Stacy Vlasits, Author at Not Even Past

Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India, by Gauri Viswanathan (1989)

Gauri Viswanathan provides a fascinating account of the ideological motivations behind the introduction of English literary education in British India. She studies the shifts in the curriculum and relates such developments to debates over the objectives of English education both among the British administrators, as well as between missionaries and colonial officials.

Viswanathan argues that British administrators introduced English literary study in India in the early nineteenth century to improve the moral knowledge of Indians. Since Britain professed a policy of religious neutrality, Christian teachings could not be used in India, unlike the situation in Britain. In order to resolve this dilemma, colonial officials prescribed English literature, infused with Christian imagery, for government schools. Initially, Indians studied English literature using poetical devices, such as rhyme, alliteration, and reduplication. However, missionaries decried such secular practices and insisted upon a more religious reading of English literature. As a result, between 1830s and the mid-1850s, government schools in India used English literature to explain Christian teachings and emphasize the higher levels of historical progress and moral standards of English society. By the end of the 1850s, however, British administrators again changed their stance and advocated a secular reading of English literature to encourage commercial and trade literacy. This reversal of stance occurred as British officials realized that a religious reading of English literature did not provide Indians with the proper knowledge to join the colonial administrative services. Besides, after the 1857 Indian revolt against foreign rule, British officials did not wish to adopt policies that might ignite fears of conversion among Hindus and Muslims.

775px-Pandit_Bapudeva_Sastri_1821-1900_Professor_of_Astronomy_teaching_a_class_at_Queens_College_Varanasi — *Bapudeva Sastri, Indian Astronomer and Professor, teaching a class at Queen’s College, Varanas, 1870*

Viswanathan gives a detailed account of the various debates that influenced the introduction of English literary study in India. While she minutely examines the stances of Utilitarians, Anglicists, and missionaries, the absence of chronological benchmarks at regular intervals prevents the reader from fully understanding the shifts in education policies in British India emerging from such debates. However, her work changes our way of studying British educational policies in India. Previously, scholars merely studied the transformative effects of British education to understand the historical function of educational policies. Viswanathan ably proves that it is necessary to examine the discourse and the context of the formulation of educational policies to better understand educational history.

La_Martiniere_1858 — *La Martiniere, a British private school in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, 1858*

Photo Credits:
All photos courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Hannah Adams: Historian of American Jews

by Allison Schottenstein

After World War II, American Jewish history emerged as a significant field of study. Historian Hasia Diner has argued that the subfield actually began to emerge as early 1892, but if we consider pioneering texts about Jews composed by American writers during the nineteenth century, the work of Hannah Adams suggests that it began far earlier. A Christian, Adams discussed Judaism in two works, The History of the Jews, From the Destruction of Jerusalem to the Present Day (1812) and A Dictionary of All Religions and Religious Denominations: Jewish, Heathen, Mahometan, Christian, Ancient and Modern (1817). Adams’ work is largely disregarded by contemporary American Jewish historians, who are skeptical of her motives as a Jewish historian, in part because she was a founder of the 1815 Female Society of Boston and the Vicinity for Promoting Christianity. Historians such as Howard Sachar, Arthur Hertzberg, and Leonard Dinnerstein suspected that if her goal was to convert Jews, her scholarship could not be trusted. Sachar and Dinnerstein are especially critical of Adams because they feel it was a reflection of America’s “fascination” with the Jewish rejection and supposed murder of Christ. Hertzberg recognized that Adams genuinely wanted American Jews to have equal rights in early nineteenth-century America, but like many other historians, he does not want to accord Adams the status of Jewish historian. In 1963 Salo Baron and Joseph L. Blau, were the first scholars to recognize Adams for publishing “the most useful contemporary general review of the position of the Jews in America,” but they too dismiss her Dictionary for having “only a superficial acquaintance with its subject.”

Jewish historians may have perceived Adams’ work as lacking substance, but a close examination of her work shows that she did indeed offer a valuable overview of what was known in the early nineteenth century about the Jewish religion in America and perceptions of early American Jewry. In the newly revised “Introduction” to Adams’ Dictionary, Thomas Tweed argues that “even though Adams clearly favored Christianity, she did not merely separate religions and sects into the true and false.” Tweed proposes that scholars consider the period in which Adams lived — a time when American Jews comprised less than one percent of the population (around 2,500). The first Rabbinical school had yet to be founded, Hebrew Schools had not been instituted, and there were no Jewish newspapers in the United States. Unlike in Europe, the U.S. had not undergone a Jewish Enlightenment — that is, a time promoting the academic study of Judaism. In this new “Christian nation,” Jews were seen as mysterious and were vilified for their rejection of Christ and their ancestors’ supposed role in Christ’s death. In this religious climate, Adams’ contribution to Jewish history, even while writing as a Christian in a Christian population, was innovative and significant. Adams’ discussion of Jews in her Dictionary initiated the study of Judaism in America even before Isaac Leeser published his English translation of the Hebrew Bible in 1853.

Touro Synagogue, Newport, RI. Oldest synagogue in the US still in use (Wikimedia)

Adams began her account by chronicling the history of Jews under Roman rule — namely, during the time of Christ. Adams could have used the New Testament as her only source, but instead she referred to the findings of ancient Jewish historian Titus Flavius Josephus to explore the complex historical position that Jews occupied in the Roman Empire. Jews were able to govern themselves, but at the same time they were forced to adapt to both oppressive Roman rule and Jewish leaders like Herod who did not represent Judaism. By pausing to explain this early history, Adams was able to convey how the Jewish position during the time of Christ was more complex than that pictured in the New Testament — a move that arguably dismantled the inflammatory image of Jews as Christ-killers.

First Hebrew Bible pulished in the US, 1814 (Library of Congress)

At the same time, her definitions provided insight into the Jewish religion to an otherwise uninformed American audience. For instance, her definition of “Cabbalists” (Kabbalah) discussed its connection to occultism, but also explored the Kabbalah as a methodological tool used to provide a higher level of interpretation of the Torah: “Jews extract recondite meanings from the words of scripture.” She traced the origins of the Kabbalah to the Oral Law, which enabled her to articulate the difference between the Torah (“written law”) and the Talmud (“oral law”). It is also interesting to note how Adams acknowledged the various terms associated with Jews, such as “Hebrews” and “Pharisees.” In her definition of the former, Adams made the radical move of explaining how the Apostle Paul was Jewish, thereby contextualizing Christianity’s Jewish roots. Her definition of “Pharisees” is of equal interest. Considering that the English vernacular uses Pharisees to mean “hypocrites,” and that the New Testament monolithically portrays them as the main opposition to Christ, Adams discussed their role as “celebrated” Jewish lawmakers who were devoted to preserving the law before, during, and after Christ. By providing a fuller picture of ancient Jews like the Pharisees, Adams provided an alternative perspective on Judaism’s historical legacy to a Christian-centric country.

Adams’ pivotal definition of “Judaism” was multifaceted, drawing attention to various aspects of Judaism. Paraphrasing the “Thirteen Principles” of Maimonides (1138-1204) — one of the most influential Jewish scholars — Adams explored Jewish prayers and kosher practices, showing their roots in the Talmud. Her insights demonstrated to a Christian-centric audience how complex and sophisticated Judaism was. Moreover, she did not refrain from describing in horrifying detail Jewish persecution by Christians throughout the ages: “[I]n Christendom, [Jews] have been despised, calumniated, oppressed, banished, executed, and burned.” By accusing her own religion of Jewish persecution, Adams not only historically anticipated America’s position as a future bastion of Jewish freedom, but helped to legitimize a marginalized faith.

First synagogue in the US (Charleston, SC) by John Rubens Smith, 1813

Adams’ History of the Jews predominately discussed Jewish experiences in the ancient world and in modern Europe, but towards the end of the book Adams briefly discussed the experiences of early American Jews. Significantly, Adams’ study precedes the two waves of Jewish immigration from Germany and Eastern Europe, which would eventually increase the population of American Jews from mere thousands to over a million. Remarkably, Adams was able to determine that the first wave of Jewish immigrants consisted of “Spanish Jews” — Sephardic Jews — who had emigrated because of the Spanish Inquisition. Though Adams recognized this as the starting point of the Jewish community in America, she determined that Jewish involvement with the Dutch East India Company was the pivotal point of the Jewish community’s arrival in the United States. Adams made the historically significant point that the Dutch East India Company was the first to allow Jews to remain in America.

Aware that she was an outsider to the Jewish faith, Adams understood that she needed to look outside of her own environment in order to complete her history of American Jews. In History of the Jews, her readers must have appreciated the manner in which she conducted research on religious practices, on family, and on social life in various Jewish communities (Charleston, New York, and Philadelphia). In Adams’ footnotes, she made a point of acknowledging how prominent Jewish figures like Rabbi Seixas had provided her with the information to give her readers the most complete perspective possible for her history of Jews in America. The neglected Adams was not just a scholar, but a pioneer and forward thinker.

In sum, both Adams’ Dictionary and History of the Jews are significant contributions to the study of American Jewish history. The Dictionary presented insight into Jewish religious practices, while The History of the Jews offered its audience an early glimpse of Jewish American history. Though Adams’ perspective was biased because of her Christian beliefs, she deserves to be recognized for enabling us to more thoroughly understand the Jewish position in early American history.

You might also like:

Allison Schottenstein won the Perry Prize for the best Master’s Thesis in 2012. An abstract of her thesis can be found here.

David Crew’s review of Saul Friedlander’s major book on the Holocaust can be found on NEP here and his article about wedding photographs from the Nazi imposed ghettos can be found here.

Miriam Bodian writes about an unusual Jew interrogated during the Inquisition, in “A Dangerous Idea”

Historians mentioned in this article:

Hasia Diner, “American Jewish History” in The Oxford Handbook of Jewish Studies, ed. Martin Goodman (2002)

Howard M. Sachar, A History of the Jews in America (1992)

Leonard Dinnerstein, Anti-Semitism in America(1994)

Joseph L. Blau and Salo W. Baron, eds., The Jews of the United States, 1790-1840: A Documentary History (1963)

Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling by Richard Lyman Bushman (2007)

by Rachel Ozanne

In the past ten years, Americans have shown a sustained interest in cultural depictions of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS), or the Mormon Church. South Park’s 2003 episode “All about Mormons” and the 2011 musical The Book of Mormon satirized the founding of the LDS church. Other television shows, however, like HBO’s Big Love and TLC’s Sister Wives have tried to portray other non-LDS strands of Mormonism in a more complex way by exploring modern day polygamy. Now with Mitt Romney’s nomination for the Republican Party candidate for President, the Mormon faith once again finds itself in the spotlight.

With all the drama of television, or quite frankly a presidential campaign, the historical origins of Mormonism can get lost in the shuffle. Despite all the media coverage, a religion that some scholars have deemed the quintessential American religion remains largely misunderstood by the American public. For those interested in learning more, however, about many of the fundamental doctrines and the beginnings of the Mormon (and particularly LDS) Church, I recommend Richard L. Bushman’s recent biography of Mormonism’s founder Joseph Smith, Jr., Rough Stone Rolling.

In Rough Stone Rolling, Bushman brings his extensive knowledge of early Mormon history to expand upon his first book about the life of Joseph Smith, Joseph Smith and the Beginnings of Mormonism, by tracing the entirety of Smith’s life from the cradle to the grave with a special emphasis on the cultural context out of which he came. Bushman himself is a member of the LDS Church, but his pro-Mormon bias does not prevent him from presenting Smith as a flawed human being, noting that Smith never set himself up as a perfect moral exemplar, but rather a “rough stone rolling”—one that would be smoothed over in time.

“The angel Moroni delivering the plates of the Book of Mormon to Joseph Smith jun.” 1886 print (Image courtesy of Library of Congress)

Bushman’s approach to writing a biography of Joseph Smith almost necessarily focuses heavily on Smith’s spiritual development and how it went hand in hand with the development of Mormonism. Thus, the narrative of the book is punctuated by major events of Smith’s spiritual life, well known to followers of Joseph Smith: his first contact with the Angel Moroni; his discovery of the golden plates on which the Book of Mormon was written; the transcription of those plates into an English text; the restoration of the Aaronic priesthood and the priesthood of Melchizedek in 1829; the founding of the church in 1830; and various revelations that instituted new doctrine or prompted the growing Mormon church to move from New York to Ohio and eventually to Illinois, where Smith was killed.

However, Bushman also spends much time providing the cultural and political context of Smith’s life. In so doing, he implicitly engages with a number of debates about Mormon history. For instance, did Joseph Smith invent the Book of Mormon or was he truly divinely inspired? Was he a power hungry man who had “convenient” revelations resting the sole power of revelation for the LDS church in him or did he really hear commands from God?

1830 copy of The Book of Mormon (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

Bushman’s treatment of polygamy is particularly engaging, given that mainstream Mormonism (the LDS Church) officially gave up polygamy in 1890. Even though Bushman doesn’t support polygamy himself, he tries to explain why “plural marriage” (the Mormon term for polygamy) made sense in the context of Joseph Smith’s theology. In particular, Bushman claims that Smith emphasized the importance of family, so he created, or was inspired to create, rituals to ensure that marriage and family lasted for eternity—marriage sealing and baptism for the dead, for instance. In this light, taking on multiple wives was considered another way to extend the family and preserve as many people together in the afterlife as possible.

1853 Harpers Magazine engraving of Smith being tarred and feathered (Image courtesy of Library of Congress)

Perhaps it is unsurprising that he takes a sympathetic view of polygamy, because he views Smith sympathetically throughout the book. Skeptics may find his matter-of-fact dealings with angels and revelations a bit hard to swallow, and strong opponents of polygamy will not likely be satisfied with Bushman’s assessment that plural marriage was mostly a loving institution at its beginning. It is important to remember, however, that Smith was not the only antebellum American experimenting with different kinds of marriage or claiming to receive messages directly from God. He was in good company with the Oneida Community, Ellen G. White and the Seventh-day Adventists, and many other 19^th-century religious groups.

The Book of Mormon Broadway musical, New York City, 2011 (Image courtesy of Brechtbug/Flickr Creative Commons)

As a biography of Joseph Smith, Rough Stone Rolling only tracks the development of the Church of Latter-day Saints up to Smith’s death in 1844 at the hands of some angry Illinois citizens. Readers interested in the rest of the story will have to pick up other books to learn about schisms in the early church; the trek westward of the followers of Brigham Young; the contest between Mormons and the U.S. government over the legality of polygamy; and the history of race and Mormonism. Nevertheless, Bushman’s history provides great insight for a reader trying to understand the appeal of Joseph Smith and the Mormon faith from the outside.

The Cuban Connection by Eduardo Saénz Rovner (2008)

by Edward Shore

In The Cuban Connection, Eduardo Saénz Rovner rethinks Cuba’s position as a hotbed of drug trafficking, smuggling, and gambling and he considers how these illicit activities shaped Cuban national identity from the early twentieth century through the rise of Fidel Castro. Prior scholarship has largely attributed the growth of narco-trafficking in Cuba to widespread poverty and close proximity to the United States. But Saénz Rovner shows that Cuba’s well-established integration into international migration, commerce, and transportation networks, combined with political instability, judicial impunity, and official corruption, facilitated the consolidation of drug trafficking on the island. He rejects earlier portraits of Cuba as a “victim” of international drug trafficking, arguing instead that native Cubans, as well as immigrants living on the island, played active roles in the development of drug trafficking networks. Finally, he suggests that the “drug problem” fueled the Revolution’s anti-yanquí propaganda machine while simultaneously framing Washington’s efforts to topple the Castro government.

Saénz Rovner examines the influx of Spanish immigration to Cuba and subsequent U.S. capital investment in the island’s sugar industry as catalysts of the social fluidity and economic growth that greatly expanded Cuba’s underground economy in the early twentieth century. Havana, with its cosmopolitan character, dynamic economy, and privileged geographic position, attracted both native and foreign-born drug traffickers who built sophisticated networks that linked Cuba to international chains of supply and demand. The 1940s and 1950s saw the expansion of cocaine and heroin trafficking within a triangle connecting the Andean region, Cuba, and the United States. These illegal drug networks operated in a manner that paralleled Cuba’s trade in legal goods and flourished under the umbrella of an economy tied closely to international commerce and to the infusion of people from abroad. Meanwhile, drugs were not only exported from Cuba, but were also consumed locally. Members of the elite favored cocaine, but their privileged place in society generally afforded them protection from authorities. On the other hand, black and mulatto marijuana smokers and Chinese opium addicts were frequently arrested and prosecuted to the full extent of Cuban law.

During the Prohibition era in the United States, Cuba became both a source of contraband alcohol for its northern neighbor and a popular tourist destination for North American tourists who flocked to its mafia-run hotels, casinos, and nightclubs. But mobsters did not introduce gambling, drinking, or even drug consumption to Cuba. Rather, casino construction coincided with Cuban government policies to stimulate tourism and compensate for the fluctuations in sugar prices on the international market. Moreover, Saénz Rovner argues that the expansion of narco-trafficking in Cuba was not the result of mafia entrepreneurship, but was instead a consequence of political instability, a climate of permissiveness, and judicial impunity that hampered the efforts of the Cuban government to suppress the drug trade.

Saénz Rover also considers how drug trafficking advanced political ends during the Cold War. While Henry Anslinger and his Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN) falsely accused Fidel Castro of promoting the international drug trade, Cuban revolutionaries accused North Americans of having corrupted the island country by engaging in illicit activities in the pre-revolutionary era.

Eduardo Saénz Rovner challenges studies that tied drug trafficking in Cuba to local poverty and its physical proximity to the United States. Instead, he argues that Cuba’s relative prosperity and success in attracting people and goods from abroad made the island nation an ideal hub for a trans-national drug trafficking industry. He discredits recent works that allege Fulgencio Batista’s personal involvement in the drug trade, exploring how pressure from the United States in fact compelled Batista to pursue large-scale drug dealers. Saénz Rovner shows that drug traffickers took advantage of the worsening security situation in Cuba, slipping away as the Batista regime focused on quelling the civil war and suppressing political opposition. Saénz Rover not only sheds light on drug trafficking in Cuba, but also highlights the multinational character of the “drug problem” by linking illicit industries in Cuba to those in North and South America, Europe, and beyond. But while Saénz Rovner provides a groundbreaking, transnational approach through which to explore narco-trafficking, his study of Cuba is hampered by several historical inaccuracies. In particular, he exaggerates the degree to which post-revolutionary trials and executions discouraged U.S. tourism to Cuba in the wake of the guerrillas’ victory, when in fact tourism had already been on the decline in the twilight of Batista’s rule. Finally, Saénz Rovner frequently mentions the activities of various drug traffickers and Mafioso’s, but does not provide a sufficient historical context so that the reader can understand the significance of these actors to the international drug trade.

Photo Credits:

Old Havana, 2008 (Photo courtesy of Wikipedia Commons)

Cuban military dictator Fulgencio Batista and his wife meeting with a US official in Washington, 1938 (Photo courtesy of Wikipedia Commons)

Robert Abzug on The Varieties of Religious Experience

By Robert Abzug

William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience is one of the most profound and profoundly influential books ever written by an American intellectual. I have known and loved this book since I first read it as a college student, enthralled by its first-person narratives of spiritual melancholy and ecstasy as well as James’s vivid characterizations of the “once-born,” the “twice-born,” and “the reality of the unseen.” Later, as a scholar, I came to value its unique window on the tumultuous world of late-nineteenth-century American scientific and religious culture. In the years since its publication, The Varieties of Religious Experience has piqued the interest of generation after generation of the lay public and remains a touchstone for students of religion, psychology, and intellectual history.

Central to its appeal has been James’s focus on individual spiritual life rather than churches, theologies, rituals, and symbols. In one of the many remarkable first-person narratives he reproduced, a Frenchman tells how one evening, while plagued by a “general depression of spirits,” he was overcome by a terrifying panic. “There fell upon me without warning,” he wrote, “just as if it came out of the darkness, a horrible fear of my own existence.” He realized that in a moment fate might reduce him to the state of a patient he had recently observed at an asylum who sat “like a sort of sculptured Egyptian cat or Peruvian mummy, moving nothing but his black eyes and looking absolutely non human.” He so feared becoming like that boy “that it was as if something hitherto solid within my breast gave way entirely and I became a mass of quivering fear.” For days on end, the Frenchmen awoke with “a horrible dread at the pit of my stomach and with a sense of the insecurity of life that I never knew before and that I have never felt since.” For months, he could not go out alone in the dark alone.

Recovery came but the experience transformed him. He could not forget “that pit of insecurity beneath the surface of life” and gained sympathy for similar feelings in others. As important, he noted that his recovery had a “religious bearing.” So “invasive and powerful” was the terror, he wrote, that only clinging to phrases from the Bible—“the eternal God is my refuge” or “I am the resurrection and the life” and other phrases—saved him from going “really insane.” As James noted concerning the power of religion to those gripped by such a “grisly blood-freezing heart-palsying” experience: “Here is the real core of the religious problem: Help! Help!”

The “Frenchman” of the story was William James himself. The crisis he disguised in Varieties and other episodes of altered realities that he experienced over a lifetime drove him to devote much of his intellectual energy to an open-ended scientific exploration of what some called spiritual and religious worlds and what James termed “consciousness beyond the margin.” He sought to convince his colleagues in psychology of the existence of realities that lay beyond laboratory observation and normal experience. An invitation from the University of Edinburgh in Scotland to give the Gifford Lectures on religion allowed him to speculate on these extra-normal moments from a different angle: How are we to understand those extraordinary experiences of consciousness often associated with religious illumination?

James gave his answers to packed audiences at Edinburgh and published the lectures as The Varieties of Religious Experience in 1902. Using gripping first-person accounts of conversion and mystical experience, he addressed the most profound issues of life’s meaning with compelling clarity, nuance, and even humor. He saw in these narratives clear evidence for what he called the “reality of the unseen,” ample justification to include human connections to invisible worlds within the scientific study of human consciousness. At the same time, James remained wary about defining the nature of that “reality.” Yes, he seemed to be saying, these individuals experienced something real beyond normal consciousness and perhaps even in the realm of the transcendent—that realm beyond everyday experience that human beings often identified as central to their spiritual lives. However, James cautioned, all specific descriptions, lessons, theologies, and confirmations of faith represented “over-belief” originating from the realm of human culture and not from the divine.

James knew that he was walking a tightrope. He worried, half in jest, that Varieties would “add fuel to the fire that burns in the hearts of God’s enemies as well as to that which burns in those of his friends.” In fact, its careful and ultimately open-ended treatment of both materialist science and formal religion, coupled with lengthy and non-judgmental presentation of the experiences of real people, presented readers wide latitude as they engaged the text.

Why, then, create an abridged edition? The simple answer is that, depending on the edition, the length of the original is 400 to 500 pages. Anyone who has attempted to teach the book by assigning selections knows that undergraduates invariably find plenty to love, dispute, and ponder. However, they rarely get a full sense of James’s take on religion in his own words—the wonderful turns of phrase and plainspoken, often humorous, arguments about the relation of madness to religion; his championing of a “radical empiricism” that recognizes spiritual as well as “material” facts; or his doubts that any theology could faithfully reflect the blinding ecstasy of “religious experience.” Nor do they experience the elegance and force of his overall argument. I hope that my abridgment gives the book new life in the undergraduate classroom and invites new readers beyond the university.

Gandhi: Prisoner of Hope by Judith M. Brown (1989)

by Dharitri Bhattacharjee

Judith Brown’s Gandhi, Prisoner Of Hope published in 1989 amply reflects the decades of quality research that went into its production. Brown elucidates Gandhi’s transition from being “a man of his time” to “a man for all times and all places” by his unswerving and whole-hearted submission to the idea of satyagraha or truth-force, most significantly reflected in the deep questions that he asked, many of which he himself did not find answers to. Brown’s biography breaks many a myth about Gandhi and encourages readers to evaluate his life and achievements for themselves, as they find access to Gandhi’s own voice, that of his contemporary’s opinions on him and even the attitudes of the Raj’s officials towards Gandhi.

The title renders to the readers two aspects of Gandhi’s life. First, the book describes Gandhi’s career from being a “nonentity” in England to symbolizing Indian identity to the world; from being an unsure leader in South Africa in his early middle age to becoming the central public figure in India in his old age. The book carefully constructs the image of Gandhi, juxtaposing it against the popular image of him as Mahatma, or “Great Soul,” a title by which he began to be called much before any of his ideas were accepted or executed on a large scale. Brown tries to project the man behind the mahatma, with his failings, doubts, mood swings and blood pressure problems. Second, Brown projects the ideological and philosophical mind of Gandhi, tracking carefully the origins of his ideas, be it satyagraha, non-violence, civil-disobedience or his stand against westernization and modernization; their development, their timely execution and their fall out. In this process Brown sets the groundwork on which she is able to explain how time and again, almost ironically, Gandhi falls in his own esteem in trying to execute his ideas, yet tries again, and how in doing so with uncompromising optimism, Gandhi became a “prisoner of hope.”

Brown does not praise Gandhi uncritically nor does she place him on a pedestal, above human beings and closer to the God that Gandhi so relied on. The beauty of her work lies in the way she discovers the mahatma in Gandhi, almost at the end of the book. In the epilogue Brown’s thesis comes to a full circle and she shows how Gandhi’s greatness, his well deserved praise, lay in being a flawed man but being courageous enough to correct those flaws. Gandhi, a frail man by stature, emerges in Brown’s works one of the strongest men in history. “God centered and man oriented,” Gandhi searched for “[H]im in humanity” and there lay his strength.

Photo Credits:

Left: Gandhi spinning, December 1929 (Photo courtesy of Wikipedia Commons)

Right: Gandhi at his Johannesburg law firm, 1905 (Photo courtesy of Wikipedia Commons)

William Faulkner: Not Even Past

William Faulkner was born on this day, September 25, in 1897. Faulkner was a great novelist, whose books include Light in August, As I Lay Dying, Absolom, Absolom! and The Sound and the Fury. He won 2 Pulitzer Prizes and in 1949 was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. He also contributed to the screenplays of the two Hollywood classics, To Have and Have Not and The Big Sleep.

William Faulkner
by Carl Von Vechten (Library of Congress)

Faulkner had a profound sense of history; examining the legacy of slavery in contemporary race relations was central to his writing. He opposed segregation, but was not able to fully embrace the civil rights movement. And of course he said, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

Lords of Finance by Liaquat Ahamed (2009)

by Mark Eaker

For those watching the financial markets, events in Europe are front and center. Market participants await announcements by government leaders, finance ministers, central bankers, and economists with anticipation. Depending upon the degree of optimism or pessimism generated by a given announcement, the market reaction leads to hundreds of billions of dollars lost or gained on equities, currencies, bonds and commodities from Frankfurt and London to New York and Tokyo. One might assume that the enormous worldwide impact that events in Europe are having is a function of globalization, new forms of financial engineering, and the speed of information transfer brought about by the Internet. Without doubt each of those has had an impact, but as the Liaquat Ahamed’s superb history of the events leading up to the Great Depression reminds us, it has all happened before.

Lords of Finance is a multiple biography of the four most prominent central bankers of the 1920s: Mantagu Norman of the Bank of England; Benjamin Strong of the New York Federal Reserve Bank ; Emile Moreau of the Banque de France and Hjalmar Schacht of the Reichsbank. There is a colorful supporting cast including the economist John Maynard Keynes, Winston Churchill as Chancellor of Exchequer and Thomas Lamont of J.P. Morgan & Co. However, the focus is on the actions and inactions of the four bankers.

Ahamed did not write the book in anticipation of our reaction to the financial crisis of 2008. He does not draw direct comparisons of the events of the 1920s to those of today. His narrative is an artful description of the roles each of the men played with rich and meaningful insights about their individual characters, their relationships with one another, their ambitions, and their personal struggles. Those insights are not just bits of historical gossip but they are at the heart his explanation of the failure of the United States and Europe to confront the problems that ultimately brought about the Depression and set the stage for the rise of Hitler and Nazi Germany.

The historical and biographical details are engrossing. In addition, Ahamed’s economic and investment background allows him to deliver an excellent primer on currency, the gold standard, and international banking.

Although Ahamed does not relate the events or lessons to today’s problems, it is hard for a reader to refrain from doing so. At the root of Europe’s problem was the debt burden imposed on Germany in the form of reparations after World War I and the decisions made to return to the gold standard at pre-war rates of exchange. Today’s problems are also related to excessive external sovereign debts and a Euro currency mechanism, which, like the gold standard, eliminates devaluation as an instrument of economic policy. In the 1920s, the economic prescription was austerity and it is the same medicine being prescribed today.

Let’s hope for a better outcome and that someday another author will describe the events of our era as well as Ahamed does the 1920s.

Photo Credits:

John Maynard Keynes and Harry Dexter White at the 1946 Bretton Woods Conference (Photo courtesy of Wikipedia Commons)

The Federal Reserve Bank of New York, 1936 (Photo Courtesy of The New York Public Library. Photography Collection: Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs)

Texans at Antietam: 150 Years Ago Today

By Nicholas Roland

By the early autumn of 1862, Americans were reconciled to the fact that the military struggle to determine the fate of the Union was going to be a long and bloody one. Intense fighting was reflected in lengthy casualty lists printed in newspapers, and the names of small towns and rural communities where battles took place became burned into American collective memory: Manassas, Shiloh, Malvern Hill. The grim task of burying fallen soldiers became almost routine as thousands of young men fell in battle and died from illnesses.

Black and white image of covered wagons crossing the stone bridge at Antietam

Then, on September 17, 1862, the cataclysmic one-day battle of Antietam (or Sharpsburg as the Confederates called it), took the staggering losses to shocking new heights. In a single day of fighting in western Maryland, there were nearly 23,000 casualties, making Antietam the bloodiest day of the entire war. Approximately 3,000 soldiers were killed outright, while thousands more would die in the coming days and weeks or suffer from debilitating injuries for the rest of their lives. In the aftermath, Alexander Gardner toured the battlefield and took a series of photographs. These photographs, the first ever taken of dead American soldiers, shocked the public when they were exhibited in New York.

Black and white image showing dead Confederate soldiers by a fence at the Hagerstown Turnpike after the Battle of Antietam — Confederate dead by a fence at the Hagerstown Turnpike, after the battle of Antietam

The sight of bloated corpses lying among the detritus of war brought the carnage to the home front in ways that newspaper reports, casualty lists, and funerals had not. The New York Times wrote of Gardner’s images (mistakenly attributed to Mathew Brady), “If he has not brought bodies and laid them in our door-yards and along streets, he has done something very like it…”

The battle of Antietam held particular significance for Texans. Over a thousand miles from their homes, the Confederate soldiers of Hood’s Texas Brigade would suffer the second-highest casualty rate of any unit during the Civil War. On the morning of September 17, the men of the First, Fourth, and Fifth Texas Infantry regiments were held in reserve and attempting to cook breakfast as the fighting opened. They arrived in the hamlet of Sharpsburg, Maryland at the end of several months of hard campaigning in Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia. Assigned to duty in Virginia early in the war, the Texans earned a reputation for hard fighting after battles at Seven Pines, the Seven Days battles, and the second battle of Manassas. Lee affectionately referred to the men of Hood’s Brigade as “my Texans.” Lee’s army had reversed Confederate fortunes in Virginia, defeating two Federal armies and completely clearing the Commonwealth of Federal forces. Lee’s fateful decision to invade Maryland brought his ragged and outnumbered army to a defensive position in the Maryland countryside opposite George McClellan’s Army of the Potomac.

The Texan’s breakfast was abruptly interrupted when the Federal army launched an assault on the Confederate left flank. Hood’s Brigade fell into formation and marched north, passing wounded and frightened Confederates streaming to the rear. Emerging from the woods in the vicinity of the Dunker Church, named for a German Baptist sect noted for its pacifism, the Texans were ordered forward in a counterattack. The Lone Star soldiers launched a ferocious assault through a cornfield, driving Federal units before them. The attack eventually foundered in the face of intense artillery and musket fire. The Texans stubbornly attempted to move forward, but massive casualties decimated their ranks. Eventually Hood’s Brigade was forced to withdraw under heavy fire. When the Texas Brigade regrouped and counted their losses, it was determined that over 550 of the brigade’s 850 soldiers had been killed, wounded, or captured. The First Texas Infantry, advancing the farthest of any unit in the brigade, suffered a casualty rate of 82% of the 226 men engaged in the battle. The “Ragged Old First” lost their regimental colors as well. Historian John Cannon reports that when a Federal soldier later in the battle picked them up, he found thirteen Texans lying dead within arm’s reach of the Lone Star flag. The First Texas’ casualty rate at Antietam was the second-highest of the Civil War on either side.

Ultimately, the Texan’s counterattack through the cornfield yielded a pyrrhic tactical victory for Confederate arms. Lee and McClellan clumsily traded blows for the rest of the day, and the Army of Northern Virginia avoided total destruction largely through the timidity of McClellan. The slow moving Federal general allowed Lee’s army to withdraw and declined to aggressively pursue the ragged Confederates. Lincoln, frustrated by McClellan’s blundering and refusal to reengage Lee, eventually removed McClellan from command. McClellan would later run unsuccessfully on the Democratic ticket against Lincoln in the crucial 1864 presidential election.

Black and white image of President Abraham Lincoln meeting with Union General McClellan and his officers outside a tent after the Battle of Antietam

Lincoln with McClellan after the Battle of Antietam

The battle of Antietam was a critical turning point in the Civil War. Although Union victory was not decisive, Lee’s repulse from Maryland was enough for Lincoln to issue the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. After Antietam the character of the Civil War would change from a limited struggle to preserve the Union to a total war against slavery. The future of thousands of enslaved Texans was therefore directly affected by the fighting in far off Maryland.

Historical documents allow us to see the tragic affect that Antietam and other battles had on individual families in Texas communities during the Civil War. Lieutenant James Waterhouse was killed in action at Antietam. A native of San Augustine, he was the son of wealthy planter and merchant Richard Waterhouse. The 1860 census lists Richard Waterhouse as owning real and personal property totaling $117,300, making him tremendously wealthy for the time. Both Waterhouse sons, Jack and James, served in the First Texas Infantry. Jack transferred from the unit prior to Antietam and appears to have survived the war. James’s death in battle, at age 20, is documented in his service records. The Confederate government later paid Richard Waterhouse $231, the remainder of James’s monthly pay owed him by the army. Tragedy would revisit the Waterhouse’s during the war. In the turmoil of wartime Texas, Richard Waterhouse was murdered and his store robbed on New Year’s Eve, 1863. The case was never solved.

While James Waterhouse’s family remained to mourn his death, Antietam claimed the lives of other young men who are perhaps only remembered in archives. In the 1860 census, Jacob Frank was listed as a 29 year old German immigrant living in Galveston. He was not married and gave his occupation as “Merchant”, although he did not own any property. A young Jewish man seeking opportunity in Texas, Frank joined the First Texas Infantry in the spring of 1862. He likely joined in anticipation of the imminent Conscription Act and to improve his economic and social status. Upon his enlistment in Houston on April 1, 1862, he received a $50 bounty from Confederate recruiting officer Lieutenant W.A. Bedell. On the morning of September 17, Jacob Frank was killed in the cornfield at Antietam. He left no property and no family behind. The American Civil War, staggering in the scope of its destruction, is illuminated through historical documents as the accumulation of thousands of personal tragedies.

You can see Jacob Frank’s $50 bounty certificate here.

All photographs by Alexander Gardner, via 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.

A History of the World in 100 Objects by Neil MacGregor (2011)

by Cynthia Talbot

Objects not only inform us about the time and place when they were made, but often have subsequent biographies of use that shed light on later historical developments. Take this wooden drum acquired in Virginia around 1730 and sent to a wealthy collector in England.

Identified as an American Indian artifact, it was one of 71,000 items in the founding collection of the British Museum, the world’s first national public museum. Since its founding in 1753 the British Museum’s collection has grown to more than 8 million objects, yet this drum still holds a special significance. A recent examination of the instrument’s wooden body revealed that it was made in West Africa, even though it had been obtained in North America and was long assumed to be of American Indian origin. Scholars now believe that the drum traveled across the Atlantic in a slave ship and spent some time on a Virginia plantation before winding up in London. It is a remnant, in other words, of the Atlantic slave trade, as well as of the Enlightenment impulse to collect and classify material from around the world.

The fascinating past lives of this drum are among the many glimpses into complex historical processes offered by A History of the World in 100 Objects by Neil MacGregor, the Director of the British Museum.

Based on a set of radio programs aired in 2010 by the British Broadcasting Company (BBC) in collaboration with the British Museum, the book is a later print adaptation that closely follows the contents of the radio broadcasts. The twenty parts into which the book is divided, each covering 5 objects, are organized both chronologically and by theme. Collectively, the objects cover a breath-taking expanse of time, beginning with a stone chopping tool from the famous Olduvai Gorge dating back about two million years and ending with a Chinese solar-powered lamp made in 2010. They come from all over the globe: Papua New Guinea, Peru, Pakistan, Paris, and St. Petersburg, among other places.

Along with representing numerous societies from around the world, the 100 items also illustrate the wide variety of material objects that humans have created over time. A ceramic roof tile from Korea, a bark shield from Australia, and a North American stone pipe are included in the selection, along with stone sculptures, paintings, and luxury goods that are more typical of museum exhibits. One of the most interesting objects from the perspective of everyday life is a British penny minted in 1903 that someone illegally stamped with the slogan “Votes for Women.” Defacing coinage was among the milder tactics adopted by British suffragettes in their long campaign to obtain voting rights for women, but it was an effective way to spread their message. They finally achieved success in 1918.

The diversity of objects contributes to the success of this project, but so too does Neil MacGregor’s engaging style of communication and constant attention to the significance of the artifacts, not only for the societies where they originated but also in terms of the larger world. In the section on the Lewis Chessmen, for example, MacGregor shows how things like chess pieces can teach us about the societies that produced them.

Made out of walrus ivory in the late twelfth century, probably in Norway, the Lewis Chessmen were discovered buried in a sand bank on Lewis Island in 1831. The Norse influence on this part of Scotland is revealed in the “berseker” chess pieces derived from the fierce warriors of Old Norse literature, the equivalent of the modern rook. Another piece in this and other European chess sets, the bishop, replaced the war elephant of the original Indian game, in a reflection on the powerful role played by churchmen in medieval Europe.

MacGregor is also skilled at highlighting how objects convey human experiences that transcend the barriers of time and place. We learn not only about the techniques of warfare from relief sculpture that depict the conquest of the Biblical town Lachish ca. 700 BCE, but also about the suffering of the local people after they surrendered to the Assyrians. MacGregor compares the Assyrian practice of forcibly resettling conquered populations to Stalin’s mass deportations in the Soviet Union during the 1930s-50s, and to the displacement of many refugees in the recent Balkan conflicts.

All in all, A History of the World in 100 Objects is an impressive achievement: a captivating introduction to the main themes of world history by means of a focus on tangible artifacts. The British Museum and the BBC have done a commendable job of making it accessible to the public, as well, through their companion websites. The original radio programs can still be heard online or downloaded as podcasts, while one or more images of each object can also be viewed along with a map of its original location. There is even a section for teachers containing lesson plans and a game, making this an even more useful resource for the classroom.

Companion websites:

100 Objects at The British Museum
100 Objects at the BBC

You may also like:

Enlightenment: Discovering the World in the Eighteenth Century (2003),
Kim Sloan, editor

“A History of New York in 50 Objects”

Photos courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

« Previous Page

Recent Posts