S. historians who are unfamiliar with the history of Western empires, at historians of European empires who abandon the study the U.S. between 1783 and 1941, and at policy-makers who appeal to the ‘lessons of history’ to shape the strategy of the future.

A.G. Hopkins, American Empire: A Global History

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