Raquel Torua Padilla, Author at Not Even Past

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.

Understanding History Through Video Games: Europa Universalis IV and Causation

The idea of using video games to teach history is nothing new. One of the oldest history video games, The Oregon Trail, was designed with this exact purpose in mind in 1971.^[1] In the following decades, the popularity and technological sophistication of history video games–those with a historical theme or setting–have grown exponentially. The award-winning medieval action role-playing game Kingdom Come Deliverance II sold over five million copies in the first year after its release.^[2] It is therefore natural that historians have started asking academic questions about history video games and how they influence younger generations’ understandings of history. However, the quantity of this research is still limited and there is a lot more to be explored and contributed. In my research project “Playing History: How Video Games Can Change The Way We Understand The Past” I sought to add to this growing field by pursuing two questions. How exactly do video games change how we think about history? What is unique about video games in how they communicate information? I surveyed and interviewed players of history video games and used Paradox Interactive’s acclaimed Europa Universalis IV as a case study to answer these questions. By analyzing the unique qualities of video games and Europa Universalis IV’s presentation of historical causation, this project demonstrated the potential of video games to communicate complex historical ideas to an audience already familiar with the medium. I will explore these conclusions here using the concepts of agency and replayability to show how Europa Universalis IV conveys knowledge of historical causation.

Video games are defined by their interactive nature. The player of a game actively influences and changes their experience through their actions, which is markedly different from how a viewer passively watches a film for example. This interactivity is best understood through the concept of agency, as defined by C. Thi Nguyen in his book Games: Agency as Art. Nguyen defines agency in the context of games as a set of temporary goals and actions available to pursue those goals, which the player takes up in order to play the game.^[3] For example, when playing the video game Pong, I adopt the goal of scoring eleven points before my opponent, and to do so can move my paddle vertically to intercept the ball and bounce it at my opponent’s edge of the screen. This is not a goal I possess as I go about my daily life, nor do I use the limited action of vertically moving a paddle to achieve my normal goals, like making dinner. I take on the goals and available actions of the game to play it, and then dispose of them when I am finished. But while playing a game, these goals and allowed actions take precedence over any others we might have, allowing players to “submerge ourselves in the temporary agency of the game.”^[4] This immersion means that video game players are not simply making mindless choices; they are firmly rooted in a game’s agency, which provides them a deep understanding of cause and effect.

Video games also possess the virtue of replayability. While some games are more replayable than others, unlike a traditional novel or film which plays out exactly the same way every time, a video game can be played repeatedly with differing results. These differences could be whether the player wins or loses, a different narrative outcome to the game’s story, or simply a different pathway the player takes to get to the end of the game. This allows a game to communicate more than just an argument about why an event happened or if it would happen or not; a game can communicate how likely that event is to occur and what causes were most impactful by “modeling difficulty.”^[5] How challenging it is to achieve the goals in a game’s agency and what sorts of tools and obstacles a player experiences create a complex picture of causation for the player to learn from.

These ideas of interactivity and replayability are key to understanding Europa Universalis IV, abbreviated as EUIV. It is a historical grand strategy game in which the player controls a country in a historical simulation from the 15^thcentury to the 19^th century. The game begins in a state that reflects historical reality at a chosen date and then develops into an alternate history simulation driven by the player’s decisions, the decisions of computer-controlled countries, and various historical events that are rigged to occur across a playthrough. The player controls all of their chosen country’s political, economic, military, diplomatic, and social policies, making them the country itself rather than any person. They take on what I call the “agency of the state,” which encompasses the goals the player adopts and the actions they take while controlling any country in the game.

Logo of the Europa Universalis IV videogame. Source: Wikimedia Commons

While EUIV is a resultingly very complicated game, it also has a high level of replayability. No two playthroughs of EUIVare alike, even if playing as the same country, because there are so many variables which can change the course of its simulated history. As a result, it is a video game that is especially well suited to teaching and exploring historical causation.

Historical change and cause and effect are intricate subjects. How historians grapple with questions of causation can be just as complex. Some prefer to attribute the course of history to the actions of influential individuals and key events, often in the form of “great man history,” while others look to large structural factors such as the environment or economic systems as the cause behind historical change. In practice, how historians approach cause and effect is a sliding scale that incorporates both approaches, and most current historians fall somewhere in the middle. In her book Thinking About History, Sarah Maza defines this mixed approach to causation as “productive chaos,” an approach that looks to analyze all sorts of factors, individual and structural, to determine how they contributed to historical change.^[6]

Europa Universalis IV reflects this nuanced approach to cause and effect. The player, as an individual actor, has a great amount of influence on the course of the game. Their actions can affect not only their own country but the entire world of the simulation. The player’s decision to declare war against their neighbor could lead to the ruin of their entire country. Or their decision to invest massive amounts of funds into trade infrastructure could result in their country becoming the commercial center of the world. In a different playthrough, these actions might have different outcomes, but in each case, it is the player’s actions and decisions that are crucial to the simulation’s development. The player and their actions are a surrogate for individual-driven change.

Yet at the same time, the player’s agency of the state and their ability to influence the results of the game through it are limited. They are constrained by the structures put in place by the game, systems and large-scale factors which mirror structural forces behind historical change. For example, religion is a constant factor within EUIV. The population of each province, and therefore country, has a dominant religious faith, and this structure is an ever-present factor in the game. The player can convert their population to different religions, promote tolerance or intolerance towards minority faiths, and even engage in religious wars with other countries. But their actions are limited. They cannot, for example, force the population to become atheists. Even if the player chooses not to interact with religion, its influence will still affect their gameplay. Countries of different state religions have diplomatic penalties, a disgruntled minority population might revolt, and the Protestant Reformation will occur whether the players like it or not. While the player is a surrogate for individual factors behind change, the game itself can be seen as a surrogate for structural causes of change.

Another structural factor within the game that constrains the player’s individual agency is colonization. Whether the player takes part in colonization or not, it will still occur in the game world. They are able to influence how it occurs, by leading France to colonize Mexico before another country does, for example, but if they do not engage with that part of gameplay, the computer-controlled countries will still do so, and colonization will happen. This is because the structures of colonialism and incentives for that behavior are built into the game for the player and the computer. The game world is unable to escape the momentum of that systematic trend. The significant variability in how each playthrough develops is limited and guided by structural factors. To illustrate this, I ran two EUIV games with only computer-controlled countries until the year 1628. In the first game, the Americas were primarily dominated by England in Canada and what is now the eastern United States, Portugal in most of South America, and Spain with the Caribbean and the rest of the mainland Americas. The second game was almost entirely different. Spain controlled eastern North America while Portugal controlled the Caribbean, Central America, and the rest of North America besides northern Canada. France was the dominant force in South America, with other colonial empires possessing small pieces, and England held few territories at all. The shape colonization takes can differ, but it always occurs. This demonstrates how unique alternate historical realities are created in each playthrough.

Man on computer playing Europa Universalis IV

Man playing Europa Universalis IV. Created on Canva, Wikimedia Commons

This is exciting in an academic context because EUIV communicates that complex understanding to its players. By taking on the agency of the state and engaging interactively with decision-making in the game, players gain a nuanced understanding of cause and effect in history. Europa Universalis IV and history video game players in the University of Maine student body were surveyed for “Playing History,” and nine of those surveyed volunteered to participate in a semi-formal interview process to discuss their gaming experience. Interviewed and surveyed players demonstrated a complex understanding of historical causation. Many placed a great deal of importance on their own actions in determining the course of the simulation in a playthrough. These players also acknowledged that the mechanics of the game and the actions of computer-controlled countries played a significant role in their experience. Others explained that they felt the player had a roughly equivalent impact on the game as structural factors. One player even went as far as arguing that they are less important than structural factors and computer-controlled countries.^[7] But all of these responses demonstrated an understanding that the causes behind simulated historical changes in the game were a mix of structural and individual ones.

Players demonstrated this same sophisticated understanding of causation when asked questions about their understanding of history. Again, some players favored structural factors, some favored the impact of individuals, and some argued they were equal, but all acknowledged their inseparability. A common interpretation was that individuals are products of historical structures that they can steer or shape but not necessarily overturn. One interviewee expressed that individuals “surfed social forces.”^[8] Another used history video games themselves to explain how they understood historical causation, arguing that the player’s actions are constantly impacted by a game’s systems, and they are also altering the state of those systems with their actions.^[9] Across the board, interviewed players expressed a nuanced view of causes of historical change, both in Europa Universalis IV and real life. Through the immersive interactivity players engage with when adopting the game’s agency, EUIV communicates the complex historical idea of causation to its players. It is able to shape how we understand history.

This ability to communicate complex historical ideas to the player is an exciting power of video games. As historians continue to increasingly recognize video games as a media form to be taken seriously, this serves as one more reason to do so. There is a great deal more research to be done on the subject and recent works such as Tore Olsson’s Red Dead’s History, Jeremiah McCall’s Gaming the Past, and Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall’s Slave Revolt on Screen are pointing the way. While “Playing History” revealed intriguing insights about history video games, it only scratched the surface. For one, the project’s sample size of surveyed and interviewed players was modest. More research on a larger scale would help us further understand how video games impact their player’s understanding of history. History video games also come in all shapes and sizes, from strategy games like EUIV to narrative games like the previously mentioned Kingdom Come Deliverance II. Further research into what historical ideas different types of games can explore and communicate is needed. History video games are a subject full of possibilities for public and academic history alike, and with the recent release of EUIV’s sequel Europa Universalis V, there is no better time than the present to study how we play the past.

Chapman “Chappy” Hall is a History PhD student at George Mason University and a Graduate Affiliate at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media. His research interests are centered on French colonialism in the 18th and 19th centuries, history video games, and digital history.

^[1] R. Philip Bouchard, “How I Managed to Design the Most Successful Educational Computer

Game of All Time,” The Philipendium, June 29, 2017, https://medium.com/the-philipendium/how-i-managed-to-design-the-most-successful-educational-computer-game-of-all-time-4626ea09e184.

^[2] “Five million Henrys are now adventuring in Bohemia!” Steam, Kingdom Come: Deliverance II,

February 12, 2026, https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1771300/view/530995512961141966?l=english.

^[3] C. Thi Nguyen, Games: Agency as Art (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020), 4-5.

^[4] Nguyen, Games: Agency as Art, 10.

^[5] Gonzalo Frasca, Mark J. P. Wolf, and Bernard Perron, “Simulation Versus Narrative Introduction to Ludology,” essay, in The Video Game Theory Reader, 1st ed. (New York, NY: Routledge, 2003), 228.

^[6] Sarah C. Maza, Thinking about History (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2017), 178.

^[7] Chapman Hall, “Playing History: How Video Games Can Change The Way We Understand The Past,” Honors College, 2024, 83, https://digitalcommons.library.umaine.edu/honors/874.

^[8] Hall, “Playing History,” 90.

^[9] Hall, “Playing History,” 90-91.

The Politics of Catastrophe: A Brief History of FEMA

Washington, DC, May 13, 2003 -- FEMA's Emergency Support Team employees were TOPOFF2 exercise participants as well as assisting with the response and recovery efforts for the tornados that hit the south and midwest. Photo by Lauren Hobart/FEMA News Photo

As the nation celebrated the 2025 Fourth of July, flash flooding swallowed the Texas Hill Country. An entire summer’s worth of rain fell in the area, causing the Guadalupe River to rise dramatically in mere minutes. This disastrous deluge tragically claimed the lives of over 100 people.

President Donald Trump declared the flood a major disaster on July 6, which allowed the affected areas to receive federal relief funding via the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). Critics have charged FEMA with moving too slowly. Such charges are nothing new. The story of FEMA’s creation and track record is a quintessential example of the ongoing tension between the local and the national in political matters.

Since the dawn of the twentieth century, disasters have become problems for which the technocratic ranks of society tried to solve by employing methods of social engineering. These solutions were frequently intertwined with the political beliefs, ideologies, or agendas held by respective actors. Federal officials began funding and organizing disaster relief operations through the American Red Cross. Prior relief operations were piecemeal, ad hoc, and mostly viewed as local, not national issues. When the Red Cross became a federally funded organization in 1900, this changed the way the U.S. administered disaster relief. The Red Cross acted with a large degree of autonomy because of a substantial donor base made up of private citizens and did not necessarily need a federal mandate to alleviate suffering from a flood, earthquake, or hurricane.

Horse carriage full of boxes with supplies for the Red Cross

A load of supplies being shipped by the American Red Cross at Dallas, Texas. 1918. Source: U.S. National Archives and Records Administration

The Red Cross’ increased role directly stemmed from a national humanitarian awakening during the Progressive Era (1880-1920). Progressive Era ideals about social control, societal uplift, and racial hierarchy guided how the Red Cross prioritized those who needed aid after a disaster. Frequently, African Americans, Latinos, and those in colonized spaces like Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines, etc., were continually excluded from receiving disaster relief from the Red Cross during this era. The most egregious instances of neglect came in Puerto Rico when several hurricanes devastated the archipelago in 1899, 1928, and 1932. On the mainland, African Americans were forced to perform manual labor to receive aid, were ushered into segregated relief camps, and those who perished were buried in unmarked mass graves following a hurricane in Galveston, Texas, in 1900 and after the Mississippi Flood of 1928. These precedents established by the Red Cross continued to guide the U.S. federal government’s approach to disaster relief throughout the rest of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first century.

Despite administering millions of dollars of aid and deploying the Red Cross on thousands of missions, a consistent disaster policy proved elusive. All previous relief needed Congressional approval, which significantly delayed response times and almost always resulted in a less-than-desired funding package. The Federal Disaster Relief Act of 1950 or Public Law 875, as it became known, changed that. The Act allowed the President to declare a state of disaster and disburse funds directly to the afflicted area instead of waiting on Congress to vote. This proved a double-edged sword because while federal disaster relief responses were more efficient, this Act allowed the President to wield significant executive power over the states and overseas territories. Thus, a new “social contract” was forged between the federal government and the citizenry, where the former assumed more responsibility for what previously had been state or local issues.

Under the Eisenhower administration, disasters truly became a federal responsibility by appointing the Federal Civil Defense Administration (FCDA) as the lead federal agency in disaster response. Previously, the Red Cross was the only quasi-federal agency mandated to handle disaster relief, but because of the highly politicized Cold War fervor and fear of nuclear attack, the FCDA assumed the responsibility. Suddenly, “tornado drills” began to look eerily like “air raid drills.” This linkage between disaster and national security could have only taken shape in the political milieu of the Cold War. This dramatic change in disaster policy strengthened the centralized power of the federal government over the states and territories. However, by the late 1970s, this arrangement lacked efficiency and coordination.

Illustration of two men with helmets running towards a fire

A product of the US Federal Civil Defense Administration, c. 1954. Source: Wikimedia Commons

The Carter administration recognized that by 1978, over twenty federal agencies were planning, training, and executing disaster relief missions. In addition, the Love Canal toxic waste disaster in New York and the Three Mile Island nuclear accident became part of the national conversation in the 1970s as citizens lobbied for more government accountability and adherence to disaster relief resilience. Love Canal was originally built to connect the upper and lower Niagara Rivers, but the project failed and became a chemical dumping site for the Hooker Chemical Company. The company sold the land to the city, filled in the toxic waste, and the city developed houses and schools on top of the land. The conditions in the area were already poor because of the chemicals left behind, and excessive rains in 1978 exacerbated the situation when floodwaters carrying the chemicals spread throughout town. Women and children bore the brunt of this disaster as initially many received chemical burns, and long-term impacts included birth defects and miscarriages. Neighborhood women spoke out against these conditions and became the face of the local and national movements to mitigate these types of disasters.

On March 28, 1979, the Three Mile Island nuclear plant nearly experienced a meltdown after a valve was accidentally left open. The incident threatened immediate consequences to public health and risked escalating into an explosion. Harmful levels of radiation were released around the site and this led to a public outcry against nuclear energy, which questioned the preventative strategies employed by the federal government. A federal hearing about Three Mile Island took place, and it was determined that the site should be shuttered and a massive cleanup effort ordered. In the age of nuclear technology, this proved a massive failure on the part of the U.S. federal government.

The political fallout from the tragedies at Love Canal and Three Mile Island prompted the federal government to take disaster relief and mitigation more seriously. President Jimmy Carter created FEMA in 1979 by executive order. Carter envisioned a single government entity that oversaw all aspects of disaster relief, the funding, coordination, and on-the-ground operations. However, FEMA was built on a shaky foundation. When consolidation occurred in July of 1979, it became a bureaucratic nightmare. A 1980 intergovernmental report described how FEMA was supposed to operate and listed 24 bullet points outlining FEMA’s responsibilities. These ranged anywhere from delivering disaster assistance to developing policy related to riot insurance. In addition to providing on-the-ground relief operations, FEMA also developed a new process for individuals to file claims to receive increased aid in the form of grants. However, the process to apply for this aid proved extremely cumbersome and intricate. These seemingly unnecessary steps to obtain aid continue into the twenty-first century, with the process still proving difficult for many ordinary Americans living in both the domestic U.S. and the territories.

Hurricane Frederic. Two days after the hurricane struck President [Jimmy] Carter and a number of other White House officials, senior Corps officers, and representatives from FEMA and other federal agencies surveyed the area. Twenty-nine counties in three states were declared disaster areas. [President Jimmy Carter (left) talks to Mobile District Engineer Col. Robert Ryan about the devastation of Hurricane Frederic and the Corps recovery operation plans in Mobile, Ala., in 1979 (Chief of Engineers Lt. Gen. Joseph K. Bratton and Director of Civil Works Maj. Gen. Elvin R. Heiberg look on].

President Jimmy Carter with Mobile District Engineer Col. Robert Ryan, Mobile, Alabama, 1979. Source: Wikimedia Commons

People found ways to work through these systems or to go around them. Through local activism and community solidarity, certain areas afflicted by disasters attempted to eschew federal disaster relief and FEMA altogether because they believed that aid did more harm than good. In the case of Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico in 2017, Puerto Ricans developed local networks of relief to sidestep FEMA and exercise disaster relief sovereignty instead of relying on federal assistance that was delayed, or, in some instances, never came.

Disaster relief in the United States evolved from the ad hoc efforts of the Red Cross to the centralized bureaucracy of FEMA. Despite these profound changes, there are recurring patterns, most notably the ongoing tension between local needs and national responses. As the recent floods in Texas show, the questions raised a century ago remain unresolved today: who is responsible in moments of crisis, and how can that responsibility be exercised both effectively and equitably? The history of disaster relief in the United States reveals that technical solutions are often entangled with political decisions.

Ian Seavey is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Texas at Rio Grande Valley. His research centers on the intersection of U.S. foreign relations and disasters.

Colton de los Santos is a student of Religious Studies in the Liberal Arts Honors Program at the University of Texas at Austin.

Antonio Arguelles is a student at the University of Texas at Austin.

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.

Beyond the Archive: Digital Histories and New Perceptions of the Past

This article is part of the series: History beyond Academia

History is often considered a solitary and insular discipline. Popular conceptions of historians include people holed up in dusty archives, writing in academic jargon, and going on long tangents about a subject that only they care about. In other words, academic history is written by historians, for historians. While some of these stereotypes persist, the advent of new digital technologies has made it both easier and more necessary than ever to produce accessible and engaging historical scholarship for audiences at all levels of expertise. Additionally, digital technologies allow historians to communicate their research using different strategies, not solely relying on the written word to convey information. In this piece, I reflect on my work in digital history, examining the strategies and methods used by the projects I’ve helped develop to make history more accessible to public audiences. I hope that this will spark ideas among professional and casual historians alike in understanding the necessity of moving towards a more connected and welcoming field, and that digital tools and methodologies are one of the options in making this happen.

I came to the world of digital history through the “digital” side. I had spent my first undergraduate year as a computer science major, but after completing a summer internship as a software developer, I realized that I was missing the humanities in my life. While I wasn’t yet ready to commit to being a historian as a career, I sought out ways that I could involve myself with the History department on campus. Luckily, The Nonviolence Project, a project run by Dr. Mou Banerjee, centering undergraduate research on nonviolent people and protests, was hiring a web designer. This was the first of many digital history projects I would later join. Through this experience and the ones that followed, I learned many lessons not only about how digital methods help communicate history, but also how they enhance the discipline of history.

Woman using computer. Source: Wikimedia Commons

Learning Outside of Books

One of the key strengths of digital history is its ability to engage different types of learners. Not everyone learns and internalizes information through reading alone; for many, interactive or visual forms of presentation are more effective, bringing history into a digital landscape. Many digital history projects are exploring these new tactics for sharing history, since a website or other digital platform is more conducive to these alternate methods of learning than a typical published book. Three projects that I’ve worked on come to mind when I think about the wide variety of ways that history can be made interactive. These forms encourage a broader and more expansive understanding of the past, and demonstrate how historical stories can be communicated in the present.

The Nonviolence Project is such a platform, where student researchers write articles about the history of nonviolence while sharing more nonconventional forms of history. The home page has an interactive map with markers for the different articles hosted on the site. This map allows someone to visually see the regions where nonviolence has made a significant impact. Also highlighted on the website is a playlist that a student made containing “songs relevant to nonviolent protests and movements.” Songs often create a more immediate emotional connection to a subject than typical prose does, so including songs inspired by nonviolence is an innovative way to connect to a wider audience. These types of unconventional ways of sharing history and historical knowledge make the subject more intriguing for people who might be disinclined to simply read history.

More recently, I’ve worked with Virtual Angkor, a project based out of Monash University, Australia, that seeks to virtually model the Angkor Wat complex and its surrounding landscape during its thirteenth-century heyday. Along with a comprehensive model, the team creates “scenes” meant to visually and auditorily depict the setting. Each part of the scene is painstakingly modeled by hand and thus has a specific purpose for being included. By analyzing and investigating the scene, users, students, and the public alike can learn about what Angkor might have looked like and sounded like as the people living there would have experienced it. Once again, this method of conveying information is both more engaging and more approachable to a wider group of people than a typical book or article might be, allowing for an immersive way of “experiencing” history.

View of the central structure of Angkor Wat, with a body of water in the middle.

View of the central structure of Angkor Wat. Source: Wikimedia Commons

Currently, I am in the process of creating a history-based video game in collaboration with the University of Texas’s JapanLab and the History Games Initiative. In this game, the player acts as an Afrodescendant healer in the booming port environment of seventeenth-century Cartagena de Indias, exploring the city, interacting with clients, and trying to avoid the Inquisition, which demonized African ancestral forms of healing as witchcraft. This was my first experience leading a team on a digital scholarship project. At times, it was difficult to ensure that everyone was on the same page. Some students came to the team with a stronger historical understanding of the setting and occasionally assumed knowledge that the team needed to unpack together. Despite these challenges, it has been one of the most fulfilling projects I’ve had the opportunity to work on. This project also helped our team understand what it means to work on an interdisciplinary team, pulling on each member’s strengths and finishing with a complete video game. Conveying this important era of history as a video game will allow for more people to engage with it, and hopefully, it will spark further interest.

Accessible History

Beyond making history more engaging, digital history also leads the discipline to be more accessible in general. Since these projects are publicly accessible, often hosted on the web, more people can discover them outside of an institutional setting. Beyond this, communicating history online widens the audience to those who are unable to read more traditional histories in books. Generally, books are made to be consumed through reading, in one language, and can only be read after purchasing. While there are exceptions to this—such as access through audiobooks, translated volumes, and renting through a library—not every work of history will be available through the above ways. Digital access allows historical knowledge to be communicated auditorily through videos or a screen reader, web accessibility standards ensure that website content is available to people who might be disabled, the text can be translated (though imperfectly) through built-in browser functions, and are generally free to access on the Internet. Additionally, the language used in digital history is often more accessible, written for a public audience rather than academics, lowering the barrier of entry for anyone interested in the subject.

The Nonviolence Project comes to mind when thinking about accessible history. This project is somewhat unique in terms of historical research because it employs undergraduate students interested in writing their own original research, which is published on a public-facing platform. Part of my job duties was to edit these articles as they came in, not only for grammar but also for clarity. I learned how important it is to keep language accessible, especially when the audience is the public. Beyond this, I also used more traditional web development standards to ensure the site was accessible on the back end, including alt text in images and using headings in the proper order. Such edits make sure that the site is compatible with screen readers that the visually impaired use to navigate the site.

Another benefit of digital history compared to more traditional forms of communicating history is that it allows for different “levels” of communication. When reading a book or article, there is usually only one way to read it: from beginning to end. However, through digital history, the same project can offer different levels of engagement. At Virtual Angkor, lesson plans are divided into three different levels based on the amount of engagement offered at each one. The first level is what one would see embedded on the site: videos, a small amount of text, and a few questions asking the user to analyze the video. The user would get the big picture of what the module is trying to convey, but doesn’t necessarily have to dig deeper. The second level contains reading excerpts from books and articles about the topic written by historians, anthropologists, and other experts on the subject for further analysis and offers more in-depth comprehension and evaluation questions. Finally, the third and most in-depth level contains a full reading list, offering the most comprehensive view of the subject evaluated in the module. The user is able to choose their own path based on their own level of interest and their own comprehension skills of the subject at hand. In this way, more people can productively interact with the site. Users are in charge of how they want to learn, and the website meets them where they are at.

Digital History to Counter (Inaccurate) Pop History

Creating innovative, interactive, and accessible ways of telling history is especially important when there are other, less-than-accurate representations of that same period. The Colombian television show Siempre bruja is set during the same time period as the video game I worked to develop, but does not go into depth on how the Inquisition worked to target African and Indigenous healing practices and instead represented them as real-life magic. The television show is problematic for other reasons, including portraying the main character, Carmen, in a (seemingly consensual) romantic relationship with her enslaver, Cristóbal. Because audiences may be drawn to the show for its entertainment value while assuming it conveys historical insight, it is especially important to provide similarly accessible, but more accurate, ways of presenting this history.

Colonial structure: Castillo San Felipe de Barajas in Cartagena, Colombia

Castillo San Felipe de Barajas in Cartagena, Colombia. Source: Wikimedia Commons

While Siempre bruja was far from a pop culture phenomenon, it is likely some people’s only exposure to that period in history. For many years, historians have debated whether they have a responsibility to intervene when an inaccurate or harmful narrative becomes entrenched in society. While there are many different positions on this debate, a possible intervention in digital history can be to offer more accurate but still engaging historical narratives that the public can seek out in addition to written forms of history.

Conclusions

Taken together, these examples illustrate how digital history expands both scholarly practice and public engagement. Through seemingly endless techniques, a project can take any number of forms. Existing projects, such as The Nonviolence Project, Virtual Angkor, the JapanLab, and History Games Initiative, can all act as models for what the future of digital scholarship might look like; histories that allow learners to more deeply integrate themselves into the area and period which they represent. Some projects even go a step further—literally recreating the past for people in the present to explore and experience.

History is not only for academics—it is for everyone. No longer are historical narratives written by historians, for historians. Instead of alone in a dusty archive, a digital historian might be frequently found in front of a computer, putting the finishing touches on a publicly accessible website, designing a virtual model of an ancient city, or meeting with a team to create a more interactive way of communicating a subject.

Chloe Foor is a Phd student in History at the University of Texas at Austin. Her current project focuses on how physical spaces impacted gendered, racial, and religious identities in the New Kingdom of Granada in the seventeenth century, as well as how historical actors manipulated those identities to claim space for themselves. Currently, she is working with the JapanLab/History Games Initiative to develop a video game highlighting Cartagena Inquisition’s witchcraft trials during the early seventeenth century.

Review of Malaria on the Move: Rural Communities and Public Health in Zimbabwe, 1890-2015 (2025).

Kundai Manamere’s Malaria on the Move: Rural Communities and Public Health in Zimbabwe, 1890-2015 is an ambitious monograph that redefines and recenters Southern African medical history by foregrounding mobility as akey concept for understanding malaria’s history and circulation. Covering the period 1890 to 2015, Manamere argues that malaria control in Zimbabwe was deeply influenced by and intertwined with the political economy of settler colonialism, land displacement, border policies, and post–colonial realities of circular migration and resettlements. As such, human mobility was the mechanism of transmission itself. The parasite cannot travel unaided; it depends entirely on an infected human host’s bloodstream to carry it from one place to another, and every wave of forced displacement, labor migration, or circular movement between countryside and city was therefore a wave of parasite circulation. What the book ultimately argues is that the political and economic systems that kept people perpetually on the move — colonial land expropriation, migrant labor recruitment, war, and land reform were the most important engines of the epidemic.

Empirically, Manamere uses an array of sources, including public health files from the National Archives of Zimbabwe; WHO MAL Offset documents (1947-2000) from the World Health Organization archives; corporate records, such as the Triangle Sugar Estates environmental files; colonial and post-colonial newspapers; and oral histories. Manamere also draws on international archives, such as the Bodleian Library in the UK. The book features six chapters written in clear language, each focusing on a specific political and epidemiological period, from settler colonialism in the 1890s to 1930s to land reform and global health initiatives in 21^st-century Zimbabwe. The first chapter places malaria control in Southern Rhodesia within the context of the political economy and racial logics of settler colonialism. This approach to control meant that public health efforts during this period aimed to protect the health of the white population and African workers while neglecting rural areas where most Africans resided. Using colonial medical archives, Manamere describes how colonial vector control and quinine distribution protected Europeans while spatially segregating Africans (p. 20). This led to a racialized view of epidemiology, with malaria seen as a rural disease. 

Furthermore, Manamere explains how malaria control programs were used as a tool of occupation rather than a true humanitarian intervention. The book centers dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT)— a synthetic insecticide applied through a technique called indoor residual spraying, where the chemical is painted or pumped onto the interior walls and ceilings of dwellings so that mosquitoes resting on those surfaces after a blood feed would absorb a lethal dose and die before they could transmit the parasite again. Malaria became an expression of how Africans mismanaged space, and as a means of enabling the establishment of European Settlers and the expansion of Estate agriculture and infrastructure. In this way, malaria management created the conditions for development. The book further highlights how these malaria public health efforts transformed the Southeastern Lowveld into a laboratory for vector eradication and the containment of Africans. 

Person in a blue suit spraying insecticide to a house

Spraying to prevent malaria. Source: Wikimedia Commons

The book further indicates that global health regimes have reproduced colonial hierarchies and that malaria programs advanced by international organizations were biased towards European towns, mines, and farms, and did not include Africans who were denied access to these interventions based on racialized assumptions of acquired immunity. Therefore, scientific authority concealed the extent to which political decisions regarding who, when, where, and how to protect were made. Scientists viewed malaria eradication as a global goal; however, aligning health interventions with extractive and settler interests in Zimbabwe widened disparities in malaria eradication efforts. The portrayal of science as neutral and universal is shown to have been embedded in a context where the economic benefits of racial capitalism prevailed.

More importantly, she deepens her analysis by unpacking the regional political economy of movement and examines how labor migration to South African mines transformed human mobility as carriers and conveyors of Plasmodium falciparum parasite (the parasite responsible for malaria transmission). Parasitized migrants moved between controlled and uncontrolled malaria zones (p. 66). The Plasmodium falciparum parasite enters the human bloodstream through a mosquito bite, multiplies inside red blood cells, ruptures them, and moves on. For as long as an infected person lives, the parasite travels with them—silent, often symptomless in those who have built a partial immunity through repeated infection, yet ready to ignite fever and death in anyone who has not. Consequently, the continued malaria outbreak is attributed to “circular migration” by seasonal workers and families, who brought infection back to their communities along social circuits of kinship and livelihood (p. 117). This conceptualization—treating circulation as both an economic strategy and a vector of epidemiological risk is among the book’s most original contributions. Manamere’s analysis shows that the failure of disease control could be attributed to a failure to reckon with the logic of everyday movement—a critique first made a couple of decades earlier by Ralph Prothero, whom Manamere references (p. 3). In that way, the book moves beyond biomedical reductionism and anthropological nuance into the historical geography of epidemiology as a decolonial method.

Bread carried on trollies for the South African mine’s workers. Source: Wikimedia Commons

When Zimbabwe achieved independence in 1980, the new government inherited what Manamere describes as “an island in a sea of hyperendemic malaria”—Triangle Sugar Estates, where decades of privatized control had been maintained, surrounded by a countryside ravaged by war of liberation in the 1960s- 1979, dislocation, and the abrupt cessation of all spraying programs (p. 165). The demobilization of fighters, the return of refugees from Mozambique, and the movement of formerly confined populations back to their homes created massive new waves of parasitized travel.

Meanwhile, malaria control remained prioritized in urban areas and economically advantageous regions, thereby reinforcing the spatial hierarchies established by colonial settlers. The rise of drug-resistant malaria and the occurrence of malarial outbreaks in urban locations that had previously been protected indicate the ineffectiveness of biomedical methods that did not consider patterns of migration and inequality. Furthermore, Manamere refutes the notion that communities should be blamed for failing to control malaria and asserts that, when examining the underlying causes of these failures, it becomes clear that they are rooted in the continued influence of colonial structures, namely the dispossession of land and the displacement of labor.

Manamere creates an excellent connection between the historical legacies of colonialism and the understanding of diseases and health in Southern Africa. The clarity of the book’s writing style, the extensive use of archival materials, and the innovative use of interdisciplinary methods are admirable. Manamere’s conceptualization of mobility integrates the disciplines of epidemiology, labor studies, and political medical geography into a model for interpreting the etiology of malaria in colonial and post-colonial Zimbabwe. However, one of the book’s limitations is that it is overwhelmingly centered on humans while neglecting parasites, mosquitoes, and blood as active participants in the analysis. Giving more agency to these nonhuman actors, especially the Plasmodium falciparum parasite, given its capacity to adapt to different environments, would have strengthened the book’s ecological argument and brought the book’s argument in line with recent scholarship on nonhuman actors.

Manamere’s book is an important contribution to scholarship on the history of medicine in Southern Africa, and Zimbabwe in particular. The study centers human mobility at the center of understanding the histories and circulation of diseases, showing that malaria’s persistence in Zimbabwe stems from structural inequalities rooted in the colonial era. By describing malaria as “a moving agent— biological, political, and moral” (p. 5), Manamereurges scholars and policymakers alike to rethink the geography of public health. The combination of rigorous archival work and innovative ideas ensures that Zimbabwe’s malaria story will be understood not as a tale of failure but of movement—an essential lesson for global health today, just as it was during the colonial period. This book is an excellent resource, and I recommend it for undergraduate and graduate courses in History of Medicine, Political Economy, African History, and African Studies.

Knowledge Grey Moyo is a Doctoral Candidate in the Department of History at The University of Texas at Austin. His research interests include History of Science, Technology and Medicine, Global Health, International Relations, and International Political Economy.

Historia, ¿para quién? desde la radio pública en México

Este artículo es parte de la serie: History Beyond Academia

This article has an English version

Historia ¿para quién? es el resultado de una conversación sostenida durante varios años entre historiadoras jóvenes y una comunicadora interesadas en llevar la reflexión histórica al día a día. Desde el inicio, el planteamiento principal fue cómo traducir temas complejos —tanto históricos como coyunturales— en contenidos claros, cercanos y comprensibles para audiencias muy diversas dentro de los medios públicos en México.

Después de la pandemia de coronavirus, se abrieron oportunidades para llevar al plano terrenal las ideas surgidas de las conversaciones. Gracias a la generosidad y complicidad de muchas compañeras, pudimos experimentar con distintos formatos y en diversos medios públicos, a los que nos abrió la puerta el Instituto Nacional de Estudios Históricos de las Revoluciones de México (INEHRM).

En ese sentido consideramos a Historia ¿para quién?, un fruto del trabajo colaborativo entre mujeres dedicadas a las ciencias sociales y la comunicación, entre las que podemos enunciar a María Minero, Fernanda Nares, Guadalupe Muro, Ana Salinas y Jehiely Hernández, de quienes hemos aprendido y con quienes hemos tenido el privilegio de trabajar.

También es un proyecto emanado de la administración pública federal, pues depende del financiamiento de la Secretaría de Cultura a través del INEHRM, así como de la producción, soporte y emisión de Radio Educación. Esto significa que atiende al derecho al acceso a la cultura y por ello los contenidos requieren la validación del instituto, lo cual, vale decir, no ha supuesto una limitante para la expresión de ideas ni la selección de temas; por el contrario, el respaldo institucional nos ha permitido conectar con múltiples especialistas, conversar con personas encargadas de acervos poco conocidos y dar visibilidad a proyectos independientes que están haciendo mucho por la preservación y difusión de la memoria histórica.

Sede del INEHRM. Fuente: Wikimedia Commons

Las encargadas de materializar este proyecto fuimos las autoras de este texto: Natalia Luna y Tamara Aranda. El Dr. Felipe Ávila, director del INEHRM, y la Mtra. Jimena Salgado, directora de vinculación del instituto, pusieron su confianza en nosotras para esta enorme y muy importante tarea. Y fue así como, aferradas al planteamiento inicial, decidimos que el programa se llamara Historia, ¿para quién?, pues en este nombre se resume lo que más nos interesa a ambas: colocar a las audiencias, sus intereses y derechos, al centro de la conversación. Esto era sobre democratizar el conocimiento histórico hasta sus últimas consecuencias.

Luego vino la planeación del formato, y para atender a nuestros objetivos, decidimos suscribirnos a la entrevista especializada, aunque con un tono cálido y afable, e incluir un segmento de contexto histórico y otro de sondeo, dándole la voz a las audiencias para que se expresen sobre cada tema. También añadimos una canción inspirada en la conversación y una ronda de preguntas relámpago, para dar dinamismo a la entrevista y forzar a las y los especialistas a “ir al punto”.

Conducimos Tamara Aranda, historiadora e investigadora del INEHRM, y Natalia Luna, comunicadora con más de una década de trabajo en medios públicos. En este proyecto encontramos varios puntos en común, que iban de intereses personales —que también son políticos— a la necesidad de explicarlos y debatirlos a partir de miradas históricas, y gracias a la colaboración y coproducción entre el INEHRM y Radio Educación —una emisora centenaria en el cuadrante radiofónico— se abrió un espacio de 55 minutos para desarrollarnos.

Nos preguntamos cuáles eran las propuestas actuales para comunicar historia y por qué existían tan pocos espacios dedicados a la divulgación histórica con un lenguaje más coloquial, con perspectiva de género, incluyente y dispuesto a salir de los márgenes de la “Historia con H mayúscula”, para dejar entrar a la cultura popular en las narrativas sobre el pasado.

También nos interesamos en invitar a las, los y les especialistas jóvenes (y no tan jóvenes) cuyos proyectos, investigaciones y saberes trascienden los muros de la academia. Creemos que los medios y, en particular, la radio pública tienen la obligación de abrir espacios para difundir conocimiento y ofrecer herramientas a audiencias con derechos muy concretos: entender, cuestionar y discernir mejor la realidad que nos rodea. Al final, todas, todos y todes somos audiencias.

El trabajo cotidiano de Historia, ¿para quién? se sostiene en la curiosidad, el asombro y la disposición. Muchas veces reaccionamos a nuestra propia vida: a las personas que conocemos, los temas que descubrimos, los coloquios y conferencias a los que asistimos. De ahí surgen las ideas que después se convierten en programas.

Banner promocional.

Contamos con un listado de temas por abordar y con una serie de recursos sonoros para “vestir” el espacio: cápsulas, sondeos en calle para escuchar lo que la gente sabe u opina, canciones que dialogan con el momento histórico y los mensajes de las audiencias, indispensables para generar eco y retroalimentación. Aquí es fundamental agradecer a Juan Ramírez, responsable del diseño sonoro y del reporteo que nutre el programa.

Cualquier integrante puede proponer un tema; revisamos las posibilidades de invitadas e invitados especialistas y, a partir de ello, vamos arropando el trabajo. Tamara asesora históricamente cada emisión y realiza la investigación que luego se convierte en una cápsula. Natalia traduce ese trabajo en un guión pensado para las audiencias, con preguntas detonadoras y recursos propios del lenguaje radiofónico. Ambas grabamos las voces de cápsulas y conducimos el programa.

El equipo se completa con la asistencia de producción de Alma Lilia Martínez y la producción general de Mario Ledesma, quienes supervisan el producto final y coordinan tiempos, estudios de grabación y articulación con redes sociales de la emisora.

Para la difusión de cada programa partimos de una regla básica: no podemos dar nada por sentado. El conocimiento académico —y, en nuestro caso, histórico— no es un punto de partida común para todas las personas. Siempre habrá alguien que no comparte los mismos referentes, y justo en el esfuerzo de desmenuzar los temas hasta su aparente simpleza, radica la complejidad de comunicar a públicos muy diversos. La radio, el archivo sonoro y las plataformas digitales donde se aloja el programa son las herramientas con las que intentamos acompañar ese proceso.

Nuestro público inicial son las audiencias de Radio Educación en el 96.5 FM. Sin contar con métricas precisas, pero sí con la experiencia de haber colaborado ahí durante quince años, sabemos que buena parte de quienes nos escuchan han crecido junto con la emisora. Es un público mayoritariamente de edad avanzada que participa de manera crítica a través de llamadas y mensajes: felicitan, cuestionan, nos dicen cómo resuenan los temas y qué otros quisieran escuchar.

Al mismo tiempo, tenemos la misión de llegar a audiencias más jóvenes a través del repositorio del programa en Spotify, donde Historia, ¿para quién? puede escucharse a demanda y circular por otros circuitos, especialmente entre estudiantes y personas vinculadas a la investigación histórica y las humanidades.

Otra de nuestras audiencias base es el público del INEHRM, que abarca un margen de edad, género y ubicación geográfica muy amplios. Al ser un Instituto Nacional con más de 70 años de trayectoria cuenta con alianzas con instituciones de todo el país, lo cual permite descentralizar la historia y sacarla de la Ciudad de México y la zona metropolitana. Esto también es un factor para ampliar el abanico temático y abordar historias que resuenan con cada rincón de México, conectando con las y los especialistas locales, y atender a las audiencias que nos llaman o escriben desde el interior de la República e incluso desde otros países.

Tras más de medio año al aire, creemos que nuestro trabajo ha influido en replantear algunas de las nociones tradicionales en las que se mira la historia, comenzando con desmontar la idea de que esta es solo pasado, y en cuanto tal, lejana y sagrada. En Historia, ¿para quién? nos hemos ocupado en reflexionar de manera crítica sobre acontecimientos que parecen muy lejanos en el tiempo, pero cuyos efectos podemos observar en la actualidad. El colonialismo o la Independencia de México son ejemplos de temas que hemos podido revisar de la mano de expertas y expertos que han compartido con nosotras y las audiencias sus saberes de manera clara.

También hemos acordado temas dolorosos para nuestra historia nacional y la historia mundial, desde la guerra sucia y el exilio español hasta los genocidios bosnio y palestino. Con estos programas hemos tocado sensibilidades que interpelan a la humanidad de quién escucha, dando a la Historia con H mayúscula un carácter humano que la hace cercana y posible de cuestionar.

Analizamos problemáticas del contexto actual con mirada histórica, para repensar nuestro presente e invitar a la comunidad de escuchas a imaginar soluciones. Si las feministas del pasado pudieron dejar sus diferencias a un lado para luchar juntas por los derechos de ciudadanía, las mujeres en lucha del presente también pueden generar medidas más efectivas de acceso a la justicia; o bien, algo debemos hacer de manera urgente, como ciudadanía, si las carpetas de investigación de personas desaparecidas en los años 70, se apilan en las fiscalías junto a las del siglo XXI. Desconocer la historia no solo implica un riesgo de repetición, sino de no reparación y lo que es peor, a la suma de agravios. En este sentido, ignorar la historia nos condena a la impunidad y a perpetuar el sufrimiento.

Al cabo de 30 programas podemos afirmar con satisfacción que nuestros objetivos se han cumplido, tanto a nivel comunicativo como de proyección institucional, pues el proyecto se convirtió en una plataforma para compañeras y compañeros dentro y fuera de la academia, así como del propio instituto, cuyos temas de especialidad enriquecen la comprensión de nuestro presente y no sólo merecen ser escuchados, sino reconocidos.

Para quienes suscribimos este texto, los mayores desafíos que enfrentamos al realizar el proyecto tuvieron que ver con la adecuación del lenguaje y las estrategias comunicativas al gran público. Esto siempre es difícil para quienes provenimos de espacios académicos, porque la costumbre de escribir y hablar para los pares, pesa como la historia misma. Afortunadamente logramos distanciarnos de la tradición y pensar fuera de la cabina y el cubículo, y creemos que eso se debe a la experiencia y sensibilidad de Natalia, tanto en medios públicos como en proyectos culturales y de divulgación histórica, así como a la falta de costumbre de Tamara en ejercicios académicos, después de haber transitado por universos tan diversos como la administración pública y el activismo de derechos humanos.

Mercado en México. Fuente: Wikimedia Commons

Haber conformado un equipo de trabajo integrado por una investigadora histórica y una comunicadora nos obliga a sostener un diálogo fuera de los marcos estrictamente académicos. Ese cruce de saberes nos ha permitido replantear preguntas y modos de abordar el conocimiento, manteniendo siempre en el centro la utilidad social de la historia. Con frecuencia partimos de la coyuntura y del presente como detonadores para construir un entendimiento histórico de nuestra realidad.

Aunque también creemos que los buenos resultados que ha tenido el programa se deben al gran equipo que está detrás, especialmente al INEHRM y a Radio Educación, donde la maestría de Juan Ramírez ha llevado al aire programas mucho más bellos de lo que imaginábamos. Juan, el mago que siempre nos hace escuchar más inteligentes y que, con sus entrevistas, se convierte en el puente entre nuestras ideas y lo que realmente interesa en las calles.

Junto con nuestras audiencias, exploramos que cada elemento de nuestras vidas contiene la posibilidad de ser historizado y, en ese sentido, adquiere relevancia en el tránsito de lo individual a lo colectivo. Para el proyecto ha sido fundamental posicionarnos desde ahí: en la calle y en sus múltiples voces, en lo cotidiano como un espacio donde la historia se teje a diario y, por ello mismo, merece ser contada.

En este sentido, Historia ¿para quién? busca dejar de obviar temas, personajes y acontecimientos; abrir espacio para la duda; y dialogar en horizontal para apropiarnos críticamente de aquello que siempre fue nuestro.

En ese proceso, la historia deja de ser únicamente un saber sobre el pasado y se convierte en una práctica pública: una herramienta para nombrar experiencias, reconocer desigualdades, disputar sentidos comunes y ampliar el repertorio de lo imaginable. Cuando la conversación histórica circula fuera de los recintos especializados —sin renunciar al rigor, pero asumiendo un compromiso con la inteligibilidad y la escucha—, la vida pública se fortalece: se vuelve más capaz de deliberar, de recordar y de exigir.

En última instancia, el valor público de este trabajo aparece en escenas pequeñas: una pregunta que se queda resonando al apagar la radio, una anécdota familiar que de pronto se conecta con un proceso colectivo, una calle que deja de ser simple trayecto para volverse archivo vivo. Ahí, en ese instante en que el presente se vuelve legible a la luz de otras épocas —y el pasado se revela como algo que todavía nos mira—, la historia recupera su potencia: no como monumento, sino como conversación.

Finalmente, nos resta decir que si celebramos este amado proyecto como un éxito, es por los mensajes que nos dejan las audiencias. A través de nuestros medios de contacto, sabemos que nuestra narrativa ha impactado sobre la forma en que las, los y les radioescuchas comprenden y se relacionan con la historia. Por eso cerramos este texto con el último mensaje que nos dejaron en el WhatsApp de Radio Educación:

… Creo que el gran aprendizaje que me llevo hoy, del programa de este 22 de diciembre de 2025, es que somos una narración los seres humanos… y ya que el programa se llama Historia, ¿para quién? creo que sería importante preguntarnos quiénes estamos construyendo la [narración de la] historia, y me incluyo, no porque sea historiador, sino porque soy un ciudadano que quiere participar en la construcción de este país, que de verdad espero pronto sea un nuevo país. En fin, creo que hoy nos corresponde a todos construir la narración de nuestra historia.

Tamara Aranda estudió Historia en la Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (Facultad de Estudios Superiores Acatlán). Actualmente es investigadora en el Instituto Nacional de Estudios Históricos de las Revoluciones de México (INEHRM) y co-conductora de Historia, ¿para quién? en Radio Educación.

Natalia Luna es comunicadora y conductora de radio con más de una década de experiencia en medios públicos. Es co-conductora de Historia, ¿para quién? en Radio Educación, donde trabaja en la traducción de la investigación histórica en contenidos accesibles para públicos diversos.

History—For Whom? From The Public Radio in Mexico

This article is part of the series: History Beyond Academia

Este artículo tiene una versión en español

History, for whom? (Historia ¿para quién?) is the result of a conversation sustained over several years between young historians and a communicator interested in bringing historical reflection into everyday life. From the outset, the main question was how to translate complex topics—both historical and contemporary—into clear, accessible, and understandable content for very diverse audiences within Mexico’s public media.

After the coronavirus pandemic, opportunities emerged to bring the ideas born of those conversations down to earth. Thanks to the generosity and complicity of many colleagues, we were able to experiment with different formats and across various public media outlets, whose doors were opened to us by the National Institute of Historical Studies of the Mexican Revolutions (INEHRM).

In this sense, we consider Historia ¿para quién? to be the product of collaborative work among women dedicated to the social sciences and communication, including María Minero, Fernanda Nares, Guadalupe Muro, Ana Salinas, and Jehiely Hernández, from whom we have learned and with whom we have had the privilege of working.

It is also a project that emerges from the federal public administration, as it depends on funding from the Ministry of Culture through INEHRM, as well as on the production, technical support, and broadcasting of Radio Educación. This means that it responds to the right of access to culture and therefore its contents require institutional validation. It is worth noting that this has not limited the expression of ideas or the selection of topics; on the contrary, institutional backing has allowed us to connect with multiple specialists, converse with people responsible for little-known collections, and give visibility to independent projects that are doing a great deal to preserve and disseminate historical memory.

Instituto Nacional de Estudios Históricos de las Revoluciones de México. Source: Wikimedia Commons

The people responsible for bringing this project to life were the authors of this text: Natalia Luna and Tamara Aranda. Dr. Felipe Ávila, director of INEHRM, and M.A. Jimena Salgado, the institute’s director of outreach, placed their trust in us for this enormous and very important task. Holding fast to our initial premise, we decided to name the program Historia ¿para quién?, because the title encapsulates what matters most to us both: placing audiences—their interests and rights—at the center of the conversation. This was about democratizing historical knowledge to its fullest extent.

Then came the planning of the format. To meet our objectives, we opted for the specialized interview, though with a warm and approachable tone, and included a segment providing historical context and another based on audience polling, giving listeners a voice to express themselves on each topic. We also added a song inspired by the conversation and a round of rapid-fire questions to energize the interview and push specialists to “get to the point.”

The program is hosted by Tamara Aranda, a historian and researcher at INEHRM, and Natalia Luna, a communicator with more than a decade of experience in public media. In this project we found many points of convergence, ranging from personal interests—which are also political—to the need to explain and debate them through historical perspectives. Thanks to the collaboration and co-production between INEHRM and Radio Educación—a century-old broadcaster on the radio dial—a 55-minute space opened up for us to develop the program.

We asked ourselves what the current proposals were for communicating history and why there were so few spaces dedicated to historical dissemination using a more colloquial language, with a gender perspective, inclusive, and willing to step outside the margins of “History with a capital H” to let popular culture enter narratives about the past.

We were also interested in inviting young (and not-so-young) specialists whose projects, research, and knowledge transcend the walls of academia. We believe that the media—and public radio in particular—have an obligation to open spaces to disseminate knowledge and offer tools to audiences with very concrete rights: to understand, question, and better discern the reality around us. In the end, all of us are audiences.

The day-to-day work of Historia ¿para quién? is sustained by curiosity, wonder, and openness. Often we react to our own lives: to the people we meet, the topics we discover, the colloquia and conferences we attend. From there come the ideas that later become programs.

Promotional banner.

We have a list of topics to address and a series of sound resources to “dress” the program: short segments, street polls to hear what people know or think, songs that dialogue with the historical moment, and audience messages—essential for generating resonance and feedback. It is essential here to thank Juan Ramírez, responsible for sound design and reporting that enriches the program.

Any team member can propose a topic; we review possible specialist guests and, from there, collectively support the work. Tamara provides historical advising for each episode and conducts the research that then becomes a short segment. Natalia translates that work into a script designed for audiences, with trigger questions and resources specific to radio language. Both of us record the segment voices and host the program.

The team is completed by Alma Lilia Martínez as production assistant and Mario Ledesma as general producer, who oversee the final product and coordinate timing, recording studios, and articulation with the station’s social media.

For the dissemination of each program, we follow a basic rule: we cannot take anything for granted. Academic knowledge—and, in our case, historical knowledge—is not a common starting point for everyone. There will always be someone who does not share the same references, and it is precisely in the effort to break down topics to their apparent simplicity that the complexity of communicating to very diverse publics lies. Radio, the sound archive, and the digital platforms where the program is hosted are the tools with which we try to accompany that process.

Our initial audience is Radio Educación’s listeners on 96.5 FM. Although we do not have precise metrics, our fifteen years of experience collaborating there tell us that a good portion of our listeners have grown up alongside the station. It is a predominantly older audience that participates critically through calls and messages: they congratulate us, question us, tell us how the topics resonate, and what else they would like to hear.

At the same time, we have the mission of reaching younger audiences through the program’s repository on Spotify, where Historia ¿para quién?  can be listened to on demand and circulate through other circuits, especially among students and people linked to historical research and the humanities.

Another core audience is INEHRM’s public, which spans a wide range of ages, genders, and geographic locations. As a national institute with more than 70 years of history, it has partnerships with institutions throughout the country, which makes it possible to decentralize history and take it beyond Mexico City and its metropolitan area. This also helps expand the thematic range and address histories that resonate in every corner of Mexico, connecting with local specialists and reaching audiences who call or write from across the Republic and even from other countries.

After more than half a year on the air, we believe our work has helped rethink some traditional notions of how history is viewed, beginning with dismantling the idea that history is only the past and, as such, distant and sacred. On Historia ¿para quién? we have critically reflected on events that seem far removed in time, but whose effects are observable today. Colonialism or Mexican Independence are examples of topics we have revisited with the help of experts who have shared their knowledge clearly with us and the audience.

We have also addressed painful topics in national and world history, from the Dirty War and Spanish exile to the Bosnian and Palestinian genocides. Through these programs we have touched sensitivities that appeal to the humanity of listeners, giving History with a capital H a human character that makes it close and open to questioning.

We analyze current problems through a historical lens to rethink our present and invite the listening community to imagine solutions. If feminists of the past were able to set aside their differences to fight together for citizenship rights, women struggling today can also generate more effective measures for access to justice; likewise, something must be done urgently, as citizens, if investigation files of people disappeared in the 1970s are piling up in prosecutors’ offices alongside those of the twenty-first century. Ignorance of history not only carries the risk of repetition, but also of non-repair and, worse still, the accumulation of grievances. In this sense, ignoring history condemns us to impunity and to perpetuating suffering.

After 30 programs, we can state with satisfaction that our objectives have been met, both communicatively and institutionally, as the project has become a platform for colleagues inside and outside academia, as well as within the institute itself, whose areas of expertise enrich our understanding of the present and deserve not only to be heard, but to be recognized.

For those of us who sign this text, the greatest challenges in carrying out the project were related to adapting language and communication strategies for a broad public. This is always difficult for those of us who come from academic spaces, because the habit of writing and speaking for peers weighs heavily. Fortunately, we managed to distance ourselves from tradition and think beyond the booth and the cubicle. We believe this is due to Natalia’s experience and sensitivity in public media and cultural and historical outreach projects, as well as Tamara’s lack of routine in academic exercises after having moved through such diverse worlds as public administration and human rights activism.

Vendors selling produce and meat at a market

Public market in Mexico. Source: Wikimedia Commons

Forming a team composed of a historical researcher and a communicator forces us to maintain a dialogue outside strictly academic frameworks. This cross-pollination of knowledge has allowed us to rethink questions and ways of approaching knowledge, always keeping the social usefulness of history at the center. We often begin with the present moment as a trigger for constructing a historical understanding of our reality.

We also believe that the program’s positive results are due to the great team behind it, especially INEHRM and Radio Educación, where Juan Ramírez’s mastery has brought to air programs far more beautiful than we imagined. Juan, the magician who always makes us sound smarter and who, through his interviews, becomes the bridge between our ideas and what truly matters in the streets.

Together with our audiences, we explore how every element of our lives contains the possibility of being historicized and, in that sense, gains relevance in the passage from the individual to the collective. For the project, it has been fundamental to position ourselves there: in the street and its many voices, in the everyday as a space where history is woven daily and therefore deserves to be told.

In this sense, Historia ¿para quién?  seeks to stop overlooking topics, characters, and events; to open space for doubt; and to engage in horizontal dialogue in order to critically reclaim what has always been ours.

In this process, history ceases to be merely knowledge about the past and becomes a public practice: a tool to name experiences, recognize inequalities, dispute common sense, and expand the repertoire of what is imaginable. When historical conversation circulates outside specialized spaces—without renouncing rigor, but assuming a commitment to intelligibility and listening—public life is strengthened: it becomes more capable of deliberating, remembering, and demanding.

Ultimately, the public value of this work appears in small scenes: a question that lingers after the radio is turned off, a family anecdote that suddenly connects with a collective process, a street that ceases to be a simple route and becomes a living archive. There, in that instant when the present becomes legible in the light of other eras—and the past reveals itself as something that still looks back at us—history recovers its power: not as a monument, but as a conversation.

Finally, if we celebrate this beloved project as a success, it is because of the messages left by our audiences. Through our contact channels, we know that our narrative has impacted the way listeners understand and relate to history. We therefore close this text with the last message we received on Radio Educación’s WhatsApp:

“…I think the great lesson I take away today, from the program of December 22, 2025, is that we human beings are a narration… and since the program is called Historia ¿para quién?, I think it would be important to ask who is building the [narration of] history, and I include myself—not because I am a historian, but because I am a citizen who wants to participate in building this country, which I truly hope will soon be a new country. In short, I think that today it is up to all of us to build the narration of our history.”

Tamara Aranda studied history at Uiversidad Nacional Autónoma de México (Facultad de Estudios Superiores Acatlán). She is currently a researcher at the Instituto Nacional de Estudios Históricos de las Revoluciones de México (INEHRM) and co-host of Historia, ¿para quién? on Radio Educación.

Natalia Luna is a communicator and radio host with over a decade of experience in public media. She co-hosts Historia, ¿para quién? on Radio Educación, where she works to translate historical research into accessible content for diverse audiences.

Beyond the Waters: Oral History and the Save Our Springs Movement of Late-Twentieth-Century Austin

Beyond the Waters banner with Barton Springs as a background

This article is part of the series: History Beyond Academia

On June 7, 1990, hundreds of Austin citizens spoke before the Austin City Council in opposition to a proposed 4,000-acre real estate development upstream of Barton Springs, an iconic spring-fed swimming pool in the heart of Austin. The development, spearheaded by flamboyant businessman Jim Bob Moffett, was to be on land over the Edwards Aquifer, a groundwater reservoir that is highly sensitive to pollution. Opponents of the project were deeply concerned about the potential impact of the development on water quality in the pool and the pool’s long-term health. The hearing ran into the following morning, and in a unanimous vote, the City Council rejected the development. The buildup to the hearing, the dramatic and unpredictable hearing itself, and the later adoption by the city of a stronger watershed ordinance (the SOS Ordinance) reflected the coalescence of local environmental groups and citizens into a movement known as Save Our Springs (SOS). The SOS Movement is now seen as a high point of activism in Austin’s history, a story that inspires both myth–it’s a classic David-and-Goliath story–and controversy.

To understand the importance of this moment, it’s critical to understand the place Barton Springs holds within Austin’s history. Barton Springs lies within Zilker Metropolitan Park, a 350-acre recreation hub that anchors the confluence of Lady Bird Lake and Barton Creek, two of the many creeks and waterways that add to the remarkable beauty of Central Texas. Just minutes from downtown Austin, Barton Springs traces its history from its role as a source of sustenance to Indigenous peoples, to its value as a site of commerce in the mid-1800s into the early 1900s, and to its final role as a recreation mecca. Like many recreation sites in the mid-1900s, Barton Springs was segregated until 1961, when activists and everyday people conducted “swim-ins” that led to its integration. Today, Barton Springs reflects both Austin’s diversity and its evolving identity as a countercultural bastion, a place where people of all backgrounds and ages can relax and enjoy its cooling waters throughout the year.

Zilker Park Entrance Portal, Austin. Source: Wikimedia Commons

Inspired by the SOS story, since 2019, I have been conducting oral history interviews with its participants, focusing on the period up to and including the 1990 hearing, the 1992 SOS Ordinance, and the years immediately afterwards. To date, I have completed audio interviews with forty people, recording the voices of everyone from environmentalists and their opponents to journalists and entertainers. My interest in Barton Springs began when I moved to Austin from Houston in 1986. A longtime recreational swimmer, I was used to chlorinated, lane-lined pools, and the cool, emerald waters of this legendary natural resource were a revelation.

The project began when I was earning my master’s in public history at Texas State University and took a fieldwork-focused oral history class in the fall of 2018. Two things happened: I discovered that I enjoyed interviewing, and I ran into a friend and key player in SOS, Brigid Shea, at a holiday party. I began talking with her about SOS and how I’d followed it when I was a young professional, and I asked whether anyone had ever captured the voices of the participants. She responded with her trademark enthusiasm, saying, “You should do it!”

This memory is important because it tells other stories about doing public history. Shea and I became friends through volunteering with the PTA at the high school our children attended. Tropes about PTA moms abound, but in this case, my relationship with Shea was key to my public history work because she was able to put me in touch with numerous SOS participants. As an oral history instructor at Texas State, I tell this story to my students to emphasize the importance of relationships in fostering historical inquiry.

A second aspect of this story is also important. I didn’t know then that Karen Kocher, a documentarian and now-retired instructor in the Radio-Television-Film department at the University of Texas at Austin, had been doing important work for some time on this same topic through her online Living Springs series. Her work includes interviews with several of the same people I was interviewing, which I didn’t discover until I was a year into my project. A central question for me became how I could differentiate my work from hers in ways that would contribute to the scholarship on Barton Springs. Eventually, Karen and I met to discuss our projects, and we have since forged a professional relationship in which we’ve shared interview material and supported each other’s work. I’ve come to see that my work differs from hers through our intended audiences, our interview style, and the points at which our lists of interviewees do differ.

I conducted my first interview in August 2019 with activist Shudde Fath, who was 103 at the time. In the course of the interview, several names arose that coincided with names I’d encountered in my research, and I began developing an interview list and working my way through it as I was earning my master’s. Although I didn’t earn class credit for my research, my affiliation with Texas State was key in their agreeing to archive my interview material and allowing me to use their interview consent form, both of which gave my project the imprimatur I needed to establish trust with my interviewees.

Aerial image of Barton Springs. Source: Wikimedia Commons

I examined the SOS Movement’s complexities through my master’s thesis, in which I focused on six interviews to discuss how SOS affected communities in Austin in varying ways. One of the most interesting discoveries involved the different ways that my interviewees defined “the environment.” Susana Almanza, who is Mexican American, stressed the importance of people, not just natural spaces and wildlife, within the environment.^[1] Jeff Travillion, who is African American, touched on the role of the sustainable food community within discussions about the environment, further expanding the parameters of environmentalism.^[2]

A controversial topic that my interviews uncovered was whether the SOS Ordinance spurred gentrification in East Austin, which historically has been home to Austin’s Mexican American and African American communities. The reasoning is that, because the ordinance restricted development over the watershed southwest of Austin, it has contributed to the supercharged development that has taken place in East Austin post-SOS. East Austin activist Daniel Llanes discussed this topic at length, the answer to which has yet to be fully resolved.^[3]

My interviewees shared their strategies and motivations for supporting SOS. Shea spoke for many in her description of the all-night hearing as an inspiring “popular uprising.”^[4] Llanes described connecting members of the activist group PODER (People Organized in Defense of Earth and Her Resources) with SOS leadership such that PODER supported SOS in exchange for assistance lobbying to rid East Austin of hazardous “tank farms” where several major oil companies stored fuel.^[5] Shea’s husband, John Umphress, recalled the simple act of circulating pickle jars at live music venues to raise money for the cause.^[6]

Kid jumping into the water at Barton Springs

Kids enjoying Barton Springs. Source: Wikimedia Commons

Building upon my findings, I have showcased my research at conferences put on by the American Society for Environmental History and the Texas Oral History Association, and I plan to continue writing about it, incorporating the voices of all of my interviewees to flesh out the SOS story fully. The project is not yet live on the Internet, but at some point, I’d like to create a website to provide public access to the interviews. In the meantime, scholars wishing to access the materials can contact Texas State University Archives or me.

A typical workday on my SOS project involves going through my project planning documents and following up on interviews. I prioritize interviewees based on role in SOS, age, recommendations from others, or the simple fact that I’ve finally stumbled across their contact information after years of having them in my sights. Then I do outreach and finalize the interview, with a typical interview lasting about an hour and a half. The most labor-intensive part of my work is transcription, both the initial pass and the process of having my interviewees review their transcriptions.

Doing this work outside of an academic setting has posed several challenges and opportunities. The first challenge is that I do all of the work on my own time; given the substantial commitment required to conduct and transcribe the interviews, the pace can be slow, evidenced by the fact that I don’t have a dedicated website for the material. This bothers me because I feel an obligation to my interviewees to make their interviews widely accessible. In addition, I bear all the costs of my research, including the software subscription, transcription services I used for my early interviews, my audio recorder, and logistical expenses such as gas and parking. These factors place the option of doing audio-visual interviews that much more out of reach. That said, I have complete independence in choosing my interviewees, managing my schedule, and drafting interview questions, and this freedom has contributed to my confidence and creativity as an oral historian.

Kids holding sign that reads: It's our future! Save the world!

Environmental protest. Source: Wikimedia Commons

The pandemic also posed unique challenges and opportunities. I discovered that people had newfound flexibility in their schedules, and I was able to schedule interviews that had eluded me prior to the pandemic. I learned that online interviews can yield meaningful material despite the fact that they lack some of the personal rapport of in-person interviews. Platforms like Zoom also create recordings of meetings, so I had natural backup files to the recordings on my audio recorder, which I operated next to my laptop during interviews. Unfortunately, I didn’t appreciate the fact that my laptop speakers were blown during several online interviews, and those recordings, while yielding decent transcripts, suffer from poor audio quality. In addition, I had to learn to manage my dogs, ensuring that they were fed prior to interviews so that they wouldn’t interrupt me. I also held several interviews outdoors to allow for good airflow. One of these took place at a Starbucks along I-35; the sounds of interstate traffic, the umbrella over our table flapping in the wind, and a monster truck that parked next to us with an idling engine while the driver picked up his order are audible on the recording.

The surprising insights that my narrators have shared with me more than compensate for these challenges, such as the revelation that environmentalists and the development community held “peace talks” in the post-SOS heyday in which they hired a shaman to mediate.^[7] It has also been fascinating to capture the point of view of members of the development community, whose portrayal of developer Jim Bob Moffett reflects a more complex take on his personality than what I obtained in interviews with environmentalists.^[8]

My project on SOS has been fulfilling in more ways than I ever imagined when I embarked upon it. My experience conducting this project contributed to my being tapped to teach oral history at Texas State, a role I’ve thoroughly enjoyed. I get to share my successes and mistakes with my students, so they gain confidence in their ability to do oral history. I’ve also become a better historian. By interviewing a range of people both inside and outside of the activist circles that drove the SOS campaign’s historic victories, I’ve come to appreciate both the value of Austin’s identity as a “green, keep-it-weird” city and the need to interrogate that identity in new ways. Finally, I’ve made countless friends, including interviewees, fellow scholars, and the professional transcriber who assisted with my early interviews. Little did I imagine during that first dip in Barton Springs in 1986 that one day I’d have the opportunity to explore its history in this way. What a gift it has been.

Mary Closmann Kahle holds a degree in history from Stanford University and an M.B.A. from the University of Texas at Austin. She earned a master’s in public history from Texas State University, where she focused on oral history and historic preservation and completed an internship with Preservation Austin. She is a history steward with the Texas Historical Association, and served on the board of Preservation Austin and as the chair of the Austin History Center Association’s oral history committee (2022-2024).

^[1] Susana Almanza, interview by author, Austin, TX, October 16, 2020, (Zoom).

^[2] Jeff Travillion, interview by author, August 19, 2020, Austin, TX, (Zoom).

^[3] Daniel Llanes, interview by author, Austin, TX, October 12, 2022.

^[4] Brigid Shea, interview by author, Austin, TX, August 23, 2019.

^[5] Llanes, interview by author.

^[6] John Umphress, interview by author, Austin, TX, August 23, 2019.

^[7] George Cofer, interview by author, Austin, TX, October 2, 2020, (Zoom)

^[8] Beau Armstrong, interview by author, Austin, TX, December 10, 2019.

Review of Brown Skins, White Coats: Race Science in India, 1920-66 (2022)

Projit Bihari Mukharji’s Brown Skins, White Coats: Race Science in India, 1920-66 adds an innovative account of India’s twentieth century to the historiography of race science. As the head of the Department of History at Ashoka University in Haryana, India, Mukharji engages with subaltern studies and decolonial writings of South Asian history. The title echoes psychiatrist and philosopher Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks (1952), and Mukharji applies Fanon’s analysis to the Indian subcontinent in discussing science’s role in racial alienation, the process by which colonial medicine and science practitioners divorced themselves from the social and political realities of the people they studied and treated. Brown Skins, White Coats examines the twentieth-century field of seroanthropology–the study of blood testing to explain social phenomena–and shows how these scientific practices, publications, and discussions shaped the racial politics of India’s nationalist movement. Mukharji argues that the history of Indian nationalism is inseparable from the development of race science in the subcontinent, and that historians of race science elsewhere must account for the Indian case.

The book introduces a fascinating and effective method of storytelling beyond archival documents. Drawing from historian of slavery Saidiya Hartman’s method of Critical Fabulation, Mukharji constructs a fictional narrative based on the writings of twentieth-century Bengali novelist Hemendrakumar Ray. The narrative, consisting of eight letters exchanged between the novelist and another writer, includes the thoughts and conversations that non-scientists may have had about racial hierarchy in 1930s India. Through historical “overhearing” (p. 36), a linguistic practice that Mukharji identifies as distinctly Bengali, Brown Skins, White Coats combines classical Western historical methods with epistemologies local to the subject matter. The fabulations strengthen the book not only by articulating the presence of race science in social discourse, but also by demonstrating an analytical technique that reveals understandings of the archival material beyond purely literal interpretations.

Mukharji begins in 1919 with the world’s first seroanthropology publication, which claimed to establish a link between blood types and ethnicity. Primarily relying on scientific publications and commentaries from scientific peers, he then demonstrates the ubiquity of racial classifications among biologists and anthropologists across the subcontinent. Concurrently, the “rapid Indianization of the scientific services in South Asia” (p. 50) separated academic science, including seroanthropology, from its previous association with Europeanness. Seroanthropologists in British India later incorporated the principles of blood-based racial hierarchy into local ethnic, religious, and caste systems. Race science and hierarchy models fit well into the nationalist independence movements of the mid-century which identified scientific infrastructure as essential to nation building.

Mukharji next identifies multiple instances in which race science persisted after the Indian independence movement and discusses the concept of exogeneity, a framework that placed certain ethnic or religious populations as forever outsiders, in contrast to indigeneity. Many seroanthropological studies sought out culturally and genetically isolated communities as research subjects, including Jewish communities of South Asia. The studies of Jewish people fed into the nationalists’ assertion that Hindu people exclusively held the right to occupy and govern India, and Mukharji effectively shows how seroanthropologists contributed to the “emptying of the once-famed Jew Town of Cochin” (p.102). Mukharji then points to another example of racialized ideas of disease risk to the population of the subcontinent: sickle cell anemia. The historian notes that the social context of biochemistry in India in the 1950s differed significantly from the United States: “whereas the American molecularization of sickle cell disease had possessed a broad race-imploding aspect that disaggregated the presence of the gene from racial identities, in India molecularization seemed to reinforce racializing trends” (p.147). Molecularization–distilling the disease into differences in people’s molecular makeup–only exacerbated the racialization of sickle-cell disease in India. Skillfully tying in the racialization of caste and class in India, Mukharji shows how Indian scientists argued that certain populations posed a risk to the young nation based on the prevalence of genetic differences.

Having explained the theoretical work of seroanthropology, Mukharji next turns to material. Seroanthropology relied on blood, and researchers often used their own blood as control samples, a process called “self-calibration” (p. 172). In using their own bodies as references, Mukharji argues, researchers placed themselves as the material “reserve” (p. 173) of scientific knowledge in India. Additionally, through interrogating the selection of research subjects, Mukharji reveals the wide variance of study design, then the author identifies swaths of blood samples that were lost due to inadequate refrigeration, which further affected results. The analysis of blood and research materials grounds the book’s discussion in the daily reality of seroanthropology and convincingly illustrates the influence of physical circumstances on the scientists’ universal claims.

School of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene Institute, Calcutta. Source: Wikimedia Commons

Mukharji rounds out his exemplary work of subaltern history of science with an account of refusals. In congruence with recent calls to decolonize the history academy, Mukharji classifies refusal not as mere resistance to science, but rather as distinct actions that Indian communities performed based on their own understandings of blood. By casting refusals as different practices in parallel to seroanthropology, this analysis rebukes claims that resistance was anti-scientific and offers an excellent framework for scholars to explore varying degrees of engagement in the history of science. The book concludes with four texts from mid-century Indian scholars articulating views for the future of their country, each incorporating eugenics and other race science into their vision of India’s past and future. This final chapter and conclusion exemplify the prevalence of race science in India after WWII, but it is difficult to discern the degree to which the lectures and scientific publications influenced public thought about race and science. Mukharji concedes the possible disconnect between his scientific subjects and the greater Indian public in the conclusion, stating “Whether their seroanthropological stories actually translated into government policies or not is doubtful, but they certainly received the funds and the benediction of the state to tell their snapshotted biohistories” (p. 216). Nevertheless, the archival information Mukharji presents effectively proves that race science was widespread on the subcontinent and aligned with the nationalist project of twentieth-century India, from the colonial period through the first decades of independence.

Brown Skins, White Coats is a triumph of decolonial history. Projit Bihari Mukharji shows how historians of science can draw on the epistemologies and techniques local to their historical subjects to bolster their argumentation. Any historian, especially one searching for an example of decolonial academic writing, would benefit greatly from reading this book, regardless of their interest in seroanthropology.

Ben Schneider is an MD/PhD student currently completing a PhD in the Department of History at UCLA. He studies the history of public and private hospital expansion in twentieth-century Los Angeles and is interested in the relationships between health policy, urban policy, and health activism.

Las cosas tienen vida: Un podcast sobre el rol de los objetos coloniales en nuestras vidas actuales

Este artículo es parte de la serie: History beyond Academia

This article has an English version

La historia es, ante todo, un esfuerzo por comprender el pasado. Quienes la estudiamos buscamos reconstruir e interpretar lo que ocurrió, utilizando métodos que nos permitan hacerlo con cuidado y rigor. Para ello trabajamos con documentos del pasado (lo que los historiadores llamamos fuentes primarias) que pueden ser verdaderos, falsos o incluso contener un poco de ambos. A partir de estos materiales, y en diálogo con otros investigadores, vamos construyendo interpretaciones que nos ayudan a entender cada época desde su propio contexto. Muchas veces, creemos que se trata de un trabajo individual entre intelectuales, sin embargo, como señala el historiador británico Raphael Samuel, “la historia es una forma social de conocimiento, el trabajo […] de miles de manos distintas.”^[1] Esto quiere decir que cualquier persona, desde una abuelita hasta el cartero, cotidianamente van contando y evaluando hechos históricos, que se van contando como tradición oral u escrita: ¡No es un monopolio de los historiadores!

Siempre concebimos el podcast como una oportunidad para ofrecer herramientas históricas a nuestro público. En cada episodio presentamos tanto los objetos —las cosas, en este caso— como a investigadores destacados, con el propósito de mostrar las diversas maneras de narrar y comprender un objeto histórico, especialmente del pasado colonial y sus implicancias en el presente, ya se encuentre en un museo, una iglesia o una colección privada. Este trabajo colaborativo nos ha permitido construir una visión del pasado colonial que buscamos compartir y enriquecer en diálogo con nuestra audiencia.

En este artículo queremos reflexionar sobre el significado de esos objetos históricos y su revalorización por parte de los investigadores, trasladando su importancia del presente al pasado y viceversa, a través de un medio de comunicación público, como lo es un podcast.

Logo del Podcast “Las cosas tienen vida”

El podcast “Las cosas tienen vida” (Imagen 1) salió por primera vez en abril de 2021 como un proyecto de Historia Pública^[2]. Su objetivo era despertar el interés de un público amplio de habla hispana en los nuevos métodos de investigación histórica, a partir del estudio de diversos objetos culturales. El proyecto comenzó a tomar forma varios meses antes, durante las pausas para el café que aliviaban nuestras largas jornadas de trabajo en el Archivo de Indias, en Sevilla. Entre los montículos de documentos coloniales, nuestras conversaciones se repetían una y otra vez, siempre volviendo al mismo punto: la frustrante falta de espacios donde poder compartir nuestras investigaciones con el público más allá del mundo académico. Cuestionamos si había una manera amena para divulgar los avances científicos de nuestros colegas a la medida de un público general. ¿Para quiénes son realmente estas historias en las que invertimos tanto esfuerzo y dedicación? ¿Podríamos construir comunidades que den valor a estos objetos históricos? ¿Cómo podemos abrir espacios donde los investigadores compartan sus trabajos con un público no especializado? No sabemos si fue el efecto de la pandemia o, más bien, el último arranque de energía de nuestra vida como doctorandos, pero de ahí nació la idea de crear algo nuevo.

A primera vista, nuestro podcast podría parecer similar a otras propuestas que narran la historia del mundo o de un país a través de una serie de objetos^[3]. Sin embargo, nuestro propósito es distinto: no buscamos ofrecer una mirada identitaria o cerrada sobre una comunidad y su tiempo, sino abrir nuevas formas de comprender la historia y sus objetos dentro de un espacio tan vasto y diverso como lo fue el mundo ibérico durante la temprana modernidad.

Nosotros no contamos las historias: solo abrimos el micrófono. Quienes realmente las cuentan son nuestros entrevistados quienes son los que las investigan. En cada temporada invitamos a entre diez y doce especialistas cuyos trabajos abarcan distintas regiones del mundo ibérico colonial, mostrando así la riqueza de miradas y métodos posibles para estudiar el pasado. Cada invitado-investigador elige un artefacto y, a partir de él, nos guía por su propio recorrido histórico. Hasta ahora, el podcast reúne más de cien episodios distribuidos en nueve temporadas, con la participación de investigadores de diecisiete países y de disciplinas tan diversas como la arqueología, la ingeniería, la historia y la historia del arte.

Nuestro “gabinete radiofónico” de objetos no sigue un criterio de selección rígido; más bien se mueve con libertad en un desorden creativo que nos encanta. Desde el inicio, quisimos centrar la atención en las decisiones de cada investigador, convencidos de que hacer historia es también un acto político. Eso implica aceptar que no podemos controlar la narrativa de los objetos ni pretender ofrecer una verdad única. En cambio, compartimos nuestras propias inquietudes y experiencias a través de ellos.

Dentro de ese aparente caos siempre buscamos un hilo común: la relación entre las personas y sus objetos, en el pasado y en el presente. Esa conexión despierta la pasión de los historiadores e investigadores, algo que se siente en cada conversación. Por eso, en los episodios más recientes, empezamos a preguntar a nuestros entrevistados directamente por la elección del objeto, el interés que lo inspira y, muchas veces, por el momento en que se produjo el primer encuentro con él.

En ese sentido, al incorporar objetos del mundo iberoamericano, e incluso del ámbito ibero-asiático, hemos podido cruzar barreras nacionales y fronteras físicas, incluso intelectuales. Esos entrecruzamientos han sido especialmente fructíferos, como el caso de la historiadora argentina Lucila Iglesias hablando de sobre un objeto del área chilena, el “Cristo de Mayo”; la chilena Laura Fahrenkrog, sobre unos instrumentos musicales en el Paraguay colonial; o la española, Marina Torres, sobre un gorro sacerdotal católico proveniente del Museo Provincial de Guangdong en China^[4]. Aquí las coordenadas se desdibujan y dan lugar a nuevas combinaciones que nos entusiasman. Rompemos, así, con el paradigma nacional que todavía nos condiciona, es decir, esa idea de que un historiador chileno debe estudiar la historia de Chile o una californiana, la de California.

En los últimos cinco años hemos aprendido de todo: desde cómo hacer una buena entrevista hasta cómo sobrevivir a la edición final. Dada la diversidad de nuestros invitados [RT1] , dependemos de tecnologías como Zoom para grabar los episodios (Imagen 2). Luego, editamos cuidadosamente cada uno para que tanto el investigador como el objeto tengan la mejor presencia posible, utilizando herramientas como Audacity. Después, gestionamos las redes y plataformas digitales para difundir los episodios entre un público amplio. Cada temporada ajustamos ligeramente el formato de las entrevistas, incorporando los comentarios y sugerencias de nuestros oyentes.

Por ejemplo, al principio producíamos episodios más largos, de entre 45 minutos y una hora. Sin embargo, muchos oyentes nos comentaron que resultaban demasiado extensos para los contextos en que escuchaban el podcast. Algunas de nuestras oyentes nos han contado, entre risas, que escuchan el podcast mientras practican yoga. Desde entonces, procuramos mantenerlos entre 25 y 30 minutos. No sería exagerado decir que detrás de cada episodio de 25 minutos hay más de diez horas de trabajo. Aun así, seguimos dedicándonos a esta labor no remunerada como un acto de amor y también como un gesto político hacia las historias y las investigaciones que compartimos.

Imagen dos: José y Kate en grabaciones

A lo largo de nuestras nueve temporadas hemos creado un gabinete virtual lleno de objetos fascinantes: desde un cojín extraviado que reapareció en medio de una disputa política durante la ceremonia del alférez mayor en Quito, en 1573,^[5] hasta obras pictóricas más clásicas, como la pintura de la Magdalena en éxtasis hecha por un artista cuzqueño y que hoy en día forma parte de la Colección Thoma (EEUU).^[6] Optar por titular cada episodio como ‘Un’ —ya sea una botija o una obra de Velázquez, episodio próximamente a estrenarse en nuestra nueva temporada— refleja una postura desafiante frente a la idea dominante de canon historiográfico. No somos un podcast de obras canónicas. En cambio, damos voz a los objetos sin imponerles un marco estilístico o historiográfico previo. Al examinar distintos tipos de cosas, buscamos mostrar la importancia de estudiarlas de forma integrada, como respuestas individuales a dinámicas locales y globales que caracterizaron la mundialización ibérica^[7].

No creemos que baste con mostrar una variedad de objetos. En nuestro podcast buscamos profundizar en cada uno a través de un análisis que va más allá de su simple descripción. Exploramos su valor histórico, su propósito, la realidad que representan y el contexto en que surgieron. Nos preguntamos qué mensajes transmiten, cuál fue su papel en su tiempo y qué significan hoy. Además, reflexionamos sobre las formas actuales de acceso a estos objetos y complementamos cada episodio con libros o artículos sobre el tema, idealmente escrito por los propios invitados.

Sin embargo, hacer la historia accesible no garantiza que la gente la escuche. Desde el lanzamiento del primer episodio hemos alcanzado más de 10.600 descargas, lo que significa que cada uno de esos episodios fue guardado por un usuario en su dispositivo.^[8] El número de escuchas son super variables… depende del tipo de objeto y el lugar de proveniencia. Por ejemplo, la espada de Bolívar [RT2] tiene muchas más escuchas en Colombia que en otros espacios^[9]. Las comunidades locales suelen mostrarse especialmente receptivas a nuestros episodios y, muchas veces, también al compromiso de los propios investigadores. Así ocurre, por ejemplo, con el episodio dedicado a “un fragmento de arcilla blanca” en Cajamarca, presentado por Solsire Cusicanqui^[10].

Gracias a la beca RSA Grant for Public Engagement Project in Renaissance Studies, entregada por la institución norteamericana Renassaince Society of America, en el último año hemos podido expandir nuestro proyecto a otras plataformas. Hemos creado una página web: www.lascosastienenvida.com, pensada para complementar el podcast. (Imagen 3)

Página web de Las cosas tienen vida.

Comenzamos con los episodios más recientes, ya que necesitamos permisos de autor e imagen para publicar los anteriores. Como mencionamos, contamos con una amplia colección de grabaciones. La página web ofrece tres formas distintas de visualizar los objetos, permitiendo a los oyentes establecer conexiones temporales, geográficas y visuales entre ellos. Al hacer clic en cualquier imagen, se accede a la página individual del objeto. Por ejemplo, en la dedicada a la escalera incaica, primer objeto de la octava temporada, se observa el formato general de todas las páginas (Imagen 4). Cada una incluye la imagen del objeto, el episodio del podcast, su transcripción en español e inglés, y una breve biografía con fotografía del investigador.

Modelo de una página web con una escalera incaica argentina

Modelo de una página con un objeto y su entrevista.

Además, la nueva página web constituye un valioso recurso educativo, tanto para la enseñanza secundaria como universitaria. Ofrece a estudiantes y docentes la oportunidad de explorar nuevos objetos, formular preguntas críticas y, por qué no, abrir caminos hacia futuras investigaciones. La plataforma fomenta un aprendizaje activo, invitando a historiadores, estudiantes y público general a explorar el pasado con curiosidad y rigor. Más que una herramienta digital, es un espacio interactivo donde los objetos cobran vida y se vuelven accesibles para una audiencia amplia. Su objetivo es servir como puente entre la historia y la comunidad, promoviendo el diálogo y la participación en torno al pasado compartido.

A modo de cierre, quisiéramos retomar una pregunta que el historiador Marc Bloch inmortalizó hace más de setenta años: “Papá, explícame, ¿para qué sirve la historia?”^[11]. Nuestra respuesta, hoy, ha sido crear un podcast. En Las cosas tienen vida mostramos que la historia no solo ilumina el pasado, sino que conecta culturas, geografías y experiencias humanas a través de los objetos que nos rodean. A lo largo de nueve temporadas, hemos explorado esa relación entre objetos e historia junto a investigadores de distintos países y disciplinas, revelando múltiples formas de comprender el mundo. Con la nueva página web damos un paso más en esa dirección: un espacio que enlaza los objetos en el tiempo y el espacio y funciona como herramienta educativa y de difusión del conocimiento histórico. Queremos que la historia siga dialogando con la comunidad, inspirando a cada oyente, estudiante e investigador a encontrar en los objetos del pasado su propia respuesta a esa eterna pregunta: ¿para qué sirve la historia?

Kate (Katherine) Mills es investigadora posdoctoral en el Kunsthistorisches Institut de Florencia. Obtuvo su doctorado (Ph.D.) en Historia del Arte por la Universidad de Harvard y una maestría (M.A.) en Historia de la Monarquía Hispánica por la Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. Su investigación actual examina la relación entre los desastres naturales en los Andes y los artistas que contribuyeron a la reconstrucción de las ciudades afectadas.

José Araneda Riquelme es investigador posdoctoral en el proyecto MISGLOB, “Misiones católicas y la circulación global de personas y bienes en la época moderna temprana (1500–1800)”, en la Universidad Roma Tre. Obtuvo su doctorado (Ph.D.) en Historia Moderna por la Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa y una maestría (M.A.) en Historia por la Universidad Católica de Chile. Su investigación explora la relación entre la comunicación y la construcción del Imperio español durante el siglo XVII.

^[1] Raphael Samuel, Theatres of Memory: Past and Present in Contemporary Culture (London: Verso, 1994), 15.

^[2] “Historia pública” es la práctica de hacer historia con y para el público. Busca compartir la investigación histórica más allá del ámbito académico, promoviendo la participación ciudadana en la interpretación y uso del pasado. Thomas Cauvin, Public History a Textbook of Practice, 2nd Edition, (London: Routledge, 2022), p. 4

^[3] MacGregor, Neil. A History of the World in 100 Objects. New York: Penguin Books, 2013 y Lucena Giraldo, Manuel. 82 objetos que cuentan un país: Una historia de España. Madrid: Taurus, 2015.

^[4] José Araneda Riquelme y Kate Mills, «Un gorro sacerdotal (China, s. XVIII). Con Marina Torres. Ep. 3×05 (12/04/2022)», Con Marina Torres. Ep. 3×05 (12/04/2022), Las cosas tienen vida, s. f.; José Araneda Riquelme y Kate Mills, «Un documento de unos músicos indígenas (Paraguay, s. XVIII)», Con Laura Fahrenkrog. Ep. 2×02 (31/08/2021), Las cosas tienen vida, s. f.; Araneda Riquelme y Mills, «Un gorro sacerdotal (China, s. XVIII). Con Marina Torres. Ep. 3×05 (12/04/2022)».

^[5] José Araneda Riquelme y Kate Mills, «Un Cojín (Ecuador, 1573)», Con Laura Paz Escala. Ep. 5×05 (16/05/2023), Las cosas tienen vida, s. f.

^[6] José Araneda Riquelme y Kate Mills, «Una Magdalena en éxtasis (Perú, s. XVIII)», Con Rosario Granados. Ep. 4×01 (13/09/2022), Las cosas tienen vida, s. f; José Araneda Riquelme y Kate Mills, «Un Velázquez (España, 1632)», Con Cécile Vincent-Cassy. Ep. 9×07 (13/01/2026), Las cosas tienen vida, s. f.

^[7] Serge Gruzinski, Las cuatro partes del mundo: historia de una mundialización (México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2010).

^[8] Datos derivados de las estadísticas privadas que nos entrega nuestra plataforma de podcast “Buzzsprout”.

^[9] Por ejemplo, el episodio “Una espada de Simón Bolívar” (temporada 4, episodio 9) analiza la espada del líder revolucionario Simón Bolívar. El veinte por ciento del total de descargas de este episodio proviene de Colombia, en particular de la región de Bogotá, donde actualmente se encuentra la espada.

José Araneda Riquelme y Kate Mills, «Una espada de Simón Bolívar (Colombia, s. XIX)», Con Juliana Ramírez Herrera. Ep. 4×09 (08/10/2022), Las cosas tienen vida, s. f.

^[10] José Araneda Riquelme y Kate Mills, «Un fragmento de cerámica blanca (Perú)», Con Solsire Cusicanqui. Ep. 3×10 (17/05/2022)., Las cosas tienen vida, s. f.

^[11] Marc Bloch, Apología para la historia o el oficio de historiador [1949] (México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2001).

[RT1]diversidad geográfica, en este caso? o de otro tipo también?

[RT2]del líder independentista de Sudamérica o algo así, para los que no sepan de él

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