Stacy Vlasits, Author at Not Even Past

Robyn Metcalfe on London’s 19th Century Meat Market

By Robyn Metcalfe

For at least a century, food markets have been disappearing from our urban landscapes. Beginning in the early 19th century, cities began to uproot food markets and place them in the suburbs or even further away. It has only been within the last two decades that fresh food is reappearing in the form of farmers markets. Why was food removed from the cities in the first place?

The story of the removal of the Smithfield live cattle market suggests an answer to that question. In 1855, London’s live cattle market, the world’s largest meat market, closed and moved to Islington, a suburb of the City. It took fifty years of arguing in Parliament before a bill was passed to remove the cattle market. Surely, an investigation of why it took so long would illustrate how cities modernized in the nineteenth century.

Food markets, the heart and soul, if not stomach, of urban centers were central and visible representations of urban communities. Throughout history, cities appeared as provisioning entrepôts, often located near transportation networks such as rivers and oceans. London, first to experience an industrial revolution, was also first to reconsider how its food markets fit into a new, modern conception of urban identity. The removal of London’s live cattle market heralded similar relocations of food markets in other cites, such as Paris, New York, Boston, and Chicago. These cities reacted to the industrialization and modernization of their food markets in ways consistent with their own urban culture.

The transformation of urban space also reflected a change in the way city dwellers viewed food. Since the Middle Ages, Smithfield had been a fluid space with few sharp angles and corners, nestled at the terminus of a network of cattle droving roads. With the arrival of the reform era and utilitarianism, urban spaces became rationalized, straightened, covered, and controlled. When the live cattle market moved out of Smithfield, meat moved away from consumers, removing the sights, smells, and connection between production and consumption. Urban wholesale markets moved outside the metropolis, repurposing rural space and connecting the City to the countryside as railroads enabled more meat to be slaughtered outside London and transported to the City by railway. In similar ways, these new transport networks and markets enlarged London’s role in a global and imperial food system. These connections situated the London meat market in a larger context of global trade.

Also by mid-nineteenth century, London had experienced industrialization, doubling in size and increasing in economic prosperity. The city suffered two cholera epidemics and gained a new appreciation for the fragility of public health and the fatal consequences of filth for a crowded urban population. The public was more informed with increasing literacy and number of publications that described urban problems and potential solutions. The reform era (1820s-1840s) compelled London’s inhabitants to address urban blight, corruption, sanitation, and environment. Utilitarianism sent improvers into the streets to find rational means for reorganizing streets and urban space. Railroads sliced into London’s corpus, connecting the metropolis in new ways to the countryside and other continents. Individuals with a new sentimentality and sensitivity towards nature joined groups such as the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. Restrictions on the British economy were loosened, bringing foreign livestock into the market, drawing upon concerns about government regulation. London’s markets were becoming free of the old system governed by guilds and entrepreneurs found business opportunities within an expanding consumer market. Retail specialists appeared on London’s streets as covered modern market spaces took the place of the old market fields. During the nineteenth century, industrialization provoked new technologies, increased demand by an expanding middle class, and tore up the landscape with new streets and railroads. By 1850, London was ready for a more rational and mechanized provisioning system.

A walk through the Smithfield Central Markets today offers visual reminders of Smithfield’s history as the site of Britain’s largest live cattle market during the Victorian period. Located in West Smithfield in the City of London, the Central Markets contain the wholesale meat trade for London. The markets, opened in 1868, settled into the space previously occupied by the live cattle market in 1855. Today the Central Markets teem with wholesale customers, porters, and meat salesmen from ten at night until late morning the following day. The meat business still permeates the area around the Smithfield Central Markets. Street names telegraph Smithfield’s past: Skinner’s Lane, Giltspur (from its history as a venue for knights and their tournaments), and Cow Cross Lane.

The struggle for a meat market in Smithfield continues. In 2004, SAVE, a London-based building conservation organization announced a campaign called, “Don’t Butcher Smithfield” to resist development of the Smithfield General Market Buildings. The City had an elaborate plan to replace the Victorian buildings of the Smithfield Live Cattle Market designed by Horace Jones with an office block. The campaigns of SAVE and English Heritage were successful and in August, 2008, the Secretary of State for Local Government and Communities denied the City the right to redevelop the General Market Building. But in 2012, property developers submitted another plan for new office and retail space in the historic market. It is unclear how long the old Victorian market will last in the heart of London’s historic Smithfield.

Further Reading

Roger Horowitz, Putting Meat on the American Table: Taste, Technology, Transformation, (2005).
Horowitz describes a history of the relationship of meat and consumers that is similar to the European experience.

Paula Young Lee, ed. Meat, Modernity, and the Rise of the Slaughterhouse, (2008).
An edited selection of essays that address issues related to meat in our cities. Meat markets heighten concerns about sanitation and animal welfare.

George Dodd, The Food of London, (1856, Reprinted 2010).
A detailed description of London’s food system through the eyes of a 19th-century journalist and surveyor.

Carolyn Steel, Hungry City: How Food Shapes Our Lives, (2009)
A British architect describes how cities and food markets have evolved throughout history.

A Historian in Hong Kong: Living in the Future-Looking at the Past

by Peter Hamilton

Hong Kong is a strange place in which to research the past. This dizzyingly dense city of seven million people moves faster than either New York or London. As any resident can tell you, trains on the MTR arrive every three minutes and you will have cell phone service for the entire journey. Buildings from the 1970s are considered old and rapidly fall to make way for opulent luxury towers and designer stores. Real estate speculation is the local obsession, while historical preservation remains a funny fringe interest. From the bottom to the summit of Hong Kong’s steep socioeconomic pyramid, the name of the game is making and spending money. And whether they are pursuing degrees, scoping flat prices, or waiting in line to exchange an iPhone 4S for that new iPhone 5, most Hong Kongers are relentlessly focused onward and (hopefully) upward.

To research and write for a living is thus already odd. But it is the approach of a historian that most often baffles people here. At meals and social events, I find myself explaining primary source research to people who think I am kidding. They assume that I should just read other scholars’ books all day in some windowless dungeon. When I explain that instead I spend my time looking through collections of old documents, there is often a double take. People love to hear that I have to wear white gloves and they giggle with glee when I affirm that no one monitors when I arrive or leave. Their grin wryly says “Oh, I’m onto your game now!” Occasionally someone will lean in and ask, “Where exactly do you go to do this?” Most have never heard of this peculiar place called “The Public Records Office.”

This disbelief only grows when I explain what I study. If I answer broadly “U.S. and modern Chinese history,” a telling response is “Well, which is it?” Due to nationalistic textbooks and the sensationalist media in both countries, America and China figure in public thinking as such radically divergent, oppositional entities that their histories could not possibly interlink. And when I answer more specifically that I study Americans living in Hong Kong from 1937 to 1997, their expressions transform from curiosity to pity. “What a fool!” their arched eyebrows and pursed lips convey. In most Hong Kongers’ eyes, this topic seems nonexistent or even slightly absurd. Several people have questioned, “You mean British people in Hong Kong, right?”

Ironically, I love these reactions. As a historical guppy in a maelstrom of corporate sharks and glamorous clownfish, I then receive this amazing gift—the thrilling, brief, and fleeting opportunity to say something that will change their mind. I comb through research treasures gleaned from the archive and interviews to convey why I choose to spend my time in this way. Do you know that posh and prestigious social club? Well, did you know its first Chinese member was a Hong Kong heiress who was denied admission before she became an American and used her new citizenship to shatter their segregation? Or what about any of these signature Hong Kong companies, all of which were founded by Americans living here? And what about that university that you attended? You might not guess that the man who built it almost singlehandedly was a tireless Chinese American scholar!

My hope in these exchanges is not to appear smug, or simply to impress people here, or even to prove my topic’s value. My earnest and naïve wish is to force them just to wonder—to pause in the headlong profit race and see the magical Hong Kong that I do. For here is where Sun Yat-sen, Ho Chi Minh, and José Rizal each took refuge, forever changing the future of China, Vietnam, and the Philippines. Hong Kong is not the periphery of China but the capital of the global China diaspora. Hong Kong has been a nexus of globalization for nearly two centuries and has the historical Armenian, Parsee, Sikh, Hyderabadi, Russian, Filipino, West African, Portuguese, French, Dutch, Swiss, Italian, Japanese, Korean, and American communities to prove it. Despite all its achievements and its many reinventions, Hong Kong rarely takes pride in its momentous historical significance. Perhaps perpetual redevelopment makes the past difficult to envision. But when I tell people what I do here, at heart I am really hoping to share what I know to be true—that Hong Kong’s past is impossibly global and startlingly rich.

Although it is more comfortable to be a graduate student in the nurturing scholarly cocoon of UT, this experience of constantly explaining myself to non-academics keeps the overwhelming endeavor of dissertation research in sparkling perspective. Every day, Hong Kong’s bustle reminds me how strange my work is and how lucky I am. This city unexpectedly reminds me of what scholarship should really be about—sharing the knowledge that we are so privileged to cultivate and harvest. On the opposite side of the planet from Austin, my heart still races when the archivists bring me my daily trove of dusty folders and crumbling papers. And I can’t wait to tell my friends about what I find.

A Historian Views Spielberg’s Lincoln (2012)

By Nicholas Roland

Steven Spielberg’s latest historical drama chronicles the 16th President’s final months and the struggle for passage of the 13th Amendment by the House of Representatives in 1865. Lincoln’s enduring popularity in both scholarly and popular circles means that this film will be subjected to intense scrutiny and debate by historians, movie reviewers, and culture warriors.

Fortunately, Lincoln is blessed with a remarkably accomplished cast. Daniel Day Lewis is Abraham Lincoln. Having supposedly read over 100 books on Lincoln in preparation for the role, he manages to convincingly replicate many aspects of Lincoln’s persona and physical aura. Lincoln’s purportedly high voice, his wry sense of humor and knack for storytelling, his slouched posture and awkward gait, and the overwhelming weariness incurred by the “fiery trial” of war all ring true in this portrayal. Mary Todd Lincoln (Sally Fields) is portrayed as a more or less sympathetic character, in accordance with more recent scholarship rejecting long-standing depictions of Mrs. Lincoln as a shrew, possibly suffering from a mental illness. Instead, Fields plays a First Lady who is grief stricken over the loss of her son Willie and weary from the stress of a wartime presidential marriage. During a scene at a White House reception, she draws on her social training as a daughter of the Kentucky planter elite to skillfully and acerbically defend herself and her husband against political critics. Secretary of State William H. Seward (David Strathairn) also appears as an important source of support for Lincoln. Seward cuts patronage deals with lame duck Democratic Congressmen in order to help secure the passage of the 13th Amendment and acts as a sort of political muse to Lincoln. Seward harangues and cajoles Lincoln on policy and political strategy but ultimately serves as a loyal ally in carrying out Lincoln’s intent, a depiction born out in the historical record. Thaddeus Stevens (Tommy Lee Jones) is also a convincing secondary character, albeit with some historical problems. A leader of the Radical wing of the Republican Party, Stevens is accurately portrayed as an advocate of racial equality and a vehement opponent of secessionists. However, a scene revealing the purported relationship between Stevens and his African-American housekeeper risks conveying the sense that this relationship was the primary motivation for Stevens’ crusade for the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments.

Despite the excellent performances turned in by the star-studded cast, Lincoln has a number of shortcomings from the historian’s point of view. Based on Doris Kearns-Goodwin’s Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, the film is at times a taut political thriller and at times the inspirational story of the final abolition of American slavery. The choice to focus on the last few months of Lincoln’s presidency is appropriate given the ultimate outcome of the American Civil War: the defeat of the

Confederacy and the end of legal slavery. However, this narrow focus glosses over Lincoln’s famously ambiguous views on slavery and racial equality. Spielberg’s Lincoln appears committed to rapidly ending slavery and even suggests that suffrage might be extended to black men in the future. In his lifetime, Lincoln was consistently criticized by Radical Republicans and African-American leaders such as Frederick Douglass for his equivocation on slavery and lenient plans for Reconstruction. Lincoln seems to have held a lifelong commitment to the free-soil ideology that every man, white or black, has the right to earn for himself by the sweat of his brow. Despite this conviction, Lincoln repeatedly stated that he wished to preserve the Union, either with or without slavery. Lincoln viewed the Emancipation Proclamation and the enlistment of black troops as a wartime expedient to preserve the Union.

To its credit, Lincoln does make some references to contradictory statements Lincoln made earlier in his presidency about slavery. Despite this nod toward the complexity of Lincoln’s political career, Spielberg risks reviving the Great Emancipator myth. The best evidence suggests that Abraham Lincoln personally abhorred slavery as an institution while simultaneously denying the concept of racial equality. Some historians have argued that Lincoln’s personal beliefs underwent a significant change during the last year of the Civil War, and Lincoln did in fact suggest to the reconstructed government of Louisiana in 1864 that “very intelligent” black men and “those who have fought gallantly in our ranks” might be given access to the ballot box. As depicted by the film, during the 1864 Presidential campaign Lincoln threw his support behind passage of the 13th Amendment and was active in securing its passage in 1865. Nonetheless Lincoln never became a radical abolitionist like Thaddeus Stevens or an outright advocate of racial equality. Lincoln continued to put forth plans for the resettlement of freedmen to the Caribbean even after issuing the Emancipation Proclamation and possibly even after the passage of the 13th Amendment.

Too narrow a focus on the actions of Lincoln and other white politicians unfortunately downplays the role played by both enslaved and free African-Americans in the Civil War-era struggle for freedom. Black characters largely appear passive in Spielberg’s account. Kate Masur points out that White House servants Elizabeth Keckley and William Slade were deeply involved in the free black activist community of Washington, D.C. Instead of appearing as dynamic characters within the President’s household, they are relegated to cardboard roles as domestics. Keckley has one brief, earnest discussion with Lincoln, but cannot offer a vision of black life outside of slavery to the President. Frederick Douglass, who visited the White House during the time depicted in the film, does not appear at all. The most assertive black character in the movie is a soldier who confronts the President about past ill-treatment and future aspirations. Lincoln artfully deflects the soldier’s concerns and the scene ends with the soldier quoting the Gettysburg Address. The one-dimensional black characters in Lincoln are unrecognizable as depictions of African Americans during the Civil War. Early in the war, when Lincoln strenuously wished to avoid confronting slavery, black enslaved workers fled to federal lines and congregated around federal camps such as Fortress Monroe, Virginia. Congress passed the Confiscation Act of 1861 in reaction to this development, marking the first movement by the federal government to separate rebellious slaveholders from their enslaved workers. While Lincoln continued to insist that the war was a struggle to preserve the Union, African Americans did not wait for the Emancipation Proclamation to turn the war into much more than a sectional conflict. Slavery was destroyed as much by their individual actions as by the political workings of white politicians.

A number of smaller inaccuracies and stylistic issues can be pointed out. For example, Alexander H. Coffroth is depicted as a nervous Pennsylvania Democrat pressured into voting for the 13th Amendment. Coffroth actually served as a pallbearer at Lincoln’s funeral, indicating that he was more than a simple political pawn of the White House. In another scene supposedly taking place after the fall of Richmond and Petersburg, Lincoln solemnly rides through a horrific battlefield heaped with hundreds of bodies. A battlefield such as this would likely represent one of the worst instances of combat in the Civil War. Richmond and Petersburg fell primarily due to General Ulysses S. Grant’s maneuvering to cut Confederate supply lines rather than through bloody fighting on the scale Spielberg depicts. Lincoln did in fact visit Richmond after it had fallen and was greeted there by hundreds of jubilant freed slaves in the streets of the former Confederate capital. The chance to depict such a poignant scene is not taken up by the filmmakers in favor of a continued focus on the political and military struggle waged by white Americans.Perhaps most inexplicably, the movie does a poor job of identifying the various cabinet officials and Congressmen central to the plot. While this poses little obstacle to historians familiar with the time period, the average moviegoer is likely to be somewhat unsure of the exact role or importance of several characters. This is especially curious given the fact that obscure members of a Confederate peace delegation such as Confederate Senator R.M.T. Hunter and Assistant Secretary of War John A. Campbell are explicitly identified on screen.

Taken on the whole, Spielberg’s Lincoln is a masterful politician and a dynamic character, able to carefully mediate between his own evolving beliefs and the political realities of his age. This interpretation falls solidly in line with the mainstream of Lincoln scholarship. For an incredibly complex, sphinxlike figure such as Abraham Lincoln, perhaps we shouldn’t expect a more thorough interpretation from Hollywood.

***

You may also like:

Henry Wiencek’s NEP review of Eric Foner’s The Fiery Trial, which examines Lincoln’s changing views on race and slavery

Photo Credits:

Series of Thaddeus Stevens photographs by Matthew Brady, sometime between 1860 and 1865 (Image courtesy of Brady National Photographic Art Gallery)

Lydia Hamilton Smith, housekeeper and alleged common law wife of Thaddeus Stevens, photographed sometime prior to 1868 (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

Mary Todd Lincoln, 1846-7 (Image courtesy of Library of Congress)

Lincoln depicted as The Great Emancipator in Thomas Ball’s statue, Lincoln Park, Washington, DC (Image courtesy of Library of Congress)

Promotional studio image of Abraham Lincoln (left) and Daniel Day-Lewis as Lincoln (right)

Images used under Fair Use Guidelines

Saint and Nation: Santiago, Teresa of Avila, and Plural Identities in Early Modern Spain by Erin Kathleen Rowe (2011)

by Chloe Ireton

In 1617 King Phillip IV of Castile controversially elevated Teresa of Avila as patron saint of Spain, joining the current patron saint, Apostle Santiago the Great. Teresa de Avila (1515-1582) had been a sixteenth century Carmelite nun and reformer of the Carmelite Order. There is no doubt that in the early seventeenth century, amidst Spanish Catholic tensions with northern Europe, Teresa’s theological focus on heresy and the Counter-Reformation seemed relevant to the contemporary needs of Spain. In celebrating Teresa on a national scale, Phillip IV was also continuing his family’s devotion to Teresa, as his grandfather and father had campaigned for Teresa’s beatification and sanctification in Rome. Phillip IV’s appointment of Teresa as patron saint, however, triggered a fierce letter writing campaign led by devotees of Santiago. Santiaguistas wrote hundreds of letters from 1617 until 1630, when a Papal decision revoked Philip IV’s decree. The number of writers involved and the speed with which letters were exchanged in such a short period of time illustrates the dawn of new printing technologies that allowed wider dissemination of letters and pamphlets throughout Castile and the Kingdoms of Spain.

In Saint and Nation, Erin Kathleen Rowe investigates the arguments used by the Santiaguistas and the Teresianos in the letter writing campaigns of 1617-1630. Rowe demonstrates that these high stakes debates on sacred issues produced an early modern discourse on the nature and meaning of the Spanish nation. The letter writers asserted different types of geographical jurisdictions, national unities, and imagined communities by employing varying terms to designate the nation, such as: “Spanish monarchy” (Monarquía Española), Spains (Las Españas), Spain (España), Hispania (Hispania), The Crown of Castile (Las Coronas de castilla), and the kingdoms of Castile (El Reino / Los Reinos de Castilla).

Writers representing each saint sought to define the Spanish nation by drawing on their saint’s unique features. Santiaguistas argued that Santiago was already widely perceived as the patron saint of Spain. They argued that along with his popularity as a “Moorslayer” (Matamoros), who had heroically aided Castile’s centuries long Reconquista in numerous decisive battles, Santiago was also the founder of Christian Spain. According to his supporters, Santiago had converted the people of Spain to Christianity in biblical times. The fact that his martyred relics had travelled to Galicia upon his death, further illustrated his close affinity with and loyalty to the Spanish nation. Santiaguistas foresaw that sharing patronage threatened Santiago’s dominant position in Spain and vigorously argued that since Santiago perfectly represented Spanish history and nation, he should fulfil the role of patron saint alone. While the Santiaguistas were conservative in their claim that antiquity was the most important condition for patronage, Teresianos radically reconceptualised the nation by attaching importance to the modern over the ancient. They argued that because Teresa was both new and contemporary, she offered better guidance to the problems of the seventeenth century, such as the Reformation and Counter-Reformation. They argued that because Santiago was such an old saint, he could not possibly understand Spain’s contemporary woes.

Copy of a 1571 painting of Teresa de Avila

Rowe provides a particularly interesting analysis of gender conceptions of the nation employed by the different writers. The Teresianos either represented Teresa as a female with male attributes, for example with military clothing, or as the perfect female companion to either the King or to Santiago the Great. Sometimes they represented the two co-patrons as married. Inevitably the Santiaguistas found such notions abhorrent and tended to criticize the idea of a female national patron, thereby conforming to Renaissance conceptions of gender. However when the Archbishop of Seville criticized the Teresa’s saintliness based on her gender and used a vocabulary with double meanings in sacred and secular life in order to represent her as less than respectable, he was sternly criticised by Teresianos who argued that the Archbishop had verged on heresy.

Santiago Matamoros, or “Saint James the Moor-slayer” (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

Rowe concludes that while this debate about the nature of the Spanish nation was multifaceted, it only represented the voices of intellectuals, politicians, and theologians in Castile. Those in the surrounding kingdoms, such as Aragon and Portugal, paid little if any attention to the “great debate” on co-patronage. While Rowe could be criticized for exaggerating the importance of the co-patronage debate and its relevance to definitions of early modern Spanish nationhood, given the complete lack of interest of those outside of Castile, the case study has significant resonance throughout Spanish history. Who exactly defines and imposes the idea of Spain? The central region of Spain has found it necessary throughout its history to forcibly insert the peripheral regions into definitions of the nation, even though those in the periphery may have been ambivalent or even opposed to becoming part of the Spanish nation. Both Santiago’s and Teresa’s lasting importance in narratives of Spanish nationhood also illustrate the centrality of these early seventeenth-century debates in contemporary society.

A frescoe depicting the 1431 Reconquista Battle of Higueruela

Rowe’s study of the origins of Spanish national discourse in sacred debate is beautifully written, well crafted, and coherently organized. It is intriguing, highly informative, and original. Not all scholars will welcome Rowe’s argument that the earliest definitions and debates about the nation rested on discussions of scared and spiritual matters, but it is a courageous and highly important study.

All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

2012 and the End of the World: The Western Roots of the Maya Apocalypse by Matthew Restall and Amara Solari (2011)

by Kristie Flannery

While many in the US thought the world would end on November 6 when the guy they didn’t vote for won the Presidency, another whole section of the population is convinced that the apocalypse will come on December 21, 2012; the fast approaching winter solstice, in accordance with predictions made by ancient Mayans. A Reuter’s poll of 16,262 people in 20 countries conducted in May this year showed that “nearly fifteen per cent of people worldwide believe the world will end during their lifetime and ten per cent think the Mayan calendar could signify it will happen in 2012.”

These are striking figures, and ones that you might find easier to believe after scanning the results of a Google search for the terms “Maya prophecy.” Only last week the electrician visiting my apartment told me that he thinks something like the apocalypse is coming: according to 70 year old Austinite Sonny, there will be a big earthquake on the east coast of the USA, and something like 9/11, but bigger, pretty soon.

Why are so many people convinced of the world’s impending destruction? There is no doubt that pop-culture has nurtured the apparently widespread fears of the looming end of the world. Roland Emmerich’s blockbuster disaster film 2012 (released in late 2009) surely played a role in translating the Mayan apocalypse from a fringe discourse into the mainstream. Furthermore, in the past twelve months, serious news-media outlets including The Guardian have discussed the end of days as predicted by the ancient Mayans (this British newspaper published the comforting words of expert archaeologists who reassure us that “the end of the world is not quite nigh”).

What is going on here? Should we start filling the bathtub with water and hoarding stocks of canned food, flashlights, and medical supplies as December 21 approaches?

Clay rendering of a Mayan priest (Image courtesy of Wolfgang Sauber/Wikimedia Commons)

Thankfully two historians, Mathew Restall and Amara Solari, have come to the rescue with the publication of a new book 2012 and the End of the World: The Western Roots of the Maya Apocalypse. In the authors’ own words, this study “takes seriously a potentially silly topic.” Restall and Solari provide an interesting discussion of pre-conquest Maya texts, including the famous but poorly understood Long Count calendar and “Monument 6” that form the basis of the present-day “2012-ology,” a the authors call it, which anyone interested in the approaching end of the world will want to read.

Albrecht Dürer’s 15th century woodcut, “The Revelation of St John: 4. The Four Riders of the Apocalypse” (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

Restall and Solari’s most important contribution is showing that the belief in a near apocalypse is a deeply-rooted tradition in Western society. Drawing upon the Bible, the writings of the twelfth-century theologian Joachim di Diore, and Albrecht Dürer’s beautiful set of fifteen engravings of the apocalypse, Restall and Solari make a compelling argument that the origins of the Maya Apocalypse lie in the medieval European millenarian tradition. “Whereas millenarianism is not easily and clearly found in ancient Maya civilization, it is deeply rooted and ubiquitous in Western civilization. Whereas Maya notions of world-ending Apocalypse – with a capital A – was a profound and pervasive presence in the medieval West.”

A 1701 transcription of the “Popol Vuh,” a compilation of Mayan K’iche’ creation myths (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

This book examines the survival of the apocalypse discourse from the early-modern period through to today. Restall and Solari make the bold claim that Chilism (the specifically Christian version of the belief that an impending transformation will dramatically change society), is at the heart of Western modernity – in Christianity as much as in Marxism.

A Mayan alter excavated in Caracol, Belize. (Image courtesy of Suraj/Wikimedia Commons)

Those interested in colonial New Spain will appreciate Restall and Solari’s analysis of Mayan documents such as the books of Chilam Balam (the Books of the Jaguar Prophet), which reveal how the Western apocalyptical discourse influenced Mayan conceptions of time and the world.

Watch for our December post on Milestones on the Mayan calendar and the history of the concept of Apocalypse

“You have died of dysentery” – History According to Video Games

Right now millions of people worldwide are reliving the American Revolution through a new historical fiction. This fictionalized revolution, however, is not televised on PBS, nor is it directed by Steven Spielberg or written by Ken Follett. Instead, this version of the Revolution comes to us through a video game called Assassin’s Creed III. Developed and published by the French gaming company Ubisoft, Assassin’s Creed III follows the story of Connor Kenway, a half-English and half-Mohawk assassin battling the British and the Knights Templar (don’t worry, I’ll explain later) during the period of the US Revolution. From Connor’s perspective, players are able to interact with famous historical figures such as George Washington and Benjamin Franklin, and explore virtual recreations of colonial cities such as Boston, New York and Philadelphia. The game, released on October 30, has already met with critical acclaim from gaming journalists and it promises to become the most consumed and financially successful historical fiction, in any medium, this year.

The video game is a relatively new medium, but it has a long record of using history to tell stories like the one found in Assassin’s Creed. Given the mass popularity of video games and gaming culture, it seems appropriate that we begin to analyze the history portrayed in this medium in the same way we consider a historical novel or period film. Why and how is history used in video games? How has this use of history changed over time? How does the use of history in video games compare to the use of history in other media? Finally, are these uses of history merely a pretense for entertainment or do they offer a real opportunity to learn about the past?

Early examples of history in video games came from titles designed explicitly for classroom use. Probably the best and most famous of these is The Oregon Trail. Developed by a group of teachers and released by the Minnesota Educational Company Consortium (MECC) in 1974, The Oregon Trail positions players as American settlers leading their families from Independence, Missouri to Oregon in 1848. While on the trail, players are required to manage their provisions as well as a number of impromptu crises, including broken wagon wheels, spoiled food, overworked oxen, and the sudden death of caravan members (usually from dysentery).Success is not guaranteed and the player’s expedition will end in failure without careful planning. Despite its rudimentary visuals and gameplay, The Oregon Trail gives players a rather accurate sense of the difficulty of transcontinental travel in the nineteenth century. It also provides players with something they cannot get from a book or film: an understanding of the past introduced through direct interaction. This interaction, however, is limited to the journey on the trail, and leaves the surrounding historical context (e.g. motivations for the journey, relations with Native Americans, etc.) up to the players, or their teacher, to fill in.

As The Oregon Trail and its imitators proliferated in classrooms during the 1980s and 90s, commercial games also began to adopt historical settings and topics. Early ventures in this genre included adaptations of historically themed board games, such as Axis and Allies, Diplomacy, and Risk, as well as digital versions of turn-based, tactical military games focused on the campaigns of the Second World War. These games were joined later by a large number of real-time strategy games (RTSs), including The Ancient Art of War, as well as games from the Total War and Age of Empires series. Like the vast majority of historical novels and films, these games focus on high politics and military history. Unlike these media, however, video games often range across long historical time periods and allow players to engage with a wide variety of subjects and events.

A key example of this type of work is the Civilization series, which debuted in 1991. Developed by the legendary Sid Meier, Civilization puts the player in charge of one of the world’s civilizations in 4000 B.C.E., with the objective of establishing and maintaining an empire until they reach either the game’s time limit (the game usually ends in the early 21st century) or one of several victory conditions (conquer all other civilizations by force, establish a colony on Alpha Centauri, be elected leader of the United Nations, or establish cultural hegemony). Players determine nearly every facet of their civilizations: agriculture, construction, demographics, diplomacy, economic policy, religion, and scientific research. The player’s civilization faces challenges from not only computer controlled competitors, but also from unhappy citizens and random natural disasters.

The Civilization series, in many respects, reflects a triumphalist, neoliberal conception of world history. Playable civilizations include crude stereotypes of current nation states, with many civilizations being completely out of place at the beginning of the game in 4000 B.C.E. For example, gamers can choose to play as the United States “civilization,” complete with an Abraham Lincoln avatar, dressed in a bearskin toga. Players often find that the game’s victory conditions are easier to achieve if they maintain a civilization that is democratic, culturally liberal, and secular. Play at all difficulty levels rewards aggressive foreign policy and the military conquest of neighboring civilizations is often a simpler path to victory than diplomatic or financial incentives. An aggressive foreign policy, however, can end in disaster if competing nations have nuclear weapons.

These problems aside, the Civilization series has much to recommend it from a historian’s perspective. It is the only history game that offers a global perspective on the past as well as an appreciation of contingency in history. The game does not follow the historical record – a player could successfully lead the Carthaginian Empire past Rome and begin the Industrial Revolution in Africa in the seventeenth century. Moreover, players can use a custom map or other modifications to create counterfactual situations in order to test variables. How different would European history be if the British Isles were connected to the continent? What if societies in the Americas had access to horses before contact with Europe? Civilization encourages players to consider the longue durée of cultural, economic, and ecological structures. And for players who seek a deeper knowledge of the game’s concepts, each edition of Civilization provides a “Civilopedia” with encyclopedia-size synopses of historical events and figures.

Though the Civilization series remains popular today, the most popular and profitable history video games of recent years come from the first-person shooter (FPS) genre. Beginning with 1992’s Wolfenstein 3D and continuing with the Call of Duty series in the 2000s, FPS games use the history of the Second World War as window dressing for what are essentially action movie simulators. Players take the role of a soldier from one of the Allied powers and shoot their way through levels filled with either German or Japanese enemy soldiers. These games make no effort to contextualize the player’s actions or to consider the moral implications of those actions. Moreover, the Second World War portrayed in these games remains firmly entrenched in the “Good War” narrative: Allied soldiers in these shooters are always heroic and righteous.

Other recent games, including the FPS series BioShock and the strategy series Command and Conquer: Red Alert, use history as the basis for adventures in counterfactuals. The first BioShock places the player in the city of Rapture, a submerged metropolis under the Atlantic Ocean built in the 1940s by a Howard Hughes-esque industrialist who hoped to create a utopian society based on Randian, or Objectivist philosophy (spoiler: it didn’t turn out so well). BioShock: Infinite, scheduled for release next year, is set in the floating city of Columbus in 1912, and will see the player engaging with Progressive Era ideas of American empire, eugenics, and exceptionalism. Command and Conquer: Red Alert begins with Albert Einstein using time travel to murder Adolf Hitler in 1924 in order to prevent the Second World War. Unfortunately, this event creates a parallel timeline in which the Soviet Union embarks on world domination during the 1950s.

The Assassin’s Creed series, which debuted in 2007, also revels in counterfactual fantasies, but attempts to place these stories in realistic historical settings. In Assassin’s Creed, players take the role of Desmond Miles, a modern day bartender who is kidnapped by a shadowy multinational corporation called Abstergo Industries. Abstergo forces Desmond to use a virtual reality machine called the Animus, which allows the user to relive the lives of their ancestors using their DNA (hold on, it gets crazier). During the first game of the series, Desmond relives the life of his ancestor Altaïr ibn-La’Ahad, a Syrian assassin who lived during the third Crusade. The second installment of the series finds Desmond reliving the life of Ezio Auditore da Firenze, a fifteenth-century Italian assassin. Eventually, Desmond learns that Abstergo is the modern incarnation of the Knights Templar and that the organization is using Desmond’s ancestral memories to search for the “Pieces of Eden,” objects of immense supernatural power (think the Ark of the Covenant in Raiders of the Lost Ark). Famous historical figures make appearances throughout the series. Assassin’s Creed II, for instance, sees Leonardo Da Vinci, act as an early modern Q to the player’s James Bond, providing the protagonist with an assortment of gadgets, including his famous tank and flying machine models.

The story in Assassin’s Creed – the Illuminati meets Ancestry.com – has much in common with the conspiratorial history seen in the fiction of Dan Brown and Neal Stephenson. This fantastical story, however, is couched in a largely accurate and detailed historical setting. The first installment of the series, set in Palestine, features period recreations of Acre, Damascus, and Jerusalem. Assassin’s Creed II, set in Italy, provides recreations of Florence, Monteriggioni, Venice, and Rome.

This game also adds historical descriptions to the buildings players encounter (and climb) while playing, including St. Mark’s Basilica, Santa Maria del Fiore, Santa Croce, and the Ponte Vecchio. A direct sequel to Assassin’s Creed II, called Assassin’s Creed: Revelations, takes place in Istanbul and provides a similar level of detail. Developer Ubisoft’s effort at recreation also extends to the human characters who populate the game world. Careful attention is paid to clothing, demeanor, and language. In pre-release coverage for the third game, creative director Alexander Hutchinson described the process of research and consulting that went into creating a Native American protagonist. Hutchison boasts of reading Wikipedia entries and watching documentaries, but his company also relies on a multinational group of professional historians and in-house researchers.

Of course, Ubisoft’s recreations are far from perfect and not always completely accurate. Yet their work demonstrates the potential for video games to provide consumers with history that is both interactive and instructive. To be sure, this history continues to focus on blood and guts, but a desire for different stories is emerging. For instance, Xav de Matos of Joystiq.com suggested last month that developers create a game focused on Harriet Tubman and the abolitionist movement. The recent growth in the popularity of video games has forced the industry and traditional gamers to begin to confront some of their biggest demons regarding racism, violence, and, most importantly, sexism. Ubisoft, for its part, published a portable game called Assassin’s Creed III: Liberation, which follows the life of a female African-French Assassin in eighteenth century New Orleans. If this trend continues, there is little doubt that new and different video game histories will emerge, and it will be exciting to see if those narratives lead to better opportunities for learning about the past.

The author would like to thank Dr. John Harney for his comments on an earlier draft of this essay.

You might also like:

Keith Stuart, “Assassin’s Creed and the Appropriation of History,” The Guardian

Here on Not Even Past: Joan Neuberger, “Telling Stories, Writing History: Novel Week on NEP.“

A free version of the original Civilization is available here

For ideas on using video games in the classroom, see Jeremiah McCall’s Gaming the Past: Using Video Games to Teach Secondary History (2011)

More by Bob Whitaker on gaming can be found on twitter @whitakeralmanac and his Playstation, Steam, and Xbox gamertag is hookem1883.

Images used under Fair Use Guidelines: See Wikipedia:Non-free content.

When the Emperor was Divine by Julie Ostuka (2003) & The Buddha in the Attic by Julie Ostuka (2012)

by David A. Conrad

Writers of ethnically-themed novels are often pegged as simply recording their family stories. However, by the time National Book Award finalist Julie Otsuka set out to capture her mother’s stories of “camp,” dementia had already stolen her once-clear memories. For the novel that became When the Emperor was Divine, Otsuka had to research the events that took her, as a 10-year-old along with 120,000 other Japanese Americans, from their homes on the west coast designated them as “enemy aliens,” and confined them to internment camps in inland desert areas during World War II. Her research produced the moving and telling details that reveal the profound loss of fought-for home and identity, the crushing helplessness, and resulting mental incapacity, that beset Japanese Americans with the onset of the war. Her novel conveys how they were literally stripped of all but what they could carry, and forced them to wait for the end of the war imprisoned in temporary barracks behind barbed wire removed from the stabilizing routines of work, school, home, community, and greater acceptance. Inspired by Hemingway, Otsuka uses luminous prose to convey the unmooring of one Japanese American family though everyday objects: the family dog that had to be killed because it could not be brought or adopted, a jump rope cut into pieces, stones thrown through train windows, silverware buried in the garden. A painter by training, Otsuka states that When the Emperor was Divine first came to her in images, which she then set down in words (Texas Book Festival, Oct. 27, 2012).

In contrast, Otsuka’s second novel, The Buddha in the Attic, for which she won the PEN/Faulkner Award, flowed as a multitude of “chanting” voices. Based upon two years of research into the lives of Japanese picture brides—young Japanese women of Otsuka’s grandmother’s generation, who followed arranged marriages and came to America between 1908 and 1924 only to find that neither their husbands nor their circumstances matched their advertised claims. Otsuka uses a “we” voice with no single protagonist to evoke the range of struggles and adaptions women made when they entered hard, working-class lives alongside their husbands on farms, in stores and restaurants, boarding houses, mining and lumbering towns, raising children and keeping house, sometimes in tents or newly built shacks without electricity or running water. There are few documents recorded in these women’s own voices and Otsuka recreates their world through their eyes. It is not a glorious story of immigrant integration and success, but a richly layered and compelling account of struggle and survival that honors the picture brides’ humanity while underscoring that their ranks did not produce any recognized heroes or literary tropes.

Japanese-Americans boarding a train in Los Angeles bound for an internment camp, April 1942 (Image courtesy of Library of Congress)

Japanese-Americans standing by posters with internment orders (Image courtesy of the United States Department of the Interior)

These two slight novels are well worth the couple of hours that they take to consume. Otsuka uses elegant and compact prose to transport readers to a transient time and set of circumstances that are, thankfully, long over, although the psychic remnants continue to resonate.

You can purchase When the Emperor Was Divine on Amazon here.

You may also like:

David A. Conrad’s reviews of Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II and Shinohata: A Portrait of a Japanese Village

Henry Wiencek Sr on Thomas Jefferson, Slave owner

Laura Miller begins her review of Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves, with this:

“No founding father wrote more eloquently on behalf of liberty and human rights than Thomas Jefferson, and none has a more troubling record when it comes to the “peculiar institution” of slavery. At present, the popular understanding of Jefferson’s shilly-shallying on this issue doesn’t extend much deeper than knowing smirks about Sally Hemings and the (unacknowledged) children Jefferson fathered with her. We tend to assume that the dirtiest secrets of the past have to do with sex. But, as Henry Wiencek explains in his new book, “Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves,” the real filth is in the ledger books.”

On Friday, October 26, 2012, Mr Wiencek visited us at the UT History department to discuss the new book with Professors Jacqueline Jones and Robert Olwell and answer questions from the audience. Listen to the discussion here or click the link above.

Henry Wiencek, “The Dark Side of Thomas Jefferson,” Smithsonian, October 2012

Laura Miller, Master of the Mountain reviewed, Salon, October 14, 2012.

Posted Monday, November 5, 2012

How Taiwan Became Chinese: Dutch, Spanish, and Han Colonization in the Seventeenth Century, by Tonio Andrade (2008)

by Shery Chanis

Focusing on seventeenth-century Taiwan, the island east of mainland China populated by aborigines who specialized in deer hunting, Tonio Andrade seeks to explore the theme of early modern colonization in a much larger context as part of his greater effort of analyzing global history. According to Andrade, Taiwan, neighboring China, Japan, the Philippines (controlled by Spain), was part of a colonial trade network and soon a focus of contention between the Dutch, the Spanish, the Portuguese, the Japanese and the Chinese.

Employing a variety of sources including travel and missionary accounts from Europeans, official records and correspondence from the Dutch East India Company (VOC), and documents from the Chinese, Andrade discusses the early modern colonization of Taiwan, known as Ilha Hermosa by the Portuguese, La Isla Hermosa by the Spanish, or Formosa by the Dutch. Spain strategically established a colony in northern Taiwan while the Dutch established theirs in the south in the first quarter of the seventeenth century.

1640 Dutch map of “Formosa,” the colonial term for Taiwan (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

Fort Zeelandia, the Dutch East India Company’s Taiwanese headquarters (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

After Spain’s decreasing interest in Taiwan and their defeat by the Dutch gave it control of the island, the VOC corrected the Spanish mistake of not making their colony self-sufficient by developing an interesting strategy which Andrade calls “co-colonization”. Having determined that it would be too costly to send Dutch to Taiwan, the VOC introduced various incentives including free land, tax exemptions and property rights to attract Chinese from the nearby Fujian province in China to immigrate to Taiwan. The plantation of sugar and rice soon became lucrative business not only for the immigrants but also the VOC. In the process, the VOC also developed a lord-vassal relationship with the aborigines and gained control over the native population. Andrade argues that this co-colonization strategy was a key difference between the Spanish and the Dutch in their colonization efforts in Taiwan. This period of co-colonization between the Dutch and the Chinese was successful so long as the interests of both parties were met. Towards the end of the century, however, the VOC’s tax increase lost the support of the Chinese immigrants, ultimately leading to rebellions from many Chinese settlers and to the Dutch defeat by Zheng Chenggong, the Ming loyalist of great military power.

Dutch sketch of a native “Formosan” circa 1650 (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

1661 Dutch engraving of Chinese soldiers in Taiwan (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

Andrade’s study of the colonization of Taiwan demonstrates the connections between Europe and Asia, which helps to illustrate a larger picture of early modern colonization beyond the Atlantic world. The multiple European and Asian colonizing powers in Taiwan also highlighted the intricate network of colonization in terms of not only military power but also trading relations and migration patterns. Interestingly, Andrade does not include any maps or other supplementary illustrations in the original/English version of his work, but he does so in the Chinese translation. Even more thought-provoking is the book title of the Chinese version. Instead of How Taiwan Became Chinese, the Chinese title is How Formosa Became Taiwan Prefecture, carrying a much more Sinocentric undertone. Nonetheless, Andrade’s book is a fascinating study on early modern global relations.

Mary Neuburger on Tobacco & Smoking in Bulgaria

By Mary Neuburger

The global history of tobacco—the weed that captured the hearts, minds, and imaginations of so many in the twentieth century—has been told in splendid and enlightening detail. Historians have delved into the stark economic, political, and social implications of the production, consumption, and exchange of this commodity in various national contexts, most notably the United States.

In writing Balkan Smoke, I wanted to explore the ways tobacco drove historical transformation in Bulgaria, a place often left out of these global histories. On the periphery of Europe and Asia, and in the path of various geopolitical interests, Bulgaria became a tobacco “center” of its own in the twentieth century. Balkan Smoke explores Bulgaria’s global economic and political entanglements via tobacco, with the Ottoman Empire, Central Europe, The Soviet Union and the Bloc, and the West, including the United States. From provisioning the Ottoman Empire (which Bulgaria was a province of until 1878), to supplying Nazi Germany and then the Soviet Union, by the 1960s Bulgaria became the largest exporter of cigarettes in the world.

A prodigious literature has also outlined how tobacco—as one of the global “big three” drugs of choice along with alcohol and coffee—has served as a central chemical palliative in the modern era. Tobacco—brought to Europe, the Near East, and the rest of the globe from the New World—seduced consumers but also provoked public scrutiny and debate. Perhaps in part this was because smoking rituals moved west from the “Orient”—more specifically the Ottoman lands. Oriental-style smoking rooms, for example, became an escapist symbol of wealth and excess for the West to emulate, appropriate, and domesticate.

This was also true of the more public coffeehouse institution, and coffee itself, that was directly imported from the Ottoman Near East to Western Europe beginning in the seventeenth century. As many scholars have argued, smoking played a role in new patterns of consumption, commerce, sociability, and even political mobilization in the West. In the Ottoman lands, the smoke-filled coffeehouse had also played similar roles, but with peculiarly local patterns.

Specifically, smoking and the coffeehouse had been always firmly associated with the Muslim coffeehouse, as opposed to the Christian tavern. Bulgarians were directly ruled by the Ottomans from the 15th-19thcenturies and lived among large Muslim populations. Yet it was not until the nineteenth century that they began to enter the Muslim coffeehouse, where they conducted commerce and local administration, read newspapers, and engaged in debate. It was then that they learned to smoke, as they came of age politically and culturally, and as their national movement gained momentum. Indeed, over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, smoking, like the tobacco industry itself, drove social change, accompanying and even propelling a certain “coming of age” for social groups who joined the ranks of passionate smokers.

As Bulgarians entered the coffeehouse at home, they also began to frequent European cafes and discover themselves as “Bulgarians” abroad, amidst the intellectual ferment of Paris, Vienna, and St. Petersburg. Soon Bulgarians began to establish coffeehouses at home that took on increasingly European characteristics, mainly aesthetically. For example, the traditional hookah was replaced by the newly minted cigarette. Paraphernalia became a marker of modern, European sensibilities, as coffeehouses became places of intellectual and cultural activity, and tobacco became a muse for generations of the Bulgarian elite. In the interwar period, in particular, the coffeehouse was at the heart of intellectual life, though other kinds of smoke-filled venues mushroomed in the Bulgarian capital and elsewhere in Bulgaria.

Smoking became the quintessential modern habit, a necessary accoutrement for the modern man and eventually woman, in both the sober coffeehouse and the drunken tavern. Women and youth slowly entered this world of public smoking in the course of twentieth century, a fact that impelled anti-smoking impulses (however meager).

In some respects this is a familiar story, with obvious global parallels, yet the Bulgarian context continually reveals it own particular nuances. In pre-1945 Bulgaria, for example, anti-smoking impulses flowed from two rather disparate sources, American (and Bulgarian convert) Protestants and the communist left. Both had a radical vision for “moral uplift” and social reform and utopian visions of the future. But both were also, in a sense, foreign, and so faced local and official hostility in the period before 1945. Most Bulgarians simply did not want to give up their new found pleasures, and the state was an important beneficiary of tobacco industry revenues and consumption taxes. In the post World War II period, the dramatic change to a communist form of government brought an entirely new set of practical and theoretical quandaries. The Bulgarian tobacco industry took off, producing ever greater numbers of increasingly luxurious cigarettes for the enormous “captive” Soviet and Bloc market.

There was also a veritable explosion of state built and run restaurants, cafes, hotels and sea-side resorts in the later decades of period, as the state sought legitimacy by providing the “good life” to its workers. By the 1960s and 1970s, however, communist state-directed abstinence efforts emerged, along with heightened concerns over the growing numbers of smoking women and youth. The Bulgarian communists continually connected smoking to “western” moral profligacy and “remnants” of a capitalist past, as well as “Oriental” degeneracy—or Bulgaria’s backwards, Ottoman past. Yet the state continued to provide cheap cigarettes and places to smoke them as never before. Bulgarian smoking rates skyrocketed under communism and the period generated a society of smokers for whom the voice of abstinence was just another form of state propaganda.

Since the 1989 collapse of communism, smoking is still central to leisure culture in Bulgaria. The gleaming new post-communist cafe, cocktail bar, pizzeria, and now McDonalds are still smoker-friendly. Although the tobacco industry was devastated by the transition, a 2010 bill to prohibit all smoking in restaurants, bars, and other leisure establishments failed to pass through the Bulgarian parliament. Smokers are digging in deep in order to maintain what one Bulgarian friend told me is their “way of life.” History helps us understand why, as the world gradually pushes tobacco smokers out in the cold, in Bulgaria they are still welcome inside.

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