A Lager Beer Revolution: The History of Beer and German American Immigration

As a German historian, writing a book on the history of beer seems to be a “natural” instinct. I started this project after attending a Beck’s brewery tour in my hometown Bremen in the early 2010s. Before Heinrich Beck opened his eponymous brewery in 1873, he had returned from a 10-year sojourn to the US. While Beck does not seem to have found his fortune as a brewer in the US, many of his compatriots did.

German-American immigrants triggered a lager beer revolution during the second half of the 19^th century, fundamentally changing US drinking culture. While the term “revolution” carries with it a certain baggage (not least in the US context), the introduction of lager beer was indeed revolutionary in a number of ways: skilled brewers and thrifty entrepreneurs founded a record number of breweries, which in turn led to a record rise of beer consumption and a switch from ale to lager. All of this was underpinned by a vibrant transatlantic social, cultural and technological transfer centered on producing and consuming beer.

A Record Held until 2015

As the US became one of the world’s leading marketplaces, many breweries were founded in the 19^th century. Between 1850 and 1873, the number of breweries rose from 431 to 4,131 – a record that lasted until 2015. Today, there are over 9,500 breweries across the US, and Texas alone has more than 300.[1]

Whereas the recent staggering growth is due to the (historically speaking) “new” craft beer movement, back in the 19th-century German American immigrants were at the heart of this brewing transformation. A closer look at census data shows that in 1880, first- or second-generation German immigrants operated more than 80% of the breweries.[2] It is not a coincidence that the peak in brewery numbers overlaps with the heyday of German-American migration.

Brewing centers developed on the East Coast, especially in New York and Philadelphia, as well as in the Midwest, which became known as “America’s German Belt.” In Texas, commercial brewing started in the 1850s and the number of breweries reached its zenith with 58 in 1876, thereby following the national trend described above.[3]

Shiner brewery — The oldest independent brewery in Texas, the Shiner Brewing Association, was formed in 1909 by a group of German and Czech locals. Prussian-born Herman Weiss was their first brewmaster who started today’s signature beer, the Shiner Bock. In 1914 the brewery was taken over by Bavarian native Kosmos Spoetzel. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

19th-century breweries can be roughly divided into four types: hundreds of small-to-medium-sized local breweries, dozens of large-scale local breweries, dozens of medium-sized national shippers, and a handful of large-scale shippers, which were mostly comprised of family dynasties such as Pabst or Anheuser-Busch.[4] The industry was dominated by breweries in the first three categories and not by the large-scale shippers whose names we know today – only by the turn of the century did these begin to overtake the others as they were able to afford improved brewing and packaging techniques as well as expensive advertising campaigns.

Texas followed the general trend: from the 1880s until Prohibition, many breweries started and collapsed quickly, often suffering from a lack of capital and an inability to compete with the big shippers. In 1883, Anheuser-Busch entered the Texan market with a superior product that sold at a competitive price. A year later, Adolphus Busch co-founded the Lone Star Brewery in San Antonio, which by 1900 became the state’s largest, helping earn San Antonio the title of “the Milwaukee of Texas.”[5]

Advertisement for Alamo Beer (Lone Star Brewing Company), August 3, 1912. — *Alamo Beer (Lone Star Brewing Company), August 3, 1912. Source: Wikimedia Commons*

My upcoming book sheds light on the Atlantic transfer of brewing knowledge (scientific, economical, and socio-cultural) and how this correlated with entrepreneurial success (and failure). German American brewers were among the first to implement the newest European science and technology, such as the process of pasteurization, which had been invented by the French scientist Louis Pasteur in 1864. Adolphus Busch, who was fluent in English, German, and French, had read Pasteur’s work early on and his brewery maximized its profits when it became the first to introduce pasteurized bottled beer.

Beer Republic

The term “revolutionary” also refers to alcohol consumption in the US, in general. Between 1790 and 1850, US Americans drank more alcoholic beverages per capita than at any other time in the nation’s history and (except for Scandinavia) more than any other country at that time. After 1850, the consumption of spirits went down, but beer consumption went up: between 1870 and 1910, per capita beer consumption quadrupled from about 5 to 20 gallons.[6] At first, German American brewers filled the demand of their fellow immigrants by providing a familiar beer of their homeland. Soon, however, lager became preferred by most other US-Americans as well.

During these years, German-style lager steadily replaced British-style ale. Before 1850, ale accounted for over 80% of the national beer production; by 1900, lager made up nearly 90%. Bottom-fermented lager differs in its production, appearance, and taste to top-fermented ale. Today, lager beer might not be the most popular drink, but in the 19th century, it was new and exciting: it was lighter, more sparkling, and lasted longer than ales and porters.

US-American Gemütlichkeit

Within 50 years, the nation had not only switched from drinking ale to lager but also began to enjoy a hybrid drink space, an Americanized form of Gemütlichkeit (loosely translated as conviviality, a feeling of comfort and relaxation) in beer gardens. While US saloons were associated with manhood, crime, and corruption, German-style drinking venues became known for their sociability, family-friendliness, and Gemütlichkeit.[7]

Scholz Garden, Austin, TX. — August Scholz opened Scholz Garden in 1866, the oldest operating business in Texas and likely the oldest beer garden in the US. In 1908, the German singing club, The Austin Saengerrunde, purchased the property and built a bowling alley next to it.
In the photo, Scholz Garden in 2013. Source: Wikimedia Commons

Beer gardens were built across the nation. Their function was, of course, to sell beer, but they also served a social, cultural, and political purpose: beer gardens provided a “piece of home” with waiters in traditional German dresses serving beer in “stein” jugs and typical German food. Soon, these venues also served as community centers for the public at large.

Blatz Brewing Company Chicago Word’s Fair of 1893 promotional poster of a “German” barmaid holding overflowing beer steins. References to German ethnicity were frequently used in advertising through stereotypical representations and/or German brand names.
Source: Wikimedia Commons

Moreover, the beer garden’s family-friendliness helped to promote beer as a temperance beverage and a “healthy” alternative to spirits. Over the course of the 19^th century, the temperance movement had come a long way from promoting moderation to calling for total abstinence of all alcoholic beverages. To German Americans, temperance was more than a mere political issue; it symbolized cultural conflict that threatened their lifestyle and value system. For the brewers, their ethnic interest was greatly reinforced by their economic interest.

Fight against Temperance

While the temperance movement has received a great deal of scholarly attention,[8] the brewers’ battle against it has not. So far, most historians have portrayed the brewing industry as homogenous and too unalarmed. Perhaps these scholars have fallen into the trap of interpreting history from the final outcome, i.e., by knowing that the temperance movement would eventually succeed, its opponents have been mostly portrayed as reactionary or ignorant. Yet, the success of temperance was not as inevitable as some scholars seem to suggest. In my upcoming book, I argue that the beer industry was resilient. It adapted and continued to grow despite the movement. Early on, brewers were well-prepared to fight off temperance and set a precedent in public relations history.

During the summer of 1855, several beer riots over Sunday closing laws and rising license fees broke out in several cities across the Midwest. These tensions were further enhanced when representatives of the nativist Know Nothing Party tried to prevent immigrants from voting. For instance, in August 1855, Know Nothings successfully won the election in Louisville, Kentucky, after a long day of street fighting in Catholic neighborhoods where at least 20 people died.

While the Know Nothing Party was rather short-lived (it dissolved in 1860), local temperance laws were not and hence, riots could not be used as a long-term strategy. Beginning in the early 1860s, German American brewers began to organize themselves. Together with saloon owners, newspaper editors, politicians, and other influential German Americans, they tirelessly lobbied for their cause. The United States Brewers Association (USBA), founded in 1862 by German brewers in New York, played a central role, developing a tight public relations network with its own publication committee issuing numerous pamphlets and books against temperance.

Besides continuously calling for personal liberty, until the introduction of the income tax in 1913, the brewer’s strongest argument was economic: between 1863 and 1909, brewers paid an estimated $1.2 billion to the US Treasury. The Commissioner of Internal Revenue was a regular and welcomed guest at the annual USBA conventions.[9]

The American Brewing Co's Famous St. Louis ABC Bock Beer. — *The American Brewing Co’s Famous St. Louis ABC Bock Beer. Source: Wikimedia Commons*

In addition, the brewers argued for the nutritious nature of beer. They went to great lengths to prove this by financing medical reports and citing “eminent” doctors and chemists. German doctors, in particular, were used as renowned experts in order to appeal to the US regard for science grounded in German academic tradition. Repeatedly, it was the Old Word that served as a reference point by drawing on Germany’s reputation as a top-quality producer of beer, brushing over problems of drunkenness in several German cities. For instance, after the beer tax was increased, beer riots erupted in Munich (1844 and 1888) and Frankfurt (1873).[10]

Ultimately, when World War I broke out, these arguments lost traction. To refrain from drinking was seen as a patriotic duty. Drinking, as the argument went, weakened the military and wasted petrol and grain needed for the war. The Anti-Saloon League, founded in 1893 in Ohio and soon reaching a national audience, frequently characterized German-American brewers as enemies of the state.

While brewers had initially entered the propaganda war well-prepared and often succeeded in fighting off local temperance agitation, World War I triggered the final push for national Prohibition. Some states were already dry by 1914, but the push to garner enough states to pass Prohibition might not have been so quickly realized had it not been for the “war at home”. Ironically, it was the brewer’s self-promoted image of a “German” drink that led to their downfall.

A Revolution Coming Full Circle?

My book highlights how the growth of breweries and the popularity of lager beer in the 19^th century correlated with the rise of German-American migration. German-American immigrants led the “lager beer revolution,” a revolution not just in numbers and economic growth but also in the technological transfer and adaptation of drinking practices. The brewers’ ethnicity helped them to apply and adapt their knowledge to their new homeland. “Germanness” (however loosely defined) became one of their key marketing strategies until World War I, selling an authentically superior “German” beer.

In 1965, Fritz Maytag kicked off the craft beer movement by purchasing the bankrupt Anchor Brewing Company in San Francisco, revitalizing its iconic Steam Beer. Initially, steam beer was first introduced by German migrants who came to the West Coast during California’s Gold Rush in the late 1840s. Similarly, in 1987, Steve Hindi opened the Brooklyn Brewery in the eponymous district in New York – situated at what was known in the late 19th century as “brewery row” and only a couple of blocks south of “Kleindeutschland,” Manhattan’s Lower East Side and the hub of German-American life where hundreds of saloons and beer gardens served the thirst of their customers. Even though Anchor Brewing just announced to close its doors, craft beers are here to stay, and so will its German-American roots.

[1] Cp. Joe Taschler (12/02/2015), “U. S. Brewery Count Reaches All-Time High,” http://www.jsonline.com/business/us-brewery-count-reaches-all-time-high-b99627164z1-360031651.html, last accessed 05/11/2023; Jess Donald (11/2021), “Texas Craft Breweries, Distilleries and Wineries,” https://comptroller.texas.gov/economy/fiscal-notes/2021/nov/brew.php, last accessed 05/11/2023; Louis Biscotti (01/19/2023), “Craft Beer Boom Slows, But Still Grows,” https://www.forbes.com/sites/louisbiscotti/2023/01/19/craft-beer-boom-slows-but-still-grows/?sh=6a9e5665e3e5, last accessed 05/11/2023.

[2] Cp. Edward P. Hutchinson, Immigrants and Their Children, 1850-1950. New York: Wiley, Chapman & Hall, 1956: p. 79-81, 98-99, 121-122.

[3] For an overview of US beer history cp. Stanley Baron, Brewed in America. A History of Beer and Ale in the United States. Boston, MA: Little, Brown and Co., 1962; Amy Mittelman, Brewing Battles. The History of American Beer. New York, NY: Algora Pub, 2008; Maureen Ogle, Ambitious Brew. The Story of American Beer. Orlando, FL: Harcourt, 2019². The popular book market on beer history has boomed since the mid-2000s, cp. Mark A. Noon, Yuengling. A History of America’s Oldest Brewery. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co, 2005; Henry Herbst et al., St. Louis Brews. 200 Years of Brewing in St. Louis, 1809-2009. St. Louis, M Reedy Press, 2009; Martin Hintz, A Spirited History of Milwaukee Brews & Booze. Charleston, SC: History Press, 2011.

[4] Cp. Thomas C. Cochran, The Pabst Brewing Company. The History of an American Business. New York, NY: New York University Press, 1948; Martin H. Stack, Martin, Liquid Bread: An Examination of the American Brewing Industry, 1865-1940. University of Notre Dame (Ph.D. Thesis): 1998.

[5] Andy Rhodes (04/10/2020), “Brewing Heritage”, Texas Historical Commission, https://www.thc.texas.gov/blog/brewing-heritage, last accessed 05/11/2023.

[6] On 19^th century alcohol consumption cp. William J. Rorabough, The Alcoholic Republic, an American Tradition. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1979.

[7] On marketing Gemütlichkeit cp. Uwe Spiekermann, “Marketing Milwaukee: Schlitz and the Making of a National Beer Brand, 1880-1940”, Bulletin of the German Historical Institute 53 (2013): p. 55-67.

[8] On temperance and Prohibition cp. Austin Kerr, K., Organized for Prohibition. A New History of the Anti-Saloon League, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985; Jack S. Blocker, American Temperance Movements. Cycles of Reform. Boston, MA: Twayne Publishers, 1989; Sabine N. Meyer, We Are What We Drink. The Temperance Battle in Minnesota. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press 2015.

[9] Cp. Hugh F. Fox, “The Prosperity of the Brewing Industry,” The Annales of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 34/3 (1909): 47-57.

[10] On German beer riots cp. Werner K. Blessing, “Konsumentenprotest und Arbeitskampf: Vom Bierkrawall zum Bierboykott,” in: Klaus Tenfelde/Heinrich Volkmann (ed.), Streik. Zur Geschichte des Arbeitskampfes in Deutschland während der Industrialisierung. München: Beck 1981: p. 109-123; Lothar Machtan/René Ott, “‘Batzebier!‘ Überlegungen zur sozialen Protestbewegung in den Jahren nach der Reichsgründung am Beispiel der süddeutschen Bierkrawalle vom Frühjahr 1873,” in: Heinrich Volkmann/Jürgen Bergmann (ed.), Sozialer Protest. Studien zu traditioneller Resistenz und kollektiver Gewalt in Deutschland vom Vormärz bis zur Reichsgründung. Opladen: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 1984: p. 128-166.

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Last Seen: Teaching about Slavery through the Lens of the Domestic Slave Trade and Family Separation

History education has been under attack recently. Or, more specifically, efforts to accurately teach the painful, brutal history of slavery are under attack. Teaching the hard history of slavery has long been a problem in American classrooms. Recently, the battle over state curriculum standards has intensified as some seek to revive a version of history popularized by the Lost Cause narrative. According to this view, which was popular until the 1950s, enslavement served as a “civilizing force,” one that capitalized on enslaved people’s natural dispositions, but ultimately benefited enslaved people.[1] Proponents of the Lost Cause insisted that the plantation served as a “school” in which enslaved people learned to assimilate and ultimately prospered.[2] Promoters of this discourse thus argue that slavery was a positive good, that it was a paternalistic, benevolent system in which enslaved people were content. Sound familiar? It probably should.

The new African American history learning standards adopted by Florida’s Department of Education have made national headlines and elicited strong reactions from educators and historians. One of the standards in question, requires that teachers and students “Examine the various duties and trades performed by slaves (e.g., agricultural work, painting, carpentry, tailoring, domestic service, blacksmithing, transportation).” While at first glance, the learning objective appears innocuous, the “Benchmark Clarifications” that follow seem to align Florida’s new standards closely with the Lost Cause insistence that slavery was a positive institution. It states that “[i]nstruction includes how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.”[3] Under these new standards, Florida middle school students will learn that enslaved people benefited from their subjugation.

"Sugar Plantation, Louisiana, 1873-74" — “Sugar Plantation, Louisiana, 1873-74”, Slavery Images: A Visual Record of the African Slave Trade and Slave Life in the Early African Diaspora, accessed August 28, 2023, http://www.slaveryimages.org/s/slaveryimages/item/2893

Pressed for clarification, members of the working group tasked with developing the new curriculum standards, Dr. William Allen and Frances Presley Rice, explained that, “[t]he intent of this particular benchmark clarification is to show that some slaves developed highly specialized trades from which they benefitted. This is factual and well documented.” Allen, professor emeritus of political science at Michigan State University, and Rice, a retired Army lieutenant colonel who holds a Juris Doctorate, offered specific examples, including “blacksmiths like Ned Cobb, Henry Blair, Lewis Latimer and John Henry; shoemakers like James Forten, Paul Cuffe and Betty Washington Lewis; fishing and shipping industry workers like Jupiter Hammon, John Chavis, William Whipper and Crispus Attucks; tailors like Elizabeth Keckley, James Thomas and Marietta Carter; and teachers like Betsey Stockton and Booker T. Washington.”[4]

The problem is that their examples are factually inaccurate. To start, only one of the seven men Allen and Rice identify was actually a slave.

Ned Cobb was born in 1885, twenty years after slavery had been outlawed by the 13th Amendment. Cobb was a tenant farmer from Alabama and an early member of the Sharecroppers Union; he may have learned his blacksmithing skills from his formerly enslaved father, but he is recognized as a leader in organizing farmers. Henry Blair patented a mechanical corn planter in 1834. Because enslaved people were not eligible to receive patents, it is likely that Blair was free.

Lewis Latimer was born in Massachusetts—his enslaved parents escaped Virginia at least six years before he was born. James Forten was a free man who worked as a sail maker in Philadelphia. Paul Cuffe was also a free man. He worked as a whaler. John Chavis was born free and worked as a teacher and minister. Although William Whipper’s mother was enslaved, Whipper was born free in Pennsylvania in 1804. Betty Washington Lewis, George Washington’s younger sister, is a white woman who owned enslaved people. Booker T. Washington is the only person Rice and Allen correctly identified as having been enslaved. Washington was nine years old when slavery ended—after emancipation, he labored in a salt furnace during the day and taught himself how to read at night. Washington did not learn this life-changing skill while enslaved because, in southern slave states, it was illegal to teach enslaved people how to read and write.

In truth, most newly emancipated people found it difficult to find work that didn’t involve continuing to toil in the South’s cotton fields or as domestic workers, or menial jobs. Even skilled craftsman often failed to find work utilizing those skills because they lacked the tools to pursue that work on their own.

Allen and Rice advocate for a distorted, myopic version of slavery. And, they don’t seem especially interested in getting their history right. Instead their claims appear to connect directly to Lost Cause narratives that were dominant decades earlier. And that project was in the end about providing the intellectual foundation for sustaining white supremacy.

If state standards provide little insight into the realities of slavery, where can teachers turn?

"Untitled Image (Iron Shackles)" — “Untitled Image (Iron Shackles)”, Slavery Images: A Visual Record of the African Slave Trade and Slave Life in the Early African Diaspora, accessed August 28, 2023, http://www.slaveryimages.org/s/slaveryimages/item/2619

Teaching about slavery is difficult and some teachers struggle to do it well.

In 2018, fourth graders in Wisconsin, were asked to identify “3 good reasons for slavery.”[5] The previous year, eighth grade students in California had their wrists taped together and were forced to lie in rows in a darkened room and watch clips from Roots as part of a lesson in which they role-played enslaved people onboard ships during the Middle Passage. Their teachers acted as ships’ captains.[6] These are not isolated incidents.

Across the country teachers use experiential lessons or role-playing simulations in which students participate in mock slave auctions, clean cotton, imagine themselves as slaves, craft advertisements for runaway slaves, or simulate escape on the Underground Railroad by running through the woods and wading through frigid water, as do students in Minnesota, in order to “learn” about slavery.[7] These examples illustrate the broader truth documented in a 2018 report commissioned by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), that just over half of the 1,700 teachers surveyed said they “feel competent” to teach about slavery—which means that almost half do not. Sixty percent of teachers surveyed find their textbooks inadequate, and 40% think that their school districts do not provide sufficient resources to teach about slavery.[8] That was before Florida and other states rolled out new standards that seem to be informed more by ideology than by historical fact.

It is not surprising then that only 55% of teachers teach about the “diverse experiences of enslaved persons,” and fewer still teach about “the continuing legacy of slavery” today. As teachers struggle to represent the horrors of slavery accurately, public school students pay the price; few learn about the history of slavery, and many learn lessons that have to be unlearned—or that should be. The SPLC report concluded that the United States “needs an intervention in the ways that we teach and learn about the history of American slavery.”

*Slave Pen, Alexandria, VA, Circa 1865. Source: Library of Congr*ess

The challenge that teachers face is aggravated by a lack of primary sources. The teaching of slavery often centers on documents and accounts created by the enslavers rather than by enslaved people themselves. Plantation records document the productive and reproductive labor enslaved people were forced to perform. Slave auction broadsides, runaway advertisements, wills, deeds, and mortgages attest to their commodification—all from the perspective and through the voices of their enslavers.

Federal census records reduced enslaved people to hash marks or a set of physical descriptors recording their gender, age, and color—Female, 17, Black—reflecting their status as property, not people. There are no records of their marriages, no birth or baptismal records for their children, and frequently even their deaths went unmentioned. This erasure from the historical record means that the lives of the enslaved remain largely unknown and their stories of separation and struggle untold.

So, how can teachers overcome these obstacles?

One way is to find sources that reveal more about the lived experiences of enslaved people. One of the most ubiquitous experiences for enslaved people was being sold—and thus being separated from their family and communities. Teaching about slavery through the lens of the domestic slave trade and family separation provides teachers opportunities to talk about topics such as westward expansion, the growth of the plantation economy in the South, the economic aspects of slavery, and regional differences. It also provides teachers a way to interrogate the long-lasting impact of enslavement on enslaved people and families—to situate attempts to put their families back together within the historical context of Reconstruction—to think about Reconstruction as an individual experience and a national endeavor.

Too often discussions about slavery end in 1865. What happened next? What did newly freed people do after emancipation? Did they prioritize finding work or a new place to live? Did they pursue an education? Or did they begin a search for their family? Asking these questions enables students to examine multiple possibilities. It helps students understand the overwhelming obstacles freed people faced. It also allows students to consider formerly enslaved people’s enduring hope to be reunited with their loved ones—to make their experiences personal and relatable to students in ways that are not possible when only thinking about slavery as an economic institution in the context of the cotton boom.

Last Seen advertisements are just such sources.[9] Formerly enslaved people took to the papers after emancipation to search for loved ones. They placed ads in Black-owned newspapers across the country describing their family histories, the last known locations of loved ones, former enslavers’ names, and countless moments of separation and sale.

Let’s look at one such ad and examine how teachers might use it in their classrooms.

Fanny Ward's advertisement. — *Fanny Ward’s advertisement.*

Fanny Ward’s 1883 advertisement (above) appeared as an appeal to the editor of the Southwestern Christian Advocate, an African American newspaper published in New Orleans. Scholars use documents like this to examine a number of trends and patterns relevant to the study of slavery. But they also hold great potential for educators to teach about enslaved families, the domestic slave trade, and the effects of emancipation on Black families. This begins by challenging students to consider how slavery resulted in massive familial separation and how it left millions of Americans with a strong desire to reunite with loved ones. With help from the teaching resources available on the Last Seen website, teachers have access to the broader historical context that will help them to consider what it meant for Ms. Ward to have been sold away from her child when that child was only a toddler. Teachers can also ask students to think about Charley’s shocking act as a manifestation of the trauma endured by enslaved people who were repeatedly separated from their families.

Consider the multiple ways teachers might use Fanny Ward’s ad.[10] Fanny’s story allows teachers to teach the differences between the Middle Passage and the Second Middle Passage, or the domestic slave trade (1820s-1860s). The latter was not a trans-Atlantic journey; when Fanny was sold away from her parents, siblings, and, perhaps, her own child, she likely walked most of the way from Virginia to Texas, chained to others in a group called a coffle. Fanny’s account enables teachers to put a human face on lessons about the nineteenth-century cotton production that fueled American capitalism and the market economy. How did these larger processes impact enslaved people? For countless young people like Fanny, it meant they were taken thousands of miles away from their families to pick cotton in fields owned by men like Coats, Slater, and Hunley. Most of them never saw their families again. The cotton they picked made its way to factories on America’s east coast and across the Atlantic to factories in England, where it was turned into cloth—the cheaper sort made its way back to America, used to make clothes for the enslaved.

"Slave Coffle, Near Paris, Kentucky, 1850s," — *“Slave Coffle, Near Paris, Kentucky, 1850s,”* *Slavery Images: A Visual Record of the African Slave Trade and Slave Life in the Early African Diaspora, accessed September 4, 2023,*http://www.slaveryimages.org/s/slaveryimages/item/1966

To teach the ad, we start by doing a bit of math. The ad was placed in 1883 describing a separation that occurred twenty-four years ago; this means Fanny’s family—all twelve or thirteen of them—lived together until around 1859 (1883-24=1859). Students can go to the 1850/1860 census to find Thomas Coats, Slater, or Hunley in Richmond, Virginia—but they won’t find Fanny, her parents, and siblings there. Or at least not named. They were property not people. The census used in conjunction with this ad, though, can reveal critical information about the households in which Fanny lived. Was she a member of a large, enslaved community, or one of a few enslaved people within the enslaver’s household? What might students be able to infer about Fanny’s life based on each new community she became a part of? Further research into county records may reveal the broader enslaved community in which Fanny lived, allowing students to draw inferences and form conclusions about Fanny’s potential social interactions. Who she might have had a child with? Reading ex-slave narratives recorded through the Works Progress Administration offer students a glimpse into individual experiences of enslaved people in that community; doing so can help students extrapolate more details about Fanny’s life.

Teachers might use Fanny’s plea for help finding her family to introduce students to historical methods. Her ad underscores the challenges of following historical subjects whose circumstances allowed them to leave only the faintest trace in the records—in this case, eleven sentences that hold revealing clues about the fates of at least twelve people living through this moment in American history. In a classroom, a teacher might ask their students to think about when Fanny became free, what it meant for her to write her family history (or perhaps Reverend W. McKenzie helped her), and how historians pursue people who changed their names through historical records. For students, Fanny’s story allows them to see the strong emotional ties that she shared with her family; twenty-four years and thousands of miles later, she still hoped she would find them.

And, then, there is what this ad reveals about enslaved peoples’ resistance and how they were sometimes able to shape their own futures. Fanny’s brother Charley, described as “a ditcher…laid his arm down on a log and cut it off” when he learned that he too was going to be sold away from his family. This act of defiance likely thwarted Charley’s sale and the impending forced separation from his remaining family. Informed by modern psychological research, scholars have begun to pose the questions that may someday allow us to understand what Charley did and how Fanny lived with the trauma of losing her family. This aspect of the ad might be more difficult for teachers to teach, however, because it challenges students to consider the overt brutality of slavery, and in some instances, resistance. We don’t know if Charley succeeded in preventing his sale or whether he was punished for this act of self-harm. What we do know, is that his act of resistance, documented by Fanny in her ad, is likely the only place he appears in the historical record. Charley resisted what was a routine part of slavery—being separated from his family and those he loved. Informed by modern psychological research, scholars have begun to pose the questions that may someday allow us to understand what Charley did and how Fanny lived with the trauma of losing her family.[11] Fanny’s 1883 ad is one of thousands collected, published and now discoverable by teachers and students in the Last Seen collection.[12]

Teachers can use this ad to personalize the experience of enslavement, separation, and resistance. Too often textbooks and teaching materials treat slavery in impersonal terms—such as asking students to consider it as something that was both “good” and “bad.” Or they present slavery in terms of the labor enslaved people performed, the value of the cotton produced by enslaved hands, and how enslaved people made possible the growth of the cotton economy. When texts discuss resistance, they focus on big, spectacular examples, such as Nat Turner’s 1831 rebellion whose widespread social and political effects have been well-studied. But the ways that enslaved people resisted the institution in their every-day lives, the small and not-so-small ways that individual enslaved women and men refused the institution’s worst forms of dehumanization, have received far less attention—although they were much more common and consequential.

Charley’s singular act of resistance reflected his determination to remain with his family. Like Charley’s story, this ad reveals details about Fanny’s family that are available nowhere else. Of the ten children born to Fanny’s parents, Melvina and Isaac, she may not have been the only one to survive to have children of her own, if she did so. And, then, there is the child Fanny mentions in the ad, whom she was sold away from. This ad allows teachers and students to think carefully about enslaved motherhood, the forced separations of parents and children, and the particular forms of women’s resistance. Fanny was not only separated from her parents and siblings, she was likely also separated from her child—and conversely, her child was separated from their mother. What choices did Fanny have? How were they the same and different from Charley’s?

a photo of The modern Medea. Margaret Garner, an enslaved woman from Kentucky, killed one of her children so they would not be returned to slavery. — *The modern Medea. Margaret Garner, an enslaved woman from Kentucky, killed one of her children so they would not be returned to slavery. Source: Library of Congress*

Beyond resistance, the other details of Fanny’s life offer students a number of opportunities to learn about the Second Middle Passage by researching the names and places in the ad. Fanny names three enslavers. Students can follow the list of white men who took away Melvina and Isaac’s children: “We were sold to Thomas Coats; to a man named Slater; also in Richmond, to a Mr. Hunley.” Each name is a bread crumb Fanny left behind that students can follow to learn more about this enslaved family, what they experienced in slavery, and whether and who among them survived.

All of this is possible because of the information found in this one ad. Using Fanny’s ad in conjunction with these additional primary sources enables students to become historians, to bring Fanny’s story to life. With the help of teachers trained on how to read Last Seen ads and use them in their classrooms, students can use various additional primary sources to fill in the picture of Fanny’s life and tell a history of slavery that places Fanny and others like her at the center. This is how we can begin to change how students understand the domestic slave trade, the family lives of enslaved people, and the long search for family after emancipation.

In short—perhaps the best way to teach about slavery is to actually teach about slavery—through the experiences of those who experienced it firsthand.

Signe Peterson Fourmy is an Assistant Professor of Instruction in the Department of History at UT Austin. She is also a Co-Primary Investigator for the NHPRC-funded project, Last Seen: Finding Family After Slavery at Villanova University. Her research focuses on slavery, resistance, gender, and the law.

Sources:

[1] U.B. Phillips, American Negro Slavery: A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor As Determined by the Plantation Regime. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1918), 339-344.

[2] Phillips, American Negro Slavery, 342.

[3] Florida’s State Academic Standards—Social Studies, 2023. Standard SS.68.AA.2.2. Accessed July 26, 2023. https://www.fldoe.org/core/fileparse.php/20653/urlt/6-4.pdf

[4] Antonio Planas, “New Florida standards teach students that some Black people benefited from slavery because it taught useful skills,” NBC News, July 20, 2023. Accessed July 21, 2023. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/new-florida-standards-teach-black-people-benefited-slavery-taught-usef-rcna95418

[5] Bret Lemoine, “Give 3 good reasons for slavery: 4th grade homework assignments sparks backlash, apology in Wauwatosa,” Fox News Milwaukee, January 10, 2018. https://www.fox6now.com/news/give-3-good-reasons-for-slavery-4th-grade-homework-assignment-sparks-backlash-apology-in-wauwatosa

[6] Anne Branigan, “Calif. High School Sparks Criticism for Using Slave-Ship Role-Play to Teach Students History,” The Root, September 18, 2017. https://www.theroot.com/calif-high-school-sparks-criticism-for-using-slave-shi-1818512323

[7] Valerie Strauss, “Don’t know much about history: A disturbing new report on how poorly schools teach slavery in schools,” The Washington Post, February 3, 2018. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2018/02/03/dont-know-much-about-history-a-disturbing-new-report-on-how-poorly-schools-teach-american-slavery/; Joe Helm, “Teaching America’s Truth,” The Washington Post, August 28, 2019. https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2019/08/28/teaching-slavery-schools/; Julian Lucas, “Can Slavery Reenactments Set Us Free?” The New Yorker, February 17, 2020. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/02/17/can-slavery-reenactments-set-us-free; N’dea Yancey-Bragg, “Mock slave auctions, racist lessons: How US history class often traumatizes, dehumanizes Black students, USA Today, March 2, 2021. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/education/2021/03/02/heres-why-racist-school-assignments-slavery-persist-u-s/4389945001/

[8] Kate Shuster, Teaching Hard History, Southern Poverty Law Center, January 31, 2018. https://www.splcenter.org/20180131/teaching-hard-history#part-i

[9] Full disclosure, I’ve worked on the Last Seen Project at Villanova University since September 2020.

[10] “Fanny Ward searching for her family,” Lost Friends Ad, Southwestern Christian Advocate (New Orleans, LA), September 13, 1883, Last Seen: Finding Family After Slavery, http://informationwanted.org/items/show/2294.

[11] On trauma, see Kidada Williams, They Left Great Marks on Me: African American Testimonies of Racial Violence from Emancipation to World War I, New York University Press, 2012; Saidya V. Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe 26, no. 2 (2008), 1-14; Nell Painter, “Soul Murder and Slavery: Toward a Fully Loaded Cost Accounting,” Southern History Across the Color Line, Markhum Press Fund, 1995, 15-39.

[12] “Last Seen: Finding Family After Slavery,” accessed August 18, 2023, https://www.informationwanted.org.

*In the banner, an enrollment list of slaves from Saline County, Mo., 1861-1865. Source: Wikimedia Commons

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.

From the Syllabus: Teaching the Practice of Early Modern Censorship in the Classroom

Introduction

From the editors: From the Syllabus is a new series from Not Even Past designed to spotlight thought-provoking essays, texts, and other teaching resources that generate great classroom discussions. Each installment features an introduction by a leading educator explaining on what we can learn from each featured resource. From the Syllabus will serve as a useful guide to students and teachers alike. It will also introduce readers to some of the vital, exciting work historians do in the classroom.

In this first installment of From the Syllabus, Madeline McMahon, an Assistant Professor in the University of Texas at Austin’s Department of History, shares and reflects on a 2017 essay by historian Hannah Marcus, which McMahon has used to teach students about censorship–both contemporary and as practiced by agents of the early modern Catholic Church. Marcus’ essay and McMahon’s introduction reveal that this always-controversial phenomenon has a long and fascinating history.

Faces and names inked out, letters reshaped into seemingly meaningless forms, blank paper glued over chunks of text, pages cut off: the early modern books that Hannah Marcus examines are in bad shape. In her essay, “Expurgated Books as an Archive of Practice,” Marcus looks at efforts to expurgate prohibited books – to purge them of the offensive material and make them readable for early modern Catholics. The Catholic Church issued the first Index Librorum Prohibitorum (list of prohibited books) in 1559. But many of the prohibited works could, in fact, be read by pious Catholics, “so long as they are expurgated.” Expurgation left behind material traces. Marcus reframes this destruction as evidence for how people read with pen in hand. Much like the annotations and underlining commonly found in early modern books, expurgation, too, was a way of highlighting, except in this case, what not to read instead of what should be read.

This past year, I’ve taught Marcus’s essay in two different history classes at UT Austin: my early modern global Catholicism lecture course and my book history capstone seminar.

In my Catholicism class, we had already been to the Benson, where we’d seen broadsides listing prohibited books and books to be expurgated put out by inquisitors in colonial Mexico, like this one. Our discussion centered around making sense of expurgation practices in the broader context of Catholic censorship, but the students were also quick to connect, thoughtfully, early modern practices to contemporary issues, including TikTok’s algospeak and more.

An early 19th-century list of prohibited and to-be-expurgated books published by Catholic inquisitors in colonial Mexico. Source: Benson Latin American Collection, LLILAS Benson Latin American Studies and Collections, The University of Texas at Austin.

In the history of the book class, we practiced expurgation. Students read an early modern text with a pen in hand—one student going so far as to rip a page into pieces. The students read and censored with different early modern identities, as lawyers and theologians, Jesuit mathematics professors, and hard-up booksellers. Their circumstances shaped how they responded to a fictitious request from the Congregation of the Index to expurgate the work. The students found that, to expurgate the work, they had to engage with the text’s arguments and subtle undertones, and their own expertise or needs in their fictional early modern role deeply affected their censorial suggestions.

In both classroom contexts, Marcus’s piece surprises the students. Censorship, it shows, was not a zero-sum game: access was provided and denied on a sliding scale. Early modern Catholic censorship mediated access, and understanding that helps us think about the motivations behind censorship, and the rational of those who, variably, defied the system, tried to work through it, or worked around it. And one paradox of censorship—that sometimes, the more you ban something, the more you draw attention to it—is shown on a material level, as crossing out text also highlights it. Precisely because censorship requires close reading a text, as the students found, the myth of the mindless censor fades away to reveal a different (perhaps more insidious) reality, that censoring something is an intellectual exercise as much as a political one.

If after reading this piece, you want to know more: check out Marcus’s recent, award-winning book, Forbidden Knowledge: Medicine, Science, and Censorship in Early Modern Italy (2020).

Expurgated Books as an Archive of Practice

By Hannah Marcus

Note: This essay was originally published by Archive Journal in August 2017 and is reproduced here under the terms of Creative Commons License CC BY 4.0. Some additional illustrations have been added by Not Even Past.

Censored pages from Conrad Gesner’s History of Animals (Zurich, 1551) and Leonhart Fuchs’s commentary on Galen (Tubingen, 1541). — *Censored pages from two expurgated books. At left: a censored page from volume 1 of Conrad Gesner’s* History of Animals (Zurich, 1551) with the author’s name transformed. Image courtesy of the Department of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries. At right: An expurgated copy of Leonhart Fuchs’s commentary on Galen (Tubingen, 1541) with Fuchs’s name transformed. Image courtesy of The New York Academy of Medicine Library.

The above images are taken from copies of sixteenth-century books of natural history and medicine. However, at a glance, it is difficult to identify who wrote these texts. The letters of the authors’ names have been transformed with pen and ink into a jumble of nonsense characters. From Conrad Gesner’s name above the image of the moose to Leonhart Fuchs’s name above his commentary on Galen, these books bear witness to the practice of ecclesiastical censorship in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Italy. By juxtaposing individual, censored objects from different library collections, we can analyze expurgated books as an archive of practice that documents and reveals the historical practices and material processes of censorship.

Following the Reformation, Catholic authorities in Paris, Louvain, Portugal, Spain, and a number of Italian cities published Indexes of Prohibited Books, lists of texts that Catholics could not read. These prohibitions established that while the works of some authors, like Martin Luther or John Calvin, needed to be burned, other works, including Gesner’s History of Animals, were instead deemed worthy of expurgation, a practice that Catholic authorities regularly referred to as “correction.” Instead of destroying the whole book, some parts of the text were removed, and the rest was allowed to remain.1 Expurgation was a form of Catholic compromise, allowing prohibited books to continue to exist in an altered form. This compromise created enormous intellectual, legal, and logistical hurdles for local inquisitions and, in Rome, for the Congregation of the Index of Prohibited Books. Expurgation also created a project for book owners, book sellers, bishops, and local inquisitors who were responsible for physically altering books to comply with the ever-shifting rules about which parts of them were allowed. These readers and churchmen took on the project of expurgation with pens, blades, paper, and glue. The corrected, expurgated books, like the examples shown above, are repositories of information about how they were used and altered to comply with ecclesiastical decrees. These two examples are striking in the similarity of their approaches, but books were expurgated in a variety of ways that have left a range of physical evidence within their pages.

In 1991, John Tedeschi published an article describing the history of the archives of the Roman Inquisition, detailing their destruction, movement, and eventual scattering among collections in Rome, Paris, and Dublin. He concluded that the records of the Holy Office were a dispersed archive.2 While the remaining administrative records of the Roman Inquisition housed in the Vatican have been opened to scholars since 1998, expurgated books also document Catholic efforts to control intellectual life in early modern Europe.3 I approach these expurgated books as another archive of the Roman Inquisition, an archive that has always been dispersed.4

Scholars of the inquisitions in Italy have used a combination of official rules and decrees, and actual trial records to explain the history of these institutions in Italian communities.5 The combination of legalistic and normative sources allows us to consider both how the prosecution and persecution of heresy operated in theory and in practice. Examining expurgated books as normative sources about the practice of censorship, in essence, opens a new archive for the study of the control of books as intellectual and material objects. Each censored book is an artifact with the power to reveal clues about its own history. Furthermore, there are many thousands of expurgated books in libraries around the world. My research brings together these artifacts from different periods and different libraries.6

The image shown above of the moose is one of many illustrations of quadrupeds in the first volume of Conrad Gesner’s History of Animals (1551). Before the manuscript addition, the headline of the page originally read “Conradi Gesneri Tigurini.” Yet, the inked addition to the text was actually a deletion in this case. By obscuring the printed name it effectively removed the author’s name from the work, a practice required across the Italian peninsula after the Pauline Index of Prohibited Books banned Gesner’s books in 1559.7 Books written or edited by Leonhart Fuchs were also banned in 1559, including the copy shown here of Fuchs’s commentaries on the ancient physician Galen of Pergamon’s On Maintaining Health. A reader censored Fuchs’s name, transforming the letters so that “Leonharti Fuchsii” was no longer legible.

*A 1525 self-portrait of Leonhart Fuchs. Source: Art Institute of Chicago.*

While the Fuchs edition contains the transformations of his name without further comment, the copy of Gesner’s History of Animals reveals additional clues about how and why it was censored. On the flyleaf, an inscription details the owner’s justification for keeping the prohibited book.8 In a small, neat script that matches the hand and ink of the expurgations and the marginalia throughout the volume, the owner explains, “Without danger of anathema this book on the history of animals … can be read. According to the mandate of the Reverend Inquisitor of Pisa, Magister Lelio de’ Medici…” The mention of Lelio de’ Medici, the Franciscan Inquisitor of Pisa from 1586-1603, allows us to date and contextualize the expurgations enacted on this volume. The period of de’ Medici’s appointment in Pisa coincided with the Roman Congregation of the Index’s edict that local experts in Pisa take the lead in correcting books of medicine and philosophy written by heretics.9 Gesner’s name was not the only part of the text that the dutiful Catholic reader altered. Names of other heretics, like Desiderius Erasmus and Martin Luther, have been “expunged and erased” from the pages. The owner of this book also indicated differences between Biblical quotations provided by the Zwinglian Gesner and the Catholic Vulgate edition of the Bible. By changing the characters in Gesner’s name and obscuring other names and passages throughout the book, the parts of the text that Catholic readers should not see were deleted.

*An 18th-century mezzotint portrait of Conrad Fuchs by J. J. Haid. Source: Wikimedia Commons.*

There is no evidence that the same person who expurgated Gesner’s book under the direction of Lelio de’ Medici also expurgated Fuchs’s text, and while the practice of transforming letters in the names of heretics was unusual, these two examples are not unique. I have identified additional copies expurgated in this method that are currently held in libraries in Genoa, Padua, Rome, and the Vatican.10 While each expurgated book contains particular information about how it was used and handled, examining multiple copies can help to establish what kinds of practices were commonplace and which examples are historically surprising. As scholars, we must take the opportunity both to read deeply into individual copies and to bring together many examples of expurgated texts to constitute an archive of practice.

Looking at multiple copies of the same book is hardly a new research methodology; descriptive bibliographies and censuses of books have done this work for many years. In the most innovative of examples, scholars treat all of the copies of an edition as a starting point not for establishing an ur-text, but as an opportunity to trace interrelated readers’ marks, wandering provenances, and the people that shaped the objects before us today.11 My research takes this approach a step further by bringing together expurgated books as an archive of practice, alongside the better-known archives of inquisition trial documents, official edicts, and even parish-level records. If we treat the interventions into books themselves as a unifying and organizing characteristic that constitutes an archive, we can consider the ways that archives both exist within and might also transcend time and space.

Book cover for Hannah Marcus' Forbidden Knowledge: Medicine, Science, and Censorship in Early Modern Italy.

When censorship did not eliminate or completely destroy a text, we are left with thousands upon thousands of objects that can constitute an archive of practice.12 We can look across copies to understand that the transformed letters above the image of the moose and the altered letters in Leonhart Fuchs’s name are not entirely exceptional practices, but are illustrative of the ways that early modern readers interacted with their books amidst a culture of censorship.13 We can expand this archive still further to put these objects into conversation with mutilated portraits of Erasmus or copies of Petrarch’s Canzoniere, from which the Babylonian sonnets have been sliced with a razor.14 Examining expurgated copies of books further complicates the traditional distinction between archives and records, revealing how these censored objects straddle the worlds of legal, material, social, cultural, and intellectual history.15

Bringing together the history of material objects and the analytic category of the archive has led Virginia Reinburg to explore French Books of Hours as “archives of prayer,” and Mary Laven to recently describe ex-votos as “archives of miracles.”16 Identifying expurgated books as an archive of practice, rather than a particular archive of a particular practice, has the advantage of transcending the specific case of censored books to open up a broader analytical category. This move, from archive as single repository to archive as witness to historical practices, allows scholars to work across traditional collections to address broader questions of historical use. As researchers, we can identify a practice of interest, like expurgation, and then assemble an archive from which to study the phenomenon, embedding our understanding of the practice within the rich texture of historical context. This methodology fuses the role of the archivist and historian, situating the researcher explicitly as the “co-creator” of the assembled archive.17

However, in the case of expurgated books, assembling the archive is not a straightforward process. Tracing provenance can provide some clues for identifying expurgated books. Books that spent the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Northern Europe are rarely expurgated, since Northern Europe was predominantly Protestant and there was, therefore, no need to comply with the laws of Catholic censorship. On the other hand, copies of books written by Protestant authors with provenances traceable to early modern Italian libraries are much more likely to bear the signs of censorship. Important collections, like those in the Vatican Library, present something of a quandary. While many of the owners of the book collections there were Catholic, Popes and Cardinals had reading privileges beyond those available to most readers in Italy; the books in these collections may or may not be expurgated.18 Libraries in the United States are a step further removed from the confessional geography of early modern Europe, and finding censored books based on provenance is exponentially complicated by the fact that many of these texts circulated for many years before arriving in their institutional homes. To take the copy of Gesner’s book shown above as an example, we know that it has traveled from where it was printed in Zurich, across the Alps to the home of an early owner in Pisa, and then across the world to the collection of Steven J. Gould, and finally to the library at Stanford. Reassembling these widely dispersed books to create an archive of practice requires digging deeply into the histories and provenances of local collections.

The Sistine Hall of the Vatican Library — *A contemporary photograph of the Sistine Hall of the Vatican Library. Source: Flickr/Michal Osmenda. This image has been reproduced under the terms of Creative Commons License CC BY-SA 2.0.*

After identifying a collection likely to hold multiple examples of expurgated books, the next challenge is searching the catalogs. Catalog entries, both online and in card catalogs, only occasionally mention when a book is censored. Without further specification about the type of censorship, the record might indicate that a copy is a reprint of a work that was targeted for correction by Catholic authorities, rather than a book that shows physical signs of expurgation.19 In this case, the work had been censored, rewritten, and reprinted, but the object that has arrived on the library desk is not physically expurgated.

Since catalogs rarely mention works as “expurgated,” I have been rethinking the ways that censorship has altered texts. The images from works by Gesner and Fuchs might be plausibly listed as “altered in pen” or even more vaguely as containing manuscript additions. To take another example, if large portions of text in a book are blacked out, and if the cataloger does not recognize the intervention as censorship, it might be noted instead as containing “ink damage.” Another way of expurgating a book was to glue blank paper over portions that needed to be hidden from orthodox Catholic eyes. When these books were later sold on the antiquarian book market, dealers would often try to remove the pasted-on pieces of paper, leaving once-expurgated books instead with “water stains” from trying to melt the glue, and more generally causing “damage to title page.” Both phrases occasionally turn up expurgated copies of books in American catalogs. Italian catalogers are especially aware of the long shadow of ecclesiastical censorship in their country, and “frontispizio mutilo,” the Italian equivalent to “damaged title page,” vividly captures the cultural perception of censorship as a defacing, mutilating, or maiming of the page, not just happenstance harm that the object incurred.

Focusing on the effects of censorship on books also reveals that expurgation causes some pages to go “missing.” In libraries with catalog entries that include collocation formulas for the books in their collections, a note that folios a1-a2 or a2-a3 are missing regularly signals that a book is expurgated. One of the common changes to volumes required by Catholic law was the removal of dedicatory epistles written by Protestant authors or dedications praising Protestant dedicatees. Indeed, the copy of Fuchs’s commentary on Galen at the New York Academy of Medicine is missing *2-*6, the pages that contained the dedication from Fuchs to the abbot of the Zwiefalten Abbey. In books like Cardano’s commentary on Ptolomey’s Quadripartito, a collocation formula missing a folio or two in the middle reveals that the highly problematic horoscope of Jesus Christ was removed from the book.20 Cross referencing expurgatory indexes alongside collocation formulas can reveal why certain pages in particular tend to go missing from books that were prohibited but could be corrected. While early modern censors regularly described removing passages from books as “canceling” them, searching for “canceled” copies in library catalogs returns the bibliographical use of “cancel” that catalogers are familiar with: a leaf removed in the course of printing a book (and often replaced), not a censorial intervention after publication.

In addition to ink damage, papering over passages, and removing whole pages, parts of books could be covered with gesso, pasted together, and transformed into a jumble of random characters. By looking across this archive of practice we can acknowledge both the individuality of each censor’s interaction with a text and generalize about the common approaches used across many texts. One goal of my research is to establish a typology of the forms of book expurgation by attending to the interventions censors made in hundreds of early modern medical books.21 This work is more than a cataloging intervention: the material practices of early modern censorship reveal the ways that censors and scholars engaged with prohibited books. Expurgation was both a process that required substantial work to determine what material should be expurgated, and a physical task to be executed upon many thousands of prohibited books circulating in Italy. Attention to how prohibited books were physically altered treats these books as an archive that provides insight into the practice of expurgation and the actors involved in book censorship. Additionally, stabilizing the language of expurgation will influence descriptions in catalog records and make these fascinating objects easier to find. Clearer catalog entries would open the door for future research on the material instantiations of censorship and facilitate better communication between scholars and librarians about the physical attributes of these texts.

Using expurgated books as an archive of practice requires consulting many distinct and dispersed copies of books, a process that is becoming easier thanks to massive digitization projects based at major libraries around the world. Digitization has made it possible for scholars to consult multiple copies of the same early modern book without travel. Searching Google Books for Conrad Gesner’s De historia animalium yields expurgated examples from libraries in Spain and Italy, alongside a pristine copy from the National Library in Austria. Searches for other prohibited authors from Fuchs to Petrarch to Erasmus turn up similar results: a mix of copies that appear in clean condition and others with indications that names and passages have been blacked out or pasted over in compliance with the Index of Prohibited Books. With more copies of early modern books readily available, it becomes increasingly clear that books with signs of censorship are a common condition for early modern imprints, not a bibliographical anomaly.22

I want to invite scholars to use the example of expurgated books to reconsider what it means to be part of an archive or a collection. Expurgated books are not united by their content or provenance, but by their shared, physical experience of censorship. The dispersed archive of expurgated books is an archive of the Catholic inquisitions that was never intended to exist. But bringing these books together has the potential to do more than identify copies of books that sat side by side in libraries 400 years ago.23 More radically, this methodology creates a new archive of texts and objects that share intellectual proximity because of their physical states. These books are by-products of the early modern disputes over religious and intellectual authority, vestiges of the power of early states.24 However, the dispersed archive of expurgated books is a collection that we are convening outside of the exigencies of the early modern era. In contrast to national archives, institutional archives, or even the proliferation of personal archives, expurgated books can be studied together as a material archive, an archive of practice.25 Learning to interact with books in ways that complied with a culture of censorship was a skill that early modern scholars mastered, and one we are only now beginning to recover.

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Ryan Kashanipour, Nicole Ferraiolo, and two anonymous readers for their insightful comments that substantially sharpened this essay. I would also like to thank Richard Calis, Caroline Duroselle-Melish, and Roger Gaskell for inspiring conversations and for sharing citations.

Hannah Marcus is the John and Ruth Hazel Associate Professor of the Social Sciences in the Department of the History of Science and the Associate Faculty Director of the Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments at Harvard University. Her research focuses on the scientific culture of early modern Europe between 1400 and 1700.

The classic study in English of ecclesiastical censorship in early modern Italy has long been Paul F. Grendler’s The Roman Inquisition and the Venetian Press, 1540-1605 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977). There has been extensive scholarly attention to the Catholic Church’s role in censorship, especially since the 1998 opening of the Archive of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. The literature is vast, but the most influential publications in English have been Ugo Baldini and Leen Spruit, Catholic Church and Modern Science: Documents from the Archives of the Roman Congregations of the Holy Office and the Index (Roma: Libreria editrice vaticana, 2009); Gigliola Fragnito, Church, Censorship, and Culture in Early Modern Italy (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Peter Godman, The Saint as Censor: Robert Bellarmine between Inquisition and Index (Leiden: Brill, 2000). [↩]
John Tedeschi, “The Dispersed Archives of the Roman Inquisition,” in The Prosecution of Heresy: Collected Studies on the Inquisition in Early Modern Italy (Binghamton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1991), 23-45. [↩]
On the opening of the ACDF, see Accademia nazionale dei Lincei and Congregazione per la dottrina della fede, L’Apertura degli archivi del Sant’Uffizio romano: Roma, 22 Gennaio 1998 (Rome: Accademia nazionale dei Lincei, 1998); Anne Jacobson Schutte, “Palazzo del Sant’Uffizio: The Opening of the Roman Inquisition’s Central Archive,” Perspectives on History, May 1999. [↩]
Historians of early modern Europe have recently considered the concept of practice in relation to both the material history of books and textual production and early modern political economies. On scholarly practices see, for example, Anthony Grafton, Commerce with the Classics: Ancient Books and Renaissance Readers (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997); William Sherman, Used Books: Marking Readers in Renaissance England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009); and Ann Blair, Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010). On practice and political economies, see Noah Millstone, Manuscript Circulation and the Invention of Politics in Early Stuart England (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 13-17; Corey Tazzara, “Managing Free Trade in Early Modern Europe: Institutions, Information, and the Free Port of Livorno,” The Journal of Modern History 86 (September 2014): 493-529; Corey Tazzara, The Free Port of Livorno and the Transformation of the Mediterranean World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming); Jacob Soll, The Information Master: Jean-Baptiste Colbert’s Secret State Intelligence System (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009). [↩]
On a legal approach to inquisition see Edward Peters, Inquisition (New York: Free Press, 1988) and, more recently, Thomas F. Mayer, The Roman Inquisition: A Papal Bureaucracy and Its Laws in the Age of Galileo (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013); Thomas F. Mayer, The Roman Inquisition on the Stage of Italy, 1590-1640 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014). For an approach to these materials from trial records see, for example, Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992). Christopher F. Black’s recent synthesis combines a legal account with details from studies of trials. See The Italian Inquisition (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009). [↩]
On opportunities for bringing together fragmented and allied collections, see Michael J. Paulus, Jr., “The Converging Histories and Futures of Libraries, Archives, and Museums as Seen through the Case of the Curious Collector Myron Eells,” Libraries & the Cultural Record 46, no. 2 (2011): 185-205. [↩]
For what was prohibited on the Index of Prohibited Books and when, the standard source is Jesús Martínez de Bujanda, Francis M. Higman, and James K. Farge, Index des livres interdits (Sherbrooke, Québec: Centre d’études de la Renaissance, Editions de l’Université de Sherbrooke, 1984-1999). [↩]
As found in Stanford’s copy of Conrad Gesner, Conradi Gesneri medici Tigurini Historiæ animalium lib. I.[-V.] (Tiguri: Apud Christ. Froschoverum, 1551), call number: RBC QL41 .G37 1551 F V.1, copy 1. The Latin inscription reads: Sine Anathematis periculo liber iste del historia animalium quadrupedum viviparorum legi potest Nam ex mandato D R I Inquisitionis Pisane duxcasis Magisteri Lelii medices expunsta ac obliterata sunt ex albo. que[m] delenda visa sunt. [↩]
On the assignment of expurgation to communities around Italy see Gigliola Fragnito, ed. Church, Censorship, and Culture in Early Modern Italy (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001). On the censorship of books of medicine, see Hannah Marcus, Banned Books: Medicine, Readers, and Censors in Early Modern Italy, 1559-1664 (PhD diss., Stanford University, 2016); Ugo Baldini and Leen Spruit, eds., Catholic Church and Modern Science, v. I, t. 1, 603-64. [↩]
Marcus, Banned Books, 213-14. [↩]
Perhaps the best census of an individual book is Owen Gingerich, An annotated census of Copernicus’ De revolutionibus (Nuremberg, 1543 and Basel, 1566) (Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2002). Daniel Margocsy, Mark Somos, and Stephen Joffe are currently conducting a similarly thorough census of copies of Andreas Vesalius’s De humani corporis fabrica. On bibliography as the social history of texts, see the classic study by D. F. McKenzie, Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999). For how scholars are currently rethinking the field of bibliography, see, for example, Michael F. Suarez, S.J., “Hard Cases: Confronting Bibliographical Difficulty in Eighteenth-Century Texts,” The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 111, no. 1 (March 2017): 1-30. [↩]
Krzysztof Pomian has described an archive as emerging from people or institutions who understood the preservation of documents as more problematic than maintaining them. This is an intriguing suggestion in the context of expurgated books because works that were expurgated were deemed worthy of preservation despite the need to destroy parts of them. Krzysztof Pomian, “The Archives: From the Trésor des Chartes to the CARAN,” in Rethinking France: Les Lieux de Mèmoire, ed. Pierre Nora, vol. 4, Histories and Memories (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 27–99. [↩]
On the expression “culture of censorship” see Cyndia Susan Clegg, Press Censorship in Caroline England (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 232. [↩]
For censored Erasmus see Silvana Seidel Menchi, Erasmo in Italia, 1520-1580 (Torino: Bollati Boringhieri, 1987). On censored copies of Petrarch see, Peter Stallybrass, “Petrarch and Babylon: Censoring and Uncensoring the Rime, 1559-1651,” in For the Sake of Learning: Essays in honor of Anthony Grafton, eds. Ann Blair and Anja-Silvia Goeing, vol. 2, (Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2015), 581-601. [↩]
On the complicated definitions of archives and records in early modern Europe see Alexandra Walsham, “The Social History of the Archive: Record-Keeping in Early Modern Europe,” Past and Present 230, no. 11 (November 2016): 13-18. [↩]
Virginia Reinburg, French Books of Hours: Making and Archive of Prayer, c. 1400-1600 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Mary Laven, “Recording Miracles in Renaissance Italy,” Past and Present 230, no. 11 (November 2016): 191-212. [↩]
Focusing on evidence of expurgation as an archive of use and practice goes some way toward achieving Terry Cook’s goal of archives that document “function, activity, and ideas, rather than primarily reflecting the structures, offices, and persons of origin.” Terry Cook, “The Archive(s) Is a Foreign Country: Historians, Archivists, and the Changing Archival Landscape,” The American Archivist 74, no. 2 (Fall/Winter 2011): 629-31. [↩]
There are also collections in the Vatican Library with non-Catholic provenances, most notably the Palatine collection seized from Heidelberg as booty in the Thirty Years War. Jill Bepler, “Vicissitudo Temporum: Some Sidelights on Book Collecting in the Thirty Years’ War,” The Sixteenth Century Journal 32, no. 4 (Winter, 2001): 955-57. [↩]
The Congregation of the Index originally intended for corrected books to be reprinted as clean, Catholic copies of previously prohibited texts; in reality, this rarely occurred. [↩]
On Cardano’s geniture of Jesus see Anthony Grafton, Cardano’s Cosmos: The Worlds and Works of a Renaissance Astrologer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 150-55. [↩]
Marcus, Banned Books, chapter 5. [↩]
Roger Stoddard helpfully placed censored books alongside books with other signs of use and provenance in his exhibition catalog Marks in Books, Illustrated and Explained (Cambridge, MA: Houghton Library, Harvard University, 1985). [↩]
On learning from provenance and changing collections see Robin Myers, Michael Harris, and Giles Mandelbrote, eds., Books on the Move: Tracking Copies Through Collections and the Book Trade (New Castle, Delaware, and London: Oak Knoll Press and The British Library, 2007). [↩]
There is a lot of excellent recent research on the relationship between archives and sources of power and authority in early modern Europe. See, for example, Filippo de Vivo, Andrea Guidi, and Alessandro Silvestri, eds., “Archival Transformations in Early Modern European History,” European History Quarterly 46, no. 3 (2016); Elizabeth Yale, “The History of Archives: The State of the Discipline,” Book History 18 (2015): 332-59; Laurie Nussdorfer, Brokers of Public Trust: Notaries in Early Modern Rome (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009); Ann Blair and Jennifer Milligan’s “Introduction” to their special issue of Archival Science 7, no. 4 (2007): 289-96. [↩]
On the formation and proliferation of personal archives in the early modern period see Elizabeth Yale, “With Slips and Scraps: How Early Modern Naturalists Invented the Archive,” Book History 12 (2009): 1-36, and her recent book Sociable Knowledge: Natural History and the Nation in Early Modern Britain (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016). See also Walsham, “The Social History of the Archive,” 18-23. [↩]

Review of India in the Persian World of Letters by Arthur Dudney (2022)

Before the 19th century, Persian was an important lingua franca and connected various territories, communities, and people across the Middle East and South Asia. Arthur Dudney’s book is a valuable account of the cultural history of language and literature in this “Persianate Cosmopolis” during the 18th century. The book contextualizes the learned figures of the Persian language in the more extensive network and cultural environment of knowledge production, circulation, and patronage. Dudney shows that book culture and dictionary-making in the Indo-Persianate world were associated with notions of prestige and elitism.

An elite milieu was essential for book production and for those who intended to join the elite cultural space. In this book we read about the career of Siraj-ud-Din Ali Khan Arzu (1687-1756), the famous poet, linguist, and lexicographer. Dudney shows how Khan Arzu’s upward mobility in the cultural milieu of India depended on his connections with other cultural figures, such as Anand Ram Mukhlis, who assisted him in moving up the hierarchy of Delhi nobility. The author shows how Arzu attempted to establish himself within the literary networks of significant poets such as Bidel Dehlawi (1642–1720) and Sarkhush (d. 1714) (33).

Book cover for India in the Persian World of Letters: Ḳhān-i Ārzū among the Eighteenth-Century Philologists by Arthur Dunbey

Despite his focus on the elite context of cultural production, Dudney, of course, does not entirely disavow the categories of philology and lexicography. Yet, he reminds the audience of the significance of situated and contextual historical readings of the debates and texts. The author maintains that while personal differences and alliances were essential factors, literary contestation and debates about aesthetics and philology remained crucial (45).

One of the main features of the book is its critical engagement with contemporary theoretical discourse. These categories include terms such as “old” and “new,” “tradition,” and “modernity,” and not least, the arguments about “modern” and “early modernity.” Methodologically, these are sensitive questions to delve into. Much of the relevant theory was first developed in a Euro-American context, while works on the global South have, for valid reasons, focused on colonialism and colonial modernity. According to Dudney, the hallmark of the early global modern period was a reverence for tradition and repurposing and transforming traditional categories anew with commentaries and reconfiguration.

Dudney shows how literary debates and cultural products such as “Indo-Persian” dictionaries in 18th-century India were not a “tradition,” as was understood from colonial and perhaps nationalist lens—i.e., they were not a stagnating phenomenon. The nature of the debates was rather “dynamic” and “changing”; literary figures constantly engaged with the past, local elements, and broader technical questions of language and style. They created a new momentum of literary and aesthetic dynamism and productivity. One of Dudney’s examples in this regard is the development of the science of philology in the Islamic world as a dynamic arena of scholarship. The cases of al-Suyuti in the 15th century and of Arzu in the 18th century show the vibrant nature of the works and debates involved (61–62).

Dudney also uses dictionaries and commentaries to comment on the question of the Persian cosmopolis and its nuances. He shows that in the syncretic Indo-Persian context, while, for instance, Arzu was careful in deploying Indic terms in his work, Mukhlis was more explicit in suggesting the usage of such terms (78). Dudney demonstrates how the vernacular became increasingly important throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in the Persianate cosmopolis when lexicographers increasingly used or debated Hindi words in Persian.

An 18th-century illustration portraying two men and a woman on a terrace. — *Two men and a woman appear on a terrace in this 18th-century illustration an unknown Indo-Persian artist. Source: Wikimedia Commons.*

A recurring theme in the book is the author’s nuanced and compelling criticism of the “decline” thesis in the Persian repertoire produced in the Indian subcontinent. The decline thesis refers to Iranian scholarly views in the 20th century that considered the Persian literary tradition and textual production in India as decadent, marking a moment of cultural decline. Dudney demonstrates that from the late 19th century and specifically the 20th century, critics promulgated the idea that the “Indian style” of Persian poetry was inferior to the Persian textual repertoire produced in Iran. This idea was propounded by Mohammad Taqi Bahar (1885–1951) in his famous history of Persian literature and advocated by the Indian Persianist Muhammad Abdul Ghani (108–09).

Dudney reiterates the earlier criticisms of the decline thesis, submitting that it was latter-day nationalists who rendered Persian to Iran and raised Hindi and Urdu to the level of national languages (234). However, Dudney’s significant contribution in this regard is exposing the indigenous traces of similar debates in the 18th century, where there was a difference of opinion concerning the aesthetic qualities of the new trend in Persian poetry. In the 18th century, according to Dudney, the debate was centered on the question of the old and new styles of Persian poetry. For example, while Azar was dismissive of Saeb’s poetry and considered it an “unpleasant style,” Arzu regarded Saeb positively as the voice of the modern style. Dudney’s argument complicates the notion that the thesis of Persian literature’s degeneration was solely a product of 19th- and 20th-century nationalism.

The book is a groundbreaking attempt to contextualize the production of lexicography and literary and aesthetic debates during the eighteenth century. Dudney’s criticism of nationalist historiography is not entirely original. But his book raises an interesting question: why were 18th-century Persian scholars suspicious of the Indian style, long before the zenith of nationalism? Was it due to changing political boundaries, imagination, and migration patterns between Iran and India? Did it emerge from the post-Safavid political condition? These are questions that require consideration and critical contemplation.

The book presents a virtuosic narrative of the cultural history of literature and language in the eighteenth century. It will be of great interest to scholars interested in Iran and India’s intellectual and literary history, to those researching the Persianate world, to historians of Persian literature, and to cultural historians in general.

Pouya Nekouei is a Ph.D. student in Middle Eastern history at the department of Middle Eastern studies at the University of Texas, Austin. His research interests pertain to Global History, the social and cultural history of Iran, the Indian Ocean world, and the connected social and cultural history of South Asia, Iran, and Europe. He is an advisor to the Golistan digital archive project and a research member of Mardomname, a people’s history journal.

The Wars of Oppenheimer

It’s a three-hour, ultra-big-screen, deeply-researched box office mega-hit about… J. Robert Oppenheimer, project manager. Leslie Groves, the manager’s manager. Kitty Oppenheimer, the manager’s kids’ manager. Lewis Strauss, the wanna-be manager. Harry Truman, the buck-stops-here manager. James Byrnes, President Truman’s manager. The scientists of the Manhattan Project were thoroughly unmanageable. The bomb? It was everybody’s fault, and nobody’s in particular. Nuclear war by committee. It’s Oppenheimer: Destroyer of Responsibility.

Director and screenwriter Christopher Nolan isn’t wrong. The essence of the Manhattan Project, several characters remind us, was compartmentalization. The less any one project member knew about how to make an atom bomb, the less he or she could reveal to an enemy — especially a Soviet, an enemy of the Allied variety.

One of the movie’s smartest choices is to place the story of mankind’s first nuclear weapon in its ideological context. It excels at depicting the intellectual context, the scientific rivalries, and the egos surrounding the bomb. It deals tolerably well with the political context, the way World War II‘s messy wrap-up determined how the bomb was used. But where Oppenheimer sets itself apart from most other movies on the topic is in its depiction of the bomb as a turning point in the debate over communism: a debate that had raged for years and would only intensify as the nuclear era began.

"Little Boy," the nuclear bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945.

Around a third of the movie takes place many years after the bomb, when Oppenheimer’s (Cillian Murphy) security clearance is under review and his occasional colleague Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey, Jr.) is seeking Senate confirmation to join President Eisenhower’s cabinet. If this sounds obscure and more “inside baseball” than a gripping thriller, it is, and Nolan leans into its wonkiness with the confidence of a director who answers to no one. Unlike the rest of the movie, these flash-forward scenes are shot in black and white, a palette that cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema uses beautifully. Nolan, who is known for trippy time-bending films like Interstellar and Tenet, collapses about a decade’s worth of bureaucratic infighting into an interwoven, frenetic, emotional, and at times corny parallel movie that he grafts onto his more conventional biopic.

It is in this seemingly tacked-on portion of the film that the theme of communism vs. anti-communism stakes out its central position. The postwar rift between “the free world” of liberal capitalism and the opposing world of the communist bloc was dangerous because, after the bombs reached a certain strength, either side could have started the war to end all wars as well as terminating all known life. However, because that hasn’t yet happened (as of the publication of this article), Nolan has to illustrate the tension indirectly. While a McCarthy-era committee grills Oppenheimer and his wife Kitty (Emily Blunt) about their prewar communist sympathies, the bitter and conniving Strauss faces a divided U.S. Senate and a rebellion of atomic scientists.

The end result is two clear camps, Strauss’ and Oppenheimer’s. And in their pride and addiction to power, both ramp up pressure until the other is destroyed. Excessive makeup and monologuing from Strauss and unearned heroics from the Oppenheimers notwithstanding, this petty skirmish after the war is key to the movie’s message.

Oppenheimer reminds us that, if we seek the origins of the Second World War in the First, the people who lived it had a more recent and more relevant frame of reference: the Spanish Civil War (1936-39). This was the first major trial by combat between fascism on the one hand and communism and republican democracy on the other. It was the romantic struggle that drew in Langston Hughes, Ernest Hemingway, and Casablanca‘s Rick Blaine. It was the proving ground for foreign, notably American, idealists who risked their lives or at least sent money to ensure that freedom – in the left-wing sense of progressive thinking and non-traditional living – would not go quietly into the night as Europe’s balance of power tilted sharply to the right.

Lewis Strauss during his tenure as the chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC).
Source: Library of Congress

Oppenheimer and his family and friends sent money through the robust international organization of the Communist Party. Nolan shows Oppenheimer as politically naive but stubbornly loyal to his communist girlfriend Jean (Florence Pugh) and fellow-traveling best friend Chevalier (Jefferson Hall). He also shows Oppenheimer’s support for unionizing and integrating academia, two supposed vectors for communist infiltration.

Nolan details how Oppenheimer’s politics made him a difficult pick to keep the U.S. military’s highest secret. Matt Damon’s character, General Leslie Groves, is a show-stealer as a buttoned-up, blunt-talking Pentagon man — the Pentagon man, since he was the one who built it — who forms a surprisingly close relationship with the Bhagavad Gita-quoting egghead he chooses for the job. Casey Affleck appears in one indelible scene as a hardened anti-communist who sees through Oppenheimer’s prevarications about his past. Nolan also shows how Oppenheimer and the scientists he recruited, a team that included a number of left-leaning academics and Jewish scientists, reacted to the realization that the atomic bombs would fall not on the Germans whose bomb program they’d been racing, but on a largely defeated Japan. Though the movie chooses not to show Japan at all, a scene in which Oppenheimer visualizes his Los Alamos team with Hiroshima- and Nagasaki-style burns is one of the film’s most powerful moments.

Oppenheimer dodges a real discussion of the surrender of Japan, about which whole movies have been devoted (see, for example, Japan’s Longest Day by Kihachi Okamoto). It mentions the Potsdam Conference, where Truman (Gary Oldman, in another instance of too much makeup) received Groves’s news about the successful Trinity Test, but viewers must read on their own about the conference’s significance for Japan’s surrender planning. He shows Byrnes (Pat Skipper), Truman’s Secretary of State and “Assistant President,” but conveys nothing about how the bomb changed Byrnes’ and, therefore, Truman’s thinking about the Soviet role vis a vis Japan. Relevant but outside the film’s scope are discussions about nuclear science in postwar Japan and the long shadow Hiroshima and Nagasaki cast over Japanese politics and art. These are directions the movie could have gone, but for Nolan the atomic bomb is not about Japan.

By the same token, the people who made the bomb are not defined by it. Oppenheimer emerges from the movie as an intellectual on par with the likes of Albert Einstein (Tom Conti) and Niels Bohr (Kenneth Branagh). He butts heads, always with the greatest professional respect, with Enrico Fermi, Edward Teller, Ernest Lawrence, and Werner Heisenberg, all brilliantly cast and sharply written. They all feel as though they could star in their own movies with the bomb as a mere footnote. The birth of nuclear weapons, it seems, was an almost accidental consequence of their combined genius. Their governments weaponized them, Nolan’s film tells us, and most of them had the good grace to feel uneasy about it.

Albert Einstein and Robert Oppenheimer. Source: Wikimedia Commons

Nolan’s is not a reductive kind of hero worship; these (almost) household-name scientists do, amazingly, feel like real people, and none are more flawed than Oppenheimer himself. The research that Nolan did to get these men right is obvious, and his Oppenheimer, like the real one, says that he feels blood on his hands and anxiety about the planet’s future. Yet equally obvious is the fact that Nolan sees the bomb-builders as visionaries, and if they felt they had no choice but to beat Hitler to the bomb, if they declined to take responsibility for what happened in Japan, then Nolan will go no further down those roads than they. What happened happened, now on to the Cold War.

Oppenheimer is Nolan’s second visit to World War II after 2017’s Dunkirk, and hopefully, it will not be his last. His understanding of the era — its mindsets, its cadences — is remarkable, and his handling of very big and very different personalities within the era is impressive. The film is his best-looking to date. There are beats that don’t work and paths not taken that deserved a closer look, but complex themes come through clearly and speak well of Nolan’s skills as a historian. Oppenheimer‘s success with audiences is a good thing well deserved.

But don’t miss Barbie, either.

David A. Conrad received his Ph.D. from UT Austin in 2016 and published his first book, Akira Kurosawa and Modern Japan, in 2022. He is currently working on a second book, which will also focus on postwar Japan. David lived in Japan’s Miyagi prefecture for three years and can’t wait to go back to his home away from home.

Two Bombings, Two Movies: From Hiroshima to Grave of the Fireflies

An orphaned boy and girl wander helplessly through a destroyed Japanese city toward the end of World War II. The boy, older but not old enough, has frustrating interactions with the adults they meet, most of whom are preoccupied with their own struggles to survive. Despite his earnest efforts, he cannot keep his little sister safe. He finally wanders alone into a train station full of other displaced people. The station is a literal junction but also a metaphorical one: the boy’s world ends here, but beyond it a new Japan will rise from the ashes.

The plot briefly described above comes from Hideo Sekigawa’s Hiroshima, a 1953 docudrama that used real survivors of the atomic bombs to bring the city’s darkest days to the big screen. From 1945 to 1952, Japanese movie studios followed the dictates of media censors in American occupation headquarters by avoiding discussion of wartime bombings, depictions of American occupation troops, and a host of other topics that Americans found uncomfortable. With the end of the occupation came a rush of bomb-themed movies, from Kaneto Shindо̄’s Children of Hiroshima (1952) to Ishirо̄ Honda’s Godzilla (1954) to Akira Kurosawa’s Record of Living Things (1955). Sekigawa’s Hiroshima, perhaps the most literal of the bunch, had little box office impact but exerted significant influence on cinema’s international New Wave movement that lay just around the corner.

The aftermath of Hiroshima. Source: Wikimedia Commons

It also foreshadowed a movie that the first paragraph of this piece describes equally well: 1988’s Grave of the Fireflies. When it came out 35 years after the release of Hiroshima, Grave of the Fireflies was largely forgotten outside of the cinephile community. But in the intervening years, its audience has only grown. Its Blu-Ray and streaming releases have allowed it to impact – one might say traumatize – new viewers around the world.

Fireflies is set in Kobe, not Hiroshima or Nagasaki or the even more heavily-bombed Tokyo, but it is grim enough all the same; the brother dies in a train station not long after the sister succumbs to illness. In Hiroshima, which has less finality but more overt messages for the present, the brother does not die in the station but leaves to find work in a factory until, seven years later, it begins to produce artillery for American soldiers in Korea. Unwilling to contribute to more war deaths, the young man quits and disappears into the drop-out world of pachinko gambling. He never discovers what became of his sister after they lost each other in the ruins of their childhood city, and that uncertainty underlines the movie’s message that Hiroshima’s agony is not over. As long as war goes on, nobody is safe from Hiroshima’s fate.

Grave of the Fireflies (1988) has its messages, too, though they can be harder to detect beneath the intense tragedy of its protagonists. More than the story of doomed siblings, the movie is an uncompromising critique of Japanese society in the waning months of World War II. It is also a milestone in the development of Studio Ghibli’s Japan-centric but universalist storytelling.

*Grave of the Fireflies poster: Image: https://image.tmdb.org/t/p/original/2jwQhzuP1RefkUI4PCaEgioCHrv.jpg*

1988 was a year of firsts for the young Studio Ghibli. The studio’s creative frontman Hayao Miyazaki directed My Neighbor Totoro, his first film set in historical Japan rather than in a fantasy world. The studio did not expect Totoro to be a financial success, so it decided to package it with an adaptation of a wartime melodramatic novel titled Hotaru no Haka, or Grave of the Fireflies. Fireflies was Ghibli’s first film neither written nor directed by Miyazaki. Instead, it was helmed by longtime animator Isao Takahata, who would go on to direct other adult-oriented features like Only Yesterday (1991), My Neighbors the Yamadas (1999), and The Tale of Princess Kaguya (2013).

The studio’s calculation was correct in the short term, but when Totoro aired on television – paired with the release of an adorable plushy – it found massive success. It soon became an international hit too, and Totoro’s title character is now Ghibli’s mascot and studio logo. Fireflies’ success has been quieter but also impressive. Disney, which for many years owned the foreign distribution rights to Totoro and most other Ghibli films, didn’t touch Fireflies, but the movie has received English dubs and frequent home media releases nonetheless. It appears on numerous Best Films lists and is many people’s go-to answer to the question: “What’s the saddest movie you’ve ever seen?”

Yet in many ways it cuts against the studio’s grain. Miyazaki’s renowned fantasies, Takahata’s later stories, and other Ghibli directors’ efforts are almost always characterized by capable people working toward clear-cut, laudable objectives. Not so much with Fireflies. Its protagonists, a boy named Seita and his younger sister Setsuko, think irrationally, make bad decisions, and don’t ever seem to know what they should do next. They are, in the most difficult ways, children, and they are caught up in terrible events.

This is particularly true of Seita. As the older sibling, he is responsible for the care of his sister when their mother dies in a bombing raid that destroys their house and their father is killed in battle. At first he does well enough. He finds lodging for himself and Setsuko in the home of a woman who provides them with food in exchange for their mother’s clothes. This woman embodies the attitude that, in wartime, everyone must make sacrifices for the good of the nation. The most poignant touches of visual detail in the movie come as she scrapes burnt leavings from the bottom of a cooking vessel, and when her young lodgers eat every grain of rationed rice and each infinitesimally-small crumb of candy in front of them.

Isao Takahata. Source: Wikimedia Commons

Seita begins to go astray, though, both from his familial duties as a caregiver and his social duties as a Japanese citizen. He quarrels with the woman sheltering them and leaves the comparative comfort of her house. At 14 he is old enough to work, to “contribute to the war effort” as the woman commands him to do, but he opts not to seek employment at a munitions factory or other work detail. He never articulates his reasons, but it is not anti-war sentiment; Seita is as emotionally invested in the success of Japan’s imperial mission as are all of the adults he knows. Rather, he seems to be motivated by a vainglorious search for individual autonomy.

Seita takes Setsuko to an abandoned bomb shelter near a small lake outside of town. In his mind, and at first glance, this appears to be an idyllic retreat from the horrors of the war. They spend their first night there catching fireflies, delicate creatures that live a lifespan of mere days before winking out of existence. The symbolism is obvious, and it leads to the movie’s most haunting images.

It is not long, though, before it becomes clear that Seita is not equipped to handle life in exile. Setsuko develops a rash that grows increasingly painful, and she begins to exhibit the disturbing physical symptoms of malnourishment. Though Seita has some money in a bank account, he turns to stealing food, a serious and increasingly common crime during the American naval blockade of Japan. Perhaps unconsciously, in his orphanhood Seita becomes obsessed with living outside the strictures of society. The death of the four-year-old Setsuko is a consequence of that determination, and Seita himself dies homeless and starving in a dilapidated train station.

The movie is a cautionary tale about young people who recklessly buck social mores, but Seita is not portrayed as solely responsible for his and Setsuko’s deaths. In fact, he hardly seems to realize what he is doing or what is happening to them. He is a child, well-intentioned but confused and psychologically shattered. The movie reserves its moral censure for the adult characters. Director Takahata, who also wrote the screenplay, shows adults to be willfully apathetic about the children’s desperate plight. The woman who takes them in and takes their mother’s possessions as payment also drives them out with harsh criticism and justifies it as an act of patriotism. A doctor diagnoses Setsuko with malnutrition, but he refuses to give her medicine and sends the brother and sister away with no food. The worker who discovers Seita’s body in the movie’s flash-forward prologue seems unmoved, poking his and other corpses and searching their possessions before casting them aside. During the course of the movie only a police officer shows Seita some kindness when he declines to press charges for theft, but in Seita’s case it might have been a greater kindness to take him into custody. Takahata has said that Fireflies is not an anti-war film, as many of Miyazaki’s movies quite clearly are, but it is certainly a bleak portrayal of the material and social conditions that Japan faced at the end of its last great war.

Yokohama residents, 1945. Source: Wikimedia Commons

Like its predecessor Hiroshima, Fireflies is tightly rooted in place and time, so why does it continue to resonate with global audiences? Hiroshima’s artistic influence, for example, on French filmmaker Alain Resnais, whose film Hiroshima, mon amour (1959) stars one of the lead actors from Sekigawa’s film, is thanks in part to the unique nature of the atomic bombings. That film’s comparative scarcity for many years also made it especially alluring for those who knew about it. Released at the other end of three decades of miraculous economic growth, Fireflies has always been readily available, and it has become something of a rite of passage for anime fans. Starting with an anonymous bombing, one of thousands of similar aerial attacks, it follows marginal lives that leave no historical record. That has increased its universal appeal. People born long after the war and on the opposite side of the globe can see themselves in Seita and Setsuko. They might have been them, if they’d been born at the wrong time and place. If all-ages Ghibli fantasies like Kiki’s Delivery Service (1989) and Spirited Away (2001) work because of universalist “hero’s journey” elements, Fireflies speaks to people because its arcs are so pathetically pedestrian. Its lives, like the titular insects, are brief and leave no trace on a world that moves quickly on.

As a work of art and a piece of historical fiction set during an especially difficult era, Grave of the Fireflies is a valuable achievement. Embracing Defeat, John Dower’s 1999 Pulitzer-winning nonfiction book about early postwar Japan, would make an excellent non-fiction pairing with Fireflies. The movie is also an unconventional herald of Studio Ghibli’s turn-of-the-millennium dominance in sophisticated animated entertainment. If the recent success of Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer is any indication, movies that touch on Japan’s unique wartime experience – whether through well-known stories like Hiroshima’s or obscurer ones like Fireflies’ – will continue to fascinate international audiences for a long time to come.

David A. Conrad received his Ph.D. from UT Austin in 2016 and published his first book, Akira Kurosawa and Modern Japan, in 2022. He is currently working on a second book, which will also focus on postwar Japan. David lived in Japan’s Miyagi prefecture for three years and can’t wait to go back to his home away from home.

Roundtable Review of The Peacemaker: Ronald Reagan, the Cold War, and the World on the Brink

From the editors:

William Inboden is the William J. Power, Jr. executive director of the Clements Center for National Security at the University of Texas at Austin. A former State Department official who served on the National Security Council under President George W. Bush, Inboden is also a distinguished scholar of international history. His most recent book, entitled The Peacemaker: Ronald Reagan, the Cold War, and the World on the Brink, presents a definitive account of the Reagan administration’s foreign policy achievements.

Book cover for The Peacemaker: Ronald Reagan, the Cold War, and the World on the Brink

To mark The Peacemaker‘s publication, Not Even Past invited historians Joseph A. Ledford and Ashlyn Hand to review its contents. Ledford and Hand are rising stars in the world of historical scholarship. Their reviews deftly describe Inboden’s key insights, showing how Reagan strove to bring peace and order to the deeply unsettled world of the 1980s. Few presidents have grappled with greater international uncertainty. But as Inboden’s book demonstrates, Reagan was able to build a lasting legacy through his skillful navigation of the late Cold War’s uncharted waters.

Banner image for The Peacemaker: Ronald Reagan, the Cold War, and the World on the Brink

Speaking to a private scholarly gathering at the Library of Congress in 1986, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger remarked that, “When you meet the President, you ask yourself, ‘How did it ever occur to anybody that he should be Governor, much less President?’” Still, Kissinger confessed of President Ronald Reagan: “He has a kind of instinct that I cannot explain.” In The Peacemaker, William Inboden not only provides clarity on Reagan’s instinct, but also furnishes the preeminent account of his statecraft, from the origins of Reagan’s 1980 presidential campaign to his December 4th, 1992, address to the Oxford Union, replete with insightful anecdotes and perceptive analysis.

A cavalcade of declassification over the past decade has helped Inboden offer greater insight into Reagan’s policymaking. To explain Reagan’s statecraft, Inboden identifies in Reagan’s foreign policy seven themes that derive from both the archives and his worldview: allies and partners; history; force and diplomacy; religious faith and religious freedom; tragedy; battle of ideas; and expansion of liberty. These seven themes reflect a hawkish but nuclear abolitionist Reagan deeply engaged in crafting and executing his foreign policy—a president determined to harness American power and allied support to challenge the Soviet Union and secure peace. The dynamic nature of liberal democracy and market capitalism, Reagan fervently believed, advantaged the United States and sustained his diplomatic and military campaign against the Soviets. Reagan sought not only diplomacy underpinned by a mighty American military buildup but also the spread of political and religious freedoms to uplift the oppressed and undermine authoritarians.

President Ronald Reagan and former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, 1981. — *President Ronald Reagan swaps pleasantries with former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger at the White House in June 1981. Source: National Archives.*

Inboden’s seven themes weave through an engrossing narrative, which also serves an important methodological purpose. Foreign policy decisions are neither made in an isolated context nor arrived at with absolute certainty. Drawing on his policymaking experience and historical craft, Inboden successfully captures in narrative form the precariousness of policymaking as the Reagan administration lived it. In doing so, Inboden eloquently reconstructs the messy reality of the international affairs in which Reagan dealt.

At once judicious and bold, The Peacemaker presents three interrelated arguments about Reagan’s bid to master 1980s geopolitics. First, alongside Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Reagan had the most significant modern presidency. In January 1981, Reagan confronted the Soviet Union at the zenith of its military power during the Cold War—a fearsome Soviet Union that had invaded Afghanistan, aided revolution across the globe, and tightened its grip behind the Iron Curtain. An onslaught of other geopolitical threats faced the president, too. In Africa, apartheid persisted, and the last vestiges of colonialism precipitated civil war. Latin America was awash in blood from the Cold War’s destructive forces. The Iranian Revolution destabilized the Middle East, and the rise of terrorism confounded policymakers. These grave issues posed vexing challenges, in addition to the problems besetting Western Europe and Asia. Inside America, Reagan grappled with a crisis of confidence and institutions, a consequence of 1970s domestic tumult and economic downturn.

As Inboden shows, however, the Reagan Revolution cast the foundations of a new world order out of the deadly frost of the Cold War. By January 1989, the United States appeared rejuvenated economically, politically, and militarily. A wave of democracy flowed from Argentina, Chile, and El Salvador to South Korea, the Philippines, and Taiwan. The “evil empire” slouched toward the ash heap of history. Reagan achieved arms reduction with the Soviet Union and, in turn, lessened the chances of nuclear annihilation. “The Iron Curtin and Berlin Wall may have appeared to the naked eye to still be standing,” Inboden observes, “but the forces that would bring them down were already boring away within” (476). The Cold War ended in short order. With the added benefit of structural forces moving to its advantage, the United States reached unipolarity under the leadership of Reagan’s successor and vice president, George H. W. Bush.

“Tear Down This Wall!”: Reagan delivers his famous Berlin Wall speech in front of the Brandenburg Gate on June 12th, 1987.

Second, and stemming from the first argument, Reagan’s grand strategy for waging the Cold War brought the Soviet Union to a “negotiated surrender,” one in which Reagan pursued diplomacy to curb hostilities and reduce the nuclear threat while marshalling all the resources of the United States to extirpate Soviet communism from the earth. Paul Nitze’s walk in the Geneva woods initiated a sprint toward arms reductions, culminating in Reagan signing the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty. During this arms race to zero, as Inboden details, Reagan embarked on the Strategic Defense Initiative, a missile defense system that scientist Edward Teller encouraged, and a cross-section of experts ridiculed, but the Soviets feared. Reagan upgraded the US armed forces, building unrivaled weaponry using new technologies. He unified the Western alliance against the Soviet Union, Warsaw Pact satellites, and other Soviet-supported authoritarians. And, crucially, he brought the Reagan Doctrine to bear on Soviet advancement in the Global South while inspiring dissidents under the yoke of communism with stirring rhetoric and covert assistance.

Third, and responsible for the second argument, Reagan effected a Cold War grand strategy through economic restoration, defense modernization, political and religious liberty promotion, nuclear weapons abolition, anti-communist insurgency financing, and the obsolescence of mutually assured destruction, a set of actions codified by National Security Decision Directives 12, 13, 32, 54, 71, 75, 166, 238, and 302. Here, Inboden daringly—and ultimately persuasively—argues that these prongs of Reagan’s strategy combined to stress the Soviet system and create the conditions that influenced the ascendence of Mikhail Gorbachev, a reformer who embraced Reagan’s diplomatic overtures to mitigate the deleterious effects of American power.

Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, October 1986. — *Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev pose for a photograph during their Reykjavik summit in October 1986. Source: National Archives.*

From this vantage, Reagan’s record may seem unblemished. Yet, despite rendering an overall positive judgement, Inboden does not pull punches on Reagan’s mistakes. In the Global South, Reagan’s policies could be counterproductive and tragic. In Lebanon, for instance, Inboden sharply criticizes Reagan’s handling of the Marine barracks bombing, particularly the president’s decision to not retaliate. “His failure to do so,” Inboden judges, “damaged American credibility, hurt relations with an important ally [France], and invited further terrorist attacks” (256). In Nicaragua, Reagan’s harbor mining operation proved a self-inflicted political disaster. “The mines,” Inboden contends, “did far more damage to America’s global reputation than to the Sandinista economy” (286). So, too, did Reagan’s support for disreputable anticommunist leaders and insurgents compromise his administration’s moral standing.

Inside the White House, meanwhile, Reagan often expressed indifference to perennial squabbling among staff and avoided personal confrontations. His inattention to the minutiae of being president manifested infamously in the Iran-Contra affair, a harebrained scheme involving arms-for-hostages deals with Iran and the diversion of the profits to the Contras in violation of the Boland amendments. Reagan arguably made his greatest blunder with Iran-Contra. As Inboden puts it: Iran-Contra “violated several of his own strategic principles, such as: Negotiate from strength. Keep faith with allies. Incentivize adversaries to engage in good behavior; do not reward bad behavior. Build public support for policies rather than keeping them secret. Even ‘trust but verify’” (423).

By contrasting Iran-Contra with the Geneva Summit, however, Inboden encapsulates the enigmatic Reagan in a single passage. During Iran-Contra, Inboden notes, Reagan exhibited his legendary stubbornness, disregarded sage advice from trusted cabinet members, and deluded himself into thinking that arms for hostages was not his cardinal objective. The scandal could have been easily avoided if Reagan had not followed his worst instincts. At Geneva, conversely, Reagan confidently pursued his creative strategy for ending the Cold War across ten sessions with Gorbachev, laying the groundwork for the conflict’s resolution. He formed a true relationship with Gorbachev while pressuring him on arms reductions and human rights. Reagan was in his element. His courage and convictions both impressed and distressed the Soviet leader.

*Reagan greets Gorbachev at the first session of the Geneva summit in November 1985. Source: National Archives.*

Although Reagan could not quote Thomas Schelling’s chapter and verse, he abhorred nuclear weapons, committed to a singular vision of world order, and possessed an uncanny ability to cut to the heart of policy matters. In a revealing anecdote, Inboden recounts Reagan’s visit to the North American Air Defense Command in 1979, during which General James Hill informed him that America did not maintain a defense against nuclear weapons, only the facility to counterattack. Reagan concluded that relying on mutually assured destruction was no way to live. This grim realization reinforced Reagan’s belief in nuclear abolition and his resolve to peacefully end the Cold War. As Inboden lucidly demonstrates, Reagan articulated the genesis of his plan in the 1970s, established the means during his first term, and delivered on the ends in his second term.

Inboden’s vivid portrayal of Reagan refutes the reversal thesis that he somehow transformed during his second term. The Cold War changed, not Reagan. The 40th president called for the zero option in 1981 and made good on his promise in 1987 by seeking “peace through strength.” (65) Only one version of Reagan served as president, and he comes alive in The Peacemaker.

Joseph A. Ledford is an America in the World Consortium Postdoctoral Fellow at the Henry A. Kissinger Center for Global Affairs at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.

Banner for Winning the Battle of Ideas by Ashlyn Hand

In The Peacemaker: Ronald Reagan, the Cold War, & the World on the Brink, William Inboden offers the first comprehensive analysis of Ronald Reagan’s foreign policy. It is a brilliantly written narrative of complicated characters and strategic vision during the final decade of the Cold War. The Cold War was not a foregone conclusion, and Inboden’s book evokes the peril and urgency of the time. The sobering reality of a potential hot war—one with the capability of obliterating humankind–sits in the narrative like a member of Reagan’s inner circle and demands intellectual empathy from the reader.

Inboden argues that Reagan understood the Cold War fundamentally as a battle of ideas made more complex because of great power competition. This contrasted with the more common understanding of the Cold War as a classic great power competition with an ideological element. This difference in framing meant that Reagan saw Soviet communism as an enemy to be defeated rather than party to a conflict to be managed or contained.

Reagan announcing his administration's Strategic Defense Initiative, March 1983 — *Reagan announcing his administration’s Strategic Defense Initiative–nicknamed “Star Wars”–in March 1983. Source: Wikimedia Commons.*

But how to defeat communism without launching World War III? Inboden describes Reagan’s goal as “negotiated surrender,” in which Reagan applied sufficient pressure and exploited Soviet vulnerabilities to puncture the Soviet system while extending a hand in diplomatic outreach. Inboden recognizes that these goals were, at times, in contradiction. Still, he maintains that Reagan himself “held tenaciously to both” (4).

One central theme in The Peacemaker is Reagan’s commitment to religious freedom and the expansion of liberty. Vis-à-vis the Soviet Union, Reagan pushed for the protection of Jewish refuseniks and persecuted religious believers like the Siberian Seven, a group of Pentecostals who sought refuge in the American Embassy in Moscow in 1978. But as Inboden addresses, Reagan’s Cold War lens could prevent him from acknowledging the brutality of regimes in places like El Salvador and Argentina (106).

A statue symbolizing religious freedom situated in the exterior plaza of the Ronald Reagan International Trade Center in Washington, D. C. The statue forms part of the Oscar Straus Memorial Fountain. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Inboden also highlights the role of historical memory in shaping foreign policy decision-making. Whether it be Bill Casey’s likening Soviet communism to Nazism or the ever-present fear of another Vietnam, the centrality of history is a recurring theme.

The book unfolds chronologically, giving the reader a taste of the sheer volume of strategic challenges facing the Oval Office–a reality Secretary of State George Shultz called the “simultaneity of events” (7). The number of issues vying for presidential attention at any one moment is overwhelming, a situation sometimes made more stressful by the eclectic cast of characters in Reagan’s cabinet. Relying on newly released documents and meticulous archival research, Inboden captures the idiosyncrasies, missteps, and glories of the Reagan team.

In the end, the Cold War outlasted Reagan’s time in office. Still, Inboden maintains, “Reagan had transformed the art of the possible. Things inconceivable in 1980 became reality by 1989” (475). The Peacemaker is key reading material to better understand foreign policy challenges of the Cold War and the strategic vision of the 40th president.

Contraception – Letters from French Women, 1960s-70s

From the editors: One of the joys of working on Not Even Past is our vast library of amazing content. Below we’ve updated and republished Judith Coffin’s illuminating, powerful and moving article on contraception in France, which was first published in 2012. Given recent developments related to reproductive rights, we feel this article could not be more timely.

In 1967, Radio Luxembourg recruited Menie Grégoire, a well-known journalist and expert on “women’s” issues, to host an audience Q&A program on the airwaves. Radio Luxembourg was a privately-owned radio station; its shows were first produced in Paris and then cabled to and broadcast from Luxembourg. But the program reached deep into France. By 1970, nearly 2.5 million listeners tuned in to listen to Grégoire, and her program displaced the advice-from-experts programs and old-school family radio dramas that Radio Luxembourg had carried since the end of World War Two. Remarkably for historians, Grégoire saved and classified all the letters her listeners sent the program (nearly 100,000 of them), and she took notes on their telephone calls (around 16,000). Those papers are now in the archives of the Indre et Loire, outside of Tours, in France. Historians who want to work in the collection need Grégoire’s permission to do so and they cannot reproduce any of the letters in their entirety or identify any of the correspondents. But the letters offer a remarkable portrait of France in the years before and after 1968, the more unusual for being focused on provincial France rather than Paris.

“Pregnant. Just had twins. Wants abortion”: One of the letters in Menie Grégoire’s collection, with her notes on the envelope, at the archives of the Indre et Loire. Photo courtesy of the author.

Listeners wanted to discuss any number of issues: work, housing (in short supply as the economy expanded), credit and debt, the struggles of family businesses, and everything having to do with sex. They asked about sexual dilemmas and crises, pregnancy, family life, parents or in-laws (helpful intrusive, or both), and children, but contraception and abortion topped the list of women’s concerns. (Men wrote as well: they, too, were and are implicated in fertility and reproduction.) In 1967, the same year that Grégoire began broadcasting, the Neuwirth law made it legal for the first time, to discuss contraception in public – and cautiously opened the door to approving the sale of selected oral contraceptives, IUDs, and diaphragms. The law had overwhelming public support, but met institutional resistance. The Pope struck back with a papal encyclical reiterating the Church’s opposition to contraception, startling public opinion in France and much of the world, which had expected the Church to soften its position. Some pharmacists refused to fill prescriptions for the pill and some doctors were reluctant to write them. Many women mistrusted “chemical” treatments. “Nature will take its revenge,” warned a French senator who had opposed the bill, stoking fear: “No cycle, no libido, no fantasies . . . breasts so painful that they can’t be touched, and psychic (sic) problems thrown in for good measure. And nature’s first revenge is that the partner becomes less interested [. . .]” (Gauthier 1999: 151).

*“Scandalized by the program (abortion). a bad influence on youth”: Grégoire’s notes on the envelope of another letter in her collection. Photo courtesy of the author.*

Small wonder that different contraceptive methods and their ramifications loomed so large in the questions listeners sent in to Grégoire’s program. Countless women wrote Grégoire asking where and how they could get a safe and legal abortion – which usually meant going to Switzerland. Grégoire could not provide that information directly, but other listeners often responded by passing on stories of their own experiences. (Abortion would be partially legalized in 1975.)

“Good letter on contraception, abortion, sex ed. but thinks that Gisele Halimi went too far by talking about pleasure.” Halimi, with Simone de Beauvoir, founded the organization “Choice.” Photo courtesy of the author.

The letters in the archive testify to women’s fears — of pregnancy, new forms of contraception, their parents, neighbors, or husbands. They also testify to women’s desire for reliable information, to the humiliations of having to depend on doctors for birth control, to the enormous complications that everyday sexual life created and strategies for dealing with them, and to the widespread wish among ordinary women to control their own decisions about reproduction.

February 13th, 1970:

I am 68, and while listening to you talk about contraception, I can’t help but think that these women are lucky – people are paying attention to them and they dare talk. (Fonds Menie Grégoire 66 J 30)

December 12th, 1967:

“Personal” written on the envelope.

Help me.

I am 17 ½ and like all girls I have my problems. My parents bought a pastry shop and café. We are open every day. I have to hurry home after school to work: wash the dishes, tidy the house, do the laundry, mop the floor, etc. My father works all night, and so he sleeps during the afternoon. My parents never have time: they only have work. They get along very well, but this is not a private life, and certainly not a family life.

[. . .] When I was young, if a pregnant woman came into the store my mother always sent me out — to fetch a broom, or something. They have never explained anything to me. Even last week, when the radio was talking about the pill during the news, my mother turned it off . . . . I can see she is afraid of having this conversation and I don’t want to upset her. (66 J 37, 925)

December 12, 1967th:

Letter from a woman 25, who has been married for four years and has a three-year-old girl. That birth was very difficult, and neither she nor her husband wants more children.

[. . .] every month is nothing but fear and anxiety, fear to find myself pregnant for a second time. That’s my life, always worrying about that fear I can’t describe but that gets inside me and makes me look at everything differently. . . . Of course I have heard talk of means of contraception, but I don’t know who to go to. I am ashamed to go to my doctor and tell him my little problems. I’m afraid he’ll make fun of me. (66 J 230)

February 11th, 1974:

Letter from 45-year old woman.

I’m afraid I am pregnant. We have always used withdrawal. But now my husband is having problems, and so sometimes he isn’t careful. I think you’re going to find me old fashioned . . . . But I have to tell you that we have always dealt with doctors who are quite cold, and we haven’t dared raise the subject. (66 J 231)

December 21st, 1967:

Letter from a regular listener. One of countless stories about extra marital pregnancies and how women and men dealt with them.

When I was 15, I ‘frequented’ a boy one year older. I got pregnant. His parents refused to let us marry. So I had my child, and continued to work on my family’s farm. The boy came back, I got pregnant again, and I agreed to marry him. We lived with my parents. Living with my father was nearly impossible. My husband worked in a bakery, where he worked all night. Since I had two children, I had very little time for him. A combination of that and the “scenes” with my family drove him away, leaving me with my two children. For the next five years, I worked as a maid while my grandmother took care of the children. I only got to come home on the weekends to see them.

[. . .] Then I married a man, a widower with 3 children. We have two children together. I didn’t love him at the beginning but I am learning to. Today many people admire me for marrying a man (who I didn’t love). I have put my life back together. (66 J 37, #932)

December 8th, 1967:

Letter from a 30-year-old.

Please send me the list of the books that you provided during your show last Saturday on sexual education and contraception. Send me the publishers too, so I can order them by mail. Can you include the list from the week before? I wrote down “the pill: yes or no,” but I didn’t get the rest down.

Here’s the problem. [. . .]

I am 30. I have been married nine years. Both of our parents were divorced. This was difficult for me, less so for him.

I am shy. I got married. We had our first child, a daughter. A sunny household. [Ménage sans nuage.] Then my health started to fail. I have thyroid problems and irregular periods. [. . .]

In the summer of 1965, fate descended on us. We didn’t want a child and one was coming.

My husband was transformed. He felt betrayed. He closed himself off. . . . I refused all sexual relations. I love him but I am afraid. I gave in once, and when my period was late, I was seized by the darkest fear. It was only my thyroid.

We still have no sexual relations.

I can’t talk about this with my family doctor – he always just wants another baby. When he comes to our house, he asks whether we have “ordered up a little brother for our girls.” I just stand there. I don’t know how to answer him. (66 J 40, #1805)

July 17th, 1971:

Letter from 27 year old, responding to another young woman’s story on Grégoire’s program.

I don’t know how to tell you about this, I’ve never spoken about it (except to my husband).

I got pregnant just before we were married. We went to a doctor who gave me a shot to bring back my period [these were hormone shots], and nothing happened, I was pregnant. Horrible.

[She was the third of five girls, she said. She couldn’t tell her parents.]

My mother has a lot of principles (for her, an unwed mother ‘une fille mere’ is a bitch ‘une chienne’) and she calls herself a Christian. My father is very strict. Everyone knows him in the village, and everyone likes him, but he is completely rigid with his family. When I was working, I wasn’t allowed to go out at night. [. . .]

I had an abortion. That cost us 100,000 francs. I was incredibly lucky to have an elderly nurse who didn’t massacre me. Then I had a D and C.

After that, I used a diaphragm for three years. Then I had a baby.

I hope my child will have a different experience. (66 J 22)

July 5th, 1971:

Letter from a school teacher, married for three years to another school teacher, who is just finishing his military service. She refuses to describe herself in the clichéd terms of women’s magazines. She isn’t “a woman disappointed by marriage” and her husband isn’t “cheating.”

You give such good advice on the radio that I don’t hesitate to write you to tell you my problem.

[. . .] I’m pregnant again and my second baby is going to be born just about a year after the first. [. . .]

I know that lots of women “manage” [‘débrouillent’] as we say, to get rid of a pregnancy that they don’t want. But aren’t they worried about their own lives? I only see one solution – legal abortion done by a doctor, but — where do you go? Who can give you information? There’s a lot of talk about the subject these days, but even so, I think that it is hard for you to find an address for me. I thought about Switzerland. Do you think you could find at least some information? I am only two months pregnant, and I want to do something now. (66 J 228)

May 5th, 1971:

Letter from a woman, 25, married for 7 years. She is unapologetic and angry, and her husband shares her feelings.

I’m writing you about abortion. I am Catholic, though not practicing. So you understand that I would be against, if my case were not so complicated.

I am five months pregnant with my fifth child, and the oldest will be seven years old at the end of the year. I can tell you, if I had been able to find a doctor who would have accepted to give an abortion the right way, I would have been fully willing, despite my principles. But in France there is no possibility, except clandestine and dangerous.

You are going to say that I could have controlled these births. Of course! I took the pill for 18 months, and then something was irregular and I went eight days without taking it and thought I was protected, which only helped me get pregnant.

So I am for abortion in certain cases, though only if under medical supervision. I hope that these Messieurs who make laws will think. I am strong and helped by my husband, and he helps hold me up, but how many other women. [. . .] (66 J 228)

This article is connected to but does not draw from my recent book, Sex, Love, and Letters: Writing Simone de Beauvoir. For more on that book, see

https://notevenpast.org/ihs-book-talk-sex-love-and-letters-writing-simone-de-beauvoir-by-judith-g-coffin-university-of-texas-at-austin-history-faculty-new-book-talk/

https://notevenpast.org/an-intimate-history-of-the-twentieth-century/

https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9781501750540/sex-love-and-letters/

Recent works on the history of sexuality in Europe and the US:

Beth Bailey, “Sexual Revolution(s)” in The Sixties: From Memory to History, edited by David Farber (1994).

George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture and the making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940 (1994).

Hera Cook, The Long Sexual Revolution: English Women, Sex, and Contraception 1800-1975 (2004).

Stephanie Coontz, A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s (2011).

Kate Fisher and Simon Szreter, Sex Before the Sexual Revolution: Intimate Life in England 1918-1963 (2010).

Elaine Tyler May, America and The Pill: A History of Promise, Peril, and Liberation (2010).

NEP Author Spotlight – Alina Scott

The success of Not Even Past is made possible by a remarkable group of writers, both graduate students and faculty. Not Even Past Author Spotlights are designed to celebrate our most prolific authors by bringing all of their published content across the magazine together on a single page. The focus is especially on work published by UT graduate students. In this article, we highlight the extraordinary contributions of Alina Scott who was also Associate Editor and Communications Director of Not Even Past from 2018-20.

Cynthia Attaquin and a Wampanoag Network of Petitioners

Change.org, Ipetition, petitiononline — today, the digital marketplace has spurred the easy distribution of petitions. While they are significant, modern petitioning campaigns offer a different contribution to public discourse than their nineteenth-century counterparts. For women, people of color, and others who had little access to political movers and shakers, petitioning placed them a signature and postage stamp away from the eyes and ears of legislators. Petitions provided grounds to begin a range of other campaigns and simultaneously created a network of canvassers and petitioners.

In 1842, Cynthia Attaquin and 13 other female residents of the Mashpee, a Wampanoag tribe on Cape Cod, petitioned the Massachusetts State Senate to clarify laws regarding the passage of people of color on railroads. Their petition represented a community of color with very specific motivations and understandings about what can come with organized petitioning efforts.

New Books in Native American & Indigenous Studies You Need to Read on Indigenous Peoples' Day

For decades Native American and Indigenous activists have advocated for a move away from Columbus Day. They argue that such commemorations are a reminder of the genocide of Indigenous peoples in the Americas that followed the arrival of Europeans in the region. Because of Indigenous peoples’ activism, legislatures across the US have started to replace the holiday celebrated on October 12th with Indigenous people’s day. This shift is about more than one day of the year. Instead, it encompasses a broader discussion about sovereignty, recognition, and accountability.

Violence Against Black People in America: A ClioVis Timeline

The brutal killing of George Floyd by police in Minneapolis this summer marked a key event in the history of violence against Black Americans. But it was just one of many acts of violence that have been committed in American history. In order to put Floyd’s killing into a larger historical context, our Digital History intern, Haley Price, created four ClioVis timelines to help herself and others learn more about such violence. Alina Scott, a graduate student in the History Department at the University of Texas at Austin and Dr. William Jones, a recent Ph.D. from Rice University, also worked on the timelines, adding relevant scholarship to many of the events to assist readers who want to learn more. Below, Haley, Alina, and Will introduce the timeline by telling us how the timelines were compiled, what they learned in making them, and how they think the timelines can serve as a resource for others. While the timelines are not comprehensive, they provide viewers with a sense of the historical forces at play across time and illustrate how the murder of George Floyd in the summer of 2020 fits into a larger pattern of historical violence.

As readers will see, there are four timelines. We originally started making one timeline. But, as the number of events grew, we decided to break the larger timeline into three separate timelines. You now see an “Overview” timeline that includes 153 events. We then divided the overview timeline into three thematic timelines: “Slavery in America,” “Jim Crow to Civil Rights,” and “Police and Civilian Brutality.”

This semester (Fall 2020), Not Even Past announced a collaboration with This is Democracy, a podcast hosted and developed by Dr. Jeremi Suri and his son Zachary. Jeremi Suri holds the Mack Brown Distinguished Chair for Leadership in Global Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin. He is a professor in the University’s Department of History and the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs. NEP Associate Editor, Alina I. Scott sat down with the Suris to discuss the origins of This is Democracy, their reasons for selecting guests, and much more.

Read the transcription or listen to the full interview here…

Digital Archive Review-Authorship and Advocacy: The Native American Petitions Dataverse

Embedded in the (digital) archive are structures of power. The Native American Petitions Dataverse shifts those structures by attributing authorship to tribal and Native individuals in hundreds of colonial and early American era petitions and memorials. However, is attributing authorship the sole responsibility of those curating digital collections? And even more simply, how does one acknowledge Indigenous authorship in the colonial and early American archive? Jane Anderson addresses this in part by saying “wherein colonialism is understood as a cultural project of control, archives function as the locus for the cultural technology of rule” (234). A “decolonial” project, then, would be would offer counter-narratives to the dominant methods of organizing, the hierarchy of archival sources, and the voices represented in the colonial archive.

Read the full article here.

Native Literatures and Indigenous Peoples' Day: A Brief Historiography

October 14th is what most people know as Columbus Day. However, for many Indigenous peoples, the celebration of Christopher Columbus is a reminder of the generations of trauma and settler conquest of Native nations and lands. For that reason, several states, including Alaska, Minnesota, Vermont, and South Dakota (and cities like Austin), have chosen to rename the holiday Indigenous Peoples’ Day. Native activists have been at the forefront of this movement….

On Indigenous Peoples’ Day, I’d like to suggest some easy additions to your syllabus, playlists, and bookshelf. This is a brief review of some seemingly untraditional academic works by Native authors, scholars, artists, and creators. My reflection on Native literature here includes scholarship in a number of forms that could easily be incorporated into a syllabus or added to your Comprehensive Exam List. This list is a starting point and I’d encourage readers to go further by listening to Native leaders, scholars, and artists.

Missing Signatures: The Archives at First Glance

On February 21, 1831, a petition containing the signatures of over 800 Connecticut residents was submitted to the United States Congress on behalf of the indigenous population in the South who were facing relocation. The petition acknowledged Native peoples as the “original proprietors of the soil” and its authors claimed that to remain silent would be criminal and cowardly. The petition was not unique, as archivists recognized when organizing it in a folder containing several other petitions with fairly similar appeals. The threat of the forced relocation of Native Americans caught the attention of many activists and benevolent societies in the North as well as the South.

Review of This Land is Their Land: The Wampanoag Indians, Plymouth Colony, and the Troubled History of Thanksgiving by David J. Silverman

““We do ourselves no good by hiding from the truth,” a Wampanoag elder told David Silverman as he prepared This Land is Their Land. In upward of 400 pages, Silverman suggests that, by “we” the elder was referring to those who would prefer to cling to heartwarming narratives of turkey and peace, rather than grapple with the details of the historical record, and the devastation the “first thanksgiving” left in its wake.”

Read the full review here…

Alina also compiled a number of indexes and lists as Assistant Editor of Not Even Past, including Black Resistance and Resilience: Collected Works From Not Even Past, Gender & Sexuality: Collected Works from Not Even Past, and Resources For Teaching Black History. She has also been featured in Creating a Collective Conversation: A Tribute to Joan Neuberger, The Public Archive, and The Public Archive: Woven Into History.

The Sword and The Shield: A Conversation with Peniel E. Joseph (Part I)

This is Part I of a conversation with Dr. Peniel Joseph. In this conversation, Dr Joseph discusses his new book, The Sword and the Shield: The Revolutionary Lives of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. This dual biography of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King upends longstanding preconceptions to transform our understanding of the twentieth century’s most iconic African American leaders. The Not Even Past Conversations Series was born out of the extraordinary circumstances of the COVID-19 pandemic. It takes the form of an interview held informally (usually at home) over Zoom with leading scholars and teachers at the University of Texas at Austin and beyond. The following is a lightly edited transcript of a conversation between Adam Clulow and Peniel Joseph.

AC: Thank you so much for joining me today. You start the book with a meeting that takes place on March 26, 1964, between Malcolm X and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Remarkably, and as you write, this is the only time they actually met. Can you tell us about this meeting and how it came about? And the bigger question that runs through the whole book is how should we characterize their relationship? You use a few different terms. You talk about them as political partners, kindred spirits, and alter egos. How should we understand this meeting and their relationship more generally?

And do you think at that moment in March 1964, they’re aware of this partnership? They’re clearly thinking about each other. They’re reading each other’s writing. They’re listening to each other’s speeches now. They’re intertwined in all sorts of fascinating and productive ways but at this moment of meeting, is there an awareness of this partnership or do you think that lies ahead?

PJ: I think there’s an awareness. I think King is very careful until Malcolm X’s assassination. King utilizes Malcolm for leverage in the political mainstream. Malcolm X represents for white Americans, including elected officials the alternative to King. So if you think King is too militant, King is too radical. Then you’ve got Malcolm X to deal with, someone who is the boldest critic of white supremacy of his generation. And so I think that Malcolm and King realize what the other is doing for them.

But because King is so mainstream, Malcolm is the person who’s more willing to be seen with King. And that makes sense, right? Because when you think about King, it’s almost like when you think about a corporation that’s too big to fail. Now Malcolm, as we see by 1963, becomes this international figure as well. Starting in 1959 but especially in 1963-64, he’s traveling overseas. He spends 25 weeks in Africa, the Middle East. The famous Oxford Union debate. So he’s really becoming more of a global figure.

But the person who is a global leader, who’s really been given the imprimatur of the world, of mainstream politics, is the Nobel Prize winner. For these reasons, King is less interested in a formal partnership with Malcolm X. And Malcolm would be more interested because King has more to lose. But by the time Malcolm is assassinated and as we see with Watts in a lot of ways what’s going to happen to King, is that he loses his alter ego. Yes. Stokely Carmichael and King. But King loses that Malcolm X figure. And King is going to be forced to become further radicalized. And I argue really, in the later chapters, for the radical King, the revolutionary King.

Martin Luther King and Malcolm X waiting for a press conference by Marion Trikosko. 1964. (via Library of Congress)

AC: You talk about these two intertwined but different notions of radical black citizenship and radical black dignity that stand at the center of the book. Can you explain in more detail what you mean?

In this book, you argue for a more expansive understanding of these two remarkable figures. In particular, you talk about rescuing them from the suffocating mythology that surrounds them. I was so struck by was this phrase, how conventional images do no justice to these complex and changing figures. Does this apply equally to both of them or is the mythology more restrictive for Malcolm X or Dr King?

PJ: You know, I think it restricts both of them. So for Malcolm, this idea of being this black warrior really takes away from who he is. We’re not allowed to see the vulnerability, the sense of humor, the fear at times that he has, the shortcomings. Ossie Davis, the late Ossie Davis, an extraordinary actor and activist, has this great eulogy for Malcolm X, saying he was our living Black manhood, our shining Black prince. And there’s positives there, positives to have Malcolm as this kind of role model. But there’s negatives as well when he becomes somebody that’s impenetrable. Any figure, every leader has faults and flaws, man or woman, because they are human beings like the rest of us. So, Malcolm, when we take him out of that mythology, one, we see what a truly extraordinary figure he was. Because, and I say this in the book, Malcolm experiences racial trauma at a very early age. His father is murdered. His mother is institutionalized. His father is murdered by Black Legion white supremacists. He has this wayward youth that he admits in his autobiography, committing crimes, working odd jobs. He’s arrested for crimes he did commit and given a rather harsh sentence and spends 76 months in jail. And then he really becomes this person who is this intellectual, who is this political leader, this deep thinker, and then this great organizer. And so I think when you label Malcolm as just a warrior, you lose something. I think it hurts Black men because of this idea that Black men don’t have the full range of emotions. You know, it hurts you there.

Malcolm X, half-length portrait, facing right / World-Telegram & Sun photo by Ed Ford. 1964. (via Library of Congress)

Two. You’re unable to see what a truly, extraordinarily supple mind and diplomat Malcolm is, because he transforms from a prosecuting attorney into a statesman by 64. What’s so interesting is in Europe and the Middle East and Africa – even though Malcolm speaks at Harvard, at Yale – they see that intellect and embrace him more eagerly than Americans. Right. That’s why he’s at Oxford Union. And they see this brilliant man. Even when people disagree. Because the thing about brilliance and ideas, as you know, is that, of course, we’re not going to all agree on everything. The extraordinary nature of ideas is that we can disagree, hopefully civilly. Right? Well, we learn from each other in those disagreements. Right. And so Malcolm speaks at Middle Eastern universities, African universities, European universities. And they’re interested in him not only because he’s a political activist, but because of his brilliant mind. So he suffers in the standard mythology.

And then King suffers in ways at times on a bigger scale, because King is still a larger, more global figure. When you think about the holiday, when you think about the annual celebrations, when you think about it, King is virtually the only Black American figure accorded this monument in Washington. I mean, you know, we haven’t done that for other Black figures. You know, Harriet Tubman. Sojourner Truth. There’s people that we could pick. Ida B. Wells just won a Pulitzer Prize posthumously from Columbia University for her journalism against lynching in the late 19th, early 20th century. So we have these truly extraordinary figures. But King is the exceptional one. The two most well-known Black figures in American history are King and now Barack Obama. And when we think of King’s suffocating mythology, we don’t want to talk about how much of a revolutionary Dr. King was. We don’t want to say that Dr. King was interested in social democracy, that Dr. King had a criticism against capitalism, that Dr. King remained nonviolent, but the reason Dr. King was assassinated is because Dr. King was using nonviolence to coerce the country into doing things it doesn’t want to do, namely Black citizenship and dignity.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., half-length portrait, facing front] / World Telegram & Sun photo by Dick DeMarsico. 1964. (Via Library of Congress)

And so King is this anti imperialist, anti-war revolutionary and King becomes a fire breather. What’s so extraordinary is how you can be that radical. And he’s not cursing. He’s not threatening violence. And he’s trying to use the moral force of the witness. Right. John Lewis does the same thing. Congressman John Lewis, when you’re saying you’re going to reveal to the world the opponent you’re up against is using immoral tactics just through your witness. And if the police commit acts of violence, we’re going to roll ourselves up into a ball and let the world watch and the world will decide. Is this the land of the free and the home of the brave? That’s who Martin Luther King Jr becomes.

And the interesting thing about Malcolm and Martin is Malcolm had criticized the march on Washington as the Farce on Washington because he said they didn’t paralyze the city. By 67, 68, as early as 65, Dr. King says that’s the next step. We’re going to use nonviolence to paralyze cities in his essay Beyond Los Angeles. So the two start to have a meeting of the minds. Even though Malcolm is no longer alive by February 21st, 1965. So it’s truly extraordinary.

Part 2 of this conversation with Dr. Peniel Joseph is available here. The banner image comes from Malcolm X and MLK, Jr., mural, E. W. alley view, N. of Manchester Ave. towards Cimarron, Los Angeles, California, 2010. https://www.loc.gov/item/2015647507/

PENIEL JOSEPH holds a joint professorship appointment at the LBJ School of Public Affairs and the History Department in the College of Liberal Arts at The University of Texas at Austin. He is also the founding director of the LBJ School’s Center for the Study of Race and Democracy. His career focus has been on “Black Power Studies,” which encompasses interdisciplinary fields such as Africana studies, law and society, women’s and ethnic studies, and political science. His newest book, The Sword and the Shield: The Revolutionary Lives of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr., was published in March 2020 and is available now.

More from Dr. Joseph on Not Even Past

Consider also reading:

A Record Held until 2015

Beer Republic

US-American Gemütlichkeit

Fight against Temperance

A Revolution Coming Full Circle?

Expurgated Books as an Archive of Practice

February 13th, 1970:

December 12th, 1967:

December 12, 1967th:

February 11th, 1974:

December 21st, 1967:

December 8th, 1967:

July 17th, 1971:

July 5th, 1971:

May 5th, 1971:

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