Stacy Vlasits, Author at Not Even Past

Thinking About the Constitution

One subtext of last week’s Supreme Court decision on health care was a debate about how economic equality should or should not be regulated by the Constitution. Our colleague, constitutional historian William Forbath, has an op-ed in the New York Times today, discussing the history of such regulation and suggesting ways to address the growing disparity between rich and poor in the US:

“The Constitution… promises real equality of opportunity; it calls on all three branches of government to ensure that all Americans enjoy a decent education and livelihood and a measure of security against the hazards of illness, old age and unemployment — all so they have a chance to do something that has value in their own eyes and a chance to engage in the affairs of their communities and the larger society. Government has not only the authority but also the duty to underwrite these promises.”

For more on the history of the Constitution, take a look at this exhibit from the National Archives: A More Perfect Union: The Creation of the U.S. Constitution.

Failed Enlightenment: Urban Design and French Modernity in Beirut

by Kate Maddox

This year’s John Ferguson Prize for Best Undergraduate Thesis went to Kate Maddox, a history major at the University of Texas at Austin. Her thesis explored the European political, social, and ideological influence in the making of the Lebanese city of Beirut. Read her abstract and take a look at some old photographs of early twentieth century Beirut below.

Abstract:

The processes that led to the remaking of Beirut reveal European powers’ economic penetration of the city, which resulted in to an ideological penetration of the city. This ideology, informed by the Enlightenment and French conceptions of modernity, manifested itself in several dominant themes, both in the period of informal European influence under the Ottomans and continuing during the period of direct French rule under the Mandate system.

In their production of the city center, and in the Ottoman urban planning projects that preceded the Mandate, French efforts drew directly and indirectly on concepts of the Enlightenment and modernity as well as other trends in imperial city building. The theory behind the making of a space deserving of the nickname “the Paris of the Middle East” can be divided into three motives, each addressed in turn in this thesis. The first, accessibility between the port and the city, owes more to economics than the social paternalism that marks imperial efforts of Westernization. The second principle manifests those efforts, the improvement of permeability of the downtown area and its buildings. Finally, the threat posed by disease and illness for the local population and, more importantly, European agents unaccustomed to the environment, combined with the concept of individual needs resulted in a focus on public health and hygiene. These ideas, however, are not mutually exclusive and developments often addressed all three. But together they drove the planning schemes in the central district that created the urban landscape that still exists, for better or worse.

About Katherine Maddox:

Katherine Maddox was born and raised in Houston, Texas. In 2008 she graduated from the High School for Performing and Visual Arts where she specialized in clarinet and bass clarinet. In the summer of 2011 she traveled to Beirut, Lebanon to study Arabic at the American University in Beirut and conduct research for her thesis. After completing her bachelor’s degree in history at the University of Texas she is travelling to Tanzania to climb Mount Kilimanjaro. Following that she will be returning to Beirut where she will continue her Arabic studies and work for an NGO.

Fordlandia by Greg Grandin (2010)

by Cristina Metz

Greg Grandin has written a page-turner that tells the story of Henry Ford’s foray into the Brazilian Amazon and much more. In 1925, Ford met with Harvey Firestone to discuss England’s challenge to the US rubber supply. Much as the Belgians had done in Africa in the late nineteenth-century, England had extracted this resource by proxy—through companies such as the Peruvian Amazon Rubber Company in the Amazon and its Asian colonies. Ford’s response was to embark upon his own South American venture into the world of rubber.

That same year, the governor of Pará sent Custódio Alves de Lima, a Brazilian diplomat, traveled to the U.S. with the aim of enticing Ford into establishing a rubber plantation in the region. The governor was prepared to grant Ford a number of perquisites, including land and tax concessions. Henry Ford took the bait. Within two years, he received a concession of close to 2.5 million acres, half private property at a cost of $125,000 and half public property granted to him free of charge. This tract of land that would soon be called “Fordlandia” became more than just a potential rubber plantation. Ford saw it as an opportunity to begin a new socio-industrial experiment that sought to impose his brand of Americanism on a people and environment.

Over the next few decades, Ford’s determination to build a place that would “safeguard rural virtues and remedy urban ills” would meet its match in the Amazon. Ford’s emissaries began a Sisyphean attempt to clear land during the rainy season, they siphoned money to line their own pockets, and they began exploiting workers who were already leery of working on Ford’s jungle experiment. Workers were expected to work in extremely high heat and humidity. Adverse work conditions, coupled with an ignorance of Amazonian epidemiology, led to many deaths. Such a high rate of mortality at Ford’s Amazon project was a common feature of other U.S. and European forays into Central and South America in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. In The Path Between the Seas, for instance, David McCullough tells the story of how the building of the Panama Canal, which at various points in its history was in the hands of a Frenchman and an American who each refused to give up in the face of nature’s challenges, also resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands of workers from disease and various threats of the Panamanian jungle.

Ford also tried to impose a lifestyle that did not jibe well with Fordlandia workers. His attempt at cultural imperialism met violent resistance, such as a multi-day riot that started in the worker’s dining hall. Up until the riot, the men had often taken their meals at local brothels and saloons. Ford, who was a teetotaler, implemented a new policy to coerce the men into eating their meals at the mess hall instead. Money for meals was automatically deducted from their paychecks and the workers resented this. To make matters worse, Ford managers chose a bland menu: oatmeal, canned peaches, and unpolished rice. The mess hall riot signaled the beginning of the end of Ford’s project aimed at restoring a bygone era. By 1945, Fordlandia had failed.

Grandin is ambivalent about explaining this failure as rooted in Ford’s hubris, opting instead for the negative effects of deindustrialization. Much of the evidence, however, points to Ford’s excessive self-confidence as a primary factor for the failure of his Amazonian project. To begin with, he purposely did not hire experts—botanists, agronomists, interpreters—who could have helped Fordlandia succeed. The Amazon was not the only place where Ford’s personal hang-ups, like his suspicion of experts and his cantankerousness, caused problems. Grandin transports readers back and forth between Brazil and the U.S. to show that at the same time that Ford was trying to build a perfect world in the middle of the jungle, his empire at home was beginning to show the strain of scandals and shop-floor abuses of despotic foremen in his factory.

In typical Grandin style, the book ends in the contemporary period. Today the Amazon forest suffers from rapid deforestation caused in part by projects like Ford’s. His doggedness in growing rubber trees his own way led Ford to clear acres upon acres of forest. Soy farming, another of Ford’s projects, required the use of toxic chemicals that have allowed this non-native crop to thrive by killing off native species. The environmental degradation that modern industry and agriculture cause is not often something that consumers consider when they purchase a car that has Brazilian soy-based plastic parts or purchase a piece of furniture containing particle board made from young trees that could have reforested the Amazon if they had been left to mature. This disjuncture between the environmental and human degradation associated with mass production and consumption is characteristic of far too-many commodity chains.

If Fordlandia is a story about one man’s attempt to impose his will over nature, it is also a story about modernity and globalization. While Grandin mentions only superficially the presence of women, Chinese, U.S. Confederates, and West Indian workers in the Amazon, readers can be sure that their presence was an effect of the shortening of time and space brought on by modernity that facilitated increased movement of people, goods, and ideas. In contrast to works that exalt the benefits of the modern world—in the realm of ideas and technological advancements, for instance—Grandin implies a weighty question. Has global industrial capitalism, of which Fordlandia is a microcosmic case-in-point, actually advanced humanity or are we now in an age of what scholars have called “the coloniality of power” where all of the old imperial modes are as entrenched as they were in the none too distant past, but now sporting the sheen of the twenty-first century?

Photo credits:

All images courtesy of thehenryford/Flickr Creative Commons.

Health Care: A Historical Snapshot

by Sally Clarke

All the debates about health insurance have emphasized how expensive health care has become. According to the Center for Medicare & Medicaid Services, as of 2010 (the most recent year available) health care constituted 17.9% of the U.S. economy. Health care expenses have risen steadily since 1929, as shown in the first chart. The second chart indicates that this expenditure has had a good payoff: life expectancy has risen from about 60 years in the 1920s to just short of 80 years today. (The big dip in 1918 reflects the influenza pandemic.) One task of historians is to identify disjunctures between the past and the present, and the two charts illustrate this point.

(Source: Historical Statistics of the United States: the Millennial Edition On-Line, series Bd33 and Ca74; Center for Medicare & Medicaid Services, “National Health Expenditures,” accessed May 11, 2012.)

(Source: Historical Statistics of the United States: the Millennial Edition On-Line, series Ab644; U.S. Bureau of the Census, Statistical Abstract of the United States: 2012, Table 104; and Sherry L. Murphy, Jiaquan Xu, and Kenneth D. Kochanek, National Vital Statistics Reports, 60.4 [January 11, 2012], accessed May 11, 2012.)

Going back to 1929, health care claimed less than four percent of the economy, and less than ten percent of Americans had hospital or surgical benefits. Yet in the fifty years from 1880 to 1930, life expectancy rose from 40 to 60 years, or by the same amount as in the years since 1930. How was it possible for life expectancy to rise as much in the first historical era as the second without recording a surge in health care expenses?

A doctor examines a child before administering a vaccine in 1941.

Scholars point to two important improvements in life expectancy. First, there was a sharp fall in infant mortality. Massachusetts provides the best data on these early years. In 1872, 19 out of 100 infants did not live to see their first birthdays. Throughout the 1880s and 1890s the infant mortality rate remained above 150 deaths per 1,000. By 1929, however, the rate had fallen to 62 deaths per 1,000. Second, life expectancy improved because there was a drop in deaths tied to tuberculosis and other diseases like measles, typhoid, scarlet fever, and diphtheria. TB was the worst of diseases, but it dropped from 194 deaths per 100,000 in 1900 to 71 deaths in 1930. These declines came about before vaccinations were available, so what explains the drop in mortality rates?

A child waits to receive a measles vaccine in 1941.

One source for the rise in life expectancy was improved hygiene in the care of infants. A second source was improved public health, notably the eradication of bovine TB and the pasteurization of milk. Improvements also stemmed from better nutrition. Data is limited, and while from 1909 to 1930 per capita consumption of calories on a daily basis was flat, production of many fruits and vegetables, such as oranges and carrots, rose. Processed foods also became common. I would add another development: the fall in the workweek. During the late 19^th century, Americans worked an average of 10 hours a day, six days a week. By the end of the Great Depression the workweek had shortened to roughly 40 hours a week. People did not physically wear out in the 1930s, as they had in the 1880s. They also did not suffer the number of industrial accidents that they had faced during the late 19^th century.

In many ways, the two historical eras are not comparable. But there is one insight from this review of the years before 1930. To the extent that nutrition was important in the first era as a “cheap” way to boost life expectancy, nutrition remains one cost-effective strategy in reducing diseases like diabetes and raising life expectancy today.

All statistics are found in Susan B. Carter, et al., Historical Statistics of the United States: Millennial Edition Online (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

Photo credits:

Arthur Rothstein, “Dr. Tabor examining Randolph Darkey, before inoculating him against measles, in the community health center, Dailey, West Virginia,” December 1941

U.S. Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Black & White Photographs via The Library of Congress

Arthur Rothstein, “Elizabeth Darkey, daughter of one of the project families, waiting in the health center to be inoculated against measles. Dailey, West Virginia,” December 1941

U.S. Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Black & White Photographs via The Library of Congress

The Eclipse of the Century: A Story of Science, Money, and Culture in Saharan Africa and the American Southwest

by David A. Conrad

Abstract:

Universities received large amounts of government funding for scientific research during World War II and the early Cold War. Such assistance allowed the University of Texas’s McDonald Observatory to pursue an ambitious research agenda in the field of astronomy. In 1973 Observatory staff and faculty from the University of Texas Department of Physics organized an expedition to the Islamic Republic of Mauritania to observe a solar eclipse. They planned to conduct a delicate experiment which could help to confirm an aspect of Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity. In addition to securing the necessary funds, the success of the expedition depended on favorable viewing conditions in the sweltering, sandstorm-prone Sahara and the assistance of an oasis community called Chinguetti.

The McDonald Observatory circa 1939.

The view from the McDonald Observatory today.

A present day eclipse in Mauritania.

About David Conrad:

David Conrad is entering his fourth year in the University of Texas at Austin’s history program. After receiving his B.A. in History and Asian Studies from Austin College in Sherman, Texas, David spent two years as an ESL instructor in a small, seaside Japanese community. He plans to pursue a dissertation under the guidance of Dr. Mark Metzler on land reform in East and Southeast Asia in the mid-twentieth century. In addition to U.S. foreign policy, Japanese history, and agricultural history, David is interested in the history of science and the history of film, television, and radio.

Visit David Conrad’s homepage.

You may also like:

David Conrad’s TEXAS piece, which offers a more in depth look into his seminar paper on the McDonald Observatory.

Our TEXAS feature on the University of Texas at Austin’s Physics Department’s history website.

Photo credits:

Russell Lee, “The McDonald Observatory Near Fort Davis, TX,” May 1939

via The Library of Congress

Flickr Creative Commons User agrilifetoday,”Wildfires Approach McDonald Observatory in Texas, 20″ April 2011

via agrilifetoday/Flickr Creative Commons

Flickr Creative Commons User paper kay, Untitled, 3 March 2007

via paper kay/ Flickr Creative Commons

The Invisible History of Hawaii in Alexander Payne’s “The Descendants”

By Sarah Steinbock-Pratt

The Descendants, directed by Alexander Payne, opens with a voice-over by protagonist Matt King (played by George Clooney), a wealthy Oahu lawyer, about how everyone assumes that Hawaii is a paradise. We quickly learn, however, that there is trouble in paradise. Matt’s wife, Elizabeth, is in a coma from a boat-racing accident, and Matt, who describes himself as the “back-up parent,” has become the sole care-giver for his two troubled daughters, Scottie and Alex. Elizabeth’s accident comes just as Matt is preparing to sell 25,000 acres of land on Kauai contained in a family trust, for which he is the sole trustee. The trust is due to expire in seven years and the many cousins in the King family have agreed to sell the land to a real estate developer.

The land is a legacy from Matt’s great-grandmother, a Hawaiian princess and direct descendent of Kamehameha, who married Edward King, the descendant of American missionaries. Although the family is fictional, the story has historical echoes. The real-life marriage of Princess Bernice Pauahi Bishop, a great-granddaughter of Kamehameha I who owned vast amounts of land, and Charles Reed Bishop, an American businessman, may have provided the inspiration for the King family. The family history is interwoven into the main plot of the film, the dynamics and drama of a family that has somehow grown apart and struggling to deal with their mother’s accident.

During a visit with Elizabeth’s doctor, Matt discovers that Elizabeth is in a persistive vegetative state, and that her living will dictates that she must be taken off life support. The doctor advises Matt to give family and friends time to say goodbye before Elizabeth dies. Matt takes Scottie to bring Alex home from the Hawaii Pacific Institute. When he tells Alex that her mother is going to die, she reveals that Elizabeth has been having an affair with another man. Matt’s reactions to all this news include an emotional trip to Kauai, where he and his daughters also visit the family land and reminisce about past camping trips. The pristine beauty of the King land is contrasted with shots of development on Kauai, particularly resorts and golf courses, the fate that awaits the trust land. In the end, Matt has a change of heart and refuses, as the sole trustee, to sell the land. Explaining himself to his angry cousins, Matt declares, “We didn’t do anything to own this land, it was entrusted to us,” and if they sell it, “something we were supposed to protect is gone.”

The process of coming to terms with the death of his wife forces Matt to confront what is owed to the dying, the dead, and to those who remain behind. It is perhaps Matt’s failure to prevent his wife’s death that makes him cling to his role as steward of the land and the family’s Hawaiian legacy. In an odd parallel, Matt acts as the steward of both Elizabeth’s death and the King land – as he lets one go, he appreciates the importance of the other all the more. As Elizabeth’s death brings him closer to his children, it also brings him back in touch with his past and the importance of preserving his family’s legacy for future generations.

It is slightly disappointing that the film never really engages with the history of Hawaii and never really links the two plots very well. The King family is, as Matt puts it, “haole as shit,” (haole is the derogatory term for white immigrants); sending their children to Punahou School and living lives of privilege and ease. The Punahou School was one of two elite schools founded by American missionaries in the islands, and was initially a school for the children of the missionaries. The other was the Chiefs’ Children’s School, a school for the children of high-ranking Hawaiians, which the last five Hawaiian monarchs attended. Punahou, as Sarah Vowel notes, became known as the “haole rich kid school,” labeled by President Obama, an alumnus, as an “incubator for island elites.” That the King family attended Punahou clearly marks them as island elites, participating in a haole educational tradition that stretches back over a century and a half.

Because the King land, moreover, comes from the marriage of a fictional Hawaiian princess and American businessman, the film does not have to address the relationship between land ownership and the role American missionaries and their descendants played in paving the way for American annexation of the islands, and why so much of Hawaii ended up in the hands of American settlers and their descendants. Traditionally, Hawaii’s land was divided according to a hierarchical system of reciprocity. As historian J. Khaulani Kauanui notes, chiefs divided up land amongst lesser chiefs, who allocated land to stewards, who administered the access to land of the commoners, who worked the land, sending tribute back up the ladder, ending with the king himself. In 1848, however, shortly after the creation of a constitutional monarchy, King Kamehameha III was persuaded to divide up the land not belonging to the Crown into individual plots, to be claimed by Hawaii’s commoners, an act known as the Mahele. As with the Dawes Act, the Mahele was hailed as step that would lead to Hawaiians becoming independent yeoman farmers, owners of their own plots of self-sustaining land. What happened in reality, also in striking similarity to the legacy of the Dawes Act, is that land once held communally and for the common good was concentrated in predominantly white hands, leaving the native population with a fraction of their former lands.

The backdrop to the Mahele was the precipitant drop in Hawaii’s native population since the late 18^th century, due mainly to diseases introduced by European and American sailors and missionaries. The declining native population (the 1890 census listed just over 30,000 native Hawaiians, a drop of over 90% of the estimated population at the end of the 18^th century), as well as the failure to educate Hawaiians about the new land policies and the difficulty of filing claims for land, meant that only a small fraction of the land put up for sale went to Hawaiian commoners. This was compounded by an 1850 law allowing the government to sell unclaimed land to anyone, foreigners included, and an 1874 law privatizing mortgage foreclosures, all of which led to, by 1890, haoles controlling ninety percent of Hawaiian land.

At the same time, the booming demand for foodstuffs created by the Gold Rush in California and Oregon, and the growing market for Hawaiian sugar in the northern United States after the Civil War cut off the supply from Louisiana, led American planters, many of them grandchildren of the original missionaries, to come to the islands, to expand their operations and buy up as much land as they could to grow their valuable crops. The introduction of a constitutional monarchy in which haoles eventually made up the entirety of the judiciary and much of the government, moreover, legally reinforced American notions of private ownership. These changes created a perfect storm for American planters to overthrow the monarchy. As their wealth and influence grew, the interests of the planters were set on a collision course with the interests of the Hawaiian monarchy and Hawaiian national sovereignty. And when America began casting about for an overseas empire in the waning years of the 19th century, there the islands were, already settled by a substantial American population (or at least the descendants of Americans), which had overthrown the Hawaiian monarchy and was eager to be annexed by the United States. Hawaii was a move-in ready Pacific colony, prepared by the labors of American missionaries and their descendants, the American planters, for annexation.

Ultimately though, while “The Descendants” is a Hawaiian story, it is not a film about Hawaii or Hawaiian history. And it is not historical fiction, though the fictionalized history of the King family plays a strong supporting role. It is a film about everyday human tragedy, and the ways we cope with loss, grief, anger, betrayal, and the fact that nothing we love stays the same forever; that families fall apart and come back together, that land is subdivided and over-developed, that traditions are lost, and that we have to do our best to adapt and draw our own conclusions about what is owed to both the past and the future.

For more on Hawaiian history, we recommend:

J. Khaulani Kauanui, Hawaiian Blood: Colonialism and the Politics of Sovereignty and Indigeneity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008).

Sarah Vowel, Unfamiliar Fishes (New York: Riverhead Books, 2011).

Photo credits:

“EAST (REAR) ELEVATION – Punahou School, School Hall, 1601 Punahou Street, Honolulu, Honolulu County, HI.”

Courtesy of The Library of Congress

“FRONT ELEVATION, ANGLE VIEW – Waioli Mission House, Kauai Belt Highway, Hanalei, Kauai County, HI.”

Courtesy of The Library of Congress

“GENERAL VIEW, ca 1865 (From original photograph in Hawaii State Archives. Photocopy made for HABS in 1966). – Adobe Schoolhouse, Kawaiahao Street at Mission Lane, Honolulu, Honolulu County, HI.”

Courtesy of The Library of Congress

Riveting and Welding: The Revolution of Women in the Workforce

by Julia Mora and Sophia Mora

Rosie the Riveter, with her red handkerchief and sculpted biceps, has become an easily recognizable national cultural icon. But what about the message behind the poster? From where did this image of a strong, confident, working woman originate? Julia Mora and Sophia Mora answer these questions and much more in their new website: “Riveting and Welding: The Revolution of Women in the Workplace.”

Julia and Sophia argue convincingly that Word War II triggered a female labor revolution by allowing women to leave the home and apply for jobs previously reserved for men. Once the war ended, men returned home with the expectation that women should abandon their jobs and return home.

However, World War II work enticed new feminist thoughts, and they began to think about life outside the home. This thought process triggered a series of labor, legal, and social reforms for women – what the Moras call a real “revolution” – resulting in a more female-friendly workforce today.

“Riveting and Welding” highlights the origins of the revolution and the legislative and social reforms it sparked, as well as popular reactions to women’s newly visible presence in the traditionally male-dominated workplace and the revolution’s legacy in today’s feminist movement. (Don’t miss out on an excellent critique of the portrayal of women in the TV show “I Love Lucy”).

Countless photographs, videos, audio clips, primary source documents, and timelines guide readers through more than half a century’s worth of information about women’s long road from the home to the workplace.

Photo credits:

All photos courtesy of “Riveting and Welding: The Revolution of Women in the Workplace.”

Mapping the Earth, Mapping the Air

by Felipe Cruz

The history of aviation is filled with heroes and their machines. Exhibits in the many air & space museums spread around the United States are filled with pictures of young pilots, proudly posing by the side of their aircraft before attempting some feat to enter into a long list of “firsts.” While we often focus on these brave characters and their daring flights, aviation became what it is today through more mundane activities than risking lives, performing stunts, or breaking records. The pilots who aided cartographers and engineers in the production of special aviation maps represented a much bigger contribution to the expansion, reliability, and increasing safety of air transportation.

Knowing one’s exact location was among the greatest challenges of the human push into the air, as it is in the exploration of any new frontier, before there were such things as aeronautical charts, that is, maps for aerial navigation. It is easy for a generation with pocket sized access to Google Maps to underestimate how different our world looks from above if you have only seen it from ground level. Pilots in the 1910s and 1920s scrambled to adapt any maps in existence to use in their cramped, loud and open cockpits.

Railroad, highway, land survey and other maps were often cut up into smaller strips depicting the exact routes pilots had to navigate. These “strip maps,” chopped and annotated from various sources are a common archival find among the possessions of pilots from the first half of the twentieth century.

This strip map shown here is a nautical chart that was cut to only show the area needed by the pilot, then folded and punch holed to be stored in a binder for easy manipulation.

Because strip maps were cut out from maps made for other forms of transportation, pilots were often forced to follow routes that already existed. American Air Mail pilots, for example, followed railroads, known then among pilots as the “iron compass.” Even with a track marking the path on the ground, pilots still required some help along the way. That could be farmers painting navigational aids on the roof of a barn, or making bonfires and installing beacons to help pilots through the night. Seaplanes flying along the coast, like the ones Pan Am operated on the New York – Buenos Aires route during the 1930s, could count on the same infrastructure sailors had used for hundreds of years. They used nautical charts, which not only showed them the coastline, but also any lighthouses along it. This early aeronautical chart was intended to be used by pilots navigating the coast around Rio de Janeiro. It was obviously made from a nautical chart, but inland features useful for aerial navigation were also added.

These adaptations made from railroad or nautical maps worked fine – so long as one only intended to fly up and down the coast or along railroads, a serious limitation on the promise of untethered transportation implied in aviation. It only took a sudden fog to throw a pilot off his railroad track with no means to find his way back. For seaplane pilots that same fog could cover coastal mountains, and since nautical charts showed the depth of the ocean but not the height of mountains, that meant serious trouble – especially as weather forecasts were often lacking in both frequency and precision. Even more mundane problems plagued pilots, especially in the days of open cockpits, when a map could fly right out of a pilot’s hand into the open air.

This aeronautical chart from the late 1930s tries to include useful meteorological information, by adding a little angel blowing the wind in the statistically prevailing direction.

Before real aeronautical charts became available, pilots often worked around these limitations by adding their own bit of navigational knowledge to maps for their own reference or to share with other pilots. Archival copies of adapted strip maps used by pilots before the 1930s often had a variety of small annotations, pointing out where one could find fuel, farms with fields large enough for landing, the height of dangerous peaks, and even descriptions of geographic features useful for navigation. This kind of information, first informally added to maps by pilots, was eventually formalized in aeronautical charts.

The notes on the two maps above were added by a pilot prospecting an area for an airline, noting the heights of the mountains and the conditions of landing fields – two pieces of information unavailable on the nautical chart which he used.

By World War II, many places with developed aviation industries already had maps that could be used for aerial navigation, charts that helped pilots interpret the ground below to understand what they were flying over. But as airplanes flew higher and higher, aeronautical charts would come to represent airspace three-dimensionally, showing different areas of airspace, restricted or reserved for different purposes at different altitudes. Finally, with the expansion of radio-navigation towers, even invisible radio highways were depicted on these maps, so that pilots could use special instruments to follow radio signals, decreasing the need for visual references on the ground altogether. Here you can see a modern aeronautical chart showing many invisible features, such as airways created by radio signals and divisions of airspace at different altitudes.

The modern aeronautical chart, rather than being only a visual representation of the ground, has become a truly three-dimensional representation of space.

Figure sources:

Amelia Earhart: Wikimedia Commons

Figure 1 – Humphrey Toomey Collection, Courtesy of Special Collections, University of Miami Libraries, Coral Gables, Florida

Figure 2 – T. Courtesy of Centro de Pesquisa e Documentação de História Contemporânea do Brasil

Figure 3 – Courtesy of Geography & Map Division, Library of Congress

Figures 4 & 5 – Courtesy of Special Collections, University of Miami Libraries, Coral Gables, Florida

Figure 6 – Wikimedia Commons

For more on aeronautical history:

Akerman, James. Cartographies of Travel and Navigation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006.

Corn, Joseph. The Winged Gospel: America’s Romance with Aviation, 1900-1950. New York: Oxford University Press, 1983.

Fritzsche, Peter. A Nation of Fliers: German Aviation and the Popular Imagination. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992.

The National Air and Space Museum has an online and physical exhibit on the history of early Air Mail pilots and navigation.

Using History to See the World

by Gustavo Fernandez

(Photo courtesy of Gustavo Fernandez)

To some, the term “international history” may come across as vague and unfamiliar. Gustavo Fernandez, a student at UT Austin’s Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs, has dedicated an entire website, “Using History to See the World,” to demystifying this academic field. Fernandez defines international history as a sub-field of history that describes how nations, non-state actors, and non-governmental organization interact in the international arena. On his website, Fernandez talks about the different ways that historians, policymakers, and students use history to address, understand, and solve present-day policy issues. What historical examples, for instance, do today’s historians turn to before offering advice on how the United States should react to Iran’s decision to develop its nuclear program? What do Fox News pundits mean when they criticize Barack Obama for being an “appeaser”?

“Using History to See the World” contains book reviews, videos, links to relevant online news publications and course syllabi, and a blog to help readers answer these and other policy-related questions.

Photo credits:

Mario Tama,“Ahmadinejad,” 22 September 2008

Getty Image via tonygido/Flickr Creative Commons

University of Texas at Austin – Department of History

(Professor: Jeremi Suri)

Debating Bolshevism

by Andrew Straw

Communism acquired many different faces during the twentieth century. In the Soviet Union, it became known as Bolshevism. Named after the political party, led by Vladimir I. Lenin, that defeated the rival Menshevik Party in the October Revolution in 1917, Bolshevism would become the official political dogma of the Soviet Union for decades to come. The domestic response to Lenin’s revolutionary doctrine has inspired nearly a century’s worth of historical literature. Yet one question remains: how did other countries worldwide understand and react to what seemed like a particularly Soviet brand of communism?

Poster shows a Bolshevik leaning on a map of Europe and setting fire to Bavaria. The text below says: “The Bolshevik is coming! Throw him out on Election Day! Bavarian People’s Party.” (Courtesy of The Library of Congress)

Andrew Straw, a doctoral student at the University of Texas at Austin, created “Debating Bolshevism” to answer this very question. While even Stalin questioned the relevance of the term in as late as 1952, one glance at primary and secondary literature from across the globe during the twentieth century demonstrate that while the term may seem obsolete now, understanding what Bolshevism meant, how it was used, and why people had such strong reactions to it is crucial to understanding twentieth century history. The fact that the Soviet Union was the only official Bolshevik state in no way confined the idea of Bolshevism to the USSR. After all, Bolshevism’s own origins came from a transnational dissident group in European exile, one in which Lenin himself claimed membership. After the Bolshevik Revolution, Bolshevism entered into an ideological debate taking place on a world stage. Supporters presented it as an alternative to Western goals and principles of the West. Debating Bolshevism demonstrates that the international community from all points of the political spectrum took it seriously: its detractors maligned its violent excesses, and its supporters exalted its unhinging of imperial powers and rapid change.

Lenin leads the October Revolution wearing a proletarian workers’ cap on the front page of a 22 January 2009 issue of Pravda. The front-page article is etitled “On the Crisis,” referring to the recent spread of “Occupy Wall Street” protests in cities around the world. The accompanying text states that unemployed workers in Putin’s Russian (unemployment had reach nearly 20% in some areas) are ripe for communist revolution and calls on all concerned to attend a communist rally that was held on January 31 in Moscow.

Further down the page, a picture of pre-revolutionary Russian workers stands side by side with an image of currently unemployed Muscovites to underline the point. In addition, the newspaper includes a flyer for the demonstration that prominently displays the clenched fists of workers.

Mao Zedong was one of the prominent leaders of the 20^thcentury, and the road leading to his successful consolidation of power in the People’s Republic of China was heavily informed by the Bolshevik idea of a radically revolutionary break and guerilla warfare tactics. Mao was a firm believer that a potential revolutionary situation exists in any country where the government consistently fails in its obligation to ensure at least a minimally decent standard of living. While guerilla warfare certainly existed before Bolshevism, Mao was inspired by Bolshevik anti-imperialism, revolutionary self-determination of colonized populations, and civilian participation. Mao’s literature on military strategy drew heavily from Lenin’s On Guerilla Warfare, citing both Lenin’s political ideas and military tactics and sharing the belief that a “people’s” revolution was inevitable. Furthermore, even Western military men viewed Lenin as key to the Marxist revolutionary trends because they thought, “only when Lenin came on the scene did guerilla warfare receive the potent political injection that was to alter its character radically.

But despite the influence, Mao did not adhere to Moscow demands calling for a proletarian revolution, but instead he believed China’s revolutionary potential was housed entirely in the peasantry. Mao “knew and trusted the peasants, and had correctly gauged their revolutionary potential.” At least at this seemed to by the case to Samuel B. Griffith wrote the 1961 introduction to his translation of Mao’s on Guerilla warfare. While Mao’s Cultural Revolution and collectivization would later bring cause take a huge toll on the countryside, his initial use of peasants contrasted with the distrust and disdain Lenin and especially Stalin had for the Russian peasantry. Mao’s view was a such source of dissension between him and the Kremlin that Moscow even sanctioned the attempt by Zhou Enlai and a group known as the “28 Bolsheviks” who tried to replace Mao in 1934. These tensions would remain and only grow into the Sino-Soviet split during the Cold War.

Visit Andrew Straw’s graduate student homepage.

University of Texas at Austin – History Department

(Professor: Jeremi Suri)

Photo credits:

Zhou Zhenbiao, “Marx’s – The Glory of Mao’s Ideologies Brightens Up the New China,” Peking, 1952

People Fine Arts via The Library of Congress

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