Natalie Cincotta, Author at Not Even Past

Film Review – A View From the Bridge (Directed by Sidney Lumet, 1962)

A View from the Bridge is the story of an Italian American longshoreman named Eddie who informs on two of his wife’s relatives, illegal immigrants Marco and Rodolpho, in order to prevent Rodolpho from marrying his niece, Catherine. Critics of the film, and of the play by Arthur Miller on which it is based, have generally paid scant attention to the representation of migration in the story and as a result have often found the characters’ motives hard to read. Miller’s original inspiration for his “Italian tragedy” was the immediate post-WWII context, when he was immersed in the labor conflicts on the Brooklyn waterfront and made a trip to Italy to visit the families of Brooklyn longshoremen. Over the next 15 years, as is clear from many drafts of the story in the Ransom Center collection, Miller, Norman Rosten (who wrote the screenplay), and Lumet, shifted the emphasis to downplay the history of illegal Italian immigration.

This history begins in the 1920s when the United States passed a law that drastically limited the number of immigrants who could enter the United States from Italy (and elsewhere). But because crewmembers on ships arriving in American ports were given temporary shore leave, Italians began entering as sailors or as stowaways, who then remained in the United States permanently, often with the help of regular crew members. After WWII, when unemployment in Italy increased the pressure to emigrate,.immigration authorities saw these seaman-stowaways, known as “submarines,’ as a major problem. They began to screen crews for potential deserters and conduct targeted raids in immigrant communities (frequently based on tips from informants). Italian American longshoremen facilitated illegal immigration for various reasons. Some were smugglers and contractors who got the migrants off the ships and found them jobs as stevedores in exchange for portions of their pay. On the New York waterfront these fixers could function well because of the power of a longshoremen’s union to manipulate the hiring process and demand kickbacks. Around the same time Miller began working on A View From the Bridge, he wrote a screenplay also set on the Brooklyn waterfront that depicted the connection between the longshoremen’s union and illegal Italian immigration. In The Hook, a corrupt union boss attempts to maintain his power by forcing “submarines” to vote for him in a union election. Miller depicts the illegal immigrants as vulnerable, but not as passive or weak; once an Italian American longshoreman explains to them, in Italian, what is at stake—“Paisani! Is this the America you broke your backs to come to? We’re trying to live like human bein’s…We’re your brothers! We’ll protect you!…Dishonor on you if you steal my bread!…I have children! I am a family head!…You’re an honest worker, no?”—some of the submarines walk out of the union hall rather than vote against reform.

Early versions of the play that became A View from the Bridge, imply that Eddie himself may have originally come into the country as a submarine; he sees in Marco a version of his young self. The pre-film versions of the story also imply that Eddie is involved in smuggling immigrants. In these early versions, Eddie is nervous about the arrival of the cousins from the ship and his concern about informants in the neighborhood is not just dramatic irony but also fear given his own involvement in illegal immigration.

Eddie, brooding and apart from the other longshoremen, under the Brooklyn Bridge

Dialogue in the earlier versions of the play conveys a fuller account of migration and the motives of the characters. After Eddie claims that many Italian men who return home after working for several years in America find their wives have had a couple more children in their absence, Marco insists that surprises like this are few. In one early version Beatrice insists that she knows half a dozen such men with two families. Eddie and Beatrice have two children in this version of the story and there is an implication, in Eddie’s defensiveness, that he might have another family abroad. In this version of the story, Rodolpho also frankly addresses the accusation that he is using Catherine to get citizenship in the United States. Refuting the binary either-or logic used by the immigration authorities to assess the intentionality of migrants and whether they are subverting the law, Rodolpho insists that he came to America seeking economic opportunity and wants to be a citizen so that he can work, but that he also sincerely fell in love with Catherine.

Rodolpho: What is this country—a prize? That you only win on your knees? I came to America to work. The same reason he [Eddie] wants to be an American. So I can make myself better before I die…You don’t trust me! You think I only want the papers…But there are no words to say this is a lie…it’s true, when I hold you I hold America also…But if I did not love you Catherine…then I could not have kissed you for a hundred Americas….I want to be an American so that I can work and eat; I want to be your husband so that I can love. It is the same thing, Catherine, there is nothing to deny. (He smiles tenderly—and sardonically): I kiss America.

Catherine: No, you’re kissing me; I know.

Rodolpho: Both . . . Both I love. Why not? It’s no crime.

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Italian Americans quietly used marriage, adoption, and other family provisions to get around immigration restrictions. Alfieri, the attorney who narrates the story in all of the versions of Miller’s play, encapsulates the tentative and partial way that the established Italian American community challenged restrictionist immigration policy at midcentury. On the one hand, Alfieri insists that Rodolpho’s intention is unknowable and that it is no crime for him to desire to remain in the country permanently. Alfieri is also sympathetic to the desperate need to provide for a starving and sick family that drove Marco to immigrate illegally and to the hard work and sacrifices he has made since arriving. Alfieri offers to bail Marco out and delay his hearing so that he can work for a few more weeks and send additional money home. On the other hand, Alfieri doesn’t challenge Marco’s deportation—the law is the law. Alfieri accepts the divide between legal and illegal manners of entering the country. The best he can do is find selective relief in individual cases like Rodolpho’s that seem “natural” and demonstrate the ability of Italian immigrants to successfully and quickly assimilate. “We settle for half and I like it better that way,” Alfieri explains.

Lumet’s film version shifts the emphasis to focus on Eddie’s unruly emotions and threatened masculinity. The film is a story about illicit sexual desire, betrayal, and desolation, more than it is about migration and freedom. Eddie’s marriage with Beatrice is childless and sexless. Rodolpho’s passionate speech about his combined intentions is shortened. Lumet replaces the discussion of Italian women who wait and men having two families with a claustrophobic scene of the extended family around the dinner table (filmed from above and behind Eddie) and then in the crowded living room (with the camera focused on Beatrice and Marco as they watch Eddie), everyone reluctant to speak or to clap to the music lest Eddie erupt. What discussion there is revolves around Marco and Rodolpho’s travel on fishing boats before they came to America—a mobility in sharp contrast to the feeling of entrapment in the Red Hook apartment. While in the original play, Beatrice challenges a sexual double standard, she comes across in the film as simultaneously subordinated and nervous—using silly small talk as a means of defense—and demanding and unsympathetic to Eddie; she gets and takes much of the blame for all that happens. The scene in the apartment ends with Marco ominously holding a chair over Eddie’s head; Lumet captures, through paired, expressionistically lit close-ups, Eddie’s weakness and Marco’s strength. Eddie comes across as a beleaguered man trying to maintain a control as he loses it, which is emphasized by changing the ending to Eddie’s suicide (rather than his murder by Marco, as in Miller’s play).

Rodolpho and Catherine flirt, while Eddie looks on ominously

Lumet’s Eddie has a lot more to lose than Miller’s. In the beginning of the film, Eddie is far removed from illegality, violence, and dishonesty as the opening scene on the docks makes clear. Eddie is presented as a man above the dockworkers, called upon to help settle disputes, a leader, close to elder lawyer, Alfieri. Eddie’s involvement with submarine smuggling is a thing of the past; the film makes no mention, as do all the other versions of the story, of any “syndicate.” Eddie asserts his distance from submarines, telling Catherine that he came into the country “in broad daylight, on a quota.” This word is used only in the film, not in versions of the story by Miller or Rosten. In the film, Eddie is more insistent that Catherine marry up, interact with “a better class of people,” work in a lawyer’s office in a neighborhood unlike Red Hook, and look and act like a college girl, all as a testament to Eddie’s sacrifice and respectability.

In the film, Eddie’s desire for Catherine is also about a desire for her Americanness. This is perhaps best captured in a scene that Lumet invents depicting Eddie watching Catherine and Rodolpho on a date at an automat. The sound in this scene is distinctive: as we watch Rodolpho work the machine and pile up Catherine’s tray, we hear the noise of the dishes and of the restaurant but not of the couple’s banter and laughter. This perfectly captures Eddie’s feeling of being privy to but apart from an American dream. Eddie feels challenged by Rodolpho not only because Catherine loves him but also because Rodolpho—dressed in newly purchased sharp clothes, interested in music and the movies—is better in tune with the emerging culture of consumption and leisure in postwar America. Alfieri and Beatrice frequently tell Eddie he must let go and make way for the next generation. He not only resents Catherine growing up, but feels threatened by Rodolpho’s soft masculinity. He feels out of step with the new social mores and sexual freedoms of the late 1940s that seemed to undermine his authority and that would provoke resentful backlash from men like him in the 1950s. Eddie feels rootless and estranged; Lumet frequently captures this in angled close ups that make Eddie seem ominous and trapped. He is unable to be the man he used to be (a struggling provider like Marco) or to become a new one, fit for changing times (a popular and open-hearted man like Rodolpho). Eddie’s kisses of Catherine and Rodolpho are passionate attempts to achieve potency. When that doesn’t work, Eddie turns informant; Lumet marks his walk to the telephone booth to call the immigration authorities with asynchronous beating sounds, giving a sense that Eddie is simultaneously determined and not in control. As Eddie makes the call, Lumet pans out to show him in a glass cage, emphasizing that his tragedy is social.

Misery in the bedroom, where Beatrice and Eddie are estranged from their young love

Miller’s original title for the story—“The Men from Under the Sea”—emphasized illegal immigrants and submarines but his final title shifted focus to a distant observation of Eddie’s unfolding tragedy; a view from above and afar. Given the differences between the film and Miller’s original conception, the bridge seems to signify separation rather than connection and emphasizes the distance between the audience and the action on stage and screen. By invoking myth and tragedy, Miller’s play depicts migration as fundamental and universal. But in the film, Eddie foists his insecurities and illicit desire onto the migrants. Lumet’s A View from the Bridge points to how migration prompts people to draw boundaries, divide, castigate, and scapegoat, and literally fight each other. The film begins and ends with shots of the hooks used to haul cargo off of ships; in this way, Lumet shows how Eddie turns a workingman’s tool into a weapon to use against Marco. Eddie associates illegality with being “a punk”—taking and spending selfishly rather than earning and providing; stealing what others have made through hard labor, dedication, and suffering. Though the slang term punk was a general epithetic diminutive by the post WWII period, it still retained sexual connotations. The word originated as term that referred to a physically slight youth who was used sexually by an older and more powerful man in exchange for money, frequently a prostitute on the waterfront. By the 1950s, calling someone a homosexual was akin to naming him a communist. In the film, Rodolpho’s refusal to keep his head down prompts Eddie’s desire to subordinate him and thereby prove his own dominance. The film shows how anti-immigrant sentiment has less to do with migrants and more to do with the people who resent them and images of what “good immigrants” should be. All versions of the story (the plays, the screenplay, and Lumet’s film) include a short scene where a longshoreman suggests to Eddie that “we oughta leave the country and come in under the water. Then we get work.” The implication is that illegal Italian immigrants unfairly have it better than Italian American workers. This divisive mentality is far from the solidarity glimpsed in The Hook. But the longshoreman’s line also shows that hatred of the other and desire to be the other are two sides of the same coin. In 1948, when jotting down his earliest notes about what would become A View from the Bridge, Miller wrote: “One of the main cements holding this country together is the fact that everybody thinks he is being persecuted…and they deny each other. It is a massive, impossibly complicated cancelation machine.”

Historical context and biographical clues helps explain the focus of the later versions of the play and the film. It makes sense that “the syndicate” is downplayed as Miller was wary of right wing attacks on union corruption, prominent in Congressional investigations in the 1950s and in Elia Kazan’s On the Waterfront (1954), which also heroized informants. Eddie, instead, is a tragic hero; Miller tries to portray what might drive someone to inform. Part of what drove Eddie to inform was illicit sexual passion, the same kind of passion that led Miller into an affair with Marilyn Monroe and ruined his marriage. Still, there was more driving Eddie, as is clear from his reference to the quota. By the 1960s, Italian American leaders were advocating for the abolition of the existing quota system to help relatives of Italian Americans emigrate, but endorsing a new ceiling on immigration from the Western Hemisphere, and, especially, Mexico. By the time Lumet’s film came out, Italians were, already, not most people’s idea of illegal immigrants.

Arthur Miller’s manuscripts referred to here can be found in The Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin, Manuscript Collection MS-2831, container 6, folder 7; container 11, folders 13-14; and container 4, folder 3.

You may also like:

History Museums: Race, Eugenics, and Immigration in New York History Museums
Domesticating Ethnic Foods and Becoming American
Film Review of A Separation (2011)

Check out the schedule for our film series “Faces of Migration: Classic and Contemporary Films”
More on this year’s Institute for Historical Studies theme “Migration, Exile, and Displacement”

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

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 first keynote speech was given by Sheila Fitzpatrick, preeminent historian of Russia and the Soviet Union, Professor of History at The University of Sydney and Distinguished Service Professor Emerita at the University of Chicago. Professor Fitzpatrick taught at UT Austin from 1980-1989.

Click here to watch a recording of Professor Fitzpatrick’s keynote.

Empire of Cotton: A Global History by Sven Beckert (2015)

Sven Beckert places cotton at the center of his colossal history of modern capitalism, arguing that the growth of the industry was the “launching pad for the broader Industrial Revolution.” Beckert follows cotton through a staggering spatial and chronological scope. Spanning five thousand years of cotton’s history, with a particular focus on the seventeenth to twentieth centuries, Empire of Cotton is a tale of the spread of industrialization and the rise of modern global capitalism. Through emphasizing the international nature of the cotton industry, Beckert exemplifies how history of the commodity and global history are ideally suited to each other. Produced over the course of ten years and with a transnational breadth of archive material, Empire of Cotton is a bold, ambitious work that confronts challenges that many historians could only dream of attempting. The result is a popular history that is largely successful in attaining the desirable combination of being both rigorous and entertaining.

Beckert frames his history of cotton with two intertwining terms: “war capitalism” and “industrial capitalism.” Both terms lack precise definitions but Beckert generally refers to their underlying themes. A play on the term “war communism” from the Russian Civil War, “war capitalism” was a period when European statesmen and capitalists established their dominance in global cotton networks, often through violent, imperialist means of conquest and expansion. Beckert counters the notion that Europeans controlled the cotton industry as a result of scientific innovation, arguing that, “Europeans became important to the worlds of cotton not because of new inventions or superior technologies, but because of their ability to reshape and then dominate global cotton networks.” “Industrial capitalism” evokes the more discreet ways in which states intervened to protect the interests of global capitalists through more diplomatic channels, preserving the initial gains made through “war capitalism.” Neither concept is exclusive, with “war capitalism” and “industrial capitalism” continually interacting with one another and overlapping chronologically, as Beckert underscores how “industrial capitalism’s institutional innovations facilitated war capitalism’s death.”

Enslaved African Americans pick cotton in Savannah, Georgia, sometime between 1867 and 1890 (via Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Division)

Through the discussion of these two concepts, Beckert underlines the importance of forced labor, with an emphasis on slavery in particular, in the development of global capitalism. Beckert claims that “the flow of cotton from the United States to Europe and of capital in the opposite direction” was at the core of developing international trade networks. The author echoes an important and emerging argument: modern global capitalism relied upon the growth of the cotton industry, which was itself indebted to slavery, as “cotton demanded quite literally a hunt for labor.” Beckert asserts that the “physical and psychological violence of holding millions in bondage were of central importance to the expansion of cotton production in the United States and of the Industrial Revolution in Great Britain.” Empire of Cotton subsequently reads as a critique of long held complacencies about the centrality of the slave trade to the development of modern capitalism.

Beckert establishes a wide-ranging, holistic study that glides from country to country, focusing on the market of cotton rather than diving into the weeds of national specificities. One of the great strengths of macrohistory is that these works tend not to be restricted by the confines of the nation state, providing a means of escaping exceptionalism and promoting a more global approach to historical study. Expanding on such works as Sidney Mintz’s Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History and more recently Elizabeth Abbott’s Sugar: A Bittersweet History Beckert outlines a vast narrative told through the lens of a singular commodity. With regard to the history of cotton specifically, Beckert largely complements Giorgio Riello’s 2013 book Cotton: The Fabric That Made the Modern World, which traces cotton production from 1000-2000. While there is common ground between the two authors in terms of scope and a focus on the economics of the cotton industry, Beckert emphasizes the direct link between the cotton industry and the tumultuous development of modern capitalism, whereas Riello is more interested in the processes of globalization.

“The queen of industry, or the new south:” Cover illustration shows a man labeled “King Cotton” leaning against a bale of cotton and stomping on the back of a slave in 1861, textile mills spewing smoke as African Americans pick cotton in 1882, and Columbia working at a spinning machine in the middle (via Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Division)

For all its impressive qualities, however, there are certain shortcomings that should be addressed. There is a lack of conceptual engagement with violence, modern capitalism, and the Industrial Revolution, each of which merit further attention. Moreover, “war capitalism” and “industrial capitalism” are rather elusive analytical frameworks, making it difficult to directly discern between the two and their distinct utility. Additionally, the unquestioned preeminence of cotton presents an overly monocausal explanation for larger trends that are arguably more multifaceted. For instance, E.A. Wrigley (2010) argues that in 1801 the British Empire’s four largest industries were cotton, wool, building, and leather – with each component being of roughly equal size. Therefore, the assumption that cotton has a direct connection to industrialization prior to 1801, and is the most important of the four largest industries, warrants more of a discussion. Furthermore, there is a curious evasion, considering Beckert’s revisionist stance, of one of the most unavoidable scholarly traditions surrounding modern global capitalism: Marxism. Perhaps this is partially due to the enormity inherent in such a study. Nevertheless, cotton’s centrality is taken as a given, and while it would be perfectly legitimate to argue that the cotton industry was vital to the Industrial Revolution, Empire of Cotton’s analytical base would be on much firmer ground with a deeper conceptual engagement with violence and capitalism.

On the other hand, it could also be argued that Beckert is merely being conscious of his readership and aiming to make academic scholarship more accessible to a wider audience. What is lost through a certain amount of oversight in analyzing conceptual frameworks is counterbalanced by its engaging narrative. Empire of Cotton is more than deserving of its wide acclaim, demonstrating the potential of ambitious and exciting trends in historiographical inquiry. The author strikes a fine balance between effortlessly fluent prose and complex subject matter, making a significant contribution to the fields of global history and history of the commodity as well as enticing a wider audience. While Empire of Cotton is a dense, impressively researched book, Beckert manages to appeal to a broader audience and create a fluently written, academically rigorous account of cotton’s journey from a local, artisanal product to a global, mass-produced commodity.

You may also like:

Review: Seeds of Empire by Andrew Torget (2015)
H.W. Brands on the rise of American capitalism
Review: The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective by Robert C. Allen (2009)

Dorothy Parker Loved the Funnies

by David Ochsner

Interminable…The last thing Dorothy Parker wanted in her funnies was some fine print. In Frank King’s Gasoline Alley strip from 1927, Walt gets full custody of the orphan Skeezix (via hoodedutilitarian.com)

“It is amazing, it is even a little terrifying to see how the spirit of the comic strip has changed,” wrote Dorothy Parker in her Dec. 3, 1927 “Reading and Writing” column for The New Yorker. Time was, she lamented, when the daily strips concerned themselves “with chubby children blowing their elders to hell with generous charges of dynamite,” and “each set of pictures ended gloriously, with a Bam and Pow, in the portrayal of the starlit delirium induced by a cracked skull.”

Dorothy Parker in the 1920s (via Wikipedia)

Most of us know Parker as one of America’s great satirists and a founding member of the Algonquin Round Table. She could also be a tough critic. No author was sacred in her book review column, which ran in The New Yorker from 1927 to 1931. She summed up the beloved “Pooh” poems in A.A. Milne’s Now We Are Six as “affected, commonplace, bad,” and when Sinclair Lewis published The Man Who Knew Coolidge, she dismissed it as “an outrageously irritating book.”

So it was a bit of a surprise to discover that Parker was also a dedicated reader of the funny pages, which doubtless offered her respite from the bouts of depression she suffered throughout her life. When favorite strips such as The Gumps abandoned broad humor in favor of long-form melodrama, Parker was crestfallen, lamenting that she hadn’t “seen a Pow or a Bam in an egg’s age.”

Andy Gump, in simpler times, from a 1920 strip featuring The Gumps, by Sidney Smith (via newspapers.com)

Sidney Smith, creator of The Gumps, is often credited as the originator of the comic strip melodrama. Unlike a daily, stand-alone gag, this serial approach kept readers waiting for the next installment. Smith was also the first cartoonist to kill off a regular character. His “Saga of Mary Gold,” which ran during 1928-29, ended with sweet Mary’s tragic death and prompted a flood of letters from readers demanding her resurrection.

Busying himself with charity work while being mixed up with spies, Andy Gump had “lost his touching and epic sympathy,” Parker wrote. On top of that, Little Orphan Annie had also gone soft, Annie helping a widowed neighbor with her housework rather than “fighting various gangs of desperadoes.”

Not Your Broadway Annie…Before she went domestic, Harold Gray’s Little Orphan Annie could kick some butt, as she did in this 1927 strip

Over in Gasoline Alley, a gag strip that featured the simple life of guys and their cars, the strip’s creator, Frank King, was allowing his characters to age naturally. “That hurts, Parker wrote. “We ask our comic artists for bread, and they give us realism.” She lamented the strip’s “interminable” storyline, which at the time was mired in a custody battle in which “Unca Walt” (the strip’s patriarch) was desperately trying to adopt little Skeesix, who had been left on Walt’s doorstep in a 1921 strip. Parker feared that by the time the custody battle was settled, “Skeesix is going to be a kindly old gentleman with a flowing beard” (Skeesix, now 96, is still occasionally featured in the strip).

Parker concluded that the melodramatic comics “are unquestionably what the readers want,” and was “surely indicative of something…I cannot bear to analyze it. My great heart is broken for my people. What this country needs is more Bams and more Pows.” If Dorothy were still around today, she would find plenty of Bams and Pows at the Multiplex.

David Ochsner writes the blog, A New Yorker State of Mind, in which he chronicles his experiences reading every issue of the New Yorker magazine. He is currently mired in the fall of 1928.

Also by David Ochsner on Not Even Past:

Reading Every Issue of the New Yorker

You may also like:

Hearing the Roaring Twenties: The New Archive (No. 12)
The Civil War, as seen by the artists of Harper’s Weekly
Digital Teaching: Mapping Networks across Avant-Garde Magazines
Media and Politics From the Prague Spring Archive , by Ian Goodale

Rethinking American Grand Strategy in the Asia Pacific

By More than Providence: Grand Strategy and American Power in the Asia Pacific Since 1783. By Michael J. Green. Illustrated. 725 pp. Columbia University Press. $45.

by Jonathan R. Hunt
University of Southhampton

First Published by The Imperial and Global Forum (October 23, 2017).

Otto von Bismarck once remarked that the United States was blessed: “The Americans are truly a lucky people. They are bordered to the north and south by weak neighbours and to the east and west by fish.” Thanks to this geographic grace, George Washington could call for freedom from “entangling alliances” in his farewell address. This distance has also bred a strong undercurrent of parochialism and chauvinism in American culture. From these two impulses has emerged the conceptual DNA of American foreign relations in the form of two dichotomies—exemplarism versus interventionism; cosmopolitanism versus exceptionalism—lending form and structure to debates about how a democratic people should manage their affairs in an often unkind, even hostile, world.

In his sweeping and authoritative account of United States grand strategy in the Asia Pacific, Michael J. Green reminds us that Americans have long regarded this maritime expanse – from the Aleutians to Cape Horn in the Western Hemisphere across to Australasia and Sakhalin in the Eastern — as integral to defending their ‘empire of liberty’. Nineteenth-century policymakers from Thomas Jefferson and Matthew C. Perry to Henry Seward and John Hay sought to pry open these watery frontiers to American influence (and conquest) so as to stave off any threats that might overleap the Pacific Ocean. Their twentieth-century successors, Alfred Thayer Mahan and Teddy Roosevelt, George Marshall and Franklin Roosevelt, Dean Acheson and Harry Truman, Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon, George Shultz and Ronald Reagan, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, among others, have fought to keep the Pacific an American lake – for now.

Green brings scholarly and policymaking credentials to this tour d’horizon. Japan Chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C., and an associate professor at Georgetown University (not to mention the Asia hand in George W. Bush’s White House), he is supremely qualified to narrate and appraise more than two centuries of decisions, processes, and events. On a hemispheric tableau teeming with squadrons, legations, missionaries, gunboats, marines, emissaries, island chains, and good intentions, he paints a United States government in pursuit of a “distinct strategic approach” that would guarantee “that the Pacific Ocean remain[ed] a conduit for American ideas and goods to flow westward, and not for threats to flow eastward toward the homeland.” (5)

The Alaska Purchase, 1867. Left to Right: Robert S. Chew, Secretary of State (USA); William H. Seward; William Hunter; Mr. Bodisco, Russian Ambassador; Baron de Stoeckl, Charles Sumner; Fredrick W. Seward (via Wikimedia Commons)

Green charts this strategic disposition from the Articles of Confederation to Obama’s pivot to Asia, dividing the chronology into four eras when a rising power—the United States, Japan, the Soviet Union, and China—convulsed the region’s politics. American assertiveness waxed as European empires toggled from New World outposts to Asian colonialism in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century. In short order, Jefferson’s greater Louisiana brought on James Monroe’s enunciation of an American protectorate in its hemisphere, John Tyler’s extension of that Monroe Doctrine to the Sandwich Islands (Hawai’i to natives Polynesians), and William Seward’s purchase of Alaska (dubbed his ‘ice box’), before the Civil War cut short the Pacific ambitions of Lincoln’s secretary of state.

This section is rich in geography and personality, acquainting readers with a century-long campaign to seize “stepping stones,” most pivotally Hawai’i, in the Pacific, introducing swashbucklers like Captain David Porter, whose piratical voyage to the Pacific in the War of 1812 foreshadowed the fusion of mercenary and military aims that would become the country’s modus operandi, and keeping a running tally of plenipotentiaries (of uneven quality) who served in an ever more prostrate Qing China. Green’s treatment of dusty concordats such as the 1858 Treaty of Tientsin, in which the United States pledged its “good offices” to Beijing in dealings with rapacious British, French, and Russians after the second Opium War, and the 1868 Burlingame Treaty, which recognized Chinese eminent domain over its whole territory, is welcome. He is sharp on the strategic contours of these many-sided rivalries; yet, while alive to the noxious influence of Anglo-Saxonism in nineteenth-century American culture, his tendency to treat republican virtues as more significant in U.S. foreign policy than Manifest Destiny chauvinism yields a handful of errors and omissions.

Green’s heroes are, above all, republican realists, high priests at the altar of the balance of power who still find ways to promote democracy, the rule of law, and free trade in the wider world. Thus, his hinge is fin-de-siècle power couple are Theodore Roosevelt and Alfred Thayer Mahan—the quintessential man of action married to the man of ideas. The latter expounded a strategic theory based on naval bases, sea lanes, and deep-water armadas; the former built a Great White Fleet to enforce it. The tendency to view America’s holdings in the Pacific, mostly insular takings such as Guam, Hawai’i, and the Philippines, as incidental rather than intrinsic to American power leads Green to paint the Bull Moose in overly Mahanian hues, emphasizing his naval leadership and power-balancing after the 1905 Russo-Japanese war while downplaying his protectionism and colonialism. What passed for strategic élan in Washington, after all, in Manila simply looked like another instance of imperialism. He is on firmer grounds in his treatment of John Hay’s push for trade reciprocity in China, contesting Wisconsin School members who deem the Open Notes clear evidence that the United States was (and remains) a capitalist octopus in ravenous search of pliant markets.

“AND, AFTER ALL, THE PHILIPPINES ARE ONLY THE STEPPING-STONE TO CHINA” – cartoon from Judge Magazine showing Uncle Sam with the “tools of modern civilization” using the Philippines as a stepping stone to China, ca. early 1900s (via Wikimedia Commons)

His appraisal of Asia policy from Teddy Roosevelt to cousin Franklin is scathing, and for good reason. Wilson sold out Korea and China’s Shangdong province to Japan for his League of Nations, before Calvin Coolidge, Warren Harding, and Herbert Hoover retracted U.S. power after Teddy’s ally, Henry Cabot Lodge, nixed an American role in the league. Green includes a revealing vignette about American interwar finance, as William Straight and J. P. Morgan sought Chinese debt before the crash of October 24, 1929, put paid to their schemes. For Green, the Department of State’s willingness to accommodate Japan, whose militaristic expansions would upset the (perhaps excessively) elegant Washington Treaty, violated Mahan’s signature insight—playing sides against one another to avert a peer regional competitor from arising. Although the Japanese Co-Prosperity Sphere bore this warning out, he dismisses too perfunctorily the alternatives that Franklin Roosevelt’s Asianists—Lawrence A. Lowell, Joseph Grew, Stanley Hornbeck, and John Von Antwerp MacMurray—put forth. After all, MacMurray’s call to retrench at the Second Island Chain prefigured modern realists like Barry Posen, whose 2014 Restraint contends that the United States would best observe Mahan’s dictum by re-drawing its defense lines further west while retaining command of the commons. (To be fair, assured nuclear retaliation has now nullified whatever existential threats had existed.)

What happened after the United States sanctioned Japan for yet another massacre in China in 1940, after seven years of turning a blind eye (par for the course in the Guernica decade), was the country’s first fair fight in the Pacific. Green is too credulous that Hiroshima and Nagasaki won the war (Tsuyoshi Hasegawa shows that the Soviet declaration of war was equally if not more decisive), but his verdict that Roosevelt and Truman failed to leverage Chester Nimitz and Douglas MacArthur’s military triumphs on behalf of a grand strategy that would deliver post-war security is devastating. When the Soviet Union switched from wartime ally to geo-ideological adversary, U.S. officials overlooked the Kuomingtang’s weakness and Mao Tse-Tung’s zeal; as a result, they held out on China serving as a fourth United Nations policeman. This even as Chiang Kai-Shek’s battle lines crumbled, in part for lack of American support (apart from a woefully inadequate 900 military advisors), leading to the loss of China and setting in train a series of events that would culminate in the militarization of containment in Korea and the Americanization of the war for peace in Vietnam.

The Cold War tested American grand strategy in ways new and old, first with proxy wars fused to anticolonial struggles, and then the Soviet Union’s massive naval build-up in the 1980s. Next to old chestnuts such as the extent of continuity in personnel and policy between the Kennedy and Johnson administrations is the conspicuous omission of the former’s obsession with China’s nuclear-weapons program (its first nuclear test was on October 16, 1964); even though it was nearly a decade before Beijing fielded a survivable arsenal, the first Asian nuclear-weapon state was a game-changer, catalysing the Vietnam War, severely constraining U.S. military options once there, and helping usher the People’s Republic into the United Nations. Likewise, there is a clear and disturbing hierarchy of liberal values for Green, with genocide ranking far lower than free trade. When he supports the contention that “noble cause” advocates make that the war helped cauterize communist insurgencies in Indochina, Malaysia, and Thailand, for instance, he glosses over the 500,000 Indonesians estimated dead in the mass killings that shepherded the Suharto dictatorship into power in Jakarta.

Nixon shakes hands with Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai. It was the first trip made by an American president to the nation, 1972 (via Wikimedia Commons)

Nixon earns plaudits as an unsentimental president who ended twenty-five years of non-recognition between the most powerful and most populous nations on Earth; but Reagan, who convinced Japan to serve as an “unsinkable aircraft carrier,” (405) invested massively in the U.S. Navy, and midwifed democracy movements in the Philippines, South Korea, and Taiwan, receives the lion’s share of praise. In Green’s telling, his emphasis on security and stability afforded strongmen like Ferdinand Marcos and Park Chung-hee the leeway to sanction free elections. Reagan’s application of military, ministerial, and moral instruments to a coherent strategy in the region affords a case study for wedding power to principle effectively. Green also holds it to offer lessons for the newest and most challenging contender for regional pre-eminence: The People’s Republic China.

The final section dovetails with a set of vigorous debates now gripping Washington and Asian capitals. Can the United States and China resolve differences without military recourse as Beijing stakes its position in the South China Sea and Senkaku islands? Will America’s hubs-and-spoke network of alliances survive as China’s wealth and power cast a spell over neutrals and allies alike? Can Washington nudge the alphabet soup of multilateral institutions toward trans-oceanic rather than intra-regional orientations, especially now that the Trans-Pacific Partnership is comatose? Will the U.S. join the Beijing-led Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank or acquiesce to the PRC’s “One Belt One Road” initiative of ports, highways, railways, and pipelines? Will Washington and its partners succeed in embedding Beijing as a stakeholder in the global rules-based order or will it shear off its sphere of influence from the norms and institutions that expedited its return to greatness?

Bill Clinton garners high marks for his strategy of engaging and balancing China, a two-pronged approach that George W. Bush and Barack Obama would adopt. And while Donald Trump’s beleaguered and inept administration has so far proven less unorthodox than anticipated on trade, Green’s emphasis on island chains, aircrafts carriers, and strategic sea-lift when compared to human rights, labour, immigration, and cultural dialogue yields a deafening silence on the centrifugal forces now eviscerating what once passed as bipartisan consensus on the importance of engagement in the Asia-Pacific for the security and prosperity of the United States.

Also by Jonathan Hunt on Not Even Past:

1986 Reykjavík Summit between Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev
Iran’s Nuclear Program and the History of the IAEA
Review: The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and its Dangerous Legacy

You may also like:

Foreign Policy from Candidate to President: Richard Nixon and the Lesson of Biafra by Roy Doron
CIA Study: “Consequences to the US of Communist Domination of Mainland Southeast Asia,” October 13, 1950 by Mark A. Lawrence
David A. Conrad reviews Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II

The Curious History of Lincoln’s Birth Cabin

The monument at Abraham Lincoln Birthplace National Historical Park (via Wikimedia Commons)

by Jesse Ritner

School children across the United States learn that Abraham Lincoln was born in a log cabin. For seven weeks this past summer I worked at the Abraham Lincoln Birthplace National Historical Park in Hodgenville, Kentucky, where that cabin (as legend has it) is encased in a stone monument. Imposingly large when viewed from the bottom of its 56 steps, the monument is almost claustrophobic inside. Designed by John Russel Pope, the early twentieth-century’s titan of neo-classical monuments and government buildings, the monument only has one room, about the size of a large living-room. The entire log cabin fits inside, reinforcing the difference between the monument built in Lincoln’s honor and his humble origins. The Grecian inspired edifice was built between 1909 and 1911, atop the knoll where legend (and some deeds with Thomas Lincoln’s name) lead us to believe Abraham Lincoln was born. The now largely forgotten monument was once national news. Over 100,000 Americans donated money to build the publicly funded temple. The cornerstone was laid by none other than President Theodore Roosevelt and, two years later, it was dedicated by President William Howard Taft, himself a member of the Lincoln Farm Association, which led the fundraising effort.

The intended lesson of the Lincoln Birthplace Memorial is clear. Those who begin in rags, can rise to riches. Those men who save the nation will, for their services, have their less than impressive childhood homes enshrined in granite and neo-classical architecture, thereby tying them for eternity to the everlasting fight for freedom and democracy that can be traced all the way from ancient Athens to today’s rolling hills of Kentucky. Yet, the monument and the cabin inside teach us much more than an overwrought story about the American dream; instead, it serves as a piece of history in of itself.

The cabin inside the monument’s granite walls never housed the Lincoln family. It was constructed in 1895 by entrepreneur Alfred Dennett and his agent, James Bigham, from logs found in a log cabin near the sinking spring where records suggest Lincoln was born. In 1897, the fabricated cabin was toured around the country, where it was matched with another ersatz birthplace cabin – that of none other than Confederate President Jefferson Davis. As the caravan of cabins continued around the United States, it finally landed on Coney Island. There, due to poor organization while shipping, parts of each cabin became mixed so they were simply joined together creating a single Lincoln-Davis Birthplace Cabin. According to James W. Loewen, author of Lies across America, when this cabin, now combining logs from the separate counterfeit cabins of the enemies of the Civil War, was sent back to Kentucky in 1906, it was represented as Lincoln’s “original” birthplace cabin. While the National Park Service does acknowledge that the cabin is not the original, but instead is “symbolic” (the quotation marks are theirs, not mine), it is largely silent on the actual origins of the cabin.

The symbolic cabin enshrined in the monument at the Abraham Lincoln Birthplace National Historical Park (via Wikimedia Commons)

In today’s conversations about Confederate statues, few are discussing the relationship between Confederate and Union memorials dating from the early twentieth century, both of which quite consciously use matching metaphors to affect their viewers. In Kentucky, monuments such as Lincoln’s birthplace offer insight into the way historical narratives created by turn of the century endeavors in public history by both Union and Confederate supporters are often intertwined, despite the heated rhetoric and violence that results from these supposedly competing historical narratives today.

The Park Service’s silence calls to question why we need the monument in the first place and why we, as taxpayers, should support its preservation. As a remembrance of President Lincoln, the monument and park are markedly outdated. Far removed from population centers, the monument is largely forgotten. On the other hand, the story of the cabin now enshrined in its “Temple of Fame,” as Theodore Roosevelt dubbed the granite structure, gives real insight into the way Americans, both Confederate sympathizers and Union patriots, collectively built historical narratives about the Civil War in the late nineteenth century. Both Presidents Davis and Lincoln were born in Kentucky and, at the turn of the century, their rags to riches stories were not seen as inherently independent of each other, but were instead part of a single American narrative that both Southerners and Northerners could claim as their birthright.

A postcard of Lincoln’s Birthplace Memorial, ca. 1930-1945 (via Boston Public Library)

The cabin today, with no mention of the monument’s convoluted history, ignores the partially fabricated histories that brought both to power, and brought these Kentucky brothers symbolically back together, even after a long, violent, and devastating war. But, the monument, despite the faults inherent in its creation, also holds valuable potential as a piece of public history that can truly engage with the way in which historical narratives are created and why monuments are built, rather than simply reinforcing centuries old attempts at public education and nation building. It suggests historical precedents to the Republican Party simultaneously claiming heritage as the party of Lincoln, while supporting the maintenance of Confederate monuments and minimizing or even erasing the history of slavery and its role in the bloody Civil War. And it shows that in towns like Hodgenville, where Confederate flags fly freely next to memorials to Lincoln, the apparent conflict in historical memory is not new, but is part of a conscious narrative built in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War and continuing today.

The current dialog revolving around Confederate memorials is far more complicated than many analyses acknowledge. Considering the current unrest regarding Civil War monuments, it is necessary for us to examine the influence of all sides on the historical narratives they choose to create. Remedying the wrongs that statues of people such as Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee represent is harder than simply taking prominent statues down. As a nation we must reassess the way we have remembered the entire history of the Civil War and we must reexamine the ways past generations remembered as well, regardless of whether the historical figures in question are currently viewed as villains or heroes.

You may also like:

A Historian views Spielberg’s Lincoln (2012), by Nicholas Roland
Watch: panel discussion of confederate statues at the University of Texas
Charley Binkow on the Lincoln Archives Digital Project

The Battle of Chile

“Where is that terrible beauty we planted so long ago?”

-Santiago del Nuevo Extremo

Rodolfo Müller is almost a hundred years old, now. He still lives in the same house as always, off Simón Bolivar, between Hamburgo and Coventry. That’s in Ñuñoa, a township on the near west side of Santiago. It’s a big house, and very nice but unpretentious. If he had wanted, he could have picked a more prestigious address further north, in Providencia, or up higher, in Las Condes. But he didn’t.

Rodolfo was born in Germany in about 1920. Before World War II, he came to Chile with his parents and his brother. They were just teenagers. I met him when he was almost sixty. He still looked very German after all those years: tall, blond, and blue-eyed. But he was a Jew. That’s what people said, anyway. Maybe, just on his mother’s side. They came to Chile to escape from Hitler. They left in time and made new lives in South America.

Rodolfo was a violinist and a pretty good one, apparently. Until he lost a segment of his little finger in an accident. If it had been his right hand, it wouldn’t have mattered as much, not for the violin. But it was the left. Violinists use that a lot. Rodolfo was a mechanic. It was a work-related accident. Machines are cold-hearted and unforgiving in that way.

He drove a ’64 Volvo. It was old, even then, but it ran like a Swiss watch. He did all the work on it personally. Rodolfo was not the mechanic at the shop on the corner. He was the ace; the mechanical surgeon. A horse-tamer for steel and steam. When big industrial contraptions at local factories broke down, they came and got Rodolfo. He understood machines.

When he gave up the violin, Rodolfo started playing the accordion. You can’t have music from Chiloé without an accordion. Besides, after Beethoven’s quartets, the melodies from Chiloé were simple, comrade. He played in a group was called Aydar. His wife, Irma Silva, was the director.

Jorge Müller shooting for the film The Battle of Chile — Jorge Müller shooting for the film *The Battle of Chile* (via Patricio Guzmán)

Chiloé is an island in the south. Potatoes, sheep, and seafood. Theirs was a picturesque culture and they had a music all their own. Aydar comes from the local vocabulary. It’s a contraction of ayudar, to help. Solidarity is fundamental for survival in a place like that. It was primitive island communism. It’s just how it was.

Irma and Rodolfo were members of the Association of the Relatives of the Detained-Disappeared, (Agrupación de Familiares de Detenidos-Desaparecidos). Aydar was not the official group of the Association. There was one. But this was Irma’s project, where Inelia sang and danced the cueca with Lucho from Lo Hermida. It’s where I met Pepe and Alfredo, Victor and Jaqueline, Sonia and the unforgettable Miguel Marín. I played guitar and sang backup vocals. I could do harmony. People liked that. Everyone there had been hurt by the Pinochet regime in one way or another. It was our protest group. They couldn’t kill the joy.

Irma was a professional folklorist. She even taught folklore at the University, before the coup. After the coup, folklore was considered suspicious. Too many leftists.

Irma and Rodolfo were the parents of Jorge Müller, the filmmaker. He disappeared on November 29, 1974, along with his girlfriend, the actress and producer, Carmen Bueno. Inelia’s boy, Tito, had been gone four months by then. Miguel Angel, Doris Meniconi’s boy, just ten days.

Jorge Müller and Carmen Bueno were clandestine members of the Movement of the Revolutionary Left, also known as MIR. Before the coup, they had worked for Chile Films. With director Patricio Guzmán, they made the documentary, La batalla de Chile –The Battle of Chile. It was about the historical process in Salvador Allende’s Popular Unity government. It was meant to be a memoir of the revolution, but it devolved into a denunciation of the coup. Jorge was the cameraman. The whole world can now see the coup unfolding through his eyes.

Jorge Müller and Patricio Guzmán (via Patricio Guzmán)

Now, if MIR wanted a documentary about the Popular Unity government, it wasn’t to come out in support of the idea that the ballot box was the right way to have a revolution, comrade. MIR wasn’t a part of the Popular Unity coalition. They believed in violent overthrow or nothing at all. The theory was that if you tried to take over the means of production nicely, there will be a coup. They were right about that. But Chile Films was more than just MIR, and documentaries are more than just propaganda. In the long run, The Battle of Chile got out of control. Now, it’s a classic.

The unedited footage was smuggled out after the coup. That cost Jorge his life. Irma was inconsolable. She was a high society lady, deep down. She liked things done properly, efficiently and on time. She joined the Association when Jorge disappeared. Later, she created Aydar.

Folklore from Chiloé was raucous, sentimental, and fun. Someone would speak briefly, at the beginning of our presentations, to say who we were and why we were there. Then, it was strictly repertoire from Chiloé. Some of the songs talked about lovers lost at sea, or travelers who never came home, but the listeners had to make the connection themselves. It was a challenge to the regime, but an indirect one. A clever one.

Among the mothers in the Association, Irma was one of the youngest. She died of cancer in ’94. Pinochet was no longer in power, but there was still no news of Jorge. Rodolfo was left alone. A grandson went to live with him. And there are many friends from the old days. He hasn’t been forgotten. His son was an artist. One of the best Chile has ever known. But there can be no poets in Plato’s Republic, comrade. As it turns out, the real battle of Chile was one that we would lose. The whole project of a world that is fair, just, and free has collapsed.

The Battle of Chile movie poster (via Patricio Guzmán)

They started filming in May of ’72. The tale had begun, but no one knew how it would end. Víctor Jara had a song about that, from before. After the coup, Santiago del Nuevo Extremo gave us the verse, where is that terrible beauty we planted, so long ago? Nostalgia, comrade.

The revolution failed, but the film is still a treasure. It has its rightful place today in the shantytowns of poor Chilean youth, the ones who never knew that once there had been a dream.

Irma and Rodolfo had a house on the coast, at El Quisco. That was a beautiful beach and, in its heyday, pretty elegant. Now, it has sort of come down in the world. People with money don’t go there anymore. They prefer Algarrobo, Papudo and Zapallar. Not because the beaches are any better, only because the crowd is more exclusive.

Irma and Rodolfo’s house was up on a cliff, right near the shore. It was a wooden house, red and white, with a huge pine tree in the front. The beach was about five hundred feet away, but to get there, you had to take the stairs. It was about two-hundred feet down. Which was why the view from the back porch was so spectacular. There was a well that never went dry. In a coastal town with a chronic water shortage, Irma and Rodolfo’s house was the oasis.

Deep down, Jorge liked the good life. Given a choice between a political demonstration downtown and a day at the beach with his friends, he preferred the day at the beach. El Quisco was his beach. I bought that house in 1987. Irma and Rodolfo sold it because they needed the money and because they weren’t going very often anymore. It was hard, because it was Jorge’s house, too. It was as if his footsteps could still be heard there. As if his heart were still beating there. Something about the smell. When I went, which was quite often, it was as if I dreamed his dreams and saw his visions. Irma and Rodolfo wanted the house to stay in the family. It was a simple place, but enchanting.

Aydar performed from ’76 until ’88, more or less. Those were glorious years, tragic and triumphant. Irma and Rodolfo had another child, a daughter, but Jorge was their pride and joy. And they were right to be proud. Repressive government doesn’t work out when people can see the truth.

The DINA took Jorge Müller and Carmen Bueno at 9:30 am on the corner of Bilbao and Los Leones. They had been to a party with the cast and crew of another film that had opened the night before at Cine Las Condes. They were on their way to work at Chile Films, but they never made it there. Agents appeared in civilian clothing, driving a grey Chevrolet pick-up. We have seen them before. They tried to rip out the people’s eyes and ears, comrade, but we still have the film. That’s not ever going away.

Perhaps, Jorge and Carmen died believing that victory was imminent. That’s what MIR had taught them. Song, poetry and cinema are more powerful than bombs and bullets. Maybe they are, but sometimes, they are not powerful enough.

For more on Chile’s disappeared ones, see www.memoriaviva.com.

La Batalla de Chile is available on Youtube, linked here is part one of four.

Also by Nathan Stone on Not Even Past:

Rodolfo Valentín González Pérez: An Unusual Disappearance

You may also like:

Monica Jimenez reviews Remembering Pinochet’s Chile
Jimena Perry on memory and violence in Colombia
Elizabeth O’Brien reviews Partners in Conflict: The Politics of Gender, Sexuality, and Labor in the Chilean Agrarian Reform, 1950-1970

“Doing” History in the Modern U.S. Survey: Teaching with and Analyzing Academic Articles

Originally posted on Process History on September 5, 2017.

by Christopher Babits

Near the end of the spring semester, my department asked me to teach a summer session of U.S. History since 1865. I had a short time to think about what I’d teach and how I’d teach it. For me, it was important for students to “do” the work of historians. This meant more than reading primary sources, though. In addition to this, students would engage with “essential questions” that are key for understanding the United States’ recent past. Moreover, in lieu of assigning a traditional textbook, which might not fully align with these essential questions, I decided that my students would read, analyze, and critique articles from the Journal of American History.

My first preparatory task was to frame the course around the essential questions. I wanted to create questions around a broad range of potential student interests. I chose four topics: 1) America’s role in the world; 2) economics and labor; 3) women and gender; and 4) comparative civil rights. These topics covered some of the important themes of post-Civil War U.S. History.

The questions I crafted (see Figure #1: The Course’s Essential Questions) were beneficial on several levels. Initially, they helped me with one of the most daunting challenges of syllabus creation—picking and choosing content to cover. These essential questions narrowed what I would focus on; lectures and in-class activities would always have to answer (at least) one of these questions. On top of this, I used the four questions to pick articles from the Journal of American History. From a content standpoint, these articles would provide additional detail that my lectures and in-class activities might not be able to cover in depth.

Selecting academic articles for an introductory survey can be tricky. I had to think about whether students would have enough prior knowledge to truly engage with the secondary source. At the same time, I needed to be cognizant of whether the article covered a fair amount of time, which might then help students understand important historical concepts, like change over time and contingency. Moreover, if I could, I wanted the articles to be useful for answering more than one of the course’s essential questions.

The Journal of American History, March 2014

I ultimately chose fifteen articles from the Journal of American History to help students answer the course’s four essential questions. (See Figure #2: Academic Articles for a complete list.) Erika Lee’s “Enforcing the Borders,” for example, helped students compare and contrast a wide-range of racialized lived experiences from the Chinese Exclusion Act through the 1924 Immigration Act. Her article complemented lecture material on and primary sources about the history of white supremacy. Julia Mickenberg’s “Suffragettes and Soviets,” on the other hand, highlighted the interconnections between domestic and global events. Mickenberg’s article proved useful for students interested in women’s and gender history as well as those fascinated by the events of the First World War. Jacquelyn Dowd Hall’s classic, “The Long Civil Rights Movement,” was one of my students’ favorite articles. Hall famously critiqued the “classical” phase of the Civil Rights Movements in her article. Yet, for the purposes of my course, Hall’s article also helped students better understand the history of African Americans, the intersection of race and gender, and racialized economics. Hall’s seminal article, then, could assist students with three of the course’s four essential questions.

Students who are used to reading textbooks, however, can find reading academic articles challenging. To have them gain the skills necessary to successfully engage with these academic articles, I devoted a fair amount of in-class time to reading, interpreting, and analyzing these sources. I viewed my role as an encouraging coach who kept his approach to the analysis of academic articles straightforward and accessible. For the first three articles assigned in the class, I had students (re)read the introduction and the conclusion with a partner or in small groups. I asked students to underline and annotate where the historian(s) articulated their argument. Sometimes this meant that students had to mark several parts of the introduction and conclusion, trying to make sense of complex arguments which had multiple supporting parts. At first, this was a tough task for students, consuming upwards of 20 minutes of a 75-minute class. However, as we spent more time on this skill, students slowly gained more confidence. I was able to go around the room to work with small groups of students, focusing them on specific parts of introductions and conclusions. After a couple sessions, I asked students to paraphrase arguments in their own words. Students’ confidence grew the more they worked with one part of “doing” history—understanding historical arguments. Over time, what had taken 20 or 25 minutes soon dwindled to 12 or 15.

Students were required to write an analysis for two of the academic articles they read. To ensure further success, students were provided a fair amount of scaffolding on these assignments. To assist with article analyses, I created a reading grid that asked students to: research the historian/scholar; note and critique the sources used in the article; make historical connections to lectures and/or primary sources; and reflect on how the source could answer one of the course’s essential questions. I had detailed questions for each box of the reading grid, providing a fair amount of guidance for students to understand what they should be looking for when analyzing an article. Figure #3:The Reading Grid displays the course’s emphasis on scaffolding the analysis of academic articles.

By the end of the term, I could see that the focus on teaching with and analyzing academic articles worked on several levels. The most important, in my opinion, was how students improved from their first to their second article analysis. They had a much more nuanced understanding of historical argumentation in their second analyses. In addition, students wrote more critically about the historians’ source bases and felt more comfortable critiquing “master narratives” they had learned in high school. For those afraid of using academic articles in their surveys, I want to offer a simple reassurance: students never shied away from this hard work. My provisional course instructor survey scores indicate that students recognized article analyses as a core part of their learning. I already have a strong sense of which articles students enjoyed, but I hope my course instructor surveys include constructive criticism about the articles students viewed as least helpful for answering the course’s essential questions.

There were other outcomes to using academic articles. Many of the articles I selected emphasized U.S. History in a transnational perspective. As a result, students had to think about the United States as a place which influences—and is influenced by—others parts of the world. By carefully selecting articles, I also made it so I did not have to assign a traditional textbook. Lectures, primary sources, and the articles covered enough material for students to understand the American experience and to walk away with their own informed interpretation of the nation’s history.

As an educator now weeks removed from the course I taught, I see an even greater purpose to teaching with academic articles. As we navigate a period of deep political division, one that is fraught with fear for many, teaching with academic articles has the possibility to instill crucial civic skills in our students. By respectfully challenging those who came before them, each scholar I assigned demonstrated that disagreement is a core part of the democratic experience. Using academic articles instead of a textbook allowed my students to see that disagreement does not need to be hateful or vitriolic. Instead, it can be a productive way to move forward, pushing in the direction of the “more perfect Union” enshrined in the Constitution.

Figure 1: The Course’s Essential Questions

America’s role in the world	Determine how the United States’ foreign policy changed and/or remained consistent from the Spanish-American War through the Cold War. How did the U.S. confront the challenges it faced around the globe? Are there core tenets (or beliefs) that have guided American foreign policy? If so, what are they? If not, how do foreign policy conflicts differ from each other?
Economics and labor	Evaluate the ways the American economy has changed over the past 150 years. How did “big business” alter the landscape of U.S. industry? Why did Progressive Era and New Deal reformers pass the reforms they did? Have Americans found a way to balance economic growth and workers’ rights in the post-World War II period?
Women and gender	Analyze the political and economic fight for women’s equality. To what extent has the role and status of women changed over the past 150 years? What have been landmark victories for women’s rights? Why have various political factions opposed women’s and feminist groups? Is there work left to be done?
Comparative civil rights	The continued fight for equality has, in many ways, defined the American experience. Compare and contrast the struggle for civil rights that two of the following segments of the population experienced: 1) African Americans; 2) women; 3) Mexican Americans; 4) Asian Americans; and/or 5) LGBTQ individuals. Are there commonalities that you see in the political rhetoric and tactics of these two groups? How would you describe the unique challenges these segments of the population faced? What are the arguments, agendas, challenges, etc. that have made coalitions difficult to form, both within and between different rights movements?

Figure 2: Academic Articles

Author	Article title	Year of publication	Essential question(s) answered
Erika Lee	Enforcing the Borders: Chinese Exclusion along the U.S. Borders with Canada and Mexico, 1882-1924	2002	America’s role in the world & comparative civil rights
Richard White	Information, Markets, and Corruption: Transcontinental Railroads in the Gilded Age	2003	Economics and labor
Jürgen Martschukat	“The Art of Killing by Electricity”: The Sublime and the Electric Chair	2002	Economics and labor & comparative civil rights
Julia L. Mickenberg	Suffragettes and Soviets: American Feminists and the Specter of Revolutionary Russia	2014	America’s role in the world; women and gender; & comparative civil rights
Lisa McGirr	The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti: A Global History	2007	America’s role in the world; economics and labor; & comparative civil rights
Julia C. Ott	“The Free and Open People’s Market”: Political Ideology and Retail Brokerage at the New York Stock Exchange, 1913–1933	2009	Economics and labor
Rachel Louise Moran	Consuming Relief: Food Stamps and the New Welfare of the New Deal	2011	Economics and labor & women and gender
James J. Weingartner	Americans, Germans, and War Crimes: Converging Narratives from “the Good War”	2008	America’s role in the world & comparative civil rights
Thomas A. Guglielmo	Fighting for Caucasian Rights: Mexicans, Mexican Americans, and the Transnational Struggle for Civil Rights in World War II Texas	2006	America’s role in the world; economics and labor; & comparative civil rights
Elaine Tyler May	Security against Democracy: The Legacy of the Cold War at Home	2011	America’s role in the world; economics and labor; women and gender; & comparative civil rights
Nancy Bernkopf Tucker	Taiwan Expendable? Nixon and Kissinger Go to China	2005	America’s role in the world & comparative civil rights
Jacquelyn Dowd Hall	The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past	2005	Economics and labor; women and gender; & comparative civil rights
Michael B. Katz et al.	The New African American Inequality	2005	Economics and labor & comparative civil rights
Kevin J. Mumford	The Trouble with Gay Rights: Race and the Politics of Sexual Orientation in Philadelphia, 1969-1982	2011	Women and gender & comparative civil rights
Michael H. Hunt	In the Wake of September 11: The Clash of What?	2002	America’s role in the world

Figure 3: The Reading Grid (PDF)

Also by Christopher Babits on Not Even Past:

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

You may also like:

A collection of articles by faculty and graduate students on teaching US survey courses
Teaching Assistants in the Department of History share stories on learning to teach
History Professor Jeremi Suri experiments with teaching US history survey courses digitally

IHS Panel: DACA: Past, Present, and Future

What will be the fate of DACA – and of the Dreamers for whom it was issued? This panel examined these topics: the history of DACA in the context of the debate on immigration reform; the constitutional and moral issues raised by the recent order for its termination; and the actions that can be pursued to achieve a just outcome.

Featured speakers included:

Juan Belman
Organizer, University Leadership Initiative, DACAmented/Undocumented Immigrant
The University of Texas at Austin

Karma R. Chavez
Associate Professor, Mexican American and Latina_o Studies, Communication Studies, and
Center for Women’s and Gender Studies
The University of Texas at Austin

Denise L. Gilman
Clinical Professor, School of Law
The University of Texas at Austin

Madeline Y. Hsu
Professor, Department of History, Center for Asian American Studies, Department of Asian Studies, and
Center for Mexican American Studies
The University of Texas at Austin

Matthew Butler (moderator)
Associate Professor, Department of History
The University of Texas at Austin

Presented by Institute for Historical Studies in the Department of History, with generous co-sponsorship of Center for European Studies; International Relations and Global Studies; LLILAS Benson Latin American Studies and Collections; and Mexico Center.

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

Peace Came in the Form of a Woman by Juliana Barr (2007)

by Justin Heath

“A legion of horribles, hundreds in number, half naked or clad in costumes attic or biblical or wardrobed out of a fevered dream with the skins of animals and silk finery and pieces of uniform still tracked with the blood of prior owners…all howl(ed) in a barbarous tongue…riding down upon (the posse) like a horde from a hell more horrible yet than the brimstone land of Christian reckoning…”: So begins the longest, most vivid sentence in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West.

As a young reader of gothic fiction, I always believed that Cormac McCarthy had an unrivaled sense for the macabre. More so than any other contemporary writer, he painted violent and terrible scenes that not only rattled my sense of poetic justice, but also delighted my curiosity about the darker recesses of the imagination. More so than I knew at the time, this mix of impressions also affected McCarthy’s more sophisticated readers. Even as he praised the book as the ultimate realization of the old western as a genre, the literary critic Harold Bloom evidently found it difficult to finish the novel. “The first time I read Blood Meridian,” Bloom confessed, “I was so appalled that while I was held, I gave up after about 60 pages.”

As an aspiring historian, what now catches my attention is not these sensational popular depictions of the Southern Plains tribes, or the “Wild West” in general, but the resonance of these otherwise careworn images in the scholarship of Borderlands Studies. Put simply, most books and articles within this academic sub-discipline still uncritically focus on a narrow range of topics — all replete the familiar scenes of violence, horror, and death.

Juliana Barr’s Peace Came in the Form of a Woman, a study of inter-ethnic diplomacy in the borderlands of Texas, marks an exception to this general trend. In this award-winning book, Barr investigates Hispano-Indian relations in the distinctive setting of the Texas borderlands, where nomadic societies, such as the Comanches and the Apaches, dictated the practices of peace-keeping to their allegedly more powerful Spanish neighbors to the south.

At the northern edge of colonial Mexico in the eighteenth century, a consortium of soldiers, ranchers, and mission Indians were in no position to dictate the terms of peace in the distant lands of “the Far North.” Left without the means to impose their will, the outposts of Texas, such as Bexar de San Antonio, had little choice but to adapt to the local culture of peacekeeping as practiced by their more resourceful indigenous neighbors. This multicultural landscape that Barr illustrates was held together not by signed treaties, maps, or anything of the Spaniards’ diplomatic reckoning, but by the extensions of honorary kinship that transcended “racial” differences between culturally unrelated groups. Within this essentially familial understanding of inter-group networking, Barr argues that it was women – as opposed to men — who served the central role as mediators.

When the Spanish decided to settle the lands of “Los Tejas” in the 1690s, the administrators in Mexico City hoped to install a buffer territory of Catholic missions and Spanish forts along the northern periphery, so as to forestall the advancement of unconquered peoples of “El Norte.” Without any such buffer, continued raids on the more prosperous regions of present-day Mexico threatened to obstruct the extraction of natural resources in one of the world’s first prominent export-oriented economies. Such a view of the geopolitical landscape seems to have guaranteed ineffectual half-measures to contain raiding activities.

A replica of the Mission San Francisco de los Tejas, the first Catholic mission established in East Texas in 1690 (via Wikimedia Commons)

Barr’s study illustrates radical changes in the conduct of borderland diplomacy. In their earliest encounters with nomadic groups like the Caddos, the Spanish often entered into indigenous camps in full regalia, bearing the sacred image of Our Lady of Guadeloupe, who assumed a central place in these processions. Noticing that the Spanish brought no women with them, the Caddos recognized the image not as innately holy figure, but as a proxy for an otherwise absent feminine presence that customarily attended peaceful negotiations between indigenous groups. The men who greeted the Spanish envoys paid homage to the female image by kissing the icon of Santa Maria. The colonists, for their part, interpreted this gesture as auspicious, signaling the Caddos’ eagerness to convert to the Catholic faith. This inference was tragically mistaken, Barr observes, since missionaries would be the choice targets in future raids. Resistance to Catholic missionaries during the first half of the 18th century would also spark decades of violence between the natives of Texas and these recent Spanish arrivals. Although the Spanish always had the ambition to occupy the region, they always lacked the means to locate, much less subjugate, these equestrian peoples.

By the end of the 18th century, after decades of countless defeats, the Spanish townspeople became increasingly sensitive to the significance of women in these diplomatic visits. When the Comanches visited San Antonio in 1772, for instance, the governor of Texas was eager to point out that a woman came at the forefront of the convoy. The implications of such cultural adaptations and what they entailed for colonial-indigenous relations serves as the primary focus of Barr’s inquiry.

Barr’s study occasions some truly thought-provoking discoveries. By her estimation, peaceful coexistence in Texas had little to do with overcoming perceptions of “racial differences,” since the category of “race” was essentially a European concept that carried little weight in the borderlands. Rather, the complex web of kinship relations focused on the movement of wives, mothers, and daughters – whether voluntary or coerced — to locations that arranged for their safe keeping. As Barr emphasizes, it was the extension of a feminized domestic space across tribal boundaries that brokered trust between men. For this reason, the presidio forts, originally designed to carry out the military occupation of Texas, served as the primary meeting grounds of what Barr terms inter-group “hospitality” networks. In these presidios, the annual distribution of gifts between families and tribal bands cemented peaceful ties between culturally unrelated peoples who often did not speak the same language.

Treaty of Peace by John O. Meusebach showing Colonists with the Comanches in 1847 (via Prints and Photographs Collection, Texas State Library and Archives Commission)

Like most innovative studies, Barr’s impressive work also has its shortcomings. For starters, whenever peaceful relations did break down, Barr is perhaps too eager to blame Spanish diplomatic clumsiness or cultural cynicism. The accuracy of these accusations aside, there is more to the picture than a question of mere prejudicial attitudes. By all accounts, the financial strain of “hospitality” was more considerable than Barr lets on. Many of the Comanches’ demands included items that were not locally produced in Texas. To obtain these gifts in a timely fashion, the treasurers and governors had to maintain a tight logistical operation that connected distant suppliers from Louisiana, Coahuila, and many other places. All of this put a strain on the coffers of the local outpost town, where money was almost always in short supply.

A second problem is Barr’s use of kinship terms. What do words like “brother” mean between former combatants in the 18^th-century Southwest? By focusing on the indigenous outlook on peacekeeping, the Spanish experience seems underappreciated, especially when one’s honorary sibling appears more like an extortionist than a guest? On the other hand, by sidelining the idiom of cultural groups, we risk injecting Eurocentric categories into our analysis of events where Europeans were merely one of several groups involved? This problem has a renewed urgency among scholars of Borderlands. With specialists such as Pekka Hämäläinen entertaining notions of a “Comanche Empire,” perhaps it is time that historians turn to the political nuances of South Plains’ speech for much needed clarification.

In spite of these problems, Peace Came in the Form of a Woman is a compelling read. By examining the Spaniards’ adaptation to new cultural surroundings, Barr undercuts the assumption that the peripheries of the Empire were essentially static, underdeveloped communities that awaited their inevitable incorporation into more culturally “advanced” or “rationalized” societies. By focusing on the practice of peacekeeping, Barr shows that Europeans and their descendants held an illusory monopoly over concerns for regional stability, long-distance trade, or extensive social networking. Other groups actively sought to arrange for amicable relations, even if they sought these ends through alternative means.

Also by Justin Heath on Not Even Past:

Review: Global Indios: The Indigenous Struggle for Justice in Sixteenth-Century Spain by Nancy van Deusen (2015)

You may also like:

Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra reviews Seeds of Empire by Andrew Torget (2015)
Susan Zakaib reviews Patrons, Partisans, and Palace Intrigues: The Court Society of Colonial Mexico 1702-1710 by Christoph Rosenmüller (2008)
On 15 Minute History: The Pueblo Revolt of 1680

« Previous Page

Recent Posts