Natalie Cincotta, Author at Not Even Past

Miss O’Keeffe

I remember Georgia O’Keeffe. I couldn’t have been but three, first time I met her. She was already an older woman by then, or late middle age, at least. She was tall and perfectly centered, with a slender frame and grey hair pulled back in a tight bun. She wore long sleeves and dark jeans. She smoked only the best Cuban cigars. Women weren’t supposed to smoke cigars at all. But she got away with it. She and Frida Kahlo.

Miss O’Keeffe got her smokes from La Habana. They were already hard to get in ’61. The trade embargo was not yet in place, but things were already getting sticky with Fidel. The State Department didn’t like the combat fatigues, and the mob wanted their casinos back. I think they drove Fidel into Soviet arms. After that, Ché Guevara went to Angola, with a habanero in his teeth, just like Miss O’Keeffe. Cuban cigars became contraband. Reserved for drug traffickers and CIA agents. I suspect Miss O’Keeffe had some stashed away for a rainy day. But in the summertime, it rained every afternoon on the high plains of New Mexico. You learned to bide your time. You knew that’s just the way it was going to be.

Georgia O'Keeffe looks directly at the camera, resting her head on her hands. — Georgia O’Keeffe, 1932, Gelatin silver print (via the Met)

Back then, people might have said that Georgia O’Keeffe dressed like a man, if she weren’t so strikingly feminine. Sometimes, she switched the jeans for a long dark skirt, the sort Jean Harlow might have worn in a Western. Her perfume was something classic from the 1920s, sprayed on with granny’s atomizer, a little pungent, perhaps, but a good combination with the juniper and piñon all around us. We would meet her often at the Piggly Wiggly in Santa Fe.

She drove her pickup truck down from Ghost Ranch to Santa Fe about once a week for provisions. Ghost Ranch was her home in Abiquiu, north of Española. We rode in with Mom from Tesuque. In a 1960 turquoise Volkswagen. It wasn’t that we would just see her and comment that there goes a famous person. She would always speak, and she remembered our names, and we would remember her. I even remember a plane ride to Midland, sitting in the same row with Miss O’Keeffe. To go to Houston, back then, you flew from Santa Fe to Midland and there, you took the train. I don’t know where Miss O’Keeffe was going. Probably, New York. She had to check in with the art world once in a while.

Georgia O'Keeffe's home and studio — Georgia O’Keeffe’s home and studio, 1996 (via National Park Service)

One day, Daddy had to drive out to Abiquiu to fix Miss O’Keeffe’s hi-fi. Stereo was still a dream of the future. Daddy was good at fixing hi-fi systems. And the old hi-fis were very good machines, but they needed attention. You had to change the needle often, and when a vacuum tube burned out, you had to identify which one it was, buy the right replacement, and change it without electrocuting yourself.

Daddy was down on the floor, on his back, underneath Miss O’Keeffe’s hi-fi, and her German Shepherd walked into the room, growling, hackles raised. Miss O’Keeffe was right behind him. Don’t move, she said, softly. Instructions for the man on the floor, not for the dog.

She managed to call off her dog. Daddy got it. We had German Shepherds, too. Far better than locks on the door for looking after yourself, or your wife and kids. In what was left of the wild, wild west. Aware of prowlers and mountain lions.

I suspect Sanders and Associates had sold Miss O’Keeffe her hi-fi, and that was why Daddy would drive out there to fix it. He worked for them. It was about an hour away. Maybe it was just because he was a nice guy. She didn’t let many people into her sanctuary. Her dog knew that.

Georgia O’Keeffe, photographed by by Carl van Vechten (via Pixabay)

We often wondered, years later, what her music was. Big bands or Aaron Copeland; maybe Stravinsky. But Daddy’s gone now, and we never got around to asking him.

Igor Stravinsky came to Tesuque in ’61. He was an elderly man, by then. He came to direct his masterpiece at the Santa Fe Opera House. It was three blocks from where we lived, so Mom and Daddy went. They were young marrieds with three babies, no money and season tickets to the opera. Where will you ever see that again? Miss O’Keeffe was there, of course.

After that, Daddy bought a recording of the Rite of Spring to play for us at home on our hi-fi. We just called it, the jungle record. We played it over and over. We hid behind the couch for the loud and rowdy parts. Alongside that, the record changer dropped Toscanini’s Beethoven, Harry Belafonte’s Calypso and the complete The Kingston Trio. It was all music to us.

Daddy worked for Sanders and Associates, a King Ranch subsidiary, which meant Alfred King was trying his hand at import-export in Santa Fe. It folded because Mr. Sanders was cooking the books. Daddy turned him in to Mr. King, and then we moved to Dallas. We watched Kennedy get shot while we were there. Dealey Plaza was just a few blocks away. Shit goes down that way in Texas. JFK didn’t have a German Shepherd. He sure needed one.

Cerro Pedernal, viewed from Ghost Ranch near Abiquiu, New Mexico (via Wikimedia Commons)

But this was supposed to be about Miss O’Keeffe. She was lovely. She had climbed the steep rock wall alone to get to the place where she was. Her masculine dress, her artistic style, and her cigars were a testament to her eternal readiness for the ongoing struggle. She possessed the peace that had cost her everything she had. She had walked through the fire.

Miss O’Keeffe gave up painting as a young woman, after attending the Chicago Art Institute’s school for starving artists. Said the smell of turpentine made her puke. For a while, she drew for an advertising firm in Chicago, then she taught public school in Amarillo. While she was in Amarillo, she started walking in the Palo Duro Canyon. It seduced her heart back to beauty.

She contracted the Spanish Flu in 1918, along with 200 million others worldwide, but she survived. She married Alfred Stieglitz, a photographer from New York, and he made many portraits of her. But she couldn’t bear his snobby family, or his philandering, so she escaped to New Mexico every summer. Hiking up high. It was there that she started painting again.

When Stieglitz died in 1946, she settled permanently at Ghost Ranch. She drove an old Model A until the wheels fell off. Then she got a Ford pickup, the one I remember from the supermarket in Santa Fe.

Ghost Ranch was out near Los Alamos, where the atomic bomb was in the process of becoming a world-changing reality. Los Alamos is the strangest city on the planet. Complex, yet simple. If you drive into town to buy supplies, someone follows you. That is why Miss O’Keeffe preferred the supermarket in Santa Fe. She was recognized in Los Alamos and not welcome, there. She was recognized in Santa Fe and loved.

Georgia O'Keeffe—Hands and Horse Skull by Alfred Stieglitz — Georgia O’Keeffe—Hands and Horse Skull by Alfred Stieglitz, 1931 (via Met Museum)

Her life was an ongoing thermonuclear moment. Once, the soil rebelled and burned her workshop to the ground. Unable to finish a commissioned piece in New York, she had a nervous breakdown and spent two years in a psychiatric hospital. Behind bars with all the other artistic souls. Big Nurse, medication and electro-shock. She emerged, changed, but unscathed. She strode out of there with frightful courage, strong legs and unyielding decision.

That was 1932. The year that changed everything for her. From then on, she was determined, committed and, yes, maybe even, happy. More and more, she spent her time in the land that gave her life. She was more alone, but not lonely. She went back to New York to bury Stieglitz in 1946. After that, her only love was the the New Mexico desert. She painted it, smoked Cuban cigars, and watched the sun set, over and over again.

She died in 1984. She was 98 years old. She was not painting anymore. She would sit and watch the red desert cliffs on the high plane as the sun rose and set each day. Taking care of the beauty around her, just watching, perennially caught up in its angel fire.

Also by Nathan Stone on Not Even Past:

The Tiger
The Battle of Chile
Rodolfo Valentín González Pérez: An Unusual Disappearance

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Death, Danger, and Identity at 12,000 Feet

by Jesse Ritner

On February 1, 1894, Frank Cook stumbled down from the Elk Mountain range, passed through the frozen town of Ashcroft, and trudging through the deep Colorado snow arrived in Aspen, Colorado. His mining partner, Mr. Spake, was dead.

Mining accidents were common in late nineteenth-century Colorado. Mr. Cook, likely weary and cold from his arduous trip, reported that he “entered the tunnel and found his partner with his head blown off and his body terribly mangled. A steel priming rod had passed clear through the body.”[1] Memory of his partner’s death may have intensified as Cook descended from the frigid elevations. Or the reporter of the Aspen Daily Times might have allowed his imagination to run wild. Unfortunately, the truth of the incident was not forthcoming. February in the Roaring Fork Valley is snowy. The citizens of Aspen waited anxiously for further information to arrive.

I, on the other hand, benefited from immediate access to Colorado Historical Newspapers. Spake was not killed by dynamite.

The town of Aspen from Aspen Mountain, taken between 1890 and 1893

Frank Cook likely arrived in the back range of the Rocky Mountains by 1889. However, due to his exceedingly common name (as the archivist in Aspen commented he may as well be named John Smith), he is difficult to trace. Nevertheless, he periodically reappears in the Aspen papers. Notably, despite his Anglophone name, Frank Cook was known as a Frenchman.[2] (Or at least as French Canadian.) As such, he was a notable presence in the bustling and growing town populated by approximately 8,000 people.

The Times reported on February 21 that Cook was still lingering about in Aspen. The authorities, having sent word to Gunnison that a coroner was needed, waited almost three weeks for Mr. Spark to arrive. (Even today, a February trip from Gunnison to Aspen is often treacherous.) On February 18, shortly after the coroner’s arrival, Cook, Sparks and a few others “formed a team to go over the range to the Big Four properties, having in view an official investigation of [Spake’s] death.” The team never made it.

The Aspen Daily Times article is gripping. The accent to the Elk Range was “extremely arduous.” The roads had “drifted full” forcing the party to “shovel snow a great part of the distance.” At Ashcroft the spirited men decided to “brave the dangers of the Taylor range on Norwegian snowshoes.” Despite the grind of their trip to Ashcroft, disaster did not strike until they reached the top of the range. There, at 12,000 feet, they encountered a dangerous storm. The papers reported that “the wind whistled and shrieked about the ragged peaks; it howled and groaned as it piled up snow… in the solitude and loneliness of these bleak and cheerless crags, the situation was enough to strike terror to the bravest of hearts.” The party, facing almost certain “destruction” if they continued turned around and skied back to Ashcroft.[3] A team from Gunnison, frustrated by the failures of Aspen, took up the search. It was only then that The Times reported, “Cook’s story of the death of Spake [was] not borne out by the surroundings in the tunnel.” A warrant was released for his arrest. But, Mr. Cook had already fled town.

Headline from The Aspen Daily Times (via Colorado Historical Newspapers)

The papers were mystified that Cook made “no attempt to conceal himself.” He had “deported himself generally as one entirely unconscious that suspicion of complicity in the affair could rest upon him.”[4] He not only took part in early attempts to recover the body, but he even let Mr. Bowman, owner and amateur curator of the Bowman Saloon and Musee, take his picture before he left town. In the end, he was found on the streets of Denver, where two sheriffs arrested him, and shipped him by train to Gunnison to stand trial.[5]

The story above is a perfect western. A dark man of dubious identity, out in the wilderness, far removed from civilization commits the ultimate crime. White men in cowboy hats ride horses, mountaineer, and ski to solve the case. They test their strength. Conquer nature. And in the end – after death, danger, and a dramatized standoff in the streets of Denver – the criminal is captured and faces justice. The dramatized story of manifest destiny is pushed to its limit, testing the resilience of American character against the chaos and violence of the still nebulous West, and in the end the violence redeems itself through the court system. I won’t lie. The thrill of the western drew me in. And there is perhaps no genre as titillating as frontier newspapers recounting in detail the crimes of their days. However, this story also reveals the limits of cinematic depictions of the American west.

Cook was born in upstate New York, on the St. Regis Indian Reservation. His mother was an Irish immigrant to Canada. His father was a “near full-blood St. Regis Indian.” Back home he was known as Frank Boots – his father adopted the last name due to the “fine boots with red tops” that he often wore, and which stood in opposition to the moccasins most Mohawks preferred.[6]

The remains of the once bustling mining town of Ashcroft

Historians, artists, and politicians have long discussed the tragedy of the “vanishing Indian.” Convinced that Indians continued to exist exclusively on reservations, if at all, Indigenous people have been written out of both the historical and cultural memory of our country. Only recently have historians – Phillip Deloria (Standing Rock Sioux) and Jean O’Brein (White Earth Anishinaabe) are but two examples – begun challenging this myth. Cook is further proof of the ways Indians have been written out of history. Not only is he from New York, a state whose Indian history supposedly finished before the Civil War, but he counteracts narratives that whitewash western expansion. The Indian Wars were over by this time, but the simple reality of Cook’s presence demonstrates that Natives still inhabited the mine filled mountainous landscapes of the Rocky Mountains.

His story demonstrates the finicky nature of identity. His father was “near full-blood,” his mother was Irish, and Frank, as a result, would have been “half-blooded.” This qualitative measuring of Indianness by local newspapers suggests the importance of biological and hereditary constructions of race during the time period. Yet, Cook’s own narrative, presenting himself as a Frenchman, shows how even in legally racialized societies, mobility could loosen the holds of identity on individuals, but Cook’s decision to pass as French does not take away his Indigenous heritage.

For many, Frank Cook’s story may not be an obvious Indian story. He lived off a reservation. He spoke English and French. And by the language of the day he was “half-blooded.” But too often we fall victim to nineteenth-century theories that argue when such people fail to fit within our pigeonholes, they were inauthentic. It is precisely this thought process that erases Indigenous people from our histories. Cook’s story shows that Indians continued to be part of the history of the Rocky Mountains.

[1] 2/1/1894
[2] 4/7/1894
[3] 2/21/1894
[4] 3/3/1894
[5] 3/9/1894
[6] 4/7/1894

Also by Jesse Ritner on Not Even Past:

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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Missing Signatures: The Archives at First Glance

On February 21, 1831, a petition containing the signatures of over 800 Connecticut residents was submitted to the United States Congress on behalf of the indigenous population in the South who were facing relocation. The petition acknowledged Native peoples as the “original proprietors of the soil” and its authors claimed that to remain silent would be criminal and cowardly. The petition was not unique, as archivists recognized when organizing it in a folder containing several other petitions with fairly similar appeals. The threat of the forced relocation of Native Americans caught the attention of many activists and benevolent societies in the North as well as the South.

Guaranteed by the first amendment, the right to petition is granted to individual Americans by the United States constitution, however, petitions were in effect long before the foundation of the United States and its Declaration of Independence from English rule. It has been a particularly useful tool for marginalized groups in the U.S. including Native and African Americans. Women were particularly engaged in petitioning efforts, advocating on behalf of others during the threat of indigenous removal, the anti-slavery and abolitionist movement, and eventually the women’s suffrage campaigns.

(via National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, DC)

Nineteenth-century petitions had the potential for several unintended ramifications. They could receive a favorable a government response, but sometimes the response was negative, and in some cases, petitions were met with silence. The gag rule, for example, immediately tabled petitions related to the antislavery cause in Congress from 1834 until slavery was repealed in 1844. Nineteenth-century petitions served a purpose to the individual or group that canvassed for the petition, helping to add to a running list of potential supporters for future campaigns and movements. This function is helpful for historians who can use the locations and names of signatories in retracing the steps of canvassers.

The layout of each petition is also important. They typically included the statement of a grievance, support, or evidence, and a signatory list. The first name on the list was typically someone of importance or the sponsoring canvasser, so as to add validity and clout to the document. The consequent names were often divided into the categories of “legal voters”(white men), “women” (white women), “colored men,” “colored women”, etc. In some cases, that division came in the form of a line drawn down the middle of the signatory list or in the drafting of two separate petitions, one for “legal voters” and the other for women or people of color.

This brings me back to the petition from February 1831. Originally, I went to the National Archives and Records Administration in Washington D.C. in search of women and people of color who were involved in petitioning efforts. After several days of finding very little evidence of women’s involvement in anti-removal petitioning, I stumbled upon the petition in question. It was one of several files in a box in the dense Record Group 75, which contains documents from the Bureau of Indian Affairs. (RG 75 contains documents ranging from the BIA’s administrative history to records of the secretary of war, and correspondence and documents related to individual BIA tribal offices). This particular box contained petitions and memorials to the House of Representatives and the Senate related to forced Cherokee removal.

The statement of grievance consisted of several pages folded together with the third containing the start of a signatory list. The first and only signature on the final page of the petition belonged to Benjamin Tallmadge, a former Continental Army officer and Representative of Connecticut to the U.S. House. Attached to the original document with a red adhesive was the start of the first full page of signatures under “Litchfield,”, the first town canvassers stopped at in Connecticut. From Litchfield the petition was taken to Kent, Roxbury, New Milford, New Preston, Salisbury, Goshen, Norfolk, South Farms, Torrington, Northfield, Harwinton, Colebrook and Winchester.

By the time I’d unfolded the petition it was more than six feet long, contained more than 800 signatures from fourteen Connecticut towns, and at first glance, none of them belonged to women. Upon closer inspection though, I found a Sally, Caroline, and Martha who signed the document in Salisbury. Next to their names was a piece of paper glued to the original document with a red adhesive, comparable to the kind used to stick the different signatory lists together. It was just under a foot long and glued at all four corners. To my surprise, underneath the flap were the names of 30 women. I was ecstatic. Not only had I found evidence of a large number of women participating in this expansive petition, but their names had been covered up for reasons impossible to gather from the document itself. I immediately called an archivist over to ask whether the adhesive could be partially removed to see the full list of names. The archivist told me that a request for review would have to be submitted and that process takes up to several years, more than the time than I had in DC. Still the existence of a covered list of women’s names on this petition raises important questions about the open and surreptitious role of women in these petition drives.

So what conclusions can be drawn from this discovery? It is not clear at what point along the journey from Litchfield to Congress the names were added or when they were covered, whether the canvassers permitted women’s signatures initially but changed their minds, if the names were added afterwards and covered before finally being turned in, or, if there was something about the three women who signed below the men that made them different from the 30 or so that were covered up. Despite these uncertainties, it’s not unlikely that the names were covered up to prevent delegitimizing the document and the issues at stake. And for historians, this document provides important evidence of the involvement of women in nineteenth-century petitioning efforts, the social value of their signatures (or lack thereof), and overall, the thrill of archival research.

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Dreaming with the Ancestors: Black Seminole Women in Texas and Mexico by Shirley Boteler Mock (2010)

by Micaela Valadez

This outstanding ethnographic history explores the migration of Black Seminole people across the South and Southwest of the United States, highlighting the survival of cultural and spiritual practices by Black Seminole women. Boteler Mock uses ethnographic research and oral history to weave together the long migratory route that Black Seminoles made since the 18th century, that tells us how this group survived centuries of danger and also provides the community with a way to save and pass down that knowledge.

Dreaming with the Ancestors argues that Black Seminole women held on to their African identities, which they melded with the Native American and Mexican cultures that the community encountered during their migration, slowly forming the culture and identity that survives to this day. From the plantations on the East Coast to present day Brackettville, Texas and Nacimiento, Mexico, Black Seminole women would have to deal with multiple adversities including discrimination, prejudice, warring, and the eventual loss of their future generations’ interest in their own history. What Boteler Mock does is provide these young Black Seminoles living in Brackettville, Texas, and to others who have moved on, with a precious piece of literature dedicated to the efforts, resilience, and incredible endurance of the Black Seminole people, especially the women. The authors’ ultimate purpose for this book, and the hope of her beloved friend and critical interviewee, Alice Fay, is that this work would revitalize the younger community to learn and appreciate their history and ancestors courage. I found that the motivation and the actual relationship Boteler Mock had with her interviewees, who would come to be more like family, really made me appreciate the work she did.

Sgt. Ben July, Black Seminole scout for the U. S. Army in Fort Clark, TX.

The methods Boteler Mock uses are key in persuading her audience to understand the importance of women in the Black Seminole community. Her blend of ethnography, archival documents, diaries, memoirs, and oral histories offers both a solid history of Black Seminole culture and identity formation and an engaging personalized account of everyday life that is hard to stop reading. The author’s descriptions of the scenery and her memoir-like introduction make you almost forget the work is also scholarly. But the book also shows how valuable oral history and ethnography are to understanding a community’s history through the experiences of those who have lived it. The mixture of historical background with the memories and stories told by the elders of the Black Seminole community make for a very revealing study of the connections between African, Native American, and Mexican cultures that have come together to form the Black Seminole identity.

Seminole women with their hand-crank sewing machines (via State Library and Archives of Florida)

This book serves not only as an essential study of Black Seminoles or Black Seminole women, but as a study of the interconnectedness of gender, identity formation, and diaspora in any community that is forcefully moved out of its space and must renegotiate its identities to survive. Boteler Mock highlights the importance that women have played in the community but also points towards their importance in maroon and Native American communities as mothers, leaders, spiritual connections to the past and future, and guardians of the culture. This book also shows the understanding that can result from an ethnographer’s honest and sincere treatment of the Black Seminole community. The honesty and openness of the women Boteler Mock interviewed and the lasting friendships they made convinced me that the women trusted her. Any reader should be able to connect with these stories as much as I did.

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What Makes a Good History Blog?

by Jesse Ritner

I love food blogs.

It’s true. The bad jokes. Exclamation marks run rampant. Mouthwatering photographs. The word chocolate, over 70 times in only 1,000 words.

Unsurprisingly, my first foray into history blogs was through food. Websites such as Cooking in the Archive (which posts about antiquated recipes with pictures and all) were natural fits. Yet, there is more to my love of food blogs than a love to cook and the guilty pleasure of overly punctuated sentences. Many of them have perfected essential aspects of blogging.

Take Sally’s Baking Addiction. The posts have attractive titles. (“Death by Chocolate Cupcakes” may be cheesy, but it is perfect for its audience.) They have clear, often linear, narration. They allow for endless side glancing through linked articles. And, most importantly, they have food porn.

(Is that even food?)(via Great British Chefs)

Granted, food blogs have their limits. For lucid prose and thought provoking ideas, I would direct you other places. But even my favorite history blogposts follow a similar model. Demystifying ‘Cool:’ A Brief History begins with a personal anecdote. (Is a story about once being called cool that different from a story about a perfect cupcake?) Flashy pop-culture pictures of Elvis, Lester Young, and the book American Cool take the place of food photography. And the beginning of the post even has runaway italicizing and punctuation: “Ohmigosh…that is so cool.” (A blogger after my own heart.)

Such overtures to internet culture may seem pedestrian, but they play an essential role in communicating complicated processes simply and briefly. Kate Grover’s opening anecdote does not simply hook the reader, it reminds the reader that “cool… is a potent force,” so shouldn’t we know its history? In a similar way, the picture of Elvis diversifies her examples, saving a paragraph on another example of coolness. All of this is to say that the best blogs do not simply use hooks to hook and pictures to illustrate, they use them as evidence to efficiently and enjoyably convince the reader.

Elvis Presley promoting the film Jailhouse Rock, 1957 (via Wikimedia Commons)

Perhaps, a less kitschy example (although still about food) is Res Obscura’s recent post What Did 17^th Century Food Taste Like? Paintings and photos of archival recipes are used throughout the article, but the most successful one for me is the photo of the watermelons. There is no need for the author to waste precious characters explaining how watermelons have adapted throughout the history. Anyone with access to a supermarket can look at the painting and understand. The blogpost is far from perfect. The article gets side tracked on discussions about art history, while the general premise (made clear by the title) is overly complicated by convoluted discussion of global foodways. While it convinces me that the Columbian Exchange enhanced the dynamism of foodways, this discussion distracts from the main point: that food tasted differently four hundred years ago. Nevertheless, what becomes muddled in the argument, is actually reaffirmed through the picture selection. Even those readers who stumble upon this article after falling down a rabbit hole of links, can get the gist just by reading the title and seeing this picture. Certainly as writers, we prefer when people read the entire post, but when engaging in such a malleable form of writing, it is important for our posts to click on all levels.

Giovanni Stanchi, watermelons and other fruits in a landscape, c. 1645 (via Red Obscura)

Something else food blogs are especially good at is embedding links. Food blogs are so effective, in part because I only need to know I want chocolate, vanilla, cookies, or cake. Once I know that, I can skim through almost endless links allowing me to find what I want. Even if I did not know what that was. Although history blogs are engaged with for different purposes, the same principle applies. Once again What Did 17^th Century Food Taste Like? does a great job of embedding extraneous information. In some cases it is a link to “small beer,” (which is apparently a low alcohol beer given to kids and servants), a recipe for an early version of “Maccarony cheese” (note it is from one of my favorite blogs), or simply links to specific food history blogs at the end of the post. These links not only give easy access to similar information, but for those interested, they allow the reader to engage seriously with the author’s sources (even if unintentionally so). In this case, Demystifying ‘Cool:’ A Brief History could certainly benefit from better integration of outside sources (For instance, I had to look up who Lester Young was!).

Good writing and engaging stories will always make good blogposts: There is no substitute. I also understand that food blogs are far from the only genre that engages meaningfully with images, links, and exaggerated stories. Yet, because their goal is usually to explain a recipe, they are a perfect template for making accessible otherwise academic takes on history.

Also by Jesse Ritner on Not Even Past:

The Curious History of Lincoln’s Birth Cabin
Paying for Peace: Reflections on “Lasting Peace” Monument

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Domesticating Ethnic Foods and Becoming American
Great Books on Urban Foodways
Demystifying “Cool:” A Brief History

Colonial Chalices: Colonial Latin America Through Objects (No. 4)

Chalice (Cáliz) Mexico City, 1575-1578 (via LACMA)

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.

Lillian Michel’s exhibit focuses on colonial chalices, one of the most sacred objects of the Eucharist. Unlike many other colonial objects that incorporated indigenous techniques and materials, silversmiths charged with the production of chalices were strictly regulated. There was little room for the incorporation of indigenous materials, let alone indigenous religious sensibilities. Chalices therefore can better document the arrival of new European styles in art and architecture than changes in indigenous traditions.

More from the Colonial Latin America Through Objects series:

Of Merchants and Nature by Diana Heredia López
Nanban Art by John Monsour
Andean Tapestry by Irene Smith

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Abisai Pérez Zamarripa reviews Indigenous Intellectuals: Knowledge, Power, and Colonial Culture in Mexico and the Andes
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Indigenous Intellectuals: Knowledge, Power, and Colonial Culture in Mexico and the Andes edited by Gabriela Ramos and Yanna Yannakakis (2014)

By Abisai Pérez Zamarripa

This collective book is about the role of Indian thinkers as actors who preserved pre-Columbian knowledge within the new social order and recreated it to enforce or contest Spanish imperial rule. The book editors integrated several essays of top historians that explain how indigenous intellectuals in the colonial Andes and Mexico were important for the success of both the Spanish authorities and Indian elites in reaching political power and legitimacy.

Together, the book’s articles offers a comparative perspective of colonial Mexico and Peru focusing on the indigenous scholars’ lives, productions, and epistemological networks. This comparative analysis shows that knowledge production was more culturally and linguistically diverse in Mexico than in the Andes. On the one hand, Spanish prevailed on the Quechua as the principal written medium. This meant the indigenous people of the Andes had to learn a new foreign language to achieve social mobility and the Spanish government could centralize more rapidly its political power in the Andean region. On the other hand, in colonial Peru, Spanish rule gradually marginalized the Inca quipu system –records expressed with numerical terms while in colonial Mexico the Mesoamerican pictographic writing tradition –codex with images and words that recorded all kind of information– rapidly adapted the Castilian alphabet scripture. This exemplifies how the Spaniards were reluctant to utilize the numerical system of the Inca people while they accepted the continuity of the Mesoamerican tradition of communicating whole ideas by combining images and words. In her contribution, Gabriela Ramos suggests that the former centralized power of the Inca empire limited knowledge to very few hands while in Mexico the fragmented structure of the Aztec empire allowed a linguistic diversity that survived Spanish colonization. Ramos explains how the indigenous language, Quechua, became the lingua franca in colonial Cusco and Lima., The standardization of one language allowed the Spaniards to exert control more effectively, but also allowed natives to use the legal culture to their own benefit.

The essays also explain how indigenous intellectuals used their ancient knowledge to transform and thus critique, resist, or accommodate with the colonial system. Religious orders played an important role in the critique of power through evangelizing and educating the natives. John Charles addresses this in his study of Jesuit colleges in the colonial Andes. He demonstrates that Jesuit schooling allowed young indigenous nobles to learn the Spanish law and language to protect local self-rule and their family’s interests and investments. Andean nobles who were schooled by Jesuits did not hesitate to confront corrupt Spanish authorities using their knowledge in the litigation process. Alan Durston offers another example of resistance by Indians thinkers. He analyzes the Huarochirí Manuscript (Quechua language text that describes the traditions and myths of the natives of pre-Columbian Peru) to explain how an indigenous intellectual and nobleman prioritized local indigenous traditions that expressed historical narratives through ancient Inca myths, the huaca tales. Durston shows that indigenous writers chose to preserve their ancient records instead of embracing completely Europeans forms of knowledge.

Concerning the issue of the political adaptation of Indians to the colonial system, María Elena Martínez provides one of the most compelling aspects of the book, a study of the political functions of Indian genealogies in central Mexico and Peru. Martínez shows that genealogical narratives empowered Indian noblemen in both regions by adapting ancient traditions to understanding the Spanish conquest as a pact of vassalage with the Spanish crown. During the 17-18^th centuries, indigenous intellectuals created a great variety of títulos primordiales (Titles of land in colonial Mexico referring both to the pre-Columbian and colonial periods) and visual representations of dynasties (Peru) to retain or gain privileges from the crown. Those genealogical narratives shows that natives elites in colonial Peru conceived of Spanish rule as a peaceful and voluntary transfer of power between the Indians and the Spanish crown, not as a military conquest.

All the authors in this collection have a clear and concise writing style and use a wide range of primary sources: chronicles, confesionarios, trial records, lawsuits, petitions, contemporaneous histories, photographic representations that combines European and Indian forms of knowledge, and so forth. Particularly, the authors show how the analysis of chronicles and histories shed light on the intellectuals’ networks and the role of Indian scholars in preserving the oral memory of native societies that today are not well known. For instance, John F. Schwaller examined the productions of the brothers Fernando de Alva Ixtlixochitl and Bartolomé de Alva. The first served to interpret and translate the native history into models that were understood by the Spanish rulers while the second used his wide knowledge of native religious practices to enforce a better Christianization. For her part, Camila Townsend shows that Nahua historian Don Juan Zapata and other Nahua historians claimed to be the responsible for preserving their communities’ memories. The essays of Schwaller and Towsend also are also remarkable as they include an insightful analysis of the Nahuátl language. Yanna Yannakakis examined the translation process for understanding the relationship between indigenous people and the legal system. She argues that translation practices in colonial Mexico led to a process of commensuration, that is, the Spanish and native languages established a common ground so that Christianity could become comprehensible both for Spaniards and indigenous communities. She demonstrates how the Zapotec language integrated the Christian notion of sin to create a discourse on criminality, which the Indian elites then used to dispute colonial power.

This collection of essays draws attention to the importance of intellectuals in the construction of alternative ways to achieve power and social mobility. The Indian intellectuals of colonial Mexico and the Andes demonstrated the validity of the common idea that “knowledge is power.” And it is power because it offers a pathway to contest or to improve the ways that people interact with their rulers.

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Yugoslavia in the Shadow of War: Veterans and the Limits of State Building, 1903-1945 by John Paul Newman (2015)

By Charalampos Minasidis

The end of the First World War in Europe signified the dissolution of the old empires, the creation of new states, and the triumph of liberal democracy and the parliamentary system. However, this triumph lasted only around a decade. By the end of 1920s and early 1930s, authoritarianism and dictatorship had replaced both liberalism and parliamentarism.

John Paul Newman uses the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes as a case study to discuss the failed liberal experiments in the successor states of interwar Eastern Europe. The Kingdom was found in 1918 under King Peter, and after 1921 under his son Alexander, of the Serbian Karadjordjević dynasty. Although the new state was a result of the panslavist dream of unifying all the South Slavs of the Western Balkans, its name proved to be a very unfortunate idea, as it did not signal the replacement of local nationalisms with a new national identity.

Newman constructs his study around the various veteran associations, their mobilizations and their remembrance and commemorations. Through documents, newspapers, and memoirs, Newman analyzes the political use of remembrance and Serbian, Croatian, and Slovene veterans’ remobilization after the war. For Newman, the veterans’ reluctance to leave the war experience behind led to the defeat of liberalism by authoritarianism. Belgrade’s official policy of “liberation and unification” viewed the period between 1912 and 1918 as a whole and praised the Serbian veterans and their allies that fought during the First Balkan War (1912-1913) against the Ottoman Empire, the Second Balkan War (1913) against their former ally, Bulgaria, and the First World War (1914-1918) against Austria-Hungary, Germany and Bulgaria. The Balkan Wars led Serbia to annex parts of the ex-Ottoman territories of Kosovo and Macedonia, while the Great War allowed Serbia to be unified with Montenegro and the ex-Austro-Hungarian territories of Bosnia, Herzegovina, Croatia, Dalmatia, Slovenia and Vojvodina. According to the official policy, it was the acts of Serbia and its army alone that liberated the South Slavs of the Western Balkans. The “liberation and unification” policy excluded the rest of the South Slavs from its remembrance and commemorations. They were viewed as just passively waiting for their Serbian liberators.

Alexander I of Yugoslavia and Maria of Yugoslavia in 1933 (via Wikimedia)

This Serbian “culture of victory” alienated all those South Slavs who as subjects of Austria-Hungary had fought under its army and had instead cultivated a “culture of defeat.” Such contradictions were even stronger for those who participated in the Austro-Hungarian campaigns against Serbia or those Slovenes, who fought against Italy, an Entente and Serbian ally, and its expansive designs into the Slovenian territories of Austria-Hungary. Both opposing cultures negated and undermined the idea behind a unified South Slav state in the Western Balkans.

Newman analyzes successfully how these conflicting cultures undermined the new state and nation building. The officers who served in the Austro-Hungarian Army were reluctant to join the new armed forces, where the official policy excluded them from the system of promotions. On the other hand, Serbian officers neither wanted their defeated ex-enemies to join them nor the official remembrance of the war to be abandoned, as it offered them pride and promotions. Similarly, new Kingdom’s welfare programs and land reform did not satisfy the veterans and ex-members of the Austro-Hungarian Army faced constant discrimination.

The Serbian Army enters Zagreb, 1918 (via Wikipedia)

As Newman demonstrates, the inability to improve their economic well-being quickly disillusioned Serbian, and other, veterans with the new state as well. Even more, Serbian veterans blamed parliamentarianism for the government’s failure to provide for them and viewed it as slow, corrupted, and ready to betray their legacy. Many Serbian and Croatian veterans also started gravitating towards fascism and right-wing revisionism. Nevertheless, cases of cooperation between ex-enemies were not rare. People like Captain Lujo Lovrić, a panslavist Croat volunteer in the Serbian army, who became blind during the war, were used by the regime to propagandize South Slav union and its social policies to the disabled veterans, but those policies were not enough.

Newman overall succeeds in explaining a failed nation-building project through a group of people who were mobilized and politicized during the Great War and could not accept the new state of affairs. Newman’s thorough analysis clarifies the catastrophic impact of divisive cultural and social policies in a divided society. As the crisis deepened King Alexander presented to the Serbian veterans the institution of monarchy as the Kingdom’s unifying symbol. In this way he secured their support, which proved crucial for the establishment of his dictatorship in 1929 and constituted his effort towards a new nation and state building project, Yugoslavia.

Also by Charalampos Minasidis on Not Even Past:

Review of The Anatomy of Fascism by Robert O. Paxton

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Book recommendations compiled for the centenary of the outbreak of WWI
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A Nation of Outsiders: How the White Middle Class Fell in Love with Rebellion in Postwar America by Grace Elizabeth Hale (2011)

by Ashley Garcia

In the works of modern philosophers and novelists and even in the lyrical stylings of folk icon Bob Dylan, the question of authenticity lingers in the background of our search for meaning and truth. In A Nation of Outsiders, Grace Hale seeks to explain how and why white Americans in the second half of the twentieth century became enamored with the romance and rebellion of the outsider. Hale uncovers how white middle-class youths of the 1950s and 1960s acquired meaning and freedom in their everyday lives through the cultural, social, and political appropriation of marginalized American people, such as African Americans. The perceived authenticity of black Americans fascinated the white youth disillusioned with the phoniness of capitalist culture, state-sponsored violence, and the expectations of their parents.

Hale’s most effective case studies include her chapters on the beatniks, blues followers, New Left Marxists, and folk revivalists who participated in the prevailing counterculture of the 1960s and the creation of their own culture of cool. These groups simultaneously exploited the music, culture, and experiences of black Americans to assuage their own anxiety and yearning for self-determination and authenticity. Hale points to J.D. Salinger, Jack Kerouac, Elvis Presley, and even Bob Dylan as examples of this appropriation of authenticity where white Americans crafted new identities in accordance with the experiences and culture of the oppressed black community they hoped to emulate. Similarly, Hale illuminates how white members of the New Left participated in the Civil Rights Movement out of more than political solidarity. Many white New Left members viewed the movement as an opportunity to transform their own lives into something meaningful and romanticized the Southern experience of black Americans as authentically beautiful.

African American and white supporters of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party in front of the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, NJ, 1964 (via Wikimedia)

Hale’s book investigates a historically relevant question of how and why white Americans romanticize and appropriate the experiences of the outsider to find meaning and freedom in their own lives. The romance of the outsider has never left white middle class American minds and Hale’s work uncovers the damage this romanticism has had on material efforts to achieve equality. White fantasies of the black experience allowed the disillusioned white middle class to forge an imaginary bond with the “outsider” and thereby solidified their own status as outsiders as well. However, this one-sided bond that occurred in the white imaginary prevented white Americans from working with actual Africans Americans to achieve equality. This romanticism of the outsider, while it served the yearning of unsatisfied white Americans, did nothing to combat the oppression and inequality the actual outsider faced in the 1950s and 1960s.

Hale’s last chapter echoes an even graver political threat that dominates American electoral politics – the widespread adoption of the ideology of the oppressed outsider by overwhelmingly non-oppressed groups. The adoption of this identity of outsider has evolved since the 1960s, but has been a staple in parts of the New Right and conservative politics for decades. Just as evangelicals in the 1960s and 1970s entered the political sphere as outsiders with a mission to reclaim the moral issues liberals of the era politicized, Tea Party activists and recent Donald Trump supporters have also declared themselves outsiders aiming to recover the “truth” in a world dominated by lying liberals, power hungry elites, and news media phonies. A Nation of Outsiders opens the door to further analysis concerning the political viability of the ideology and identity of the outsider in white politics. Scholars must be aware of how political candidates and their constituents romanticize the notion of the outsider as it provides insight into voters’ perceptions of their social, political, and economic place in the world. What drives this alienation of members of the white middle class? How have they come to understand themselves as outsiders, oppressed, and marginalized in a world where their economic resources and political power indicate otherwise?

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Diana Bolsinger reviews The End of White Christian America by Robert P. Jones
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Andean Tapestry: Colonial Latin America Through Objects (No. 3)

Backstrap Loom, ca. 600-1476 AD Peru, Pachacamac, Gravefield I; William Pepper Peruvian Expedition; Max Uhle, subscription of Phebe A. Hearst, 1897; University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archeology and Antrhopology

Irene Smith’s exhibit offers a survey of weaving techniques in pre-colonial and colonial Peru and shows how the natives sought to keep forms of local weaving in the context of new looms and new fibers. The result were fabrics that dazzle but also reveal long-lasting Andean continuities in the midst of rapid technological change.

More from the Colonial Latin America Through Objects series:

Of Merchants and Nature by Diana Heredia López
Nanban Art by John Monsour

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Brittany Erwin reviews The Archaeology and History of Colonial Mexico by Enrique Rodríguez Alegría
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