ms55896, Author at Not Even Past

Slavery and Race in Colonial Latin America

Roughly 12 million Africans were forcibly transported to Europe, Asia, the Caribbean, and the Americas between 1500 and 1900. As Emory’s Slave Trade Database shows, a huge proportion of Africans ended up in Colonial Latin America, shaping the emerging societies there and leaving a lasting legacy on race relations today.

Not Even Past has published numerous articles and book reviews on Slavery and Race in Colonial Latin America, covering a wide range of topics. What hierarchies conditioned the relations between Africans, Europeans, and native groups? How did these socio-racial systems work on the day-to-day of life in Colonial Latin America? And, how did racially discriminated groups resist? These are some of the key questions addressed in the articles below.

Spanish America:

Susan Deans-Smith discusses the eighteenth-century Casta paintings, depicting different racial mixtures derived from the offspring of various unions between Spaniards, Indians, and Blacks.

Casta painting from Luis de Mena.

The Casta paintings reveal an idealized hierarchical socio-racial system, but in practice some mixed race populations achieved social mobility by purchasing whiteness. Ann Twinam discusses.

Reviewing Joanne Rappaport’s Disappearing Mestizo, Adrian Masters highlights the gap between the rigid caste system and the reality of day-to-day life in Colonial Latin America and discusses his own work on the evolution of the Mestizo category.

Fluidity and malleability of racial identity was a defining feature of Latin American colonialism as Kristie Flannery discovers reading essays from Imperial Subjects: Race and Identity in Colonial Latin America.

In the early modern Caribbean, individuals not only crossed socio-racial boundaries within the Spanish Empire but also shaped religious identities to move between Catholic Spanish and Protestant English worlds. Ernesto Mercado-Montero reviews Ordinary Lives in the Early Caribbean: Religion, Colonial Competition, and the Politics of Profit, by Kristen Block.

For further reading on the way identity worked in Colonial Latin America see Zachary Charmichael’s reviews of David Weber’s

Bárbaros: Spaniards and Their Savages in the Age of Enlightenment and Jane Mangan’s

Trading Roles: Gender, Ethnicity, and the Urban Economy in Colonial Potosí.

Brazil:

As the slave trade database shows colonial Brazil was one of the principal destinations for slaves transported from West Africa, creating an unique Luso-phone Atlantic world. In her review of studies by Mariana Candido and Rocquinaldo Ferriera, Samantha Rubino highlights the cultural exchange between Portuguese and Africans, altering the way historians conceptualize creolization and the formation of slave societies.

Portuguese officials meet with the Manikongo, who ruled the African Kongo Kingdom (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

Michael Hatch discusses the story of Brazil most famous slave rebellion, the Muslim uprising of 1835 in Bahia, emphasizing the plurality of African ethnic identities in the development of Afro-Latino cultures rooted in the Atlantic slave trade.

Also focused on Brazil’s North East, Edward Shore reviews Glenn Cheney’s Quilombo dos Palmares, unveiling the history of Brazil’s nation of fugitive slaves.

For more on casta paintings:

Magali M. Carrera, Imagining identity in New Spain: Race, Lineage, and the Colonial Body in Portraiture and Casta Paintings (2003)

María Concepción García Saiz, Las castas mexicanas: un género pictórico americano (1989)

Ilona Katzew, Casta Painting: Images of Race in Eighteenth-Century Mexico (2004)

Jim Crow: A Reading List

By Jacqueline Jones and Henry Wiencek

In the late nineteenth century, white Southerners imposed a system of constraints on African Americans, denying blacks their Constitutional rights, and, indeed, their human rights. This system—often violently enforced—was called “Jim Crow,” named after a minstrel song that stereotyped blacks. It included the disfranchisement of black men, the forcible segregation of blacks from whites in public spaces, and forms of state-sanctioned terrorism such as lynching, which included hanging, mutilating, and burning victims alive.

An African-American man drinking at a “colored” drinking fountain in a streetcar terminal in Oklahoma City, 1939. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

“Jim Crow” shaped the South’s judicial and public education systems, employment structure, and patterns of landownership. Black people were limited to the most menial kinds of jobs, and sharecroppers found it difficult if not impossible to escape chronic indebtedness to their landlord-employers. In effect, white Southerners were determined to replace the institution of slavery with a new set of constraints enforced by white judicial officials, politicians, religious leaders, and lynch mobs.

For their part, African American Southerners protested “Jim Crow” by forming advocacy organizations, educational and religious institutions; boycotting and protesting against segregated facilities; and moving north.

The “Jim Crow” project included the creation of a white identity based in part on the glorification of the “Lost Cause”— the myth that before the Civil War, the south was an idyllic place populated by gracious planters and contented slaves. The Lost Cause found tangible expression in the many statues and other memorials dedicated to the Confederacy and the soldiers who fought for it.

Ku Klux Klan members and a burning cross, Denver, Colorado, 1921.The KKK was founded by former Confederate soldiers after the Civil War. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

The erasure of slavery and “Jim Crow” from the historical record has distorted the teaching of U. S. history in both the South and the rest of the country. As communities finally begin to discuss and remove remnants of the Confederacy from public spaces, it is vital that all of us confront and fully understand this history.

Books:

James Allen, Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America. Sante Fe: Twin Palms Publishers, 2000

Douglas A.Blackmon, Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II. New York: Anchor Books, 2008

David Cunningham, Klansville, U.S.A.: The Rise and Fallof the Civil Rights-Era Ku Klux Klan. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.

Philip Dray, At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America. New York: Random House, 2002

Scott Ellsworth, Death in a Promised Land: The Tulsa Race Riot of 1921. Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1982

David F. Godshalk, Veiled Visions: The 1906 Atlanta Race Riot and the Reshaping of American Race Relations. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005

Gaines M. Foster, Ghosts of the Confederacy: Defeat, the Lost Cause, and the Emergence of the New South, 1865-1913. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988

Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Gender & Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896-1920. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996

Grace Elizabeth Hale, Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890-1940. New York: Pantheon Books, 1998

Louis R. Harlan, Booker T. Washington: the Making of a Black Leader, 1856–1901. New York: Oxford University Press, 1972

Louis R. Harlan, Booker T. Washington: the Wizard of Tuskegee, 1901–1915, Volume 2. New York: Oxford University Press, 1983

F. Michael Higginbotham, Ghosts of Jim Crow: Ending Racism in Post-Racial America. New York: NYU Press, 2013

Albert Kirwan, Revolt of the Rednecks: Mississippi Politics, 1876-1925. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1951

J. Morgan Kousser, The Shaping of Southern Politics: Suffrage Restriction and the Establishment of the One Party South: 1880-1910. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974

Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005

J. Anthony Lukas, Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families. New York: Alfred Knopf, 1985

Neil McMillen, Dark Journey: Black Mississippians in the Age of Jim Crow. Urbana, Ill: Illinois University Press, 1989

Michael Perman, Struggle for Mastery, Disfranchisement in the South. Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press, 2001

Remembering Jim Crow: African Americans Tell About Life in the Segregated South, edited by William H. Chafe, Raymond Gavins, Robert Korstad. New York: The New Press, 2014

Slavery and Public History: The Tough Stuff of American Memory. Edited by James Oliver Horton, Lois E. Horton. New York: The New Press, 2006

LeRae Sikes Umfleet , A Day of Blood: The 1898 Wilmington Race Riot. Raleigh: Historical Publications Section, Office of State Archives and History, 2009

Articles:

Carl R. Weinberg, “The Strange Career of Confederate History Month,” OAH Magazine of History, Vol. 25, No. 2, Civil War at 150: Origins (April 2011), pp. 63-64

Elsa Barkley Brown and Gregg D. Kimball, “Mapping the Terrain of Black Richmond,” Journal of Urban History, 21, 3 (March 1995), 295-346

Fred Arthur Bailey, “Free Speech and the Lost Cause in the Old Dominion,” The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, Vol. 103, No. 2, “Play the Bitter Loser’s Game”: Reconstruction and the Lost Cause in the Old Dominion (Apr., 1995), pp. 237-266

Grace Elizabeth Hale, “Granite Stopped Time: The Stone Mountain Memorial and the Representation of White Southern Identity,” The Georgia Historical Quarterly, Vol. 82, No. 1 (SPRING 1998), pp. 22-44

Michael Martinez, “The Georgia Confederate Flag Dispute,” The Georgia Historical Quarterly, Vol. 92, No. 2 (Summer 2008), pp. 200-228

Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, “The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past,” Journal of American History 91, no. 4 (March 2005): 1233–63.

Kenneth O’Reilly, “The Jim Crow Policies of Woodrow Wilson,” The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, No. 17 (Autumn, 1997), pp. 117-121

Reiko Hillyer, “Relics of Reconciliation: The Confederate Museum and Civil War Memory in the New South,” The Public Historian, Vol. 33, No. 4 (November 2011), pp. 35-62

Stephen A. Berrey, “Resistance Begins at Home:The Black Family and Lessons in Survival and Subversion in Jim Crow Mississippi,” Black Women, Gender + Families, Vol. 3, No. 1 (SPRING 2009), pp. 65-90

Documents:

The Library of Congress has a Teacher’s Guide to American segregation, including several documentary resources

Library of Congress collection of photographs and documents specifically relating to Brown v. Board of Education and its aftermath

Blackpast.org has compiled a large trove of primary documents that tell the story of segregation from colonial Louisiana to present day America

Oral histories, videos and documents that specifically recount the Civil Rights Movement in Virginia

Interviews with several individuals who participated in the Civil Rights Movement in Danville, Virginia

A new digital history project that uses GIS mapping software to visualize housing segregation in Washington, DC

An NEH piece documenting “Massive Resistance” to school integration in small towns in the South [also includes a lot of great photographs]

A two-volume Congressional report on Mississippi’s 1875 constitutional convention. Here is volume 1 and here is volume 2.

National Humanities Center, The Making of African American Identity

The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow, the website of this PBS special has stories, maps, documents, and activities for teachers.

You might also like these NEP articles on Slavery and its legacy in the US and further reading on Confederate flags, monuments, and historical myths.

Featured image: Attempting to block integration at the University of Alabama, Governor George Wallace stands defiantly at the door while being confronted by Deputy U.S. Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach. 11 June 1963. Via Wikipedia.

Charleston Shooting Exposes America’s Pro-Apartheid Cold War Past

By R. Joseph Parrott

This article first appeared on Imperial and Global Forum, University of Exeter, UK (July 6, 2015)

In the wake of the shooting at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, the United States has undergone a deep soul searching. Images of the confessed shooter posing with the Confederate Battle Flag have launched a long-overdue national debate about the meaning of Confederate imagery. But they have quickly overshadowed the shooter’s use of two other symbols: the defunct standards of Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) and apartheid South Africa.

Though not nearly as ubiquitous as the “stars and bars,” these totems symbolize an international segregationist philosophy of white superiority. While historians have rightly focused on the transnational dimensions of decolonization and the civil rights movement, there was also a smaller, if no less global, reaction against these trends. Both South Africa and Rhodesia actively cultivated alliances with reactionary white populations abroad, building support in the United States, particularly in the area of the old Confederacy. The Charleston shooting therefore serves as a violent reminder that American racism today is not only a regional issue – it has also been shaped by a decades-long global opposition to human and civil rights.

This particular transnational solidarity of whiteness emerged as a response to the interconnected struggles for civil rights and self-determination during the Cold War. The ideological conflict encouraged Western countries to realize their rhetorical commitments to democracy and freedom, creating an environment conducive to both decolonization and a reevaluation of racially defined inequalities such as American segregation.

Historians have shown that these international and domestic trends complemented each other, drawing inspiration across borders and informing a general movement toward a new rights-based international system.[1] The reevaluation of race relations inherent in these movements directly challenged imperial concepts of white superiority and Europe’s self-serving “civilizing mission,” famously described by British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan in 1960 as the “wind of change.”

Flag of apartheid South Africa

The normative shift away from colonialism and Euro-American dominance began the slow process of isolating segregationists in Africa and the Americas, but it also inspired them to seek transnational support through appeals to common racial and ethnic heritage. The most influential state actor on this new transnational frontier was South Africa. The nation had become the international exemplar of discriminatory official policy when it installed its apartheid system in 1948. Under attack at the United Nations and eventually ousted from the British Commonwealth, South Africa based its international propaganda campaign on two central arguments: anti-communism and negative stereotypes of black peoples. As Tim Borstelmann and Thomas Noer have argued, South Africa claimed to be a strategic bulwark in the Cold War, protecting key minerals and European economic interests from African nationalists the regime depicted as Soviet-controlled communists.[2]

South Africans also appealed to popular assumptions about the inability of colonized peoples to govern themselves. Recasting the outdated civilizational thesis in the rhetoric of the 1960s, the apartheid government argued that it strove to achieve “separate development,” helping to modernize its internal populations at different rates and in ways acceptable to Euro-American interests.[3] South Africans contended that it was white governance that allowed the country to build its modern economy and Westernized high-rise cities, minimizing the ways settler colonialism had depended on the conscious exploitation of black Africans. South Africa’s success in becoming what a 1966 Fortune article called “the only real industrial complex south of Milan” was enough to convince many business-minded Americans to overlook the country’s deep structural inequality.[4] This diplomatic propaganda effectively quieted much Western criticism of apartheid in its first two decades.

Apartheid South Africa also appealed to baser American motivations, manipulating racial fear to curry favor with more desperate elements of American society. Officials including apartheid’s architect, Prime Minister Daniel Malan, cited Kenya’s Mau Mau Rebellion and the chaotic period succeeding the 1960 decolonization of the Congo as proof of the importance of maintaining white control.[5] Violence, the argument went, would inherently follow the end of European rule, much of it targeting whites.[6] This propaganda appealed particularly to Americans in the desegregating south and urban areas, who were anxious over how the changing complexion of their communities and governments would affect future social relations.

Sen. Allen Ellender (D-LA) meeting with President Lyndon Johnson. When Ellender offered to arrange for a private screening of the film documenting his 1963 African tour, the president politely declined

American segregationists gravitated to the racially motivated warnings of individuals like Malan to justify their own policies. In one memorable example from 1963, Senator Allen Ellender (D-LA) contrasted his visits to South Africa and the British colony of Southern Rhodesia with those to newly independent Africa to argue that black peoples were “incapable of leadership except through the assistance of Europeans.”[7]

Rhodesia Flag

This reactionary internationalism bloomed especially after Rhodesia’s unilateral declaration of independence in 1965. Fearing a metropolitan transfer of power that would strengthen the political power of the black majority, the white government of Southern Rhodesia broke with Britain and eventually declared itself a republic. Few nations recognized the sovereignty of the new state, which severely restricted the political and economic rights of black Africans it claimed were not yet fit to govern.

Sanctioned by the United Nations and the Anglo-American entente, Rhodesia became a symbol for disaffected Americans to argue that decolonization – and by extension civil rights – unjustly favored non-white peoples. Solidarity organizations supporting Rhodesia sprang up across the United States, with historian Gerald Horne estimating that the Friends of Rhodesian Independence alone counted 25,000 members in 122 local chapters.[8] Though barred from establishing embassies in most countries, the rogue state operated information offices in Washington and elsewhere that promoted popular solidarity and actively recruited white immigrants to bolster the minority population.

This transnational solidarity grew from a common worldview among reactionary segregationists. Southerners in particular drew on a peculiar melding of democracy and white supremacy, which institutionalized an Anglo-Saxon tradition of liberty that restricted suffrage and rights of governance to peoples of northern European descent.[9] It was this logic that they had used to justify segregation and the disenfranchisement of blacks and Hispanics. As their traditional system of white rule was undermined by civil rights, they looked abroad to South Africa and Rhodesia as the last bastion of what one conservative group called “the long-established doctrine of an informed electorate as prerequisite for self-government” that had at its center a hierarchy of race.[10]

The dichotomy of the seemingly modern minority nations and the selectively chosen examples of chaotic independence in countries like the Congo provided evidence of the rightness of the status quo. As Thomas Noer has astutely observed, the “segregationist critique of international issues began with an attempt to use the newly independent African nations as examples of black inferiority to buttress their defense of continued white political power in the American south.”[11] As civil rights advanced, the minority governments gained sympathy as examples of a new “lost cause”.

Strikingly, South Africa and Rhodesia did not only target whites but used interlinked claims to anti-communism, economic development, and traditional race relations to justify their existence on broader conservative grounds. The two countries employed a variety of lobbyists and public relations firms to sell their segregationist societies abroad, even to the African American community.[12] In one example, South Africa covertly provided tens of thousands of dollars to the American-African Affairs Association (AAAA) under the direction of the black anti-communist Max Yergen and influential conservative commentator William Rusher, who published a series of sympathetic pamphlets on the minority governments and colonial Portugal.[13] Activities undertaken by the AAAA and similar groups lent an air of multiculturalism and multiracialism to the defense of the segregationist regimes.

Yet these wider propaganda campaigns could not disguise how the most effective support for minority governance came from disaffected whites concentrated in the southern parts of the United States. Southern congressmen took the lead in defending the minority regimes from a growing popular chorus of criticism in the 1970s and 1980s, positions that played well with many of their constituents.

A 1971 U.S. law to allow the import of Rhodesian chrome, despite a UN boycott, passed with the sponsorship of Senator Harry F. Byrd, Jr. (D-VA) alongside pressure from the Friends of Rhodesia and the segregationist Citizens’ Councils of America.[14] Other congressmen such as James Eastland (D-MS) and Jesse Helms (R-NC) had personal and professional ties to the minority regimes, and they worked actively to undermine any attempts to condemn South Africa or Rhodesia at the federal level.[15] It was only in 1986, when the American anti-apartheid movement had effectively built its own national network to counter South African propaganda, that Congress was able to pass a sanctions bill over the veto of President Ronald Reagan and place the United States firmly against minority rule.

The transformation of Rhodesia into Zimbabwe in 1980 and the collapse of apartheid in 1994 ended mainstream white transnational solidarity, but it has done little to end its afterlives in the popular American subconscious and openly at the political fringes. The stereotypes reinforced and propagated by a transnational segregationist alliance remain embedded in the United States’ national heritage.

As evidenced by events in Charleston, white supremacists maintain this anachronistic and racist view of black peoples, while media coverage of the disturbances in Baltimore and many events in Africa hint that a subliminal acceptance of these stereotypes has not fully disappeared. In much the same way that the United States is engaging with the institutional memory of the Civil War, the country would do well to recognize the lasting transnational legacies of Cold War decolonization, modernization, and official segregation.

You may also like these articles on slavery and its legacy in the US and flags, monuments, and myths about the confederate history.

[1] See in no particular order Brenda Gayle Plummer, In Search of Power: African Americans in the Era of Decolonization, 1956-1974 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013) James Meriwether, Proudly We Can Be Africans: Black Americans and Africa, 1935-1961 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2001); Penny Von Eschen, Race Against Empire: Black Americans and Anti-Colonialism, 1937-1957 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997); Francis Njubi Nesbitt, Race for Sanctions: African Americans Against Apartheid, 1946-1994 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004); Mary L. Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000); Thomas Borstelmann, The Cold War and the Color Line (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001); Carol Anderson, Eyes Off the Prize: The United Nations and the African American Struggle for Human Rights, 1944-1955, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003) among others.

[2] Thomas Borstelmann, Apartheid’s Reluctant Uncle: The United States and Southern Africa in the Early Cold War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); Thomas J. Noer, Cold War and Black Liberation: The United States and White Rule in Africa, 1948-1968 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1985), chapters 1-2.

[3] For a discussion of how whiteness and modernization worked together to shape American attitudes toward Africa, see the work of Larry Grubbs, notably Secular Missionaries: Americans and African Development in the 1960s (University of Massachusetts Press, 2010).

[4] John Davenport, “South Africa: The Only Real Industrial Complex South of Milan,” Fortune, December 1966.

[5] See for example the interview with Daniel Malan in U.S. News and World Report, 16 April 1954, 60-66.

[6] This argument was reinforced by the Angolan rebellion of 1961, which began with a number of violent attacks on white owned farms (and even more violent responses by the Portuguese). With the aid of a public relations firm and a Lisbon-backed American organization, the government issued a number of grisly publications in English showing the mutilated bodies that not so subtly portrayed the barbarity in racial terms. See “On the Morning of March 15^th,” (Boston: Portuguese-American Committee on Foreign Affairs, 1961?). Thomas Noer also touches on this theme in his article on segregationist internationalism, “Segregationists and the World: The Foreign Policy of the White Resistance,” in Brenda Gayle Plummer, ed., Window on Freedom: Race, Civil Rights, and Foreign Affairs, 1945-1988 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 141-162.

[7] Jack Anderson, “State Cables Tell Tale of Ellender,” Washington Post, 6 August 1963.

[8] Gerald Horne, From the Barrel of a Gun: The United States and the War Against Zimbabwe (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 45.

[9] Daniel Geary and Jennifer Sutton, “Resisting the Wind of Change: The Citizens’ Councils and European Decolonization,” in New Directions in Southern History: U.S. and Europe Transatlantic Relations in the Nineteenth Century (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2013), 265-282. For a greater discussion of the 19^th century tradition of exclusionary governance, see Reginald Horseman, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981).

[10] American-African Affairs Association, Some American Comments on Southern Africa (New York: American-African Affairs Association, 196-?), III.

[11] Noer, “Segregationists and the World,” 142.

[12] Claims of communist infiltration, all-expenses paid and highly choreographed trips to the minority-ruled countries, as well as cash payments won over allies of all hues, including the conservative black columnist George Schuyler. New York Times correspondent has recently completed a book on South Africa’s international propaganda machine during the apartheid era, excerpted recently as “How apartheid sold its racism,” The Star, 25 June 2015.

[13] The AAAA used South African funds to produce the pamphlet Red China in Africa (New York: American-African Affairs Association, 1965?). Memo, J.S.F. Botha to Secretary of Foreign Affairs, 7 April 1966, Folder 1/33/3/1, South African Department of Foreign Affairs Archives (Pretoria, South Africa).

[14] In the late 1960s and 1970s, anti-apartheid activists and churches were impressed by the size and influence of the pro-Rhodesia lobby. Ken Carstens to Blake et al., “Report on visit to Congressmen in April,” 29 April 1967, Box 23, RG6, National Council of Churches Papers, Presbyterian Historical Society (Philadelphia, PA). See also Horne, chapter 4.

[15] Noer, “Segregationists and the World,” 145-146; Geary and Sutton, 272. South Africa also directly attacked congressmen who worked against their interests in the United States, likely targeting liberal internationalist and Africa subcommittee chair Senator Dick Clark (D-IA) by funneling money to his electoral opponent in 1978. For a very readable examination of this incident, see David Rogers, “A Nelson Mandela Backstory: Iowa’s Dick Clark,” Politico, 26 December 2013.

Slavery and its legacy in the USA

By Mark Sheaves

Not Even Past has published many feature articles, book and film reviews, and podcasts on slavery and its legacy in the USA. The history of slavery is an important issue today, and the articles we publish aim to make publicly available the academic research and historical perspectives on this topic produced by graduate students and faculty at UT Austin. This body of work provides an overview of key issues important for anyone wanting to understand slavery and its legacy in the USA.

How has slavery shaped racial politics today? What was it like to be a slave? How different was the experience of slavery on plantations and in cities? Was the Emancipation Proclamation successful? How has slavery been portrayed in popular culture? Can slavery be mapped? Below you will find a thematic list of articles we have published offering some answers to these key questions.

Race and slavery’s lasting legacy:

Jacqueline Jones discusses her book A Dreadful Deceit: The Myth of Race from the Colonial Era to Obama’s America, an exploration of the way that the idea of race has been used and abused in American history.

Daina Ramey Berry and Jennifer L. Morgan offer historical perspectives on the casual killing of Eric Garner, highlighting slavery’s lasting legacy and the historical value of black life.

Concerned by misconceptions about slavery in public debate, Daina Ramey Berry dispels four common myths about slavery in America.

blacklives — Shippensburg University student Cory Layton, a junior from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, paints his face with the slogan “Black Lives Matter” at the ‘Fight for Human Rights and Social Equity’ rally at Shippensburg University in Shippensburg, Pennsylvania, on Thursday, December 4, 2014. (AP Photo/Public Opinion, Ryan Blackwell)

Urban Slavery:

In their article Slavery and Freedom in Savannah, Leslie M. Harris and Daina Ramey Berry explain the importance of understanding urban slavery: “Because of the great economic and social dominance of rural plantation-based slavery in the Americas, historians have long assumed that slave labor was not suited to cities and therefore slavery in American cities was insignificant. But a re-examination of slavery in cities throughout the Atlantic World has demonstrated the importance of urban areas to the slave economy and the adaptability of slave labor and slave ownership to metropolitan regions, especially port cities such as Savannah. Urban slavery was part of, not exceptional to, the slave-based economies of North America and the Atlantic world.”

Interested to learn more about urban slavery? You may also like:

Jacqueline Jones discusses her book Saving Savannah: The City and the Civil War, a study of the unanticipated consequences of the Civil War for Confederate slaveholders and the dramatic efforts of the city’s black people to live life on their own terms in Savannah.

Tania Sammons’ essay on Andrew Cox Marshall, a former slave who went on to become a successful businessman and religious leader in pre-Civil War period Savannah.

From 15 Minute History, Daina Ramey Berry talks about Urban Slavery in the Antebellum U.S.

Daina Ramey Berry and Leslie Harris offer further reading recommendations on Urban Slavery.

Going to Market- A Scene Near Savannah, Georgia. Harper’s Weekly, 1875 Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Miscellaneous Items in Hight Demand collection, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-USZ62-102153

Experiencing Slavery:

Slavery is often discussed in terms of numbers and dates, human rights abuses, and its lasting impact on society. To be sure, these are all important aspects to understand, but one thing that is often given relatively short shrift is what it was like to actually be a slave. What were the sensory experiences of slaves on a daily basis? How can we dig deeper into understanding the lives of slaves and understand the institution as a whole?

On 15 Minute History, Daina Ramey Berry discusses teaching the “senses of slavery,” a teaching tool that taps into the senses in order to connect to one of the most important eras in US history and bring it to the present

You may also like:

Let the Enslaved Testify: Daina Ramey Berry discusses the use of former slave narratives as a “valid” historical source.

Rosa and Jack Maddox (Briscoe Center for American History, UT Austin)

Labor and Gender:

Daina Ramey Berry discusses her book Swing the Sickle, an incisive look into the plantation lives of enslaved women and men in antebellum Georgia.

For further reading, consult this list of classic studies, new works and a few novels on labor and gender and the institutions of slavery in the United States.

Emancipation Proclamation:

On the afternoon of January 1, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln signed The Emancipation Proclamation, freeing approximately three million people held in bondage in the rebel states of the Confederacy. The Emancipation Proclamation was a huge step towards rectifying the atrocity of institutionalized slavery in the United States, but it was only one step and it had a mixed legacy, as these essays by UT Austin historians remind us.

George Forgie discusses the political wrangling that accompanied the Emancipation Proclamation, the work it left undone, and the need – that seems so obvious today, but was so deeply contested at the time – for a law abolishing slavery altogether.

Jacqueline Jones takes us right into Savannah’s African American community on New Year’s Eve, to see and hear how Black Americans there anticipated the momentous news.

Laurie Green brings us up to 1963 to show us how civil rights activists in the 1960s saw the work of the Emancipation Proclamation as still unfinished. One hundred years after it was signed, they viewed the civil rights movement as an effort to fulfill its original intent to bring not only legal freedom, but economic justice and individual dignity to the descendants of US slaves.

Daina Ramey Berry looks at Quentin Tarantino’s sensationalist and willfully inaccurate treatment of slavery in Django Unchained and she offers us alternative sources for learning about the historical violent abuses of slave life.

Juliet E. K. Walker examines the contrast between the legal and economic consequences of the Emancipation Proclamation.

You might also like:

Jacqueline Jones on The Freedmen’s Bureau: Work After Emancipation

Henry Wiencek recommends Eric Foner’s The Fiery Trial

Slavery in Popular Culture:

Historical films and books always distort the historical record for dramatic purposes. Sometimes that doesn’t matter and sometimes it does. How has the history of slavery been presented in historical films?

Jermaine Thibodeaux reviews 12 Years a Slave (2013) and talks about the difficulty of dramatizing the ‘Peculiar Institution’.

Daina Ramey Berry, Tiffany Gill, and The Associate of Black Women Historians comment on The Help (2011).

Nicholas Roland offers historical perspectives on Spielberg’s Lincoln (2012).

Daina Ramey Berry and Jermaine Thibodeaux discuss Nat Turner: A Troublesome Property (2002) and Haile Gerima’s film Sankofa (1993)

Mapping Slavery:

Henry Wiencek recommends two significant digitalization projects that help capture broad trends related to slavery and emancipation in the US:

Mapping the Slave Trade using Emory University’s Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database.

Visualising Emancipation(s)‘, a new digital project from the University of Richmond that maps the messy, regionally dispersed and violent process of ending slavery in America.

First photo via The Texas Tribune

Architectural Agents: The Delusional, Abusive, Addictive Lives of Buildings, by Annabel Jane Wharton (2015)

By Jacob Doss

Are buildings alive? Of course, the answer is no, in the technical sense. That question, however, raises another: are buildings agents? In other words, are they active, do they affect and animate the world within which they exist, or are they simply passive structures to be used however their owners might desire? Annabel Wharton’s answer to this question is “yes.” Buildings behave in ways that shape the landscape, constrict movement, and communicate knowledge.

For Wharton, agency, as it applies to buildings, indicates the ability of a non-living thing to affect and animate its environment. In order to explain how buildings might be agents Wharton employs body metaphors. Like bodies, buildings, young and old, are met with a certain amount of expectation by those interacting with them. Young buildings, like young bodies, are expected to be strong, reliable, and vibrant. Conversely, old buildings might be leaky, frail, and decrepit. Wharton’s body metaphors also provide the organization for her book. Architectural Agents is divided into three thematic sections: Death, Disease, and Addiction.

In her section entitled “Death” Wharton examines two museums, the Cloisters in New York City and The Palestine Archaeology Museum in East Jerusalem. In the case of the Cloisters, Wharton argues that buildings can be victims of murder especially when their destruction is “brutal, undeserved, and concealed.” In the case of the Cloisters, numerous medieval buildings suffered violent fragmentation only to be reassembled into a medievalizing amalgamation that conceals the violent past of its parts under the guise of a coherent, planned, whole. The Cloisters are implicated in the cover-up as the building actively lies to patrons who believe they are glimpsing an accurate medieval structure.

Similarly, the Palestine Archaeological Museum, once the agent of powerful patrons, in this case John D. Rockefeller, Jr., communicated an inaccurate western, colonial history of civilization. Now, however, it sits in a state of catalepsy. It is frozen in its 1930s form as the result of “state politics infected by old colonial arrogance and current religious and ethnic tension,” and its most important artifacts, the Dead Sea Scrolls among them, have been claimed as spoils for the Israeli state.

In her second thematic section, “Disease,” Wharton’s most compelling case study concerns the Hospital de los Reyes Católicos, now known as the Hostal de los Reyes Católicos. The Spanish monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella built the religious hospital turned hotel in 1486. As Wharton argues, hotels and hospitals are important agents of propaganda. As a hospital, the Hospital de los Reyes Católicos operated as an agent of the Spanish monarchy. The building’s propaganda connected the monarchy to the church’s charity work, while promoting amnesia in reference to the monarchy’s bloody crusade against the Moors, expulsion of the Jews, and utilization of the Inquisition. Similarly, as a hotel, converted and renovated during Franco’s fascist regime, the building sold the same false memory of a benevolent monarchy, thus connecting Franco with the “benign” rule of Ferdinand and Isabella. The building promoted a state-sponsored “false amnesia,” which attempted to erase the building’s bloody associations and construct a more kindly Spanish history.

Entrance to the residence of the Catholic Kings, formerly used as a haven of refuge and a hospital for the pilgrims; now turned into a 5-star parador; Santiago de Compostela, Spain

Wharton’s most persuasive and fascinating example of how buildings act as agents comes in her third and final section, “Addiction.” Wharton examines the architecture of the Las Vegas Strip and the idealized, addiction-inducing spatial settings of video games. She finds that the buildings of the Vegas Strip perform in two ways. First, the exteriors act as cues, both triggering and promoting gambling addiction. Second, the interiors, once the gambler has conceded to a building’s calling, entrap the visitor and promote gaming.

In the visually stunning playgrounds of modern video games, such as Assassin’s Creed, gameplay provides the opportunity for virtual tourism, both spatially and historically. Similar to actual tourist itineraries, buildings within the game limit the player’s perceived freedom to explore the virtual city. Also, the game makers are not interested in the accuracy of the environments and buildings they construct.. Rather they reveal idealized modern conceptions of the past. The buildings act in a “picturesque” manner, drawing on elements that construct an expected, familiar, and digestible image of the medieval Holy Land. Historical reality is not the concern, only the illusion of realness.

Wharton concludes by returning to material things. Her exploration of buildings as agents reveals her wider interest in understanding how “things” act in the world. In fact, generally if things act, they act badly. Just as pain makes people aware of their bodies, a roof is only noticed when it leaks. Similarly, buildings arrest our attention in nefarious ways. Modern society, however, no longer recognizes the power of material culture. For example, medieval pieces of dead holy people or holy objects, that is relics, were thought to possess power in and of themselves. Following the Reformation’s denigration of relics and renewed textuality, holy matter, indeed matter in general, lost power. A modern example of this shift in attitude is revealed in Chicago’s Tribune Tower. The Tribune Tower contains fragments of the world’s most important buildings and powerful places. Nonetheless, the tower’s powerful pieces, separated from their original context and without their authenticating descriptions, become simply architectural oddities and benign curiosities. Wharton’s book calls on us to think about how space and material objects influence human interaction, shape our lives, and reshape the past.

Wharton ends her book with a discussion of the theory that informed her study. For academic readers, leading with a discussion of theory might have been helpful. Her subject, however, is architecture and environment. Her approach and narrative style allows the buildings to drive the discussion, not the theory. The buildings speak for themselves in a sense. Organizing the book this way allows those that have not or will not engage with spatial theory to understand her arguments. For a highly theorized work it is wonderfully accessible. Understanding buildings as agents provides an analytical lens through which to explore the “lives of buildings” and by extension the situations and cultures that produced them.

Annabel Jane Wharton, Architectural Agents: The Delusional, Abusive, Addictive Lives of Buildings (University of Minnesota Press, 2015)

Louis Althusser on Interpellation, and the Ideological State Apparatus

By Michel Lee

Louis Pierre Althusser (1918-1990) was a French Marxist philosopher who wrote in the wake of Nikita Khrushchev’s denunciation of Joseph Stalin and the Soviet Union’s brutal suppression of the Hungarian revolution of 1956. These two events led many western Communist leaders and philosophers to question the tenets of the Marxism and, while many elected for a reading of Marx that sought to recover his humanist roots, Althusser opted for a provocative structuralist interpretation that downplayed the role of human agency in history.

One central concept in Althusser’s writings is ideology. Early on, Althusser had argued that ideology is a “system of representations” governed by rules that serve political ends. Ideology, in Althusser’s view at this time, was a matter of the unconscious, inescapable even by the dominant class. But with his publication of Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays in 1970, Althusser drastically changed his position on ideology. While he still viewed ideology as inescapable, he also came to argue that it is realized in real actions and behaviors.

Within this framework, Althusser introduces the concept of interpellation, otherwise known as “hailing.” Ideologies “call out” or “hail” people and offer a particular identity, which they accept as “natural” or “obvious.” In this way, the dominant class exerts a power over individuals that is quite different from abject force. According to Althusser, individuals are interpellated from the day that they are born—and perhaps even before, since parents and others conceive of the role and identity that their child will assume.

Front cover of the French edition of Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays.

With this concept of interpellation, Althusser implies that there is no inherent meaning in the individual. There are no individuals: only subjects, who come into being when they are hailed or interpellated by ideology. Instead, the subject exists only as he or she is recognized in a specific way that has a social structure as its referent. The subject is thus preceded by social forces, or “always-already interpellated.”

This act of hailing the subject is effected by what Althusser terms “Ideological State Apparatuses” (ISAs). While Repressive State Apparatuses (RSAs), such as the police force and military, function primarily by repression, ISAs are churches, schools, families, religion, and other entities in the private domain and function primarily by ideology. RSAs show themselves rarely; ISAs are commonly accepted features of a society. ISAs reinforce the hegemonic rule of the dominant class by replicating its dominant ideology. According to Althusser, schools are a particularly important ISA because teachers hold captive the undivided attention of their students in what is supposedly a neutral environment, thus rendering the content taught “obvious.”

E P Thompson addresses anti-nuclear weapons rally, Oxford, England, 1980

Other scholars, namely British historian E.P. Thompson, have heavily criticized Althusser for his allegedly impersonal structuralist approach to Marx. Yet however one assesses his views, his concepts of interpellation and Ideological State Apparatuses perhaps best exemplify his structuralist reading of Marx and his work in systematizing Marx into a philosophical framework.

Pierre Louis Althusser in the classroom. — Louis Pierre Althusser in the classroom.

Historical Perspectives on Agnieszka Holland’s In Darkness (2011)

By Tatjana Lichtenstein and Jonathan Parker

This first section of this post is by Tatjana Lichtenstein

Wedged between Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Empire, Eastern Europe was the site of unprecedented human and material destruction in the years between 1938 and 1948. As the staging ground for Hitler’s vision for a new racial order in Europe as well as Soviet expansion and social revolution, the region was devastated by genocide and ethnic cleansing, mass deportations, programs of economic and social exploitation, and warfare. In my upper-year undergraduate seminar “World War II in Eastern Europe,” students examine not only the history of war and occupation, but also the ways in which this most devastating experience is remembered in Eastern Europe.

This year students worked in groups on six different films, crafting class presentations in which they examined how filmmakers chose to interpret and represent specific historical events or questions. In their projects, students focused on the kinds of choices the film makers made in presenting history and how those choices were reflected in the film itself. The films chosen included Polish, Soviet, and German films such as “Katyń” (Poland, 2007), “Come and See” (USSR, 1985), and “A Woman in Berlin” (Germany, 2006).

Several of the group projects analyzed films on the Holocaust. Since the collapse of Communism, the Holocaust has been one of the most intensely researched and debated topics in several East European societies, most prominently in Poland. Historical monographs, exhibits and museums, as well as films have introduced audiences to new perspectives on the German destruction of Poland’s Jews. Among them has been new research on the attitudes and behaviors of Catholic Poles towards their Jewish neighbors during and after the war. As archives became accessible, what the historians found unraveled long-standing myths of widespread Polish assistance to Jews during the Holocaust. Instead, they uncovered a disturbing pattern of intimate exploitation and violence and Poles benefiting from the deportation and murder of Jews. Sometimes the killers were Poles not Germans. In stark contrast to the cherished memory of Poles as heroes or victims, some appeared to be collaborating with the Germans while the majority remained indifferent and morally distant to the catastrophe that befell Poland’s Jews.

While such revelations of non-Jews’ indifference and complicity are not unique to Poland—it is a well-established fact that the Germans did not do it alone—this new history fundamentally challenges the memory of the war nurtured by both Communist Polish authorities and Polish diaspora communities. It contests the validity of mainstream Polish historical memory. One film director who has grappled with this question in her work is Agniezska Holland. Her latest film about the Holocaust, the 2011 feature In Darkness, was the topic for one of the seminar student presentations. In the review below, Jonathan Parker, a third-year Plan II and History major, discusses the ways in which Holland seeks to both interpret history and show a way forward out of the morass created by a painful, thorny, and divisive history that continues to be the subject of intense debates in Polish society today.

The following section of this post is by Jonathan Parker

In her film In Darkness, Polish director Agnieszka Holland presents the true story of Leopold Socha, a Polish sewer worker in the then Polish city of Lwów. Socha helped a small group of Jews survive the Holocaust during the Nazi occupation of eastern Poland until the Soviets liberated the city in 1944. In telling this story, Holland attempts to reconcile the traditional Polish narrative of Poles as heroes and victims with the more recent argument that Poles both actively and passively collaborated with the Nazis in the Holocaust. The result is a nuanced and compelling story that confronts Poland’s dark past and in doing so attempts to redeem Poland. Holland’s narrative suggests to its audience that by confronting and coming to terms with the darker parts of their history, Poles can redeem themselves.

Holland builds this narrative primarily through the development of Socha as the film’s protagonist. In the beginning, he makes anti-Semitic comments and seems intent on exploiting the Jews under his care. When his co-worker expresses concern that they might both end up dead for helping the Jews, Socha brushes this aside by saying that they can see how much money the Jews have and then turn them in to the Nazis whenever they want. Socha continues in this vein until the Jews run out of money, by which point he has become more sympathetic and begins working for them for nothing. By the end of the film, Socha apparently has only humanitarian motives. In this way Socha redeems himself and Holland addresses Polish anti-Semitism while pointing out that Poles were also humanitarians.

Screenshot from In Darkness.

The most important thing to note is that In Darkness is first and foremost about Socha, not the Jews. It is a Polish story with the Jews (reminiscent of Schindler’s List) almost as mere props for this Polish redemption narrative. In fact, at the very end of the film, Socha explicitly takes ownership of his humanitarian actions by repeating “these are my Jews, this is my work.” This emphasis on the Polish side extends into the absence of the Soviets who, despite their pivotal role as the liberators of the city, are almost entirely erased from this story. Thus In Darkness is emphatically a Polish story about the Holocaust, one in which the audience is presented with a character who redeems himself over the course of the film and thus helps Poles to come to terms with their own past. In other words, Socha demonstrates to the audience that it is possible for Poles to overcome their former anti-Semitism and come back into the light.

Screenshot from In Darkness

Holland is responding to the recent debate in Poland around the role of Poles in the Holocaust with a film that attempts to reconcile two competing narratives: Poles as victims and heroes versus Poles as perpetrators and participants. She creates a third narrative in which Poles can redeem themselves by confronting their past. The title of the film thus takes on a double meaning: Not only are the Jews trapped in the darkness of the sewers, but Poland is trapped by its dark history, and both come back out into the light by the film’s end.

Slaves and Englishmen, by Michael Guasco (2014)

By Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra

Historians have been puzzled by the rapid development of slavery in English America in the last three quarters of the seventeenth century: Scott Irish indentured laborers, Algonquian prisoners of war, and captured Africans were pressed into slavery. In a society that flaunted “English” freedoms at home, the introduction of slavery in America allegedly represented a radical departure. Moreover by the early eighteenth century the Caribbean islands and many mainland colonies witnessed the emergence of mature plantation economies and the growth of racial slavery. Michael Guasco has written a book to challenge this narrative of two seemingly different moments of transition. Although the English might have praised themselves for their freedoms, slavery was an institution deeply entrenched in England and in English America well before the 1620s. When it came to slavery there never was a divide between an English metropolitan core and a colonial periphery. Slavery was constitutive of the English Atlantic from its very inception in the mid sixteenth century.

Purchase of Christian captives from the Barbary States in the 17th century

Guasco presents a gamut of events and institutions that rendered slavery familiar to the English within and without. Penal slavery, forms of inherited agrarian servitude, and impressment of captured Irish rebels thoroughly acquainted the English with domestic forms of servitude. The Old Testament, patristic Christian sources, and the Greek and Roman classics helped reinforce the deeply rooted naturalness of the institution. English travelers painstakingly reported the near universality of servitude in Portugal, Spain, Italy, Russia, the Ottoman Empire, China, Japan, and Africa. Moreover, tens of thousands of English sailors became themselves slaves, captured and held hostage for a ransom by Barbary corsairs.

Five Englishmen escaping slavery from Algiers, Barbary Coast, 1684, by Jan Luyken

It was the imperial rivalry with Portugal and Spain that familiarized the English to the institutions associated with African slavery. The English followed the Spanish and the Portuguese everywhere and learned from them how and where to obtain slaves in West Africa. Many of the so-called Iberian slave traders were themselves English rooted in Iberian soil, operating from Seville or the Canary Islands. Moreover, inter-imperial rivalry provided the English with an excuse to raid Spanish vessels and ports, hijacking hundreds of slaves who were later resold back to the Iberians or retailed in England and its emergent colonies.

For Guasco the English connection to Iberian empires created a smug rhetoric of liberty that cast the English as liberators and the Spanish as brutal overlords. Indians and Africans appeared as allies of the English, battling a Spanish slaving antichrist. While “liberating” the Africans, the English also learnt from Spaniards how to integrate them into households through conversion and miscegenation. Like their Spanish teachers, the English provided some legal protections for African slaves, including safeguards for slave property and married couples and families, as well as the right to self-purchase. There were plenty of freed blacks in the early English Atlantic. Guasco does not mythologize these institutions as they slowly went away while the plantation regime of racial slavery came of age. For Guasco there were no sudden transitions from one slave regime to the next. Slavery of whites or Native Americans (either through penal institutions or captivity in “just war) always had a “moral” dimension to it. Pre-capitalist slavery sought to uplift morally the captive rather than to resolve labor shortages. In the early English Atlantic, African slaves were from the very beginning commodities purchased to solve labor needs.

British Slave Traders load a ship off the coast of West Africa. Image courtesy of Discover Liverpool

This is a stimulating book but for a reader not acquainted with the narrative of English freedoms and sharp slave-regime transitions not very surprising. What is surprising is that this vast world of forced labor regimes would have remained hidden to the historiography. Early-modern polities traded in slavery and forced labor systems promiscuously. The English were no different, for all their alleged freedoms. Given the overwhelming number of galley slaves, Irish captives, pirates, apprentices, indentured labor, agrarian servants, child laborers, and late medieval oblates, how could it have ever been possible to imagine the English world as singularly “free”? The English constructed a fiction of English freedoms that was no different from that built by, say, the Spaniards. In fact, Spanish Old Christians enjoyed even more “freedoms” than did the English. Old Christians, who battled invading Islamic overloads by retreating to their Cantabrian strongholds, not only were entitled to their freedoms but also to the fueros of hidalgos, that is, to the right to have others work for them. They went one better than the English by clearly articulating the paradox of early modern freedoms: there were institutions of forced labor and slavery so that a handful could be free.

Slaves and Englishmen: Human Bondage in the Early Modern Atlantic World, by Michael Guasco (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014)

This review was first published in the Journal of Southern History, Volume LXXXI, no. 2, May 2015

The Curious Life of General Jackson’s Horse’s Hair

By Josh Urich

The artifact below and the document that accompanies it are out of the ordinary: hair taken from General Thomas Jonathan “Stonewall” Jackson’s horse, Old Sorrel. The hair itself was plucked by General Fitzhugh Lee and given to John S. Wise, the son of former Virginia governor Henry S. Wise. John S. Wise in turn gave the hair (and a copy of Fitzhugh’s certificate of authenticity) to John B. Allen in 1891, who sent it to his father, J.B., that same year.

Black and white image of Virginia Congressman John Sergeant Wise, circa 1885. Via Wikipedia. — Virginia Congressman John Sergeant Wise, circa 1885. Via Wikipedia.

Aside from Stonewall Jackson, there are two especially important names in this list. The first is John S. Wise, the general counsel for the Sprague Electric Railway & Motor Company, which was responsible for installing the first successful citywide electric streetcar system in the world in Richmond, Virginia. Sprague’s improvements to the electric streetcar rendered horse-drawn streetcars obsolete––an interesting coincidence given the equine nature of this artifact. But it is also significant that John S. Wise ran for governor of Virginia as a Readjuster in 1885. The Readjuster party formed in the wake of the Civil War and African Americans’ entry into politics. The party was biracial and, in places, had a black majority. Their name refers to their mission to “readjust” the wealth gap between the planter elite and everyone else. The party’s other goals were the advancement of civil rights, particularly among blacks.

Postcard of electric trolley-powered streetcars in Richmond, Virginia, in 1923, two generations after Frank J. Sprague successfully demonstrated his new system on the hills in 1888. The intersection shown is at 8th & Broad Streets. Via Wikipedia.

The second important name is Fitzhugh Lee. Lee was a confederate general during the Civil War, and Wise’s Democratic opponent in the 1885 gubernatorial race. With Wise running as a Readjuster and Lee running as a Democrat, this race would help decide Virginia’s post-Civil War path. Would it abandon its Old South political style and traditions under Wise, or would it cling to them under Lee? Lee and his Southern Democrat ideology were victorious and Lee served as Virginia’s governor until 1890. Governor Lee gave the hair to Wise three years after the race.

Black and white photograph of Fitzhugh Lee — Fitzhugh Lee

Such a gift was laden with the mythology of the “Lost Cause.” Next to Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson was the most revered southern general. One Confederate veteran, William Williston Heartsill, called Jackson the “Soldier Saint of the Lost Cause,” the man who gave the South “sublime confidence” until his untimely death. A hair from Jackson’s horse was not mere memorabilia, it was a relic––an object made sacred to the southern cause through its proximity to the South’s “Soldier Saint,” Stonewall Jackson.

Why did Fitzhugh Lee, a Democrat and the man who defeated Wise in the 1885 gubernatorial race, give the horse hair to Wise? Wise, a Readjuster, must have had complicated feelings about the Old South mythology embodied in such a relic. Is this perhaps why Wise gave the hair away? Or simply because it brought back bad memories of the race of 1885? This document invites many interesting questions but sadly yields few answers.

A portrait of Stonewall Jackson (1864) held in the National Portrait Gallery. Via Wikipedia.

Old Sorrel’s hair is held at the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, University of Texas at Austin.

Reading Every Issue of The New Yorker

By David Ochsner

In Jack Finney’s novel Time and Again, the protagonist Simon Morley is taken to a top-secret government facility where time travel is made possible through self-hypnosis. Simon views what seem to be a series of historically accurate movie sets—complete with live actors performing everyday activities—and through extreme concentration he “travels” to the era depicted in those sets.

I read the novel when I was about ten years old, and subsequently attempted the trick myself, building shoebox dioramas and concentrating on the contents in hopes that it would be a portal to some great adventure.

It didn’t work.

I’ve since found another way to access the past through the The New Yorker magazine’s digital archive. By reading every issue—every article, every advertisement starting with Issue No. 1, Feb. 21, 1925— and blogging about it, I am hoping to gain a better sense of how one slice of America was living and thinking in the interwar years and beyond.

The New Yorker, Issue No. 1, Feb. 21, 1925. Many of magazine’s elements familiar to today’s readers were in place from the beginning, including the magazine’s distinctive typography and its famous cartoons. (The New Yorker Digital Archive)

This approach is similar to one taken by writer Laura Hillenbrand when she wrote a bestseller about the racehorse Seabiscuit. In an excellent essay in the July, 7, 2003 New Yorker, she described how a chronic illness forced her to conduct much of the book’s research from home, and in a recent interview with The New York Times Magazine (Dec. 18, 2014), she further related how the research included buying old newspapers on eBay and reading them in her living room as though she were browsing the daily paper. “I wanted to start to feel like I was living in the ’30s,” she told the magazine. “That elemental sense of daily life seeps into the book in ways too subtle and myriad to count.”

The New Yorker’s digital archive doesn’t provide the same tactile experience as newsprint, but each issue is nevertheless an exact scan of the original, some even bearing a past reader’s penciled notes, dog-eared corners, or the shadow of cellophane tape hastily applied over a tear.

My blog, A New Yorker State of Mind, is by no means a comprehensive survey of The New Yorker, but I hope my selections and observations give readers a sense of what was important to the magazine’s editors and writers. In addition to citing actual articles and illustrations from each magazine, I provide some context through research and images gleaned from various sources.

Famously droll cartoons were a New Yorker staple from the very beginning, including this illustration of President and Mrs. Coolidge by Miguel Covarrubias. The president was a frequent target of the magazine for his frugality and bland demeanor. March 14, 1925 (The New Yorker Digital Archive)

The magazine archive not only offers a glimpse into the lives of upper-middle class Gotham strivers, but it is also offers a point of reference to a particular time, and to all of the historic digressions to which it is connected.

For example, the May 2, 1925 issue’s “The Talk of the Town” notes the rapidly changing face of the city—Fifth Avenue mansions are giving way to commercial interests and architectural landmarks, such as architect Stanford White’s Madison Square Garden, are falling to the wrecking ball. In “The Sky-Line” section of the magazine, architecture critic R.W. Sexton noted, in reference to the Garden’s demise, how critics, including foreign visitors, often taunted New Yorkers about their “rabid commercialism.” The following week’s issue (May 9) told of the removal of Augustus Saint-Gaudens’ nude “Diana” sculpture from atop the Garden’s tower (which White fashioned after the Giralda of Seville), and an oblique reference was made to Stanford’s White’s scandalous demise, noting that although the manner of the architect’s death put him “in a poor light among his puritanical countrymen,” he was nevertheless courageously defended by the likes of Saint-Gaudens. That sent me back to 1906 (though various scans of tabloids from that time) to briefly revisit how the architect of Madison Square Garden was murdered by the husband of his lover, the actress Evelyn Nesbit, in the rooftop theatre he built in the shadow of his Giralda tower. I returned to 1925 with the understanding that the wrecking ball would be taking away far more than brick and stone.

Image of the destroyed Madison Square Gardens. Via Museum of the City of New York

Photo of the destroyed Madison Square Gardens. Via Museum of the City of New York

Photo of Evelyn Nesbit, whose affair with the architect Stanford White led to his death on the rooftop of Madison Square Garden in 1906. Via Wikipedia.

That is what makes this exercise so engaging: one can read the magazine as a contemporary while moving back and forth across the timeline. The blog is also informed by other contemporary readings—newspapers, other magazines, and books such as Patrick Leigh Fermor’s unfinished trilogy recounting his 1933 journey on foot across Europe. Following the Rhine and the Danube on his way to Constantinople, the 19-year-old Fermor occasionally noted in his journal the rumblings of fascism in Germany and Austria, but mostly describing the faded glories of collapsed empires and the many places that retained old ways of life.

However, Fermor did not start writing his trilogy until the 1960s, and didn’t publish the first book in the series, A Time of Gifts, until 1977. It is an account of what a young man hears and sees in 1933, but the omniscient hand of his future self guides his pen. Young Fermor gives us fresh-eyed descriptions of villages and the homely charms of the people, while the older Fermor knows (and occasional notes) that much will be obliterated by the war to come.

So before one gets too carried away, one must be mindful of this “older self” that can haunt a serial reading of The New Yorker. Although I attempt to read the articles and advertisements as though I am living in that time, this is not possible since I possess the foreknowledge of an omniscient reader. When I come across a cheeky account about two buffoons named Hitler and Mussolini, I know a horrible truth awaits my fellow readers.

Foresight and hindsight: A reader of this ad in the May 8, 1937 issue of The New Yorker would be well advised not to book passage on the Hindenburg, because it will not be making the return trip to Germany. (The New Yorker Digital Archive; Wikipedia)

Then there are the advertisements, such as the series that urges indiscriminate spraying of FLIT insecticide (with whimsical drawings by Theodore “Dr. Seuss” Geisel), or the quarter-page ad in the May 8, 1937 issue that invites readers to book a flight on the Hindenburg, which was destroyed on May 6, 1937, claiming 36 lives. The following year Germany would annex Austria, and soon after Czechoslovakia, and the rest is, um, history.

The indiscriminate spraying of FLIT insecticide was encouraged in a series of ads merrily rendered by Dr. Seuss. (The New Yorker Digital Archive)

Which begs the question I often ask myself during my readings: In the midst of the Roaring Twenties, did the New Yorker writers or readers have any idea of what was to come?

The answer so far: No more than we do today.

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