Joan Neuberger, Author at Not Even Past

Historical Objects: Latin America

“Colonial Latin America Through Objects” is a class taught by Prof. Jorge Cañizares that offers a view of a region’s past by exploring material remains: currencies, playing cards, musical scores, water mills, comets, relics, mummies, coded messages, to name only a few of the 50 objects studied. The class introduces students to a region from unusual angles that upset deeply seeded assumptions about Hispanics.

The students are required to produce two online museum exhibits. The five best exhibits for the mid–term are sampled here. These five exhibits address unusual aspects of colonial Latin America through their material culture. Click on links to see full exhibits (and credits for images).

The history of conquest as described in sixteenth-century indigenous codices by Tymon Sloan

Bernadino De Sahagun, Illustration of the Mirror-Faced Bird, La Historia Universal De Las Cosas De Nueva Espana,1577 Ink on Paper Medicea Laurenziana Library, Florence, Italy

Bernadino De Sahagun,
Illustration of the Mirror-Faced Bird, La Historia Universal De Las Cosas De Nueva Espana,1577
Medicea Laurenziana Library, Florence, Italy

Cranial Deformity and Identity by Aaron Quintanilla

Native Drinking Cups of the New World by Riley Reynolds

Ancient Zapotec Chocolate Vessel (Gardiner Museum of Ceramic Art)

Syncretism and Marian Representations by Lily Folkerts

Our Lady of the Rosary of Potama (Anonymous, 17-18c, New Mexico History Museum)

Las Bolsas de Mandingo: Deconstructing Misconceptions of Traditional African Religions in the Luso-Atlantic World, by Maryam Ogunbiyi

Manuscript showing syncretism of African and Portuguese Catholic representations

Digital Dividends

By Joan Neuberger

For the past few months I have been considering beginning a new digital history research project. I’m not talking about digitizing sets of existing archival documents or starting a new history blog, although those have both proven to be important new tools for researching and talking about history and I will probably have good reason to do both along the way. I’m talking about what I’ve been calling Digital History For Real: a project that creates new kinds of historical documents that can be analyzed with new kinds of computational methods and that can generate new questions or answer old questions with new kinds of historical knowledge. The last part of that sentence is especially important to me. Although Richard White, distinguished historian and digital history pioneer, argued that the production of digital historical documents was itself an analytical project, most of what passes for digital history has been document-making rather than document-reading and document-analysis. This is now beginning to change.

One advantage of digital sources is their scale. For example, we can learn a great deal about the Middle Passage from fine-grained readings of sources about a handful of slave-bearing ships. Now, though, the massive Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database lets historians test our micro-histories and draw new conclusions based on scale. The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database exemplifies White’s argument: the compilers of the data had a number of difficult sources to work with and difficult decisions to make about coding entries, a process you can read about in the website’s detailed “Methodology” section. The database has generated a number of stand-alone works as well as providing a source for a whole generation’s histories of the Atlantic. David Eltis, one of the founders, has written a number of award-winning works based on the database, including the Atlas of the Atlantic Slave Trade (co-authored with David Richardson), whose maps have become popular through internet sharing and reporting, including our own article by Henry Wiencek on its maps. Another recent book that uses the TASD is James Walvin’s Crossings: Africa, the Americas, and the Atlantic Slave Trade (2013).

Increasingly, historians are embedding analytical essays and articles into the websites that contain their data and data visualizations. Kindred Britain, a site that shows family links among close to 30,000 people in Britain, includes a section of essays related to the networks the site illustrates. “Britain’s First Botanist: Eras mus Darwin,” — more a blog than a scholarly article — is one of the site’s “Stories” and is accompanied by customized data visualizations (“familial and professional associations” for example) that illustrate its arguments. An older project on networks of Enlightenment literary figures, Mapping the Republic of Letters, a project well funded by prestigious institutions and often held up as a model, illustrates one of the most significant current problems of digital scholarship: sustainability. Mapping promisingly includes a page for listing publications based on its networking data, but the links are all broken at the moment because the team is in the process of re-design. [Update November 4, 2017: This has been partially rectified now. The links are live and one can find more excellent visualizations and other primary sources on the Publications page, but of the six projects listed, only one includes a published article.]

Another approach in digital scholarship is to use computational methods on a smaller scale to address a single problem in some depth. One contribution along these lines is Cameron Blevins’ article in the Journal of American History, “Space, Nation, and the Triumph of Region: A View of the World from Houston.” The article is based on the use of text processing to track place-names in two Houston newspapers for the periods 1836-51 and 1894-1901. A blog on Stanford’s Spatial History website explains the methodology used to quantify the place-name data and the article then analyzes the significance of the patterns the data generated for understanding the historical construction of space through analysis of economic, political, international, and regional contexts.

The sample of projects I’ve been discussing here uses a variety of different computational methods and a variety of written presentations, from blog to scholarly journal article to wide-ranging book, but they are still a rarity among historians. Where the literary studies wing of the digital humanities has developed formal institutional structures like national and international journals and conferences, historians are still more engaged in digitizing data or constructing visualizations of data, or in using digital documents for pedagogy, than in scholarly analysis and institution building. Unlike literary studies, historians are not usually working with ready made texts like novels or poems, but rather have to construct new digital documents before they can get started. And the start-up costs in time and labor and career-risk are high. It remains to be seen how many historians will do more than make digital illustrations for conventional research they carry out with conventional documents. Another problem is that in many departments, digital history remains marginalized or under-developed.

My own project is relatively modest in scope. As a historian of Soviet film, I have long been focused on the work of one of film’s great innovators, Sergei Eisenstein. Eisenstein was not only a film director, he wrote the first body of serious film theory and he made thousands of drawings on a wide range of subjects. He was also a key figure in the Soviet film industry and the Soviet culture industry at large. He travelled to Europe, the US, and Mexico between 1929 and 1932 and made contacts in cultural spheres everywhere he went. In other words, Eisenstein was at the center of a number of important, overlapping social and political networks. When I stumbled on the networking website, Six Degrees of Francis Bacon, one of the best known examples of social network analysis in the humanities and devoted to the social networks in which Bacon travelled, I thought it would be fun to plot the networks revolving around Eisenstein and his many acquaintances. He knew everybody, but how were his contacts connected? I am especially interested in the ways personal relationships got movies made in the Soviet Union. Patronage seems to have played a significant role in all the highly politicized arts communities there and I wondered if I could track patronage relationships to understand its role more thoroughly.

%d0%94%d0%be%d0%bc%d0%b1%d1%80%d0%be%d0%b2%d1%81%d0%ba%d0%b8%d0%b8%cc%86-%d0%92-%d0%92-%d0%a0%d0%b0%d0%b1%d0%be%d1%87%d0%b8%d0%b8%cc%86-%d0%bc%d0%be%d0%bc%d0%b5%d0%bd%d1%82-%d1%81%d1%8a%d0%b5%d0%bc

On the set of Ivan the Terrible (L-R) Mikhail Romm as Elizabeth I in drag, Eisenstein, and Andrei Moskvin, Director of Photography. Photograph by V. V. Dombrovskii

In other words, I have a lot of questions about Eisenstein and the Soviet film industry that haven’t been studied, but I don’t know yet if digital social networking computation can help me answer them. For example, I don’t yet know if I want to put Eisenstein at the center of a set of networks or if I want to plot the industry as a whole where Eisenstein would be only one important node. Social networking analysis is very basically a set of nodes and connections. I don’t yet know how to weight or measure the various relationships that one can plot using networking nodes and connections. I also don’t know if the answers are worth the investment of time and labor.

I have been working with a colleague, Seth Bernstein, at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow, who has done much of the preliminary work in creating a database of cast and crew members of Soviet films. And this week, I’ll be taking a hands-on seminar in social network analysis offered by the American Historical Association at its annual convention and taught by Jason Heppler. I hope that the workshop will help me decide whether to move forward with the project.

In order for me to decide to go ahead, I have to be convinced that I can do more with the technology than make a new database; I will have to be able to produce data on social relationships in the Soviet film industry that form the basis of a new perspective and new analysis of the subject. I will also have to find out how much of the work I can do myself. Most digital scholarship is collaborative and requires significant funding; I’m hoping to design a project I can do without a huge, expensive team. I also want my project to be fully integrated into the academic fields of history and film scholarship; I’m not interested in a project that is isolated or marginalized on a methodological island. And it will have to be fun.

If I decide to plunge into this new methodology that I’ve only passively observed and consumed until now, I will be using this space to record my progress. I hope you will follow along with me as I explore a world that is sure to be challenging and interesting.

Episode 91: The History of the Family

“Kids today.” Everyone says it, it seems, in reference to the idea that children today are spoiled, raised with poor values, and somehow have it worse than their parents generation. This notion dominates discussions from political debates to stand up comedy acts. But, what defines the stages of life and how people are supposed to act in each? Has it always been that way?

Steven Mintz has long been interested in the transformations of family life through the ages and, in this episode, talks about how nearly everything we think we know about family life would be unrecognizable even a century ago.

The Last Hindu Emperor

By Cynthia Talbot

Why are some medieval kings still widely remembered today, when so many others have been forgotten? The monuments they commissioned sometimes keep their memories alive, but the kings of the distant past who loom largest in popular memory typically either ushered in a new age – like Charlemagne, the king of the Franks, crowned Holy Roman Emperor by the pope in 800 AD – or else they represent the end of an era – like King Arthur, a British leader who may have fought the Saxon invaders around 500 AD.

Like Charlemagne and King Arthur, the twelfth-century Indian ruler Prithviraj Chauhan stood on the cusp of two periods in a time of great change. He has often been described as “the last Hindu emperor” because Muslim dynasties of Central Asian or Afghan origin became dominant after Prithviraj Chauhan’s death.

Prithviraj Chauhan is mentioned in history textbooks today mainly because he lost a major battle in 1192 against Shihab al-Din Muhammad Ghuri, based in Afghanistan. This defeat soon led to Muslim rule in much of North India under the Delhi Sultanate (1206-1526) and the Mughal empire (1526- ca. 1750). Prithviraj Chauhan’s defeat had serious consequences: an influx of Central Asian and Afghan warriors, the adoption of Persian language and culture, and the spread of Islam. But his defeat in one battle does not seem important enough to justify the dozens of narratives about him that have been composed since his death. He continues to be remembered in India to this day. A three-rupee postage stamp bearing his name was issued in 2000 and a lavishly produced TV series on his life, “Prithviraj Chauhan, Warrior Hero of (Our) Land” (Dharti ka Veer Yodha Prithviraj Chauhan) aired between 2006 and 2009 on StarTV. A recent bronze statue of him forms the centerpiece of a large memorial park created in the king’s honor in 1996 at Ajmer, the city in the state of Rajasthan that was his dynasty’s capital. It is featured on the Wikipedia entry on Prithviraj Chauhan and appears on numerous other websites.

The main reason for Prithviraj Chauhan’s continuing fame is Prithviraj Raso, an epic about the king that became popular beginning in the late sixteenth century. In this poem composed in medieval Hindi, Prithviraj does not simply sink into obscurity after his defeat as most historians now believe. Instead, Prithviraj Raso tells us that the king was taken captive and blinded. Prithviraj’s loyal court poet, Chand Bardai, hears of his lord’s imprisonment in Ghazni, the enemy’s capital, and makes the long journey to Afghanistan. There he tricks Muhammad Ghuri into permitting an exhibition of Prithviraj’s legendary skill at archery. The blind Prithviraj, who is supposed to shoot an arrow through seven metal gongs thrown up in the air, instead aims at Muhammad Ghuri’s voice and instantly kills him. With this gratifying ending to his life story, the king regains his honor if not his kingdom. Although scholars have denied Prithviraj Raso‘s historicity for over a century, the claim that it dates back to Prithviraj’s twelfth-century lifetime is still sometimes made, especially in popular Indian culture.

The almost two hundred surviving manuscripts of Prithviraj Raso show that it was a favorite of the Rajput warriors of northwestern India. Rajputs were the main group of Hindus who fought on behalf of the mighty Mughal empire, most of whose leading officers were Muslim. Prithviraj Raso maintained its status as an authoritative source of information on King Prithviraj among Rajputs well into the nineteenth century. This was partly because James Tod, the first British agent appointed to their territory, accepted and propagated the Rajput belief that the epic was written by Chand Bardai, Prithviraj’s court poet. Rajput nobles of the early nineteenth century cherished Prithviraj Raso as a history of their community because the epic narrated the valiant deeds not only of the king but also of his 100 elite warriors, regarded by later generations of Rajputs as their ancestors.

Once a sense of Indian nationalism developed in the late nineteenth century, after more than a hundred years of British rule, Indian intellectuals came to regard Prithviraj Chauhan as a patriot who had given up his life in the struggle against foreign invaders. Prithviraj Chauhan and other Rajput lords inspired colonial era Indians who also had to face foreign rulers, although they were English this time and not Central Asian. Prithviraj Chauhan was already confirmed as a nationalist, anti-colonial hero when Western scholarship rejected Prithviraj Raso‘s claim to be an eyewitness account of the king’s twelfth-century reign. During the early twentieth century, Prithviraj Raso‘s version of his heroic exploits was retold repeatedly in the newly expanding public sphere created by the modern Indian printing presses. He was even commemorated in visual form, on mass-produced lithographs like the example below from the 1930s. Throughout the period of the nationalist movement against British colonialism, therefore, the hero of Prithviraj Raso retained his grip on popular imagination and this image of the king has prevailed in popular culture since India’s independence in 1947 as well.

The long history of Prithviraj Chauhan and the popularity of epics like Prithviraj Raso shows the remarkable resilience of popular myths that can shape the ways kings are remembered in new historical contexts.

Adapted from:

Cynthia Talbot, The Last Hindu Emperor: Prithviraj Chauhan and the Indian Past, 1200-2000 (Cambridge University Press, 2016).

Read more about Indian rulers and their stories:

Catherine B. Asher and Cynthia Talbot, India before Europe (2006).

This survey of Indian history provides an overview of developments from Prithviraj Chauhan’s death in the late twelfth century to the commencement of British dominance in the subcontinent. The time span it covers, the years from 1200 to 1750, corresponds generally with the period of Muslim rule in North India. It is particularly strong on cultural history.

Manan Ahmed Asif, A Book of Conquest: The Chachnama and Muslim Origins in South Asia (2016).

The Chachnama has long been identified as an eighth-century chronicle about the Arab invasion of Sind, the southern Indus region of Pakistan. Because that was the first area of the subcontinent to be ruled by Muslims, this text was regarded as the forerunner of a long line of triumphant narratives about the Muslim conquest of South Asia. In his radical re-interpretation of Chachnama, Asif shows that it is actually a work of the thirteenth century which articulated a regional identity for Sind that situated it in a transnational world of commerce and travel.

James W. Laine, Shivaji: Hindu King in Islamic India (2003).

Laine, a scholar of religious studies, is interested in how the evolving narratives about the seventeenth-century Maratha king Shivaji contributed to the formation of a Hindu identity in the Maharashtra region during the past 350 years. Over time, Shivaji, whose armies successfully resisted the advance of the Mughal empire into the Western Deccan for decades, came to be associated with certain local saints and goddesses in popular memory. Laine’s questioning of some aspects of the stories surrounding Shivaji led to outrage among right-wing groups in Maharashtra and the banning of this book.

Ramya Sreenivasan, The Many Lives of a Rajput Queen: Heroic Pasts in India c. 1500-1900 (2007).

The Many Lives of a Rajput Queen also explores multiple narratives about a single figure and highlights their changing content over time. However, the focus of Sreenivasan’s study, Padmavati, is a woman who most probably never existed but whose beauty was reputedly the cause of Delhi sultan Ala al-Din Khalji’s attack on the famous Rajput fort of Chittor in 1303. As in the case of Prithviraj Chauhan, the story of Padmavati was retold by James Tod and subsequently taken up by Indian nationalists; and Sreenivasan attends closely to the shifting political contexts.

Top Image:

Prithviraj being dissuaded from going out in a storm while Kamdev, God of love releases arrows of desire and Laxmi and Narayan, rest on the celestial serpent ‘’Shesh nag’’: Mewar 17 century. Albert Hall Museum, Jaipur, Accession Number 17/11, 1097

Episode 90: Stokely Carmichael: A Life

Stokely Carmichael, the charismatic and controversial black activist, stepped onto the pages of history when he called for “Black Power” during a speech one Mississippi night in 1966. A firebrand who straddled both the American civil rights and Black Power movements, Carmichael would stand for the rest of his life at the center of the storm he had unleashed that night. This week, preeminent civil rights scholar Peniel E. Joseph, author of Stokely: A Life, winner of the Benjamin L. Hooks Institute for Social Change National Book Award (2014), discusses Carmichael, using his life as a prism through which to view the transformative African American freedom struggles of the twentieth century.

Cuba on Not Even Past

When Fidel Castro died last week at age 90 he had survived 11 US Presidents. A dictator who stifled free speech, political opposition, and nonconformity, and a revolutionary who made education, health care, and independence high priorities, his legacy will be debated for many years to come.

We have reported on Cuba regularly over the years and link below to all the articles in our archive.

In our first year online in 2011, Prof Frank Guridy (now at Columbia University) offered an online book discussion group on Cuba, leading discussions of three books you might like to read:

Louis A. Perez, Jr., On Becoming Cuban: Identity, Nationality, and Culture
Jana Lipman, Guantánamo: A Working-Class History between Empire and Revolution
C. Peter Ripley, Conversations with Cuba

We featured Prof Guridy’s own book on the connections between Afro-Cubans and African Americans in February 2012: On the Transnational Black Diaspora. You can see our video interview with him on that page as well.

The Future of Cuba-Texas Relations

Jonathan Brown teaches courses on the history of Latin American revolutions. He is now completing a manuscript on “How the Cuban Revolution Changed the World.” Professor Brown took the first of his four trips to Cuba in 2006.

Capitalism After Socialism in Cuba

The trip in Cuba from Trinidad to Havana was very hard, as our landlady misled us in order to make a commission off a local cab company.

The Cuban Missile Crisis

by Priya Ramamoorthy, Kavya Ramamoorthy, Smrithi Mahadevan and Maanasa Nathan Westwood High School Senior Division Group Website Over thirteen tense days in October, 1962, nuclear conflict nearly broke out between the United States and the Soviet Union.

I am Cuba, for Sale (1964)

An extravagant party on the rooftop of a Havana hotel. It’s the late 1950s; hedonistic tourism is booming in the City. A band plays loud. Drinks. Laughter. Our line of vision moves from the hotel’s rooftop to a crowd of tourists below, where we see a woman and follow her into the pool. Underwater….Hailed today a classic for its inventive cinematography, “I am Cuba” was virtually forgotten for three decades.

The Cuban Connection by Eduardo Saénz Rovner (2008)

In The Cuban Connection, Eduardo Saénz Rovner rethinks Cuba’s position as a hotbed of drug trafficking, smuggling, and gambling and he considers how these illicit activities shaped Cuban national identity from the early twentieth century through the rise of Fidel Castro.

The Old Man and the New Man in Revolutionary Cuba

The forces that created the Cuban Revolution often get lost in polarizing debates about Castro’s Cuba. Two very different films highlight the changes that ripped through Cuban society in the 1950s and early 1960s and created the Cuban Revolution.

Sad and Luminous Days: Cuba’s Struggle with the Superpowers after the Missile Crisis by James G. Blight & Philip Brenner (2002)

Throughout the Cold War and the decade that followed it, historians assumed that Cuban and Soviet leaders cooperated closely in the events associated with the Cuban missile crisis. Havana and Moscow, so went the conventional wisdom, put their lots together in a challenge against U.S.

Che in Gaza: Searching for the Story Behind the Image

On June 18th 1959, dressed in full army fatigues and accompanied by several comrades exhibiting an equally imposing revolutionary appearance, Che Guevara landed in Gaza.

Operation Urgent Fury: A Revolution Aborted

On the evening of October 27, 1983, President Reagan addressed the American people on live television to discuss unsettling events taking place on the Caribbean island of Grenada.

Che: A Revolutionary Life by Jon Lee Anderson (2010)

In July 1997, a Cuban-Argentine forensic team unearthed the skeletal remains of Comandante Ernesto “Che” Guevara in Vallegrande, Bolivia. Thirty years earlier, on October 9, 1967, CIA-trained Bolivian Special Forces agents had captured and executed the thirty-nine-year-old revolutionary before dumping his body in a shallow pit near a dirt runway.

Making History: Takkara Brunson

In the sixth installation of our new series, “Making History,” Zach Doleshal speaks with Takkara Brunson about her research on Afro-Cuban women in pre-revolutionary Cuba. Brunson’s research experiences in Cuba, and stories of the fascinating women who form the core of her research offer a taste not only of life and work in a place few Americans get to visit, but also a window into the making of a social and cultural historian.

From Baseball to Politics

New works on Afro-Cubans and African-Americans

Che’s Afterlife: The Legacy of an Image by Michael Casey (2009)

How can we make sense of the coexistence of bumper stickers depicting Rambo and Che Guevara in a traffic jam in Bangkok, Thailand? Although this book never answer its opening question, such an insight might allow us to understand Casey’s attempt to explore the different uses of an image that remains remarkably vital decades after its capture.

Latin America’s Cold War by Hal Brands (2010)

In this new book, covering the entire period of the Cold War in Latin America, Hal Brands restores agency and initiative to Latin American actors, in the process demolishing many of the platitudes that have governed much of the U.S.foreign policy literature.image Based on prodigious research in a dizzying array of U.S., Latin American, and even East German archives, Brands’s work advances a trenchant interpretation that cannot be ignored.

Conflicting Missions: Havana, Washington, and Africa, 1959-1976 by Piero Gleijeses (2002)

Conflicting Missions: Havana, Washington, and Africa, 1959-1976, takes readers beyond the familiar categories of the Soviet-American Cold War. In the wake of decolonization, as charismatic national leaders emerged across Africa – from Algeria to Zaire – statesmen in Washington and Moscow waited anxiously to see if the new governments would align with democracy or communism.

Episode 89: Seven Skeletons

Over the last century, the search for human ancestors has spanned four continents and resulted in the discovery of hundreds of fossils. While most of these discoveries live quietly in museum collections, there are a few that have become world-renowned celebrity personas–ambassadors of science that speak to public audiences. But how does a fossil become a celebrity? Lydia Pyne, historian, author, and fellow of UT’s Institute for Historical Studies, has written a book about seven of the world’s most famous human fossils–appropriately titled Seven Skeletons. In this episode, she shares vivid examples of how human ancestors have been remembered, received, and immortalized.

Stokely Carmichael: A Life

June 2016 marked fifty years since Stokely Carmichael (later Kwame Ture) called for “Black Power!” during a political rally for racial justice in Greenwood, Mississippi. Carmichael defined Black Power as radical social, political, economic, and cultural self-determination Carmichael’s political legacy indelibly shaped civil rights and Black Power organizing and provides important historical context for understanding the contemporary movement for black lives.

Poised between Dr. Martin Luther King’s shield and Malcolm X’s sword, Stokely Carmichael stands as the bridge between two generations of black political activists. Born in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad, Carmichael arrived in America in 1952, attended the prestigious Bronx School of Science, and was mentored by Bayard Rustin, the openly gay black social-democratic activist and pacifist who would serve as a key advisor to King and organize the March On Washington in 1963.

Like the current generation of Black Lives Matter activists, Carmichael devoted his energies to exposing American myth and lies. At Howard University he became the most charismatic and outspoken student activist in the Nonviolent Action Group (NAG), the campus satellite of the larger Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC, pronounced “snick”). SNCC grew from lunch counter sit-ins that spread across the south, then nationally, in the winter of 1960 into the most important grassroots civil rights organization in postwar American history. The group, guided by the political and organizing genius of Ella Jo Baker, organized for voting rights, set up freedom schools, and civic education in some of the most dangerous parts of America.

While attending Howard University, Carmichael participated in local struggles in Washington, D.C., and Cambridge, Maryland for racial and economic justice, the desegregation of restaurants and public accommodations, and the integration of the building trades. Beginning in 1961, he traveled to Mississippi where he was arrested as a Freedom Rider and jailed in Parchman Penitentiary, alongside future March On Washington speaker, SNCC chairman, and Georgia Congressman John Lewis. By Stokely’s count, between 1961 and 1966 he was arrested twenty-seven times for civil rights activism.

Like many of his Howard colleagues, Carmichael utilized non-violence as a political tactic, rather than a way of life. His own political philosophy hewed close to the social-democratic teachings of Rustin, the Marxist-Leninism he imbibed in study groups in high school, and the pan-Africanism he reveled in while hearing reports of successful liberation movements in Ghana and listening to South African singer Miriam Makeba (his future wife) on the radio.

Carmichael’s allegiance to civil rights struggle did not prevent him from listening to Malcolm X at Howard University or form friendships with black nationalists and political radicals who fit outside the civil rights mainstream. Despite his militancy, Stokely led the Second Congressional District during Mississippi Freedom Summer in 1964 and dutifully protested outside the Democratic National Convention on Atlantic City’s Boardwalk in a vain effort to seat the Mississippi Freedom Party Delegation led by sharecropper turned activist Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer.

The Democratic Party’s refusal to seat an integrated delegation that organized for democracy under the threat of death convinced Stokely to forever abandon mainstream politics. He re-emerged from the disappointment in Atlantic City as one of SNCC’s biggest voices supporting independent black politics, which took shape in tiny Lowndes County, Alabama during 1965-1966. Carmichael helped to organize sharecroppers, poor people, and community activists to create the Lowndes County Freedom Organization that would be nicknamed the Black Panther Party.

By the time he called for Black Power in 1966 Stokely Carmichael had become a touchstone to multiple streams of political and cultural radicalism. Carmichael spread the word about black being beautiful before James Brown, came out against the Vietnam War before Dr. King and Muhammad Ali, and helped to popularize the Black Panthers by headlining “Free Huey” rallies in Oakland and Los Angeles, California.

In doing so, Carmichael defied the dictates of American hegemony by traveling overseas to Cuba, challenging the Johnson Administration’s moral and political integrity, and vowing to go to jail rather than ever serving in the armed forces.

Global black lives mattered to Carmichael. During his 1967 tour of Africa, the Middle East, Cuba, and Europe he visited Conakry, Guinea and met former Ghanaian Prime Minister Kwame Nkrumah and Guinean President Sekou Toure. By 1969 Carmichael relocated to Conakry where he argued that Pan-Africanism represented Black Power’s highest stage and would, over the next three decades until his premature death in 1998, remain an unapologetic black revolutionary.

Contemporary movements for racial and economic justice owe a deep debt to Carmichael’s legacy of grassroots organizing, student activism, and willingness to speak truth to power. Before Black Lives Matter activists identified the criminal justice system as a gateway to racial oppression, Stokely Carmichael called out America as an empire who subjugated black and Third World people domestically and internationally. As a local organizer, Carmichael testified before civil rights commissions, attended conferences, participated in debates, and mapped policy strategies to help build two black independent political parties. Hounded by the FBI, local law enforcement, the State Department, and the CIA, Carmichael remained a committed political revolutionary until his dying breath. Carmichael’s legacy extends to the iconography of the black freedom struggle. His friendships with Martin Luther King Jr., Fidel Castro, Kwame Nkrumah, Sekou Toure, the Black Panthers, Angela Davis, Kathleen Neal Cleaver, Ella Baker, and Fannie Lou Hamer offer nothing less than a political and intellectual genealogy of postwar decolonization and anti-racist movements, one that continue to reverberate from Black Power to Black Lives Matter.

Episode 88: The Search for Family Lost in Slavery

One of the most callous and tragic aspects of slavery in the United States was the slave owners’ practice of dividing families: children were taken from parents, husbands and wives were separated, brothers and sisters too. Why was this practice initiated? How did it impact families? Did the slave-owners feel any responsibility or remorse? And, after the Civil War, how did families scattered across the south try to reconnect?

Our guest today, Heather Williams, Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania, has written a moving book about on the subject, Help Me Find My People: The African American Search for Family Lost in Slavery.

Thinking in Public: Public Scholarship at UT Austin

It turns out that Not Even Past is only one of many projects where faculty and students at UT Austin share their research with the public.

We began to hear about other fantastic projects a few years ago but UT is so big that most of us hardly know what else is going on around here.

So, we decided to start a new website to promote UT Austin public scholarship in all its many forms. We call it Thinking in Public (a name we stole from a now-defunct website created by one of American Studies Prof. Randy Lewis’s students). The new site has three pages: a searchable database of all projects we learn about, a blog for explaining, celebrating, and promoting individual projects and the people who initiated them, and a page for occasional stories about public scholarship that catches our eye from outside UT.

1434685 — Briana Toole, who runs Corrupt the Youth, a program to introduce philosophy to underserved high-school students.

Are you doing some public scholarship? Let us know (click the SUBMIT button on TiP) and we’ll add you to the site.

Have you always wanted to reach a broader audience with your own scholarship? Check out existing projects for models, contacts, ideas, and advice.

dantefront — Guy Raffa’s multi-media journey through the three realms of Dante’s afterlife combining textual commentary, artistic images, and audio recordings.

Do you want to learn more about Austin today, or Austin in the past? Do you want to listen to a science podcast or a radio program about your mind? Do you want to help save antiquities in the Middle East? Would you like to learn more about the intersection of business and ethnics? We have links and stories for you.

Or maybe you just want to learn about what else we do when we’re not teaching and researching and writing? All these projects are run and staffed by faculty and students as volunteers (often with some significant help from our staff) because we are committed to sharing our academic passions with students and life-long students.

14125033_10155065702309041_1101735272293060251_o-1024x990 — Kevin Michael Foster and the 2016-17 staff of his COBRA and VOICES projects to support high school students of color.

During the month of October, Not Even Past will be sharing stories about many of the exciting public scholarship projects we are promoting. So stay tuned. Share our websites with your friends.

Follow Thinking in Public for the latest news and stories.
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