ms55896, Author at Not Even Past

Facing North from Inca Country: Entanglement, Hybridity, and Rewriting Atlantic History

This November, UT Austin will host a workshop on the Entangled Histories of the Early Modern British and Iberian Empire and their Successor Republics, bringing together graduate students and faculty from across the United States. The emphasis of this event is to explore the ways in which ideas, commodities, and peoples circulated across the formal boundaries of empires and nations. In the lead up to the workshop Not Even Past will be publishing reviews of key works of scholarship in the area of entangled history during the following month. These reviews are written by UT graduate students, many of whom will be submitting papers to the workshop, and will lay the foundation for the lively conversations this November. To kick-off, UT graduate student Bradley Dixon introduces the key questions that will be addressed at the workshop, and proposes a new model for studying entanglement.

By Bradley Dixon

When William Strachey imagined Virginia’s future, he pictured Peru.

In 1612, the colony’s former secretary compared the Powhatan Indians of Virginia with the “Cassiques or Comaunders of Indian Townes in Peru” whose people mined the silver that was filling Spain’s coffers. The caciques, Strachey wrote, were “rich in their furniture horses and Cattell.” Their wealth, however, was not only in material goods but in political capital—namely, the protection they received as vassals to the king of Spain. In the same way, Strachey pictured Virginia’s Indians becoming vassals to England’s “king James, who will give them Justice and defend them against their enemyes.”

This passage poses a number of interesting questions. How could a Protestant Englishman like Strachey look to Catholic Spain as a model for ruling indigenous peoples? Where did he obtain his information about the nature of the Spanish Empire? And, perhaps most importantly, how does the fact that Strachey imagined Virginia as a Protestant Peru affect our understanding of the colonial venture that started in Jamestown?

Map of Virginia, discovered and as described by Captain John Smith, 1606; engraved by William Hole. — Map of Virginia, discovered and as described by Captain John Smith, 1606; engraved by William Hole (Via Wikimedia commons)

This November, a conference of UT history graduate students and faculty drawn from near and far will consider these and other questions as they ponder the “entanglement” of the Spanish and British empires in the Atlantic world. Three scholars among the presenters—Eliga Gould, Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, and Benjamin Breen—have already published work that complicates, opens, or even erases, the historiographical barrier that often stands between the British and Iberian Atlantics. Instead, they have emphasized the peoples, goods, and influences that crossed imperial boundaries. The Spanish empire, which throughout the colonial era was the older, larger, and richer of the two, exuded a powerful influence and served as a potent example for subsequent colonization enterprises by other European nations, notably Britain.

For Gould, the most important unit of analysis remains “empire.” Gould might explain William Strachey’s vision as a logical in a period in which Spain’s empire was not just preeminent but dominant. When Strachey wrote, Jamestown was a tiny, hardscrabble outpost within what Gould has called “a Spanish periphery that included much of the Western Hemisphere.” Seen from this perspective, one might picture the two empires as partners in a dance, each watching the other, anticipating the other’s moves. Gould argues that the mutual influences of the two empires reached to their very cores. The encounters between the partner-empires happened in locales far and wide, not just on their outer borders.

Map from the Description des Indes Occidentales [Description of the West Indies]. Antonio de Herrera y Tordesillas. Amsterdam: M. Colin, 1622. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

Cañizares-Esguerra and Breen proposed, as an alternative model, a “hybrid Atlantic” that de-centers both the nation-state and the empire as the major units of analysis. More important to the development of the hybrid Atlantic are the “local contingencies, cultural exchanges, extra-national groups, indigenous perspectives, and the roles of nonhuman actors like objects, environments, and ecologies.” The political map of this hybrid Atlantic would have little in common with traditional maps of European imperial influence. The hybrid Atlantic model recognizes the many places that “were only nominally controlled by any European state in the colonial era.”

If Gould’s model of entanglement is the dance of empires, then Cañizares-Esguerra’s and Breen’s seems more like an elaborate pinball game that Jorge Luis Borges might have imagined. The machine encompasses the entire Atlantic world with, not multiple, but millions of balls in play, careening into each other and transforming the bumpers and flippers themselves as they collide with them.

More than a decade ago, Daniel K. Richter turned the perspective of early North America around in another way, recounting the history of colonization from the American Indian’s point of view. “Facing East from Indian Country,” the title of his now-classic book, has become a shorthand for placing the views of Native Americans at the heart of North American history.

Daniel K. Richter, Facing Eaast from Indian Country (2003) — Daniel K. Richter, *Facing East from Indian Country* (2003)

So, what if, as a thought experiment, we faced northwards from the Andes? Seen from Peru, both Virginia and New England look very different from the image that most people in the United States learned in school, in which these tiny settlements are the original acorns from which mighty oaks would one day grow.

Viewed from the Andes, Virginia was but a small outpost—and a trespass—in La Florida, a region where Spanish missions were already fifty years old and where Native American polities were independent and sovereign. Likewise, when seen in this way, familiar figures appear in a different guise. John Smith becomes a would-be conquistador, striving to subdue the peoples of the Chesapeake. Captain Christopher Newport, like a latter day Cortes or Pizarro, sought to crown—and thus make a vassal of—a Native emperor, Powhatan. The colonial world that emerged in the Chesapeake would be different but its differences must have seemed like matters of scale at the beginning.

Sketch of the Jamestown fort sent to King Philip III of Spain by his ambassador Zuniga. The sketch was found on the back of a map made by John Smith in 1608. The cross is thought to represent the church and the flag like drawing may be a garden. It may also be a representation of the early 17th century English blue ensign. (via Wikimedia Commons)

From the Andes, the settlements of the British Empire probably always seemed smaller. That is, until it wasn’t small anymore and was barking at the gates of the Spanish empire. But even then, both empires watched each other carefully for weaknesses and for ideas.

This southern perspective offers only one way that we might begin to perceive and conceive of the “entanglements” between the British and Spanish Americas. As the conference gathers in November, we look forward to exploring others.

Digital History: A Guide by Daniel J. Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig (2006): New Archive (No. 18)

By Maria José Afanador-Llach

Daniel J. Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig, Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving, and Presenting the Past on the Web, (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006)

In the past years, the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media has produced a myriad of digital tools and scholarly reflections on the impact of using digital media and computer technologies to democratize history. For the Center, democratizing history means to incorporate multiple voices, reach diverse audiences, and encourage popular participation in presenting and preserving the past. Daniel J. Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig, both former directors of the Center, offer a pragmatic and well-documented guide about the ways in which historians can “build the digital future of history in the web” or the “History Web.” The book offers a reflection on why historians should build history websites and the related on-the-ground challenges and opportunities of doing so.

Digital History begins with a brief history of digital history and the ways historians have translated their work to the web with digital archives, online exhibits, online articles with sets of historical documents, historical fanzines, blogs, educational resources, and multimedia products. The authors contend that becoming familiar with what has already been done on the web, defining the genre of the site you are creating, and thinking about the intended audience are basic steps to get started online. The key questions here are: what communities of people do you want to reach and what are your goals in doing digital history? After assessing the different genres of the History Web, the authors then turn to a very pragmatic discussion of how to start a historical website.

In “Getting Started,” the authors highlight the importance of understanding the basic technologies behind the web to be able to match scaled technologies to particular History Web projects. The authors offer basic explanations of the nature of a website—the non-fixed nature of content on the web—the decentralized nature of the Internet, the programming lingua franca of the Internet – HTML — and choices about where to host a website. Each website has a content and purpose, they contend, and an appropriate technology should match each website. They then turn to an overview and assessment of the many computer programs available to make basic websites (such as Dreamweaver and Microsoft’s Front Page) that require varying levels of HTML or other knowledge. Alluding to the potential for interactivity, the authors refer to Flash—an animation software—for creating multimedia narratives combining videos, maps, timelines, photographs and text. Another key issue is a task that historians face day to day: organizing the data. Databases or XML are necessary when one has hundreds or thousands of artifacts or documents to display. A more complete discussion about the possibility of organizing expansive resources using databases or XML is found in the Appendix of the book. The chapter ends with the question of how to fund a digital history project and a reminder of the importance of defining clearly the genre and goals of the project.

Not Even Past brings primary sources, book recommendations, and the cutting edge research of the Department of History at UT Austin to the wider public through digital medium.

The authors go on to discuss the possibilities for manipulating historical data with electronic tools in order for historians to make findings that were not previously evident in analog sources. In this connection, one of the first steps in a digital project is to efficiently produce digital formats. Here the authors assess the pros (advantages of access) and cons (expensive, information is lost) of digitization, the ways in which a text can be digitized, and the existing digital formats. The chapter also offers information on specific tools to make images digital, how to digitize sound and moving images, and they discuss whether you should do all of the work by yourself.

Related to building the repository of digital materials to feed any digital history project is designing a website itself. The authors stress the centrality of designing websites that serve public historical understanding. In “Designing for the History Web,” the authors discuss several design principles that can account for effective online communication. Since presenting content in the web is different from composing paper-based works, the authors stress the need to think about design principles such as contrast, the relationship between features on the page, order, alignment, consistency in color, font, size, and texture. Since the nature of hypertext implies non-linear navigation of contents, every webpage needs a basic navigation tool. Lastly, the authors discuss the site structure, which I believe should be the guiding principle of any web content, even before defining stylistic elements. The information architecture of a website is what allows users to know where to find information in a website. “Building an Audience” is concerned with strategies for attracting an audience to a history website. The chapter discusses the importance of defining an audience, reaching it, marketing strategies, get visitors to comer back, and tracking and assessing the audience using log analysis programs.

Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media

“Collecting History Online” casts light on the use of the Internet to collect accounts and artifacts from the recent past. The authors argue that the collection of historical documents, images, and personal narratives has the potential to create innovative forms of history in the future. Thousands of historical sources are produced daily on the web. Webpages are ephemeral, newspapers sites change every day, and even many blogs disappear leaving no trace. Gathering material from the web, however, can entail hurdles related to privacy and copyright. “Owning the Past” traces the history of copyright and intellectual property, which the authors call “an ever-evolving set of principles” that raises questions about the rights of producers and consumers on the web. The authors align themselves with the principle of Creative Commons, which allows the distribution of material found online as “a shared storehouse of human creations.” The authors discuss the legal landscape that digital historians should navigate to protect their intellectual property and ensure their compliance with copyright laws. While historians worry about copyright infringements, for-profit organizations such as ProQuest have made massive investments in digitizing the past and selling access to their collections to universities. Questions of unequal access to digital historical materials forefronts a debate on who owns the past and engenders ethical questions around the commercial drive that turns paper-based sources into commodities. This raises issues around the copyright, for example, of twentieth-century materials (almost everything published after 1923 remains covered by copyright), that in the majority of cases only big corporations can afford.

The Old Bailey Proceedings Online makes available a fully searchable, digitised collection of all surviving editions of the Old Bailey Proceedings from 1674 to 1913, and of the Ordinary of Newgate’s Accounts between 1676 and 1772.

The final chapter, “Preserving Digital History,” is a meditation about strategies to ensure that digital materials will survive in the future in an electronically unstable environment. Digitization is not preservation, the authors explain, given the loss of information that comes from transforming analog into digital format. A robust reliable storage system is not enough, the authors argue, and the information sciences still have a long way to go towards improving the longevity of digital copies and avoiding the corruption of files.

In short, the book offers a comprehensive overview of the perils of contributing to the History Web and ways to manage the obstacles and produce a useful website. Surprisingly, the book does not situate digital history within the broader field of the digital humanities. This issue has been the subject of debate, as it seems that digital humanists have defined the field mostly around digital literary studies leaving digital history outside the defining features of the intersections between computing and the humanities.

Lastly, rather than reading the book in a linear way, I recommend using this book as a manual in which to find advice on specific practical issues regarding the creation of a digital history project. Very useful assets of the book are the countless links to online publications and digital history projects. Learning about digital history is partially achieved by reading the book. Navigating through the great number of online digital projects, even those in literary studies, I believe, is the best way to get a sense of the various, creative ways other humanists have chosen to preserve and visualize their research in the web.

One question remains: Now that we have a multitude of digital history websites – archives, blogs, data visualizations and collections, how are these digital tools shaping historical research methods? Stay tuned.

Daniel J. Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig, Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving, and Presenting the Past on the Web (Online).

Ghosts and the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror

By Ronen Steinberg

Can ghosts teach us anything about the Reign of Terror? The Reign of Terror (1793-4) was an event of mass violence in the middle of the French Revolution. Tens of thousands of people were executed and hundreds of thousands were imprisoned. I study the aftermath of the Reign of Terror. I am interested in how the people who had lived through this event struggled to come to terms with it.

In the course of my research, I came across a strange document, a pamphlet containing an exchange of letters between the living and the dead.

Correspondance des vivants et des morts

The pamphlet was published anonymously in 1795 and went through several editions. It tells the story of a correspondence between two friends who had been in prison together during the Reign of Terror. In prison, they had promised each other that, should they to survive, they would devote their lives to persecuting those who arrested them and to telling the world about their misfortune. One of them survived, but the other was guillotined. One day, about a year after the end of the Terror, the friend who had been killed appeared in the dream of the survivor. He said that although he was dead, he was still intent on keeping the promise that they had made to each other in prison. When the friend awoke from his sleep, he found strange sheets of paper on his desk. What made them strange is that the writing on them appeared to be mobile, quivering, as if the lines on the page were alive. It turns out that these were letters sent from the netherworld. The two friends embarked on a correspondence between the living and the dead, in which they discussed politics, the events of the French Revolution, and also gossiped about celebrities.

So what should we make of this strange story? Well, ghosts are interesting because they embody a past that has not passed. Normally we think of time in a linear fashion: past – present – future. Ghosts disrupt this linear sense of time. They are the return of what should have been gone forever. This is captured very well in the French term for ghosts, revenants, meaning those who have come back. I think that’s what makes them so scary and also fascinating.

One doesn’t need to believe in ghosts to see that this document teaches us something valuable about the period: it shows us how those who had lived through the Terror expressed the notion that they were haunted (literally!) by the terrible events they experienced. Ghosts gave them a way to talk about a difficult past, a past that continued to reverberate in the present.

Image depicting Étienne-Gaspard Robert’s Phantasmagoria show

This popular pamphlet was not the only appearance of ghosts in the immediate aftermath of the Reign of Terror. In 1797, three years after the Terror, a man of science by the name of Étienne-Gaspard Robert invented a machine for the projection of moving images, which he called the phantasmagoria. The word is composed of the Greek fantasma, meaning ghost, and agora, the public meeting place in the city-states of ancient Greece. So the word phantasmagoria means something like a gathering of specters. The shows of the phantasmagoria consisted in the projection of images of ghosts rising from the dead, usually to the accompaniment of the eerie sounds of the glass harmonica, a musical instrument that was invented by Benjamin Franklin and that was thought to have curious effects on the nerves of listeners.

French artist Thomas Bloch, exhibiting the glass harmonica in the Paris Music Museum, Nov. 29, 2007.

In short, the phantasmagoria was a kind of 18^th century horror show that appeared in Paris immediately after the Terror. Indeed, many of the images that Robert created for the show were of victims of the Terror or other celebrated figures from the French Revolution. Eventually, the police shut down the shows because it found them to be seditious. So in this case, ghosts were used in order to talk about a past that was politically delicate, perhaps even forbidden to talk about.

Image depicting Étienne-Gaspard Robert’s Phantasmagoria show

To go back to the exchange of letters between the living and the dead, the most telling detail in that text has to do not with ghosts themselves but with the way they communicated with the living. In the story, one could only read the letters of the dead if one stood at a certain distance from them. The narrator in the pamphlet tells us that if he got too close to the letters, “the magical script started moving before my eyes and became opaque… If I wanted to grab the papers in my hand, the entire script disappeared at my profane touch, and would only reappear once I placed myself at a respectful distance.” [Correspondance des vivans et des morts, 4-5]

This is an interesting detail because it is counter-intuitive. For most of us, I think, the closer we are to a text, the easier it is to read it. But here, proximity makes the text unintelligible and distance makes it legible. I interpret this detail in the following way: the letters of the dead are bearers of traumatic knowledge. This is impossible knowledge, which cannot be grasped when one is too close to the events at hand. This knowledge only becomes accessible from a distance, the distance of time rather than of space.

So ghosts give us access to the manner in which men and women in the late eighteenth century processed difficult pasts, pasts marked by brutality and massive repression. It turns out that they have a lot to teach us about the Reign of Terror. Bwahahahaha!

For more on ghosts in early modern France see Julie Hardwick on the Early Modern French Family

First image courtesy of Ronen Steinberg

Second and third image courtesy of metalonmetalblog

Video courtesy of youtube

Study History: Help Save America’s Crumbling Infrastructure and Bring the Humanities Together with the STEM

By Erika Bsumek and Kyle Shelton

As students begin to contemplate which classes to take during the spring semester, many will ask themselves what’s the point of a liberal arts education? Why study history, literature, philosophy and “soft” sciences like sociology and psychology when science, technology, engineering and math seem to dominate our futures?

Both STEM and the Humanities are essential to understanding our society and building for the future and they ought to be better integrated. The Humanities teach us how to think critically about the challenges relevant to all of us, including engineering and technology problems. Our deteriorating infrastructure, for example, lies in the hands of our future engineers. But as our roads, bridges, and dams continue to receive poor marks on the American Society of Civil Engineers report card, we can best rebuild only if we understand the infrastructure’s history and the social, economic, and cultural context we are building in. It’s time to help humanities students better understand how to engage with the physical world around them and to introduce critical social and cultural studies to engineering students. Bridging these disciplines can help all students recognize and grapple with the fact that seemingly divergent fields overlap in significant ways. One recent American Academy of Arts and Sciences study notes the importance of integrating “the sciences, social sciences, humanities and artistic practice” in order to “serve our students better.”

In the spring of 2014 we taught a new undergraduate history class at UT Austin called “Building America: Engineering Society and Culture, 1868-1980,” intended to bring STEM and Humanities students together. One of the main goals of the class was to teach Humanities students how the technology surrounding them works and to teach STEM majors how history shapes technological advances.

Coffer Dam, 1960 (Courtesy of the Department of the Interior, Bureau of Reclamation)

“Building America” examines roughly 100 years of construction and engineering projects in American society from the late 1860s through approximately 1980. The key mission of the course is to appeal to a wide variety of students from across campus but especially to draw engineering students who often do not get the chance to take required general education courses until the last semester of their senior year. The class helped examine the work of politicians, architects, engineers, urban planners, naturalists, and reformers. We studied the complex relationships between large-scale infrastructure projects, the technologies those projects required, and the social developments that brought the projects into being and changed in their wake.

Night view of Glen Canyon Dam and all four jet tubes open releasing water during high-flow experiment – March 5, 2008 (Courtesy of the Department of the Interior, Bureau of Reclamation).

The course filled quickly during registration, indicating that the subject appealed to a diverse collection of students and their enthusiasm didn’t wane. STEM students seemed hungry for ways to place the technical skills they had been acquiring into a broader social context. Rather than take a “march through time,” approach, the course focused on five different infrastructure projects—including the Interstate Highway system and Glen Canyon Dam—and the ways they transformed business and engineering practices as well as art, design, and the allocation of resources.

View of I-45 in Houston, Courtesy of the State of Texas Department of Transportation

View of the I-45 in Houston prior to redevelopment (Courtesy the State of Texas Department of Transportation)

Students from both STEM and Humanities backgrounds said that they found the class much more relevant than typical history survey courses. A senior nursing major noted that the class illuminated connections between the past and present in the built environment, which gave her a totally new perspective on the relationship between the environment and health that was missing from her other courses. Another student recalled that the course worked for him because his STEM professors only rarely addressed the ways engineering concepts affected society. They only discussed “how things worked, not where they fit” in society.

View of I-45 in Houston, Courtesy of the State of Texas Department of Transportation Now

View of the I-45 in Houston after redevelopment (Courtesy the State of Texas Department of Transportation)

Engaging with the history of the built environment helps students from across the large UT community realize that infrastructure matters to everyone: not just urban planners and policy makers. Both at the university and beyond, we have a tendency to artificially compartmentalize the world into discrete disciplines. Our classroom served as a place to connect, rather than divide. This approach offers a replicable opportunity to engineer a solution to the problem of disciplinary stratification that threatens to devalue the Humanities and sterilize the specialized training of STEM students.

Bringing disciplines together in a Humanities classroom and using that space to push students to ask probing questions about their lives, their studies, and their society, does more than add to a toolkit of job skills. It builds up the students’ curiosity and understanding about the world around them and helps them see that building a bridge may require more than solving a set of technical problems. It also means asking a set of questions about what we value in society.

Authors:

Erika Bsumek, an associate professor of history at the University of Texas, researches the impact that large construction projects (dams, highways, cities and suburbs) had on the American West. She is currently working on a book titled “The Concrete West: Engineering Society and Culture in the Arid West, 1900-1970.”

Kyle Shelton, a postdoctoral fellow at the Kinder Institute for Urban Research at Rice University, finished his PhD in American History in May 2014 and was the graduate teaching assistant for Bsumek’s “Building America” cours

Digital Visualization Workshop, Venice 2014: The New Archive (No. 17)

By Maria José Afanador-Llach

Over the summer, I spent two weeks in Venice participating in a digital history workshop organized by Duke University and Venice International University. The objective of the workshop was to introduce participants to a variety of digital tools for historical research and presentation. The participants came from disciplines such as art history, history, archeology, architecture history and information science. We learned the basic features of different software, mostly open source, in hands-on sessions.

Island of Burano, Venice Lagoon

Once we became familiar with the history of Venice and its geography, we started to work hands-on with various digital programs. We used QGIS to make maps and overlay historical maps on locations in physical space. Another tool that we used was Neatline to create exhibits linking images, maps, and timelines. With SketchUp we produced 3D representations of objects. Lastly, we used Google Earth Pro to record a tour inside a 3D map and produce video files. We also learned the basics of blog and website development, and video editing.

We worked in groups to create a digital-historical narrative of a theme of our own choice related to the topic of the workshop: The Venice Lagoon. I worked with an art historian and an archeologist to produce a narrative about the fortification system of the Venice Lagoon. We produced a video and a timeline exhibition using some of the tools that we learned. You can see them here.

View of Venice From La Guidecca

I would like to recommend two of the tools that we used during the workshop and end with a short reflection about what I believe are pertinent questions to ask when considering going digital.

Geo-Referencing Historical Maps

In the first sessions, we learned to overlay historical maps on contemporary maps by geo-referencing them with a free software program called QGIS. Geo-referencing means to assign real world coordinates to old maps. Geo-referencing historical maps can help historians visualize, interpret, retrieve and compare geographic and spatial information. On this webpage of the National Library of Scotland, there are some relevant points to take into consideration about the uses, limits and possibilities of geo-rectifying maps. For example, a possibility is to compare historical maps from cities in different points of time and compare them to present-day satellite images. Also, geo-referencing allows integration of early maps with other topographical information such as height. In some cases one should be cautious of the possible distortions that geo-referencing can cause to historical maps that do not fit contemporary maps with geometrical accuracy. Here you can see a geo-referencing exercise that I made using QGIS with map of the viceroyalty of New Granada—contemporary Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador, and Panama. I marked six points in the historical map and then matched them with points in the real map. For a step-by-step tutorial for georeferencing using QGIS click here.

Creating a geo-reference map.

Image of historical map geo-referenced on top of present day map.

A Geotemporal Interface

If you are trying to figure out a way to interactively visualize and narrate historical transformations, a geotemporal interface can be helpful. In the workshop, we learned about geotemporal storytelling using Neatline. Created by the Scholars’ Lab at the University of Virginia, Neatline expands the functionality of Omeka, which is a content management system. Neatline offers the possibility to create a story through an interface that connects a timeline to a map. You can georectify a historical map with QGIS and then place it on top of the default OpenStreet or Google Map to create an exhibition. Then you can start adding objects (events, photos, documents) to link to the map. The interactivity features include a “Neatline-enhanced edition of text documents.” It works by connecting paragraphs, sentences, and words of your own writings with objects in the exhibit. A fascinating example is the project Mapping the Catalogue of Ships which analyzes Homer’s natural geography of Greece through a map of the itineraries of Book Two of the Iliad. The exhibit links the contingents in the Greek army with locations in the map. For more about this feature you can read about Neatline-text here.

Mac Lab at Venice International University. Venice Visualization Workshop, June 2014.

After my experience in Venice, there are some things that I would recommend for those interested in engaging with digital tools. First, consider how a digital component could enhance your research and teaching.

Do you want to incorporate digital tools to curate your own archival material and maybe then turn it into an online exhibition?
Do you want to create public history contents to circulate in social media?
Do you want to engage digital tools for teaching and as a resource for working in the classroom?
Do you want to visualize your archival research differently to see if you can come up with new research questions?
Do you want to use digital tools to visualize a historical transformation that is not easily discernable in the written text?

Secondly, learning new tools always takes time, and archival work and writing consumes most of our time. However, the Venice workshop helped me realize that I can learn to use software that at first might seem too challenging. If you are seriously considering using digital tools for your work, you should be open to experiment and learn the basics about the tools you want to engage with. I would add that ideally, as it has been happening across the world, we should aim for collaborative work among humanists, computer scientists, graphic designers, and digital humanists. For now, there are lots of open source and user-friendly digital tools to experiment with.

Catch up on the latest from the New Archive series:

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 Maria José Afanador-Llach

A Texas Ranger and the Letter of the Law

This article is part of an occasional series of articles highlighting the extraordinary collection of historical documents in the Briscoe Center for American History at UT Austin.

By Nathan Jennings

John Salmon “Rip” Ford had a long military career as a soldier of the Texas Republic (1836-46). He was a volunteer in the Mexican War, a Texas Ranger on Texas’s borders, and commander of a Confederate Cavalry Regiment in the Civil War. Ford’s archive at UT Austin’s Briscoe Center for American History, contains records of his activities as a physician and newspaper editor, as well, revealing an uncommon breadth of occupational skills. But the bulk of the archive is occupied by Ford’s voluminous memoirs, which span his life from 1815 to 1892.

John Salmon Ford, photographed while serving as a Colonel in the Confederate 2nd Texas Cavalry during the War Between the States. Original photograph circa 1860 to 1865. (Via Wikimedia commons)

Those memoirs detail an informative event in the history of civil-military relations in nineteenth-century Texas. In 1858 Ford refused to follow the orders of a District Judge to arrest eighteen Anglo-Texans accused of murdering reservation Native Americans. This account of what became known as the Garland Affair, after the main culprit, Peter Garland, and Ford’s perspective on the event, provide insight into how Texas Rangers prior to the Civil War perceived themselves in relation to both civil law enforcement and military service.

Ford’s memoir is notable for the clear distinctions he makes between civil authority and military limitations. His argument and actions, as he described them, contradict the popular notion of the Texas Rangers serving as the premier law enforcement order during Texas’s early years. When Judge N. W. Battle ordered the Captain Ford to “forthwith arrest” Garland and his band of settlers in Central Texas for the murder of seven Native Americans, including women and children, the ranger flatly refused. Ford articulates the difference between a “sheriff” and a “military officer,” and further questions the order on “principal” to use his company to “attack a body of American citizens.” He finishes by emphatically stating that the judge had no authority “to command me, as the captain of a company of rangers, to arrest Garland and others.” He also worried that “a civil war might have been the consequence.”

This argument, made by the senior Texas Ranger in the state, revealed the purely military intent of the early ranger forces. Even though the guilt of Garland and the others was never in doubt, and the judge ordered a legal arrest, Ford nevertheless refused “to act except in strict subservience to law.” These Texas Rangers viewed themselves as irregular cavalry, not police forces. It is equally possible that the ranger felt disinclined to move against a fellow Anglo citizen on behalf of a native victim, or that he was hesitant to provoke a possible violent confrontation between his force and the settler militia. Regardless of motive, Ford’s intransigence also reveals that, despite the volatility of Texas’s rough frontier culture, the historical American aversion to military interference in civil matters had matriculated westward. Eventually the captain offered to subordinate his company under the prosecuting leadership of “the civil authorities” to “assist” in the arrest. Garland and his perpetrators, however, were never arrested.

These writings are now partially edited in Stephen Oates’s 1987 book, Rip Ford’s Texas.

More amazing finds at the Briscoe Center:

“The Die is Cast”: Early Texans Face the Comanches

Standard Oil writes a “history” of the old south

Stephen F. Austin visits a New Orleans bookstore

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.

Giving a life, winning a patrimony

By Sumit Guha

It was the Indian month of Shravana, and early summer rains of 1653 would have set in as the delegation of villagers toiled up the steep slopes to the gates of the fort of Rohida, (later named Vicitragadh) and presented themselves to the officials there. They came into the court of Dhond-deu, the Hawaldar – an officer charged with the general fiscal and administrative control of the villages subordinate to the fort. These were turbulent times in western India as the Mughal empire from the north began to slowly conquer the southern kingdoms based in Bijapur and Golkunda. Locally a young lord, Shivaji Bhosle, was gradually adding fort after fort to his domains and planning the creation of an independent kingdom. The officers seated around Dhond-deu must have heard many tales of strife before this time. But this one was stranger than usual.

“The fort gateway was probably elaborately ornamented, a contrast to the simple huts of the villagers who toiled up the hill to it. We may conceive its appearance from the sketch made about 1850 of the gateway to the fort of Panhala – not far from Rohida.”

Some days earlier the two hereditary headmen from the village Karanjiya had come to the fort to pay their taxes. The headmen, Balaji Kudhle and Nayakji Kudhle, were accompanied by a Dalit (lower-caste) servant named Gondnak who was employed by the tax office. Maybe he had been sent to summon them? While in the fort, Gondnak (so the document says) got into a broil and beat up a junior treasury official. The headmen seem to have quickly fled back to their village, but a cavalry unit soon arrived in pursuit and seized their extended families and servants. They then demanded to be fed: the villagers slaughtered a goat and supplied them with rich viands and marijuana candy among other things. After a while, some of the soldiers went to sleep and others sat on guard. But their repast began to tell, and so they summoned the hereditary Dalit (Mahar) servants attached to the village and told them that if even a single detainee was missing in the morning, all of their heads would be cut off.

The villagers held a hasty confabulation: they asked the Dalits who had patrimonial rights in the village if one of them would step forward to confess to the offense: each of these replied – “Confess and have our heads and our sons’ heads cut off? We cannot do this.” The Gondnak who had gone to the fort that day was found and the headmen and their kinsmen beseeched him to surrender and redeem all of them. He had no patrimony and was merely a servant at the fort. He said: “Very well, I will ransom you all with my neck. But swear to me now what share of inheritance you will give my son and swear on your ancestors that you will fulfill that promise.” So they all duly swore to give his son, Arajnak, an eighth share of the rights and fees pertaining to the Dalit Mahar servants of the village as well as an honorific role in village ceremonies and shares in taxable and tax-free lands. They swore this on their ancestors and the name of the fearsome god Mahakala. They bound their descendants to never contest this claim in future. Then Gondnak stepped forward and was taken away and beheaded.

Teen darwaza gate, Panhala, Maharashtra, India, 1894

Thus it was that the village delegation came up to the fort to have the deed attesting the creation of a new share in patrimonial rights and lands of the village attested and recorded in the fort where they paid their revenue. The officials in the fort asked the head of the current holders of village service shares, Dhaknak, son of Jannak if he accepted the arrangement. He said that the promise the headmen made bound him and his clan in perpetuity. A deed recounting the circumstances in which Arajnak gained a share in the patrimony was written out and sealed. Copies were kept in the district office and the original given to Arajnak, son of Gondnak to hold as evidence of his rights.

My narrative so far follows that in the document. But I suspect that the village heads may have been the instigators or indeed participants in the broil where the official was beaten up and that the impoverished Dalit Gondnak was the scapegoat for the whole affair. Else it would be unclear why the headmen and their relatives were arrested at the outset. Surely the horsemen would have sought out Gondnak’s kin or children for reprisals? But the incident is a vivid illustration of how important acceptance into the village community was – even if only as a lowly watchman and servant, in western India a few centuries ago.

Image of doorway to fort of Rohida, later named Vicitragadh

The fort is now in ruins but a gateway – perhaps even the one through which the villagers came – survives largely undamaged.

For more on the social and political system where this incident occurred:

Sumit Guha Beyond Caste: Power and Identity in South Asia, Past and Present (2013)

First image via Graham, D.C. 1854. Statistical Report on the Principality of Kolhapoor Selection from the Records of the government of Bombay No. VIII (new series) Bombay: Education Society Press.

Second Image via Wikimedia Commons.

Third image via Wikimapia.org

“Oh this learning, what a thing it is!”: The New Archive (No. 16)

By Charley S. Binkow

Has any single author had as massive an impact on history as William Shakespeare? For over four centuries, the works of the Bard have been read, analyzed, and performed all around the world. Keeping track of that massive history, let alone the history of Elizabethan/Jacobian England, is a monumental ambition. Luckily, the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., has taken up the task. And even better: they’ve digitized their collection for the world to see.

Title page of the First Folio, by William Shakespeare, with copper engraving of the author by Martin Droeshout. Image courtesy of the Elizabethan Club and the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University.

Title page of the First Folio, by William Shakespeare, 1623.

This extensive online collection has over 80,000 digital images. There are manuscripts, flyers, posters, books, papers, costumes, theater memorabilia, art pieces and a lot more. The behemoth archive is broken up easily into three sections: What, When, Where, and Who. Historians interested in letters of Francis Bacon or religious ceremonies of the 17^th century (like these marriage sermons), only have to click a few buttons to find what they’re looking for. Just browsing the topics will intrigue most anyone. Some fascinating things I stumbled upon include a picture of a Japanese Hamlet from 1905, Edwin Booth’s Iago and Richard III costumes, and a German graphic of The Merchant Venice from the 19^th century.

Photographic full-length portrait of Edwin Booth as Iago in Shakespeare’s Othello, the Moor of Venice, c. 1870 (Via Wikimedia Commons)

Historians, theater enthusiasts, and Shakespeare lovers will get a lot out of this collection. Historians can get primary documents showing Shakespeare’s influence all over the globe, they can read the documents of his time, and peruse four centuries of art in high definition (seriously, zoom all the way in and get up close to the cross-hatches). Any one studying anything even tangentially related to Shakespeare’s age can find something useful in this collection, like this early map of Cuba from the 16^th century or this Italy travel guide.

This is an amazing collection of historical images. Follow our links, or just jump into it and get lost among the artifacts. The love of Shakespeare is infectious; seeing the thousands of items associated with Shakespeare, compiled by people who love him and his era, will make you want to open a new tab in the Folger site and start reading the complete works.

Catch up on the latest from the New Archive series:

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

And Charley Binkow perused some incredible photographs of Egypt snapped by European travelers

First image courtesy of the Elizabethan Club and the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University

Andrew Cox Marshall: Between Slavery and Freedom in Savannah

By Tania Sammons

This essay is reproduced from the book we are featuring this month, Slavery and Freedom in Savannah, edited by Daina Ramey Berry and Leslie Harris. If you would like to know more about the book and especially about the sidebars that feature short essays on interesting figures and events related to the Owen-Thomas House and the history of Savannah, you can watch the video interview we posted with the editors.

Andrew Cox Marshall was Savannah’s most important African American in the pre-Civil War period. Born into slavery in the mid-eighteenth century, Marshall acquired his freedom and went on to become a successful businessman and an influential religious leader with far-reaching ties throughout Savannah’s diverse free and enslaved African American community; he was also well known among Savannah’s white elite. The lives of those who gained freedom before slavery ended were restricted by laws that limited their economic and social opportunities. Yet Marshall managed to navigate such constraints and achieve some level of success and autonomy.

Andrew C. Marshall. In James M. Simms, The First Colored Baptist Church in North America, Constituted at Savannah, GA, January 20, .D. 1788 With Biographical Sketches of the Pastors (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1888), 76. Courtesy of Documenting the American South, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Libraries.

Born in South Carolina around 1755 to an enslaved woman and an English overseer, Marshall wound up in Savannah as a result of two failed manumission promises and ownership by five prominent slaveholders, including John Houstoun, the governor of Georgia in 1778 and 1784, and Joseph Clay, a businessman and judge. Accounts of Marshall’s life indicate he participated in activities that supported the United States in the American Revolution and War of 1812. He purportedly received pay for his work in both wars and had the opportunity to meet General George Washington. Marshall later served as President Washington’s personal servant on his visit to Savannah in 1791. Richard Richardson purchased Marshall in 1812, and Marshall purchased his freedom at some point soon thereafter with funds lent to him by Richardson, who was a merchant, banker, slave trader, and the first owner of the Owens-Thomas House. Richardson became Marshall’s first guardian, which the law required of free blacks. Marshall’s wife, Rachel, and their three daughters—Rose, Amy, and Peggy—had previously gained their freedom through the efforts of Marshall’s uncle, Andrew Bryan, the popular and influential pastor of the First African Baptist Church, as well as Richardson and other white elites in the community. As a free man, Marshall established a home with his family in Yamacraw on Savannah’s west side. He set up a successful drayage (hauling) business that allowed him to accumulate sizeable wealth. In 1824, the tax assessment of his real estate was valued at $8,400, and his will indicates that he had acquired shares in a state bank. At the time of his death, in 1856, he owned several buildings, including a brick house that he left to his immediate family. His fine clothes and silver watch he bequeathed to his enslaved cousin Andrew, showing the strong connections binding the enslaved and the free.

Image of Rev. Andrew Bryan from History of the First African Baptist Church, From its Organization, January 20th, 1788, to July 1st, 1888. Including the Centennial Celebration, Addresses, Sermons, Etc. by E.K. Love

In addition to family, home, and business, Marshall focused his attentions on building up the congregations of black Baptists in Savannah. In 1815, at about the age of sixty, Marshall took over as pastor of the First African Baptist Church. He served in that position twice for a total of more than thirty years. During his leadership, Marshall baptized nearly 3,800 people, converted 4,000, married 2,000. His widespread and diverse religious activity included traveling around the country to preach, taking a special interest in the poor and infirm, and beginning a Sunday school. He even addressed the Georgia legislature. Beginning in 1840, he directed that church funds be used for foreign missions to Liberia, the African country established by Americans for the resettlement of free blacks.

Marshall’s prominent position did not keep him from suffering the indignities visited upon other free or enslaved blacks. He did not always agree with his peers or guardians and was sometimes called out or put in his place. Around 1820 he was sentenced to be publicly whipped for making an illegal purchase of bricks from slaves. His guardian and former master, Richard Richardson, and others spoke in his behalf to ensure the whipping did not “scratch his skin or draw blood.” Nonetheless, the public spectacle was meant to make clear to Marshall and all the free and enslaved people of Savannah the limits of their power.

First African Baptist Church, Savannah (Chatham County, Georgia), 2009.

Within the Baptist association and his own church, Marshall suffered repercussions because of his support of the work of the controversial white minister Alexander Campbell of Virginia, a reformed clergyman who favored the emancipation of slaves. Marshall showed interest in Campbell’s movement, known as the Disciples of Christ, and invited him to speak at the First African Baptist. Marshall’s association with Campbell resulted in a split within the church, with 155 members leaving First African Baptist to establish their own church, Third African Baptist. The Sunbury Baptist Association, the regional Baptist organization run by whites, sought to have Marshall dismissed from his post by the members of his church. When that didn’t work, they removed First African Baptist from their association from 1832 to 1837. The First African Baptist Church was readmitted to the association only after Marshall recanted his support of Campbell and asked forgiveness for his errant ways. In addition, his apology helped ease tensions with the white elites in the community.

Andrew Cox Marshall lived an extraordinary life, not least for reaching the age of one hundred. He experienced slavery and freedom, witnessed and participated in key moments in American history, and spent much of his time helping his fellow men and women. He died in December 1856 after returning home from a preaching tour in Richmond, Virginia, meant in part to raise money to build a new church in Savannah. Hundreds of people attended his funeral. A newspaper account noted “an immense throng without respect to color or condition collected in the Church, the floor, aisles, galleries and even steps and windows of which were densely packed [and] hundreds [were] unable to gain admittance.” He was buried in a family vault at Laurel Grove South Cemetery.

Tania Sammons is senior curator for decorative arts and historic sites for Telfair Museums. Sammons oversees the reinterpretation of the museums’ two National Historic Landmark buildings, the Telfair Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Owens-Thomas House. She also produces original exhibitions and related materials on decorative and fine arts and history. Her publications include exhibition catalogues The Story of Silver in Savannah: Creating and Collecting Since the 18^th Century; “The Art of Kahlil Gibran,” in The Art of Kahlil Gibran; The Owens-Thomas House; and Daffin Park: The First One Hundred Years. Recent originally curated exhibitions include Sitting in Savannah: Telfair Chairs and Sofas; Journey to the Beloved Community: Story Quilts by Beth Mount, and Beyond Utility: Pottery Created by Enslaved Hands.

Image of Andrew Bryan courtesy of University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Website: http://docsouth.unc.edu/church/love/love.html This work is the property of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. It may be used freely by individuals for research, teaching and personal use as long as this statement of availability is included in the text.

Image of First African Baptist Church, Savannah (Chatham County, Georgia) via Wikimedia Commons

Partners in Conflict: The Politics of Gender, Sexuality, and Labor in The Chilean Agrarian Reform, 1950-1973, by Heidi Tinsman

by Elizabeth O’Brien

In this gendered labor history, Heidi Tinsman looks at the lives of rural agrarian workers under Salvador Allende’s socialist revolutionary government. She examines women’s participation in — and exclusion from — agrarian production and reform in Chile. Tinsman makes a major contribution by showing that the marginalization of women affected the success of Allende’s efforts to expropriate land and create worker-run agrarian cooperatives.

Drawing on a wealth of oral testimonies and legal sources, Tinsman shows how agricultural workers lived under the highly exploitative systems of inquilino and obligado labor in the years before Allende came to power. The author then chronicles the Christian Democratic regime’s initiation of agrarian reform in 1964. The Christian Democrats sought to modernize industry, punish abusive patrons, unionize laborers, and raise the rural standard of living. As a result the number of unionized workers rose from 2,000 in 1964 to a quarter of a million by 1972. The reformists were not revolutionary, however, and although they encouraged workers to resist landowners, the Christian Democrats did not challenge state authority.

After his election in 1970, Allende called for the complete destruction of latifundia. He quickly doubled the amount of expropriated land and converted it into communally run plots, known as asentamientos, which incorporated approximately 20,000 Chilean families. Although still operating hierarchically, asentados (the workers in charge of asentamientos) paid workers more fairly than patróns and made collective decisions about production and construction. Only men were allowed to serve as asentados, however, which excluded wives (who were seen as dependents) and single women who allegedly lacked the requisite experience.

*Salvador Allende and his government, 1970. Source: Wikimedia Commons*.

The impact of agrarian reform on women was mixed. For example, the Unidad Popular (Allende’s party, the UP) did not respond to feminist calls to reassess domestic divisions of labor that restricted women’s ability to participate in working communal plots. Nonetheless, women assumed new levels of political activism: they participated in land tomas (takeovers), successfully demanded housing reform, and coordinated community soup kitchens. Women’s Committees (CEMAs) flourished, union membership skyrocketed, infant mortality dropped by 60%, and illiteracy was halved.

Mujer avanza con la bandera dela patria” (“Women Advance with the Flag of the Motherland”) (1970). la Unidad Popular (Popular Unity), Chile. Courtesy of Centro de Documentación Salvador Allende. — *“Women Advance with the Flag of the Motherland”: a poster supporting* La Unidad Popular, 1970. *Source: Centro de Documentación Salvador Allende.*

Historians traditionally depict rural women as conservative, religious, and opposed to political change. Tinsman shows that in Allende’s Chile this was not the case. Women in Aconcagua, for example, were not particularly religious and rural female support of the UP grew stronger as land expropriation accelerated. To investigate how women experienced the reform, Tinsman explores on-the-ground issues that produced social polarization in rural Chile. Some campesinos, for example, opposed expropriation and defended the bosses, which at times provoked bloodshed. Problems also arose when husbands excluded their wives from politics and took advantage of their political positions in order to take mistresses. To make matters worse, rural food distribution was politicized, and UP supporters often received more rations. Amidst the political and social turmoil, charges of wife beating tripled in comparison to the Christian Democrat years, and rape charges increased as well. Although Tinsman interprets these figures at face value, they are not clear indicators of increases in abuse, because, under the UP, women might have felt more empowered and thus filed more charges.

While Allende’s approach to women and gender was more radical, egalitarian, and feminist than the Christian Democrats who preceded him, Tinsman shows that men were still the “central subjects and main protagonists” of agrarian reform, while women experienced “sexually inscribed vulnerability within the process of political struggle.” Women worried about the effects of social upheaval on their families, which was sadly ironic because “the family continued to be central to female survival and still loudly touted by the UP as the foundation of social uplift.”

Heidi Tinsman, Partners in Conflict: The Politics of Gender, Sexuality, and Labor in the Chilean Agrarian Reform, 1950-1973

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