ms55896, Author at Not Even Past

Notes from the field: Retracing Sixteenth-Century Steps in Seville

Sitting in the archive, thumbing through delicate sixteenth-century documents and trying to decipher centuries old paleography, it is easy to forget that the city outside breathes history too. Sources are mesmerizing and reading them is addictive and satisfying. But the life of a researcher can begin to feel like scurrying through tunnels made of words, dates, and images spread across paper, or on the screen. Occasionally, when one comes up for air and walks through the streets of a city, the mind wonders in creatively productive ways and the subjects of research can appear in unusual places far away from the archive. These moments remind us that real people walked the same ground centuries before. That is what happened to me during my first research trip to Seville while researching at the General Archive of the Indies, the enormous bureaucratic repository of documents related to Spain’s overseas kingdoms.

General Archive of the Indies, Seville. Via Wikipedia.

It was a boiling hot day and I decided to take a break from my work. Offering a lazy “ciao” to the security guard on the way out, I walked into the wall of heat that surrounded this beautiful Andalus city in the summer. Strolling around the magnificent cathedral that integrates Moorish and Catholic elements, scurrying between the shadows provided by palm trees, I headed up one of the gaudy shopping streets that act as tributaries from the city’s historic center. Undistracted by the pulsating music and new flowery patterned shirts on display, my mind remained fixed on the sixteenth-century English merchant and botanist John Frampton, who had lived in the city nearly five centuries previously and was the subject of my research.

Frampton’s life in Seville had been eventful. He traded with the cosmopolitan merchant community, established friendships with the English expats of Southern Iberia (much like myself), and was tried by the Inquisition for having a copy of a forbidden book (luckily, not much like myself). Allegedly his English friends had watched him carried into the city for his trial hanging from the underbelly of a donkey. Frampton was also the great translator of six important Spanish works on the New World, most notably the huge compendium of medical discoveries collected by the famous Spanish botanist Dr Nicolás Bautista Monardes, resident of this city.

Nicolas Monardes at the age of 57. Via Wikipedia.

Dr Monardes was curious by nature. A Genoese physician by training, he became fascinated by the medical potential of the plants and herbs used by indigenous people across the Atlantic in the New World. As ships returning from their lengthy voyages sailed up the Guadalquivir River from the Atlantic and settled on its banks, Dr Monardes would purchase the natural products and seeds they brought back and begin experimenting. He sent reports of his discoveries to King Phillip II and he published them in multiple editions. By doing so, he brought the extraordinary pharmacopeia and medical knowledge of the people of South America to the reading public in Europe. Yet, as always seems to be the case, the indigenous groups received little credit as Monardes and others with connections to notables and access to publishers took all the plaudits. As a result of this all-too-common maneuvering, Monardes has come down to us as a key player in the sixteenth-century Iberian scientific revolution.

Boats in the Puerto de Indias on the river Guadalquivir in the 16th century. Via Wikipedia.

As I walked, my mind moved into a new gear as I considered how the lives of these historical subjects intersected with the sixteenth-century scientific revolutions I had read about. A recent pair of studies focused on London and Seville came to mind. Commonly associated with the intellectual communities of Northern Europe, studies by Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra and Antonio Barrera-Osorio have reconsidered the scientific revolution in terms of place, period, and the scope of historical actors and disciplines. These books questioned the importance of “Great Men” such as Galileo by expanding definitions of science from math and physics to human approaches to nature. They highlighted the roles played by artisans and merchants during European overseas expansion in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. As merchants brought natural products and knowledge to European ports, new systems of organization, experimentation, and proof developed. In their accounts, Seville was the bustling laboratory of Europe’s first scientific revolution, and it was here that the English expat merchant Frampton discovered and most likely met the Genoese expat naturalist Monardes.

A page from Frampton's Joyfull Newes Out of the Newe Founde World. Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library — A page from Frampton’s Joyfull Newes Out of the Newe Founde World. Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library

Frampton’s Joyfull Newes Out of the Newe Founde World, his translation of Monardes’ treatise became a best seller in Elizabethan London, testament to the ways the scientific culture of Iberian cities like Seville sparked a fascination with the New World in England. The book formed part of a larger corpus of English language translations of Spanish scientific texts completed by merchants who had spent most of their lives in Iberian port cities. These men learned Spanish, married locally, and integrated into local societies, until the reformation and heightening imperial rivalries sent them home to England. Back in Albion knowledge became their new commodity and their language skills offered them a chance to rebuild a life as translators in the service of the English crown. But it was on the bustling streets of Seville that he learned Spanish and discovered the works of Monardes.

Many years later, the streets still bustled as I walked past a delicious looking ice-cream shop and remembered that Frampton’s translation had also been cited in Deborah Harkness’ recent study of a vibrant scientific community in London between 1550 and 1610. Harkness discovered nearly two thousand artisans and “middling-sorts” conducting experiments in London’s streets during this period. Fascinated by the natural world and commercial opportunities, this community formed the backbone of London’s Elizabethan Scientific Revolution. These early men of science disappeared from history only because they failed to publish their discoveries. Instead, now well-known figures like the herbalist John Gerald and Francis Bacon claimed ownership of their ideas through publications; reminiscent of the fate of indigenous medical knowledge at the hands of Monardes. Harkness introduces us to a number of fascinating individuals such as the naturalists of Lime Street and one Clement Draper whose “Prison Notebooks” demonstrate the existence of a cosmopolitan laboratory of scientific exchange and discovery in the King’s Bench Prison. Harkness downplays the significance of individuals, instead emphasizing the importance of London’s “urban sensibility” – its spirit of collaboration and exchange – in providing the conditions for the emergence of scientific culture. But was London’s “urban sensibility” so unique in this period?

I rolled this question around, turned a corner, and came to the end of the long shopping street. I paused for a moment to look at the faces staring out of a clock shop and thought about the precise scientific method that developed on these streets. I stepped back to take a photo and I happened to look up. Mounted there, above the ticking clocks, a small blue sign marked the botanical garden of none other than Dr Monardes. I tried to imagine what the site must have looked like as the doctor worked among his tropical plants. I thought of the magnificent gardens I had seen a few weeks before in the Alcazar, just around the corner. It was refreshing and exciting to stand so close to the place that Dr Monardes had conducted his experiments, and where John Frampton would no doubt have stood when admiring the work of the great scientist. It was in this moment, trying to imagine the life of these two individuals, that they came alive again, in my mind, as humans living in a dynamic world.

Monardes Plaque marking the site of his botanical gardens. Image courtesy of the author.

And now I found myself wondering how individuals like Frampton connected the sixteenth-century scientific revolutions of Seville and London. Frampton, like myself, lived between the English and Spanish worlds, happily content in either. Given the continuous movement of such merchants between the Anglo and Iberian worlds in this period, I began to consider how separate these worlds were, and whether the scientific revolution should be understood in relation to national or imperial frameworks. And with this new set of questions in mind, I retraced my steps back to the archive.

Sometimes it is best to give your eyes a break from the sources and go searching for history in the streets. When the city walls show you where it really happened, ideas spark and our connections with historical subjects are re-made.

You may also like:

Ernesto Mercado Montero discusses Ordinary Lives in the Early Caribbean: Religion, Colonial Competition, and the Politics of Profit, by Kristen Block (2012)

Mark Sheaves reviews Francisco de Miranda: A Transatlantic Life in the Age of Revolution 1750-1816, by Karen Racine (2002)

Bradley Dixon, Facing North From Inca Country: Entanglement, Hybridity, and Rewriting Atlantic History

Ben Breen recommends Explorations in Connected History: from the Tagus to the Ganges (Oxford University Press, 2004), by Sanjay Subrahmanyam

Christopher Heaney reviews Poetics of Piracy: Emulating Spain in English Literature (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013) by Barbara Fuchs

Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra discusses his book Puritan Conquistadors: Iberianizing the Atlantic, 1550-170 (Stanford University Press, 2006) on Not Even Past.

Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra reviews Shores of Knowledge: New World Discoveries and the Scientific Imagination (W.W. Norton Company, 2014)

Renata Keller discusses Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in the Americas, 1492-1830 (Yale University Press, 2007) by J.H. Elliott.

Further Reading:

Deborah Harkness, The Jewel House: Elizabethan London and the Scientific Revolution (Yale University Press, 2007)

Antonio Barrera-Osorio, Experiencing Nature: The Spanish American Empire and the Early Scientific Revolution (University of Texas Press, 2006)

Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, Nature, Empire, and Nation: Explorations of the History of Science in the Iberian World (Stanford University Press, 2006)

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

The Professor and the Madman, by Simon Winchester (2005)

By Stefanie Shackleton

The nineteenth century in Britain was a time of grand figures, grand projects, and Imperial expansion. Imperialism was spreading the English language across the globe, yet there was still not a definitive guide to the language. There were small guides and selections of words, but no unified work that encompassed the whole of the English vocabulary. So in 1857, the grand project of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) was proposed.

Book Cover Winchester Professor and Madman

Including both serious historical research and journalistic dramatic intrigue, Simon Winchester’s The Professor and the Madman is an intelligent, clear, and captivating read. It is a history of the dictionary, but it is also a glimpse into some of the strangest corners of the social world on both sides of the Atlantic. This glimpse is through the lives of two central figures: a self-educated scholar, and a delusional murderer.

The scholar is Dr. William Chester Minor. Born into a wealthy family of American missionaries, he grew up with access to a fine education and ample opportunities. After obtaining a medical degree, he joined the Union army, becoming an army physician in the Civil War in 1864. This is where, Winchester feels, Minor’s life began to crumble. Haunted not only by his impulses and lusts, but then by his experiences on the gruesome battlefield, his life was filled with terror and shame. Plagued by vivid nightmares and hallucinations, he became convinced that he was being tormented in his sleep and retired from the army as one of the “walking wounded.”

Minor travelled to London where he hoped to begin a relaxing trip around Europe. Unfortunately, this is where he took a turn for the worst. In the early hours before dawn, Minor tragically gunned down an innocent man, mistaking him for one of his imagined assailants. He was committed to Broadmoor, an asylum for the criminally insane, where he was to remain for over thirty years. It is in those cells that he found time to contribute to the dictionary project, lead by a man who became his unlikely friend, James Murray.

Asylum for Criminal Lunatics, Broadmoor, Sandhurst, Berkshire. Printed in Illustrated London News 1867.

Professor James Murray came from rather different circumstances. Born to a tailor and linen draper in Scotland, Murray left school at the age of fourteen. With no money to pay for additional formal schooling, Murray took his education into his own hands. Exceedingly bright and hardworking, he studied and read independently. He learned several languages, read extensively on science and math, did his own experiments, and read profusely in other subjects. Eventually, he worked his way into a job as a teacher and schoolmaster. Through lectures and friends, he later made his way into the more scholarly circles and societies of London. He was then offered the position as lead editor of what was to become the Oxford English Dictionary.

James Murray and the OED editorial staff, 1915 — James Murray and the OED editorial staff.

The religious, family-oriented teetotaler was almost the opposite of the promiscuous, impulsive, and troubled Minor. They had several traits in common, however: a fastidious working method, incurable curiosity, and a nearly obsessive passion for the work on the dictionary. Murray was editor of the OED from 1879 until his death in 1915. Minor submitted tens of thousands of quotes for use in the dictionary over roughly two decades until his mental state took a gruesome and violent turn. Winchester reveals the surprising manner they were able to come together, become friends, and spend days walking the grounds of the asylum discussing politics, language, and literature.

For the most part Winchester confines the account to what he found in the evidence, though he tells his story with colorful description and imagery. He is able to touch upon several aspects of social history as well, including war experience, class relations, treatment of criminals and the mentally ill, and religion. Yet throughout the work, Winchester stays close to the human element of the account.

A diagram of the different kinds of vocabulary of the English language and their frequency, drawn by James Murray, first editor of the Oxford English Dictionary

In 1928, the first edition of what became the Oxford English Dictionary, at that point titled A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles, was published in its ten-volume entirety. Neither Murray nor Minor lived to see that day, but their work and the methods they used in its creation were crucial to making it possible. In this best selling book, Winchester offers this all too human part of the story, in all its shocking and poignant glory.

Simon Winchester, The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary (Harper Perennial, 2005)

[This review was edited to correct minor errors on June 16, 2015.]

History Museums: Race, Eugenics, and Immigration in New York History Museums

By Madeline Y. Hsu

New York Historical Society (Wikipedia)

Ideas about race and eugenics have had a long influence on U.S. immigration and citizenship laws. A pair of historical exhibits ongoing in New York City vividly convey this troubling history. The regulations governing U.S. borders reveal the beliefs of legislators, but also many Americans, regarding what kinds of people are “fit to be citizens.” These two exhibits, “Chinese American: Exclusion/Inclusion” at the New York Historical Society and “Haunted Files: The Eugenics Records Office” at New York University, demonstrate how deeply entrenched such beliefs have been and the many forms of inequality that they produce and signify.

A political cartoon from 1882, showing a Chinese man being barred entry to the “Golden Gate of Liberty”. The caption reads, “We must draw the line somewhere, you know.” (Wikipedia)

For example, in 1882 the United States set a precedent in making Chinese the first and only group identified by race for severely restricted entry rights into the United States and bars against their naturalization. The so-called Chinese Exclusion Law lay the foundations for future U.S. immigration laws that targeted an expanding array of undesirable people by race, national origin, illiteracy, imbecility, and likelihood to become a public charge. By 1924, a majority of the world’s people, originating everywhere from Palestine to Southeast Asia, could not legally enter the United States and eastern and southern Europeans faced much higher bars against entry than their counterparts from western and northern Europe.

‘Chinese Must Go’ pistol from the 19th century. (Wikipedia)

The “science” of eugenics made such immigration controls seem to be a necessity for national preservation. As one slogan claimed: “Every 15 seconds $100 of your money goes for the care of persons with bad heredity,” thereby mandating the use of laws to protect U.S. population, civilization, and resources. Bolstered by protracted schemes to measure quantitatively, systematically categorize, and document racial and other inherited attributes, eugenics bore the force of natural selective processes, thereby tempting its practitioners to intervene in its principles in order to improve the caliber of American human beings. Such quests for a higher order of civilization and society irreparably marginalized and damaged humans identified as inferior by their ancestral traits.

In conjunction, “Chinese American: Exclusion/Inclusion” and “The Haunted Files” provoke insights regarding the very close relationships between U.S. immigration laws, our restrictions upon citizenship, and naturalized assumptions about what kinds of persons deserve to join America’s democracy.

Madeline Hsu’s book The Good Immigrants: How the Yellow Peril Became the Model Minority is now available for pre-order from Princeton University Press.

More from our series of history museums:

NEP editor Joan Neuberger visits the Museum of Liverpool

When Champagne Became French: Wine and the Making of a National Identity, by Kolleen M. Guy (2010)

By Cali Slair

Since the twentieth century champagne has widely been seen as inherently French both in France and abroad. In When Champagne Became French, Kolleen M. Guy takes a close look at how this regional sparkling wine came to represent French national identity. Guy not only shares the history of the champagne industry, focusing on the years 1820-1920, but also details the organic qualities of the Champagne region that are believed to contribute directly to the quality of champagne.

In contrast to its signature feature, the story of how this wine became a protected product by the French government is far from sparkling. When Champagne Became French is a story of internal and external conflict. Guy details conflicts between wine-merchants and vineyard owners and workers over the qualities that determined champagne’s authenticity: regional traits or the brand names and processes that were unique to the wine-merchants. In 1911, riots broke out among vineyard owners and vineyard workers in the Champagne region over the lack of formal boundaries marking the areas that contained grapes that could be used in wines labelled and marketed as champagne. Class-based antagonism between wine-merchants and vineyard workers also contributed significantly to the escalation of this conflict. In addition, the success of the French champagne industry was threatened by foreign makers of sparkling wine who tried to sell their wine as “champagne.”

A burned Champagne House after the 1911 riots.

What makes the story of When Champagne Became French historically compelling is Guy’s detailed account of how champagne came to be known as French and how the French saw champagne as representative of their glory and sophistication. French wine-makers presented the protection of the name champagne and the importance of the Champagne region to champagne making as a national issue. One thing on which the wine-merchants and wine-makers could agree was that the French champagne industry needed the French government’s protection to combat foreign or fraudulent champagne. In this way, protecting the elite status and authenticity of champagne that came from the Champagne region became linked with protecting French national interests.

French troops mobilized to respond to the revolt of winemakers in Champagne.

Edwardian English advert for the French Champagne, listing its honours and its many royal drinkers

Edwardian English advert for French Champagne, listing its honours and its many royal drinkers

In telling the story of how champagne came to be associated with French identity Guy discusses various marketing techniques used in the Champagne industry from 1789-1914 which explain how champagne came to be associated with luxury and celebration. She also examines the concept of terroir, the organic properties of the vineyard, that together with the individuality and dedication of the wine-maker, combine to make a region’s grapes unique. She shows how the campaign for champagne set a precedent for associating region, product, and nation in France. After champagne became French so did many other regional products such as brie cheese and bordeaux wine.

When Champagne Became French is not just a great history book; its discussion of wine-making and the wine-industry will impress wine connoisseurs. In fact, it did just that. When Champagne Became French received the 2004 Champagne Veuve Clicquot Wine Book Prize and the 2003 Gourmand International World Book Awards prize for “Best Wine History Book.” This story of the journey of champagne from a regional wine to a national product indicative of modern French identity at home and abroad makes When Champagne Became French an interesting book for all readers.

Kolleen M. Guy, When Champagne Became French: Wine and the Making of a National Identity (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010)

On French History you may also like:

Ronen Steinberg on Ghosts and the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror

Pierre Minault’s First World War Diary

Other commodity histories:

Elizabeth O’Brien reviews The Deepest Wounds: A Labor and Environmental History of Sugar in Northeast Brazil, by Thomas D. Rogers

Maria José Afanador-Llach recommends Colour of Paradise: The Emerald in the Age of Gunpowder Empires, by Kris Lane (2010)

All images courtesy of Wikipedia

From the Humanities to the Digital Humanities: The New Archive (No. 20)

By Maria José Afanador-Llach

How does a humanist become a digital humanist?

Dr. Ece (pronounced “A.J.”) Turnator talks with us about her work in digital history. She earned her Ph.D. in Byzantine History at Harvard University in 2013 and is currently curator of the Global Middle Ages Project and is a CLIR (Council on Library and Information Resources) and The A. Mellon Foundation postdoctoral fellow in Medieval Data Curation at the English Department and UT Libraries. In the Fall 2015, she will teach Introduction to Byzantine History in the UT History Department. My conversation with Dr. Turnator offers insights into the challenges and the exciting new possibilities that the digital era brings to scholarship in history and more broadly in the humanities.

Ece Turnator

During her graduate training Turnator became interested in the workings of the digital world. She studied with Prof. Michael McCormick on the Digital Atlas of Roman and Medieval Civilizations (DARMC), a project that makes materials for a Geographical Information System (GIS) approach to mapping and spatial analyses of Roman and Medieval civilizations freely available on the internet. She became the assistant project manager of DARMC, a seminal experience that introduced her to new ideas and methodologies that ultimately helped shape her own research and dissertation.

By the time Turnator started to explore these digital tools, she, like other students, had been seeking training on her own and trying to figure out what tools were best suited to her research. She initially learned how to utilize GIS through workshops that gave her a sense of the scope and potential of the tool. She felt that she needed more than what occasional workshops had to offer and began to take courses in digital methodologies. She recommends that students take advantage of the resources at UT, and take an introductory course in digital humanities (offered at the iSchool) in order to get a proper overview of the methodologies available to them. This advice is relevant no matter what area of the humanities one might be interested in. Turnator explains, “In general, I don’t think we ought to divide digital humanities into departments because the questions asked and the tools used can be deeply relevant no matter which specific humanities field we happen to be in.” Data visualization tools and text analysis tools can be useful to anyone in the humanities, she asserts, “These tools can productively shape research, depending on what questions we pose.”

Distribution of a Thirteenth-Century Fine Ware. (Map created using a GIS)

For example, in her dissertation research about Byzantine economy, Turnator worked with large amounts of data involving archaeological artifacts, ceramic, coins, and textiles. In trying to understand the distribution patterns of ceramics across what is today Western Turkey and Greece, she built a table of ceramic types and mapped them by site. She was able to notice patterns that were difficult to see by using traditional methods and these insights changed the course of her subsequent research.

Sites Studied in Turnator’s Dissertation

Excel Table showing data on Fine Ceramic types derived from sites studied in Turnator’s Dissertation

The Global Middle Ages Project (a much expanded site is under development) started in 2007 by Prof. Geraldine Heng from UT Austin and Prof. Susan Noakes at the University of Minnesota, aims to become a generator of new ideas and questions about the global Middle Ages and work as a tool for graduate students, scholars, and the general public to reflect and learn about the medieval world beyond Europe. In 2013 under the leadership of Dr. Fred Heath, the Vice Provost and Director of UTL, the libraries became a partner of the project. Currently, the new GMA site is being built utilizing the expertise in the libraries. One of the site’s projects in the pipeline is called Virtual Plasencia. Prof. Roger Martinez (U. of Colorado, Colorado Springs) and Dr. Victor Shinazi’s (ETH Zurich) and an international team are working on a 3D redesign of the city in northwestern Spain today. One of the biggest challenges of this and other digital projects, according to Dr. Turnator, is to not replicate our analog habits but to learn to benefit from being in the digital world by understanding how it actually works, and what its limitations are.

There are five other projects in the GMA pipeline:

Lynn Ramey and her team’s (Vanderbilt University) “Discoveries of the Americas
Chapurukha Kusimba (American University) and his team’s “Early Global Connections in East Africa”
Timothy Pauketat (Urbana-Champaign) and his team’s “The North American Middle Ages: Big History from the Mississippi Valley to Mexico”
Christopher Taylor’s (Williams College) “Peregrinations of Prester John: The Creation of a Global Story Across 600 Years”
Nükhet Varlık (Rutgers University) and Abdurrahman Atçıl’s (Queen’s College, CUNY) “A Prosopographical Study of Sixteenth-Century Ottoman Medical Elite”
Thomas Kealy’s (Colby-Sawyer College) “Itinerary Poets in Thirteenth-Fourteenth-Century-Al-Andalus

Another challenge that Dr. Turnator faces right now on the Global Middle Ages project is establishing consistent searching tools for the diverse projects that are and will be in its network. It is necessary but difficult to produce “metadata standards,” that is, categories for indexing content that most medievalists can agree upon so that users can find what they’re looking for on a large network of websites. To that end, she is organizing a workshop funded by CLIR, the Mellon Foundation and UTL, to bring medievalists to UT Austin for a two-day workshop in May 2015. The purpose of the meeting is for medievalists, librarians, and technologists to discuss medievalists’ workflow in research, publication, and teaching. Turnator explains that “the biggest challenge in digital anything is that it absolutely requires collaboration with librarians and other stakeholders on campus to succeed in the long run.” Librarians are experts in long-term preservation, access and in dealing with what are called data-interoperability issues, or the problems that come up when online content is created without consistent standards of data description and definition. That is why having one foot in the libraries and one foot in a humanities department has been so useful for Turnator and for the projects she works on.

Digital Humanities is increasingly becoming a desired and expected skill set for humanists. Job openings at the MLA (Modern Language Association) and AHA (American Historical Association) are increasingly requiring this skill set. Nationwide, humanities departments have begun to incorporate courses to accommodate these emergent needs. At UT, Turnator points out, the School of Information (iSchool) has fantastic resources and courses relevant for humanities students; workshops are available at UT Libraries, TACC (Texas Advanced Computing Center), Digital Writing and Research Lab (DWRL), to name a few. So UT has great resources but they may be difficult to navigate for humanities students in their fields trying to fulfill their department-specific requirements.

Turnator also shared her views about how she sees the digital humanities evolving and affecting scholarship. Projects in the digital humanities, she explains, challenge traditional ways of doing scholarship, especially the single author/monograph model. We do not yet have a well-oiled review processes to evaluate digital projects, which are often collaborative, and hiring committees often do not understand where credit is due and tend to ignore them completely in the hiring process; that will change as the field matures. For now good digital humanities projects bring mostly good publicity and fame to established scholars. In the future, formal training will not only help graduates get jobs but will also help forge the path that leads to peer-review and publications that help faculty get promoted based on valued digital projects. She adds “the acquisition of digital skills require formal training and careful study.” We need to train a new generation of humanists who not only know how to build digital projects but also how to evaluate and utilize them. Formal training in these methodologies should be front and center, and just as the methodologies tend to be naturally collaborative, this type of training needs departments, research units, and libraries to bring their expertise to the table and collaborate. When this happens, digital methodologies have the potential to change the world of humanistic inquiry in the long term.

Catch up on the latest from the New Archive series:
Maria José Afanador-Llach discussed her experience at a Digitilization Workshop in Venice and Daniel J. Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig, Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving, and Presenting the Past on the Web
Charley Binkow discussed digitalized images from the Folger Shakespeare Library
Charley Binkow explored photographs of California’s Gold Rush
Henry Wiencek found a digital history project that not only preserves the past, but recreates it

All images courtesy of Ece Turnator

Carrie Marcus Neiman: A Pioneer in Ready to Wear

By Lynn Mally

Neiman Marcus building from a postcard circa 1920

The Neiman Marcus store, which opened in Dallas Texas in 1907, was founded on a revolutionary idea—that ready-to-wear clothing for women could be as well made as couture garments. At the start of the twentieth century, women who had the means to do so bought custom made clothing. The three founders—Herbert Marcus, Albert Neiman, and Carrie Marcus Neiman (wife of Albert, sister of Herbert) sought to change those patterns of consumption.

It was Carrie and her colleague Moira Cullen who did the most to make the Neiman Marcus experiment a success. They were the buyers for the store; when they didn’t find merchandise that met their high standards, they had it made. As Stanley Marcus wrote in his memoir, Minding the Store, “They were creators of a style, a Neiman-Marcus style, which they accomplished by fabric substitution, ‘always for the better’; by the replacement of garish buttons, pins, and belt buckles with simpler ornamentation; by insisting on handsewn linings, deeper hems, and subtle colors.”(62)

Carrie Marcus Neiman, from Stanley Marcus Minding the Store

At work Carrie Neiman wore a kind of uniform, a black outfit with pearls and two gold bracelets on one wrist. You can see the basics here in this 1948 photo, taken when she was around sixty-five. Her clothes outside of work must have sometimes been more colorful. After she died her family donated 200 items from her closet, which became the basis of the some 200 became the basis for the Texas Fashion Collection at the University of North Texas. You can browse the collection on line. It has many a dark dress, but also a burnt orange Chanel suit and a metallic green dress and coat combination by Bonnie Cashin. How fitting that she bought not only from Parisian designers, but also from Americans known for their outstanding ready to wear clothes. She had paved the way for them.

Original post on American Age Fashion.

Che in Gaza: Searching for the Story Behind the Image

On June 18^th 1959, dressed in full army fatigues and accompanied by several comrades exhibiting an equally imposing revolutionary appearance, Che Guevara landed in Gaza. Considering his reputation today, one might have expected the 31-year-old Che to, perhaps, instruct the Palestinian resistance fighters (the Fedayeen) in the ways of guerrilla warfare, tell them in detail about his grand foco tactics, or take notes on their then-decade-long battle of resistance against Israel. Indeed, upon first learning of Che’s first – and only – visit to Gaza, I myself was filled with such questions. Was such an exchange of revolutionary tactics the legacy of his visit? Did he come there on purpose in order to build long-term relationship with Palestinian fighters? Was he attracted to Gaza as a hotbed of universal resistance to colonialism? What exactly came of this visit and who did he meet there? I was curious to know.

The handwritten text reads- “With Guevara, hero of the Cuban Revolution. Mansion of the Governor General, Lieutenant General Ahmad Salim. Gaza, 1959." Via Wikimedia Commons — The handwritten text reads- “With Guevara, hero of the Cuban Revolution. Mansion of the Governor General, Lieutenant General Ahmad Salim. Gaza, 1959.” Via Wikimedia Commons

I first heard of Che’s intriguing visit about three years ago. The random person I met in the archives could not tell me much besides the fact that he read somewhere (but where?) that Che visited the Shati refugee camp and was warmly welcomed by its Palestinian inhabitants. That was not much. Searching the web yielded the image above which shows Che and other dignitaries with Ahmad Salim, the powerful Egyptian governor of Gaza. Che’s trustworthy biographer, Jon Lee Anderson, added a few more details and a date but nothing else. So, with this modest beginning, I ventured into the archive to find the story behind the visit and the photo. I started with the Israeli State Archives. From the end of the 1948 war until 1956, and again between 1957 and 1967 (when it was conquered by Israel during the Six Day War), Gaza was under Egyptian rule and their army controlled every aspect of Palestinian life, including their resistance to, and infiltration of, Israel. The Israeli State Archive seemed promising because of how closely they had monitored Gaza throughout this period and into the period of Israeli occupation. I thought that the Israelis could not possibly have missed such a high-profile visit by one of the chief theoreticians and practitioners of guerrilla warfare. To my surprise, it turned out they did. In fact, Che’s visit to Gaza left no impression whatsoever in the Israeli archives. Thus, in the absence of evidence from the Israeli archive and the absence altogether of an Egyptian archive, I turned to the Arab press. What I found was somewhat surprising. Che, it turned out, was a Cuban nobody that the Egyptians mostly ignored.

Indeed, as it turned out, Che’s visit to Egypt – then known as the United Arab Republic – was a brief, low-key event that was tightly controlled by Egyptian authorities reluctant to acknowledge competing revolutionary projects such as Cuba’s. His trip to Gaza was even further played down. The press contingent was kept to a minimum, no iconic photographs were published and – so it seems – only a single image survived. Though Che and the Cubans visited several refugee camps, by day’s end, they dined not with top leaders of the Palestinian revolutionary Fedayeen, but with the Brazilian contingent of the UN Emergency Force. In fact, not a single member of the Fedayeen was present, and there was no talk about revolutionary theory, neo-colonialism, Zionist imperialism, or any of the other 1960s sub-categories of global resistance. Twenty-four hours after Che arrived in Gaza, he was back in Cairo. The newspapers the next day buried the story.

Back in Cairo, the theme continued. The Cubans were far from the talk of the town, and Egyptian attention was visibly elsewhere with the more important visit of Ethiopia’s Emperor Haile Selassie. While Selassie received heavy press coverage, the Cubans, except for a few back-page reports, got hardly any. It was not that the Cubans were ignored. Though he was apparently too busy to officially greet Che in the airport upon his arrival, the following day, Nasser awarded him the United Arab Republic’s Decoration of the First Order in a quaint, sparsely-attended ceremony. The rest of the visit was characterized by a paternalistic tone, wherein the Egyptians lectured the inexperienced Cubans on methods of engendering an agricultural revolution in the interest of social equality, and various theories and suggestions were provided as to how the Cubans ought to approach the industrialization of their country. Thereafter, the Cubans left to Damascus, visited the tomb of Salah al-Din (Saladin), a renowned symbol of resistance and sacrifice, and continued on their journey to other locales in Africa and Asia.

This visit to the revolutionary heartland of the Arab world tells us in no uncertain terms that the bearded, cigar-smoking Che was not yet an international icon of global resistance and that that iconic revolutionary decade, the 1960s, had not yet truly begun. In fact, the point of his visit appears not so much to have been to launch an international revolutionary movement but to launch instead a three-month tour to the Third World so Che could introduce himself to the various countries’ progressive elites and, perhaps, along the way, forge commercial ties and hopefully sell some sugar. Yes, that’s right: sugar took precedence over guerilla warfare. But with this tour, Cuba also began a search for its revolutionary role in world affairs. Three years later, Che would emerge the universally recognizable Third World icon of the New Man, worthy of front-page coverage even in Egypt. Indeed, in his future meetings with Nasser, the tables were turned and Nasser presented himself as Che’s attentive and modest acolyte. By this point, of course, the global resistance culture of 1960s was already an integral part of daily Arab politics.

Che Guevera shakes hands with Gamal Abul Nasser. Via the Middle East Institute Journal blog.

As for Palestinians, the Fedayeen fighters of the 1950s had little to do with the guerrilla culture with which they are now anachronistically associated. But this too was about to change, as during the 1960s Che forged a close relationship with the Palestinian Liberation Organization and a new generation of Palestinian fighters were heavily influenced by his example as well as by the global culture of resistance. Their moment to act came after 1967 when Israel occupied the Gaza Strip, settled in, and began making itself comfortable. In response, left-wing Palestinian guerrillas launched a sustained campaign that reached a zenith under the leadership of Muhammad al-Aswad, known at the time as the “Guevara of Gaza.”

A Commemorative poster by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine marking the death of Guevara of Gaza (1978). Via Palestine Poster Project

Al-Aswad proudly carried Guevara’s legacy all the way to his tragic end, which came during a battle with Israeli soldiers in 1973. A few years later, due to a sustained Israeli campaign, Gaza’s left-wing Palestinian resistance movement was in ruins, and a decade later, the revolutionary left did not have much to offer. Indeed, by then, military opposition to Israel was organized along Islamic lines with organizations such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad taking a central role. Today, after two popular rebellions (intifadas) and after a score of other bloody skirmishes, all that is left of Che’s Gazan legacy is a few middle-aged Palestinians who, back in the 1960s, were given the name Guevara by their idealistic parents. So goes the history of Guevara in Gaza, an engagement that began modestly with a visit by an anonymous, cigar-smoking Cuban but ended, famously, with the making of an icon of resistance for Palestinians, one who sought to liberate his country as well as the world.

Genghis Khan and the Making of The Modern World, by Jack Weatherford (2004)

By Norman Coulson

Genghis Khan and the Mongols are generally portrayed as ruthless butchers who slaughtered entire cities and left behind great piles of human bones as memorials to their conquests. In this revisionist history, Jack Weatherford chooses to portray the Mongols as builders as well as destroyers of civilization and not nearly as destructive as they are portrayed.

The Mongol conquests of China and Persia are described in great detail. According to Weatherford the Mongols executed outright the aristocrats, the soldiers, and those who had no apparent value for them. The rest of the population would be divided into groups according to skills. Those with special skills such as the literate, craftsmen, or entertainers would be taken as captives to the rest of the empire where they would hone their talents in the service of their new Mongol overlords. The peasants would be used as a labor force for the Mongol Army. They would do such tasks as pushing siege engines, or filling moats for the Mongol soldiers to cross.

Taizu, better known as Genghis Khan. Portrait cropped out of a page from an album depicting several Yuan emperors (Yuandjai di banshenxiang), now located in the National Palace Museum in Taipei 14th century

Weatherford also discusses Mongol beliefs. He deems it unlikely that the Mongols would have built large piles of human bones because their taboos around death were very strict. Mongols never viewed death as a form of art. Weatherford instead attributes this practice to Tamerlane who falsely (according to Weatherford) claimed descent from Genghis Khan, but who was really more a Turk than a Mongol. The Mongols also avoided torture, he argues, even when it was gruesomely practiced by the civilizations they conquered.

Weatherford attributes various important innovations to the Mongols. They created the first international postal service, introduced paper money, and modified the previous Chinese invention of gunpowder so that it would explode instead of burn. However, the primary importance of the Mongols was their facilitation of cultural exchange. Vast areas of Asia along the silk-road were opened up to international commerce. Playing cards and noodles were introduced to Europe, the checking of the pulse was introduced to the Middle East, and lemons were introduced to China. Weatherford attributes the European Renaissance to their encounter with knowledge from the Mongol empire. The Mongols also reformed the social systems of the peoples they conquered. He claims that Russia and China were united into the large nations they are today. Taxes under the Mongols were lower than under other kings. Freedom of religion was granted in the empire. Weatherford speaks glowingly of Shangdu, the capital city of Kublai Khan, the grandson of Genghis Khan and one of his successors. There artisans and merchants from all over the known world could be seen plying their trades.

Mongols using Chinese gunpowder bombs during the Mongol Invasions of Japan, 1281

Weatherford does a thorough job demonstrating that the Mongols made great contributions to civilization and that their brutality was exaggerated. Nevertheless, his argument is not without its weaknesses. He does not give any figures as to how many died at the hands of the Mongols due to indirect causes. The laborers who the Mongols impressed likely died in great numbers. The Mongol army was highly mobile and did not contain the vast wagon trains which a vast slave labor force required. An incident noted by Weatherford in which the Mongols destroyed the farmland in a large part of northern China likely led to great starvation amongst the Chinese peasants who depended on that land for sustenance. Genghis Khan and his successors may have created a vast glittering empire, but it came at a price.

Jack Weatherford, Khan and the Making of The Modern World (Crown Publishing, 2004)

All images via Wikimedia Commons

A Graphic Revolution: The New Archive (No. 19)

By Joseph Parrott

Lincoln Cushing reviewing slides from the Cuban Communist Party in Havana, 1994.

Digital History is more than just a new, innovative way of using and presenting historical data. It offers an opportunity to change the way historians and archivists understand the holding, preservation, and curation of artifacts. Archivist and artist Lincoln Cushing has been quietly working at the forefront of this information revolution, spending nearly twenty years compiling, digitizing, and organizing political posters from Cuba, China, and the United States. Available through the website Docs Populi and his ongoing work with the Oakland Museum of California (OMCA), these posters represent a truly global exploration of art, politics, and identity available at the click of a mouse.

The importance of this new archive is clear in Cushing’s first major project, the unrivaled collection of posters from the Organization in Solidarity with the People of Africa, Asia, and Latin America, or Organización de Solidaridad con los Pueblos de Asia, África y América Latina (OSPAAAL). OSPAAAL was founded in 1966 to help promote anti-imperial and socialist causes in the developing world. The Cuban-based organization helped define an imagery of global revolution through its dynamic, brightly colored posters that it distributed in the pages of Tri-Continental magazine. Traveling to Cuba in the 1980s, Cushing was stunned to find that despite their importance, there was no archive or even definitive list of OSPAAAL posters. He spent years scouring various repositories on the island, in the United States, and Europe compiling a list of every poster produced until 1995.

Yet rather than bringing these posters together in a single repository, Cushing chose to assemble the archive virtually. An early believer in employing technology to preserve and disseminate knowledge, Cushing used digital photography to bring the artifacts together online, free for all to access as the artists originally intended. The 300 posters therefore represent not the digitization of a physical collection but rather the best available artifacts assembled from individual repositories and private collections scattered across the globe. The images are presented in high definition, faithfully preserving the intricate details, coloring, and overall quality of the prints.

Posters from the Ann Tompkins collection on the Cushing dining room table, some tightly rolled for more than thirty years.

The combination of preservation and accessibility fits perfectly with the idea of activist posters and provided a model for future work. Cushing slowly expanded his digital archive as new opportunities appeared. A member of the Bay Area activist collective, Inkworks Press, his digitization of its work since 1974 has provided an American perspective on leftist politics. Docs Populi added more than 500 images from the Chinese Cultural Revolution after Ann Tompkins (Tang Fandi) worked with Cushing to digitize her entire collection before donating the physical objects to the East Asian Library at the University of California at Berkeley. Finally, Bay Area activist and collector Michael Rossman insisted that Cushing be involved in managing the more than 24,000 images he donated to the Oakland Museum, a collection representing American causes from the 1960s until today. The result is a truly global archive.

Poster for the Port Chicago Campaign (1983) that worked to stop arms shipments to Central America from the Concord Naval Weapons Station in northern California.

Such posters are good candidates for digitization, because artists rarely copyrighted images and indeed desired widespread reproduction, but Cushing has also used technology to manage the ongoing tension between openness and responsible stewardship. With the Rossman collection, the OMCA wanted to maintain the ability for visitors and researchers to engage with the sometimes intricate details of the prints while still preventing anyone from using the high resolution images for their own purposes. The solution: provide a low resolution image with the ability to magnify details for individual exploration. Online visitors have the ability to explore the posters with the same level of detail they would likely have in an archive, all while preventing misuse, preserving the objects themselves, and making them available to audiences unable to visit Oakland.

In combining these diverse images in a single digital gateway, Cushing has made it possible to explore the transnational dialogue that occurred between leftist artists. Visitors can browse through the individual collections or search by date, subject, or artist and see the transportation and adoption of ideas that helped create visual vocabularies of revolution and counter-culture. Comparison of material from the OSPAAAL and Rossman archives, for example, illustrate how Cuban artists adopted psychedelic imagery to help sell their ideas abroad. One can even follow the evolution of specific iconography, seeing, for instance, how Americans repackaged Cuban depictions of African revolution (itself borrowed from an Emory Douglas illustration in The Black Panther) to protest Gerald Ford’s intervention in Angola in 1976.

Inkworks Press Anti-apartheid poster (1985).

Just as important as finding new audiences and revealing connections is the recovery of information. In contrast to traditional archival practice that only opens public access once the material is fully catalogued, organized, and described, Cushing’s archives have the ability to evolve. The Rossman collection at the OMCA is a perfect example. With more than 24,000 thousand images, fully cataloguing the entire collection will take years. Cushing nonetheless posts the material as soon as possible with minimal descriptions of text, size, and production method that he later supplements with greater detail on the artists and context. This approach opens the collections to the public sooner, but it also provides the opportunity for people knowledgeable on the images to contact the OMCA to provide additional information. This kind of managed crowd-sourcing is, in Cushing’s word, “a very robust way of producing truth.”

The idea of a single digital repository for widely scattered material is especially attractive for decentralized movements and, as a result, Docs Populi is one example of a slowly emerging practice of collecting and centralizing materials on political causes and themes for open access research. While it cannot and should not replace the necessary preservation of documents at the OMCA, the University of California, and elsewhere, it provides a way to bring together scattered information for the purpose of research and education. Cushing’s work provides a model for the ways that new digital platforms can strengthen libraries and archives as they pursue their primary missions of preservation, information collection, and knowledge dissemination.

Catch up on the latest from the New Archive series:

Maria José Afanador-Llach discussed her experience at a Digitilization Workshop in Venice and Daniel J. Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig, Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving, and Presenting the Past on the Web

Charley Binkow discussed digitalized images from the Folger Shakespeare Library

Charley Binkow explored photographs of California’s Gold Rush

Henry Wiencek found a digital history project that not only preserves the past, but recreates it

Links

Lincoln Cushing on the technical aspects of digitization and online exhibition:

http://www.docspopuli.org/Documentation.html

Texas posters from Michael Rossman’s “All of Us or None” Collection, including a great piece from Austin artist Jim Franklin: http://collections.museumca.org/?q=taxonomy%2Fterm%2F154&keys=texas

Interview with Michael Rossman from “Berkeley in the Sixties”:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DKFzq9xPwiE

All images courtesy of Lincoln Cushing

Reforming Prisons in Early Twentieth-century Texas

By Nakia Parker

Elizabeth L. Ring was a prominent public servant and social reformer in early twentieth-century Texas. During her marriage to Henry Franklin Ring, an attorney, Elizabeth became involved in campaigning for state funding for libraries, advocating for more educational and political opportunities for women, and spearheading efforts to enact laws that protected the rights of working women and children (such as minimum wage legislation). Yet, Ring left her most indelible mark on the prison reform movement in her home state. She tirelessly worked to better conditions in Texas prisons during the Progressive Era, and the Texas Committee on Prisons and Prison Labor formed under her watch. A document found among her papers at the Briscoe Center for American History shows us something about how a progressive activists thought about prison reform at that time. This is a questionnaire from the Psychology Department of Western State Penitentiary in Pennsylvania for the wives of incoming prisoners that was related to her research on prison conditions.

Western State Pen Questionnaire

The questionnaire probes every crevice of a prisoner’s marital and familial relationships, posing questions on the state of the marriage before the husband’s incarceration, his work, personal and religious habits, his family history (including reputation in the community and the past criminal acts of siblings), as well as determining the extent of the wife’s personal knowledge of her husband’s crime. Even the wife’s activities are put under a microscopic lens, as evidenced by the questions “How are the children supported now? If you support them, how do you do it?” Indeed, to call the application intrusive seems a gross understatement. Yet, by examining the document in the context of American prison reform in the Progressive Era, the purpose of the questioning can be understood. In particular, prisons in the northern part of the United States, such as Western Penitentiary, experimented with programs that focused on the “reforming” of criminals through the use of individualized educational, medical, and psychiatric treatment. Thus, it appears that the prison psychology department utilized this invasive line of questioning in an attempt to explain motivations or reasons behind criminal behavior by conducting a thorough investigation of the prisoner’s background.

Prisoners assemble for the visit of Governor Colquitt, July 4, 1911. — Prisoners assemble for the visit of Governor Colquitt at Huntsville Prison, July 4, 1911.

It is harder to ascertain how Elizabeth Ring used this particular questionnaire for her research. Was there something unique about the treatment programs of this prison that led Ring to believe this form could prove useful in pushing for penal reform in Texas? In addition, the reader has no way of knowing whether this paper served as the standard application for the wives of the incarcerated. Were there separate questionnaires for whites and non-whites? Or for native-born individuals and immigrants? More research would be necessary to answer these questions, but anyone interested in the Progressive Era, reform movements, prison history, or women’s history would doubtless find this an intriguing source.

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