Joan Neuberger, Author at Not Even Past

Episode 102: The “Servant Girl Annihilator”

In 1885, the world’s attention was focused on a series of grisly murders that took place in the otherwise quiet town of Austin, Texas. Several African-American women were murdered in the middle of the night, leading the press to dub the unknown assailant “the Servant-Girl Annihilator.” Some even went so far as to speculate that Jack the Ripper was the same person.

Lauren Henley describes the events of 1884-85, but also discusses how these murders tell us something about the uneasy racial history of the postbellum south, and also asks what drives our fascination with serial killers and unsolved mysteries.

Episode 101: The Bolshevik Revolution at 100

It’s been 100 years since the Emperor of Russia was overthrown by a group of left wing revolutionaries espousing a radical change in politics and economics, who turned the Russian Empire into the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. The echoes of 1917 reverberated around the world, and, at the close of 2017, historians did what historians tend to do: look back at what happened and try to encapsulate the global significance of the Bolshevik Revolution.

Today’s guest, Sheila Fitzpatrick, discusses some of the myriad interpretations that have been given to the 1917 revolutions, judgments about its success and importance, and offers insight into Russia’s own subdued attitude toward the centenary.

Goddess of Anarchy: Lucy Parsons, American Radical

By Jacqueline Jones

The news headlines today tell an alarming if familiar story—of workers losing their jobs to machines, of the diminished power of labor unions, rising rates of economic inequality, and the inadequacy of the two-party system to address these issues in any meaningful way. The internet and other new electronic technologies might suggest that these are present-day challenges without historical precedent. In fact, the plight of workers today echoes the plight of workers in America’s Gilded Age. Then, 150 years ago, an array of activists working outside the two-party system sought to confront the titans of industry and the politicians who did their bidding.

One of the most famous—and, to the self-identified “respectable classes,” infamous—of these activists was Lucy Parsons. Who was this prolific writer and editor and a fearless defender of the First Amendment and why did her speeches attract adoring crowds and baton-wielding police officers?

Born to an enslaved woman in Virginia in 1851, Parsons promoted the interests of the white urban laboring classes throughout her long life, right up until her death in 1942. For generations Parsons’s historical legacy has been subsumed under that of her husband, Albert Parsons, hanged in 1887 for his alleged role in the Chicago Haymarket bombing the year before. During a workers’ rally in May 1886, someone tossed a bomb into the crowd, killing seven police officers and four other people, and wounding many others. The identity of the bomb-thrower was unknown at the time, and remains a mystery to this day, but a biased judge and jury proclaimed Chicago’s anarchists guilty of murder and conspiracy solely on the basis of their radical writings and speeches.

“Police charging the mob after the explosion, Explosion of the bomb, and Hospital scene. Border images include clockwise from left: A.R. Parsons, Louis Lingg, Inspector Bonfield, Captain Schaack, Sheriff Matson, Michael Schwab, August Spies, Samuel Fielden, Officer Mathias Degan, Mrs. Parsons, Oscar Neebe, Nina van Zandt, Captain Ward, George Engel, and Adolph Fischer. Pictorial West. Vol. 11, no. 11 (Nov. 20, 1887)

Lucy and Albert met in Waco, Texas, soon after the Civil War. The two made an unlikely, couple. She was tall and (according to the black and white men and women who knew her) strikingly beautiful; he was short, wiry and dapper, with carefully trimmed hair and mustache. He was a veteran of the Confederate army and the brother of a famous Confederate general. Lucy and Albert managed to marry in 1872, when Republicans sympathetic to black civil rights were in control of state politics; a year later the Democrats resumed power, and the couple fled to Chicago, where they settled in a German-immigrant community, embracing first socialism and then anarchism.

Lucy Parsons in 1886

Lucy Parsons defiantly declared to newspaper reporters, “I amount to nothing to the world and people care nothing for me.” In this she was deeply mistaken, for a media frenzy swirled around her wherever she appeared. After Albert Parsons was jailed in the summer of 1886, Lucy embarked on a series of lecture tours in an effort to raise money for the defense of her husband and the other six defendants convicted with him. She was a powerful speaker—impassioned and eloquent, able to hold large audiences in her thrall for hours at a time.

The immigrant workers of Chicago revered her, politicians reviled her, and the general public maintained an intense fascination with her—all for good reason. Parsons lived a life that was rife with contradictions. She denied that she was of African descent, instead claiming that her parents were Hispanic and Indian. She remained largely indifferent to the injustices faced by black laborers, focusing her attention on the white workers of Chicago and other big cities. In private, she took lovers after the death of her husband, but in public presented herself as a prim Victorian wife and mother and a grief-stricken widow. She glorified the bonds of family, yet did not hesitate to rid herself of her son Albert Junior when he threatened to embarrass her by joining the U. S. army. In 1899 she had Junior committed against his will to an insane asylum, where he died twenty years later.

She was a well-read, insightful critic of Gilded Age America, advocating small cooperative trade unions as the building blocks of a more just society. At the same time, she became well known for her rhetorical provocations, urging the laboring classes to “Learn the use of explosives!” to protect themselves from predatory industrialists and police forces. In describing her, Parsons’s enemies often evoked the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. She was a “firebrand” who delivered “fiery,” “red-hot,” “incendiary,” “inflammatory” speeches that her critics feared would spark a bloody uprising among her followers.

Lucy Parsons c1920

The contradictions between Parsons’ mysterious private life and her defiant public persona was rooted in the struggles she faced as a radical, a woman, and a former slave, beginning with her forced migration from the East to Texas during the Civil War and her teenage years in Waco. In Chicago, she began a rigorous course of self-education, reading widely in newspapers and popular magazines as well as in dense tracts on history and political theory. Together with her husband, she participated in debates and discussions among leading radicals in the city.

In her writings, Lucy Parsons decried the effects of technological innovation on the workplace and the effects of money and influence on politics. Committed to the free expression of ideas no matter how radical, she edited several anarchist newspapers and contributed to many others. She impressed even those hostile to her and her ideas with her fluent denunciations of greedy capitalists and abusive bosses. She took delight in nimbly dodging the police officers who hounded her and tried to silence her. Her career reveals the challenges of promoting a radical message that would appeal widely to the toiling masses who were themselves divided by craft, religion, political loyalties, gender, and racial identity.

Lucy Parsons’s biography offers several overlapping narratives— a love story between a former slave and a former Confederate soldier, the rise and decline of radical labor agitation, the evolution of race as a political ideology and social signifier, and the trajectory of social reform from Reconstruction through the New Deal. She was a bold, enigmatic woman. Her power to inform and fascinate is enduring and her story, in all its complexity, remains a remarkable one for its useful legacies no less than its cautionary lessons.

Jacqueline Jones, Goddess of Anarchy: The Life and Times of Lucy Parsons, American Radical

For more about Lucy Parsons, anarchism, and labor, try these:

Paul Avrich, The Haymarket Tragedy (1984). This is arguably the definitive account of the Haymarket bombing, written by the premier historian of American anarchism. Avrich covers all the major characters involved; workers’ movements in Gilded-Age Chicago; the rally on May 4, 1886; the subsequent trial; and the aftermath of the tragedy.

Gale Ahrens, ed., Lucy Parsons: Freedom, Equality, and Solidarity: Writings and Speeches, 1878-1937 (2004). This edited volume provides a good introduction to Lucy Parsons’s writings and speeches. She was a prolific writer of letters to the editor, essays and political commentary, and fiction. She also edited two anarchist periodicals, and delivered hundreds of speeches over the course of her long life.

Lucy E. Parsons, ed., Life of Albert R. Parsons, With Brief History of Labor Movement in America (1889). This book contains an autobiography of Albert Parsons, letters he sent to Lucy during his lecture tours, testimonials from comrades, and accounts of the Haymarket trial and its aftermath. Lucy published it to keep alive the memory of her martyred husband, and also to help support herself and her children. A reprint is available on Amazon.

William D. Carrigan, The Making of a Lynching Culture: Violence and Vigilantism in Central Texas, 1836-1916 ( 2006). Carrigan examines the anti-black violence that pervaded the area where Lucy Parsons and her mother and brother lived during and after the Civil War—McLennan County, Texas.

Michael J. Schaak, Anarchy and Anarchists: A History of the Red Terror, and the Social Revolution in America and Europe, Communism, Socialism, and Nihilism in Doctrine and Deed, the Chicago Haymarket Conspiracy and the Detection and Trial of the Conspirators (1889). Schaak was a Chicago detective who helped fuel fear and hysteria in the general public over labor radicals such as Albert and Lucy the Parsons and their comrades. He takes note of Lucy’s prominence in Chicago anarchist circles. This book is available online.

Margaret Garb, Freedom’s Ballot: African American Political Struggles in Chicago from Abolition to the Great Migration (2014). The Chicago radicals, socialists as well as anarchists, represented the white urban laboring classes exclusively, and steadfastly ignored the plight of black workers, whom they demonized as strikebreakers. Garb details the activism among black men and women in Chicago during this period.

Timothy Messer-Kruse, The Trial of the Haymarket Anarchists: Terrorism and Justice in the Gilded Age (2011). Messer-Kruse carefully examines the transcript Haymarket trial transcript, and argues that the defendants were complicit in the bombing, to varying degrees. To some extent his argument relies on performances by Albert Parsons and other anarchists, who went out of their way to brag to undercover police about their possession of dynamite and willingness to use it.

Cuba’s Revolutionary World

By Jonathan C. Brown

On January 2, 1959, Fidel Castro, the rebel comandante who had just overthrown Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista, addressed a crowd of jubilant supporters. Recalling the failed popular uprisings of past decades, Castro assured them that this time “the real Revolution” had arrived. Castro’s words proved prophetic not only for his countrymen but for Latin America and the wider world.

Fidel Castro announcing the arrival of “the real revolution,” 1959.

The political turmoil that rocked a small Caribbean nation in the 1950s became one of the twentieth century’s most transformative events. Initially, Castro’s revolution augured well for democratic reform movements then gaining traction in Latin America. But what had begun promisingly veered off course as Castro took a heavy hand in efforts to centralize Cuba’s economy and stamp out private enterprise. Embracing the Soviet Union as an ally, Castro and his lieutenants, Che Guevara and Raúl Castro, sought to export the socialist revolution abroad through armed insurrection. Chairman Khrushchev’s early support aided the Cuban revolutionaries in defeating of the CIA invasion of Cuban émigré fighters at the Bay of Pigs. However, he subsequently lost his job over the 1962 Missile Crisis that pushed the superpowers to the brink of nuclear war.

By the end of the 1960s, rural and urban uprisings linked to the Cuban Revolution had spilled over from Central America into the bigger countries of South America. Revolutionary groups whose leaders had trained in Havana were operating in Venezuela, Colombia, Peru, and Argentina. Most of the rural and urban guerrillas may not have traveled to Cuba. Yet they certainly followed Fidel’s “anti-imperialist” example. Che himself attempted to spread the revolution to Bolivia, where he died. Other rebel groups with names such as the Tupamaros and Montoneros and still others with initials like FALN, ELN, and MIR defined the 1960s as the age of student unrest.

Castro’s provocations inspired intense opposition. Cuban anti-communists who had fled to Miami found a patron in the CIA, which actively supported their efforts to topple Castro’s regime. American presidents supported anti-communist forces that often utilized disproportionate violence against pro-Cuban dissidence in their own countries. The insurrections fomented by leftist guerrillas lent support to Latin America’s military castes, who promised to restore stability. Brazil was the first to succumb to a coup in 1964. A decade later, juntas of generals governed most Spanish and Portuguese-speaking nations of the Western Hemisphere. Rightwing terror claimed increasing numbers of casualties into the 1980s. Thus did a revolution that had seemed to signal the death knell of dictatorship in Latin America produce its tragic opposite.

Latin America’s military establishments especially came to oppose revolution because they learned what had happened to the Cuban army that failed to defeat Castro’s guerrilla rebellion. Revolutionary firing squads killed hundreds of military and police officers when the Batista dictatorship fell. Consequently, Che Guevara’s travels in Latin America proved especially toxic. President Jânio Quadros of Brazil resigned one week after presenting Guevara with a medal and Argentina’s army generals deposed President Arturo Frondizi several months after he “secretly” met with El Che.

Omar Torrijos and Fidel Castro in 1976

However, it is instructive that two generals who performed coups d’état in 1968 took advantage of the nationalist feelings of peasants and workers to establish pro-Cuban juntas. Generals Juan Velasco of Peru and Omar Torrijos of Panama ousted elected governments in order to implement overdue social reforms. Many countries of Latin America followed the Brazilian example of establishing long-term counterrevolutionary military dictatorships. Brazil’s generals governed for twenty-one years.

The Cold War that Cuba introduced to Latin America affected the lives of countless ordinary citizens. Humberto Sorí Marín, the revolution’s first agriculture minister. opposed the turn toward communism, resigned, and fled to Miami, only to return with a cache of weapons for an uprising against Castro. He died before a firing squad. There was also Osvaldo Ramírez, the bandit king of the Escambray Mountains who led a widespread guerrilla rebellion against Castro’s rule until militia troops shot and killed him in battle. His anti-communist guerrilla successors endured within Cuba until 1965.

Cuban militiamen capture an anti-Castro guerilla fighter, c. 1962.

Antonio “Tony” Zamora was one Castro opponent who survived. He aspired to study law but left Cuba in 1960 to join the brigade of exiled Cuban youths who landed at the Bay of Pigs. President Kennedy ransomed Zamora and his fellow prisoners following the Cuban Missile Crisis. Tony became a lawyer in Miami and went on to advocate greater dialog with the Castro regime as the Cuban Revolution approached its fiftieth anniversary.

Cuba’s revolution attracted youthful visitors from all over Latin America who wished to learn how they too might become armed revolutionaries. Julio García left the University of Buenos Aires to learn how to fight as a guerrilla in 1962. However, he and several other Argentineans quit the camps after training became too rigorous for them. Venezuelans like Luben Petkoff did finish Cuban guerrilla training. Luben engaged in combat for nearly ten years only to give up finally with a pardon from one of the few democracies that survived the 1960s.

Venezuelan Leftist Guerillas

Women too became involved in the turmoil. The guerrilla Tania gave up her life for the revolution, this one in Bolivia. Tania’s real name was Tamara Bunke Bider, an Argentinean-born East German who first met Che Guevara as a government translator in East Berlin. She immigrated to Cuba in the early 1960s and eventually became Che’s spy in La Paz, Bolivia. Tania campaigned with Guevara’s last guerrilla group in 1967 and suffered the fate of most of his followers.

Student rioters in Córdoba, Argentina, 1969

Argentina’s Norma Arrostita visited Havana in 1967 to attend a conference of armed leftists from all over Latin America. When she returned to Buenos Aires, Norma acted as the lookout for the kidnapping and killing of a former general who once served as Argentina’s president. A founding member of the urban guerrilla group known as the Montoneros, Arrostita later “disappeared” in a military prison like thousands of other suspected radicals.

As Mao used to say, “The revolution is not a dinner party.” Fidel Castro provided the corollary. “But the counterrevolution” he said, “is always more cruel.”

Jonathan C. Brown, Cuba’s Revolutionary World (2017)

For more on twentieth-century Latin American revolutions, try these:

Jorge I. Domínguez, Cuba: Order and Revolution (1978).
The foundational text for any serious study of Cuba’s three revolutions in the modern age: the Wars of Independence, the 1933 Revolution and rise of Fulgencio Batista, and the 1959 Revolution of Fidel Castro and his many associates.

Alexandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali, One Hell of a Gamble: Khrushchev, Castro, and Kennedy, 1958-1964 (1997).
A fascinating account of Havana-Moscow relations culminating in the October Missile Crisis of 1962. The authors had access to Soviet and US document collections but only a few Cuban ones, which are generally not available to researchers. The title derives from a statement by President Kennedy during a White House discussion about Premier Khrushchev’s possible motivations for placing nuclear missiles in Cuba.

Jan Lust, Lucha revolucionaria: Perú, 1958-1967 (2013).
The most thorough study of a guerrilla movement in any country of Latin America during the 1960s. The author interviewed survivors and collected detailed information on leaders and fighters from a variety of sources.

Valeria Manzano, The Age of Youth in Argentina: Culture, Politics, and Sexuality from Perón to Videla (2014).
An important study of the student movements of one important country in South America during an age of youthful protests and cultural change wrought by national political turmoil and military interventions. The book covers the period from the 1955 overthrow of Juan Perón to the 1976 coup d’état that preceded the last military dictatorship of the country.

Episode 100: Extravaganza Spectacular!

We’ve made it to 100 episodes! Join co-hosts Joan Neuberger and Christopher Rose as they look back on the origins of 15 Minute History, relive the awkwardness of the first few outings in the studio, recap their favorite episodes, share embarrassing moments with impressive guests in the studio, ponder the phenomenon of being asked to entertain serious questions at weddings, and give short glimpses into those April Fools’ episodes that we never quite got around to recording.

Episode 99: The 40 Acres During World War I

With America’s entry into World War One in April 1917, life immediately changed for many young Americans. Nowhere was this change more evident than on college and university campuses. The University of Texas, with its 3,000 students, was a typical example: the liberal arts were set aside in favor of military drills for young men, and nursing classes for young women. As we near the 99th anniversary of Armistice Day, Ben Wright from UT’s Briscoe Center for American History, takes a look at World War One on our very own home front: the storied Forty Acres of the University of Texas at Austin.

Enclaves of Science, Outposts of Empire

By Megan Raby

At the end of 1960, near Cienfuegos, Cuba, on the Soledad estate of a U.S.-owned sugar company, the American Director and Cuban staff of Harvard’s Atkins Institution began packing up their scientific equipment. The Cuban Revolution had caught up with them. Director Ian Duncan Clement, his wife, Vivian, and lab technician Esperanza Vega worked quickly to put the station’s herbarium, library, and lab “in stand-by condition.” The station’s horticulturalist, Felipe Gonzalez, and his assistants pruned the trees in the station’s arboretum, preparing them “to withstand a period of neglect.”

“Harvard House,” 1939. Felipe Gonzalez, 1980. (Courtesy of Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden.

The Atkins Institution had operated as an important field research station for visiting botanists and zoologists since shortly after the 1898 Spanish American War. It had survived difficult times in the past––hurricanes, economic depression, and the Revolution of 1933. Despite the escalation of Fidel Castro’s insurgency, Harvard held its Biology field course there as usual in the summer of 1958. The station remained unscathed even as the front lines of the revolution passed over its grounds later that year. Only when the Soledad estate was nationalized and diplomatic relations between the United States and Cuba disintegrated were the Clements and staff members Vega and Gonzalez forced to leave. They expected to return soon.

Jardin Botánico de Cienfuegos, Cuba (Photograph by Anagoria, via Wikimeida).

The former Harvard station continues today as a Cuban institution, the Jardín Botánico de Cienfuegos. Harvard’s loss (and Cuba’s gain) is a vivid example of the entanglement of biological science and politics in the twentieth-century Caribbean. Living and working at field stations like this one throughout the Caribbean shaped biologists’ ideas about the diversity of life on earth–– but maintaining these institutions during an era of U.S. hegemony in the region embedded U.S. scientists in broader structures of power.

Cartoon depicting Harvard’s Atkins Institution at Soledad as a naturalist’s tropical playground. US scientists appear as recognizable caricatures, while the faces of Cuban staff are obscured. D. A. Mackay, 1941. © President and Fellows of Harvard College. Arnold Arboretum Archives.

Working in situ at field stations allowed researchers from the United States and Europe to intensively study living tropical plants and animals in their natural environments for the first time at the turn of the twentieth century. While the traveling naturalists of previous centuries had ransacked tropical lands in search of specimens to ship back to northern metropolitan centers, the new station-based fieldwork emphasized studies of the ecology, physiology, and behavior of living organisms in place. Like field stations in the United States and Europe, tropical stations playing a key role both in the rise of experimental biology and in the development of place-based ecological field methods. But because visiting researchers traveled from the comparatively species-poor temperate zone, their experiences working at tropical stations led them to focus especially on investigations into the ecological and evolutionary causes of the great species diversity of the tropics.

Anolis allisoni, Jardin Botánico de Cienfuegos, Cuba (Photographer: Redeemer, via Wikimedia).

Stations in Cuba, Jamaica, Panama, Guyana, and Costa Rica were attractive to researchers from the United States, not only because they offered access to tropical nature, but also because they were seen to provide a place to live and work in comfort, health, and safety––insulating northern researchers from the real and imagined dangers of tropical environments. Working at these institutions also tended to isolate visiting U.S. researchers from their Latin American and Caribbean counterparts. Despite Cuba’s eminent and well-established scientific community, for example, most U.S. visitors experienced the Atkins Institution as a U.S. enclave. The Cubans they usually interacted with were laborers, assistants, or technicians who they did not see as scientific equals.

Graduate student Edward O. Wilson with his pet giant Cuban anole, Methuselah, at Harvard’s Atkins Institution at Soledad, July 1953. (Photograph courtesy of Edward O. Wilson.)

Even though they often had few ties to local communities, the growth of U.S.-run field stations were crucial to establishing a critical mass of biologists within the U.S. scientific community who had experience in the tropics,. By mid-century this group self identified as “tropical biologists.” Edward O. Wilson, one of the world’s most famous living biologists and a major champion of biodiversity conservation, for example, had his first formative visit to the tropics in Cuba as a student in Harvard’s Biology field course in 1956.

For U.S. biologists, securing longterm stability for their stations meant emphasizing the relevance of basic ecology to applied tropical agriculture and medicine. Tropical biologists struggled to maintain access to land and connections to streams of funding, transportation infrastructure, and local labor. They succeeded not by “carving out” space for basic research, but by linking support for basic tropical research to the concerns of the U.S. government agencies and corporations that dominated regional economies and politics. In the process, U.S. biologists began to argue that the diversity of tropical life was itself a resource. Harvard’s Cuban station, for example, had begun as a sugar experiment station, but by the 1920s, biologists had succeeded in expanding it into a broadly-based biological station. Rather than tie their professional concerns solely to a few economically significant commodity or pest species, tropical biologists framed the large numbers of unknown tropical species and their complex, little-studied ecologies as the most important source of untapped potential in the tropics. In doing so, they laid the foundations of the modern discourse of biodiversity.

Fleur en coupe. Jardín Botánico de Cienfuegos, Cuba. (Photography by MIchel Chauvet, via Wikimedia)

Such close ties to U.S. interests ultimately carried unforeseen risks. Even as the Cuban Revolution cut Harvard’s ties to its tropical station, other sites seemed threatened by a wave of nationalism and anti-colonialism. Even the Smithsonian’s influential station in the Panama Canal Zone seemed insecure as Panamanians called for renegotiations of the Canal treaties. In response, U.S. tropical biologists came together in the 1960s and 1970s to form new professional societies and institutions. For the first time, they also made substantial efforts to collaborate with Latin American and Caribbean scientists. They had long articulated the study of tropical biology in terms of its potential to aid U.S. national and corporate interests in exploiting the tropics. Now they rapidly shifted to emphasize the value of scientific cooperation, international development, and the conservation of tropical biodiversity.

To a degree not usually appreciated by either historians or scientists, “biodiversity” has Caribbean roots. Both the key concepts and values embedded in the biodiversity discourse were forged in U.S. biologists’ experiences at stations throughout the circum-Caribbean, from the era of the Spanish-American War through the revolutionary 1960s and 1970s. The scientific achievements of these institutions are impressive. Nevertheless, the legacies of exclusion and missed opportunities for connection between U.S. and Caribbean and Latin American scientific communities persist.

For more, see Megan Raby’s book:

American Tropics: The Caribbean Roots of Biodiversity Science (2017)

And see her recent article in American Scientist, “The Colonial Origins of Tropical Field Stations”

Read more about the history of ecological science and empire:

Londa Schiebinger and Claudia Swan (eds.), Colonial Botany: Science, Commerce, and Politics in the Early Modern World (2005).

This excellent collection offers an introduction to the significant role of plant knowledge in early modern colonialism––including essays on such topics as “bioprospecting” and Alexander von Humboldt’s debt to Creole ecological ideas.

Michael Lewis, Inventing Global Ecology: Tracking the Biodiversity Ideal in India, 1947-1997 (2004).

In one of the only books to examine the history of ecology, conservation biology, and the question of U.S. cultural imperialism, Lewis focuses on the relationship between American and Indian ecologists during the second half of the 20^th century.

Stuart McCook, States of Nature: Science, Agriculture, and Environment in the Spanish Caribbean, 1760-1940 (2002).

Challenging any dichotomy of “imperial” versus “national” science, McCook shows how agricultural science adapted to Caribbean contexts and gave rise to new forms of “creole science.”

Peder Anker, Imperial Ecology: Environmental Order in the British Empire, 1895-1945 (2001).

Anker scrutinizes the variety of ways that early 20^th-century British and South African ecologists applied their ideas to international politics and the management of human societies.

Richard Grove, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens, and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600-1860 (1996).

In a work of astounding breadth, Grove locates the dawn of conservationist thought in responses to the ecological destruction wrought by the colonization of tropical islands.

Episode 98: Brazil’s Teatro Negro and Afro-Brazilian Identity

Nearly half of the ten million Africans brought to the Americas over the course of the Atlantic Slave trade were brought to the shores of Brazil. Yet, despite having the largest African descended population of any country outside Africa, Brazil has long struggled to deal with the legacies of slavery and the racial equality that has persisted in its society. In the years after WWII, a new movement called teatro negro sought to put black bodies front and center in a rapidly changing Brazilian culture, a development that has been seen as political, social, and cultural. Guest Gustavo Cerqueira explores the cultural sterotypes that centuries of slavery left in post-emancipation Brazil, and the ways that teatro negro sought to re-position Afro-Brazilian people–literally–on the national stage.

The Bombing War and German Memory of WWII

By David Crew

At the beginning of September 2017, construction workers in the major west German city of Frankfurt am Main uncovered a British “blockbuster” bomb dropped during World War Two. Nearly 60,000 residents were evacuated so that experts could defuse this huge bomb designed to destroy an entire street of houses. Unexploded bombs from World War Two are still being discovered in other German cities. During the war, the British and the Americans dropped some 2.7 million tons of bombs on Germany. All the major German cities were reduced to ruins and between 305,000 and 410,000 Germans, most of them women, children, and old people were killed, sometimes in quite hideous ways, by Allied bombs. By the 1990s, however, many Germans would insist that this traumatic experience had been overshadowed by Germany’s confrontation with the Holocaust. The experience and suffering of German civilians during the Allied air war appeared to be “off-limits,” the subject only of private conversations around the family dinner table but never a major focus of public memory. Germans who had lived through the bombing were, it appeared, victims twice over—victimized by the bombing itself and then by the silence to which they were allegedly condemned after 1945.
Yet, far from being marginalized in postwar historical consciousness, the bombing war was a central strand of German popular memory and identity from 1945 to the present. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, local narratives of the bombing war established themselves as important “vectors of memory.” Not produced by professional historians and usually lacking any scholarly pretensions, these local publications are examples of the kind of “public history” which has been so influential in constructing and transmitting popular understandings of the past to successive generations of Germans since 1945. Along with the flight and mass expulsions of ethnic Germans from the East and the mass rapes of German women by Soviet soldiers, the bombing war allowed Germans to see themselves as victims at a time when the Allied liberation of the concentration camps and the Nuremberg trials presented Germans to the world as perpetrators or at least as accomplices. The bombing war continued to serve this function even as Germans became more and more willing directly to confront the genocide of European Jews –which by the 1960s was beginning to be referred to as the Holocaust.

The power of the local master narrative established in the 1950s depended upon its ability to compress the local memory of the war and the Nazi past into the experience of the bombing. This version of local history depicted the inhabitants of individual towns and cities as innocent, unsuspecting victims of both Allied bombs and of the Nazi regime which had deceived and misled them. But by the late 1990s, this narrative had become intensely problematic. New scholarship, the activities of local History Workshops, public controversies about the traveling exhibition “Crimes of the Wehrmacht” (1995-1999) and about Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s book, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (1996) all focused public attention on the participation of ordinary Germans in the crimes of the Nazi regime. At the end of the twentieth century, it seemed no longer possible to decontaminate local history.

US Bombing Raid Over a German City. (National Archives and Records Administration via Wikimedia)

Photographic images played essential roles in local publications about the bombing war. Photographs were used not simply to illustrate the written text but also to show aspects of the bombing war that the authors believed could not be communicated adequately in words. Yet the power of images was limited by the conditions under which they had been produced during and immediately after the war. Photographers had simply not been able to capture pictures of some of the most horrific experiences of the bombing. The images that were used might also generate contradictions that could not be resolved visually. Photographs of dead German bodies might conjure up the other images of dead and dying Jews and other concentration camp victims which the occupying Allies had used as evidence of German crimes in 1945. The early local publications established a fairly limited visual canon which relied primarily upon pictures of ruins and (less frequently) dead German bodies to construct a visual argument that presented Germans as victims. But as the repertoire of images expanded in the 1960s to include pictures of Allied air crews, of Jews or other victims of Germans, as well as photographs of the European cities destroyed by German bombing, these other images made it more difficult to maintain an exclusive focus on German suffering.

Hamburg after bombing by UK Royal Air Force (Imperial War Museum via Wikipedia)

Pictures of ruins have remained the most common motif in publications about the bombing right up to the present but the genre of ruin pictures has changed significantly since 1945. Ruin pictures now routinely include photographs of cities bombed by the Germans–Guernica, Warsaw, Rotterdam, London, Stalingrad. Pictures of forced foreign laborers, Russian POWs and even Jews in the ruins draw attention to Nazi racism and genocide. The important question is, however, not whether but how these pictures of Germany’s victims have entered the visual world of the bombing war. Are they presented in ways that require readers to look at the suffering caused by Germany while still allowing them to empathize with the German victims of the bombing? Or do they seriously disrupt the ability of photographs of Germans in the ruins to elicit the sympathy of contemporary readers/viewers? Or do pictures of Germany’s victims, when they are set side-by-side with images of Germans as victims, show readers that World War Two turned ordinary people on all sides into victims and created a European-wide community of suffering?

Berlin Women clearing debris. (German Federal Archives via Wikipedia)

The most recent visual and textual representations exhibit no clear agreement on the “right” narratives and the “right” images that should be used to depict the bombing of German cities. A range of different voices and pictures now compete for the attention of German audiences. This “pluralization” of bombing narratives and images both reflects and enables the competing, sometimes contradictory ways that Germans imagine the air war and its relationship to the Holocaust.

Related Reading and Viewing

Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughter-house Five (1969).
The classic novel by one of America’s most important writers. Vonnegut was a POW in Dresden when the city was devastated by Allied firebombing on February 13-14, 1945

Richard Overy, The Bombers and the Bombed. Allied Air War Over Europe, 1940-1945 ( 2015)
An unusual approach by the eminent British historian of World War Two that provides a comprehensive discussion of the Allied bombing of not just Germany but of many other European countries

W.G. Sebald, On the Natural History of Destruction(2003).
In this provocative short collection of essays, translated from the German original, the author and literary critic, W.G. Sebald faulted German writers for not having made the air war a more central and significant focus of post-war literature.

Jörg Friedrich, The Fire:The Bombing of Germany, 1940-1945 (2006).
The English translation of Friedrich’s massive, tendentious and hotly contested critique of the Allied air war which quickly became a bestseller in Germany.

Dresden (Dir: Roland Suso Richter, 2006). The first fiction film about the fire-bombing of Dresden. It drew an audience of 13 million viewers on the first evening it was broadcast on German television in March 2006.

from Dresden (2006)

Episode 97: The Zionist Movement in Czechoslovakia

After World War 1, the Zionist movement – the Jewish nationalist movement that had the creation of a national homeland as its ultimate goal – took root in the new country of Czechoslovakia. However, through the mechanisms of the Zionist movement itself, Czechoslovak Jews realized their collective power as an organized group within their own country for the first time. What happened next was a struggle between the goals of international Zionism and the potential reality of what Czechoslovakian Jewry could attain through collective bargaining – until the rise of Hitler and WWII tipped the scales.

Guest Tatjana Lichtenstein has studied the Zionist movement in Czechoslovakia and gives us a glimpse into the interwar period when Czech Jewish leaders saw the possibility of being accepted into European society, ironically through the mechanisms of a movement that’s become associated with immigration to the Middle East.

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