Raquel Torua Padilla, Author at Not Even Past

NEP Author Spotlight – Aidan Dresang

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Aidan Dresang stands out as one of our most active and consistent undergraduate voices at Not Even Past. Working under the mentorship of Erika Bsumek at The University of Texas at Austin, Dresang’s work explores the relationship between communities, infrastructure, technology, and democracy. His research examines how ordinary people have challenged large institutions and technocratic systems that they believed threatened their values, livelihoods, or environments. From antinuclear activism in North Texas to the experiences of Black Civilian Conservation Corps workers at Palo Duro Canyon, his work highlights how local struggles reveal broader questions about power, citizenship, and public participation.

Dresang recently completed his undergraduate honors thesis, Exposing the Nuclear Dinosaur: How North Texans Protested Nuclear Power and Energized Democracy, which received the Liberal Arts Honors Outstanding Thesis Award in the Humanities category from the UT Austin Liberal Arts Honors Scholarship Committee in Spring 2026. He is currently exploring connections between the twentieth-century antinuclear movement and present-day debates surrounding AI data centers and technological development. Beyond his academic research, he is deeply committed to public history and history education. In fall 2026, he will graduate with a degree in History and Social Studies certification before beginning student teaching at Weiss High School in Pflugerville. He also continues to work with ClioVis, a UT-based educational technology platform focused on interactive timelines and critical thinking in history education, where he develops research timelines, social media content, and educational materials that connect historical inquiry to contemporary public debates.

His first contribution to Not Even Past, published in February 2024, reflected many of the themes that continue to shape Dresang’s work: environmental history, public history, and the relationship between science and historical interpretation. In “The Fellowship of the Tree Rings: A ClioVis Project,” Dresang examined how scholars have used dendrochronology—the study of tree rings—to reconstruct centuries of Caribbean hurricane activity and connect climatic shifts to major historical developments such as the Sugar Revolution and the Golden Age of European Piracy. Drawing inspiration from a RadioLab episode and research by scholars such as Valarie Trouet, Dresang explored how environmental forces shaped human history in ways often overlooked by traditional narratives. The piece also reflected his interest in using digital tools to make complex historical and scientific ideas more accessible to broader audiences. The article highlighted Dresang’s interest in making complex historical and scientific ideas accessible to broader audiences while encouraging readers to reconsider the environment not as historical backdrop, but as an active force in shaping human events

The Fellowship of the Three Rings: ClioVis Project banner

Published in October 2024, “Leaps of Fame: The Rise of Sam Patch and a Changing Industrial Landscape” demonstrated Dresang’s growing interest in the intersection of labor history, environmental history, and public space. The piece examined the life of nineteenth-century daredevil Sam Patch, one of the United States’ earliest “common man” celebrities, whose public jumps became spectacles tied to the social transformations of the Industrial Revolution. Drawing on historian Paul E. Johnson’s work and integrating an interactive ClioVis timeline, Dresang situated Patch’s performances within broader struggles over industrialization, class identity, and access to natural spaces in early America. Rather than presenting Patch simply as an eccentric entertainer, Dresang showed how his performances reflected deeper tensions between working-class communities and elite attempts to privatize and regulate public land during the rise of industrial capitalism.

Leaps of Fame: The Rise of Sam Patch and a Changing Industrial Landscape banner

Published in fall 2025, “Constructing a Canyon: Black CCC Workers and the Making of Palo Duro” marked a significant expansion of Dresang’s scholarship into questions of race, memory, infrastructure, and public landscapes in the American Southwest. Focusing on Black Civilian Conservation Corps workers who helped build Palo Duro Canyon State Park during the 1930s, Dresang examined how New Deal infrastructure projects simultaneously depended on Black labor while erasing Black presence from the historical narratives embedded within the park itself. Drawing on archival sources, including letters written by Black CCC workers protesting segregation and geographic isolation, he argued that the park’s roads, trails, landmarks, and promotional materials constructed a settler-centered vision of Texas history that marginalized both Black and Indigenous peoples. Drawing on ideas such as “place-making” and Erika Bsumek’s idea of “infrastructures of dispossession,” Dresang demonstrated how physical landscapes shape public memory and historical understanding.

Constructing a Canyon: Black CCC Workers and The Making of Palo Duro banner

Through his work with Not Even Past, Aidan Dresang has consistently combined rigorous historical research with digital humanities and public engagement. Whether writing about climate history, industrialization, labor struggles, or the racial politics of public landscapes, his work encourages readers to think critically about how ordinary people shape—and are shaped by—the environments and institutions around them. Central to this approach has been his work with ClioVis, where he uses interactive timelines and digital tools to help audiences visualize historical connections across space, time, and theme. As both a historian and future educator, Dresang remains committed to making history accessible, relevant, and meaningful beyond the university classroom.

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.

Lesson Plans: The Vietnam War and American Society

These lesson plans were developed through a partnership between Not Even Past, AVAnnotate, the This Is Democracy podcast, and the LBJ Presidential Library. Built around curated podcast excerpts and interactive audio annotation, each lesson provides a complete, classroom-ready resource that offers educators an engaging alternative to traditional history instruction while requiring minimal preparation.

The series is continuing to grow, with additional lessons covering a wide range of historical topics in development. Educators with questions, feedback, or requests are encouraged to contact us at notevenpast.uthistory@gmail.com.

Lesson Plans: Protest and Social Unrest

Lesson Plans: Radio and Communications Technology

Lesson plans: radio and communication technology

The Long-Lasting and Perpetuating Effects of Lynching Postcards and Photography

Throughout U.S. history, Black Americans have been victims of a range of violent and coercive systems, including slavery, segregation, and state-sanctioned violence, leaving enduring strains on the nation’s past and present. Among the most overt and brutal manifestations of this history was lynching, which made racial domination visible through public acts of terror. Emerging in the early nineteenth century, lynching in the United States functioned as widespread extrajudicial violence, most often carried out by White mobs against Black Americans and other marginalized groups [SH1] .^[1] These killings typically involved an accused individual being seized by a mob and publicly executed, often after prolonged torture that included burning, cutting, drowning, or shooting. Victims were frequently left hanging in public spaces as a warning to others.^[2]Such acts were routinely justified under the language of “social justice” and rarely resulted in legal consequences for perpetrators.^[3]

Dogwood trees in bloom in Dixieland, postcard. Ca. 1930

Crucially, lynching was not only enacted as violence but also staged, documented, and circulated. Many of these events were photographed, with images reproduced as postcards and distributed among White communities, extending the spectacle beyond the immediate site of the killing and embedding it within a broader visual culture of racial domination.^[4]

Since the mid-nineteenth century, photography has played a significant role in shaping popular culture and historical memory through the use of violent imagery. [SH2] During the American Civil War, photographs of battlefields and soldiers’ daily lives were widely produced to document the conflict. Yet Black soldiers, who also fought in large numbers, appear only rarely in this visual record. Instead, Black people were more often depicted as civilians attached to the military or as refugees, a pattern that reinforced racial hierarchies by presenting Black subjects in subordinate or dependent roles relative to their White counterparts.^[5]

Postcards, known as “Patriotic Covers”, started appearing at the end of the Civil War era in 1865, with portraits of White patriots to commemorate and honor them for their service and sacrifice.^[6] To most people during the late nineteenth century, postcards were a modern form of visual communiqué mainly marketed to White audiences as pictographic collectibles of important places, events, and individuals. By 1908, 677 million postcards were mailed, increasing to nearly one billion in 1913.^[7] Picture postcards became a popular visual communication medium in the United States and are often used as a tactile method to commemorate leisure outings and activities.^[8]

Photo postcard of a man seated in front of a postcard display in a souvenir shop.

Papa Jony, Farmers City, IL sitting in a store, which sold postcards. Source: Wikimedia Commons

Purchasing and collecting postcards became a way to signal taste and social identity, with the style and quality of the images reflected in the postcards people possessed, mailed, and exchanged with others.^[9]Within this broader visual culture, racialized imagery also circulated widely. Some postcards depicted Black figures deliberately darkened with ink and positioned alongside White subjects, reinforcing racial hierarchy and representations of Black inferiority.

Therefore, postcards produced and disseminated racist stereotypes, particularly through images of Black children depicted as primates or ape-like figures in degrading and stylized poses, such as eating watermelon, sitting on the ground, or walking barefoot in cotton fields.^[10] Consequently, since the 1860s, lynchings also started being photographed across the country, especially in the South. These visual depictions of racial violence were widely reproduced and sold on the streets and local shops, primarily to White southerners from Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia.^[11] These states, where most lynchings happened, sold postcards for an average of ten cents each, which would later be sent throughout the country to relatives who shared the same racist views.^[12] The dissemination of these postcards conveyed the message of the superiority of White individuals in the picture, who often posed in front of the camera with a grin of satisfaction.^[13] These expressions not only asserted White superiority and power but also framed Black suffering as an expected outcome for those accused of defying the dominant group, regardless of guilt.

Image from 1908 that reads: The Dogwood Tree.
This is only the branch of the Dogwood tree: An emblem of WHITE SUPREMACY. A lesson once taught in the Pioneer's school. That this is a land of WHITE MAN'S RULE. The Red Man once in an early day, Was told by the Whites to mend his way. The negro, now, by eternal grace, Must learn to stay in the negro's place. In the Sunny South, the Land of the Free, Let the WHITE SUPREME, forever be. Let this a warning to all negroes be. Or they'll suffer the fate of the DOGWOOD TREE. -Pub. by Harkrider Drug Co., Center, Tex. Copyrighted. Fig. 6. "US. Postcard", 1908.

The Dogwood Tree, 1908. Credit: Without Sanctuary

In Sabine County, Texas, in 1905, the lynching of Will Manuel, Cleve Williams, Moses Spellman, Will Johnson, Jerry Evans, and a male whose last name was [SH3] identified as Williams was preserved in postcard form (See Figure above) and remains one of the few surviving examples to include pro-lynching poetry. Such postcards often featured explicit language that endorsed and reinforced White supremacy, whether through printed text or handwritten annotations. Not only did these postcards show the contemporary mindset of that time, but they also influenced future generations and their connotations of non-white people, as families often saved these postcards as memorabilia. Indeed, the writer’s supposed sense of righteousness and objectivity present in their words are material proof of their views and attitudes toward minorities and their support for a White supremacist America and the perpetual subjugation of Black people.

Public understanding of lynching remains uneven, and discussions of this history are often avoided or marginalized within broader narratives of the nation’s past.^[14] Many White Americans have the perception that extremist racist behavior in society is an issue of the past and that the nation is long past violent and racially driven crimes and behaviors.^[15] However, the legacy of lynching, and particularly its visual documentation, has influenced public policy and social attitudes, with lasting consequences for Black communities. Public lynchings continued until the mid-twentieth century, and so did the dissemination of postcards and photographs through the mail, even after the outlawing of their mailing in 1908.^[16] Presently, lynching postcards and physical souvenirs of the deceased, such as clothing items, locks of hair, and bones, can be found in family albums, attic trunks, online sales, thrift stores, pawn shops, and flea markets, with some selling for up to thousands of dollars. Therefore, this indicates that objects considered to be lynching memorabilia were frequently hidden among family possessions or discarded as a means of avoiding the law or, in contemporary times, out in society, ready for acquisition by those who actively seek the items out.^[17]

While the historical contexts differ, scholars note that visual documentation of racialized violence continues to shape public perception today. Similarly, lynching photographs have given way to “othering” of Black Americans in the US by the general population and the police force. The brutality shown in those postcards can still be seen today in the proliferation of images featuring police violence against Black people. Historically, many police forces have been “official” perpetrators of violence against African Americans in the South. In some cases, law enforcement agencies carry out a brutal and lengthy legacy of maintaining peace through state-sanctioned coercion and fearmongering among the minority population because of preconceived, racist, and stereotypical notions that are woven into the threads of American society.^[18] For example, in contemporary conversations around police body cams, the proliferation of images of police violence against Black people is evident. The evidence can tell us that this Black person is doing nothing and is not a threat, yet they are handcuffed, or worse, their lives are taken from them.^[19]

Memorial corridor at the national museum for peace and justice

Memorial Corridor at The National Memorial for Peace and Justice. Source: Wikimedia Commons

The photographs act, still to this day, as a moment frozen in time where lynching victims were suffering at the hands of the White mob and are a permanent display of power, race, and White supremacy. Indeed, lynching photographs today stand as tokens of the most sensationalistic aspects of lynching: photographers selling torture and death through pictures and postcards for profit and spectators who bought them, sent them to friends and family, and preserved them for generations. Nevertheless, at the turn of the last century, they served as “proof” of something more; the shots photographers chose to take, develop, and sell, and how senders chose to present themselves through writing, ultimately came to visually substantiate the ideologies of White supremacy and White solidarity that both justified and incited lynching.^[20] These images have allowed racist individuals throughout time to rationalize or obscure the brutality of lynching by reframing it as social justice or civic duty. In this sense, lynching photography not only documented racial terror but also functioned as a tool of denial—reinforcing the shared narratives and symbols of the past that both celebrated White dominance and concealed the depth of Black suffering. Regardless of the era, whether it involves a lynching postcard or the killing of a Black individual at the hands of the police, visual evidence of outright violence against the Black community struggles to raise awareness of the structural problem in a society that has long been accustomed to the inequalities and subjugation of Black Americans. Treating and understanding lynching photography as historically rooted yet still active in shaping the present enables us to recognize its enduring influence on the way race is perceived. Confronting these images, therefore, is not only about acknowledging a dark past but also about addressing the ongoing structures of racism they helped create, to prevent their repetition in new forms.

Alejandro Soto Camacho is a Ph.D. student in sociology at The University of Texas at Austin. He earned his BA in Sociology and Anthropology with a minor in Forensic Science from North Carolina State University. Currently, his research interests are in historical and environmental sociology.

Rasul A. Mowatt is the Department Head of Parks, Recreation, and Tourism Management in the College of Natural Resources and Affiliate Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at North Carolina State University. His interests and concerns are strongly centered on critiquing society for issues that are most prevalent in impacting quality of life.

Full article link: https://www.proquest.com/openview/240faeda045d4a5bb108212017cc5541/1?pq-origsite=gscholar&cbl=5531555

References:

Brown, Kimberly J. 2024. “The Absence of Black Soldiers in Civil War Photos Speaks Volumes.” The MIT Press Reader, June 19. https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/theabsence-of-Black-soldiers-in-civil-war-photos-speaks-volumes/.

Haydel, Nia Woods. 2007. “Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America, a Case Study of a Higher Education Partnership for Social Justice Education.” PhD diss., Georgia State University. ProQuest (3301005). https://www.proquest.com/dissertationstheses/without-sanctuary-lynching-photography-america/docview/304843783/se-2.

Jordan, Meghan Lynn. 2017. “Lynching Photographs and Their Aftermath: The Overlay of the Gaze.” PhD diss., The University of Arizona. ProQuest (10622868). https://www.proquest.com/dissertations-theses/lynching-photographs-theiraftermath-overlay-gaze/docview/1966211490/se-2.

Mowatt, Rasul A. 2012. “Lynching as Leisure.” American Behavioral Scientist 56 (10): 1361– 1387. https://doi.org/10.1177/0002764212454429

Natividad, Ivan. 2022. “Confronting America’s Traumatic History of Lynching.” Berkeley News, June 16. https://news.berkeley.edu/2022/06/16/confronting-americastraumatic-history-of-lynching

O’Neill, Aaron. 2024. “Lynchings by State and Race in the U.S. 1882–1968.” Statista, February 2. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1175147/lynching-by-race-state-and-race/.

Raiford, Leigh Renee. 2003. “‘Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare’: History, Memory, and the Photography of Twentieth-Century African American Social Movements.” PhD diss., Yale University. Pro Quest (3084356). https://www.proquest.com/dissertationstheses/imprisoned-luminous-glare-history-memory/docview/305285177/se-2.

Scott, T. A. 2015. “‘Don’t Fail to See This’: Race, Leisure, and the Transformation of Lynching in Texas.” PhD diss., The University of Chicago (3725551). https://www.proquest.com/dissertations-theses/dont-fail-see-this-race-leisuretransformation/docview/1734444871/se-2.

Staff, Frank. 1966. The Picture Postcard and Its Origins. Frederick A. Praeger.

Stewart, Amy R. 2014. “Witnessing Horror: Psychoanalysis and the Abject Horror of Lynching Photography.” Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society 19 (4): 413–434. https://doi.org/10.1057/pcs.2014.40.

Tucker, Linda. 2005. “Not Without Sanctuary: Teaching About Lynching.” Transformations: The Journal of Inclusive Scholarship and Pedagogy 16 (1): 52–69. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/trajincschped.16.2.0070

Wood, Amy Louise. 2005. “Lynching Photography and the Visual Reproduction of White Supremacy.” American Nineteenth Century History 6 (3): 373–399. https://doi.org/10.1080/14664650500381090.

^[1] Haydel 2007; Jordan 2017

^[2] Haydel 2007; Jordan 2017; Mowatt 2012.

^[3] Haydel 2007; Jordan 2017; Mowatt 2012.

^[4] Raiford 2003; Stewart 2014.

^[5] Brown 2024.

^[6] Brown 2024.

^[7] Scott 2015.

^[8] Scott 2015

^[9] Staff 1966.

^[10] Scott 2015.

^[11] O’Neill 2024; Scott 2015

^[12] O’Neill 2024; Scott 2015

^[13] Mowatt 2012.

^[14] Jordan 2017; Tucker 2005

^[15] Jordan 2017; Haydel 2007

^[16] Scott 2015

^[17] Jordan 2017

^[18] Raiford 2003

^[19] Natividad 2022.

^[20] Wood 2005.

Lesson Plans: The Cold War

Lesson Plans: Civil Rights and Civic Participation

The Fox and The Wolf

There was no reprieve from the cold or the hail that accompanied it. With each passing year, the weather claimed more homes, livestock, and children, even as the labor never ceased. In the late sixteenth century, the forests of Lorraine, once an independent duchy near the Netherlands, Luxembourg, and Franche-Comté, now part of northern France, were as alive with the chopping of timber and the clanging of metal tools on stone as with the howling of winter winds. The laborers of the region were able to briefly forget the cold, as they sweat over grain and vine. Claudette Dabo could not. Her feet ached; her aging bones could no longer handle the long miles on frozen sludge as they once had. She stopped at the side of the path, extending a shivering outstretched hand, but found little relief. Her neighbors avoided her gaze and passed her by not only because of their own hardships, but because they saw her as more than a sickly old woman. Between 1600 and 1614, the courts of Lorraine accused several people, including Dabo, of being a werewolf.^[1]

Claudette Dabo had a forceful presence. Cantankerous and bold, her neighbors feared her. We do not know what she looked like, but we do know she was stubborn and resilient. She was born around 1550 into a tight community among several small river towns in eastern Lorraine.^[2] Neither her mother nor her father ever strayed very far from the familiar mountains, and she followed suit.^[3] Her work was inherently social as she visited and received other women as guests to exchange her handmade goods and manual labor for money and other necessities. Her wide network of confidants and colleagues extended across several towns.

Oil painting. The cycle of the seasons fascinated 17th-century Europeans, but the shifts in the tilt of the earth that causes them were not understood. Winter was especially hard then; Europe was in the middle of a little ice age and it was much colder than today. The Southern Netherlands was also in the midst of a war, and ill-paid soldiers terrorized the peasants. Here, the landscapist de Momper uses subdued color and tonal unity to suggest the bleakness of a late winter afternoon, complemented by an intricate, stark pattern of barren branches against the sky.

Winter Landscape Ca. 1620. Source: Wikimedia Commons

However, by the turn of the seventeenth century, these towns were gaunt and rotten. During the Little Ice Age (c. 1550–1700), hail fell frequently in this region, destroying crops and leading to large-scale famines. It was impossible to fatten infants when the crops themselves were thin, pale, and broken. The animals, too, adopted frail, unimposing figures. As if, at any moment, they could drop dead from disease or starvation. What little food there was frequently made the villagers fall ill. Regardless, they worked with what little they had.^[4]

Sometimes a scream would disrupt the gentle sounds of work. The bleating of farm animals and quiet rasps of spades would come to an abrupt stop as the sounds of violence erupted nearby. Expansion efforts of neighboring states,the now decades-old French Wars of Religion and the nearby Dutch Eighty Years’ War threatened the townspeople with disease and marauders. French soldiers marched through, Dutch soldiers marched back, though to the farmers, it didn’t matter whether the soldiers were French, Dutch, German, or Spanish. They all brought suffering and the smell of stale blood, iron, and war with them.^[5]

But it wasn’t just the people who noticed the smell—other animals did too. As with the frequent carnage came wolves. They came down from the Vosges Mountains to stalk neighborhoods and lurk along the forest’s edge. They too brought screams. Children and livestock, weak from their diets and hard work, became prey. Dabo’s stepchildren had long been too big and loud for the wolves, but her neighbors were not so fortunate.^[6]

Lorraine had a substantial wolf population at the time, with farmers experiencing frequent attacks prior to their extinction in France in the twentieth century.^[7] Historian Jay M. Smith argues that extensive bloodletting was one possible cause for such attacks, as in the case of the Beast of the Gévaudan, which purportedly terrorized southern France nearly a century later.^[8] He argues that during the 1590s, because of the chaos of the Wars of Religion, wolves potentially attacked thousands.^[9] The wolf population was notably large in Lorraine and Franche-Comté, likely peaking between 1600 and 1614 when the werewolf trials took place.^[10] The threat of wolf attacks, particularly to children, was a horrifying reality.

The wolves served as a common enemy against which the predominantly Catholic townspeople could rally. They took up arms to thin the population, yet they suspected other actors could have been responsible for their misfortunes. The whispers grew louder the longer the wet, wintry months kept stomachs growling and coughs lingering. The misery in the town of Gratin was so great that the farmers began to speculate that demonic forces brought wolves and hail. Rumors took root, and fingers pointed to the poor and unpopular like Claudette Dabo.^[11]

Série B, Cours et juridictions. B 7232-9130, Archives départementales de Meurthe-et-Moselle. Account accusing Dabo of transforming into a wolf.

By 1614, Dabo’s financial struggles became detrimental to her relationships within the community, from which she needed support.^[12] During a time when everyone was poor, she was destitute. She opportunistically took advantage of neighborly interactions to ask for financial favors, slowly eroding her relationships. As the years went on, people refused her requests for butter and cheese more frequently.^[13] Sometimes it was necessary for her to beg on the streets. She was also itinerant. When generosity ran low in one town, she would walk nearly 20 miles to the town where her mother was born to do so.^[14]

Lorraine and Alsace regions in the northeast of France^[15]
Points on map are towns relevant to Dabo’s trial. Her mother was from Rambervillers, and her father was from Nompatelize. Dabo lived in Gratin but had spent the previous ten years living in Robache. Saint Dié was the location of the prosecuting office.

As misfortune followed her throughout her life, the farming villages she called home would, both literally and metaphorically, imprison her. Her contentious home life left her unsupported and alone. She was on her third marriage—this one no happier than the previous two. Having been twice widowed by the age of sixty and in constant turmoil with her immediate family made her the perfect subject of gossip. Regardless of whether or not she was guilty, she was the kind of person who people could believe was a murderer. In one instance, one of her stepsons accused her of killing several horses to spite him, and in turn, she accused him of attempting to kill her with an axe. On another occasion, a different stepson accused her of “pull[ing] away half his beard, and boast[ing] about it.”^[16] The community agreed that she had been responsible for his eventual death as well as the deaths of her husbands, who reportedly routinely abused her. When an accused witch, Jehennon Renard, claimed that Dabo had transformed into a wolf and eaten the heart of a small child, people believed the claim.^[17]

Accusations against Dabo, claiming she was a werewolf, were based on coincidence and her poor reputation in the community. When Renard accused Dabo, she claimed that they had both been in the form of wolves when they ate the child’s heart.^[18] Historian Robin Briggs suggests that the accusation that Dabo and Renard ate the child’s heart may have reflected beliefs about magical practices used to influence trials.^[19] After the initial accusation, local testimonies supported the belief that she had potentially transformed. Such accusations, however, were based entirely on Dabo’s proximity to coincidental wolf attacks. Witnesses to one wolf attack against another child claimed to have seen Dabo in the meadow immediately after.^[20] Another man accused her of turning into a wolf after his livestock had died suspiciously in the wake of an argument with Dabo over her husband’s debts.^[21] He recalled a time a wolf had nearly attacked his daughter, and proposed that Dabo had been the assailant.^[22] These accusations pose the question: to what extent did the people of Lorraine believe Dabo was a werewolf? To what extent did they believe that werewolves existed at all?

Lycanthropy did not have one concrete definition, and early modern scholars pursued many different avenues to describe it. The word “lycanthrope” itself has Greek origins, drawing from the Greek lykos for wolf and anthrōpos for human.^[23] In Pierre La Primaudaye’s 1618 philosophical work The French Academy, he noted Nebuchadnezzar II as an early lycanthrope, a state which he defined as a mental illness.^[24] The French word for werewolf, loup garou, and its early modern translations provide more insight into different interpretations of the words werewolf and lycanthrope. Guy Miege’s 1677 English and French dictionary defined loup garou as a wolf that only consumes human beings, a sorcerer, or someone with a mental illness that believes themself to be a wolf.^[25] Miege’s dictionary states, “Loup garou, a mankind wolf, a wolf that once being flesht on men and children will rather starve than feed on any thing else. Loup garou, sorcier, one that possessed with an extream[sic] and strange melancholy believes he is turned wolf, and behaves himself as a wolf.”^[26] Similarly, English scholar Robert Burton cited lycanthropia, or “wolf-madness” as a disorder by which an individual believed they were a wolf and acted in such a manner in his 1628 book detailing different kinds of psychological issues.^[27] Typically, Neoplatonists believed that literal transformation was impossible because man’s soul was too “noble” to exist within the body of an animal.^[28] By the early modern period, scholars tended to define the werewolf as a mental illness or demonic illusion. These scholarly debates, however, mattered little in rural Lorraine, as people claimed to witness literal physical transformations during the Lorraine witch trials.^[29]

Dabo often imposed her will on others and held her ground in confrontations. Even throughout the accusations and trial, she withstood torture for longer than many and resisted confession until the last possible moment. As she stood trial for witchcraft, no family members or friends testified in her favor. Those in whom she confided her escape plans shared the information with the court. The people of Lorraine accused her of turning into a wolf because the threat of some greater malevolent power offered a compelling explanation for their misfortune. What little we know about her and people like her comes from the mouths of their opponents, manipulated by courts with anti-heretical agendas. It is with this in mind that we read between the lines to uncover some truth about the lesser-known individuals instrumental to our understanding of history. The victims of the witch trials were often impoverished and/or social outcasts. These accused heretics and witches were scapegoats during times of hardship. The courts did not afford people like Claudette Dabo the luxuries of fairness or sympathy, and it is in understanding their deaths that we can understand the institutions that oppressed them.

Melina Olivas is a Master’s student in the History Department at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, pursuing a Certificate in Public History. She graduated with a BA in History and Government from The University of Texas at Austin with Special Honors in History. She is interested in the intersection between religion and animals in the medieval Mediterranean and making historical information more accessible.

^[1] “Lorraine Witchcraft Trials” (website), w273 B 8712 no 2; “Claudette femme Jean Dabo, Grattain (1614). Destitute.”

^[2] Série B, Cours et juridictions. B 7232-9130, Archives départementales de Meurthe-et-Moselle.

^[3] Série B, Cours et juridictions. B 7232-9130, Archives départementales de Meurthe-et-Moselle.

^[4] Robin Briggs, The Witches of Lorraine, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).

^[5] Sarah Ferber, “Reformed or Recycled? Possession and Exorcism in the Sacramental Life of Early Modern France,” in Werewolves, Witches, and Wandering Spirits: Traditional Belief and Folklore in Early Modern Europe, ed. Kathryn A. Edwards, (University Park, USA: Penn State University Press, 2003), https://doi-org.ezproxy.lib.utexas.edu/10.1515/9780271091099-010.

^[6] Jay M. Smith, Monsters of the Gévaudan the Making of a Beast, (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2011).

^[7] Jean-Marc Moriceau, “The Wolf Threat in France from the Middle Ages to the Twentieth Century,” (2014): 12 ffhal-01011915.

^[8] Smith, Monsters of the Gévaudan, 12.

^[9] Smith, Monsters of the Gévaudan, 12.

^[10] Machielsen, “The Making of a Teen Wolf,” 237.

^[11] Philippa Carter, “Work, Gender and Witchcraft in Early Modern England,” Gender and History (July 2023), https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-0424.12717.

^[12] Série B, Cours et juridictions. B 7232-9130, Archives départementales de Meurthe-et-Moselle.

^[13] “Lorraine Witchcraft Trials” (website), w273 B 8712 no 2; “Claudette femme Jean Dabo, Grattain (1614). Destitute.”

^[14] “Lorraine Witchcraft Trials” (website), w273 B 8712 no 2; “Claudette femme Jean Dabo, Grattain (1614). Destitute.”

^[15] Made with ArcGIS StoryMaps.

^[16] “Lorraine Witchcraft Trials” (website), w273 B 8712 no 2; “Claudette femme Jean Dabo, Grattain (1614). Destitute.”

^[17] Série B, Cours et juridictions. B 7232-9130, Archives départementales de Meurthe-et-Moselle.

^[18] “Lorraine Witchcraft Trials,” (website), w273, 5.

^[19] Briggs, The Witches of Lorraine, 126.

^[20] “Lorraine Witchcraft Trials,” (website), w273, 1, 4.

^[21] “Lorraine Witchcraft Trials,” (website), w273, 4.

^[22] “Lorraine Witchcraft Trials,” (website), w273, 4.

^[23] “Lycanthropy Definition & Meaning,” Merriam-Webster, (Accessed April 19, 2024), https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/lycanthropy#:~:text=ly%C2%B7%E2%80%8Bcan%C2%B7%E2%80%8Bthro,possible%20by%20witchcraft%20or%20magic.

^[24] Pierre de La Primaudaye, R. Dolman, W. P., Thomas Bowes, William Phillip, and R. (Richard) Dolman, The French Academie Fully Discoursed and Finished in Foure Booke, (London: Printed [by John Legat] for Thomas Adams, 1618): 420. Nebuchadnezzar was the king of the Neo-Babylonian Empire. The Bible depicts him as a tyrant punished by God with insanity.

^[25] Guy Miege, A New Dictionary French and English with Another English and French According to the Present Use and Modern Orthography of the French Inrich’d with New Words, Choice Phrases, and Apposite Proverbs, (London: Printed by Tho. Dawks, for Thomas Basset, 1677): 189.

^[26] Miege, A New Dictionary, 189.

^[27] Robert Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy, (Project Gutenberg, 2004), Subsect 4; Pierre de Lancre, On the Inconstancy of Witches: Pierre de Lancre’s Tableau de l’inconstance Des Mauvais Anges et Demons (1612), trans. Gerhild Scholz Williams, (Tempe, Ariz: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2006).

^[28] Brett D. Hirsch, “An Italian Werewolf in London, Lycanthropy and The Duchess of Malfi,” in Early Modern Literary Studies 11 no.2, (September 2005): 3.

^[29] Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy, Subsect 4; Nicole Jacques-Lefèvre, “Such an Impure, Cruel, and Savage Beast… Images of the Werewolf in Demonological Works,” in Werewolves, Witches, and Wandering Spirits: Traditional Belief and Folklore in Early Modern Europe, ed. Kathryn A. Edwards, (University Park, USA: Penn State University Press, 2003): 185, https://doi-org.ezproxy.lib.utexas.edu/10.1515/9780271091099-010.

The Spanish Empire’s Hidden Hand: How the Gálvez Network Turned the Tide of the War of Independence

An Independence Within an Empire

When the thirteen British colonies declared their independence in 1776, the world witnessed not only the birth of a new nation but also a decisive shift in the balance of global power. As historians such as Jeremy Adelman, J. H. Elliott, and Anthony Pagden have noted, the American Revolution unfolded within a wider imperial struggle stretching from Canada to the Caribbean.

Within that contested Atlantic world, Spain played an important—but often underappreciated—strategic role. Its intervention did not single-handedly determine the American victory, but it helped reshape the wider war against Britain by opening new fronts, redirecting British resources, and strengthening the Franco-American effort. What was celebrated as liberty in Philadelphia was, in Madrid, recognized as an opportunity: a calculated move by the Bourbon monarchy to check British expansion after the Seven Years’ War. Scholars such as Thomas E. Chávez and Gabriel Paquette have emphasized that weakening Great Britain was essential to safeguarding Spain’s Atlantic dominion.

It was in this environment that the Gálvez family of Macharaviaya in Málaga—José, Matías, and Bernardo—rose to prominence. Alongside figures such as Luis de Unzaga y Amézaga, Admiral Luis de Córdova y Córdova, and the financier-administrator Francisco de Saavedra, they formed a transatlantic network of reform, diplomacy, logistics, and military coordination that altered strategic realities on both sides of the ocean.

However, Spain did not aid the rebellion out of sympathy for revolutionary ideals, but to preserve its position within a competitive imperial system. Yet the outcome was paradoxical: by helping secure the independence of others, Spain accelerated the erosion of its own imperial logic. The story unfolds in four movements—José de Gálvez’s reforms, Unzaga’s clandestine diplomacy, Bernardo de Gálvez’s Gulf campaigns, and Córdova’s naval pressure—culminating in Yorktown and the Treaty of Paris.

A map of North America (1779) during the American Revolutionary era, illustrating the extent of Spanish possessions and the multiple theaters of war. Source: Wikimedia Commons

José de Gálvez: Architect of a New Imperial Order

Before Bernardo de Gálvez became known for his Gulf campaigns, José de Gálvez had articulated a new vision of imperial governance. Trained in law and seasoned within the Bourbon administration, he arrived in New Spain in 1765 as visitador general, charged with cutting through entrenched privileges and bureaucratic inertia. As Allan J. Kuethe and Gabriel Paquette note, the visitador embodied the most ambitious edge of Bourbon reform.

His mandate was to implement the centralizing reform agenda of Charles III: enhanced administrative efficiency, tighter fiscal controls, and strengthened military defenses. Gálvez reorganized the Treasury, bolstered provincial militias, and promoted the system of intendencias—administrative districts designed to tighten royal oversight from Madrid. These reforms marked a broader shift from negotiated colonial authority to a more centralized model.

He also played a central role in one of the most controversial decisions of the era: the expulsion of the Jesuits in 1767. Intended as a demonstration of royal authority, the expulsion dismantled the most cohesive educational and intellectual network in Spanish America. Jesuit colleges had shaped generations of criollo elites; their removal widened the cultural and emotional distance between Crown and colony. David Brading and Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra have shown how this rupture reshaped the relationship between faith, knowledge, and civic identity in the late colonial world.

By 1776, as Minister of the Indies, Gálvez envisioned an Atlantic strategy grounded in centralization, preventive diplomacy, and trusted family networks. He placed his brother Matías as Captain General of Guatemala and his nephew Bernardo as acting governor of Louisiana, creating a chain of command aligned with Bourbon priorities. The Gálvez family came to embody an imperial project confident it could still contest British influence.

Portrait of José de Gálvez. Source: Wikimedia Commons

Luis de Unzaga: Secret Diplomacy Before the War

If José de Gálvez was the architect, Luis de Unzaga y Amézaga was the first to put the strategy into practice. Born in Málaga to a Basque family, Unzaga represented a generation of officials who blended bureaucratic discipline with political pragmatism. As Thomas E. Chávez and Daniel C. Richter suggest, Unzaga recognized early that British vulnerability offered Spain an opening.

As governor of Louisiana from 1769 to 1777, he established covert channels of support for the North American rebels. While Madrid deliberated cautiously, concerned about revolutionary contagion, Unzaga built a clandestine network of intelligence, correspondence, and supply routes from then-Spanish-controlled New Orleans up the Mississippi River and onward to the insurgent colonies. Shipments of gunpowder, lead, muskets, and provisions, often disguised as commercial cargo, ultimately reached George Washington’s army. As Gabriel Paquette and Manuel Covo note, this assistance reflected strategic calculation more than ideological sympathy.

Unzaga’s diplomacy extended beyond logistics. In late 1776, General Charles Lee informed Washington that he had received a letter from “Don Luis Venzaga (sic), Governor of New Orleans,” addressing Washington as “General of the United States of America.” Preserved in Founders Online, this reference does not amount to formal diplomatic recognition—Spain would not recognize the United States until 1783—but it suggests an early informal acknowledgment of the rebel leadership and a purposeful signal from Spanish Louisiana. Although Unzaga’s original letter has not survived, Lee’s reference shows how informal contacts were already testing the boundaries of imperial diplomacy.

By the time Spain prepared to enter the war formally, Unzaga had already laid critical groundwork. When Bernardo de Gálvez replaced him in 1777, he inherited a stabilized province and a mature intelligence-and-supply network. The discreet official from Málaga had provided the foundation for Spain’s military escalation.

Commemorative plaque dedicated to Luis de Unzuaga y Amézaga on the Alameda Principal in Málaga, Spain. The plaque reads: Luis de Unzaga y Amézaga (1717–1793) was an inspiration behind the name of the United States, Captain General and Governor of Louisiana. He promoted the construction of the Alameda Principal, including this building, where he lived and died.

Commemorative plaque dedicated to Luis de Unzaga y Amézaga on the Alameda Principal in Málaga, Spain. The plaque reads: Luis de Unzaga y Amézaga (1717–1793) was an inspiration behind the name of the United States, Captain General and Governor of Louisiana. He promoted the construction of the Alameda Principal, including this building, where he lived and died. Credit: Daniel Capilla

Bernardo de Gálvez: The Atlantic War

Bernardo de Gálvez arrived in Louisiana in 1777 as the conflict reached a turning point. Following the victory at Saratoga, the rebellion had gained momentum, France was moving toward open intervention, and Spain—guided by José de Gálvez and the Count of Floridablanca—was preparing to enter the war. As Chávez and de Covo note, the Bourbon court increasingly viewed the Gulf of Mexico as a decisive front.

At just thirty-one, Bernardo combined ambition with political acuity. His objective was clear: to prevent Britain from consolidating control of the lower Mississippi and secure the southern flank of the rebelling colonies. After Spain entered the war in 1779, Bernardo launched a coordinated campaign that would become one of the most effective—and most overlooked—of the American Revolution.

Leading a diverse force of regulars, criollos, free Black soldiers, Indigenous allies, French volunteers, and American frontiersmen, Gálvez captured Baton Rouge, then Mobile, and ultimately Pensacola—Britain’s most fortified position in the Gulf. Storms, disease, and supply shortages complicated the campaign, yet its success reshaped the geopolitical map: Spain secured the Mississippi, and Washington’s vulnerable southern flank was stabilized.

While Washington fought in the north, Gálvez’s victories disrupted British supply lines and undermined their southern operations. Jonathan Dull and David Head emphasize how combined pressures—Spanish in the south, Franco-American in the north—strained Britain’s capacity to sustain multi-theater operations.

Gálvez excelled not only as a commander but as a mediator, organizer, and governor. His inclusive policy—arming and promoting criollos, mestizos, and free Black soldiers—reflected pragmatic, Atlantic-minded governance. His victory at Pensacola in May 1781 was a strategic turning point in the Gulf theater: it removed Britain’s principal stronghold on the Gulf Coast, protected the lower Mississippi, and helped prevent British forces from concentrating fully against the Franco-American campaign that culminated at Yorktown. Charles III rewarded him with the title of Count of Gálvez and the motto Yo solo (I alone).

Strategically, Pensacola demonstrated that Spanish power remained effective across the Atlantic. Without Gálvez’s successes—and without the silver shipped from Havana that helped finance crucial phases of the Yorktown campaign—American independence would have faced far greater obstacles. Washington commanded the army; Gálvez commanded the Gulf.

Spanish sculptor Salvador Amaya works on a statue of Bernardo de Gálvez. Amaya is known for his sculptures of historical figures, including several busts of King Felipe VI of Spain. Photograph reproduced with permission of Salvador Amaya.

Luis de Córdova: A Decisive Blow

While Gálvez secured the Gulf, Admiral Luis de Córdova y Córdova struck at Britain’s global lifelines. A veteran naval commander from Seville in his seventies, he led the combined Franco-Spanish fleet during a critical phase of the conflict. Historians such as Chávez and Dull have reexamined his role, highlighting its strategic weight.

In August 1780, Córdova captured a British convoy of more than fifty ships loaded with troops, military stores, commercial cargo, and specie bound for Britain’s imperial war effort. The loss was a significant financial and logistical setback. Contemporary accounts described a deep shock in London’s mercantile circles when news of the capture arrived; the convoy’s loss deprived Britain of supplies and reinforcements intended for several theaters and exposed the vulnerability of its Atlantic supply lines. Though often minimized in British accounts, the episode demonstrated how Franco-Spanish naval pressure could complicate Britain’s ability to sustain a global war.

Córdova aimed not at spectacle but at suffocating enemy commerce. His actions—from supporting operations around Gibraltar to controlling access to the English Channel—forced Britain to disperse its forces across the Atlantic, Caribbean, and Indian Ocean. Henry Kamen and Stein & Stein note that these operations reflected the maturity of Bourbon naval reform. In the Caribbean, Francisco de Saavedra ensured the financing and rapid dispatch of funds that sustained key phases of the Yorktown campaign. Without this support, the broader Allied strategy would have lacked its material foundation.

By the Treaty of Paris in 1783, the Atlantic map had been redrawn. Spain regained territory and prestige, but the conflict also strengthened a rising power: the United States.

Portrait of Luis de Córdova y Córdova. Source: Wikimedia Commons

Conclusion: Spain at the Threshold of a New Atlantic Order

The American War of Independence was both the beginning of a nation and a turning point for the Spanish Empire. As Elliott and Paquette argue, the Revolution must be understood within an Atlantic contest in which Spain sought to redefine its position after the Seven Years’ War.

Guided by José de Gálvez and executed through figures such as Bernardo de Gálvez, Luis de Unzaga, Luis de Córdova, and Francisco de Saavedra, Spain helped dismantle key elements of British Atlantic supremacy through a calculated mix of diplomacy, logistics, finance, and naval action. The achievement was considerable—and paradoxical. By supporting the rebels, Spain weakened the rival that threatened its flank while contributing to a political vocabulary of self-government that, as scholars from Elliott to Janet Polasky note, would echo across the Americas within decades.

The Atlantic system that Gálvez and Córdova served became a space where former viceroyal territories absorbed principles that the Bourbon reformers had tried to regulate. The Gálvez family embodies that contradictory moment: an enlightened elite able to conceive the empire as a system, yet unable to foresee its unraveling. José designed the framework, Unzaga set it in motion, Bernardo defended it, and Córdova consolidated it with a strategic victory. Together, these historical figures showed that Spain remained capable of shaping the Atlantic conflict in meaningful ways, especially as Britain was forced to fight on several fronts. Yet that achievement came at a cost. The war expanded borrowing and debt, placed new pressure on the fiscal resources of the Spanish Monarchy, and exposed the limits of the imperial system Spain sought to defend. Spain’s success was therefore real, though not unlimited: it weakened Britain, secured important territorial gains, and helped sustain Allied pressure, while also revealing the financial and political strains placed on Bourbon power as it sought to preserve Spain’s position in the Americas. Spain’s role in the American War of Independence was therefore not a footnote to someone else’s revolution. It was one of the last great demonstrations of Bourbon imperial capacity in the Atlantic world. Yet that success carried its own irony: Spain helped weaken Britain and sustain the birth of a new republic, even as those efforts exposed the limits of the imperial order it sought to defend. Its victory was real, but it belonged to a world already beginning to change—one in which the United States, born as a republic in 1776, would become a central force in the Atlantic order Spain had helped to reshape, at the threshold of Spain’s long nineteenth-century imperial decline.

José A. Adrián is a Professor of Psychology at the University of Málaga (Spain), specializing in language as a cognitive phenomenon and in its oral and written disorders. In addition to his academic work, he maintains a strong interest in history and the role of Spain in the Americas.

Review of Beyond States. Powers, Peoples and Global Order (2024).

Banner of Beyond States (2024) book review by Fernando G. Herrero.

One serious historian shares the big dream of a one-world federation. Do we share the dream? Importantly, how do we evaluate this future-oriented invitation? What does that do for “history”? If the reputed English historian Anthony Pagden (UCLA)^[1] does it, it must be legitimate. Beyond States: Powers, Peoples and Global Order is a slim, manageable, and erudite book of compact global history. As such, it is symptomatic of our times, for good and ill. The book is aimed at a general readership with interests in history and international relations. It remains firmly oriented toward Western perspectives, which continue to dominate the field. Europe is what matters to Pagden the most. This is the territory to study, defend, and love. Eurocentric at the core, with or without the professional home in the U.S. If you are someone who follows world events and seeks some needed historical background, this work is for you.

Readers will travel vast timespaces as a whole lot of “human” history is packed in these 285 pages. The adjective in quotes recurs in key moments. Compression must happen if we are to contemplate Cyrus the Great of Persia (6th century B.C.) and reach for the last Shah of Iran in 1967 in a few pages (119). Remember the grand gesture of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, from the fighting hominids and the throwing of a bone into the air to the shocking segue into the waltz of the spaceship of human civilization in a technological future. A planetary human civilization in outer space is the vision in the end.

This historicism is and must be thus a tight condensation of political vignettes and references, many of which are left begging for greater development. Do not lose the thread of the argument, which bets for a desired global federalism.

European Union flags on Castle Street, Hull. Source: Wikimedia Commons

Beyond States is thus this bold projection of a desire for a better future, which translates into the withering of the state (Engels, explicitly cited). The terminology is “humanistic” (post-structuralism is no serious consideration for Pagden, who does not contemplate the whole literature on post-modernism either). The nation(-state) does not hold either. There are no crocodile tears. Here, nationalism is a dull or obtuse parochialism, and the empires of the past were, in essence, imposition and coercion. “Modernity” is, sure thing, certain to leave them behind (there is no engagement with post/decoloniality either). Pagden’s proposal: history teaches us that a global federalism of big units emerges as “the most desirable alternative” (26). Is “global” another word for total, universal, indeed “world”? In any case, this federalism is no mega-State, no federal State either. It allows a high degree of cultural, political, and legal variations (225). It is not unity, but a union. It feeds off, unmistakably, from the lessons of the European Union and its principle of subsidiarity, but it is not exclusively Western anymore, although it has its prints and features. It is, or it should be, Pagden says, more inclusive and exercises “factual consensus.” How persuasive and seductive is this vision?

Pagden’s proposal is a “liberal” alternative to Carl Schmitt’s Large-Space Politics of a century ago (23, 35, 207, 225). Beyond States outlines four parts: the birth of the nation-states, from the national to the international, the order of the world, and a world federation. We leave empirical and archival conventions behind to pursue the teleological thesis of a global federation of federations. The prose is polite, non-belligerent, cautious, the apodictic is suspended, the hypothetical gains traction, and the Schmittian predilection for the political theological is here secularized. Yet, there is, in general, little institutional detail or historical development of each section. The declaration of faith of Beyond States: universal federalism is univocally proposed for the whole wide world to see and embrace with conviction.

As a respectable historian working within the English school of political thought, Pagden presents an enjoyable, readable, and professional account, supported by a wide range of references. You may, however, circumscribe the bibliography mostly within the white-male-European-and-Western names of the North Atlantic in the lingua franca. There is some French and a bit of German, and that’s about it (there is a telling reference to Italian in the end). No doubt, the pulsating heart of Beyond States is never far away from a European Union ideal. Pagden’s proposal is that the world will learn from it, make it its possession, and push it further. The European Union is the emotional and intellectual home of our English expatriate in Los Angeles. He will die faithful to it. Other parts of the world are add-ons, and he keeps the U.S. at a distance.

Working across thousands of years and at the scale of the global as a theoretical object, the book necessarily relies on rapid, schematic treatments rather than detailed or sustained engagements. Beyond States offers many fascinating vignettes, typically rendered in two or three pages, that would benefit from further development or reading elsewhere. Their compression, however, also produces a different effect, privileging suggestive, quick-pencil sketches over extended, multiperspectival accounts. I missed the clash of different interpretations provided by the different national, social or ethnic groups.

Tomb of Cyrus the great and the night sky

Tomb of Cyrus the Great. Source: Wikimedia Commons

Regarding empires, there is the inclusion of Cyrus the Great, Genghis Khan, the “human expansion” of the 15th century into America, the “first and second empires” (40-44), and much more. Regarding the nation, it is born (44ff), with Renan and Kant (there is a whole lot of Kant!); yet, the birth of such an entity, the nation, is not clear: is it Spain in 1469? Is it perhaps England in the 9^th, 13^th, and 17^thcenturies? (50). The notion of nation conveys, he tells us, some kind of “union,” and this is the general run of the book. We are not meant to stop at the different stations; the train moves forward, and we are all moving, it appears, towards greater, irrepressible forms of human convergence. Such forms trump, so it is suggested, over fragmentations and divergences, also dissent. Before the 19^th century, nations existed “in one way or another,” Pagden adds, but not so the conceptions of nation-state, or even nationalism. The modern nation will thus be the assemblage of “microunits” (51). Habermas speaks of “unity” (52) apropos the 19th century. “Union” is the preferred term for a better future. There is a lot of Habermas, always quoted approvingly (52, 158). The spirit of such social democracy is also here. Sympathetically reading Beyond States, your knickers will get occasionally tangled up too, but it is no major problem.

Portrait of Immanuel Kant by Johann Gottlieb Becker, 1768 Source: Wikimedia Commons

The notion of democracy is important, and it pops up from time to time. It is a “society without a father” (Hans Kelsen). There is a lot of the Austrian jurist Kelsen, proponent of a normative universalism, who is said to deliver a “happy world” (52, 72, 142-47, 220, 231). We see the ideal guard rails of Pagden in between such gentlemen (Kelsen and Habermas). Sovereignty yokes nation and state (references to Hobbes and Bodin are included, even the Labour-liberal politologist Harold Laski, quoted approvingly), but sovereignty is here not the totem and taboo that others take it to be. Beyond States traffics in the illusion of a future without limits or boundaries, and in the final invitation is something like “global governance.” We might want to say, against all evidence, a hypothetical “yes”, but what does that mean?

If sovereignty is not definite and does not hold court, the push and pull of the book are towards bigger and “open” time-spaces. Warring social groups will cohere into the singularity of “human.” Yet, Pagden is most at home in the European-sourced club of readers and interpreters, with the occasional “diversity” inclusion that does not signify a sustained dissidence or divergence. There is a telling inclusion of a seductive French cosmopolitanism (Russian expat Alexandre Kojève, 215-219). There are some Italian elements: Mazzini, the architect of Italian unification, is highlighted (57-60), Italian Prime Minister Georgia Meloni, however, puts a face to populism (187), which Pagden opposes. Citations come galore, sometimes circling the U.S. legacy of Woodrow Wilson, but the heart of our historian is not here. There are many citations, and the development of many of them could have grown into different trajectories, but this would have been another book. Beyond States is yet another push in the unequivocal universalist tradition of eminent political forms of Western origins.

The chapter on international law speaks of “values” (125) and of “liberal consensus” (125-26), coming out of secularized Christian justice, described as “good for the majority of humanity.” The notion of “human rights” is also a Western conception of political desirability. Cosmopolitanism “for many” (133) brings us close to “the moral vision of the universal” and, of course, the references are to Kant (134-38). Fear not: Pagden will follow none of the postcolonial critique apropos the anthropological racism of the enlightened Prussian philosopher. There are simply too many assumptions that require many more pages. There are not enough counter-narratives. The respected Finnish international-law scholar Martti Koskenniemi, cited explicitly, would resist such fast normative aspirations, situating them within the persistent conflicts and tragedies that Pagden tends to exclude from his future vision of global governance (126–27). There are references to the United Nations and the International Court of Justice. Yet, their contemporary dilemmas remain unexamined. Back to the future of the 1930s, the influential English economist John Maynard Keynes’s “optimistic vision” of a world of non-belligerent and competitive nation-states emerges (159). Most Westerners quoted are the steps of this stairway to the heaven of a global federation.

Beyond States is thus a public, professional exercise in the Europeanist faith. The faith affirms a globalizing federalism that is within reach or at least not far into the future. The Hegelian universalist state configuration will be left behind due to its overwhelming difference-erasing state-centrism (61). Yet its universalism is retrieved (118). Particularisms somehow survive: the dream is about positive, seemingly voluntary and non-coercive “union” and not enforced, uniform, negative “unity.” The push-and-pull is here towards collaboration and interdependence of bigger and bigger units rising above the limitations of this or that particularistic sovereignty. The agent or subject of this convergent history is not defined. Dante’s De Monarchia is “for many the supposed affinity of peoples of the whole planet” (219-20). Who is this “many”? What is that affinity? Democracy (dispatched as “collective self-government”) is added to the mix of the nation-state from time to time. Our current messy times require more bite and investigation. Is Pagden “guilty” by association? The good names are always –let us repeat–in the vicinity of the West. China is not democratic (69). Russia? You already know the answer. The varieties in the Global South, perhaps? We are assured that democracy is not exclusively Western; the Ochollo tribes in Ethiopia, the Zaporizhzhian Cossacks, the Igbo nation in Western Africa, and “perhaps many others, relatively small communities” (69), have been democratic. Bet your hat that our historian is not seeking sustained inspiration in those faraway societies.

Beyond States (2024) book cover.

Beyond States affirms an incredible linearity of global modernity, the one coming out of the French and American revolutions (71), coalescing around the moment of the Enlightenment, more European than American, and acquiring its “proper” qualities in the 19th and 20th centuries. This is the West that matters, the creator and exporter of all good things (73-5), with its contemporary NATO and EU articulations. The magic pill? The key factor? Commerce is the oldest and most sustained form of “contact” (76). The world is nothing if not interconnected. The terminology of the West overtakes that of Europe, with the French intellectual Auguste Comte (93-96), and the independent leader, Mustafa Kemal, “father of the Turks.” Where is America (from Alaska to Patagonia) in this Western expansionism? Beyond States runs a Europeanist counterpart to the contemporary U.S.-led West, currently under duress, which is not addressed.

This is, therefore, a self-styled “optimistic” ride if you want to take it. Injustices, slavery, racism, and man-woman inequality do, of course, happen; the refinement of these bad features in the West is “perhaps unknown in the rest of the world” (107-111). Scratch the eggshell: the West is the fons et origoof most things of value and some “refinement” of “less value.” As I read the text carefully, I keep wondering about the engine of this political machine and who gets to sit in the driver’s seat. The merchants? The business types? Self-assigned elites of the hegemonic countries? Do these preferences attenuate messy politics? There are also the politics of knowledge production and the geopolitical configurations of world partitions that still require reflection. Classes do not appear. Race plays no big part. Women are discriminated against. What else then? Beyond States constitutes a grandiose illusion, a kind of cosmic bird’s eye view of global history, of disembodied “humans” passing through the dark clouds and rain and thunder and reaching the warmth and nurture of a good sun. Climate change, theoretical West in the interregnum, internal tensions in the nations of this world, and crises in universities. Do not go far away from the U.S. ‘What else is ‘global history’ for?’, is the question that keeps Beyond States together. Or does it?

Yet, it is commerce that makes us “play the field,” nationally and internationally, and it is in the latter dimension where we “should” settle, Pagden asserts. From the 1st century to the 15^th, the silk trade, Adam Smith’s enlightenment of the commercial society, communication, exchanges, ineluctable modality of modern society “to many” (85), who is this “many”? And there will be no more war or conquest. Carthage was the first commercial state, Pagden says (85). The most dynamic economic areas of the world today are omitted. The three dominant regions of the world are, however said to be the U.S., Europe, and China (229-232). Russia is not in the picture. No Asean, no Brics+, no Global South. Looking at the crystal ball, Pagden proposes amalgamations. It is a geopolitical nutshell. Things could go differently. Yet, our historians’ call is for the cultivation of sympathy, human sociability for the better care of our existence as a species (239-241). No technological prowess, no transhumanism, no AI, no Elon Musk or Peter Thiel here. The economy is not, per se, addressed. Capitalism is missing in action. We appear to be dealing with the dance of nominal entities and disembodied ideas.

Make no mistake: this is a liberal modality of “global history.” The Europe included here is that of the European Union, less so of NATO Europe, qua an ideal core of a Western compact (Brexit is a tragedy, 87; and Britain does not appear besides the sprinkling of a few Enlightenment figures). There are big silences in Beyond States, basically everything that upsets the thesis of greater convergences. Pagden’s core Europe is Franco-German filtered through the Anglo publishing prowess of Oxford and Cambridge. There are occasional admirative Italian touches. The “Hispanic” world makes a negligible contribution to the general vision, remarkable for our historian, who started his career under the guidance of John H. Elliott in the English context.

The author does not linger on the current problems or troubles of “Europe”; those of other units receive less attention. The portable volume does not, cannot linger in any detail of the political turmoil currently sweeping not only the West, but other parts of the world. Would ASEAN, BRICS+, G-20, USMCA, African Union be considered federations of the inspirational kind proposed by Pagden? No current political figures are mentioned, except for the populist Meloni. The Germany of Habermas does not show up. The U.S. of Trump is missing in action. The Latin America of Lula, idem. Is our historian too “optimistic”, too polite and euphemistic, too distant, too tactful? The “Hispanic” world occupies an uneven, marginal, and forgettable prelude to globalization, but the conventional term in quotes demands an update. Does China have anything to say? Russia? The Middle East? The Arab-Muslim world? Israel? The Jewish world? Africa? Never mind: a better “federalist” future looms in the future. Further conversations await with the esteemed historian in a dignified European club (Paris, London, Rome?), or perhaps in a cute taqueria in Los Angeles, with or without Chatham House rules.

Fernando G. Herrero is a Senior Research Fellow affiliated with the Instituto Iberoamericano of the University of Salamanca, Spain.

^[1] See the two parts of my extensive conversation with Pagden, for greater context, also in Not Even Past.

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