Natalie Cincotta, Author at Not Even Past

Crossing Borders: Modernity, Ideology, and Culture in Russia and the Soviet Union by Michael David-Fox (2015)

One of the pivotal issues that western historians of the USSR have debated since its collapse more than 25 years ago is its so-called “exceptionalism.” That is, to what extent should the history of the Soviet Union be considered as but one variation of the remarkable process of state modernization in the twentieth century, and to what extent might we posit a distinctively “Soviet modernity,” distinguished by its communist ideology, its party-based state, and its social and/or nationalist “neo-traditionalism.” In Crossing Borders, Michael David-Fox, a prolific scholar and one of the founding editors of the field-defining journal Kritika, brings together significantly revised versions of earlier publications with new material in a volume that takes aim at a comprehensive, holistic reframing of these much-debated questions. The very sensible central thrust is that we should and can transcend the binarisms that have developed — modernity vs. neo-traditionalism, exceptionalism vs. likeness. As he asserts in an ambitious introduction that sets a frame for the disparate chapters that follow, there is a way to “thread the needle” between the various interpretations that will allow scholars to arrive at richer understandings.

David-Fox determinedly asserts that the way out of historiographical and theoretical conundrums is not to abandon the terms of debate but rather to expand them. In particular, he suggests, that the way out of the impasse between proponents of Soviet modernity and neo-traditionalism is to utilize the concept of “multiple modernities,” which can resolve or at least contain some of the paradoxes. Of course, deconstructing binaries to arrive at a more sophisticated synthesis is not in itself a radically novel solution to historical debates, and the author strives to avoid oversimplifications of the numerous scholarly works that he examines. Threading the needle requires more than simply saying that the answer lies “in between,” and to his credit David-Fox claims to be aiming at that (or, more precisely, beginning the process of doing that) in compiling these essays and articles.

1924 pro-literacy poster by Alexander Rodchenko (via Wikipedia)

The chief features of this interpretation include a rigorous examination of what is denoted by modernity, and, in particular by an approach that is not merely comparative but aggressively transnational. Any evaluation of Soviet modernity must be done not only via comparison with multiple other modernities (and not just a stereotype of Western modernity), but also through an empirical examination of international interactions at the time. Focused primarily, but not exclusively, on the interwar period, David-Fox aims to demonstrate – in work building on his previous scholarship, in particular the recent Showcasing the Great Experiment – that patterns of influence were complex and multifaceted and cannot be reduced to a simple question of imitation. This volume aims not to resolve these complexities but rather to show empirically how intricate these interactions could be, and thus to suggest the need for still further examination by the field.

The book aims to “cross borders” not just between nations but also among various subdisciplines and approaches. In a new essay entitled “The Blind Men and the Elephant,” David-Fox examines definitions of “ideology,” asserting that for a concept so ubiquitous it has been curiously undertheorized by Soviet historians. This explication of six different modalities for studying ideology (as doctrine, as worldview, as historical concept, as discourse, as performance, as faith, and in the mirror of French revolutionary and Nazi historiography) offers a useful, concise, and comprehensive overview. Together with the examination of Soviet modernity and a significantly revised and expanded version of the author’s well-known “What is the Cultural Revolution?” the historiographical and theoretical chapters might offer, among other things, a precise introduction to the basic questions of Soviet history for graduate students and general readers.

Poster of the experimental Soviet silent film “Man with a Movie Camera,” 1929 (via Wikimedia Commons)

The other major new inquiry in this volume is “The Intelligentsia, the Masses, and the West,” which provides a sort of précis of the author’s own original interpretation of what he calls “intelligentsia-statist modernity.” Impressively integrating the work of a diverse array of scholars, David-Fox posits that Russian/Soviet modernity was marked by “the way long-standing traditions of state-sponsored transformation were wedded to Westernized elites’ attempts to overcome Russian backwardness, and they all revolved around enlightenment from above and a search for alternatives to the market.” At the center of this conception is the well-known impulse of the Russian intelligentsia, the Kulturträger tradition, to disseminate “culture” to the masses. Here and in the revised version of his piece on the Communist Academy and the Academy of Sciences included later in the volume, David-Fox studiously avoids reducing the complexities and paradoxes of the Soviet integration of long-standing intelligentsia traditions. At the same time, in a book that strives to analyze and deconstruct major interpretative categories (modernity, ideology, etc.), it might be argued that this essay reifies a notion of “the intelligentsia” that is not sufficiently complicated. From at least the turn of the century, intelligentsia conceptions had been debated and contested, so that the original, more integral understanding had already been broken down. While there were undoubted strong étatist and tutelary propensities among the Russian/Soviet intellectual classes, there were also contradictory tendencies, including anti-intelligentsia sentiment and debates over fundamental concepts of social and intellectual life.

But it is clear that both this essay and the rest of the volume’s impressively erudite analysis represent far from the author’s last word on these matters. One expects an even more comprehensive framework will be built on these thought-provoking foundations.

You may also like:

Rebecca Johnston discusses policing Soviet art in early Soviet Russia
Julia Mickenberg on American girls in red Russia
Jessica Werneke reviews Consuming Russia: Popular Culture, Sex, and Society since Gorbachev ed. Adele Marie Barker (1999)

Ideological Origins of a Cold Warrior: John Foster Dulles and his Grandfather

by Paula O’Donnell

Dulles with President Eisenhower in 1956 (via Wikipedia)

To experts on the history of U.S. foreign policy, the Dulles brothers’ service during Dwight D. Eisenhower’s presidency marks an important watershed in the evolution of American interventionism. In the context of brewing conflict with the Soviet Union, Eisenhower’s administration aimed to protect developing countries of the “Third World” from being converted to Communism. However, as recovery efforts following World War II mobilized international diplomatic efforts to broker world peace, U.S. officials were reluctant to deploy troops abroad. John Foster Dulles was Eisenhower’s secretary of state during this time. His brother, Allen Dulles, served as director of the recently founded Central Intelligence Agency. Together, the Dulles brothers used this agency to eliminate perceived communist threats in the Third World through covert operations, establishing a powerful precedent for “regime change” as foreign policy strategy.

What fewer scholars and policy enthusiasts know is that the Dulles brothers were products of an elite political family with a strong internationalist tradition. John Foster Dulles’ personal papers, stored at his alma mater Princeton University, exhibit how the eldest brother’s upbringing and family network, consisting of diplomats, missionaries, and international lawyers, influenced his developing world view. This is particularly the case with his maternal grandfather, John W. Foster, a prominent patriarchal presence during Dulles’ childhood. Ideological continuity between Foster and his oldest grandson is evident in their comparable career paths, their methods of preparing subsequent male generations, and their published texts and speeches which analyze the role of U.S. foreign policy in international affairs.

John W. Foster, Secretary of State under President Benjamin Harrison (via Wikipedia)

Dulles’ personal papers suggest that he modeled his career after that of his grandfather. Foster had also served as secretary of state, at the end of President Benjamin Harrison’s administration. He inhabited this role during the fall of the Hawaiian monarchy in January 1893, an event that led to U.S. annexation of the archipelago. Foster then left political office to pioneer U.S. corporate legal practices and distinguish himself as an international diplomat. Notably, he mediated negotiations at the close of the First Sino-Japanese War and drafted the Treaty of Shimonoseki, signed on April 17, 1895. Dulles’ career subsequently followed a similar path. He also became an international corporate lawyer, partially through his grandfather’s connections, at the elite law firm Sullivan and Cromwell LLC. As partner at this firm, Dulles represented powerful U.S. corporations with vested interests abroad, such as the United Fruit Company. Dulles simultaneously cultivated a long-term career in international diplomacy, serving as secretary to the Economic Reparations Committee at the Treaty of Versailles and later as delegate to the San Francisco Conference which established the United Nations.

Continuity is also evident in the two figures’ strategies for patriarchal mentorship. While Dulles was still a child, he spent his summers at his grandfather’s house on Henderson Harbor in upstate New York. Very early most mornings, Foster took his grandsons fishing. On these excursions, the Dulles brothers learned how to catch their own lunch and cook over an open fire. They ate as they listened to their grandfather’s stories of his experiences abroad, often in the company of distinguished guests such as William Howard Taft, Andrew Carnegie, or Bernard Baruch. These trips taught the boys that self-reliance was a masculine virtue while, at the same time, integrating them into a network of white male elites. Dulles later applied similar methods to raising his sons, taking them on month-long sailing voyages up the Canadian coastline, where they learned to navigate by starlight and catch their own food. For both Foster and Dulles, traveling by water was a fruitful exercise in battling uncontrollable elements, which they believed benefitted male members of subsequent generations.

Eleanor Roosevelt, Adlai Stevenson, and John Foster Dulles at the United Nations in New York City (via National Archives and Records Administration)

Dulles’ and Foster’s published texts and speeches exhibit their shared value of an activist, and interventionist, American foreign policy. Foster had written two books on U.S. diplomacy, both treasured by his progeny. The first of these, A Century of American Diplomacy: Being a Brief Review of the Foreign Relations of the United States 1776-1876, published in 1900, recounted a diplomatic history of the United States, with emphasis on the functions of the state department. Foster exhibited profound enthusiasm for the foresighted genius of the founding fathers and for the “honorable position” characteristic of U.S. diplomacy. The closing chapter examined the importance of the Monroe Doctrine to U.S. foreign policy. President James Monroe first articulated the Doctrine in an address to Congress in 1823. It established U.S. rights to exclusive influence over the whole Western Hemisphere in response to colonial ambitions of the Holy Alliance (Russia, Prussia, and Austria) following the decline of the Spanish Empire. Like his grandfather, Dulles viewed the Monroe Doctrine, as the “most essential expression” of American foreign policy. During the Cold War, Dulles drew parallels between the threat of the Holy Alliance and the one posed by the Soviet Union. Despite writing at dramatically different times in U.S. history, both Dulles and his grandfather interpreted the Monroe Doctrine to sanction American use of force in the interest of preventing the spread of European political influence.

Dulles’ history goes to show how an analysis of his service as secretary of state, or the C.I.A. operations he sanctioned, are not sufficient for understanding how U.S. policymakers justified intervention during the Cold War. The secretary’s relationship with his grandfather and his understanding of U.S. history shaped his worldview in significant ways. It is important to pay attention to the durability of intellectual and ideological influences that inform the most prominent individuals who execute foreign policy in the United States. This is especially so since American society still grapples with ideological convictions regarding gender, class, religion and nationality that echo sentiments advanced by Dulles and his contemporaries. Such intellectual and ideological understandings will continue to have a dramatic impact on the U.S. foreign and domestic policies. Scholars would do well to recognize and wrestle with the durability of these beliefs, if they believe history might help Americans understand the many ramifications sure to emerge as a result.

You may also like:

Mark Battjes reviews Worldmaking: The Art and Science of American Diplomacy by David Milne (2015)
Michelle Reeves reviews For the Soul of Mankind: The United States, the Soviet Union, and the Cold War by Melvyn P. Leffler (2008)
Mark A. Lawrence on the Soviet view of U.S. intentions after WWII

Collecting the World: Hans Sloane and the Origins of the British Museum by James Delbourgo (2017)

by Diana Heredia López

A biography of an English scientist during the early Enlightenment may not seem like cutting edge scholarship.. In Collecting the World, James Delbourgo tells the multifaceted story of Hans Sloane, an Englishman who amassed a collection of nearly eighty thousand natural objects and curiosities through his work in natural history, commerce, and medicine. Before he died in 1753, Sloane laid the foundations for the establishment of the first national and free museum in the world, the British Museum. Sloane is hardly ever remembered as a harbinger of the Enlightenment and much less as a serious scientist because his diverse activities and interests are impossible to capture in a single modern scientific discipline and because the eclectism of Sloane’s collection seems to lack scientific rigor. Still, Sloane’s vast collection was so impressive that it was purchased by the Royal Family to transform it into the first public museum of the world. To understand these contradictory perceptions of Sloane, Delbourgo constructs a biography that links all Sloane’s seemingly disparate activities to his ever-lasting desire to collect the world. Delbourgo is able to merge the social and personal motivations behind collecting objects while also explaining the political and religious frameworks under which natural history was practiced in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century.

For Delbourgo it is equally important to explore both Sloane’s collections — which are now scattered through various English institutions — and the world where he constructed them. He takes the reader from Sloane’s modest origins in Ireland to London where he established his medical practice and then to Jamaica, the island that saw the naturalist and entrepreneur Sloane emerge. Delbourgo goes back to Bloomsbury to explain how Sloane consolidated his reputation as a medical practitioner, became president of the Royal Society and the Royal College of Physicians while amassing a great fortune through the sugar plantations he owned from his wife’s dowry. He continued to expand his burgeoning collection by establishing networks of collectors all over the world who would send him exotic objects and natural curiosities. This of course, would not have been possible without the endorsement of the British Empire.

Sir Hans Sloane (via Wikimedia Commons)

Even though this story might remind us of Carl Linnaeus or other eighteenth-century collectors, Delbourgo is careful to analyze the motives behind Sloane’s desire to collect. His ultimate goal was not necessarily to classify all of the objects in his collection but rather show the vast but finite world that God had laid out for human use. At the same time, Sloane was also interested in collecting the infinite variations that could exist within the same type of object. It is also worth noting that Sloane collected amulets and superstitious paraphernalia to actively demonstrate his antipathy towards magic and idolatry. Delbourgo explains how this vision was connected to a specific form of Christianity that battled against superstition and was perfectly compatible with the mechanical view of the world often associated with modern science.

Overall, Delbourgo is careful to situate Sloane and the importance of his heritage without glorifying him. The clearest example of this, and perhaps one of the most relevant contributions of the book is the emphasis on the role of slavery and Sloane’s contact with black and indigenous populations in shaping his medical and natural history practices. This allowed him not only to establish his medical career back in London but also to begin a collection of people, indeed Sloane’s interest in the study of black bodies persisted for many years. Moreover, his medical contact with slaves and natives in Jamaica also opened the possibility to collect objects from them.

Hans Sloane’s Nautilius Shell housed at the Natural History Museum in London (By Paul Hudson, via Flickr)

Collecting the World is written with vivid detail and includes several color plates of some of the most striking objects of Sloane’s collections such as a carved nautilus shell or a portable Buddhist shrine.. This book will appeal readers who are collectors themselves or museum lovers. It will definitely put the apparently innocuous and romantic activity of collecting and appreciating museum objects into a different perspective.

Also by Diana Heredia López on Not Even Past:

Of Merchants and Nature: Colonial Latin America Through Objects (No. 1)

You may also like:

Cynthia Talbot reviews The History of the World in 100 Objects
Jorge Cañizares Esguerra reviews Shores of Knowledge: New World Discoveries and the Scientific Imagination
Maria José Afanador-Llach reviews Colour of Paradise: The Emerald in the Age of Gunpowder Empires

King: Pilgrimage to the Mountaintop by Harvard Sitkoff (2009)

by Tiana Wilson

As we approach the life and legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr. on the 50^th anniversary of his death, April 4, 1968, it is crucial to appreciate King entirely. Beyond his push for nonviolent direct action and racial integration, we should recognize his expansive human rights activism, anti-war advocacy, and ground-breaking thinking.

Harvard Sitkoff’s biography of King shows him as a heroic but flawed leader and emphasizes his radicalism rather than his pacifism. Sitkoff does not shy away from King’s shortcomings. He brings attention to King’s adultery and highlights the criticism he faced from others within the movement. His portrait of King shows him to be a man who made mistakes, feared death, belittled women, gambled, partied, and often compromised. However, it was also clear that King was intelligent, strategic, pious, courageous, radical, well spoken, passionate, and loving at heart. Sitkoff argues that King’s view of the civil rights movement shifted. At the beginning of the movement, the goal was to end Jim Crow and obtain voting rights. However, after King’s experience in the urban north, he knew that the civil rights movement needed to expand to include economic and job security as well as housing reform. By the end of King’s life he was a firm advocate of anti-colonialism and opponent of war and he took a global perspective: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. after meeting with President Johnson to discuss civil rights, at the White House, 1963. Source: Warren K. Leffler, Library of Congress

Stikoff’s book is organized around the key events that shaped King’s leadership. The most compelling argument Stikoff makes is that King was an activist first and then a preacher. He argues that King resisted becoming a pastor and only decided to go into ministry because he knew that it was the best strategic method to get his political agenda across. However, I do think that King was deeply spiritual and used religion to strengthen himself as he became the symbol of the movement and a target of its opponents. King also knew that the south was deeply religious and biblical references would appeal to his supporters. On the other hand, using the black church as the center point for the movement worked in the south but was unsuccessful in the north. De facto segregation complicated urban issues in Chicago and New York, where nonviolent direct action was not as effective as it had been in the south. Shadowing King’s life as the leader of the civil rights movement was was the infamous harassment of the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover. The FBI’s strict surveillance of King was made prevalent throughout the book, which shows how the system that was supposed to protect King was actually out to destroy him.

Reexamining the legacy and life of Martin Luther King gives us insight into the ways that social movements can be used to make radical changes in the United States and the ways those changes can make their leaders into targets.

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1863 in 1963 by Laurie Green
Stokely Carmichael: A Life by Peniel Joseph
Matt Tribbe reviews Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice

Historical Perspectives on Marshall (dir: Reginal Hudlin, 2017)

By Luritta DuBois

When Hollywood media websites announced Chadwick Boseman would portray Thurgood Marshall in December 2015, people immediately slammed director Reginald Hudlin’s choice to select an actor who did not share Marshall’s phenotype. Boseman is brown skinned with 4b hair, while Thurgood Marshall was light skinned and had a 3b curl pattern. Those vast differences, the critics held, rendered the movie inauthentic because Thurgood Marshall benefited from light skinned privilege his entire life. Some even thought Boseman’s slender physique made him the wrong choice. I chuckled at that observation knowing that a glance at the movie’s synopsis and a Google image search would have easily cleared up their confusion. All jokes aside, I initially reacted to the news with curiosity and not disdain. I wanted to know whether a filmmaker could truthfully tell Marshall’s story without focusing on how colorism worked in his favor. In order to give a fair response to this question, I examined a variety of materials: a summary of the film; Chadwick Boseman’s interview on Jimmy Kimmel Live! (air date June 21, 2017), biographies Devil in the Grove by Gilbert King and Thurgood Marshall: American Revolutionary by Juan Williams; and the movie Marshall. I decided the scope of the film made such an undertaking possible.

The debate over light skin privilege stems from a practice common in the United States known as colorism, a form of discrimination in which people are treated differently based on the social meanings attached to skin color. This type of behavior is manifested in the preferential treatment given to African Americans who physically approximate whiteness. For example, in the early 20^th century, brown paper bag and blue vein tests constituted an integral part of the application process for some Black institutions and organizations (i.e., universities, sororities, and fraternities) that afforded members opportunities to improve their social-economic situation. The ideal candidate had the following physical features: lighter than or the same color as a brown paper bag and visible veins because of light skin. People censuring Boseman’s casting most harshly argue that the color caste in America enabled Thurgood Marshall to accomplish important milestones like earning a law degree from Howard University, being a successful NAACP litigator (Marshall won 29 out of the 32 cases he tried before the Supreme Court), and becoming the first African American Supreme Court Justice.

While the complexion critique is valid, one cannot reduce Thurgood Marshall’s life to benefiting from light skin privilege. Devil in the Grove and Thurgood Marshall: American Revolutionary show there were limitations to his color entitlements, the most striking example being Marshall’s attempted lynching in Columbia, Tennessee. In 1946, the NAACP sent Marshall to Columbia to defend two African American men accused of rioting and attempting to murder white law enforcement officers (Zephaniah Alexander Looby and Maurice Weaver served as co-counselors). Following their acquittal, an angry group of local whites, including some police officers, apprehended Marshall and his colleagues, but chose to lynch Marshall instead of the dark skinned Looby and Weaver, who was white. Fortunately for the Civil Rights icon, Looby’s protestations and the sound reasoning of a local magistrate stopped Marshall’s execution. This incident was one of many where Marshall’s French Vanilla hue could not protect him from experiencing the racial violence (real and threatened) and discrimination that come with being Black in America.

Thurgood Marshall in 1957 (via Library of Congress)

Since Marshall focuses on the areas in Thurgood Marshall’s life where colorism played an insignificant role, casting a dark-skinned actor does not dilute the story. The movie introduces us to Marshall’s personality, provides a glimpse into how he executed his legal genius, and sheds light on the challenges he faced as a Black lawyer. In exploring those aspects of Marshall’s life, the movie’s objective is not to deify him, but to bring him down to earth and capture his essence when he was a young lawyer for the NAACP. The viewer sees this in a story centered on one criminal case he and Connecticut based attorney Samuel Friedman tried in 1941. The previous year, white Greenwich socialite Eleanor Strubing accused her Black American chauffeur and butler, Joseph Spell, of rape. She also claimed he attempted to kill her by throwing her into the Kensico Reservoir. The NAACP took on the case not only to ensure an innocent man received a fair trial, but also to protect other African American domestic workers in Connecticut. After Strubing’s allegations, the NAACP heard rumors of Northern white families firing their servants because they feared the presence of a sexual predator in their home. Given that domestic labor was the main source of income for African Americans in Connecticut, the NAACP felt compelled to prove Spell’s innocence. Lastly, high profile criminal cases expanded the organization’s membership and increased funding, which the NAACP needed in the early 1940s.

Although Marshall, like all Hollywood films based on historical events, took a few liberties, the Associated Press noted that the movie was, for the most part, faithful to the facts. This is especially true when it comes to the film’s depiction of Thurgood Marshall’s character, his skills as a litigator, and the hardships he endured. Gilbert King and Juan Williams describe him as folksy, charming, and always laughing. Looking at Marshall’s fondness for joking, King recounts a time when, after a legal victory, he opened a bottle of whiskey in the NAACP’s headquarters and amused his co-workers with impersonations of judges, opposing counsel, and dimwitted “uncle Tom” witnesses. In the movie, he is unpretentious and alluring in his interactions with everyone from the Connecticut Black family who hosted him to a woman he met in a local bar. Screenwriters Michael Koskoff and Jacob Koskoff (father and son) and director Reginald Hudlin also showcase Marshall’s comical side in the scenes where Sam Friedman picks him up from the Bridgeport train station and when both approached an angry group of whites in front of the courthouse. At the train station, Marshall asked Friedman to carry his luggage. Upon picking them up, the latter inquired if the suitcases contained cement because of their weight. Marshall, whose back is facing Friedman, answers “guns” with a devilish smile. He quickly ended the prank and assured his co-counselor that the luggage only had law books. Once the trial started, a mob who supported Mrs. Strubing greeted Marshall and Friedman, who was Jewish, with posters that had racist caricatures of them. Marshall walks up to a person holding a sign, turns to Friedman with a smirk and replies, “that doesn’t look anything like me, does it?”

Thurgood Marshall and other members of the N.A.A.C.P. legal defense team who worked on the Brown v. Board of Education case (via The New York Public Library)

Even though Marshall has light hearted moments, Hudlin and the Koskoffs balance the comedy with serious events. As a result, Marshall does not come across as a jester, but a layered man who could simultaneously joke about racism and use his legal expertise to diligently seek justice for wrongly accused Black Americans. The jury selection scene stands out in illuminating this quality about him. Friedman wanted to dismiss a woman because he felt the juror’s southern roots and gender made her biased towards Mrs. Strubing. Marshall, however, viewed those characteristics as unimportant. Instead he carefully examined the juror’s body language during her interview and noticed she reacted unpleasantly to Lorin Willis, the head prosecutor, but gave non-verbal signals that showed she valued Friedman’s opinions. Eventually, Marshall convinced his co-counselor to keep her and the decision boded well for them. Overall, the movie shows that it was Marshall’s keen observations of the evidence (depositions and the physical landscape where Spell allegedly tried to kill Strubing) that planted seeds of doubt in the minds of the all-white jury. You not only see the future Supreme Court Justice’s talents at work, but also an incredible amount of charisma.

Lastly, the film portrays the violence Marshall endured as a Black man on a Civil Rights crusade. In one of the opening scenes, a gang of white men fired gunshots to intimidate him as he left Hugo, Oklahoma after trying a sensational case. Later on during the Spell trial, two white men who sympathized with Eleanor Strubing assaulted him at a bar he visited to relax following a taxing day.

U.S. Supreme Court, 1976 (via Library of Congress)

Despite the effort that went into attending to the facts, Marshall is less than perfect. The main weaknesses are the underdevelopment of Marshall’s relationship with his first wife Vivian “Buster” Burey (Marshall became a widower in 1955 when she died from cancer) and the cursory glance given to Marshall’s performance in the courtroom. The viewer learns Buster had multiple miscarriages and Thurgood’s legal work kept him away from her for long periods. Since the movie aims to humanize Marshall, it could have benefited from more attention to how he and Buster coped with their fertility problems. Moreover, an in-depth depiction of Marshall’s struggle to reconcile his demanding job with his responsibilities as a husband would have given the audience a better understanding of the man behind the myth. Hudlin and the Koskoffs could have resolved the film’s second shortcoming by extending the scene where he represents W.D. Lyons, a black man coerced, through torture, into confessing he murdered a white family in Hugo, Oklahoma. In the movie, Sam Friedman talks during the Spell trial because the judge gagged Marshall. Although we see Marshall masterfully coordinate the defense’s strategy, the movie does not thoroughly show how he excelled at cross examining witnesses and presenting evidence to the jury. This was a missed opportunity: during Lyons’ case, Marshall’s skills as a trial lawyer were so great that local whites developed sympathy for the defendant and found exculpatory information for the NAACP’s lead attorney.

With all its flaws, Marshall is worth seeing. Chadwick Boseman deftly captures the spirit of Thurgood Marshall described in Gilbert King and Juan William’s biographies. Furthermore, actors Josh Gad and Sterling K. Brown give strong performances as Sam Friedman and Joseph Spell. In addition to being an enjoyable, well-acted legal drama, Marshall has value because it peels back the mythic veil surrounding Thurgood Marshall and gives viewers an introduction to the man. For those interested in Marshall’s life beyond his most noteworthy achievements, Brown v. Board of Education and becoming the first African American Supreme Court Justice, I recommend Marshall, Devil in the Grove, and Thurgood Marshall: American Revolutionary.

You may also like:

History Calling: LBJ and Thurgood Marshall on the Telephone
Jennifer Eckel reviews the HBO film Thurgood (2011)
12 Years a Slave and the Difficulty of Dramatizing the “Peculiar Institution”

Of Merchants and Nature: Colonial Latin America Through Objects (No. 1)

(via Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana)

This new 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.

Diana Heredia López’s exhibit centers on the Florentine Codex, a twelve volume encyclopedia of Aztec knowledge compiled by Franciscan friars and dozens of Nahua scribes trained in the mid sixteenth century in in Latin and classical learning. These polyglot Indians surveyed the natural history of central Mexico using Pliny’s model. The latter described objects along the ways they were processed, consumed, and transformed. She focuses on Nahua agave, cotton, figs, and gourds and the fabrics and containers they engendered.

Legacies of the Vietnam War

(via Flickr)

The Ken Burns and Lynn Novick documentary The Vietnam War (2017), shown in 10 parts on PBS, once again brought a divisive and contested conflict into American living rooms. Mark A. Lawrence, Associate Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin and preeminent historian of the Vietnam War, recently wrote about what we are learning from historians’ renewed interest in the subject, especially with new scholarship based on Vietnamese sources. Last month, Lawrence discussed the legacies of the Vietnam War on a panel marking the 35th anniversary of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial at the National Archives in Washington D.C. and on a CSPAN program on the state of the war in 1967.

Watch: 35th Anniversary of the Wall

“In partnership with the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund (VVMF), we present a panel discussion about the history and legacy of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, dedicated on November 13, 1982. Participating in the discussion will be Jan Scruggs, Founder and President Emeritus (VVMF), Jim Knotts, President and CEO (VVMF), author and historian Kristin Ann Hass (Carried to the Wall: American Memory and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial), and others.”

Watch: State of the War in 1967

“Historians Mark Atwood Lawrence of the University of Texas at Austin and Lien-Hang Nguyen of Columbia University responded to viewer calls and tweets about the state of the Vietnam War in 1967, President Lyndon B. Johnson’s strategy, and the politics and motivations of the North Vietnamese government and Viet Cong guerrilla forces.”

Also by Mark A. Lawrence on Not Even Past:

Studying the Vietnam War: How the Scholarship has Changed
Must Read Books on the Vietnam War
The Prisoner of Events in Vietnam
Changing Course in Vietnam – or not
LBJ and Vietnam: A Conversation

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Aden Knaap reviews Kill Anything that Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam
Janet Davis on cultural memory and the Vietnam War
Clay Katsky reviews Kissinger’s Shadow

Nature Boy, 30 for 30 (directed by Rory Karpf, 2017)

By Chris Babits

“Nature Boy” Ric Flair at the Hulkmania Tour in Melbourne, Australia in 2009 (via Wikimedia Commons)

Growing up, I enjoyed going over to my Uncle Glenn’s house on Saturdays. In the afternoons, he and my Uncle Jeff would tune trucks and fix lawn mowers, rototillers, and other machinery. I was too young to fix anything, but I wasn’t there to help my blue-collar uncles with these tasks. I came over to watch World Championship Wrestling’s Saturday Night. It was at my uncle’s house where I was introduced to the first “heel” I’d ever root for — “The Nature Boy” Ric Flair.

Flair’s personal life is the subject of ESPN’s newest 30 for 30 documentary, “Nature Boy,” directed by Rory Karpf. Flair, the consummate showman, lived the life he portrayed on television — a stylin’, profilin’, jet flyin’, kiss stealin’, wheelin’ n’ dealin’ son-of-a-gun. In the process, Flair captured the imaginations of wrestling fans around the nation. Yet, as “Nature Boy” shows, the pressures of living this life, which included heavy drinking and sexual promiscuity, weighed on Flair. “I always wanted to be The Man,” he says early in the film. “I could never live just being a man.” The result was a string of broken marriages and devastating alcoholism and depression.

Born in 1949, Flair, whose legal name is Richard Morgan Fliehr, was adopted. He fell in love with wrestling as a child, watching it on Saturday evenings. From a young age, Flair’s interests were not those he could share with his adoptive parents. In addition to loving wrestling, Flair was into sports. His parents, on the other hand, went to the theatre. Flair’s athletic prowess was on display as a high school athlete, ultimately landing him a spot on the University of Minnesota football team. But, the academic life wasn’t for Flair. He was always looking for more attention than hitting the books could’ve provided.

After leaving the University of Minnesota, Flair attended Verne Gagne’s wrestling camp. Here, Flair learned the basics of the art of wrestling. Gagne put his recruits through the wringer. As part of training, Flair recounts having to run up 21 flights of stairs, often carrying another wrestler on his back. Then, the pair would have to wheelbarrow up the stairs. These exercises helped recruits gain the physical and cardiovascular endurance to participate in the “fake” sport of wrestling. But, Gagne’s camp had other challenges. Even “hitting the ropes” involved endless practice. If done poorly, the ropes tore the skin off the wrestlers’ arms. On top of this, Flair and others had to learn how to fall on the mat. For the first six weeks of Gagne’s camp, Flair remembered how everything was black and blue. Flair had a knack for wrestling, something immediately apparent to everyone who saw him..

Ric Flair vs. Douglas Williams (via Wikimedia Commons)

Everything was almost taken away from him when, on October 4, 1975, Flair’s life nearly ended in an airplane crash. Flair broke his back in three places; his spine was smashed together. Not being able to exercise caused Flair’s body to wither from 225 to 180 lbs. He had to start working out again if he wanted to wrestle. This experience helped Flair understand who he wanted to be as a wrestler. “When I crashed in the airplane,” Flair tells Karpf, he realized that he “wanted to be blonde and a bad guy.”

The way “Nature Boy” documents the process of inventing Ric Flair is one of the documentary’s strengths. Leslie Jacobs, Flair’s first wife, saw a noticeable change in her husband as he began to live his wrestling persona. Flair purchased the items he’d often mention in his promos. This included his own limousine and the elaborate robes that he’d wear on his way to the ring. He wasn’t shy about how much his Rolex watches or leather shoes cost. Consumerism became a key part of his wrestling and personal life. Flair’s wrestler self, according to Jacobs, “got bigger and bigger.” Wrestling, which experienced a boom in the 1980s, provided Flair the opportunity to do anything he wanted to do. Separating “The Nature Boy” from Richard Morgan Fliehr became essential for getting what he wanted out of life. “I lived my gimmick,” Flair admits.

Flair’s persona, not to mention his style of wrestling, was a natural fit in the National Wrestling Alliance (NWA) and Ted Turner’s World Championship Wrestling (WCW), both of which were marketed for blue-collared men (like my uncles) who wanted to see a fight. (What these companies presented contrasted sharply with the cartoonish gimmicks the World Wrestling Federation (now World Wrestling Entertainment) offered its young audience.) The different styles of wrestling meant that Flair could have intense — and violent — rivalries with some of the best wrestlers of the 1980s. This included longstanding feuds with Dusty Rhodes and Ricky “The Dragon” Steamboat, two of Flair’s favorite opponents. Flair’s association with NWA and WCW, though, limited him as a regional wrestler. Until he joined the WWF in the early 1990s, Flair’s fame remained restricted to parts of the South and the Midwest.

Instead of focusing on Flair’s in-ring career, “Nature Boy” spends considerable time on Flair’s weaknesses — sex and alcohol. In interviews with Karpf, Flair is open about his inability to be monogamous, claiming to have slept with as many as 10,000 women. Often, women and alcohol went hand-in-hand. Flair tells a story about how he visited a sports psychologist who asked him about his sex and drinking habits. In this confessional, Flair admitted to drinking at least 10 beers and 5 mixed drinks every day for nearly 20 years — from 1972 to 1989. During this span of time, Flair remained a functional alcoholic, showing up for his matches and remaining dedicated to the sport he loved.

Ric Flair after winning a Hardcore match in 2010 (via Wikimedia Commons)

Wrestling couldn’t provide Flair with everything he wanted. Flair’s candid about how he was never home, pretty much neglecting his children from his first two marriages. In addition, Flair’s parents were not impressed by their son’s rabid consumerism. Flair recalls how excited he was to show his parents the $2 million house he bought. Instead of being impressed, they asked why anyone would need such luxuries in their life. Despite being one of the most recognizable faces in “sports entertainment,” Flair never received the recognition he wanted from his parents.

The most devastating part of “Nature Boy” deals with the death of Flair’s son, Reid. Reid, a successful amateur wrestler, idolized his father growing up, even mimicking his father’s famous “Woo!” in WCW promos in the late-1990s. Flair fostered Reid’s interest in professional wrestling, taking him to Japan to earn some money and gain in-ring experience. Although Flair was spending time with his son, he showed another weakness — his inability to be a father. Reid was masking his problems much in the same way his father had done — with alcohol and drugs. When Reid was trying out for the WWE, Flair was told by Paul Levesque (better known as Triple H) about his son’s drug habit. Yet, Flair, a “consummate liar,” according to Levesque, couldn’t face the truth and, on March 29, 2013, Reid died from a heroin overdose. In mourning, Flair drank. It was the “[o]nly way I could get away from it,” he says.

In “Nature Boy,” Karpf fully captures the ups-and-downs that have characterized Ric Flair’s life. It’s an emotional documentary that underscores how fragile the human experience can be. As a biographical account of Ric Flair, “Nature Boy” succeeds. Still, I found myself wanting more from a 90-minute film. There’s mention of Flair bouncing back-and-forth between WCW and WWE, but “Nature Boy” offers little regarding Flair’s status as a wrestler in the 1990s, a period where these two wrestling companies duked it out in their famed Monday Night Wars. In addition, there’s little about the homosociality of wrestlers. At one point in “Nature Boy,” Sting, a WCW icon, remembers, “I’ve never seen a guy with his pants pulled down more than Ric Flair.” With all the mention of “locker room talk” over the past fifteen months, “Nature Boy” never really answers the main question it raises: What is a man? Additional commentary on this point, including more pointed questions from Karpf to Flair about manhood and masculinity, would’ve made a good documentary even better.

Also by Christopher Babits on Not Even Past:

“Doing” History in the Modern U.S. Survey: Teaching With and Analyzing Academic Articles
Finding Hitler (in all the Wrong Places?)
The Rise of Liberal Religion by Matthew Hedstrom (2013)
Encountering America: Humanistic Psychology, Sixties Culture, and the Shaping of the Modern Self by Jessica Grogan (2012)
Another perspective on the Texas Textbook Controversy

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Remembering Willie “El Diablo” Wells and Baseball’s Negro League by Edward Shore
Unsportsmanlike Conduct: College Football and the Politics of Rape by Jessica Luther
Watching Soccer for the Very First Time in the American West by Mark Sheaves

Demystifying “Cool:” A Brief History

by Kate Grover

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

When I was nineteen, I was bestowed with some of the highest praise a person can receive.

It happened at a rehearsal for The Vagina Monologues (go figure…) when some cast members I hadn’t met approached me for the first time:

“You’re Kate, right? Cool Kid Kate?”
“What?”
“Cool Kid Kate. There’s another Kate in the cast, so we’ve been calling you that to know which one we’re talking about.”

I was stunned. “Wow. Thank you,” was all I could say. We talked for a few more minutes, but at that point, I had completely checked out of the conversation. The compliment pinballed around my brain, igniting pleasure centers that I didn’t even know existed.

Cool kid Kate. Cool kid Kate. Ohmigosh…that is so cool!

This anecdote highlights a more-or-less universal truth: cool—as a concept, a descriptor, and a category—is potent force. For me, hearing someone say I was cool was much-needed validation, reassurance that the way I was living, acting, and being in that moment was acceptable. Better than acceptable—cool!

But while I had no doubt what cool meant to me, it remains an elusive concept. What is the mysterious power of cool? And where does it come from?

Believe it or not, scholars have been asking these questions for the last thirty years. Since the late-1980s, several writers have attempted to define cool and position it as a distinctly American concept. In the 1940s, African-American jazz musicians first popularized cool as a way of describing both the new, more restrained style of jazz and a form of emotional and aesthetic self-possession. For example, jazz saxophonist Lester Young, the figure scholars most widely cite as the first to bring cool into American vernacular, used the phrase “I’m cool” to communicate being in control and relaxed. Cool was different from hip, another staple in the lingo of African-American jazz culture, which meant being streetwise and aware of new trends and ideas.

Lester Young in New York, 1946 (via Flickr)

Though cool and hip have similar roots, it is important to distinguish these two concepts and validate their specific meanings in postwar African American culture. At the same time, it is also important to recognize that, for many people in decades past, cool and hip have come to mean the same thing: what is new, what is now, and what’s in vogue. Consequently, some of the early scholars studying cool have used the term in different ways. Two of the first major studies to explore ideas about coolness, by Richard Majors and Janet Mancini Billson, and by Peter N. Stearns use cool to connote a specific way of being—a usage akin to the meaning of cool promoted by 1940’s jazz artists. Conversely, Thomas Frank and Susan Fraiman rely on a formulation of cool that reflects its conflation with hip. While these early texts provided the groundwork for later studies, their diverging approaches and lack of consensus on cool’s origins and function in American life meant that cool remained an obscure area of scholarly research for quite some time.

Joel Dinerstein and Frank H. Goodyear’s 2014 book American Cool, has played a major role in popularizing, legitimizing, and catalyzing the scholarly study of cool. Published as a companion to the exhibition Dinerstein and Goodyear curated for the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, American Cool examines what it means for someone to be cool. The study introduces cool as an American concept, theorizes how cool acts as a marker of distinction, and showcases portrait photography of “cool figures” throughout American history—the same portraits that appeared in exhibition. But most importantly, the study outlines the ways these cool figures (mainly iconic politicians, musicians, or actors) provide us with new, innovative ways of being. According to Dinerstein, cool people are important to Americans because they teach us methods for living life that we would have not otherwise known. Cool figures are special among ordinary people because they take what other cool people before them have done and transform that into something new for subsequent generations. People emulate cool figures and new forms of coolness develop that provide even more people with models for being that enliven and inspire. Cool, in this construction, is a way of describing someone you admire for being and doing something you could not do and be on your own. This explains, perhaps, why the quippy compliment “Cool Kid Kate” meant so much to me.

The American Cool exhibition and its glossy-yet-scholarly coffee-table book companion attracted media attention and public interest to the study of cool. In particular, news outlets focused on Joel Dinerstein, the educator who had been teaching college courses on cool decades before the American Cool exhibition. Dinerstein has subsequently become the most prominent—and in-demand—scholar working on cool today. In 2014, writers at TIME consulted Dinerstein for their “coolest person of the year” series. A couple years later, the fashion brand Coach asked Dinerstein to write a book celebrating the company’s 75^th anniversary. This year, Dinerstein published the first cultural history of cool in the Cold War era, The Origins of Cool in Postwar America. As the title suggests, this nearly 400-page text is American cool’s origin story and gives the most comprehensive research on cool’s roots to date.

But the study of cool is far from complete. There are many more questions to ask, especially about what cool means to different groups of people in the U.S. today. Is cool still important to people? How does cool change in different environments? Who gets to be cool, and why? The answers to these questions promise to reveal major insights about American life and culture.

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Watch: The Wider Arc of Revolution: The Global Impact of 1917 (Part II)

To commemorate the centenary of the Russian Revolution, the UT Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies held an international conference entitled, “The Wider Arc of Revolution: The Global Impact of 1917.”

The second keynote speech was given by Professor Lisa Kirschenbaum, Professor of History at West Chester University. Professor Kirschenbaum has published three books, including: Small Comrades: Revolutionizing Childhood in Soviet Russia, 1917-1932; The Legacy of the Siege of Leningrad, 1941-1995: Myth, Memories, and Monuments; and International Communism and the Spanish Civil War: Solidarity and Suspicion.

Watch a recording of Professor Kirschenbaum’s keynote here.

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