Natalie Cincotta, Author at Not Even Past

The Public Archive: Frederic Allen Williams

Millions of tweets and millions of state documents. Intimate oral histories and international radio addresses. Ancient pottery and yesterday’s memes. Historians have access to this immense store of online material for doing research, but what else can we do with it? In Spring 2018, graduate students in the Public and Digital History Seminar at UT Austin experimented with ways to make interesting archival materials available and useful to the public; to anyone with access to a computer. Over the Summer, Not Even Past will feature each of these individual projects.

Frederic Allen Williams (1898-1955) was a prominent sculptor, lecturer, intellectual, and rodeo rider. Based in New York City, he became known for his talks on Native American art delivered in his midtown studio using magic lantern slides, an early type of image projector. By digitizing a sizable collection of Williams’ prints, negatives, lantern slides, and other ephemera held at the Harry Ransom Center, Jesse Ritner‘s digital project not only makes these materials accessible to wider audiences, but also reflects on using photography as historians and teachers.

More on Ritner’s project and the Public Archive here.

Also by Jesse Ritner on Not Even Past:

Death, Danger, and Identity at 12,000 Feet
The Curious History of Lincoln’s Birth Cabin
Paying for Peace: Reflections on “Lasting Peace” Monument
What Makes a Good History Blog?

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The Public Archive: Woven Into History by Alina Scott
Who Put Native American Sign Language in the US Mail? by Jennifer Graber
A Graphic Revolution: The New Archive (No. 19) by Joseph Parrott

The Public Archive: Woven Into History

Alina Scott‘s project, titled Woven into History, is a digitized collection of nineteenth and twentieth-century Navajo rugs currently on exhibit at the Blanton Museum of Art. In addition to photographs of the rugs themselves, Woven into History also provides a brief history of the Navajo and lesson plans to contextualize the collection and provide a platform for respectful collaboration and discussion.

More on Scott’s project and the Public Archive here.

Also by Alina Scott on Not Even Past:

Cynthia Attaquin and a Wampanoag Network of Petitioners
Missing Signatures: The Archives at First Glance

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A Historian’s Gaze: Women, Law, and the Colonial Archives in Singapore by Sandy Chang
Secrecy and Bureaucratic Distancing: Tracing Complaints through the Guatemalan National Police Historical Archive by Vasken Markarian
Justin Heath reviews Peace Came in the Form of a Woman by Juliana Barr (2007)

Feeding of the Body and Feeding of the Soul: Colonial Latin America Through Objects (No. 5)

This series features five online museum exhibits created by undergraduate and graduate students at the University of Texas at Austin for a class titled “Colonial Latin America Through Objects.” The class assumes that Latin America was never a continent onto itself. The course also insists that objects document the nature of historical change in ways written archives alone cannot.

Pauline Hodencq’s exhibit centers on corn in Aztec culture not only as source of calories but also as the foundation of the most revealing religious metaphors. For the Aztecs milpa corn dominated the agricultural cycle; it was even the source of children’s toys. More important, corn organized Aztec ways of relating to deities and understanding the body. Gods were corn growers and bodies were maize. Gods consumed bodies in the same way humans consumed corn.

Of How a Hopi Ancient Word Became a Famous Experimental Film

by Montserrat Madariaga

The theater is at its full capacity. The musicians are in place as the orchestra conductor starts to wave his arms in time with the image on the screen. There, little red dots emerge from a black background. They slowly widen and turn into capital letters: The word KOYAANISQATSI takes over. Keyboard notes evoking a church organ underline the mystery of the term and suit the dramatic hard-edged-typography. It is a Friday afternoon, February 23, 2018, in the Bass Concert Hall of the Texas Performing Art Center of The University of Texas, at Austin. The occasion is the screening of Godfrey Reggio’s 1982 film, accompanied by the live performance of The Philip Glass Ensemble playing its original score music.

Featured for the first time to an ample public in the 1982 New York Film Festival, Koyaanisqatsi is an audiovisual art piece without dialogue or voiceover, deprived of any explicit narrative, that is nowadays a cult classic. It opens with a shot of the Holy Ghost Panel in Horseshoe Canyon, Utah, a human trace dated between 400 AD and 1100 AD. Then, footage of imposing natural landscapes and wildlife of the United States’ Southwest is followed by images of urban spaces: construction, crowded streets, demolitions, technology of the time, and so on. The collage escalates in its pace along with the music: flutes, clarinet, trombone, viola, tuba, keyboards and vocals from time to time repeat the word “koyaanisqatsi” in a low pitched ceremonial tone that creates an apocalyptic atmosphere. The last scenes of the film exhibit the same red letters of the beginning but depicted as an English dictionary entry: “ko.yaa.nis.qatsi (from the Hopi language), n. 1. crazy life. 2. life in turmoil. 3. life out of balance. 4. life disintegrating. 5. a state of life that calls for another way of living.” The piece ends with three sentences translated from “Hopi Prophecies” that were sung during the film. Their content indicates the destruction of the land and the “Day of Purification” to come.

Well received by its first audiences, the movie continues to be screened and studied as an audiovisual experimental piece that influenced many filmmakers and composers. However, little attention has been paid to its Hopi framing. How did Reggio become acquainted with the word “koyaanisqatsi” and the prophecies he cites? Was it something of common knowledge during the mid 70s when he started filming? If so, why? Did Hopi people engage with non-natives at the time? Is this a case of “playing Indian,” as Philip J. Deloria would put it, an appropriation? Did Reggio request permission to use the Hopi knowledge? When asked about it (in our telephone interview), Reggio answers with a ready-made discourse learned over the years:

Let’s take the Graduate Department of Ethnology of any university. People from other cultures use their subjective categories to analyze Indigenous Peoples. So, knowing that, what I did was take the subjective categories of Indigenous Peoples [the Hopi] and use that to analyze the world we live in. I made an inverse relationship of what we do in academia, because I thought their point of view about the world we lived in was more profound than our point of view of it.

This didactic approach may explain his main inspiration, but there is more to the story. It involves a collective movement that started in 1948 and was prominent until the beginning of the nineties, advocated by the “Traditionalist Hopis,” as they were called, or the “Hopi Indian Empire,” their self-chosen name, and Reggio’s own personal sense of mission on Earth. Like many extraordinary events in the human saga, this was a product of being in a specific place at a specific time. The result is a film that encapsulates an important chapter of the history of the relationship between Native and non-native people on the Turtle Island or the United States.

A Mesa Village of Hopi Indians, Arizona (via Wikimedia)

As a Pueblo people, the Hopi’s history goes way back in time, long before the Common Era. Today, they are a sovereign nation that inhabits the northeastern area of Arizona, organized in twelve villages that occupy three mesas. This episode of their existence begins with the extraordinarily cruel act of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 by the United States’ Air Force, near the end of World War II. Among the remote consequences of this attack, one or two years later, a group of Hopi of the Second Mesa at their ceremonial reunions (kivas) started “equating the atomic bomb with a prophetic story about a gourd of ashes which brought destruction when it was cast on the ground,” according to anthropologist Brian D. Haley. By 1948, with the devastation of planet Earth in mind because of human greed, elders and religious leaders of the Second and Third Mesa decided it was urgent to share this prophecy with the “White people” so that everyone could be prepared for Purification Day, the moment when deity of the current fourth world, Maasaw, would come and redeem humanity, creating a new paradise on Earth.

The effort to spread the word on the ancient prophecies is what anthropologist Richard Clemmer designated the “Hopi Traditionalist Movement.” The Hopi agenda, though, was more than a spiritual calling; it was very political. In 1949 they sent President Truman a letter in which they detailed their prophecies and message of awareness, but also their position about land ownership, mineral extraction permits, the cultural and political rights of indigenous peoples, and pending US policies.

With the help of non-Native People, the movement got the attention of conscientious objectors and draft resisters of the Second World War, pacifists, anarchists, spiritual radicals, and, in time, the different counterculture circles of the 1950s, 60s and 70s, including hippies, and even Hollywood stars like Elizabeth Taylor and Jon Voight. One spokesperson, Thomas Banyacya, became well known for his lifetime struggle to get out the Hopi message of environmental destruction, its consequences, and Indigenous People’s rights.

It’s the mid 1970s and Godfrey Reggio does not have a name for the film he is shooting. His co-workers are telling him they are not going to get distribution or financial aid if he does not name it. Reggio had resisted to do so until then, because for him the images were the message. Persuaded, he starts searching for a word “with no cultural baggage, a new word to describe the world.”

When Reggio decided he was going to translate his thoughts onto film, he was building on ideas based on a life of spiritual and social engagement. He spent 14 years, beginning at age fourteen, with the Christian Brothers, a Catholic religious order. In 1963, he started Young Citizens for Action in New Mexico with a group of juvenile street gang leaders. He was dedicated to helping adolescent boys and girls escape these violent communities. But his willfulness to take the Christian Brothers’ educational mission outside, to vulnerable people living in poverty, made the authorities uncomfortable and so, in 1968, he was asked to leave. “The world I lived in prior to knowing Hopis seemed like a world that was upside down,” he says today. His concerns for the ways in which humans were living their lives, and inhabiting the Earth with its technological, social and environmental transformations are embedded in the film.

Living in Santa Fe, Reggio was near the Hopi reservation and had friends that were “Hopi devotees,” as he calls them. They insisted on the connections between his creative project and the Traditional Hopi Movement’s prophecies. He met David Monongye, one of the Hopi spokesmen of Hotevilla, by giving him a ride from the reservation to a doctor’s appointment and they became friends. Reggio liked the idea of naming his film with an originally non-written language to evoke his argument that the literate culture he lived in was no longer a good describer for the insanity he saw all around. Thus, he contacted the linguist Ekkehart Malotki, who knew the Hopi language, and his Hopi co-worker Michael Lomatuway’ma. They introduced him to the word koyaanisqatsi, a concept that nailed his awareness. Reggio went to David Monongye for permission. “David said it’s an ancient word,” recalls Reggio today, “a word that’s not in popular use. He didn’t talk much about it, but he said the definition we had, took the meaning of the word.”

Reggio not only asked for Monongye’s opinion, he also went through two more examinations by clan leaders of other villages: first by Mina Lansa, the traditional leader of Old Oraibi, and her husband John, then by a group of members of the 2^nd Mesa. Reggio felt as he had gone through an ecclesiastical interrogation once again, and in a language he couldn’t understand, but with better results. All of them gave him consent. When the film was finished, he screened it at the cultural center of the reservation, in addition to renting buses to bring Hopis to the exhibition of the film in Santa Fe, where Monongye introduced it. Today, Reggio states he has never had a complaint from the Hopi peoples and he has continued to use their language in his qatsi (life) trilogy, with the films Powaqqatsi (1988), life in transformation, and Naqoyqatsi (2002), life as war. Lately the word has had a new revival. Historian James F. Brooks uses it in his book Mesa of Sorrows (2016) to depict the telling of the mesa massacre of the 1700, when Hopis killed Hopis.

Reflecting on why, of all the possibilities, he chose the Hopi language, and with it their culture and history, to frame his thoughts, Reggio says today: “What defines my relationship to the Hopi is that I was one person with a mission that was their mission too: To show the world in another way.”

This article drew on my telephone interviews with Godfrey Reggio on March 5 and April 19, 2018, and the following sources:

Brian D. Haley, “Ammon Hennacy and the Hopi Traditionalist Movement: Roots of the Counterculture’s Favorite Indians,” Journal of the Southwest, Vol. 58, No. 1, Spring 2016.

Armin W. Geertz, The invention of Prophecy (University of California Press, 1994).

Richard O. Clemmer, Roads in the Sky: The Hopi Indians in a Century of Change (Westview Press, 1995)

You may also like:

For Native Americans, Land Is More Than Just the Ground Beneath Their Feet by Kelli Mosteller
Mark Sheaves reviews Playing Indian by Philip Deloria (1999)
The Public Archive: Doing History Online and in Public

The Littlefield Lectures 2018: The Van and the Rear: Abolitionist Roots of Radical Reconstruction (Day 2)

On February 26-27 2018, The History Department at the University of Texas at Austin was pleased to welcome Dr. Manisha Sinha, Professor and James L. and Shirley A. Draper Chair in American History at the University of Connecticut, as the featured speaker for The Littlefield Lecture Series. Dr. Sinha’s first lecture, titled “Abolition and the Making of Southern Reaction,” is featured here.

Watch Professor Sinha’s second lecture on Not Even Past, titled “The Van and the Rear: Abolitionist Roots of Radical Reconstruction:”

You may also like:

15 Minute History Episode 105: Slavery and Abolition with Dr. Manisha Sinha
Reconstruction in Austin: The Unknown Soldiers by Nicholas Roland
Work Left Undone: Emancipation was not Abolition by George Forgie

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 Littlefield Lectures 2018: Abolition and the Making of Southern Reaction (Day 1)

Watch Professor Sinha’s first lecture on Not Even Past, titled “Abolition and the Making of Southern Reaction:”

Dr. Manisha Sinha was born in India and received her Ph.D. from Columbia University where her dissertation was nominated for the Bancroft prize. She was awarded the Chancellor’s Medal, the highest honor bestowed on faculty and received the Distinguished Graduate Mentor Award in Recognition of Outstanding Graduate Teaching and Advising from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where she taught for over twenty years.

Her recent book The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition, winner of the 2017 Frederick Douglass Prize, is a groundbreaking history of abolition that recovers the largely forgotten role of African Americans in the long march toward emancipation from the American Revolution through the Civil War.

Her first book, The Counterrevolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina, was a Finalist for both the Avery O. Craven Award for Best Book on the Civil War Era, Organization of American Historians, and the George C. Rogers Award for Best Book on South Carolina History. It was named one of the ten best books on slavery in Politico in 2015.

Dr. Sinha’s research interests lie in United States history, especially the transnational histories of slavery and abolition and the history of the Civil War and Reconstruction. She is a member of the Council of Advisors of the Lapidus Center for the Historical Analysis of Transatlantic Slavery at the Schomburg, New York Public Library, co-editor of the “Race and the Atlantic World, 1700-1900,” series of the University of Georgia Press, and is on the editorial board of the Journal of the Civil War Era. She has written for The New York Times, The New York Daily News, Time Magazine, CNN, The Boston Globe, The Washington Post, and The Huffington Post, and been interviewed by The Times of London, The Boston Globe, and Slate.

In 2014, she appeared on Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show. She was an adviser and on-screen expert for the Emmy nominated PBS documentary, The Abolitionists (2013), part of the NEH funded Created Equal film series. In 2017, she was named one of Top Twenty Five Women in Higher Education by the magazine Diverse: Issues in Higher Education. Professor Sinha is currently working on her new book on abolition and the making of Radical Reconstruction.

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Wrong About Everything

by Christopher Rose

Originally posted on Christopher Rose’s blog on April 12, 2018.

I know, not the best title for my first blog entry, right?

A couple of months back, I presented some of initial findings on epidemic and epizootic disease in Egypt during the first World War at a symposium. (Ok, I’ll tell you the symposium was at Oxford. Yes, you may touch me.) I was flattered to be asked, especially since, as an ABD candidate, I got to be part of a two-panel session with speakers like Khaled Fahmy and Marilyn Booth (I’m still not entirely convinced I didn’t embarrass myself and everyone else, but that’s impostor syndrome for you).

The paper–which you can read here–is a short synopsis of human suffering during the war, especially among the poor, rural classes in Egypt, which are largely undocumented. It’s a works-in-progress presentation, very much based in preliminary findings, as one does at this stage in writing.

My dissertation focuses on breakdowns in public health during the war–the topic sentence could be summed up as “1918 was a deadly year for the Egyptian populace.” Even if one heeds Roger Cooter’s warning about reifying a positivist relationship between war and disease[1] –and I’ve compiled statistics for nearly a decade before and after the war–the demographic anomalies in Egypt between 1914 and 1918 are unmistakable. Four times as many Egyptians died of disease during the war than from military actions.

1918 also saw the birth rate decline to its lowest rate in a quarter century.

BirthDeath — source: Annual Reports of the Department of Public Health, Ministry of the Interior, 1911-1919.

I described a number of issues: food shortages that were documented as early as 1916. As residents complained about shortages of soap, eggs, cheese, and meat the Anglo-Egyptian administration, concerned with keeping the protectorate profitable, maintained a positive trade balance, exporting goods that were dearly needed at home. The cost of some basic household items rose over 200% between 1914 and 1918.

Likewise, relapsing fever and typhus cases increased substantially — both are louse-borne diseases, which can likely be tied to the increased movement of troops and support staff (including the men of the Egyptian Labour Corps). The war ended with the “Spanish flu” outbreak, which killed almost 140,000 Egyptians in just under three months.

There were also epizootics of both cattle plague (rinderpest) and foot-and-mouth disease that lasted over 18 months in large swaths of the country. Is there a relation between this and the soaring price of meat? It’s almost certainly the source of much of the protein that was sold on the black market in major cities.

As I said. Cheerful stuff.

During the break that followed my panel, a member of the audience approached me, identifying himself as a member of the landholding class from the Sharqiyya province in the Nile Delta (for the record, he is not an academic).

He insisted that I was completely wrong about nearly everything that I had said.

“We had hygiene!” he declared. “People didn’t die from these diseases in the 20^th century!”

He suggested that I extend the dates of my study by decades in each direction; for example, he inquired if I had I looked at the number of deaths incurred through the construction work on the Suez Canal (1863-69), or knew how many more people died of disease in Egypt in the 18th century.

I won’t lie. This was my first outing with this material, and this was … not the sort of feedback I had hoped to get. The more I tried to explain the nuance of my argument, the more pushback I got. Having spent 3 months mapping the country from cataract to Delta, I tried to change the subject and ask where he was from–meaning where, specifically, in Sharqiyya. He looked at me as if I might just be the stupidest man on earth and responded, “Egypt?!”

Map showing typhus outbreaks in Egypt, September 1, 1914 – May 31, 1919 (created by Chris Rose, featured in the blog Mapping & Microbes)

As you can tell, I’ve let this episode roll right off my back.

However, I think there is something significant in the greater picture about his defensiveness, one that pushed me to think about the puzzling collective silence in nearly every history book about what I’m looking at. Even the Spanish flu is described in only two medical reports from the time; I’ve seen it mentioned nowhere else.

The notion of Egyptians dying in elevated numbers from disease was clearly distasteful to him–largely, I suspect, for the reason that it was undignified. People—at least not those of his class—did not die from disease in high numbers in the early 20^th century.

In short, Egypt was modern. If it had not ascended, as the Khedive Ismāᶜīl had optimistically pronounced in 1869, to being among the ranks of countries which should be considered European, it had developed more rapidly than much of the Arab east, which languished in such a state that one scholar discussing the “Spanish flu” influenza pandemic in the Arabian peninsula (1919) could legitimately wonder whether medical officials in central Arabia were capable of distinguishing the influenza apart from other diseases with similar symptoms, such as typhoid.[2]

Indeed, my interlocutor is correct about that hygiene and medical care had been introduced under Muhammad Ali Pasha in the mid-19^th century as part of a national campaign to improve public health. This has been described by LaVerne Kuhnke and Hibba Abuguideri (although the project had peaked in the 1850s and all but vanished under British administration).[3]

A market scene in Cairo during World War One (via Australian National Maritime Museum)

I struggled to explain in my response that afternoon that my interest was the significance of the war’s anomalous blip in the statistical record. The public health scheme in Egypt had, to a certain degree, brought epidemic disease under control, which is why the fact that infection and death rates soared during the war comprise a factor of interest. So, too, do the numbers of registered prostitutes in Egyptian cities, as well as the number of reported cases of venereal diseases, both of which increased substantially during the war and comprised their own crises in both medical and social health.

During the First World War, Egypt was a nation at war. Its citizens were recruited into the war effort, and many of those citizens faced bodily harm and death fighting for the Union Jack in far-off lands. Those who remained at home suffered from shortages of basic supplies–although production rates decreased slightly, they dropped nowhere near as much as consumption rates. They were forced to eat tainted meat that they purchased at high prices. They died of disease whose effects were exacerbated by malnutrition. Some turned to prostitution or other illicit activity to make ends meet.

There is nothing heroic about the fight against a virus, perhaps. As the First World War and the 1919 uprising became enmeshed together in the national historiographic project celebrating the nationalist movement and Egypt’s strive for self-determination, there was no space for sympathetic portrayal of poor women desperate to feed starving children and elderly relatives, and those who, in sheer desperation, turned to extreme measures to support themselves.

The commemorations held in Egypt from 2013 onward to celebrate the nation’s contribution to the First World War recognize only one of these groups.

I’m hoping to recognize the second.

[1] Roger Cooter. “Of War and Epidemics: Unnatural Couplings, Problematic Conceptions.” The Journal of the Society for the Social History of Medicine 16, no. 2 (2003): 283–302

[2] LaVerne Kuhnke. Lives at Risk. Vol. no. 24. Comparative Studies of Health Systems and Medical Care. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990; Hibba Abugideiri. Gender and the Making of Modern Medicine in Colonial Egypt. Ashgate Publishing, Ltd., 2013.

[3] Guido Steinberg. “The Commemoration of the ‘Spanish Flu’ of 1918-1919 in the Arab East.” In The First World War as Remembered in the Countries of the Eastern Mediterranean, edited by Olaf Farschid, Manfred Kropp, and Stephan Dähne. Beiruter Texte Und Studien 99. Würzburg: Ergon-Verl, 2006, 159–60.

Also by Christopher Rose on Not Even Past:

Mapping & Microbes: The New Archive (No. 22)
Searching for Armenian Children in Turkey
Exploring the Silk Route
Review: The Ottoman Age of Exploration (2010) by Giancarlo Casale
What’s Missing from Argo (2012)

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Charalampos Minasidis reviews Yugoslavia in the Shadow of War: Veterans and the Limits of State Building, 1903-1945 by John Paul Newman (2015)
Book recommendations compiled for the centenary of the outbreak of WWI

IHS Talk: 50 Years Since Prague Spring: Czechoslovak Dreams and Cold War Realities

This panel offers a retrospective examination of the 1968 Czechoslovak “Prague Spring”, or what the LBJ administration labeled the “Czechoslovak crisis.” Panelists Dr. Mary Neuburger, Professor of History and Director, Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies (CREEES) and Dr. Jeremi Suri, Professor of History and Mack Brown Distinguished Chair for Leadership in Global Affairs, offer their insights into the 1968 reform movement and popular response in the context of internal Bloc transformation and the “global 1960s.” They also discuss the implications of the Soviet (or Warsaw Pact) Invasion of Czechoslovakia and the US decision not to intervene for East-West Cold War engagement. 50 years after the event, both panelists tap into the past due decades of scholarship to re-examine the regional and global importance of these events and their aftermath.

Dr. Neuburger also introduced the Prague Spring Archive Project, an open-access resource consisting of digitized documents – such as intelligence reports, briefs, and day-to-day commentary by US policymakers – on the Prague Spring held at the LBJ Library.

More on the Prague Spring Archive Project:

Dr. Neuburger and Ian Goodale, CREEES digital librarian, reflect on phase one of the project, and Ian Goodale discusses media and the Prague Spring.

Cynthia Attaquin and a Wampanoag Network of Petitioners

Change.org, Ipetition, petitiononline — today, the digital marketplace has spurred the easy distribution of petitions. While they are significant, modern petitioning campaigns offer a different contribution to public discourse than their nineteenth-century counterparts. For women, people of color, and others who had little access to political movers and shakers, petitioning placed them a signature and postage stamp away from the eyes and ears of legislators. Petitions provided grounds to begin a range of other campaigns and simultaneously created a network of canvassers and petitioners.

In 1842, Cynthia Attaquin and 13 other female residents of the Mashpee, a Wampanoag tribe on Cape Cod, petitioned the Massachusetts State Senate to clarify laws regarding the passage of people of color on railroads. Their petition represented a community of color with very specific motivations and understandings about what can come with organized petitioning efforts.

Cynthia Attaquin’s 1842 Petition (via Massachusetts Antislavery Dataverse)

The text of the petition, likely printed in a widely distributed newspaper, requested the legislature to “pass a law declaring and defining the rights of the people [of Massachusetts] in the use of the means of conveyance furnished by the Railroad Companies… in order that the Officers of said Companies may no longer claim the right to depriving any class of persons the use of any of their cars, on the sole ground of a difference of color…”

For several years in the mid-nineteenth century, Congress established a “gag rule,” immediately tabling all abolition-related petitions. However, the focus of this particular campaign was local, and Attaquin’s was one of sixty sent to the Massachusetts State Legislature in 1842 on the topic of clarifying railroad regulations. In total, 5129 individuals participated in this petitioning campaign (Map 1).

State representatives responded with Senate Bill No. 9 and 10, which proposed to prohibit discrimination on the basis of color on railroads and remove a clause in the state constitution outlawing “intermarriages of different races and complexities.”^[1]This campaign is a great example of successful, local mobilization efforts by canvassers, however, it was not unusual. According to Colin D. Moore and Daniel Carpenter, “women canvassers garnered 50% or more signatures than men while circulating the same petition requests in the same locales.”^[2] Additionally, as Manisha Sinha and others have argued, people of color were instrumental in advocating for their own social and cultural place in the United States. Native women were no different.

Towns of 1842 petitioning campaign for freedom from discrimination on railroads (by Alina Scott)

While the campaign itself is interesting, what is more compelling are the signers: the petition submitted by the “women of Mashpee” was signed entirely by women of color.^[3] The first signer, likely the canvasser, or the individual who encouraged others to sign, was Cynthia Conant Attaquin, originally from Plymouth. According to 1860 and 1880 census data, Cynthia was married to and lived with Solomon Attaquin, Mashpee’s first postmaster. Their racial classifications fluctuated between “Indian” and “Mullato,” but they were listed as members of the Indian tribe in official reports to the state department responsible for managing the Mashpee. Census data confirms that both Cynthia and Solomon were literate and could speak fluent English, making it even more likely she was the canvasser. Though in their 30s and recently married, both gained social prominence in Mashpee because of their relationship to other high standing elders, particularly, Ezra and Solomon Attaquin, Solomon’s father and grandfather. Familial ties to political and tribal leadership could also explain the involvement of four other Attaquin women in the petition: Betsy J. and Martha (Solomon’s sisters), Desiah (Solomon’s paternal grandmother), and Leah (Solomon’s aunt and wife of Ebenezer Attaquin).

Cousins Hannah Conant (left) and Cynthia Conant Attaquin ca. 1840 (from Earl Mills’ Son of Mashpee)

Additional signers included Achsah R. Jones (also spelled Axah), identified in the census as either Black or Indian, Martha Simmons who was 59 at the signing, Ruth Coombs, Ruth Kurt, Ophelia Ceasar, whose family lived next door to Benjamin Attaquin (Solomon’s brother), Sarah (Wickums) Barney, and finally, Abigail (Wickums) Amos, who married either Joseph or Josiah Amos. In an 1858 map of Barnstable County (below), one can note the proximity of “S. Attaquin,” ” J. Amos,” “Mrs. Jones,” “B. Attaquin,” and others just off what is still Main Street facing the Mashpee Pond. (See map 2).

Map 2: 1858 Map of Mashpee District digitized by the Sandwich Historical Commission

One is left to wonder the motivations of the female actors in this narrative. Seeing as many of them were literate, had they read of the call for petitions in the newspaper or heard tell of an abolitionist circular? Did they see themselves immediately impacted by the cause? And once Cynthia decided to sign her name onto this petition, did she walk down Main Street, stopping at each of her family member’s and friend’s homes convincing them of the potential for positive repercussions? Or did they meet up somewhere, possibly the Indian Meeting House, the parsonage (also on Main Street), or even the Attaquin Hotel? What is certain is the imprint of their participation on the town of Mashpee. Local histories like Earl Mills’s Son of Mashpee: Reflections of Chief Flying Eagle, A Wampanoag recall that the legacies of the Amoses and Attaquins remained stamped on the town even after the campaign.^[4]

Solomon and Cynthia were known to have opened the famous Attaquin Hotel that often doubled as the town’s post office and that hosted government officials and diplomats. They were also heavily involved in a previous petitioning campaign for tribal rights. The recently married Attaquins were active participants in what would be called the Mashpee Revolt, a peaceful protest in response to unfair exploitation of Mashpee land and frustrations with the guardianship. Led by a Methodist preacher and Pequot Indian named William Apess, a 1833-34 petitioning campaign and protest resulted in the reclamation of Mashpee self government. The revolt’s primary petition from the Wampanoag contained a total of 287 signatures of men and women living in Mashpee including Ophelia Caesar, Betsey Attaquin, and Martha Simmons. By 1842, Cynthia and others in Mashpee were well aware of the potential in petitioning, and their effort drew on a well-established network of Native American petitioners.

The pattern of Cynthia Attaquin’s petition affirms what many scholars have pointed to, which is firstly, the importance of social networks and kinship ties to mobilization; secondly, the presence of women and people of color writing their own histories; and finally, the importance of indigenous petitioning efforts. Native peoples continue to petition the government. In 2016 a Change.org petition by a 13 year old member of the North Dakota Sioux Tribe to protect waterways on the Standing Rock reservation gathered over 560,000 signatures and this month a petition for the UT Austin Native American and Indigenous Student Space Collective also circulated. In 1996, Chief Flying Eagle, Earl Mills Sr., of Mashpee summed up the importance of petitions to Native peoples:

Mashpee was different in the past and is still different today from other towns in the Cape. Our presence, the Wampanoags’, and the influence of our culture here, have made the difference. This small community and the United States have gone through similar stages of development. In many ways Mashpee is a microcosm of this country. To understand Mashpee is to understand our society better.^[5]

^[1] State Library of Massachusetts, Senate Bill No. 9 and 10.

^[2] Daniel Carpenter, Colin D. Moore. “When Canvassers Became Activists: Antislavery Petitioning and the Political Mobilization of American Women”. American Political Science Review. Vol. 108, No. 3 (August 2014): 481.

^[3] Digital Archive of Massachusetts Anti-Slavery and Anti-Segregation Petitions, Massachusetts Archives, Boston MA, 2015, “Senate Unpassed Legislation 1842, Docket 11057, SC1/series 231, Petition of Cynthia Attaquin”. http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:FHCL:11858184

^[4] Sr, Earl Mills, and Alicja Mann. Son of Mashpee: Reflections of Chief Flying Eagle, A Wampanoag. 1st edition. North Falmouth, Mass: Word Studio, 1996, 12.

^[5] Sr, Earl Mills, and Alicja Mann. Son of Mashpee: Reflections of Chief Flying Eagle, A Wampanoag. 1st edition. North Falmouth, Mass: Word Studio, 1996, xi.

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How do we talk about Enoch? Enoch Powell, Race Relations, and Public History in Britain

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by Edward Watson

Few British politicians in the 20th century have been as inflammatory as Enoch Powell. On April 20, 1968, the Conservative MP and Shadow Defence Secretary criticized mass immigration from the Commonwealth into the UK during an address to the Conservative Political Centre in Birmingham. Dubbed the “Rivers of Blood” speech, Powell claimed that the anti-discrimination Race Relations Bill of 1968 would provide immigrant communities with the means to “overawe and dominate the rest with the legal weapons which the ignorant and the ill-informed have provided. As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding; like the Roman, I seem to see ‘the River Tiber foaming with much blood.’”

Powell’s speech caused uproar. The Times condemned it as “an evil speech” and Powell was promptly dismissed from the Shadow Cabinet by Conservative leader Ted Heath. However, Powell had his supporters. In fact, a Gallup poll in 1968 found that 74% of respondents supported his suggestion of repatriation. Powell subsequently became a mythologized and divisive figure. For the far-right, “Enoch was right” became a key rallying cry of anti-immigrant sentiment. For many on the center and the left, Powell embodies an openly vitriolic, racist strand of British politics.

BBC Radio 4, a highbrow wing of Britain’s public service broadcaster, decided to air a dramatic reading of Powell’s speech interspersed with commentary from journalists and academics in commemoration of the speech’s 50th anniversary. The presenter, BBC media editor Amol Rajan, promoted the program on Twitter, claiming that “on Saturday, for 1st time EVER, Enoch Powell’s Rivers of Blood speech will be read in full on UK radio.” The BBC has widely come under fire, most forcibly from Labour peer Andrew Adonis and academics. Dr Shirin Hirsch, who had been interviewed for the broadcast, tweeted that she was “disgusted by the way the BBC are promoting this show. I made a mistake and was interviewed for this but I have been sick with worry since seeing the way this is being presented.” Considering the divisive nature of Powell’s speech, many questioned the decision to give an uncritical platform to the far-right while others focused more on the decision to commemorate the speech at all. Rajan later defended the decision by arguing that “the speech is broken up, and critiqued by voices from across the spectrum. Not just read out in a single go.”

On Saturday, for 1st time EVER, Enoch Powell's Rivers of Blood speech will be read in full on UK radio (by actor Ian McDiarmid). Please join us @BBCRadio4 8pm. Super-brains Nathan Gower + David Prest have done an amazing production job. Great guests too: https://t.co/3XvDMSH16d
— Amol Rajan (@amolrajan) April 12, 2018

The BBC’s broadcast touches on numerous ethical and methodological issues for public historians. How do we deal with difficult subject matter? What is the best medium for a critical analysis of such an incendiary speech? How should such a broadcast be marketed? What are the risks of presenting the speech as a commemoration? Its hype as “the first time” the speech had been broadcast was fundamental to the controversy. Historians often use anniversaries as an opportunity to disseminate their own work and engage with a public audience. In this instance, the seemingly celebratory nature of the significance of Powell’s speech was widely criticized. Historicizing Powell’s speech is important and we have to establish critical and reflective ways of covering Powell in the wider context of race relations in Britain. There is no singular correct way to do this, but a dramatic reenactment of the speech seems inappropriate, especially as there is no recording of Powell’s most famous and divisive line, “I seem to see ‘the River Tiber foaming with much blood.’”

This is not to say that Enoch Powell should be ignored. Powell’s speech represents an important juncture in British political and cultural history. Prior to the Commonwealth Immigrants Act of 1962, Commonwealth citizens had extensive rights to settle in the UK. Race riots, most notably in Notting Hill and Nottingham in 1958, inflammatory speeches (such as Powell’s), and restrictive immigration laws were indicative of intense debates surrounding race relations in the UK. In 1964, the hugely controversial election in Smethwick in the West Midlands highlighted the prevalence of racism in British politics, as the Conservatives were widely reported as adopting the slogan “if you want a n****r for a neighbour, vote Labour.” By the time British citizens of South Asian origin faced a campaign of discrimination from the Kenya African National Union (KANU) government in 1967, racial tensions and white British concerns over the influx of immigrants from the Commonwealth were immensely influential over government policy. The Kenyan Asian crisis, as it came to be known, prompted the Commonwealth Immigrants Bill in 1968, which reduced immigration from the Commonwealth to 8500 per year and a mere 1500 from Kenya specifically. 80,000 people in Kenya, who had previously been entitled to British passports as Citizens of the UK and Colonies, were effectively rendered stateless. In an effort to appease their critics, the Labour government passed the Race Relations Act in 1968. The act made it illegal to refuse housing, employment or public services to a person on the grounds of race or national origins. Powell rallied against the Labour government’s bill and the levels of immigration, arguing that it was “like watching a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre.” He believed that racial tensions “of American proportions” which were “interwoven with the history and existence of the States itself, is coming upon us here by our own volition and our own neglect.”

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The specific context to Powell’s speech is often forgotten and there are historical and political ramifications in understanding its background and subsequent influence. For the left, so eager to portray the Labour party as the bastions of racial equality, it represents a colossal failure in terms of immigration and race relations for Harold Wilson’s government. On the far-right, Powell’s mythology is increasingly synonymous with all anti-immigrant sentiment. Understanding Powell’s background illuminates why his speech was so dangerous. Powell has been caricatured as a demagogue and a rambling racist, but he was a highly respected, classical scholar with an astute awareness of how he could manipulate history for political means. Powell believed history “was always a series of myths and the point was to choose the most appropriate ones for the hour of national need.” He was an articulate and charismatic orator. This was no incoherent, raving outsider, but a calculated and educated member of the political elite.

This is what made his speech so divisive and why it continues to have relevance in British political life to this day. In 2014, comedian Russell Brand called UKIP leader Nigel Farage a “pound shop Enoch Powell” on the BBC’s political TV show Question Time. Welsh UKIP leader, Neil Hamilton, defended Enoch Powell, arguing the idea that Powell was a “racist villain” is “absolute nonsense.” Even more recently, Commonwealth immigration has hit the headlines with the Home Office coming under fire for destroying landing cards from the “Windrush generation,” with thousands of children who were brought to Britain from the West Indies in 1948 now at risk of deportation. Days ago, Labour MP David Lammy, lambasted the Prime Minister and Home Secretary for appeasing the anti-immigrant sentiment of the far-right, arguing that “if you lay down with dogs, you get fleas.” The ghost of Enoch Powell looms large over UK politics. We would do well to figure out an appropriate way to discuss Powell’s speech in its historical context as well as how it fits into contemporary political discourse. Understanding Powell’s strand of racist rhetoric derives from a closer reading of his speech and the context in which he delivered it. In this sense, the BBC’s decision to critique the speech amidst the dramatic reading is important. However, if Britons are to have a more meaningful discussion about the history of race relations, then the discussion must go beyond a dramatization of Powell’s speech. Moreover, public scholars need to do more thinking in terms of how to appropriately frame such a difficult discussion.

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Review of Empire of Cotton: A Global History by Sven Beckert

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History in a “Post-Truth” Era

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