Raquel Torua Padilla, Author at Not Even Past

Still Making Texas: Why David Montejano’s Anglos and Mexicans Matters in 2026

“Anglos and Mexicans; Still Making Texas” 40 Anniversary Symposium will take place on February 20-21, 2026 at the University of Texas at Austin. More details at the end of the article.

When I first read Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas, 1836-1986, it felt like I was reading about the entire world. My entire world. By that point, I had lived my entire life in the area under Montejano’s analysis. Some critics questioned Montejano’s methodological flexibility, yet for readers who grew up in that region, Anglos and Mexicans can explain everything. Unless you grew up wondering “Is Texas Bigger than the World-System?”, Anglos and Mexicans may not resonate as strongly. When I read Anglos and Mexicans, I hear strains of stories my grandfather told me about his father, the Hebbronville dairy farmer Robert McBryde. I see the mythologized King Ranch demystified. I remember stories my high school Ag teacher, Mr. Analiz, told me about how the palm tree and grapefruit came to Mission, brought by land speculators trying to entice Midwest Anglos to settle here. So, for me, readingAnglos and Mexicans represents the first time that evidence went deeper than the archive; it resonated from within. I knew that what was written was correct because I had lived it and heard decades of stories from those who had lived more of that history than I had.

My response to Anglos and Mexicans is precisely the kind of engagement Montejano’s work invites. For a work of history to generate that degree of emotional and intellectual resonance is no small achievement. That Montejano’s study can still produce such an effect in me and in others speaks to the enduring force of its analysis. Rarely does a work of scholarship offer such sustained insight into a vexing social problem. Rarer still is the study that does so in a way that reshapes an emerging field. First published in 1987, David Montejano’s Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas, 1836–1986 has proven to be one of those foundational works, setting the terms for subsequent scholarship on race, power, and political economy in Texas.

To quote Texas: An American History author Benjamin Johnson, “David Montejano was country before country was cool. Long before the explosion of scholarly interest in borderlands in the 2000s, he asked penetrating questions about how Mexican-descent people made Texas society in the 150 years after the Texas Revolution.” Despite early criticisms of Anglos and Mexicans’ “heavy reliance on secondary sources,” or the “perceptible parochial view” of its author, those same reviewers praised “the imaginative scholarship and impressive scope of Montejano’s work” and claimed that “within the context of Texas historiography, it will have great impact and may become a classic.”^[1]

Granted, Anglos and Mexicans was not the first attempt at a systemic–structural account of race-relations in the Southwest. But it was among the first to advance such an analysis so forcefully and coherently. To paraphrase reviewer Mario T. Garcia, the book is a defining “contribution to the revisionist historiography of the Southwest and West.”^[2]

Though rooted in Texas, Anglos and Mexicans is not simply a foundational text in Texas history. It is a seminal work of Southwestern history, Chicane studies, borderlands studies, and the analysis of racial capitalism in the United States. Montejano’s method—which combined archival research, sociological analysis, and political economy—established a model for the interdisciplinary work that defines Ethnic Studies today. Since Anglos and Mexicans’ publication in 1987, there have been many groundbreaking works of scholarship whose authors explicitly draw from or cite the book as a pivotal influence. The Injustice Never Leaves You by Monica Muñoz Martinez; From South Texas to the Nation by John Weber; White Scourge by Neil Foley; and Working Women into the Borderlands by Sonia Hernández—among many others—come immediately to mind. Whether subsequent scholars have extended his insights, challenged his framework, or attempted to move beyond it, Anglos and Mexicans set the terms of debate on race and class in the Southwest.

What has made this book so impactful? By Montejano’s own assessment, “cultural analysis was the dominant analysis” prior to UT Press’ publication of Anglos and Mexicans in 1987. Anglos and Mexicans rejected the prevailing conflict of Anglo–Mexican relations as differences in “culture…value orientation” that triggered a “cultural clash…and the result [being] segregation,” as previous (Anglo) scholars did.^[3] No, what set the book apart upon publication was its argument that “the diversity of Mexican–Anglo relations…reflected the various ways in which ethnicity was interwoven into the class fabric of these two societies.”^[4] While a visiting professor at UC–Berkeley, a chance placement one floor under the office of famed economist Paul S. Taylor gave Montejano the “window to the past” he needed to make such bold proclamations.^[5] The result is a 150 year wide window into the Texas—Mexico border region’s transition from “pre-capitalist” or “semi-feudal” to “Modern;” in essence it opens into view the full process of Texas’ incorporation into the World System. In this sense, what happened between 1836 and 1986 in the Texas—Mexico border region was a local node in the centuries long, violent birth of the modern world. The dispossession of Mexican and Tejano land by Anglo settlers was not a repetition of the lord—serf contradiction that propelled European development over centuries, but instead a permutation in essence manifesting in alternate forms; a race—labor based social hierarchy.

Using the “gold mine” in Taylor’s 1920s–1930s interviews with Nueces County Anglos, Montejano interpreted the unspoken intent of early twentieth century Anglo ranchers and merchants to illuminate the dominant ideologies of turn-of-the-century South Texas.^[6] Montejano used Taylor’s interviews—alongside census data, land records, news articles—to authoritatively argue that systems of racial domination in South Texas evolved through distinct periods of incorporation, reconstruction, segregation, and integration. Those interviews exposed how systems of racial domination are inseparable from labor exploitation and land dispossession. Perhaps most importantly, Anglos and Mexicans demonstrated the utility of Montejano’s signature “relaxed class–analysis,” one that introduces “race or ethnicity into the whole discussion.”^[7] In doing so, Montejano staked a position that neither strict cultural analysis nor Marxist orthodoxy was sufficient to explain the complex interplay of race and class.

Mexican cowboys branding cattle, old picture, no date

Mexican cowboys branding cattle. Source: Wikimedia Commons

The upcoming 40^th anniversary of Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas offers a unique moment to assess the book’s generational impact. If some now consider the book dated, regionally limited, or overly traditional, that only sharpens the case for its reassessment. The strongest ideas can travel and adapt to new material conditions. Does Anglos and Mexicans’ insistence on the structural still offer a clever lens of analysis? What did—and does—Anglos and Mexicans mean to the three generations of scholars who have read and worked with it? What still resonates within its analysis? What remains insufficient or undertheorized? What has been left unresolved in the histories Anglos and Mexicans sought to narrate? How have Anglos and Mexicans continued to make Texas, 1986–2026? The Department of Mexican American and Latino/a Studies at UT Austin has organized “Anglos and Mexicans; Still Making Texas,” a symposium to address not only these questions but to imagine where the next forty years of Chicane, Borderlands, and Southwestern scholarship should be oriented. This symposium is more than a tribute. It is also an intervention and expansion.

Because the “Making of Texas” is a project without a finish line, we gather this February not merely to celebrate a forty-year-old text, but to stress-test its framework against the urgent realities of 2026. While Montejano’s 1987 edition laid the groundwork for understanding land dispossession and labor regimes, the decades since have introduced new complexities—from the expansion of the carceral state and mass deportations to a deeper scholarly reckoning with gender and Indigeneity. “Anglos and Mexicans; Still Making Texas” will take place February 20–21, 2026, at the Department of Mexican American and Latino/a Studies’ Gordon White Building. Across two days of panels, roundtables, and featured conversations, participants will return to Montejano’s central provocations: race and class as mutually constitutive social forces, uneven development as a regional condition, and “making Texas” as an ongoing political project. This symposium will be of interest not only to historians of Texas and the U.S.-Mexico borderlands but also to scholars, students, educators, and community members concerned with the long afterlives of land dispossession, labor regimes, racial formation, and state power in the Southwest.

The University of Texas at Austin, where Montejano studied, later taught for many years, and where his papers are now housed, will host the symposium as a homecoming celebrating his enduring contributions. Rooting this dialogue in the specific institutional memory of the Center for Mexican American Studies (CMAS) and MALS allows genealogical continuity while writing the future of Chicane and Latinx Studies. We invite scholars, students, educators, and community members to join us as we trace this intellectual genealogy and set its trajectory forward.

Ethen Pena is currently pursuing a PhD in Mexican American and Latino Studies at The University of Texas at Austin, with research centered on power dynamics, Anzaldúan theory, Radical Chicano Politics in the Southwest. He is dedicated to bridging academia and grassroots initiatives to inspire meaningful social change.

^[1] David G. Gutierrez, “The Third Generation: Reflections on Recent Chicano Historiography: Mexicano Resistance in the Southwest. Robert Rosenbaum.; Let All of Them Take Heed: Mexican Americans and the Campaign for Educational Equality in Texas, 1910-1981 . Guadalupe San Miguel Jr.. ; Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas, 1836-1986. David Montejano. ; The Texas-Mexican Conjunto: History of a Working Class Music . Manuel Pena,” Mexican Studies 5, no. 2 (1989): 293; James E. Crisp, “Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas, 1836-1986,” The Journal of Southern History 55, no. 1 (1989): 143–44; Ellwyn R. Stoddard, “Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas, 1836-1986,” Contemporary Sociology (Washington) 17, no. 4 (1988): 475; Crisp, “Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas, 1836-1986,” 144.

^[2] Mario T. Garcia, Review of Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas, 1836-1986, by David Montejano, The American Historical Review 94, no. 4 (1989): 1185.

^[3] Montejano oral history, VOCES.

^[4] David Montejano, Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas, 1836-1986, 1st ed. (University of Texas Press, 1987), 245.

^[5] Montejano oral history, VOCES.

^[6] Montejano oral history, VOCES.

^[7] Ibid.

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.

Longhorns v. Aggies: The Way Rivalry in Sport Shapes History and Culture

The “Longhorns v. Aggies” Exhibit is currently on display at the H.J. Lutcher Stark Center for Physical Culture and Sports at the University of Texas at Austin

I have lived in Texas my entire life. Because of this, the football game between the University of Texas and Texas A&M University has always played an integral part in the way my family experienced the Thanksgiving holiday. When I was a kid, we often spent the week at my grandparents’ farm in Temple, Texas, where they did not have cable television. So, when the Farmers and Longhorns played, my grandfather would rent a room at a little motel off the interstate highway, and we would all cram in together, sprawled across tiny beds with itchy comforters, and eat bad delivery pizza while watching the big game. My family, however, was all maroon. My grandfather graduated from A&M, my father graduated from A&M, and my younger sister is now a graduate of A&M. I was an anomaly in my family, an artist and writer, and by the time I was a sophomore in high school, I knew College Station wasn’t the place for me. I completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in creative writing at Saint Edward’s University, a small, liberal arts school on the hilltop off South Congress Avenue here in beautiful Austin, Texas. And now, I work as the curator at the H.J. Lutcher Stark Center for Physical Culture and Sports, a world-renowned research library with significant gallery space that allows us to host public exhibitions at the University of Texas at Austin. This article is the first in a new series for Not Even Past exploring topics in sports history and the Stark Center archives, with a focus on developing exhibits in public spaces.

The Stark Center’s latest exhibit, called Longhorns v. Aggies, celebrates the long-running rivalry between the Texas Longhorns and Texas A&M Aggies, specifically the annual Thanksgiving Day football game.^[1] The 2025 game was the 120^th matchup between the two schools’ football teams. It was the first time in fifteen years that a game between the Longhorns and Aggies was played at DKR-Texas Memorial Football Stadium.^[2] Because of that hiatus, most of our current undergraduate students had no personal ties or first-hand connection to this historic game, commonly referred to as The Lone Star Showdown. So, when I sat down with Stark Center Museum Director Jan Todd and we began having conversations about an exhibit covering the long feud between Aggies and Longhorns, we decided that current students deserved to know about the highs and lows of this game’s past, as well as its influence on the cultures, traditions, and identities of each school. The result is an exhibit that attempts to show the complexities of the renewed rivalry.

“Longhorns v. Aggies” Exhibit. Courtesy of The H.J. Lutcher Stark Center

The Origin of Powerhouse Athletics Programs

Although many people assume that The University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin) is the oldest state institution of higher learning, Texas Agricultural and Mechanical College (A&M) began educating students in engineering and agricultural science in 1876, seven years before UT Austin opened its doors to students. From those earliest times, however, the two schools regarded each other as rivals. UT Austin offered higher education focused on liberal arts and the humanities. Its campus was located in downtown Austin, the state capitol. The student body was co-ed from its inception. The Aggies, on the other hand, emphasized a curriculum centered on agriculture and engineering. Theirs was a rural campus with an all-male student body required to participate in Corps of Cadets military training. After the two schools began meeting for an annual football game in 1894, the frictions between the rural “Farmers” of A&M and the big-city “Steers” of Texas only grew. We tell “Aggie jokes.”^[3] They call us “t-sips.”^[4] The lyrics in each school’s fight song bids the other farewell. The rivalry deepened as UT Austin won fourteen of the first seventeen games.^[5] Folks in College Station were frustrated.

In 1909, the Aggies hired Charley Moran as their new head football coach and assigned him one task: build a team that could beat Texas. After recruiting players from other successful collegiate programs in the American South, the A&M football team did just that, winning back-to-back games in the 1909 season and the lone game against Texas in the 1910 season. Tensions ran especially hot during this period. On-field play was remarkably violent with players from both teams regularly suffering major injuries. Off the field, supporters clashed, taunting and fighting each other—Longhorn fans once carried broomsticks and marched in a mockery of A&M’s Corps of Cadets, which led to a massive brawl. A University of Texas student suffered knife wounds in a rumble after the 1908 game–the wounds were non-fatal and A&M officials issued a sincere public apology. In 1911, the game was played on neutral territory in Houston, as the headline event of the city’s No-Tsu-Oh Festival. Texas defeated A&M 6-0 on a late game scoop-and-score fumble recovery. After the game, A&M’s Corps of Cadets marched on downtown Houston, taking over city blocks and instigating physical altercations with anyone perceived to be affiliated with the University of Texas. Swarms of police were required to restore the peace. In the aftermath, the Athletics Council at UT sent a telegram to the Athletics Council at A&M:

Dear Sir:
Referring to my telegram of November 8 and letter of November 9, I beg to inform you that the Athletic Council of The University of Texas has decided not to enter into any athletic relations with the Agricultural and Mechanical College of Texas for the year 1912.
Very respectfully,

W. T. Mather Chairman of the Athletic Council The University of Texas

“Longhorns v. Aggies” Exhibit. Courtesy of The H.J. Lutcher Stark Center

The Farmers’ Athletic Council was, apparently, fine with the idea and the schools did not face each other again until 1915.^[6]

This is significant because the loss in revenue from the already ubiquitous rivalry, deemed the “richest attraction in the Southwest,” left both schools’ athletics programs teetering on the brink of bankruptcy.^[7] Enter L. Theo Bellmont. In 1913, Bellmont was hired as the University’s first director of athletics. Bellmont’s hiring was promoted by Lutcher Stark, a great benefactor of Texas Athletics, who would later become the youngest man ever appointed to The Board of Regents.^[8]

It was Bellmont’s job to organize physical education classes for men and to run the sports programs. One of his first acts was to establish an advisory board for Athletics and then to petition for his new Athletic Council to have financial oversight for running the games and raising funds. First, he appealed to President S. E. Mezes to grant him and the Athletic Council complete management of all athletic events. His wish was partially granted in 1913 and then fully in 1914. Second, he began the formation of a new athletic conference, the Southwest Athletic Conference. The Southwest Athletic Conference came to be known, more famously, as the Southwest Conference, which existed from 1915 until 1996 when Texas, Texas A&M, Texas Tech, and Baylor moved to the Big XII Conference in search of television revenue from football and basketball games.

“Longhorns v. Aggies” Exhibit. Courtesy of The H.J. Lutcher Stark Center

Meeting with A&M officials in “behind-closed-door sessions” in 1914, Bellmont was able to navigate a renewal of the rivalry between Aggies and Longhorns through the establishment of the Southwest Conference and a still unconfirmed agreement by the Aggies to fire Coach Charley Moran.^[9] Essentially, the first pause in the Lone Star Showdown led both athletic departments to face their greatest crisis to date, very nearly bankrupting and ending them entirely. And the renewal of the rivalry, through the actions of Theo Bellmont, gave birth to the modern intercollegiate athletics program at the University of Texas.

Shaping the Exhibit
This past summer I was blessed with research help from Valeria Misakova, an undergraduate Stark Center intern, who normally attends Notre Dame University. Valeria spent dozens of hours scanning The Daily Texan and The Cactus yearbooks for information on these historically significant games and teams. Stark Center Archivist Caroline De La Cerda was a tremendous resource on this project, including connecting me with archivists at Texas A&M’s Cushing Library who helped accumulate assets related to Aggie history and culture that can’t be found in our own archive. Sports archivist Patty McCain and Stark Center Associate Director Kim Beckwith also contributed to helping us find artifacts to display and getting the history “right.”

“Longhorns v. Aggies” Exhibit. Courtesy of The H.J. Lutcher Stark Center

This exhibit, with its rich history, is shaped by chapters or subsections, rather than a rigid chronological organization.
1. “The Kickoff” presents the origins of football at each school and the early matchups.
2. “Raising Cain” documents the colorful history of off-field hijinks.
3. “Siblings First, Rivals Second” memorializes the 1999 Bonfire Tragedy and the Unity response.
4. Untitled, the longest wall in the gallery and primary backdrop of the exhibit, features photographs and artifacts that showcase the history of the games played on the field, from 1915 all the way up to the game in 2024, highlighting specific decades for each team as well as recognizing the three Heisman Trophy winners that played in the Lone Star Showdown.
5. Two walls, presented side-by-side in burnt orange and maroon, respectively, showcase the various cultures and traditions at each school, particularly those that were formed out of this rivalry.
6. “Cover Art” features a colorful collage of gameday programs spanning the past 100 years of games played between Texas and Texas A&M.^[10]

“Longhorns v. Aggies” Exhibit. Courtesy of The H.J. Lutcher Stark Center

If you have not been to the Stark Center, or you have not visited since we opened Longhorns v. Aggies, please drop by and explore our space and learn more about the history of this Texas-sized rivalry. The Stark Center is located on the 5^th Floor of the North End Zone at DKR-Texas Memorial Football Stadium, open Monday-Friday, 9am until 5pm. There is no charge for admission, and all fans are always welcome in our space.

“Longhorns v. Aggies” Exhibit. Courtesy of The H.J. Lutcher Stark Center

Kyle Martin has worked as the Curator of the Stark Center since September 2024. His primary fields of work are writing, designing, and curating new exhibits and other creative projects related to the promotion, marketing, and enhancement of the Stark Center and its missions. He also serves as the technical editor of Iron Game History.

^[1] Or Thanksgiving-adjacent; Longhorn/Aggie football games have also regularly been played the day after Thanksgiving, as this year’s game was. The first time Aggies and Longhorns played football against each other on Thanksgiving Day was 1900. Since then, the game has, typically, been scheduled on or near the holiday.

^[2] In 2011, Texas played Texas A&M at Kyle Field in College Station. The Longhorns won 27 – 25. At the conclusion of the 2011-2012 academic year, Texas A&M Athletics left the Big XII Conference to join the Southeast Conference, a move that shocked both fan bases and led to the Longhorns and Aggies no longer facing each other on a regular season schedule. The teams did not play again until 2024, at Kyle Field in College Station, when the Texas Longhorns played their inaugural season in the Southeast Conference, following their own departure from the Big XII. The pause in play was so monumental that state legislators attempted to pass bills forcing the restoration of the rivalry. They were unsuccessful in doing so. As a result, the 2025 match up was the first played in Austin—at DKR-Texas Memorial Football Stadium—in fifteen years.

^[3] Here’s an example of an Aggie joke that scores points against A&M and the Longhorns’ other rival, OU:
Did you hear about the Aggie who moved to Oklahoma? The move raised the average IQ in both states.

^[4] Or “Tea-sip” is a label that Aggie students gave to Longhorn students to mock their perceived “snootiness” or elitism, one who hoists a pinky up and sips at their tea.

^[5] Played in the span of 14 years; the schools often played twice per season at this time. There were two games that ended in a tie (1902 and 1907). Also worth noting, the Aggies did not score a single point in their first 8 matchups against Texas.

^[6] From a class paper by Bill Gunn and Jimmy Viramontes, “An Early Athletic Administration Problem at The University of Texas, A Problem Presentation” for ED. AD. 392. Dr. Kenneth E Mcintyre-Professor, by. Found in the Texas Athletics Media Archives, The H.J. Lutcher Stark Center for Physical Culture and Sports.

^[7] Ibid

^[8] Here, at the research center which bears his name, we credit H.J. Lutcher Stark as the “father of the Longhorn logo,” when he purchased blankets for the 1914 Texas football team that featured the image of a longhorn on them. This was the first time a longhorn logo—a full head and neck with details like eyes, fur, and spots—was used on official gear at the University of Texas, cementing the mascot/brand.

^[9] Gunn and Viramontes, “An Early Athletic Administration Problem.” Also note, Moran was beloved by the Farmers and colloquially referred to as “Uncle Charley” but hated by Longhorns who believed he coached his teams to seek out plays that would injure opposing players. In 1910, Longhorn fans developed a new cheer for football games against A&M: “To hell, to hell with Charley Moran, / and all of his dirty crew / If you don’t like the words of this song, / to hell, to hell with you.”

^[10] What can football programs tell us about the past? As it turns out, plenty. The many Texas v. A&M football programs featured in this collage have helped to create the public images of both the Longhorns and Aggies as they evolved over time. Cover art has been used to foster traditions and emotions that surround the game experience, but also to mark changes in technology and historic events, giving us a glimpse into the mindset of Texas and A&M students through the years.

What is MACRI? Meet the Organization Showcasing Mexican American Civil Rights History in San Antonio and Beyond

This article is part of the series: History beyond Academia

MACRI Executive Director Dr. Sarah Z. Gould will be at UT Austin on February 19th, 2026. You can find more information about her talk at the end of this article.

Nestled in the heart of San Antonio, Texas, just west of downtown, lies the Mexican American Civil Rights Institute (MACRI), an organization dedicated to chronicling and sharing the history of Mexican American civil rights in the United States. It lies within the field of public history, which moves history beyond university classrooms and academic journals, bringing it into museums, community spaces, and online platforms where the public can engage with it directly. On October 22, 2025, I sat down with its executive director, Dr. Sarah Zenaida Gould, to talk about the organization, its beginnings, and its mission.

“2018 and 2019, these were two big anniversary years in San Antonio,” Gould said, explaining that the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights Hearings had been held in December of 1968 in the city. The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights was established in 1957 by the federal government to address issues like discrimination that concern race, ethnicity, and culture in the United States. The 1968 hearing in San Antonio was “one of the first times that the federal government officially heard testimony about experiences of discrimination that Mexican Americans had throughout the Southwest” specifically. The hearings occurred just a few years after the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which were aimed at reducing discrimination for African Americans and set a precedent for civil rights to later be expanded to other minority groups. A conference was held in November 2018 in San Antonio to commemorate the event.

This was followed by a second conference in 2019 for the 50th anniversary of the Edgewood school walkouts, an event that took place in May of 1968, when over 400 Mexican American students protested for better and more equitable education by walking out of Edgewood High School in San Antonio. The conferences were significant as people involved in both the walkouts and the commission hearings gave testimonies about their experiences and how the events got more people involved in the Chicano Movement, politics, and community activism. These back-to-back conferences reignited interest in Mexican American history and, more importantly, in how to preserve it.

For Gould, the conference was not just a spotlight on San Antonio’s Mexican American civil rights history, but also a race against time. “At the next big anniversary,” she warned, “most of those people would no longer be with us.” The question was simple and urgent: “how do you keep that history alive?” That question ultimately led to the creation of MACRI. The initial plan was just to create an exhibit that depicted Mexican American civil rights icons in San Antonio, but support from the city council, Mayor Ron Nirenberg, and the community was much more substantial than anticipated. Gould explained that it was at a cultural moment when a lot of people were thinking about equity within history. “One thing that we kept hearing from city council members and members of the public was why haven’t we had this before?”

National Farm Workers Association protest buttons. Source: Wikimedia Commons

MACRI began organizing itself with funding from the city and was officially incorporated on May 29, 2019. Gould was involved from the beginning and was asked to step into the position of Executive Director in 2020, partially to help the organization transition into a virtual space during the pandemic. This was when MACRI first began to flourish in its engagement and reach, creating a community despite everything happening in the world at the time. They began by having conversations about Mexican American civil rights in online events with historians and other experts, and noticed that over half the viewership was from outside the San Antonio area. “They were from all over,” Gould said. “That was particularly exciting.” Even when MACRI began to transition to having mostly in-person events as the pandemic eased up, they still received emails from people across the country, asking that virtual involvement remain in some form so that they could continue to participate in Mexican American history.

One of MACRI’s goals is to make San Antonio’s role as the birthplace of Mexican American civil rights to the general public. This is already happening among guests who attend MACRI’s in-person and virtual events, celebrating moments when people stood up against injustice. Gould discussed how “for so many people, this history is part of their living present moment,” as they often had a personal connection to the stories MACRI was telling. Still, others were learning about it for the first time. Nearly all wanted to learn more.

MACRI hosts a number of different events, including talks and exhibits with historians, activists, and more. These usually have themes, such as civil rights trailblazers or landmark court cases involving Mexican Americans. Their September 27 to November 26, 2025 exhibit was on Cisneros v. Corpus Christi ISD, an important civil rights case that extended school desegregation from Brown v. Board of Education to Mexican Americans. Brown occurred in 1954 and Cisneros in 1970. “So it takes a while for these things to happen,” Gould said. “You have to have those precedent-setting cases so that you can move the legislation forward.”

Gould is already planning events well into next year, which will be the 250th anniversary of the United States. The events will aim to “[make] sure we’re inserting Mexican Americans into how we understand America.” They will start with Spanish colonial Texas and will move forward in time over the course of the year. The events and exhibits will include discussions of important court cases involving due process, and in the summer of 2026 they will host screenings for the 30th anniversary of the Chicano! History of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement documentary series that originally aired on PBS in 1995. Gould will also be visiting a number of universities throughout the state, including the University of Texas at Austin, where she will be sharing more about what MACRI does with current students.

A man walking in the old Mexican market area just west of downtown San Antonio

In the old Mexican market area just west of downtown San Antonio. Source: Wikimedia Commons

When creating their in-person exhibits, MACRI tries to identify a scholar for whom that area of history is their subject matter expertise, whom they consult with. Their first exhibit was based on Dr. Cynthia Orosco’s biography Pioneer of Mexican-American Civil Rights: Alonso S.

Perales for their trailblazers series. For the current exhibit on Cisneros, MACRI worked with Dr. Isabel Araiza at Del Mar College in Corpus Christi. Their goal with each project is to make the information accessible. “The idea with most exhibits is to give people just a slice of what that is, so that they have a basic understanding,” and then if they are interested in learning more, MACRI points them to more resources.

MACRI has also done exhibits that were created through collaborations with local schools. Earlier in 2025, they did an exhibit for Dolores Huerta’s 95th birthday. Huerta is a Mexican American civil rights activist who is best known for being the co-founder of the United Farm Workers Association, a labor rights organization, alongside Cesar Chavez. MACRI’s exhibit on Huerta was created by sending out a call for art submissions to schools across the San Antonio area. “I have to thank the teachers whom we sent this out to, because clearly they talked to their kids about who she was,” Gould commended. “A number of them incorporated quotes from her into their artwork, and in their artist statement… You could just tell that they had been really reflecting on ‘Why does she matter to me?’ ‘Why does she matter to my family?’ ” She praised the teachers multiple times, stating that MACRI had only given them parameters and a brief synopsis of Huerta’s life, but she “could tell the teachers went above and beyond what we provided them, because the students clearly put a lot of thought into what they were drawing or painting, and connecting that to her life.” This was part of an initiative to get students more involved with history museums, which tend to cater to and attract an adult audience, unlike art and science museums. But the success of the project showed that it is far from impossible to get children to engage with history.

Gould also discussed the challenges and opportunities that working beyond academia brings. The most difficult thing she cited was the lack of infrastructure available to her and the other employees at MACRI, including things like access to research databases. But there are positives too, the most prominent of which is the freedom from constraints of university timelines. Historians who work for universities are tied to both the academic calendar and making sure they are hitting the goalposts in their careers, such as tenure review. But as a public history organization, MACRI can do things on its own time.

Still, Gould has hope for bridging the divide between the two fields. “I would love to see more collaboration between universities and people who are independent historians outside of academia,” Gould said. “Because you know, the universities do have resources that public historians could really benefit from, and public historians do have typically… connections to real grassroots-type history that could be of a benefit to students to know about.” With its exhibits, events, and media outreach, MACRI is working to bridge the gap. But to reach this goal, universities and historians within academia have to do their part to connect with public history as well. By remaining dedicated to continued collaboration between the public, academics, and everyone in between, MACRI is a model example of what these types of connections can look like, reshaping how American history is told.

Flyer for Dr. Sarah Z. Gould's talk at UT Austin. February 19, 2026, 2:30 pm at Garrison Hall 4th floor

Kara Alexandra Culp is a current history PhD student at UT Austin, focused on Latina/o history in the 20th-century United States. Her dissertation project aims to explore the effects of education policy and law on Latina/o immigrant students in the borderlands in the 1970s and beyond.

Sarah Zenaida Gould, interview with author. October 22, 2025.

AVAnnotate: A Research and Teaching Tool for Creating Digital Exhibits and Editions with Audiovisual Recordings

Not Even Past and AVAnnotate will soon be partnering to develop new collaborative initiatives that connect readers with NEP content. More to come.

The first historical recordings that piqued my interest were made by my fellow Floridian Zora Neale Hurston in a studio in Jacksonville, Florida, in 1939. Recorded on June 18 at the Federal Music Project Office of the Work Projects Administration (WPA) with Carita Doggett Corse, Herbert Halpert, and Stetson Kennedy, these are unusual and rich texts to study. They document a Black, female ethnographer performing African American stories and songs for a White audience, both in the recording studio, where her fellow ethnographers can be heard asking her questions, and for the white listeners at the Library of Congress who would later receive the recordings. These 1939 recordings are shockingly well-produced (even as they are sometimes difficult to understand) and are now digitized and online. All of these factors make recordings like these interesting artifacts. They include the circumstances of the recording, the transposition of the original acetate disks onto reeltoreel tapes, their digitization, and how curators described them in catalogs that now form the metadata through which they are discoverable in the archive and online.

Zora Neale Hurston with Rochelle French and Gabriel Brown, Eatonville, Florida, June 1935. Photograph by Alan Lomax. Courtesy of Library of Congress

It can be difficult for scholars, students, and the public to use audiovisual (AV) collections at libraries, archives, and museums (LAMs) in research and teaching. Because accessing these materials often requires specialized equipment, expertise, and time, LAMs with diverse AV collections might not prioritize their preservation. In addition, LAMs report that there are few accessible technologies and examples for how to use digital AV cultural heritage materials in the classroom, in research, or in public contexts.^[1] LAMs remain in the early stages of working through the politics, protocols, and systems of access.

I’m trained primarily in textual studies and modernist literature, but I’ve spent many years using and creating digital tools with all kinds of texts (including print documents, manuscripts, and audio recordings). Reflecting on the significance of archival audio recordings to literary study is the focus of my recent book, Dissonant Records: Close Listening to Literary Archives. It seems ironic to write a print book about sound recordings, but it is technically much simpler to teach and do research with text in print. You can hand it around; you can mark it up with underlines and words in the margins like “interesting!” You can highlight key passages or moments and use them to support discussion and interpretation. Scholarly editions have long fulfilled this role for textual sources in a formal, institutionalized way; more recently, digital editions and exhibits have served a similar function. Still, I wanted a way to directly share the context (and my thoughts about it) around underutilized and culturally important AV collections like those I write about in my book.

To achieve this, I developed AVAnnotate with the help of my team and the support of funding from the American Council of Learned Societies and the Mellon Foundation. AVAnnotate facilitates making projects with an AV player and user-generated annotations. Plus, adding essays, notes, and index terms served my needs as a scholar and teacher and helped me tell my story about these recordings. There are more technical details in the documentation, but some of the principles behind the technical development include that AVAnnotate is open-source software that leverages the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF)^[2] standard for AV materials and GitHub in a minimal computing workflow ^[3] that simplifies creating standards-based, user-generated, online projects. These principles underlie an easy-to-use dashboard on the backend where users can create AVAnnotate annotations that take four forms in the published project (see Figure 1). There are (1) long-form notes that could be transcriptions (see “My name is Zora Neale Hurston . . . “ or more like the sort of marginalia one might find in a print scholarly edition (see the note beginning “Man singing with instruments . . .”); (2) index terms or “tags” (such as “Zora Neale Hurston,” “Song,” or “Unknown singing with instruments”) that facilitate organizing, searching, and visualizing types of annotations and important concepts; (3) tag groups to further facilitate filtering groups of tags (e.g. “Environment,” “Speaker,” and “Nonspeech”); (4) timestamps (e.g., 12:50-13:01) that help situate the notes and index terms. These kinds of annotations mark how and to what we listen in these recordings, just as editorial choices and marginalia notes mark how and what editors and authors find significant in specific versions of manuscripts and printed texts.

Figure 1: AVAnnotate page from “Zora Neale Hurston’s WPA field recordings in Jacksonville, FL (1939)”

Collecting institutions, researchers, teachers, and the public have used AVAnnotate for a variety of purposes in their desire to make AV more accessible. Librarians from the Benson Latin American Collection at the University of Texas at Austin have created multiple exhibits. Some projects highlight radio programs, including the Latin American Press Review Radio Collection to showcase radio programs from the Longhorn Radio Network airing from 1973 to 1974 that covered all of Latin America and the Caribbean, and Radio Venceremos, the rebel radio station that broadcast from the mountains of Morazán, El Salvador, during the eleven-year Salvadoran Civil War (1981-1992). Benson librarians and I have also used AVAnnotate to share recordings from historical symposia, including the Benson’s Speak-Out! Charla! Bate-Papo! Contemporary Art and Literature in Latin America Symposium held October 27-29, 1975, at the University of Texas at Austin (transcriptions provided in both English and Spanish), and my own edition of the Harvard 1953 Summer Conference on “The Contemporary Novel,” which includes recently discovered recordings of panels and lectures from literary luminaries such as Ralph Ellison.

Researchers have used AVAnnotate to discuss historical cinema, poetry readings, podcasts, and oral histories. Jack Riordan created a bilingual AVAnnotate project around his interviews with Cuban filmmaker Lester Hamlet, exploring Hamlet’s poetry, archival materials, and cultural contexts. He also developed a separate project on Auteurism, examining the theory through filmmakers such as Stanley Kubrick, Wes Anderson, Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, Andrei Tarkovsky, and Akira Kurosawa. In addition to oral histories, interviews, and cinema, other projects showcase research around poetry readings and podcasts. Of special note, researchers from the SpokenWeb partnership created the SpokenWeb UAlberta in 360° to present a fusion of past and present technology. This project brings together artifacts created for and at the 2025 SpokenWeb Sound Institute, with special emphasis on author reactions to a 360° video made of author reactions to literary recordings from the 1960s-1980s played back on a 1960s Sony TC-102 portable reel-to-reel tape player in the same Edmonton locations where they were originally recorded decades earlier.

Educators in particular find AVAnnotate useful both for teaching students about historical AV recordings and for giving students the opportunity to create their own projects. The Educational Project for John Beecher, McComb “Criminal Syndicalism” Case project is an example of working with and annotating sensitive audio using a recording from the John Beecher Sound Recordings Collection at the University of Texas’s Harry Ransom Center. In this recording, John Beecher and members of the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO) meet with high school students arrested on charges of criminal syndicalism after their release from jail in McComb, Mississippi, on October 19, 1964. The project includes: the audio annotated with research about the recording’s social and historical context and a full transcription; two lesson plans for instructors to use AVAnnotate and this recording in a high school classroom with one in-person and one asynchronous lesson plan; the asynchronous, student-facing lesson that is ready to use in the classroom; and an example student collaborative project that teachers could build by the end of either lesson. Other projects are the result of students in a cinema class creating a project about Identity and Embodiment in the Stella Adler Collection, the RHE 306 Anthologydeveloped by students asked to produce original audio or video compositions paired with annotations and a transcript that examine rhetorical strategies, and the Literary Sound Studies: English 483 Class Anthology where student annotations represent an analysis of voice, rhythm, silence, and audience with a focus on how literature is performed and heard.

AVAnnotate is currently released as a stable version. Our resources include documentation, examples, and tutorials. Our general user guidelines have been developed for Collecting Institutions, Researchers, Educators, and the Public. Additionally, the AVAnnotate team has collaborated with partnering organizations including a community of scholars, information professionals, and teachers to produce Principles of Engagement that discuss guidelines around using tools like AVAnnotate to create contextual information for AV artifacts outside of collecting institutions where they have been processed, preserved, and made accessible. The kind of “round-trip” sharing of resources—from libraries, archives, and museums (LAMs) to the community and back into the LAM system—that AVAnnotate has the potential to create inspires a technical and social ecosystem that will increase the responsible use and sustainability of cultural heritage AV. My hope is that AVAnnotate encourages more ethical, human-centered, and community-shared approaches to knowledge production.

Tanya E. Clement is the Director of the Humanities Institute and the Robert Adger Law and Thos. H. Law Centennial Endowed Professor in Humanities in the Department of English at the University of Texas at Austin. Her primary areas of research are textual studies, sound studies, and infrastructure studies as these concerns impact academic research, research libraries, and the creation of research tools and resources in the digital humanities. In her most recent project, AVAnnotate, funded by the Mellon foundation, she seeks to increase access to AV recordings in research and teaching by developing an application and a workflow for presenting user-generated, digital editions and exhibits with AV. Her book Dissonant Records: Close Listening to Literary Archives was published by MIT Press in August 2024.

^[1] Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) and the Library of Congress. The State of Recorded Sound Preservation in the United States: A National Legacy at Risk in the Digital Age. Washington DC: National Recording Preservation Board of the Library of Congress, 2010.

^[2] IIIF is a standardized solution that libraries and archives have adopted to give users the ability to perform scholarly methods for research and teaching using third-party platforms like AVAnnotate. More information on the IIIF background to the beta-version of AVAnnotate (AudiAnnotate) is discussed in https://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/16/2/000586/000586.html.

^[3] See Clement, Tanya, et al. “The AudiAnnotate Project: Four Case Studies in Publishing Annotations for Audio and Video.” Digital Humanities Quarterly, vol. 016, no. 2, June 2022.

A Shogun’s Tale: How William Adams Became the West’s Favorite Samurai

Banner for A shogun's tale by Josefine Lin

Lit by fiery amber torchlight, rows of samurai stand shoulder to shoulder as their lord, Yoshii Toranaga, strides toward his stage. The English-born foreigner John Blackthorne, blue-eyed and bewildered, listens through a translator as Toranaga announces that, in return for saving his life, Blackthorne will be granted land, servants, kimonos, and two swords. He is now a samurai, his translator says, and there is a sense that this moment has changed the course of his life.

This scene in the 1980 television miniseries Shōgun captivated millions of American viewers, who accounted for one-third of all households when it aired.^[1] Based on James Clavell’s 1975 novel of the same name, the miniseries sparked renewed interest in the novel and nurtured a growing Orientalist fascination in the West, to the point that many articles on the cultural phenomenon credit it with popularizing sushi for Americans. Its protagonist, Blackthorne, was inspired by a real English sailor named William Adams, whose life in seventeenth-century Japan became the seed for one of history’s most persistent cross-cultural narratives. Yet the William Adams of record—a navigator, merchant, and retainer of Shogun Tokugawa—has been largely eclipsed by the samurai Adams of mythmaking. It then begs the question: who was the real man behind the myth?

Born in Gillingham, England, Adams began as an apprentice shipwright and later joined the Royal Navy during the Anglo-Spanish War. Employed by a Dutch trading fleet as pilot-major, Adams set sail from Rotterdam in 1598, bound for Asia in hopes of buying spices and other foreign goods. The journey was disastrous. Only one of the five ships survived the grueling two-year voyage, reaching Japan in 1600 with only a handful of starving sailors still able to walk.

William Adams before Shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu. Foreigners frequently confused the Shogun with the Emperor.

William Adams before Shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu. Source: Wikimedia Commons

Adams’s arrival in Japan could easily have ended in execution. The Portuguese Jesuits had already been active in Japan for fifty years, having established a Catholic Christian and European trade monopoly on the island chain.^[2] The Portuguese had exclusive trading rights between Japan and the rest of Asia, giving them significant power and influence. But Tokugawa Ieyasu, then a powerful warlord on the cusp of becoming shogun, summoned Adams for questioning. Through an interpreter, Adams explained European affairs and maritime trade, information that likely broadened Ieyasu’s understanding of Western politics and offered him greater insight into the Jesuit influence as well as European rivalries.

After Ieyasu’s victory at the Battle of Sekigahara later that year, he summoned Adams again and asked him to build a Western-style ship. The Englishman succeeded, and Ieyasu rewarded him with land, servants, and an annual stipend, which made Adams a hatamoto, a direct retainer of the shogun. “The emperor had given me a living,” Adams wrote in his letters, “as in England a lordship.”^[3] In keeping with his status, Adams may have owned several katana and wakizashi, which are mentioned in his will. He married a Japanese woman, fathered two children, and remained in Japan until he died in 1620.^[4]

While Adams accomplished much more than just shipbuilding during his time in Japan, these are little discussed in retellings. Instead, he would take on an entirely new life. William Dalton’s Will Adams, The First Englishman in Japan, published in 1861, is regarded as the first fictionalized biography of the sailor. Written from the perspective of one of Adams’s shipmates, the story transforms him into an archetype of British virtue: a noble, Christian gentleman who wins Japan’s admiration through personal honor and trade. Dalton’s version of Adams embodied the ideals of Victorian mercantilism and national pride more than historical fact.

In 1872, journalist James Walters claimed to have discovered Adams’s tomb in Japan, which sparked renewed interest in his story. Though the grave was known to the local Japanese, Walters’s publication sent waves through Great Britain, bringing awareness to their lost countryman whose homeland had largely forgotten him. As historian Derek Massarella notes, after Walters’s article in The Far East Journal was published, the myth of William Adams truly “took wing.” At a time when Britain sought to frame its imperial history as one of exploration and enlightenment, Adams became a convenient symbol: the brave, lone Englishman forging peaceful relations with an exotic ally.

Map of Japan with William Adams who visits the Shogun in 1707. In the top right is Hokkaido (Terra de Iesso) In the top left side is a part of the Korean peninsula. The bottom right is a cartouche representing the audience of William Adams with the Shogun (Tokugawa Ieyasu). The bottom right text says: "William Adams Reystogt na Oost-Indien; Avontuurlyle door de Straat Magellaan in't Keyzerryk van Iapan Voleyndigd." Translation = "William Adams travels to East India; adventurous through the straight of Magellan in the Empire of Japan completed."

Map of Japan with William Adams who visits the Shogun in 1707. Source: Wikimedia Commons

Arthur Diósy’s 1904 essay “In Memory of Will Adams: The First Englishman in Japan” continued to build on this concept. Writing amid the newly formed Anti-Russian Anglo-Japanese Alliance, Diósy cast Adams as a bridge between two island nations bound by “mutual respect, sympathy, and interest.” He claimed that Adams adopted Japanese dress and “wore two swords,” a detail not mentioned before, but one that would profoundly shape later retellings. With Diósy, the image of Adams as a samurai began to solidify as a reflection of British admiration for Japan’s rise as a modern imperial power, especially considering the two countries’ alliance during the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese War that same year.

The myth reached new heights in 1975, when novelist James Clavell published Shōgun. Clavell, a British Royal Artillery veteran, was captured by Japanese forces during the Second World War and was held captive in Changi, Singapore. His experience as a prisoner of war in a place where only 1 in 15 prisoners survived greatly influenced the rest of Clavell’s life and career.^[5] Those incredibly challenging years did not harden into resentment for Clavell but instead became the inspiration and fascination that drove much of his writing. Clavell’s epic novel, based loosely on Adams’s story, recast Adams as John Blackthorne, a rough-edged, adventurous, and spiritually reborn figure in Japan. This version diverged significantly from earlier portrayals: John Blackthorne is gritty and tough, but also charming and adaptive, not afraid to get his hands dirty. His loyalty to the shogun, his romance with his translator, and his adoption of Japanese customs all dramatized the allure of cultural transformation. This version of Adams proved to be one of the most enduring. In an article for the New York Times, writer Webster Schott described Clavell’s novel as “so enveloping that you forget who and where you are.”^[6]

The spectacle of a Western man mastering samurai ways captivated audiences with the 1980 television adaptation and cemented Adams’s new identity in the public consciousness. In the decades since, Adams’s myth has grown in digital form. The Encyclopedia Britannica wrote its first digital entry on Adams in 1998, and Wikipedia first mentions him in 2003, titling his life “From seaman to samurai.” YouTube videos and historical explainers perpetuate this image, often referencing Clavell’s novel more than Adams’s own letters. The story’s latest revival came with FX’s 2024 Shōgun series, which reached nine million streams in a month and introduced Blackthorne to a new generation.^[7] Even with a more nuanced portrayal, the myth remains: William Adams, the Englishman who became a samurai.

Samurai in the Edo period walking through town. The second and fourth from the left are samurai. Samurai could kill a commoner for the slightest insult and were widely feared by the Japanese population. An illustration in Santo Kyoden's book of manners and customs "Shiji-no-yukikai" (published in 1798).

Samurai in the Edo period walking through town. Source: Wikimedia Commons

The irony, of course, is that Adams was a samurai in title only. By 1600, samurai were increasingly bureaucrats rather than sword-wielding knights. In his article “Death, Honor, and Loyalty: The Bushidō Ideal,” Cameron Hurst credits this image to the efforts of Nitobe Inazō, who created the concept of Bushidō, the samurai “code of conduct,” through his novel of the same name. The irony? Nitobe was isolated spatially, culturally, religiously, and linguistically from Meiji Japan, with a limited and highly selective understanding of Japanese history and literature. If one tries to trace the historical origins of bushido before Nitobe’s 1899 classic, anything that remotely resembled Nitobe’s “version” was often out of touch with the broader spectrum of Confucianist thought, which most of the samurai class had adhered to for centuries.^[8] Given the reality of the two hundred years of peace following shogun Tokugawa’s reign, it would have been far less likely to be in a situation where seppuku would be necessary or even appropriate, despite Nitobe’s claims. In the words of Hurst, “What is the role of the warrior in an age of peace?”^[9] William Adams, while definitively a samurai in title, was nothing like the samurai with which popular consciousness is familiar, making his historiographical journey particularly ironic. The days of serving a powerful warlord through prowess on the battlefield had long passed by the time Adams arrived in Japan.^[10] In a time when samurai were beginning to turn toward bureaucratic government service, the idea of Adams being a sword-toting, battle-hardened samurai becomes even more fantastical.

The persistence of Adams’s myth reveals more about the cultures that retold his story than about the man himself. In the nineteenth century, he represented British trade and empire. By the early twentieth century, he had become a symbol of friendship between East and West. In the postwar world, he became a vessel for Western fascination with Japanese discipline and mystique. Each reinvention reflected changing desires for connection, heroism, and cultural adaptation.

For a man who spent his life navigating between worlds, perhaps it’s fitting that William Adams remains suspended between fact and fiction. Adams stands independently of even his own writings. The myth has eclipsed the Adams of the original letters. Now, Adams, the samurai, is the most prevalent mythologized version of the real historical figure and is likely to remain so.

Josefine Lin is a recent graduate of the University of Texas at Austin, having written her capstone on the study of public memory and popular history. As a history major and Philosophy of Law minor, she participated in the Normandy Scholar Program in May of 2024. Her research interests include material culture, anthropology, and the Second World War.

^[1] Cobb, “Despite ‘Shōgun’ Success, TV Is Falling Out of Love with the Miniseries,” TheWrap. https://www.thewrap.com/shogun-history-and-future-of-miniseries/

^[2] Frederik Cryns, “In the Service of the Shogun,” 37

^[3] Cryns, 125

^[4] Cryns, 214

^[5] Grimes, “James Clavell, Best-Selling Storyteller of Far Eastern Epics, Is Dead at 69,” The New York Times.

^[6] Webster Schott, “Shōgun: From James Clavell with tea and blood,” The New York Times, June 22, 1975. https://nyti.ms/4lT2ZIU

^[7] Otterson, “’Shogun’ Hits 9 Million Views and Beats ‘the Bear’ Season 2 as FX’s Biggest Hulu Premiere,” Variety.

^[8] Hurst, “Death, Honor, and Loyalty: The Bushidō Ideal,” 512

^[9] Hurst, 521

^[10] Michael Wert, Samurai: A Concise History, 78

Review of Puerto Rican Chicago: Schooling the City 1940-1977 (2022).

Banner for Puerto Rican Chicago: Schooling the City 1940-1977 book review.

In Puerto Rican Chicago: Schooling the City 1940-1977, Mirelsie Velázquez provides an eye-opening account of Puerto Ricans’ relationship to colonialism and education as they migrated to the city of Chicago in the mid-twentieth century. The book presents a thorough examination of how these migrants built and fought for a community through the lens of K-12 and postsecondary education systems, showing how colonial education policies and principles followed Puerto Ricans in their schooling across the United States. It fits well within the literature of Latino education history, specifically involving civil rights, alongside books like Brown Not White: School Integration and the Chicano Movement in Houston by Guadalupe San Miguel Jr., while also providing an important contribution to the growing field of Latino studies in the Midwest, and it aims to bring public schools into the discussion as a transformative force in the region.

The book is shaped by the author’s experiences as a Puerto Rican woman who spent her formative years in Illinois and now teaches at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Velázquez states that intersectionality (the interconnectedness of different social categories which lead to discrimination) “of schools, oppression, and liberation” was a guiding influence for the diasporic Puerto Rican community and argues that its history cannot be separated from its relationship to colonialism (p.19). She uses this to analyze the intersection of concepts such as Coloniality of Power (the understanding of power structures that remain after decolonization) to diaspora studies as well as urban history, as the Puerto Rican communities she studies only formed in the large cities of New York and Chicago.

Book cover of Puerto Rican Chicago (2022).

Puerto Rican Chicago is the product of archival and oral history methodology. Velázquez notes that a challenge she encountered was the silences in primary sources directly depicting Puerto Ricans during the early decades of their mass migration. This created gaps in the narrative “from the community’s own voices,” something she skillfully supplemented with oral interviews (p. 20). The strength of her use of the archives is found in her sources from the 1960s—discussed most heavily in chapter five—which delves into print media produced by and for Puerto Ricans in their own words. The methods she uses shape her argument that schools were an essential place of the community fighting against inequality by providing the personal reasons and motivations behind their actions.

The author emphasizes the connectedness of Puerto Rican civil rights movements in Chicago to other cities and movements by other groups, including African Americans and Chicanos. She depicts the Chicago community as intricately connected to New York City, both as a legacy of migration and an ongoing relationship that tied the two communities together through familial relations, organizations like the Young Lords, and print media. By placing her own findings within the context of existing literature on New York’s Puerto Rican communities and other civil rights movements, especially those where African Americans and Chicanos fought for their right to a just education, she further solidifies this connection.

Midway of Riverview Park, Chicago. Ca. 1950s or 1960s

Midway of Riverview Park, Chicago ca. 1950s-1960s. Source: Wikimedia Commons

Velázquez frames her study as an effort to center women and their activism, but the source material she draws on more often reveals the limits placed on women’s participation in community organizing, a limitation she herself acknowledges. For example, even Que Ondee Sola, a newspaper that she states was notable for its inclusion of women, did not include the depiction of women as part of its mission, nor were women “equally represented on the writing staff” (p. 149). This also remains true for the women depicted in the involvement of schools, who were exceptions to the rule rather than the norm. Her argument could have been strengthened by reframing her claim to emphasize that women’s involvement was silenced even by their contemporaries as it aligns more with the information she presents on women’s sidelining in their participation in community organizing and activism.

The book is organized into five chapters. Chapters One and Two discuss Puerto Ricans’ historical relationship with colonial schooling and argue that the school system in Chicago is a continuation of Americanizing practices. In both, she discusses that schools were a reflection of the community’s struggles with issues of adequate housing and labor. She also creates a cyclical narrative of how Puerto Ricans adjusted to the city, how the city responded to them, and how the group reacted to their systematic treatment. Chapters Three and Four focus on school systems, with the first depicting community involvement in K-12 public schools and the latter on universities. Velázquez stresses the importance of student involvement in both, as students and their communities fought for adequate services and against discriminatory practices. Chapter Five discusses Puerto Rican newspapers and journals in Chicago and across the country, which highlighted community voices and needs with varying degrees of radicality.

Paseo Boricua in Chicago. Source: Wikimedia Commons

As debates over education and immigration continue to shape American politics, understanding the fight for civil rights in the nation’s public schools remains essential. Puerto Rican Chicago is an important contribution to the intersection of education, immigration, and cultural history, all in the burgeoning field of Latinos in the Midwest. It is also a beautiful exploration of the strength of the Puerto Rican immigrant community building in the face of systemic oppression, which in their case uniquely stems from the United States in both their place of origin as citizens of a U.S. territory and their destination as migrants to Chicago. The book can easily find a home on immigration, Latino, and education history syllabi, as well as on the bookshelf of anyone who has faced their own experiences with the U.S. education system as part of a diaspora. As this book importantly reminds us, Americanization is something that is constantly occurring in U.S. schools, a continuing legacy of colonialism and empire. But it is not the unstoppable force that it strives to be.

Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca: Survivor and First Spanish Chronicler of Texas

Introduction: a figure at the margins

American historical memory abounds with the names of explorers and pioneers: Hernando de Soto, associated with the European discovery of the Mississippi; John Smith and the English settlers of Jamestown; the pilgrims of the Mayflower; and, in Texas, Davy Crockett and the Alamo have become mythic symbols. Yet few can easily recall the man who, long before all of them, wrote the first chronicle of what is now Texas: Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca.
This contrast is not new. Cabeza de Vaca was never part of the traditional canon of explorers and pioneers; instead, he stands apart as a survivor who, out of necessity, became the first chronicler and an accidental ethnographer of the southern regions of what would later become the United States.

The Narváez expedition and its disastrous end

In 1527, Pánfilo de Narváez received the royal commission to conquer and settle the region then known as La Florida, a vast territory along the Gulf Coast. But the enterprise ended in disaster: shipwrecks, hunger, and clashes with Native peoples—particularly the Apalache—destroyed most of the expedition. Narváez departed with 600 men, but only four survived: Cabeza de Vaca, Andrés Dorantes, Alonso del Castillo, and Estebanico, an enslaved man of Moroccan (or North African) origin.
In Naufragios (1555), Cabeza de Vaca himself described with stark honesty the misery of those days, when survival depended on begging for food, improvising cures, or submitting to the demands of Native peoples. His account reflects not a conquest, but a defeat that forced a rethinking of the relationship between Europeans and Indigenous communities.

Bust of Cabeza de Vaca in Houston, Texas. Source: Wikimedia Commons

Eight years on foot across North America

For nearly eight years, Cabeza de Vaca wandered on foot for thousands of miles across Southwest North America, from the Texas coast to northern Mexico. Born into the minor Andalusian nobility and trained as a royal official, he was utterly unprepared for what followed. He was a captive, an itinerant trader, and eventually a healer. He learned languages, participated in rituals, and acted as a mediator between rival groups.
One extraordinary episode shows both his vulnerability and the reputation that began to surround him:

“En aquella isla que he contado nos quisieron hacer físicos sin examinarnos ni pedirnos los títulos (…). Vi el enfermo que íbamos a curar que estaba muerto (…) y lo mejor que pude supliqué a nuestro Señor fuese servido de dar salud a aquél. Y después de santiguado, rezar un Pater noster y un Ave María y soplado muchas veces (…) dijeron que aquel que estaba muerto se había levantado bueno, se había paseado y comido con ellos.”

(“On that island I have mentioned, they wanted to make us into physicians without examining us or asking for credentials (…). I saw that the patient we were to cure was already dead (…) and as best I could I prayed to Our Lord to grant him health. After making the sign of the cross, reciting a Pater Noster and an Ave María, and breathing on him many times (…) they said that the one thought dead had risen well, had walked about, and had eaten with them.”)

It was medicine born less of science than of utter desperation. That experience transformed him—not because he set out to be more humane than other Spaniards, but because survival required him to navigate systems of violence, captivity, and coercion that did not fit his European frame of reference. He was no longer the Andalusian nobleman who had left Spain, but a man shaped by captivity, forced adaptation, and life on the margins of multiple Indigenous worlds.

Unlike Hernando de Soto, who led an armed expedition through the Southeast of what is now the United States and left a trail of violence, Cabeza de Vaca’s journey carried him far to the west and southwest, across much of present-day Texas and into northern Mexico. He survived through forced adaptation, negotiation, and the fragile accommodations of life on the margins. A clear map of Cabeza de Vaca’s route can help readers visualize the expansive westward trek that distinguished his journey from that of De Soto.

Map: Expedition of Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca 1528 bis 1536

Expedition of Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca 1528 bis 1536. Source: Wikimedia Commons

An early chronicle of Texas and the Southwest

The value of Naufragios lies not only in its spirit of adventure, but also in its status as the first written chronicle of Texas and the American Southwest. Within its pages, one encounters now-vanished peoples such as those later identified as the Karankawas and the Tonkawas, described in remarkable detail in their customs, social organization, and beliefs. More than a story of exploration, the work often reads almost like a proto-ethnography (long before anthropology existed as a discipline), attentive to daily life, ritual, and conflict resolution that few other chroniclers ever attempted.

A particularly revealing passage describes how disputes were resolved among these groups:

“Cuando tienen diferencias sobre algún negocio, pelean a puñadas hasta que se desbaratan la cara y todo el cuerpo de sangre; y después de quedar así maltratados se apartan y los suyos se meten entre ellos y los pacifican; y lo más admirable es que de allí en adelante quedan amigos y no queda memoria de la injuria pasada.”

(“When they have disagreements over some matter, they fight with their fists until their faces and bodies are covered in blood; then, once battered, they separate and their people step in to make peace. What is most remarkable is that from that point on they remain friends, with no memory of the injury suffered.”)

He also recalled the sheer physical toll of survival:

“…nos mandaban sacar raíces del fondo de los esteros, y con el agua y el esfuerzo se nos despellejaban manos y pies…”

(“…they ordered us to dig roots from the bottom of the swamps, and with the water and the effort our hands and feet were left raw and bleeding…”).

Far from the triumphalist tone of other chronicles of the Indies, Cabeza de Vaca’s work is the testimony of a man stripped bare, who observes and narrates not from the posture of conquest, but from the exposed and precarious position of a man forced to survive at the edges of multiple Indigenous worlds.

Legacy and memory

Despite the significance of his experience, Cabeza de Vaca has not become a central figure in wider American or Texan public memory. While he has never disappeared from scholarly work—and even has a statue in Houston—his life and legacy remain deeply contested. Historians such as Rolena Adorno, Patrick Charles Pautz, and Andrés Reséndez have placed him at the heart of debates on early Indigenous–European encounters, captivity, and proto-ethnography. Yet outside academic circles, he remains overshadowed by the dominant Anglo-American narrative of the frontier.

Part of this marginal position has to do with the kind of figure Cabeza de Vaca became. He was neither a successful conquistador nor a founder of colonial institutions, and thus did not fit easily into the political or ideological stories that later shaped U.S. national identity. His trajectory—marked by captivity, forced adaptation, and uneasy coexistence within multiple Indigenous worlds—did not lend itself to the heroic model promoted in popular accounts of exploration.

Historiographically, his reception has evolved. At the end of the nineteenth century, Charles Fletcher Lummis celebrated him as “the first American traveler,” emphasizing the extraordinary journey he undertook half a century before Anglo settlement reached these lands. Later, the foundational volume Spanish Explorers in the Southern United States, 1528–1543—first published in 1907 and reissued by the Smithsonian Institution in 1935—placed Naufragios alongside other essential early accounts and reinforced its value as a primary source. More recent scholarship—such as Andrés Reséndez’s A Land So Strange (2007)—has expanded this perspective, situating Cabeza de Vaca within the broader study of Indigenous–European interaction, cross-cultural mediation, and the limits of imperial power on the North American frontier.

As with Francisco de Saavedra—another Spaniard whose role I have previously discussed—Cabeza de Vaca remains far from central in the broader American historical imagination. Yet his story helps widen our view of the country’s origins: not because he stood at their center, but because his experience reveals forms of Indigenous–Spanish interaction later overshadowed by the dominant Anglo narrative.

Title page: La relacion y comentarios del gouerna, 1555. Source: Wikimedia Commons

Conclusion

Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca embodies a different kind of explorer—not the victorious conqueror, but the survivor who learns and observes. His account is the first Spanish chronicle of Texas and an irreplaceable window into the Indigenous world of the sixteenth century.

Recovering his memory is not an antiquarian gesture, but a way of recognizing that the history of the United States was, from its beginnings, plural, mixed, and shaped by cultural encounters that still echo today in debates about frontier and identity, as well as in broader discussions about intercultural contact and historical memory in the early Americas—conversations that continue to shape how we narrate the origins of the U.S. Southwest.

His voice—overshadowed in Texas and in the broader national memory—deserves to be heard again, not as a relic but as a living part of American history. It is also a reminder that the “frontier myth” of Anglo conquest, perpetuated for decades by Hollywood and popular culture, is only one version of the story—and that Cabeza de Vaca’s survival reveals another: a frontier of adaptation, exchange, and fragile coexistence.

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

Pauliceia 2.0: A Collaborative and Open-Source Historical Mapping Platform

This article coincides with an upcoming public talk at UT on Pauliceia 2.0, January 28 at 4:00 p.m. For more details, please visit the event page.

While passing through Austin on vacation in 2015, Brazilian historian Luis Ferla went for a walk across the UT campus. He was mulling over new projects for the research lab he coordinates, “History, Maps, and Computers” (Hímaco), at the Federal University of São Paulo.

As he crossed the Forty Acres, inspiration struck: what if, he thought, we developed a digital mapping platform where a variety of people–researchers, teachers, students, even neighborhood residents–could create, explore, and share information about a city’s past? What if, he wondered, we made the underlying technical architecture of that platform openly and freely available for use in other urban contexts, in Brazil and beyond? Ferla’s vision–what Hímaco students would come to call a “Google Maps for the past”–was set.

In the ten years since that reflective walk, the initial idea has become a beta-stage reality: the collaborative, open-source historical mapping platform Pauliceia 2.0.

A screenshot of the Pauliceia 2.0 homepage.

Produced by historians, computer scientists, and software developers in Brazil and the United States, the platform focuses on the city of São Paulo between 1870 and 1940. Today, São Paulo’s nearly 20 million residents make it the most populous city in the Western Hemisphere. The city’s growth, however, only began in earnest in the late nineteenth century: from 30,000 residents in 1870, the city grew to over 1.3 million by 1940. In this seminal period, the city also gained the affectionate, poetic nickname (Pauliceia) that would inspire the name of the platform.

If Pauliceia 1.0 was the real, material city of 1870-1940, Pauliceia 2.0 is a digital reconstruction containing a selective, yet richly varied, collection of information about the city. The beta platform contains seven layers of georeferenced historical maps of São Paulo, stretching from 1868 to 1930, that provide cartographic context and allow users to trace the city’s development over time. This early release also contains many thematically-focused layers, most created and submitted by contemporary researchers, that display geographic information about a range of topics: from significant Catholic churches and the former streetcar network to the sites of visiting circuses and disease outbreaks. The result of this process–a collaborative reconstruction of São Paulo’s past–will, we expect, advance the central promise of historical mapping: to illuminate relationships in space and over time, including those that might not be visible otherwise.

Use cases for the project also reach beyond the academy. In the wake of disastrous floods in São Paulo in 2020, journalists at Brazil’s largest newspaper, Folha de S. Paulo, used a layer that Hímaco created about a massive 1929 flood to show how, despite advances in urban infrastructure over 91 years, flood-threatened areas in the city remained largely the same. Though created before the beta release of Pauliceia 2.0, these flood layers are now on the platform, available for investigation and downloading. Separately, a group called Cartografia Negra (Black Cartography) has used the platform to remap places that held special significance for African descendants in the city, which in the nineteenth century was the provincial capital of one of the final frontiers of slavery in the Americas.

The Pauliceia 2.0 team has begun to further expand its public-facing mapping activities and partnerships. The team is, for example, collaborating with São Paulo’s municipal archive and residents in two of the city’s most historic neighborhoods to facilitate a series of community mapping initiatives. In the summer of 2025, representatives from Pauliceia 2.0 participated in the NEH-funded Community Deep Mapping Institute (one of only two accepted teams from outside the U.S.) to strengthen their knowledge of best practices with participatory mapping.

A group of people inside a church. They are participating in mapping activities coordinated by the Pauliceia 2.0 team.

A group of people gathered on the street. They are participating in mapping activities coordinated by the Pauliceia 2.0 team.

Photos of recent participatory mapping activities coordinated by the Pauliceia 2.0 team in the São Paulo neighborhoods of Penha and Bom Retiro.

In addition to its historiographical contributions, the Pauliceia 2.0 team has also produced technical innovations. Most recently, the team developed an algorithm that facilitates the location of historic street addresses. This tool is essential for historical research about cities like São Paulo, where street numbering has changed over time, and primary sources about spatial change are severely limited. The source code for the geolocation tool, along with the code for the project as a whole, is freely and openly available, a reflection of Pauliceia 2.0’s commitment to the principles of Open Science.

Luis Ferla will return to UT in the coming weeks, where he and UNIFESP graduate student Luanna Mendes will give a public presentation about how Pauliceia 2.0 is helping to expand our understanding of the ways urban history can be produced and shared. The presentation brings together an array of constituencies across UT, including the co-sponsoring units: the Department of African and African Diaspora Studies, LLILAS Brazil Center, UT Open Source Program Office, and School of Architecture Community and Regional Planning program.

Banner/invitation to attend "Pauliceia 2.0", a talk by Dr. Luis Ferla and Luanna Mendes do Nascimento

While in Austin, Ferla and Mendes will also host a workshop in the interdisciplinary course “Bulldozed: Urban Destruction.” Cross-listed in African and African Diaspora Studies, the School of Architecture, and the School of Information, the spring 2026 version of the course will focus on São Paulo and Austin. Though they have many differences, of course, the cities also bear compelling similarities, especially a breakneck pace of urban transformation that involved widespread and much-debated demolitions. In addition to studying these cities’ histories, Bulldozed students will learn foundational skills of historical mapping and construct a layer to contribute to the Pauliceia 2.0 platform.

Andrew G. Britt is an Assistant Professor in the Department of African and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. A historian of the Black diaspora with a focus on Latin America, his research centers on contemporary Brazil, digital humanities and emerging technologies, and spatial history.

Review of The Sewards of New York: A Biography of a Leading American Political Family (2025).

In The Sewards of New York, Thomas P. Slaughter offers a captivating exploration of the Seward family’s multifaceted place in the first half of the nineteenth century. Although not written as a traditional political biography, Slaughter emphasizes that “politics, and particularly the abolition of slavery” remains central to the Sewards’ collective story (p. 2). Slaughter looks beyond William Henry Seward’s political achievements in his roles as New York State Senator, Governor, U.S. Senator, and Secretary of State under Lincoln. Slaughter details a gendered history of a political family. He shifts the focus away from formal political record and toward the inner world of the Seward family, tracing the relationships, tensions, and experiences that shaped their lives.

Slaughter draws on newly rediscovered family correspondence and archival materials from the University of Rochester to illuminate the private world of William Henry Seward, his wife, Frances, their children, and broader family dynamics in Auburn, New York. Slaughter highlights that with the use of the “Seward family’s letters, we can look behind the curtain of the Victorian era’s private sphere to see life as it was experienced by other Americans” (p. 4). The book effectively argues that understanding the Seward family’s domestic life is essential to grasping the political landscape of their time. Through a rich tapestry of letters, the author connects the family’s personal experiences to significant societal changes, such as industrialization, expanding literacy, and evolving gender roles.

Book cover: The Sewards of New York (2025) by Thomas P. Slaughter

One of the strengths of the book is its accessibility. Slaughter combines scholarly rigor with engaging narration, making it suitable for both academic readers and general audiences. This is a testament to his deliberate effort to bridge the gap between academia and public readership, as evidenced by his recent transition to trade imprints. Reading through thousands of letters exchanged among multiple Seward family members over decades, Slaughter invites readers into the interwoven lives of a prominent political family navigating an intensely tumultuous moment in American history.

The narrative is not merely biographical; it highlights how private life was intertwined with the public sphere, especially during pivotal moments of life in the antebellum period and the Civil War. Slaughter’s exploration of Frances Seward is particularly striking in its engagement with a broader perspective on 19th-century gender roles and women’s leadership in the household. Slaughter emphasizes the sacrifices that the Seward family experienced as William Henry’s political career evolved; the Seward family began to “excuse his domestic limitations as son, sibling, husband, and father for the better part of another decade as prices they all had to pay for his dedication to the public interest” (p. 169).

Often overshadowed by her husband’s accomplishments, Frances emerges as a formidable force within the family, passionate, politically aware, and more progressive in her beliefs than her public persona suggests. Her correspondence sheds light on domestic ideals, gender constructions, and even spiritual movements of the era. While William Henry may have been the most famous Seward in Slaughter’s book, Frances’ story effectively takes center stage.

William Seward, Secretary of State, bw photo portrait circa 1860-1865

William Seward, Secretary of State of the U.S. Photo portrait ca. 1860-1865. Source: Wikimedia Commons

The book’s structure, supplemented by a detailed table of contents, allows readers to easily navigate through the family history from the 1820s to the early 1860s, making it ideal for those interested in case studies of political families. Each chapter covers a distinct period in the Sewards’ political and domestic lives. The themes of family ties, emotional resilience, and moral convictions are woven throughout, offering insights into how the Sewards navigated the complexities of their era, including issues of slavery and political upheaval.

A central theme in the Seward household is the private disconnect between Frances and William Henry. Slaughter’s detailed account restores Frances Seward’s agency, largely absent from the historical record for nearly two centuries. “Frances realized that it was not just his political ambition that kept her husband from home but rather his disdain for family life” (p. 239). Slaughter opens the reader to the perspective of life as a wife and family member of a significant political figure, and to the spiral of family issues that comes with it.

Portrait of Frances Adeline Miller Seward in 1844, by Henry Inman. Source: Wikimedia Commons

Slaughter’s The Sewards of New York is a poignant and enriching examination of a notable American political family. The author invites readers to engage with the Sewards not just as historical figures but as complex individuals whose lives reflect the broader societal transformations of their time. Unlike many political biographies, The Sewards of New foregrounds the domestic world that shaped nineteenth-century political life. Slaughter offers an example of how other authors may contribute by examining significant political families, focusing on how the historiography may shift depending on which figures are highlighted. It will undoubtedly serve as a valuable resource for anyone interested in early American history, political families, or the interplay between private life and public action.

Alec Ainsworth is a graduate student from Southern California in the Department of American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. He received a bachelor’s degree in American Studies and English at California State University, Fullerton.

Cold War Chronicles

What does a Catholic Cardinal sequestered in the US embassy in Budapest and the dead body of an American found in Prague’s Vltava River in the 1960s have in common? Characters in a true crime podcast? No, at least not yet. Instead, these are examples of lives (and lives lost) whose stories are buried in the voluminous files of the Lyndon B. Johnson Library on the University of Texas campus. In addition to a fantastic museum, the Library contains an extensive archive of over 45 million pages of documents from the LBJ administration, providing a unique insight into America’s global reach during the momentous 1960s. For those who don’t have time to visit the wonderfully Cold War modern building and its peaceful reading room, there is also a considerable digital collection. Substantial as it may be, at last count, the percentage of digitized material was still well under 1%, a figure that is understandable given the scope of the collection and the resources required to scan and process materials for public online access. I experienced firsthand these challenges when I initiated and managed Cold War Chronicles, a decade-long (and ongoing) digitization project of the LBJ materials related to the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.

The Cold War is best studied and researched as a deeply transnational phenomenon, in which both sides were constantly observing and directly or indirectly engaging the other side. If we study Eastern Europe only from its own sources, we miss half of the conversation. With that in mind, I began to explore the vast collections housed in the LBJ library over 15 years ago, mining it for documents related to my own research on Cold War-era Eastern Europe. I recall, for example, researching US-Eastern Bloc competition and engagement at Cold War trade fairs as part of my broader interest in consumption practices and patterns under socialism. I found a fascinating memo written by Anthony Solomon, LBJ’s influential financial policy advisor, who pushed for increased trade with the Bloc at a time when many Americans opposed it: “It is clear to me that it is in our best interest to take actions which help bring about a diversion of their resources from military and space programs to consumer goods…Who among us wouldn’t rather have Soviet workers making passenger cars instead of missiles?”^[1] Solomon seemed delighted by the idea of the Soviet citizens having to deal with traffic, parking issues, and their kids asking for the keys to the car. Indeed, new exchanges that exposed Eastern Bloc citizens to American consumer culture mushroomed under the LBJ administration, which led the Eastern Bloc to try (and fail) to “keep up.” I integrated this and other discoveries into my research as well as teaching on Cold War Eastern Europe, which foregrounds the permeability of the Iron Curtain, but also the East-West mutual preoccupations.

My research discoveries coincided with my assuming a new role as Director of the Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies (CREEES) in 2010. As director of CREEES, I had the pleasure of hosting and interacting with visiting scholars from Russia and Eastern Europe, many of whom were fascinated with the LBJ materials related to the former Eastern Bloc (and ex-Yugoslavia). These materials were cataloged in a rough guide created in 2009, which I still regularly consult. In 2014, I faced the daunting task of applying for a US Department of Education grant that would give CREEES the status of a National Resource Center (NRC). In preparing our proposal, we needed to think creatively about projects that would utilize the resources of UT relevant to the Eastern Bloc and ideally make them accessible to a much broader audience. We consulted with LBJ library archivists, who informed us that the repository’s documents are in the public domain, allowing us to digitize and post them on our site as desired. An LBJ documents digitization project was featured in our successful grant proposal, which gave CREEES the status of a National Resource Center (NRC) from 2014-2018, and again in 2018-22, and 2022-2026. The Cold War Chronicles project slowly but surely came to fruition.

Okay, but where to begin? The files related to the former Eastern Bloc were significant, and most of them were scattered among disparate collections, including those of Foreign Policy advisors like McGeorge Bundy and Walt Rostow, as well as collections on agriculture, trade, space, etc. There were also communications from heads of state, White House central files, and the list goes on. In the very beginning of the guide, however, there was an easy answer – the Country Files of the National Security collection. Given the concentrated nature of this set of documents, it made sense for us to digitize whole folders and boxes on each country of interest, as opposed to cherry-picking documents of interest. Thus, the online collection would be complete, allowing users to have a similar experience to being in the archive. Federal funds supplemented UT resources, which supported a (revolving) team of UT students and staff at CREEES and the UT libraries to scan, crop, tag, process, and post in Texas Scholar Works. By far the largest of these country collections was the USSR, with 15 boxes full of some 10,000 documents! Due to its sheer size, we decided to complete that collection last. As of fall 2025, it is still not available for public use, but it will be soon!

Instead, we started with Czechoslovakia, the largest and most significant of the Eastern Europe collections, because of the notable 1968 event, the so-called “Prague Spring” in which state reform snowballed into a popular movement for change to “socialism with a human face.” The result was a Soviet-led Warsaw Pact invasion of the country to crush the liberalized regime and its enthusiastic population. Indeed, our first iteration of a public website was on the Scalar platform, entitled “The Prague Spring Archive,” put together by Ian Goodale, who is currently the European Studies Librarian for the University of Texas Libraries. The LBJ documents shed light on day-by-day developments on the ground, the decision-making process around the US response, and the global reaction to this consequential set of events as the “Czechoslovak crisis.”

The Soviet Invasion of Czechoslovakia. Tanks burning. People carrying flags

The Soviet Invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968. Source: Wikimedia Commons

After Czechoslovakia, we went country by country across the region–Yugoslavia, Romania, Poland, Bulgaria, Hungary, and finally the USSR and East Germany. As of fall 2025, most country files have been digitized, and only the Soviet and East German files remain to be fully processed and posted online. The cache of digitized documents is permanently housed in the Texas Scholar Works (TSW) repository, a massive open-access collection of materials that UT faculty and students have authored, digitized, or collected. In addition to its ample storage capacity, the repository provides convenient features for its collection, such as author and date searchability. However, its interface is not particularly flexible or user-friendly, and it does not allow for any curation of our collection. For that reason, I spearheaded the new Cold War Chronicles website, which we launched this fall in collaboration with a team of CREEES staff and students.

Cold War Chronicles offers a user-friendly portal and guide to our entire TSW collection, designed for researchers, teachers, or enthusiasts of Cold War history. For researchers, we provide a detailed guide with clear instructions on the scope of the collection and how to navigate, access, and cite the documents. The site also includes country-specific landing pages with general overviews of the sub-collection contents and links to folder-by-folder descriptions. I have also included a link to other English-language online archives for Cold War research, with direct links to search pages and short notes on navigation in cases where usability is not intuitive.

These other archives are also linked to through the “teaching resource” page, which includes a series of assignments that I created while teaching my “Cold War Eastern Europe” course at UT in spring 2025 (note: the Soviet Union was not a focus of the course, and the materials reflect that). In these assignments, students are asked to work in “country” groups on in-class activities that require them to dig into various online archives to find answers to prompts on discrete phases in the Cold War. The teaching resources also include a link to a list of English-language memoirs related to communist Eastern Europe and a sample assignment for using them in a course. These teaching materials are flexible and appropriate for higher education, as well as high school curricula.

Returning to the Catholic Cardinal stuck in the Budapest embassy, one of the most interesting collections of country files in our archive is Hungary. The Hungarian Cardinal Josef Mindszenty, designated “venerable” by Pope Francis in 2019, is a famous and revered figure in Hungary today. He spoke truth to power against Fascism and Communism, and as a result was imprisoned by both wartime and postwar regimes in Hungary. Released from prison during the famous Hungarian Revolution of 1956 against Soviet domination, he took refuge in the US embassy when the Soviet tanks rolled into Budapest and remained there until 1971! During the LBJ years, he wrote frequent letters, such as the one to LBJ, who responded through the local chargé d’affaires. The complete set of letters offers a rich Cold War chronicle of this episode in history, in which the US was harboring an enemy of the state in Hungary while trying to broker detente with the Eastern Bloc.

Cardinal Mindszenty giving a public speech

Cardinal József Mindszenty, 1956. Source: Wikimedia Commons

As far as the body in the Vltava River, it was Charles E. Jordan, executive vice president for the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC), who was found on August 20, 1967. Jordan was reported missing five days prior while vacationing in Prague, a side trip from his JDC work in neighboring Romania. Although it was reported as a suicide by Czech authorities at the time, there has long been speculation as to the cause of death, and it is considered an unsolved murder by the JDC.

Stories such as Mindszenty’s and Jordan’s are just a select few that were once buried among the millions of documents in the carefully kept boxes under lock and key in the LBJ Library. Now, at least some of these chronicles are online for all to access, although there is so much more to discover for those who can make it to the nearly windless white tower perched on a hill on the east end of our campus. Cold War Chronicles will continue to evolve over the coming years. This has truly been a labor of love for me and the CREEES team, and we sincerely hope teachers and researchers make use of this unique collection!

^[1] Personal Papers of Anthony M. Solomon, East–West Trade, Box 1, file 1, p. 36. Lyndon Baines Johnson Library.

Mary Neuberger is the Mildred Hajek Vacek and John Roman Vacek Distinguished University Chair in Russian and Slavic Languages; Director of CREEES; and Chair of the Slavic & Eurasian Studies Department at UT Austin. Her research interests include urban culture, consumption, commodity exchange, and the history of truth at the intersection of science and religion in modern Eastern Europe, with a specialization in southeastern Europe.

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