Jesse Ritner, Author at Not Even Past

Between King and People: Digital Tools for Studying Empire

Governing is complicated. It requires an understanding of both top-tier policy and a recognition of changing circumstances over time. It also involves a comprehensive workforce, who perform different tasks according to their position in the larger hierarchy. The Spanish monarchy ruled over territories stretching from the Caribbean to the islands of Asia, and to the southernmost point of South America, for over 300 years. During that period, there was no neat transference of authority from the court, located in Madrid, to the civilizations of the Americas. Instead, a confluence of contradictory voices and choices paved the way for Spanish imperial rule.

“Bureaucracy on the Ground in Colonial Mexico” is a digital exhibition created to help scholars and the public access the lived experience of colonial rule. Its newest features allow for further exploration of the many actors involved in the processes of governance.

The objective of this project is to follow bureaucratic function on the ground. In partnership with the Benson Latin American Collection, I created an interactive digital exhibition on the 1765 visita, or royal inspection, of New Spain. The visita examined local institutions, evaluated economic policies, and reorganized society in a broad display of royal authority. This procedure helped the king implement widespread political, economic, and social reform in this territory in order to tighten control and increase efficiency. It set the precedent for changing policies throughout the empire over the next several decades.

Designed for a non-specialist audience, the exhibition explores the timeline, spatial breadth, and procedure of the inspection, by providing access to digital versions of the original documents produced by the royal inspection visita. The project provides an accessible forum for understanding how the lengthy and expensive process of royal governance effectively fostered relations between the ruling government in Spain and its many different constituencies on the ground in the Americas.

The site now offers full transcriptions of all the documents. Users could previously read the documents in their original form from high-quality images. Now they can dive deeper into the significance of the text itself. The kinds of words that Spanish officials were using– and the patterns in which they used them–help reveal the way that the Crown’s authority manifested itself locally.

Closer textual analysis also helps identify the multiple actors involved in this process. The Spanish monarch, Charles III, had designated José de Gálvez as the inspector general, or visitador. However, at every point, the inspection required the assistance of a wide variety of local officials, from priests to supervisors at the tobacco factory. Gálvez also frequently consulted with the viceroy, Carlos Francisco de Croix. These personal connections are significant because they reveal both the tensions and the cooperation that royal administration could meet in the Americas.

The new features of the “Bureaucracy on the Ground” site help make the obscure topic of imperial governance more accessible. For the Spanish Crown, 300 years of colonial rule depended on more than the faraway king’s decisions. It was the people on the ground who made the bureaucracy work, and this project aims to acknowledge the many forms of their participation in the process of imperial rule.

This project has received support from Professor Joan Neuberger, LLILAS Benson Digital Scholarship Coordinator Albert Palacios, and the UT Digital Writing and Research Lab

Also by Brittany Erwin

The Museo Regional de Oriente in San Miguel, El Salvador
The National Museum of Anthropology in in San Salvador
Review of The Archaeology and History of Colonial Mexico by Enrique Rodríguez Alegría (2016)
History for Us at the El Paso Museum of History

IHS Panel: The Influenza Pandemic of 1918-1919: 100 Years Later

The influenza pandemic of 1918-1919 was one of the deadliest natural disasters in history, causing the death of 50 to 100 million people worldwide. This panel will be a wide-ranging discussion of the 1918-1919 outbreak and subsequent episodes from a historical, sociological, and medical perspective.

Featuring:

“Improved Approaches to Combat a Future Pandemic”
Robert Krug
Professor Emeritus, Molecular Biosciences
University of Texas at Austin

“The Flu in Texas”
Abena Osseo-Asare
Associate Professor of History
University of Texas at Austin

“One Hundred Years Later: Unknowns of the 1918 Flu Epidemic”
Sahotra Sarkar
Professor of Philosophy, and Integrative Biology
University of Texas at Austin

Miriam Bodian, moderator
Professor of History, and
Director, Institute for Historical Studies
University of Texas at Austin

Climate and Soil: The Environmental History of the Maya
Revolutionizing the Way We Fight Disease

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.

The Refugees of ’68: The U.S. Response to Czechoslovak Refugees during Prague Spring

By Jonathan Parker

Fifty years ago Soviet tanks rolled through the streets of Prague. Soviet and Warsaw Pact forces entered Czechoslovakia on August 20, 1968, and within two days occupied the entire country. The Soviet Union and its allies had decided that the reformist experiment, “socialism with a human face,” in communist Czechoslovakia was too dangerous, and might provoke a wave of democratization across the Eastern Bloc. When the tanks came in August 1968, thousands of Czechoslovaks were abroad in western Europe and the U.S., taking advantage of recent visa liberalizations to go on vacation and do business. Once it became clear in the days after the invasion that the “normalized” regime would return to the old days of communist repression and isolation, many decided not to go home, instead opting to seek asylum where they were. Before long the U.S. and its allies were beset by refugees from Czechoslovakia, fleeing the imposition of what would become one of the most brutal, authoritarian, and isolationist regimes in the Communist Bloc. How did the U.S. and its allies respond to this wave of political and economic refugees?

Men carrying national flag while a Soviet tank burns during the Prague Spring. (via Wikipedia)

This story begins with a telegram sent from the U.S. mission in Geneva, Switzerland, to Washington D.C. sometime in August after the invasion. The telegram notes the presence of “several thousand” Czechoslovak citizens abroad. It then requests instructions from D.C. on how to handle the situation, as most of these citizens are expected to seek asylum. It also recommends that the U.S. commit up to $100,000, nearly three quarters of a million dollars in today’s money, in order to “insure needs [of] asylum seekers [are] adequately met.” The main concern of the message was not to keep people out or send them back to Czechoslovakia, but to meet the needs of the refugees, presumably granting as many of them asylum as possible.

Walt Rostow (vie Wikipedia)

A couple of weeks later at the start of September, then President Lyndon Baines Johnson exchanged a flurry of memos with his advisers, in particular Walt Whitman Rostow. A staunch anti-communist and right-wing economist, Rostow advised the president, in a memo dated September 4 to allocate $20 million (about $145 million adjusted for inflation) to pay the costs of “reception, interim care and maintenance, resettlement processing, transportation, [and] integration.” He also notes that the refugees will be shared out among American allies, including Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom, while Germany and Austria will take the majority, indicating that there was significant international cooperation on this issue. Most interestingly, Rostow appeals to “our national heritage, our traditional humanitarian role, and our foreign policy interests” to make the case for accepting and resettling refugees. This rhetoric obviously stands in stark contrast to contemporary attitudes and policies in many of these same governments. Rostow also prepared a draft statement for the President that would have had the President saying “I declare that our doors are open as they always are to those who seek freedom.”

However it seems that this statement was only the first draft, and subsequent drafts toned down the “open door” message substantially while still stating that the U.S. government will still make provisions for the “orderly entry, in accordance with our immigration laws, of those Czechoslovak refugees who desire to come to the United States.” Nevertheless, the administration confirmed that they would spend money to process and resettle Czechoslovak refugees.

A Photo of Czech Children in front of a Bandstand in the United States (via Immigrationtous.net)

While the current administration has adopted a violently combative stance in reaction to migration into the United States (including not only policies implemented at the U.S.-Mexico border, but also the blanket ban on travelers from several predominately Muslim countries), fifty years ago the U.S. government was planning to spend a significant amount of government funding to process and accommodate refugees from Soviet-style communism. The President’s advisors explicitly argued for this policy not just on cynical, “Cold Warrior” grounds, but also out of a sense of American history and tradition. Johnson and his advisors saw this policy as the American thing to do to welcome refugees fleeing violence, at least in the context of the Cold War in Soviet-dominated Europe. The contrast between these two events highlights how important contemporary politics are in shaping responses to humanitarian crises. During the Cold War, the U.S. and its allies was generally willing to welcome anyone fleeing from communist regimes throughout Eurasia. Finally, it also highlights the fact that migrants and refugees from some parts of the world are treated with greater sympathy by the U.S. government than people from others.

Sources:

The Prague Spring Archive (at the LBJ Library and Museum)
Box 180, Folder 2:
#39 “Memo for President Johnson Regarding Czech Refugees”
#70 “Telegram Regarding Czech Refugees and Border Closings”
#19 “White House Memo for Rostow Regarding Czech Refugees”
#25 “Statement of President Johnson on the Admission of Czech Refugees to the United States”

The Blackwell School in Marfa, Texas

By Samuel Ginsburg

Marfa, a West Texas town of less than 2,000 permanent residents, attracts a lot of visitors. Known as the backdrop to 1959 James Dean film Giant, the town’s main attractions include two main streets lined with galleries, the mysterious Marfa lights that only seem to come out when nobody is looking, and the Chinati Foundation, an epic former military base-turned-art museum. While the scene is now speckled with luxury airstreams and Instagram models dressed in pristine cowboy gear, the bohemian vibe brought over in the 1970s by artists trying to escape New York still resonates, and the sprawling desert backdrop adds to the effect that makes “Marfa” (the idea) feel bigger than Marfa (the place).

Just a few blocks from the main drag is the Blackwell School, a plain, white building that might have gone unnoticed if it weren’t for its Texas Historic Landmark sign. The museum inside the old schoolhouse tells the story of de facto segregation in Marfa since 1889, as special schools were set up for Mexican-descendent children until integration was achieved in 1965. Old desks and books line the open rooms, along with photos and articles about the scholarly and extracurricular activities of the students. More than a look at the evils of segregation and inequality, the museum highlights the special moments in the lives of the people that passed through the school. Photographs show smiling children decorating pumpkins, playing basketball, and proudly posing in marching band uniforms. While meandering through the exhibits, one gets the feeling that great things happened in this place, despite problematic history that led to the school’s founding.

Photograph of the main street of Marfa, Texas — Marfa, Texas (via Wikipedia)

As not to cover up the issues surrounding the school, there are parts of the museum that show the instances of institutional discrimination, such as the board of former teachers that features very few Spanish last names. The museum’s most striking exhibit is titled “Burying Mr. Spanish” and tells the story of a mock funeral that was held in 1954 to officially kill off the use of Spanish at the school. As English was the only language allowed on campus, 7^th-grade teacher Evelyn Davis organized an event in which students wrote Spanish words on small pieces of paper, put them in a coffin, and then buried them next to the school’s flagpole. The museum has photos of the event, along with the coffin and a wooden cross that says “Spanish” and “R.I.P.” In “The Last Rights of Spanish Speaking,” Davis calls hearing the language her greatest “pet peeve,” and recounted the ceremony that had been going well (for her) until the very end: “Everything was perfect up to this moment until two pall bearers, who had not rehearsed, were to lower the casket with dignity. They started pulling against each other in disagreement, which was followed by anger, and then a volley Spanish curse words # % @ * $ * ? The solemnity turned to titters, then giggles followed by hilarious laughter as the bearers threw dirt at each other. What a GREAT FIASCO!” As heartbreaking as it is to read about a school-sanctioned ceremony aimed at cutting off the students’ cultural heritage, it’s hard not to laugh at the ensuing bout of rebellious chaos. As a moment of both forced assimilation and student resistance, this scene recognizes the complicated nature of this space and the need to preserve its stories.

The earlier known photograph of the Blackwell School in Marfa, Texas — The Earliest Known Photo of the Blackwell School (via Marfa Public Radio)

The Blackwell School Alliance was founded in 2007 by former students as the abandoned building was being threatened with demolition. Since then, efforts have been made to seek state and federal protection of the site. The alliance has also looked for ways to reincorporate the school’s history back into the public memory of Marfa. These efforts included the Blackwell Block Party and the commission of a mural by artist Jesus “Cimi” Alvarado. The mural features a poem by Luis Valdez about Chicano pride, an image of current Marfa students building rockets, and the West Texas desert in the background. Most importantly, the mural positions the Blackwell School in the very center, right between Marfa’s iconic water tower and Presidio Country Courthouse. The goal is to reshape how Marfa is seen by both tourists and residents, to create a space for this history within the conceptual landscape of artists and cowboys. For those people fighting to keep the museum open and running, this is a part of Marfa that more people should be visiting.

For more information on the museum and for ways to support the Blackwell School Alliance, visit //www.theblackwellschool.org/.

IHS Talk: Climate and Soil: An Environmental History of the Maya

The Late Holocene history of the ancient Maya world provides a microcosm of the Early Anthropocene. Much of the region today is tropical forest or recently deforested, but from 3,000 to 400 years ago Maya cities, farms, roads, reservoirs, and fields altered most of this region. Although a literate society, the written record provides little for environmental history; thus we can turn to climate and soil records. Climate played some role in periods of instability and stability and perhaps the Maya themselves caused some climate change. Indeed, ancient Maya climate change provides our clearest comparison with the modern Anthropocene because the ancient Maya also experienced sea level rise and climate drying like the contemporary world. But we are still—and may always be— uncertain about attribution of climate change to Maya history because of the imperfections in proxy data and the many unknowns about Maya adaptation and unrelated cultural changes. Soil tells us much more than climate about the Maya. The soil record from geoscience and archaeology provides direct evidence of human responses or lack of responses at times that correlate with other changes. Some responses of Maya Civilization that show up in soil studies were positive long-term impacts on the built environment, like wetland field systems, terraces, and other practices that enriched soils and ecosystems. The soil also indicates negative impacts like erosion and eutrophication, both playing out again today. But the Maya Classical period—with its peak human population and land use intensity— experienced less soil erosion, perhaps due to soil conservation. All of this study is still in its infancy because of the proliferation of lidar imagery that is providing a much better footprint of the impacts and infrastructure of the ancient Maya on their tropical forest.

Dr. Timothy Beach, holds a C.B. Smith, Sr. Centennial Chair and directs the Beach-Butzer Soils and Geoarchaeology Lab in Geography at the University of Texas at Austin. For twenty-one years, he taught at Georgetown University, where he held the Cinco Hermanos Chair and was Professor of Geography and Geoscience and Director of the Science, Technology, and International Affairs and Environmental Studies Programs. He has conducted field research on soils, geomorphology, paleoecology, wetlands, and geoarchaeology in the Corn Belt of the United States, the original corn belt of Mexico, Belize, Guatemala, the Mediterranean in Syria, Turkey, and Italy, and some other places. His work earned funding from the National Science Foundation, the National Geographic Society, USAID, The University of Texas at Austin, and Georgetown University. His field studies have been the bases for more than one hundred peer-reviewed articles and chapters and hundreds of scientific presentations around the world, including at the Vatican in 2017. Most of his publications were on long-term environmental change, soils and geomorphology, paleoclimate, and geoarchaeology in the Maya world. He was elected as a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and awarded Guggenheim and Dumbarton Oaks Fellowships, the G.K. Gilbert Award in Geomorphology, Georgetown University’s Distinguished Research Award in 2010, Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service’s Faculty of the Year for Teaching Excellence in 2014, the Carl O Sauer Award in 2017, and the CSU Chico Alumni of the Year in 2018.

Contraceptive Diplomacy: Reproductive Politics and Imperial Ambitions in the United States and Japan. By Aiko Takeuchi-Demirci (2018)

In her first book, Aiko Takeuchi-Demirci enters a longstanding conversation surrounding twentieth-century eugenics projects. Contraceptive Diplomacy adopts a transpacific approach to reproductive politics, focusing on joint Japanese-American efforts to curb population growth and maintain strong national bodies. Takeuchi-Demirci grounds her analysis in two women central to the movement: Margaret Sanger and Ishimoto Shizue. As she traces Japanese-American relations and birth control activism throughout the century, Takeuchi-Demirci finds that state governments’ racial fears and desire for international dominance eclipsed Sanger’s and Shizue’s feminist goals. Rather than provide women more control over their own reproduction, Japan and the United States harnessed eugenics discourse to demonstrate their cultural and scientific advances and reduce “undesirable” populations.

Takeuchi-Demirci begins by highlighting Sanger’s trip to Japan following World War I. Already infamous in the United States for her birth control activism, Sanger’s decision to move her work abroad allowed her to escape the frustrations she experienced in her domestic efforts. The Japanese government saw in Sanger’s call a way to resolve a host of social problems by limiting the population, while an active women’s movement, well aware of her work, welcomed Sanger as a fellow woman dedicated to reproductive rights. Moving from the post World War I moment to the tense years leading up to the Second World War, Takeuchi-Demirci shows that Sanger and Shizue maintained a connection throughout the conflict, albeit with tensions, and reframed birth control as a way to obtain international peace by balancing the world order. Anti-Japanese feelings in the United States ultimately inspired an immigration ban. Fearing “The Yellow Peril,” the U.S. government became concerned that Japanese migrants, who supposedly reproduced at alarming rates, would overrun the white population. The U.S. government also blamed Japan’s “aggressive” imperialism on Japanese women’s robust fecundity. Around the same time, Sanger began to temper her radicalism and joined forces with eugenicists interested in population control. Despite the fact that these men wanted to promote reproduction in white women while reducing it among non-white, Sanger nevertheless saw the alliance as an opportunity to promote birth control as a benefit for women.

In U.S. occupied Japan after World War II, caution about population control following the Nazi genocide did not prevent the U.S. from promoting birth control behind the scenes or from claiming that these efforts were indigenous-led. In particular, Takeuchi-Demirci argues, the United States hoped reducing the population and enhancing its quality would defend against communist infiltration. When birth rates did in fact decline, the U.S. envisioned replicating their approach throughout Asia. Takeuchi-Demirci shows how the Japanese continued these efforts and linked them to “New Japan,” the empire’s more modern, progressive successor. Sanger participated in these activities by pushing to develop new birth control technologies using Eastern countries, and people, as a testing ground. Japan hesitantly accepted this offer, but insisted on leading the project to mitigate any Western exploitation. The Japanese eventually lost interest in the population control movement as birth rates continued to fall, to the distress of the United States, which remained intent on preventing communism’s spread through modified populations.

Ishimoto Shizuko in 1922 (via Wiki Commons)

Contraceptive Diplomacy travels uncharted territory by investigating transpacific attempts to bolster state power through a combination of birth control and eugenics. Takeuchi-Demirci’s work reminds us that U.S. eugenics projects did not exist in isolation, but on the world stage during a century fraught with international conflict. In working together to promote population control, Japan and the United States actually competed to demonstrate their cultural and scientific superiority. Feminist-led initiatives became, as Takeuchi-Demirci calls it, “a tool for patriarchal control and world domination” (210). Born in an anti-imperialist and socialist climate during the first World War, birth control traveled in imperialistic ways to facilitate international diplomacy. Takeuchi-Demirci shows the different ways discourses can be manipulated to serve dominant desires, and how even those who initially resisted this co-option, such as Sanger, become complicit. While the argument that eugenics served state goals is not particularly new, Takeuchi-Demirci does shed light on previously ignored Japanese-American projects. Her work makes this scholarly oversight appear all the more glaring given Sanger’s extensive involvement with the Japanese government and women’s groups.

Not all of Takeuchi-Demirci’s goals are achieved, however. Her stated intention to trace her narrative through Sanger and Schizue does not materialize; in fact, Schizue seems confined to the first few chapters, before disappearing as Sanger steals the show. While the women’s understated presence may make sense in light of the state’s tightening control over birth control, Sanger’s continued appearance seems to privilege the Western activist. Nevertheless, Takeuchi-Demirci’s has produced a fine book, as well as a relevant one. Her epilogue notes continuing twenty-first century eugenics projects and renewed fears about non-white reproduction outstripping that of whites (one thinks, for example, of United States anxiety over supposed Mexican “anchor babies.”) Contraceptive Diplomacy will appeal to a wide variety of readers, including those interested in international relations, twentieth-century United States or Japanese history, gender history, and the history of medicine.

Kellianne King is a graduate student pursuing a dual-title in History and Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Penn State University. Her areas of interest include nineteenth and twentieth century United States history as well as the history of medicine and psychiatry.

Notes from the Field
The “Knock Knock Who Is There” Moment for Japan
Racing the Enemy

When Answers are not Enough: The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

By Jimena Perry

(All photos are courtesy of the author.)

The only facts we know about Rosalia Wourgaft Schatz are that she was raised by Jewish parents in the city of Tulchin in southwestern Ukraine. In 1919 her family emigrated to France and in 1940 when the Germans occupied Paris and began their anti-Jewish politics, she, like many other Jews, was forced to wear the yellow star. In 1942 she was deported to Auschwitz where she was murdered at age 67.

Rosalia’s brief life story is registered in the Identification Card #1847, found at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, founded in 1983 in Washington, D.C. Her IC is one of thousands that can be find in a shelf near the venue’s second floor elevators, that take you up to the main floors of the permanent exhibit. Before starting the tour, visitors can take an identification card like Rosalia’s, to go through the display with an actual target of the Nazi regime in their hand. The idea is that every person who enters the exhibit will get to know at least one victim. The short biographical information found in these cards are the only data we will ever know of many of the casualties of the Nazis, aside from the fact that they were one of the approximately 6 million Jews killed during the Holocaust.

Once on the main exhibit floors, people can see the atrocities of the Nazi regime against Jewish, Roma, Armenian, and other minority populations. One of the main purposes of the curators of the United States Holocaust Museum is to encourage and promote the audience to keep asking “Why?” There is plenty of evidence of the torture and brutality committed by the Germans against their target populations but the basic question, why? still remains unanswered. The need to elucidate responses, find more explanations, and ignite further discussion fuels the intention of the museum professionals. This is evident at the very entrance to the building where vistors see two big posters that state: “This museum is not an answer but a question” and “What`s your question? #AskWhy”

As basic as these inquiries may seem and despite the myriad answers they have produced, there is something missing for the victims and their families. The basic Why? is still hovering in the back of the minds of those who endured and survived the Holocaust.

It is a question that the curators, employees, and researchers of the museum use to create historical memory narratives that include the victims, remember and honor them, and counteract versions that deny that these violent events did actually happen.

Raising awareness of the past to understand contemporary issues is one of the bridges built by memory museums because they demonstrate with facts, testimonies, documents, and images that atrocities like the Holocaust occur. In this sense, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum is considered a pioneer in display and representation of difficult topics. Another of the main objectives of the professional team of the museum is that the world will not allow the repetition of these brutalities. In the current political climate not only in the United States but in Latin America, for instance, where racism, discrimination, and exclusion are acquiring strength, to know that genocide is real and can happen is key. To deny or distort the Holocaust or other violent conflicts invalidates the victims’ voices, and prevents people like Rosalía and many others from finding justice.

This museum, as most memory sites, however, generates polemics. Should the past be relived in a setting like a museum? Do the survivors feel retraumatized by the displays? Is it not better to forget what happened? Apparently not since during the last decades there has been a huge proliferation of memory museums and displays, which demonstrates that diverse communities want to know what happened in order to restore the social fabric of their societies, to decide what to pass on to future generations, and to attempt to prevent atrocities from happening once more.

A Longhorn’s Life of Service: Tom Ward

By Nicholas Roland

On March 23, 1961, recently-inaugurated President John F. Kennedy held a press conference at the State Department on Laos, a country little-known to most Americans at the time. Using a series of oversized maps, Kennedy detailed the advance of Communist Laotian and North Vietnamese forces in the country’s northeastern provinces. Rejecting an American military solution to the situation, Kennedy argued for a negotiated peace and a neutral Laos in hopes of containing the advance of communism in Southeast Asia. Before the Bay of Pigs disaster, before the Cuban missile crisis, and before serious escalation of American involvement in Vietnam, Laos presented the young president with his first major foreign policy dilemma. Kennedy’s wish for a peaceful, neutral Laos would be nominally achieved the following year, after months of negotiations. In accordance with the peace settlement, the United States withdrew its military advisors. The North Vietnamese did not.

In Austin, Texas, a University of Texas graduate and staff member, Tom Ward, was one of the few Americans paying keen attention to the situation in Southeast Asia in the early 1960s. Born in 1931, Ward grew up in Austin, in the 1930s and 1940s a sleepy college and government town hardly recognizable as the rapidly developing, cosmopolitan capital that Texans are familiar with today. In a recent interview, Ward recalled his upbringing in the Old Enfield neighborhood, when the street’s paving ended at the Missouri-Pacific Railroad tracks, now Mo-Pac. At that time the University of Texas loomed even larger than it does today. As a boy, Ward attended a nursery school run by the university’s Department of Home Economics. He later attended many UT football games, paying a quarter to sit with his friends in a children’s section in the north endzone dubbed “the Knothole Gang.” In the pre-air-conditioned summers, Ward played in Pease Park and swam at Deep Eddy and Barton Springs. “I had a very pleasant experience growing up in Austin,” he remembers.

After graduating from Austin High School in 1949, Ward entered the University of Texas. He initially majored in business administration and pre-law, but finally decided to pursue his real interests: government and history. After graduating in 1954 with a degree in government and substantial coursework in history, Ward volunteered for the military. Having grown up during the Second World War, Ward said, “I felt that there was definitely an obligation to be in the service.” In 1955, Ward was sent to Fort Ord, California, for basic and advanced infantry training. He was initially designated to be sent as a replacement to Korea, but when it was discovered that he had a college degree he was reassigned to an anti-aircraft guided missile battalion at Fort Bliss, Texas. After serving out his time in the El Paso area, Ward returned to Austin, where in 1957 he began graduate work. He accepted an offer to work in the university admissions office the following year. It was at about this time that American involvement in Southeast Asia began to make headlines.

Black and white photograph of a twin-engine airplane dropping supplies via parachute during flight — Air drop of supplies

Ward had long held interests in government, history, and international relations, especially regarding Southeast Asia. He recalls with fondness that these interests were nurtured during his years at UT through courses in history, jurisprudence, and international relations with professors like William Livingston, James Roach, and Malcolm MacDonald in government; R. John Rath, Walter Prescott Webb, Otis Singletary, and Oliver Radkey in history; and George Hoffman in geography. In 1961, Ward had even taken a leave of absence from his position at UT to travel in Asia with a fraternity brother, a six-month trip that took them from Japan through East and Southeast Asia, India, the Middle East, and Europe, contracting hepatitis A along the way after drinking rice wine with a group of locals in Burma (now Myanmar). His adventures in 1961 were a harbinger of things to come. Ultimately, Tom Ward was destined for a life of service and overseas adventure far from the small, slow-paced Texas city where he had grown up.

In 1962, after the short-lived farce of Laotian neutrality, President Kennedy responded to the continued Communist insurgency in the country by increasing America’s aid to the Royal Lao government through the Central Intelligence Agency and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) channels. Kennedy hoped that a combination of assistance to ethnic minorities and economic aid to the country in general could stem the advance of the Communist Pathet Lao and their North Vietnamese allies without drawing US conventional military forces into the conflict. Given his experience and interests, it is little wonder that a professor at UT subsequently recommended Tom Ward to one of the State Department recruiters that fanned out over the country in search of potential aid workers for the American effort in Southeast Asia. With USAID in its infancy, Ward was interviewed by an official from the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the closest thing the U.S. government had at the time to a source of expertise in working with indigenous populations. Despite his awareness of the ongoing conflict in the country, Ward recalled, “I volunteered for Laos. … And the reason I wanted to go to Laos, [was] because of my experience at the university and I knew about Laos.” Before his new adventure commenced, however, one last memorable occasion on the Forty Acres came on March 9, 1962, when Ward was one of 1,200 students who packed into the Texas Union to hear an address on civil rights by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Ward became one of six recruits selected to serve in Laos, with another twelve destined for Vietnam. Several months were spent at the University of California at Berkeley for training in local languages, Southeast Asian studies, and community development. Although they were civilian aid workers, Ward recalls, “community development training could also be considered counterinsurgency.” By April 1963, Tom Ward had become a foreign service officer and arrived in Laos, joining what became known as America’s “Secret War” in the small country.

Upon arrival in Laos, Ward found himself living with the Hmong ethnic minority group in a village called Sam Thong, working to coordinate the delivery of food, medical care, basic education, and other forms of humanitarian relief. Ward’s partner was the irascible Edgar “Pop” Buell, a former Indiana farmer and widower who had come to Laos in 1960 to work for International Voluntary Services, a private forerunner to the Peace Corps. It was in the mountainous northeastern provinces that the Pathet Lao guerillas were most active, and the indigenous Hmong formed the backbone of the CIA’s clandestine anti-Communist fighting force. In other words, Ward was now in a war zone.

Black and white photograph of Tom Ward with Hmong children in Sam Thong, Laos in 1965 — Tom with Hmong children in Sam Thong, Laos, 1965

Ward and Buell’s humanitarian work was necessitated by the Communist forces’ disruption of the traditional cycles of Hmong agriculture. By providing the Hmong with aid and basic services, the U.S. and Laotian governments hoped to maintain a counterinsurgency in the country and to strengthen the legitimacy of the Royal Lao government. “I lived in a grass hut with bamboo walls, a grass roof, dirt floor, no electricity, no plumbing, [and] a [55]-gallon drum out back for water. That’s where you bathed, and you lived like the local people did and ate their food,” recalls Ward. In addition to Ward and Buell, a CIA intelligence officer and a paramilitary officer were stationed nearby to coordinate training and military support for the Hmong.

Black and white photograph of Americans distributing relief supplies to Hmong villagers — Distribution of relief supplies

Although Ward’s work in Laos was focused on humanitarian relief, the dangers of operating in a war zone were a fact of daily life. The only two roads leading into northern Laos were both blocked, so Ward and other American personnel were forced to move around the countryside on small short takeoff and landing (STOL) aircraft operated by Air America, a CIA-owned dummy corporation that played a vital role in the agency’s paramilitary efforts. Although “these were the best pilots in the world,” Ward says, travel in the war-torn country was filled with danger. Ward recounts many landings on airstrips that were shorter than 250 feet in length, or in some cases simply clearings on the side of a mountain. The planes negotiated low visibility and rugged terrain without instruments and avoided enemy anti-aircraft fire by flying as high as 10,000 feet, despite a lack of onboard oxygen. Once, Ward was supposed to go back to the capital city of Vientiane for a break, but a fellow aid worker had a date planned with a local woman and wanted Ward’s seat on the next plane. Ward gave up his spot on the flight. He learned later that the plane had crashed in the forest and had not been located for three days. Incredibly, the aid worker with whom he had swapped flights was still alive, albeit with severe burns that forced his evacuation from the country. On another occasion, mortar rounds began to land on a nearby position. With helicopter transportation seemingly unavailable at the time, Ward and his fellow workers prepared to walk out of the danger zone to safety. Finally, helicopters came and they were evacuated. Another memorable incident was the recovery of a US pilot who had been shot down and rescued by the Hmong.

Tom Ward served in Laos until January 1968, just before the Tet Offensive in neighboring Vietnam, at which time he was reassigned to the US mission in Thailand. As U.S. military involvement in Vietnam escalated, both aerial bombardment and ground fighting spilled over into Laos and Cambodia. Ultimately, all three countries would fall to Communist forces in 1975. Reflecting on the trajectory of events in Southeast Asia, Ward believes that the joint effort between the CIA and USAID was a successful counterinsurgency campaign that was derailed by U.S. military escalation in the region. “I think we . . . were there for the right reason and we did a good job,” says Ward, “and that forces beyond us took over and that’s why it ended up like it did.” Ward continues, “overemphasis on the military was counterproductive as far as I’m concerned.” Rather than a conventional military victory achieved through massive air power and ground combat, Ward believes that a counterinsurgency campaign could have achieved much different results in Southeast Asia.

Black and white photograph of eight armed Hmong fighters — Hmong fighters

In contrast to Laos, for a variety of reasons anti-Communist efforts in Thailand were ultimately successful. Like other Southeast Asian countries at the time, in the 1960s the Thai government sought American help to counteract a rural Communist insurgency. Ward worked for USAID in the Accelerated Rural Development program (ARD) between 1968 and 1975. This joint Thai-U.S. program sought to improve the local economies of the country’s troubled rural areas, thereby relieving their grievances and instilling confidence in the central government. Ward says the program was “like in the New Deal.” “I was in Chiang Rai for two years,” he continues, “and [I] worked with these programs in education, in health, and providing . . . improved rice seed to farmers, building roads so they could get their crops to market and this sort of thing.” Although the Communist insurgency continued in Thailand until 1989, Ward believes that “the standards of living were definitely raised in those areas. And if you go look at them today, it’s unbelievable the difference. You know, you have universities in a lot of these different places, a lot of these provinces where there was little economic development.”

After twelve years in Laos and Thailand, Ward returned to Washington, D.C., to work for the USAID Office of International Training. For the next five years, his career took him on short-term assignments to Nigeria, Tanzania, Egypt, Burma, Nepal, and Pakistan, helping to select candidates identified by their governments for graduate degrees and specialized technical training in the United States. From its founding to the time that he departed the program, Ward recalls, “we’d trained over 10,000 people” in fields such as agriculture, public health, finance, education, and a variety of governmental functions.

Ward was then assigned to Indonesia as a Development Training Officer working with the Indonesian government to select candidates for graduate training in American universities and short-term technical training with various U.S. government agencies. USAID’s training programs had a long-term impact on participating countries: at one point, six members of Indonesia’s governing cabinet had been trained in the United States. The goal, Ward says, was “to work yourself out of a job” as participating countries built indigenous governance capacity and technical expertise. Although the work was generally not as dangerous as his experiences in previous assignments, Ward still found himself in proximity to momentous events around the world. He was in Nigeria during a “transition from one dictator to another,” and he visited Kabul in 1978, on the eve of the Soviet-Afghan War (1979–1989).

In 1985, Tom Ward was called back to Washington, D.C., where he became a career counselor for foreign service officers. In 1991, after thirty years in service – twenty of them spent overseas – Ward retired from the State Department. Ward continued to work for a time as a government consultant in Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, and Pakistan. Today he splits time between Washington, D.C., and Austin, punctuated with continued trips overseas.

Black and white image of "Pop" Buell with three Hmong fighters — “Pop” Buell with Hmong fighters

Reflecting on his decades of experience as a foreign service officer, Ward was often astonished at the ignorance and apathy toward international events that he would encounter on visits home. While stationed in Laos, he says, “I’d come home on leave and they’d say, ‘Well, where [have] you been?’ ‘Well, I’ve been in Asia.’ ‘Oh, that’s interesting, tell me about it.’” Ward laughs. “And I’d get maybe two or three sentences, and then they’d change the subject: ‘Oh by the way, did you see ‘I Love Lucy’ last night?’” Ignorance of foreign cultures could also be a problem in government agencies and the military. Although he believes that in Southeast Asia, “a lot of these people were very dedicated officers and men… they were not taught to learn about the culture, speak the language, learn how the people felt about things, and how to work with them from their point of view, if at all possible.” This lack of understanding failed both the United States and the people of Laos and Vietnam. Ward believes that the situation has improved over time, but familiarity with foreign cultures and political systems remains a key variable in the success or failure of U.S. efforts overseas.

After a career spent in public service, Ward has not been content to simply focus on personal pursuits in retirement. Over time he has become increasingly active in supporting the institution that molded his interests and opened the door to his career: The University of Texas at Austin. Ward has found ways to volunteer his time and leadership over the years, joining the College of Liberal Arts Advisory Council shortly after his retirement and the Department of History Visiting Committee a few years later. He is currently in the process of establishing a chair in international relations in the College of Liberal Arts.

Ward’s career has informed his involvement with UT. In his experience, the best way to improve lives is “through education, in this country or overseas.” He continues, “What we were doing overseas [was] giving them development opportunities they didn’t have.” As a foreign service officer Tom Ward worked to improve the economies and governments of other countries. Now he sees similar opportunities closer to home, through UT’s ability to increase American understanding of the international context and in the university’s potential to aid underserved and non-traditional student populations.

Dr. Nicholas Roland is a historian at the Naval History and Heritage Command, Washington, D.C. He earned his PhD from The University of Texas at Austin in 2017. A revised version of his dissertation, “Violence in the Hill Country: The Texas Frontier in the Civil War Era,” is forthcoming from UT Press.

Sources:

Tom Ward oral history, April 19, 2018

//www.jfklibrary.org/Asset-Viewer/Archives/JFKWHA-020.aspx

//history.state.gov/milestones/1961-1968/laos-crisis

Driven Toward Madness: The Fugitive Slave Margaret Garner and Tragedy on the Ohio by Nikki M. Taylor (2016)

In January of 1856, a prolonged period of frigid temperatures in northern Kentucky—the coldest in sixty years—froze the Ohio River creating a bridge to freedom for enslaved people daring enough to cross it. On Sunday, January 27, 1856, Margaret Garner and seven members of her family made the arduous eighteen-mile journey that separated their lives of enslavement in Kentucky from freedom in Ohio. After only a few hours on free soil, the Garners found themselves facing imminent capture. When the chaos subsided and the Garners were subdued, Mary, a toddler, lay dead and the Garners’ three surviving children all bore wounds of various degrees and intensity. Margaret had attacked her own children. Examining the events that shaped Garner’s decision and the subsequent legal battle that propelled her, if only briefly, into the national spotlight, Nikki M. Taylor offers a nuanced study of Margaret Garner’s life and the impact of the trauma of enslavement on the enslaved.

The title of Taylor’s work suggests a causal relationship between slavery and the “madness” that inspired Garner to kill her daughter. In the introduction, Taylor asserts unequivocally that “slavery caused trauma.” This is a significant aspect of Taylor’s analysis as she argues that understanding Margaret Garner’s trauma is critical to understanding her reaction to the threat of capture. When federal marshals and the Garners’ enslavers surrounded the house where the Garners hid, Margaret and Robert both reacted violently—Taylor, however, reads an important distinction into their respective actions. Robert, using a pistol stolen from his enslaver, fired at the slave catchers as they forced their way into the house. Margaret also responded with deadly force, but unlike Robert, Margaret’s attention focused inside the house. Taylor cogently applies trauma theory first espoused by Sigmund Freud and later expanded by Cathy Caruth to examine this gendered distinction.

Article from the February 2, 1856 issue of the Anti-Slavery Bugle (via Ohio Memory)

Driven Toward Madness explores the intimate aspects of Margaret Garner’s life and fleeting celebrity by tracing the arc of the Garners’ flight, capture, legal controversy, and removal to Louisiana. Taylor insightfully considers the psychological effects of enslavement and sexual abuse and the meaning of infanticide in asking whether murder can be considered resistance. Reconstructing Garner’s life from interviews and articles published in contemporary newspapers, fugitive slave hearings, criminal indictments, and personal papers, Taylor employs a variety of methodological approaches that integrate black feminist theory, trauma studies, pain studies, genetics, history of emotions, and literary criticism to explore the trauma Garner experienced as an enslaved woman, and the violence that Garner endured and enacted. Taylor’s focus on the interconnected themes of motherhood, sexual vulnerability, trauma, and violence, and her attention to Garner’s mental state and perceived psychological trauma push slavery studies into new territory—the psychological impact of enslavement on the enslaved—that until recently has remained under-explored. This interpretative approach presents a challenging line to walk—one that requires the historian to stay true to the extant records yet acknowledge the unavoidable silences and absences within the archive that often obscure enslaved women’s lives. The result is a work that reconsiders enslaved motherhood and how we conceptualize resistance.

Although the specific nature of the violence Garner experienced at the hands of Archibald Gaines is absent from the written record, Taylor persuasively reconstructs a psychological profile of the enslaver. She painstakingly tracks recorded incidents of his violent temper to establish that Gaines was prone to violent outbursts. She describes the scars on Margaret’s face, as evidence of violence that was both up-close and personal; those scars offered silent testimony to the physical abuse she endured.

Margaret’s reproductive history tells of another kind of abuse. Describing Margaret as “perpetually pregnant” from the birth of her first child in 1850 to her escape in 1856, Taylor documents Margaret’s pregnancies as evidence of the sexual abuse she likely experienced. This is perhaps Taylor’s most impressive analytical work. Building on the method of reading the record Annette Gordon-Reed used in her ground-breaking study of Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson, Taylor establishes the probability that Gaines fathered at least two of Margaret’s children. Enslaved within different households, Margaret and Robert lived apart. They had what was commonly known as an “abroad marriage.” This meant that their time together was often infrequent and subject to their enslavers’ discretion. Additionally, Robert was often hired out, resulting in frequent and prolonged absences. Citing these absences, Taylor questions the paternity of the child in Margaret’s womb and her two youngest children, Mary and Cilla, who were often described as so fair they appeared white. To support the assertion that Gaines likely impregnated Margaret, Taylor engages in genetic analysis that includes a detailed examination of the probability that Robert (a dark-skinned man) and Margaret (a light-skinned woman) produced two extremely fair-skinned children. Taylor acknowledges the imprecise nature of this type of analysis—but her discussion of genetics, skin color, sexual abuse, court testimony, masculine honor, community complicity and silence, and sexual access point to an answer.

Driven Toward Madness is well-written and thoroughly researched. For scholars of slavery, Taylor’s examination of Margaret Garner’s life within the midwestern community of small-slaveholding households is an insightful examination of motherhood, sexual abuse, violence, and trauma created by the institution of slavery. She brings into clear focus the political implications of the jurisdictional conflict between national and state authorities concerning the Fugitive Slave Law and federal authority that contextualized Garner’s prosecution. Taylor’s work attempts to fill the substantial silences in the record that point to what is ultimately unknowable—that is, how enslavement traumatized Garner to the extent that when faced with capture, Garner picked up a knife, and then a shovel, and attacked her children rather than see them return to enslavement.

The Frontera Collection

By Alan Garcia

Before I became an avid follower of history blogs and museum social media accounts, one of my favorite pastimes was studying the liner notes of the world music CDs available at my public library. This was occurring at the same time that social media platforms and instant messaging was improving the way we learned new things and communicated with each other yet there was something so easy and entertaining about this offline environment where I could access expertly researched introductions to Chilean folk songs of the 1970s or early Jamaican ska music just within a few steps of each other.

Stacks of CDs in a library (via Wikimedia)

One of my favorite record labels, Arhoolie Records, based in California, produced scholarly, yet accessible research for the liner notes of their albums of ethnic music. While Arhoolie’s output has paused since being acquired by the Smithsonian Institution, the non-profit Arhoolie Foundation now collaborates with the UCLA Library on an immensely entertaining and educational blog on the history of commercially produced Mexican and Mexican American recordings. The Strachwitz Frontera Collection contains over 125,000 digitized recordings originally issued on 78 rpm, 45 rpm, 33 1/3 rpm records and cassette tapes, yet navigating their website does not overwhelm the senses with the endless graphics and links that are common with older history blogs. “The Frontera Collection” is one of my favorite sites for leisurely research because it replicates my beloved experience of browsing through the recorded world music at the public library for historical information on the communities and struggles that produced these sounds.

Yet this would qualify as a minor omission when compared with the site’s informative rotating blog posts on both little and well-known musical genres represented in “The Frontera Collection.”

(via the Frontera Collection)

The strength of the music blog posts comes from the writers’ attentiveness to the history of pressing issues of today like immigration, copyright laws, and gender studies and how they impacted Mexican and Mexican American recordings of the past. Take the popular Mexican romantic ballad Sabor A Mi, which growing up I remember being played constantly by my parents during our backyard barbecues at home and on road trips to Mexico. “The Frontera Collection” deconstructs the song’s popularity among Mexican-American listeners in their blog, “Romance and Revolution in Sabor A Mi” , which recounts how the sensuous 1950s era ballad was the sonic backdrop to the political activism of young Chicano/as in East Los Angeles during the 1970s. The biographical research contained in the blogs on “The Frontera Collection” offers a rare source of information on the lives of the famous Mexican ranchera singers that populated my parents’ record collections. Additionally I’ve begun to identify some of the missing voices in my parents’ music that shaped my childhood. Without the research of “The Frontera Collection” I would have struggled to find the historical information that helps readers understand and appreciate the legacy of previously overlooked female Mexican ranchera singers from the 1930s and 1940s like Lucha Reyes and Eva Garza.

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=IUd9barwefg

For an ethnic musical style that has traditionally existed at the margins of mainstream American music industries, it is refreshing to read publicly accessible scholarship online that bestows working-class immigrant culture with respect.

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