Joan Neuberger, Author at Not Even Past

American Girls in Red Russia: Chasing the Soviet Dream

Until quite recently, tales of Americans’ enchantment with the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1930s were typically told as prelude to their eventual disenchantment: this “liberal narrative” described immature, naïve, utopian idealism replaced by contrition and mature, rational rejection of radical extremism. So it was that I felt embarrassed by the excitement I found myself experiencing when I read descriptions from the time of exciting developments in the “new Russia.” In addition to the Soviet avant garde’s innovations in visual art, theatre, film, and literature, I found repeated emphasis on the special provisions being made for women and children: eliminating the very idea of an “illegitimate” child; radically democratizing education; simplifying divorce; mandating equal pay in the workplace; legalizing and subsidizing abortion; extending pre-natal and maternal welfare provisions; and creating public dining halls, laundries, and nurseries so that domestic duties would not limit women’s professional capacity (yes, these duties were still understood to be women’s).

I felt in my own gut some of the deep attraction that many people in the West experienced amid and following the Russian Revolution. But as a historian, I had incontrovertible proof that the Soviet state, despite every artist it supported, every cool program it put into effect, every effort it made to raise the level of the masses, was at a very fundamental level dehumanizing, repressive, and often violent, all of which became clear to many outsiders fairly early on. I remember telling a colleague that I was interested in exploring and perhaps making sense of all the hopeful rhetoric in the US vis-à-vis the Soviet Union and her warning me that following this path would get me into a whole lot of mishegas, craziness, a Yiddish word that I’ve always figured needs no translation. But the Soviet thing was like an itch I couldn’t keep myself from scratching. I wondered if I could take on this topic, or some piece of it, without seeming to be an apologist for Stalin or denying the facts of history. I had written about left wingers who wrote children’s books during the McCarthy era, which is to say, I had already spent some time thinking about the inherent contradictions within the communist movement.

British Quakers postcard appealing for funds and supplies to support children suffering from the 1921 famine in Russia. © Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) in Britain. Used with permission. This same image was used in a booklet published by the communist Friends of Soviet Russia.

A few scholars who had come of age after the end of the Cold War were writing about Americans and the Soviet Union in more nuanced ways than had been possible in an earlier era. However, I’d seen very little written specifically about attraction to the “new Russia” on the part of women, particularly independent, educated, and liberated “new women”— this despite the fact that, as the title of a breezy syndicated news article published in 1932 would suggest, “American Girls in Red Russia” were, well, a thing.

American Friends Service Committee workers in a Quaker hut in Buzuluk, Christmas Eve, 1922. Bottom left, Robert Dunn and Dorothy North “reading an Irish play.” Bottom right, Ann Herkner. The other two men are Karl Borders and a Russian coworker. (Andree A. Brooks Research Files on Bluet Rabinoff, box 2, Robert Dunn photographs, Tamiment Library, New York University).

Oddly enough, it was continuing research in children’s literature that finally convinced me to go ahead and write a book about “American Girls in Red Russia,” mishegas and all. In the archives of Ruth Epperson Kennell, who, in the 1930s and 1940s, published a number of books and stories about children in the Soviet Union, I found myself intrigued by Kennell’s own story, especially her years as a “pioneer” in Siberia working on an industrial commune founded by several American Wobblies (Industrial Workers of the World) in the early 1920s. Seeking release from what Lenin had described as the “household drudgery” that confines women in most societies, Kennell was attracted to the idea of living communally—and also working collectively toward the shared goal of creating a better world. Answering a call from the Society for Technical Aid to Soviet Russia, she and her husband Frank signed a two-year contract, packed up their worldly possessions, and left their 18-month-old son back in California with Frank’s mother.

Ruth Kennell in Siberia, wearing a Russian blouse. (Courtesy of Red Hill Museum, Kemerovo, Russia, with help from Marina Potoplyak).

Ruth worked as the colony’s secretary, librarian, and postmistress and was also its most avid chronicler, writing in The Nation about the “new Pennsylvania” they were building. She also wrote, even more revealingly, about her experiences in letters, a diary, and an unpublished memoir/novel. In these private sources Ruth describes the personal awakening she experienced in Siberia, where she fell in love with a Cornell-trained engineer she met in the colony office: a Jew, a Communist, and an avid reader of literature and philosophy. When Frank decided to go back to California amid a dispute between Wobblies and Communists, Ruth insisted that she wanted to fulfill her two-year contract, but actually, she had other reasons for staying: as she noted in her diary, “I want to be free, free!” She was not alone. Ruth noted in an article that she published in H.L. Mencken’s American Mercury, “In the spring of 1925 more than one matrimonial partnership melted, usually on the wife’s initiative. The colony women found in Siberia the freedom their souls craved.”

John Reed Colony, of which Anna Louise Strong was “chief” or, more accurately, patron, in the mid-1920s. (Anna Louise Strong papers, University of Washington Libraries, Special Collections, UW37340. Used with permission from Tracy Strong.)

Kennell helped me begin to recognize the deeply personal attractions that American women felt to the Soviet Union, as well the moral and ethical compromises they made to rationalize so much that was deeply troubling about the Soviet system. Ruth was well aware of inefficiency, hostility to communism among many Russians, gender and ethnic conflicts, as well as the pettiness, corruption, cruelty, and ineptitude among Bolshevik leaders. But ultimately she still thought the Soviet experiment was worth supporting. Kennell’s friend Milly Bennett, author of the article on “American Girls in Red Russia” from which I took my book title, flippantly but also revealingly told a friend: “the thing you have to do about Russia is what you do about any other ‘faith.’ You set your heart to know they are right. . . . . And then, when you see things that shudder your bones, you close your eyes and say . . . ‘facts are not important.’”

Milly Bennett and other workers from the Moscow News marching in a May Day parade. Bennett is the woman, second from the right, wearing glasses. (Milly Bennett papers, Hoover Library, Stanford University.)

Historians of the Russian empire have used Soviet citizen’s diaries to gain insights into “Stalinist subjectivity,” that is, the ways that individuals actively incorporated the Bolshevik ideal into their very sense of themselves. But diaries and other intimate sources have barely been tapped as a means of exploring ways in which the Soviet system likewise brought meaning to the lives of Americans and other foreigners. American women’s diaries and letters reveal both their genuine excitement—about Soviet schools, theatre, public spectacles, nurseries, workers’ housing, laws supporting maternal and child health, the “new morality,” and the simple fact of women’s visibility in public life.

Kuzbas pilgrims picnicking. (Courtesy of Red Hill Museum, Kemerovo, Russia, with help from Marina Potoplyak.)

“Women do everything here,” Louise Thompson wrote to her mother in the summer of 1932 from Moscow. “Work on building construction, on the streets, in factories of course, and everywhere.” Thompson’s activism on behalf of African-American civil rights had attracted her to the Soviet Union, and she wound up leading a group of 22 African Americans, among them luminaries of the Harlem Renaissance such as Langston Hughes and Dorothy West to act in what was being billed as the first true-to-life film about American race relations. Although the film was never made, group members, several of whom stayed on in the Soviet Union, were treated like the stars they might have been, honored rather than shunned for their blackness. Thompson liked to joke, “It will really be difficult to scramble back to obscurity when we return to the old USA, I suspect.”

Pauline Koner with her students from the Lesgaft Physical Culture Institute. (Pauline Koner papers, Jerome Robbins Dance Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Astor, Lennox and Tilden Foundations.)

The young Jewish dancer Pauline Koner, like Isadora Duncan a generation earlier, was deeply inspired by the very fact of being in the Soviet Union and the opportunity that offered to embody a revolutionary ethos through her movement. “I have to pinch myself to really believe I’m here,” Koner wrote in her diary, in December 1934. “Since arriving on Soviet soil I’ve felt different, the air smelled different and the land looked different. . . . Moscow is the most energizing and invigorating place in the world. It is the place for creative thought and for happiness. Its beauty at times is unbelievable.” As a Jew, Koner had reveled in the experience of visiting Palestine; in the Soviet Union she reveled in the idea of shedding her ethnic particularity and joining the Soviet people.

My book includes suffragists, settlement house workers, “child savers,” journalists, photographers, educators, social reformers, and a range of “new women” who felt drawn to Russia and the Soviet Union from approximately 1905-1945.

Today, as American women continue to struggle for many of the same things as these women of yesteryear—satisfying work that will allow them to balance motherhood and career, romantic relationships that are not bound by economic incentives, and a way to make sense of a society that is exploitative, unjust, racist, and demeaning to women—Russia is once again in the news. Now, ironically, it is mostly right-wing men who see possibility in Russia thanks to its breed of capitalism that puts profit above all else. Like the Communist dictators of old, the new administration in Russia, utterly focused on its own power and gain, shows a callous disregard for individuals and personal freedoms. Meanwhile, American women—like women in many parts of the world—remain as hungry as ever for more just and satisfying social arrangements.

Julia L. Mickenberg, American Girls in Red Russia: Chasing the Soviet Dream (University of Chicago Press, 2017)

Learn more about Americans’ attraction to revolutionary Russia:

Warren Beatty’s classic 1981 film, Reds, captures the romance of the Russian Revolution for many Americans. Beatty plays the journalist John Reed and Diane Keaton plays his wife and fellow journalist Louise Bryant; dramatic reenactment of their relationship with each other and with the Russian revolution is interspersed with interviews from surviving members of their Greenwich Village milieu.

The Patriots, a novel by Sana Krasikov, tells the story of a woman who moves from Brooklyn to the Soviet Union, “in pursuit of economic revolution, a classless society, gender equality — and a strapping engineer she met while working at the Soviet Trade Mission,” as the New York Times’ review puts it. She stays in the Soviet Union much longer than most of the women I write about, at a high cost. The book chronicles not just her life in Russia but also that of her son, who returns to the Russia of his childhood and youth as a Big Oil executive, navigating Putin’s Russia as he tries to learn more about his mother’s past.

Mary Leder’s My Life in Stalinist Russia is the memoir of a woman who, at 16, went with her parents from Los Angeles to Birobidjian, a planned Jewish colony in Soviet Far East, but quickly decided this muddy, disorganized mess in the middle of nowhere was not for her and went on to Moscow. There she found she could not get a job without her passport, but when her father sent that on to her it was mysteriously lost in the mail. Leder felt she had no choice but to take Soviet citizenship—and hence wound up being stuck in the Soviet Union for more than thirty years.

Women, the State, and Revolution: Soviet Family Policy and Social Life, 1917-1936 (1995) by Wendy Goldman speaks to both the ambitious Bolshevik program vis-à-vis women and children and the material and practical realities that prevented realization of the most utopian visions in realms ranging from social welfare to morality.

Anna Louise Strong’s memoir, I Change Worlds: The Remaking of An American, was a bestseller when it was published in 1935 and it offers an insightful picture into what motivated Strong to be a self-appointed propagandist for the Soviet Union, despite awareness of the system’s many limitations. She wrote the book hoping it would provide her with entry into the Communist Party, but in fact neither the Soviet or American parties would have her, despite having devoted much of her life to serving the Soviet Union.

Tim Tzouliadis, The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin’s Russia. This popular history describes the thousands of Americans drawn to the Soviet Union during the First Five Year Plan, and the significant numbers who wound up in the gulag or dead, with far too little protest from the US Embassy.

Episode 94: Populism

Populism seems to describe everything in America these days, from politics to styles of communication. Some might say that it’s used so often, and in so many context, that it’s lost most of its meaning. But populism, or the movement from which it gets its name, arose in a specific context in American history at the end of the 19th century, and revisiting the history of this specific movement can help us understand how and why the term is used the way it is in present day politics.

Our guest for this episode, Dr. Steven Hahn of New York University, literally wrote the book on populism and helps us turn this political buzzword into a historical phenomenon from a time period in American history that has a number of parallels with our own.

Industrial Sexuality: Gender in a Small Town in Egypt

Our featured author this month, Hanan Hammad, received her PhD in History at UT Austin in 2009. She is now Assistant Professor of History at Texas Christian University and we are proud to introduce you to her excellent new book.

By Hanan Hammad

Millions of Egyptian men, women, and children first experienced industrial work, urban life, and the transition from peasant-based and handcraft cultures to factory organization and hierarchy in the years between the two world wars. Their struggles to live in new places, inhabit new customs, and establish and abide by new urban norms and moral and gender orders underlie the story of the making of modern urban life—a story that has not been previously told from the perspective of Egypt’s working class.

Reconstructing the ordinary urban experiences of workers in al-Mahalla al-Kubra, home of the largest and most successful Egyptian textile factory, demonstrates how the industrial urbanization of Egypt transformed masculine and feminine identities, sexualities, and public morality. Coercive industrial organization and hierarchy concentrated thousands of men, women, and children at work and at home under the authority of unfamiliar men, intensifying sexual harassment, child molestation, prostitution, and public exposure of private heterosexual and homosexual relationships. Juxtaposing these social experiences of daily life with national modernist discourses shows us that ordinary industrial workers, handloom weavers, street vendors, lower-class landladies, and prostitutes—no less than the middle and upper classes—played a key role in shaping the Egyptian experience of modernity.

Factory culture and organization were sites where male workers and supervisors negotiated traditional and modern masculinity. Men often used violence and aggression on the shop floor as expressions and performances of the contestation, ambivalence, and changing of men’s fluid masculine identities. Men negotiated the coercive, industrial hierarchy by oscillating between docility and violence. In an attempt to strike a balance between personal pride in making a livelihood and protecting their own integrity, workers evaded authority and developed male associations and bonded among themselves.

Peasants in their traditional galabya dress in the convulsive factory shop floor

Outside factories, workers coming from rural areas had to partake in urban traditions and manners, despite mutual hostility with townspeople. Violence broke out as a result of the division between the urbanites and the factory workers. In that context masculine gender identity, the performance of masculinity, and the construction of manhood were important elements in adapting to industrial urban life. In their competing and fluid loyalties, working-class men developed their notion of the ideal masculine identity and created social locations for peer bonding and friendship.

Blue-collar workers under the eyes of the afandiyya supervisors

Textile factories opened more opportunities for rural women to venture into urban life and to assume an industrial working-class identity. Female industrial workers in both handloom and mechanized factories went through a multifaceted process of proletarianization while being subjugated to the coercive industrial hierarchy and facing both capitalism and patriarchy inside and outside the factory. Factory work subjected women to sexual harassment and social stigma. They acquired skills to operate modern machinery, rose in the social ranks of the salaried urban population, and gained experiences in dealing with a factory system. Yet they had the lowest status and payment among the workers in the male-dominated industrial hierarchy and their morality became subject to communal suspicion and mistrust.

Taking advantage of unprecedented growth in the demands for cheap accommodation, women of the popular classes invested in workers’ lodging and set up their own businesses to provide workers food, drink, and other cheap commodities and services. Entrepreneurial women contributed immensely to shaping the socioeconomic transformation and labor history. These new patterns of economic investment and work allowed lower-class women to assume powerful positions in their households and enabled them to challenge patriarchal norms. These lower-class landladies played an important role in shaping new workers’ experiences with urban life, undermined the agricultural economy in favor of real-estate investment, and challenged the power of the state in the spheres of urbanization and urban control.

Thousands of workers leaving factory gates under guards’ surveillance

With the lack of privacy and increasing sociocultural differences among individuals sharing limited spaces, sexual life became vulnerable to public exposure, and exposing sexuality was a way to negotiate disputes in one’s own favor. Children and adults from different geographical origins often shared living and sleeping spaces. Unmarried female and male strangers shared houses with urbanite families and individuals. In living and work environments marked by anxiety, jealousy, mistrust, and suspicion, it was not unusual for ordinary disputes with neighbors, roommates, housemates, and coworkers to slip into judging one another’s sexual behaviors. By examining the social arguments and controversies over sexual practices, such as women’s harassment, child molestation, sodomy, sex outside wedlock, and homosexuality, people in this transformative urban milieu constructed fluid and intricate, rather than rigid, social norms of licit and illicit sexuality.

The largest labor strike in the history of modern Egypt took place in 1947. Striking workers exposed horrific work and living conditions and shattered the idealistic, nationalist image of industry as a banner of nationalism and economic independence. Prostitution was blamed for the deterioration of workers’ health, which exposed all workers’ sex lives to public scrutiny. Religious and nationalist discourses against sex work that had been a part of the urban landscape made the morality and sexuality of the working classes a target of bourgeois anxiety. Invoking morality against sex workers resonated with the nationalism and the state’s effort to medicalize, control, and stigmatize the lower class’s sexuality, but these discourses also served to overlook tuberculosis, malnutrition, and other diseases that preyed on the poor urban population and triggered strikes and urban unrest.

Industrial Sexuality: Gender, Urbanization, and Social Transformation in Egypt, The University of Texas Press (2016)

Further reading on the history of gender, sexuality and the working classes in Egypt:

Liat Kozma, Policing Egyptian Women: Sex, Law, and Medicine in Khedival Egypt (2011)

In Policing Egyptian Women, Liat Kozma traces the effects of nineteenth-century developments such as the expansion of cities, the abolition of the slave trade, the formation of a new legal system, and the development of a new forensic medical expertise on women who lived at the margins of society. Kozma outlines the complicated manner in which the modern state in Egypt monitored, controlled, and “policed” the bodies of subaltern women. Some of these women were runaway slaves, others were deflowered outside of marriage, and still others were prostitutes.

Joel Beinin, Workers and Peasants in the Modern Middle East (2001)

Inspired by the Indian Subaltern Studies school, this social history offers a survey of subaltern history in the Middle East. Beinin illuminates how their lives, experiences, and culture can inform our historical understanding. Beginning in the eighteenth century, the book charts the history of the peasants and the modern working classes across the lands of the Ottoman Empire and its Muslim-majority successor-states.

Judith E. Tucker, Women in Nineteenth-Century Egypt (1985)

Focusing on lower-class women, this study traces changes in the work role and family life of peasant women in the countryside and craftswomen and traders in Cairo during the rapid social and economic change in the nineteenth century. Brought about by the country’s developing ties with the European economy, the effects of capitalist transformation on women are studied in detail, using material from the Islamic court records.

Beth Baron, Egypt as a Woman: Nationalism, Gender, and Politics (2007)

Focusing on Egyptian national and gender politics between the two world wars, Baron shows how vital women were to mobilizing opposition to British authority and modernizing Egypt. Egypt as a Woman explores the paradox of women’s exclusion from political rights at the very moment when visual and metaphorical representations of Egypt as a woman were becoming widespread and real women activists–both secularist and Islamist–were participating more actively in public life than ever before.

Films on gender, sexuality and the working classes in Egypt:

I’m suggesting few Egyptian films, mostly from the social realism genre, that discuss issues of gender and sexuality in the intersection with class, social morality, urbanism and rural exploitation.

Youssuf Chahine, Cairo Station, 1958

In the hustle and bustle of Cairo Station, this movie tells a story of romantic infatuation, frustrated sexual desires, and labor struggles in the newly-independent Egypt. A physically-challenged peddler coming from Upper Egypt falls for a gorgeous lemonade seller who is engaged to one of the station’s workers. That fiancé is a strong and respected porter struggling to unionize his fellow workers to combat their boss’ exploitative and abusive treatment.

Muhammad Khan, Factory Girl, 2013

Through the ordinary life of a 21-year-old female worker in a Cairo textile factory, the movie engages with class aspiration, female desires, and moral hypocrisy. When the impoverished factory girl becomes attracted to the factory’s new supervisor, she discovers the glass ceiling of class and gender hierarchy inside the factory and the moral hypocrisy of the larger society that divides the urban working and middle classes.

Henry Barakat, al-Haram (Sin), 1965

This masterpiece portrays the cruel reality of itinerant rural workers. The newspaper Le Monde wrote: “we have been attracted to this movie due to the true picture that reflects the suffering of this village, the picture is not about a problem for one individual; it’s about the reflection of everything surrounding her, from people to culture.”

Sergei Eisenstein on “The Birth of a Nation”

The great Soviet film pioneer Sergei Eisenstein (1898-1948) shared many of the Eurocentric views of his day, but throughout his career, he was outspoken in his opposition to racism. He was also a lifelong admirer of D.W. Griffith, another great innovator in the early period of cinema and the director of the notorious 1915 film “The Birth of a Nation”, which demonized African Americans and glorified the Ku Klux Klan.

Protests like this one in New York in 1947 took place at screenings in 1915, throughout the 1910s and 20s, and again in the 1940s when it was revived. (Library of Congress)

Griffith’s film was greeted with protests when it opened and again when it was revived for the 25th anniversary of its premiere. On that occasion, in 1940, Eisenstein explained what he thought of The Birth of a Nation. This letter was published in the English language journal, International Literature, in 1940 and in Russian the following year.

Sergei M. Eisenstein, “Dickens, Griffith, and Ourselves,” Selected Works: Writings, 1935-47, ed. Richard Taylor, transl. William Powell.

Janet Staiger, “Birth of a Nation: Reconsidering its Reception,” The Birth of a Nation: D.W.Griffith, Director, ed. Robert Lang (1994)

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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 93: Women and the Tamil Epics

Male-dominated narratives, male authors, and male-centered agency and priorities have been the norm throughout history, until the latter half of the 20th-century. So it’s no surprise that in ancient literature and epics, if you consider something like Homer’s Odyssey or other classics, even the Ramayana, the story of King Rama in early India, you see male authors telling the stories, adventures, and histories of men. In the Tamil literature of South India, however, we see something different. Guest Andrea Gutierrez introduces us to epic South Asian poems from the beginning of the first millennium that past the Bechdel test, when women’s narrative critiqued, cajoled, narrated, and provided guidance for the devout.

The Price for Their Pound of Flesh

By Daina Ramey Berry

The Price for their Pound of Flesh is the first book to explore the economic value of enslaved men, women, and children in the American domestic slave trade, from before they were born until after their death, in both public and private market transactions and appraisals. How was a slave’s price determined? How did planters and traders establish values for enslaved people with specific ages, specific skills, or specific health conditions? Studies of the domestic slave trade rarely discuss the economic meaning and social significance of the market values and appraisals assigned to enslaved people. When they do discuss slave prices, the focus has mostly been on prime male slaves. This study examines slave prices of women, men, and children during their entire “lifecycle,” including preconception, infancy, childhood, adolescence, adulthood, the senior years, and postmortem.

Another original component of this work is its illumination of enslaved people’s reaction to being appraised, bartered, and sold. Enslaved people remembered their values. “Men or mechanics were worth from 12 to 1300 dollars,” recalled one former slave, “and boys 8 and 9 years old, 5 and 6 hundred dollars.” The book explores slaves as commodities and as people through all phases of their lives. Did slaves know their market values and/or appraisals? Were they impacted if they commanded high prices or if their buyers considered them “bargains”? How did their monetary values shape relationships within the enslaved community and beyond? Rather than explore how traders turned “people into prices,” as historian Walter Johnson did in Soul by Soul, this book converts the prices into people. The dollar values placed on enslaved people have more meaning when one considers their humanity, how they may have felt on the auction block, and how they responded to being sold “to the highest bidder.”

Now that the book is complete and on sale, I would like to share a few other thoughts about this decade long endeavor. First, I love being in the archives and have been called an “archive rat” with pride. The experience of discovery feeds my desire to locate untold stories and share them with readers. Enslaved people drove this research just as plantation records offered foundational evidence and a starting point. I combed through thousands of records to find individual enslaved people who were often overlooked in history. I wanted to bring their buried stories to life and to highlight their thoughts. The research was difficult and many of their accounts are heartbreaking, but when I consider that people survived and lived to tell their stories I was encouraged. The voices of the enslaved motived me to write and to keep writing. Sadly, for some I only knew a name and no other details. Others offered much more fruit for me to share—testimonies, emotions, feelings, opinions, etc. This book is meant to give a voice to enslaved people, particularly about their experiences of, and responses to, the commodification of their bodies.

Dr Berry and UT graduate student Lauren Henley offer these suggestions for further reading on the economies and medical histories of enslaved people in the United States.

Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market (1999)

In Soul by Soul, Walter Johnson imagines the moment of a slave sale from the perspective of the buyer, the seller, and the enslaved individual. Drawing from slave narratives, enslavers’ letters, docket records, and nineteenth-century economic descriptions of the enslaved, Johnson highlights the processes by which labor, humanness, capital, race, and power were negotiated in physical and metaphorical spaces throughout the American South, showcasing the brazenly economic and political motivations that built the institution one sale at time.

Michael Sappol, A Traffic of Dead Bodies: Anatomy and Embodied Social Identity in Nineteenth-Century America (2002)

Exploring the academic and popular histories of anatomy in American society, Michael Sappol considers the role corpses played in shaping American identity and subjectivity. His examination of nineteenth-century medical education and professionalization reveals a network of professors, students, grave robbers, state officials, and law enforcement officers directly benefiting from the death of others. The corpses that were often literally dragged into this operation were those of the poor and dispossessed, overwhelmingly represented by black men and women, in slavery as well as in freedom. Cadavers provided hands-on training for medical students, but they also reinforced notions of identity, class, culture, and hierarchy for all parties involved in their trafficking.

Calvin Schermerhorn, The Business of Slavery and the Rise of American Capitalism, 1815-1860 (2015)

The Business of Slavery examines the buying, selling, and moving human of chattel in the nineteenth-century interstate slave trade, focusing on the forced movement of enslaved men, women, and children from the mid-Atlantic region to the Deep South.

Harriet Washington, Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present (2006)

Medical Apartheid charges the American medical profession with conducting extensive involuntary research on black bodies since at least the eighteenth century. From abusive and painful gynecological experiments on enslaved women to the now-infamous Tuskegee syphilis trials, Washington inverts the dominant narrative by showing that medical histories have always been written from the perspective of the field’s professionals, which has hidden the fact that advances of American medicine have been literally inscribed onto the bodies of society’s least fortunate—blacks, the poor, women, the infirm, and children. For centuries blacks’ mistrust of medical institutions has not been the manifestation of irrational fear, but a response to the failure of medical professionals to do no harm.

Craig Wilder, Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities (2013)

Directly linking elite universities in New England to Southern slavery and the eradication of Native Americans, Ebony and Ivy highlights both the all-encompassing influence of slavery on American society as well as the extent to which elite universities informed popular perceptions of race, slavery, and Americanness. This entangled history of education, slavery, exploitation, and capitalism challenges longstanding notions of ivory tower benevolence.

Digital Learning: Starting from Scratch

by Joan Neuberger

Getting a PhD in History requires us to learn some new skills, but those skills are mostly refinements of things we’ve been practicing since first grade. We have to improve our ability to read carefully, to write lucidly, and to ask increasingly complex questions about what we read. We need to pay attention to the ways historical documents are created and preserved and to the contexts that shape their ideas, but those issues are not qualitatively different from thinking about the books we read in high school and college or the novels we enjoy reading as adults. Digital history, on the other hand, demands entirely new ways of thinking. Building complex digital networks requires me to think like a computer, which is different in significant and interesting ways than thinking like a reader or a writer.

From “Elements of Design in Avant-Garde Magazines,” by Christa Clay, Amanda Jordan, and Natalie Pyle. students in “The Avant Garde in Print,” taught at UT Austin by Meghan Forbes

In my last blog I referred, somewhat skeptically, to Richard White’s contention that constructing a data visualization was itself an analytical project. Here’s the full quote:

“One of the important points that I want to make about visualizations, spatial relations, and spatial history is something that I did not fully understand until I started doing this work and which I have had a hard time communicating fully to my colleagues: visualization and spatial history are not about producing illustrations or maps to communicate things that you have discovered by other means. It is a means of doing research; it generates questions that might otherwise go unasked, it reveals historical relations that might otherwise go unnoticed, and it undermines, or substantiates, stories upon which we build our own versions of the past.”

Now, I get it.

This month I went to two digital history workshops at the annual convention of the American Historical Association. I knew that a three-hour workshop wouldn’t give me all the skills I needed to carry out a social network analysis of the Soviet film industry, but I wanted to figure out whether it would be worth it for me – a pretty old dog – to try to learn some new tricks. I wanted to know if I could manage the computational work on my own without having to raise enough funds to hire a team of computer scientists. And I wanted to know if I am capable of acquiring the skills to make the project yield new questions and interesting answers.

Jason Heppler, an Assistant Professor of History at University of Nebraska at Omaha and a Researcher at the Stanford Spatial History Project, ran the workshop on social network analysis. The goal was to show us the basic functions of the network analysis program, Gephi, an open source program for generating visualizations of networks. We also learned how to use Palladio, an even more user-friendly network analysis program. As with any complex skill, the introduction to these tools was just enough to give us a sense of the range of the program’s main functions. Gephi can take a massive collection of data on relationships and turn it into visualizations (graphs, flowcharts, networks, etc). It can tell us how relationships we might find in a small number of sources play out on a much larger scale. It can display degrees and flow of relationships (friends of friends of friends), suggesting hierarchies of influence and alliances.

I know I will need more time and repeated practice to learn everything that social networking can do for me, but the introduction demonstrated some of the ways Gephi “thinks” about data, or how I need to think about data in order to work with Gephi. I am interested in analyzing social and political relationships in the Soviet film industry. Right off the bat, I can understand some of the most elementary ways I can track some of those relationships. I understand how I can get Gephi to show me who knew whom, who had the most acquaintances or working partnerships, and how to track those in overlapping ways for an individual’s various roles (as director, teacher, actor, etc). Historians Jamie Miller and Maria Belodubrovskaya have shown the continued influence of some prominent avant garde directors even as Stalinist cultural policies in the 1930s prohibited avant garde filmmaking. I want to know how long that influence remained in effect and on what scale. Did directors tend to work with the same actors? Which party-state administrators had direct contact with which artistic studio administrators? Gephi can weight those kinds of relationships, establishing patterns of contact in a number of interesting ways. The most interesting thing I learned is that Gephi can show something called “betweenness.” So, for example, Person A and Person B may know and be known by the most people, but Gephi can identify a Person C, who might not be personally known by as many people as A and B, but might be a conduit for a higher number of relationships; more people need to contact C in order to reach either A or B. That looks like a promising category for trying to generate new information about people who might not look influential or powerful at first glance.

Hue (from red = 0 to blue = max) shows the node betweenness. Graph by Claudio Rocchini

I was still left with a lot of questions about how I can tell Gephi to code relationships in specific ways. I’d like to be able to show that government bureaucrats who supervised the film industry had important, two-way relationships with the artists who made the films. I’ve written about patron-client relationships between a handful of party-state arts administrators and one film director based on reading documents in the film studio archive that show how people in power made decisions that could only be explained as patronage, but I don’t yet know how I can collect and organize data that shows such relationships and shows them on a larger scale. I don’t yet know how to weigh or color or mark those relationships in order to generate that kind of new knowledge. I am also still trying to decide whether I want to organize my study around a single, influential individual, like the great filmmaker, Sergei Eisenstein, or whether I want to organize it more broadly without a single central node.

Even more useful than the workshop, therefore, was the drop-in session for digital history that took place on the day after the workshop. There I was able to speak one-on-one with Jason about my particular project. He recommended that I look at some projects organized around a single individual that have used Gephi and Palladio, such as Micki Kaufman’s Quantifying Kissinger. And he recommended some reading, including Scott Weingart, “Demystifying Networks,” Shin-Kap Han, “The Other Ride of Paul Revere,” and Caroline Winterer, “Where is America in the Republic of Letters.” There is also a large literature on networks in other disciplines, all of which I will discuss later on this blog.

At the drop-in sessions, I was also able to talk to Ian Milligan, another network specialist and an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Waterloo, about web scraping. Ian ran the web scraping workshop the previous day at the AHA. (All his materials are available here.) He walked me through a easy-to-use web scraping tool called import.io and we used it to see how to generate databases from lists of films and their cast and crew on a Russian website called Film-Theater.ru. Like with Gephi, I am going to have to figure out how to adapt the web scraping Ian taught me and I’ll have to start from scratch when I do. Not only will I have to relearn the steps I need to take to use import.io (because once through just wasn’t enough to build those memory pathways in my brain), but I’ll also need to think hard about how to organize and categorize the data I collect.

Looking at documents as a mass of information points that need to be categorized and coded is very different from reading and analyzing masses of documents in order to get a general idea of something and then to pick out the relevant bits of evidence to support the argument I am developing. I am still trying to figure out how I can show power relationships with these tools. One step at a time.

Next time: “From Kissinger to Eisenstein.”

The previous post in this series: Digital Dividends

Information about all the Digital History panels at the AHA 2017 can be found here:

Seth Denbo, “Making Connections: Digital History at AHA17.”

For more on Digital History on Not Even Past, see our series, The New Archive.

#changethedate: Australia’s Holiday Controversy

by Kristie Flannery

January 26 is Australia day, a national public holiday where the good people of that great southern land celebrate ‘straya by taking a paid day off work, having a barbie in their backyards, and listening to Triple J’s countdown of hottest 100 songs of the year, all while wearing the country’s flag as a cape. Traditionally, these celebrations involve the consumption of copious quantities of alcohol.

But this year Australia day is surrounded in controversy. January 26 is the anniversary of the 1788 British invasion of Sydney – the beginning of the violent British conquest and colonization of the Australian continent. The British stole Aboriginal people’s land (in one of the biggest acts of land theft in world history), and waged a genocidal war against the original inhabitants of Australia. Many Aussies are calling for the prime minister to #changethedate and move Australia day, because this important part of our history is not cause for celebration.

This viral video from Juice Media asks viewers, you wouldn’t celebrate the 9/11 or the anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima, so why would you celebrate 26 January?

In another video the Australian comedian Jordan Raskopoulos suggests we move Australia Day to May 8 (Mate – get it?) so our national holiday becomes a celebration of friendship, rather than genocide.

This year’s #changethedate campaign has a long history. Many Aboriginal people rallied in Sydney against Australia Day on January 26, 1938: the 150^th anniversary of the British invasion of the continent. On this ‘Day of Mourning,’ protestors demanded Aboriginal people be recognized as Australian citizens and granted equality before the law.

This year some local governments have responded to the call to #changethedate. The city of Freemantle in Western Australia has cancelled fireworks scheduled for January 26 and will host a free concert on January 28. But the Federal Government won’t follow suit any time soon. Earlier this week Senator James McGrath issued a press release in response to protests (along with a joke about “feral lefties in their vegan pyjamas calling for #Australiaday to be changed.”)

Senator McGrath thinks he’s pretty funny. We’re not laughing.

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Liberal National Party Queensland Senator James McGrath has launch an attack on people wanting to shift Australia Day. (Alan Porritt-AAP)

At least one good thing has come from this debate. In a nation that is adept at forgetting, the #changethedate campaign has pushed the history of Aboriginal genocide into the public spotlight. This war to erase Indigenous people continued long into the twentieth century as the Australian government forcibly removed Aboriginal children from their families. Some argue that it continues today as the rate of Aboriginal incarceration and deaths in police custody remain high, and big mining corporations attempt to force Aboriginal communities from their resource-rich lands. Recognizing injustice in the past is key to achieving justice in the present.

You can learn more about the genocidal war against aboriginal people in Sydney by listening to this speech by Padraic Gibson to a Solidarity public meeting marking invasion day 2015.

History in a “Post-Truth” Era

by Jacqueline Jones

To me at least, the recent presidential election was all about history. Historians explored the precedents for what many called an unprecedented contest. Historical documents (such as President Obama’s birth certificate) became campaign talking points. The president-elect vowed to “Make America Great Again.” In an interview with the New York Times last March, he identified his favorite periods: The early twentieth century (the high tide of business-building and entrepreneurship, he said), and the 1940s and 1950s –when, in his words, “we were not pushed around, we were respected by everybody, we had just won a war, we were pretty much doing what we had to do.”

And then there was fake news and what it means for future historians.

Stylized picture of a laptop sitting on a nicely decorated desk displaying the words "fake news" on a blurred out online article

Certainly it is doubtful that tomorrow’s historians will agree among themselves about the meaning of Mr. Trump’s victory. Some will see it as the logical culmination of forces set in motion in the 1970s and 1980s, when the emerging global economy brought prosperity to some Americans but left behind those who lost their jobs when companies took their production overseas or south of the U. S.-Mexico border. Other historians will push the timeline back further, and highlight technological innovations in the workplace that displaced employees in a variety of industries, leaving them stranded in distressed communities. Still other historians will focus on the rise of international terrorism; the demographic transformations wrought by immigration; conflicts between ethnically diverse urban areas and homogeneous (white) rural areas; the on-going culture wars over abortion and same-sex marriage; or negative attitudes toward the Washington political establishment. In other words, I can predict with some confidence that in the process of accounting for Mr. Trump’s appeal, historians will engage in a lively debate among themselves about the distant and recent past.

However, history is an evidence-based discipline, and what will happen if the evidence itself is in dispute? Historians will all agree that the election took place on Tuesday, November 8, 2016; that is a matter of chronological fact. Yet to draw some conclusions about the meaning of the election, historians must find and assemble evidence and present a coherent narrative, a story that will explain Donald Trump’s victory and Hillary Clinton’s defeat.

"Yellow journalism" cartoon about Spanish–American War of 1898, Independence Seaport Museum. The newspaper publishers Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst are both attired as the Yellow Kid comics character of the time, and are competitively claiming ownership of the war — “Yellow journalism” cartoon about Spanish–American War of 1898, Independence Seaport Museum. The newspaper publishers Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst are both attired as the Yellow Kid comics character of the time, and are competitively claiming ownership of the war. (via Wikipedia).

In discussing the nature of news today, we might return to the Jonathan Swift saying of 1710, “Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it”; variations have been attributed to Mark Twain and others. Today Americans get their news from a variety of media, including Facebook and highly partisan TV cable networks and shows. A few decades ago, media observers were lamenting that our political discourse had been reduced to “soundbites” on the TV evening news; now those soundbites seem positively expansive when compared with the 140-character pronouncements unleashed on Twitter. The president-elect distrusts the news media; he wants no filter on his words; hence his determination to speak directly to his Twitter followers. Conventional media outlets can then report on his postings if they choose. (It was interesting to see so-called “lamestream” journalists as well as sites such as factcheck.org and politifact.com quickly dispute Mr. Trump’s claim that he won an electoral-college “landslide,” when in fact his margin of victory was 46th out of 58 presidential contests.) No doubt we as historians will have to show considerable resourcefulness in assembling a story about the past that relies not only on email messages but also on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat (these last two messaging apps). Although Snapchat is short-lived and self-deleting, someone could take a screenshot of a Snapchat posting and then email, tweet, text, or publish it. The sheer number of different means of communication can be overwhelming.

Websites run the gamut from legitimate, responsible news outlets, to highly partisan sites, to purveyors of fiction. This array presents a special challenge to journalists today as they craft the so-called first draft of history. These sites might or might not abide by the journalistic convention and rely on multiple vetted sources before publishing an article. And of course sensationalism defines many of these sites. In the three months running up to the election, according to a study by Buzzfeed, the “top fake election news stories generated more total engagement on Facebook than top election stories from 19 major news outlets combined.” These fake stories included the claims that the Pope had endorsed Donald Trump and that Hillary Clinton sold weapons to ISIS.

William Randolph Hearst was not the first publisher to discover that lurid and fake stories sell lots of newspapers, and his descendants in the business have brought a high-tech sensibility to the enterprise. This presidential election represents a new chapter in the commodification of news—or rather, in some cases, of fiction—as whole websites with official sounding names like USADailyPolitics.com became “clickbait” for some Americans. Advertisers are drawn to sites that are popular, and pay to place their ads on those sites, enriching the storytellers. Resourceful people in the U. S. and abroad made tidy sums by running articles that Hillary Clinton’s criminal indictment was imminent: Read All About It!

So what’s a historian to do? First of all, we have an obligation to our students to teach them how to evaluate evidence– to consider the source as well as the context, and to seek multiple sources that confirm an assertion– a skill that will serve them well in the classroom but also after college, as they become responsible, informed citizens. Second, we have an obligation to the historical profession to uphold traditional standards of excellence by adjusting our research methods to account for, on the one hand, the proliferation of all kinds of useful information online, and, on the other, the fact that some of that material is less than trustworthy. And finally, we must continue to prize nuance and complexity over simplistic explanations.

Picture of Barack Obama's birth certificate from Hawaii

Still, we live in perilous times for historians and others in fact-based disciplines. President Obama released his long-form birth certificate in April, 2011, but that document (combined with other evidence about his childhood in Hawaii) did not convince a substantial minority of Americans that he was indeed born in the United States. For some, truth is contingent on one’s gut feelings. Indeed, in November, 2016, the Oxford English dictionary declared as the “word of the year” the term “post-truth,” defined as “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.” If we do live in a “post-truth” age, historians of the future will truly have their work cut out for them.

Episode 92: Disability History in the United States

Americans with disabilities compose approximately 50 million people today, and yet remains largely removed from the historical record. The road to recognition has been long and varied; from President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s use of a wheelchair while in office, to the popularity of “freak shows,” wherein physical ailments were put on display. How have organizations and activist groups groups dealt with stigma and asked for rights to be able to participate in the public sphere in the United States?

First year history graduate student John Carranza, specializing in disability history, sheds some light on historical representations of disability, and how modern understanding of disability is informed by the past.

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