Stacy Vlasits, Author at Not Even Past

Narco-Modernities

Drug trafficking – especially as it pertains to Mexico – has been a main fixture in today’s news for some time now. But UT graduate student Edward F. Shore argues that the violence, disorder, and political, social, and economic instability associated with the drug trade has a long history, and one that has had international repercussions. Shore’s website “Narco-Modernities” shows that while drug-related episodes may take place in specific countries or regions, the people, governments, economies, and societies they have affected and continue to affect span the globe. Through book reviews, primary sources, maps, secondary historical literature and the author’s own original commentary, “Narco-Modernities” discusses current events while also engaging historical debates surrounding globalization, immigration, crime, gangs, prisons, the “War on Drugs,” the Cold War, and present-day U.S.-Latin American relations.

Nicaraguan Contras

An August 23, 1986 e-mail message from Oliver North to Ronald Reagan and National Security Advisor John Poindexter. In it, North describes his meeting with Panamanian Leader Manuel Noriega’s representative. “You will recall that over the years Manuel Noriega in Panama and I have developed a fairly good relationship,” North writes before explaining Noriega’s proposal. He notes that if U.S. officials can “help clean up his image” and lift the ban on arms sales to the Panamanian Defense Force, Noriega will “‘take care of’ the Sandinista leadership for us.”

“Godfather of Cocaine” Pablo Escobar’s mug shot

A recently declassified Department of State briefing paper from Inter-American Affairs. It showcases Washington’s frustration with the Guatemalan government’s failure to investigate the a surge of violence, assassinations, and an attack on an American citizen in that country. The United States was particularly concerned about the Guatemalan government upholding human rights, implementing judicial reform, and monitoring drug trafficking but felt that “it can continue to be unresponsive to [its] interests.”

University of Texas at Austin – Department of History

(Professor: Jeremi Suri)

The Civil World: A Global “War Between States”

by Henry A. Wiencek

Can historians reinterpret the American Civil War as a global event? This question inspired Henry Wiencek, a first year doctoral student in history at the University of Texas at Austin, to create the website “The Civil World: A Global ‘War Between States.’”

A rendering of the naval battle between in the infamous CSS raider, Alabama, and the Union Keasarge.

Weincek designed the site to provide an “intellectual portal” for historians, students, and general interest readers alike to consult in order to learn about the economic, diplomatic, and social changes ushered in by the Civil War on the international stage. That the Civil War can be interpreted as an international event may come as a surprise to many readers. The conflict, after all, is often taught and thought of as a regional phenomenon: its origins, key players, events, and consequences are traditionally thought to be constrained within U.S. borders. Wiencek’s website tells a different story. Through its diverse collection of maps, newspaper clippings, and recent historical literature, “A Civil World” argues convincingly that the war’s international stage played a significant role in the war’s origins, trajectory, and eventual outcome.

(A Harper’s Weekly cartoon satirized the widespread fear that a post-bellum, pre-Reconstruction America will descend into a “Mexican” state of constant civil war.)

Abraham Lincoln as the “Federal Phoenix” in the British magazine Punch.

University of Texas at Austin – Department of History

(Professor: Jeremi Suri)

For Greater Glory (2012)

By Cristina Metz

“¡Viva Cristo Rey! Long Live Christ the King!” The rallying cry of the men and women who fought for religious freedom against Mexico’s revolutionary anti-clerical laws gave the movement its name. The Cristero Rebellion (1927-29) was a bloody uprising waged in central and western Mexico less than a decade after the end of the Mexican Revolution (1910-20). Director Dean Wright’s For Greater Glory (opening June 1, 2012) tells the tragic and violent story of President Plutarco Elías Calles’s zealous implementation of the anti-clerical laws inscribed in the 1917 Constitution and popular reactions to it. Tension between the Catholic Church and state had heightened after the Revolution. For liberal politicians—those who favored the modern over tradition—the Church was an outdated institution that threatened their modernist state-building projects. The anti-clerical laws were designed to decrease the Church’s power by, for example, prohibiting it from providing primary education and from intervening in national politics. By 1926, the Church became more vociferous in its opposition to the laws and Calles responded by sending in federal troops to enforce them.

Many reviewers of For Greater Glory will undoubtedly focus on the desire for religious freedom dramatized in the film. Such a view, however, overlooks the film’s other important contributions, not least of which is that it alerts us to the power struggle between two of Mexico’s major institutions. Would the ecclesiastical structure submit to the authority of a secular state or would the Church become a state within a state answering to the Vatican, not the Mexican president? The value of For Greater Glory is that it portrays these concerns and extends beyond them by also offering viewers insight into the impact of religion on daily life in 1920s Mexico, the opposition tactics that cristeros adopted, a history of the conflict, and into how history itself is constructed.

Andy García plays General Enrique Gorostieta Velarde (1889-1929), a retired army general whose military prowess was well-known, but who had retired to a life as a soap manufacturer. As Calles enforces restrictions upon Catholic clergy and public displays of religiosity, Gorostieta clashes with his wife Tula (played by Eva Longoria) over his anti-clerical liberalism and her concern for the Catholic education of their daughters. As Gorostieta’s family adjusts to the changes—Tula becomes responsible for her daughters’ religious education—two other important storylines develop.

The Liga Nacional de Defensa Religiosa (League for the Defense of Religious Liberty) organized opposition to Calles’s law, initially adopting non-violent tactics to fight the restrictions on Catholic life. In response, Calles deployed federal troops to stamp out opposition. Troops desecrate churches, execute priests, and persecute cristeros, both in the film and in real life. It is this violent repression and religious persecution that pushes the League and others to radicalize. The film shows individuals reacting to threats against their civil rights – their right to religious expression – showing how politics and religion came together to drive participation in the Cristero Rebellion. League members take up arms along with 20,000 others, smuggle munitions to the fighters in the field, and form an intelligence network. The League also hires General Gorostieta to unify all of the Cristero armies under one centralized command.

Why was religion so important to Mexicans in this period to propel them into armed revolt? A third storyline that focuses on 13-year-old José Luis Sánchez del Río (who Pope Benedict beatified in 2005), shows the many ways religion saturated daily life. When we meet José, his godfather, Mayor Picazo, is dragging him by the ear to church to apologize to Father Christopher, the local priest, for having misbehaved toward him. José must do penance by cleaning the church. All of this conveys the deference, inculcated at an early age, that the laity had toward the clergy and that underpinned the Church’s authority in early-twentieth-century Mexico. As we watch José complete his penance and begin training as an altar server, we glimpse the central role that religion plays in daily life during this period. Families attend mass together, their homes display religious paintings, and we see children and adults go through the Catholic rites of passage, or the holy sacraments (baptism, communion, marriage, etc.). Seen in this light, the reaction to Calles and repression of the Church becomes much more complex. For some, participation in the rebellion had to do with non-religious concerns and the film shows this. For others, however, civic life was intertwined with religious life and participation in the uprising was as much about defending the civil right to freedom of religious expression as it was about defending markers of one’s identity. After all, Mexicans in 1927 did not go to city hall to get married or to register births and deaths—such major life events were validated by one’s priest and recorded in the local parish record.

The cristeros developed their own reasons for joining the rebellion, but events also occurred at the highest level of national and international politics that they had little chance of influencing. Interspersed among the scenes of Gorostieta readying his army, of League collaborators mobilizing, and of José finding his revolutionary self and suffering for it, is another important story about twentieth-century international relations, especially between Mexico and the United States. While the federales were killing priests and desecrating Catholic churches, the United States saw its economic and political interests in Mexico threatened. In one scene, President Calvin Coolidge sends Ambassador Dwight Whitney Morrow to Mexico to negotiate a resolution to the war that will protect U.S. oil interests. In exchange for oil concessions, the U.S. decides to sell military weaponry to the Mexican government. Not unsurprisingly, Ambassador Morrow becomes a key figure in peace talks, not between the state and cristeros, but between the state and the Church, the two institutions who were fighting for legitimacy and hegemony. In the film, all of this happens without cristero input. In fact, while Calles and Morrow discuss an end to the conflict that would protect U.S. interests and appease American members of the Knights of Columbus who pressured the State Department into acting on behalf of their besieged Mexican Catholic brethren, Gorostieta is busy building a unified cristero army out of many smaller militant groups. Unbeknownst to him and the other cristero generals, many of whom had fought in the Revolution, the stakes and tactics of war had changed. What began as a local conflict would be shaped by Cold War geopolitics, new military technologies, and a new mode of governmentality embodied by the political party that would rule Mexico for 70 years, the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (Institutional Revolutionary Party, PRI).

A pro-Catholic Church fighter standing in front of an abandoned church during the Cristero Rebellion.

This film is, superficially, a descendant of spaghetti western kitsch with all of the expected gunfights and feats of bravado, but upon closer analysis, it offers much more than that. It is about war and new methods of communication. Railroads, telegraphs, and photographic images made possible greater global integration, inasmuch as information about the cristeros spread around the globe more rapidly. The film also provides viewers with an entertaining lesson in the sources that historians use to construct narratives of the past. In this case, Gorostieta’s letters to his wife, photographs, presidential speeches, and records of diplomatic intervention provide the primary sources of a narrative that shows elite perceptions of the cristeros and ordinary peoples’ own perceptions of themselves and their role in national and regional politics. Finally, For Greater Glory offers an explanation for why people radicalize in response to government action, reminding viewers that war is never simple.

The Cristero Rebellion inspires homage and this film is dedicated to those who fought and died in the rebellion, yet there are a few surprising holes. Gorostieta says in one scene that “women are as important to this war as any soldier” yet the lone female figure shown collaborating with the League plays a minor role in the larger narrative and the range of female cristero activity shown in the film is limited to the collection of signatures in petition drives and smuggling bullets. Women from all social classes acted as cristeros or as their supporters in a wide range of ways. Notwithstanding, For Greater Glory is a moving and informative film and deserves a wide audience.

For more on the church-state crisis of the post-revolutionary period in Mexico you might enjoy:

Matthew Butler, Popular Piety and Political Identity in Mexico’s Cristero Rebellion: Michoacán, 1927-29 (2004)

And here on NEP: Matthew Butler’s review of Graham Greene’s novel, The Power and the Glory, which takes place during the same period.

Watch “For Greater Glory” here.

Photo credits:
National Photo Company, “Gen. P.E. Calles,” 31 October, 1924
National Photo Company via The Library of Congress
Unknown photographer, Untitled
Unknown photographer via locaburg/Flickr Creative Commons

“Captive Fates: Displaced American Indians in the Southwest Borderlands, Mexico, and Cuba, 1500-1800.”

by Paul Conrad

This past May, the Department of History at the University of Texas at Austin awarded the Lathrop Prize for Best Dissertation to Paul Conrad, a PhD graduate in early American history. His dissertation, titled “Captive Fates: Displaced American Indians in the Southwest Borderlands, Mexico, and Cuba, 1500-1800,” chronicles the history of Native American capture by Euroamerican settlers in the Greater Rio Grande River Basin.

Abstract:

Between 1500 and 1800, Spaniards and their Native allies captured hundreds of Apache Indians and members of neighboring groups from the Rio Grande River Basin and subjected them to a variety of fates. They bought and sold some captives as slaves, exiled others as prisoners of war to central Mexico and Cuba, and forcibly moved others to mines, towns, and haciendas as paid or unpaid laborers. Though warfare and captive exchange predated the arrival of Europeans to North America, the three centuries following contact witnessed the development of new practices of violence and captivity in the North American West fueled by Euroamericans’ interest in Native territory and labor, on the one hand, and the dispersal of new technologies like horses and guns to American Indian groups, on the other. While at times subject to an enslavement and property status resembling chattel slavery, Native peoples of the Greater Rio Grande often experienced captivities and forced migrations fueled more by the interests of empires and nation-states in their territory and sovereignty than by markets in human labor. Uncovering these dynamics of captivity and their effects on Apachean groups and their neighbors serves to better integrate American Indian and Borderlands histories into central narratives of colonial North American scholarship.

Contemporary view of the Rio Grande, New Mexico.

Map of the Rio Grande River in 1718.

Castle of San Juan de Ulua (Veracruz, Mexico) where Native captives were housed en route to Cuba.

About Paul Conrad:

Paul Conrad is currently an Assistant Professor of History at Colorado State University-Pueblo. He will spend the 2012-2013 academic year at the Clements Center for Southwest Studies at Southern Methodist University, where he has received a research fellowship to work on revising his dissertation into a book manuscript.

Visit Paul Conrad’s homepage.

Photo credits:

All photos courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

“‘Perl’s of Wisdom’: ‘Rabbi’ Sam Perl, New Models of Acculturation, and the ‘In- Between’ Jew”

by By Allison E. Schottenstein

This year’s Perry Prize for Best Master’s Thesis went to Allison E. Schottenstein, a third year doctoral student in Jewish History. Her thesis, titled “‘Perl’s of Wisdom’: ‘Rabbi’ Sam Perl, New Models of Acculturation, and the ‘In- Between’ Jew,” tells the story of Rabbi Sam Perl’s efforts to unite the Mexican and Anglo communities within the Texas town of Brownsville, as well as integrate the border town with its sister city of Matamoros. Read the abstract of Schottenstein’s thesis, as well as her biography, below.

Abstract

“‘Perl’s of Wisdom’: ‘Rabbi’ Sam Perl, New Models of Acculturation, and the ‘In- Between’ Jew” examines archival materials from the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, The Brownsville Herald and El Heraldo de Brownsville to demonstrate how Sam Perl — an Eastern European Jewish immigrant who changed the face of Brownsville, Texas — redefines historical approaches to Jewish acculturation. In this bordertown, Perl not only revitalized the Jewish community when he became the temple’s lay-rabbi, but he also actively united Mexican and Anglo communities both in Brownsville and across the border in its sister city of Matamoros. In Perl’s efforts to simultaneously revitalize his own religious community and the greater social landscape of the border area, Perl proved that he did not need to conform to the expectations of Anglo-Christian identity to succeed. Challenging theories of whiteness studies scholars, Perl never sacrificed his Jewish identity, had a boulevard named after him, and came to be known as “Mr. Brownsville.” Indeed, Perl’s profound impact on the Brownsville-Matamoros community was the result of his ability to occupy an “in-between,” interstitial position that did not require him to blend in with majority cultures; that is, Perl remained distinctly Jewish while simultaneously involving himself in both Anglo and Mexican arenas. Immersing himself in every aspect of bordertown life, Perl occupied multiple roles of community authority, serving as a businessman, rabbi, a Charro Days founder, cultural diplomat, court chaplain and radio host. A close examination of Perl’s life and considerable legacy demonstrates how new acculturation models are needed to better understand the manner in which Jews like Perl have adapted and contributed to dominant cultures.

Jewish immigrants arrive in Galveston, Texas in 1907.

A 1917 photograph of students sitting in front of a San Antonio Texas Jewish Synagogue.

An H. Budow postcard from 1918 features the Jewish Temple in San Antonio, Texas.

Sam Perl smoking a cigar while playing pool.

About Allison Schottenstein:

Allison E. Schottenstein was born in Columbus, Ohio on March 18, 1986 to Gary and Gail Schottenstein. In 2004, Allison attended Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts. She received a combined degree in Near Eastern and Judaic Studies as well as Women and Gender Studies. Allison graduated Summa Cum Laude and Phi Beta Kappa in 2008. From 2008-2009, Allison served as an intern at the American Jewish Archives at Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, Ohio. She entered the University of Texas at Austin’s doctoral program in History in 2009.

Visit Allison Schottenstein’s homepage.

Photo credits:

Photographer unknown, “Jewish immigrants arriving in Galveston, Texas,” 1907.

Courtesy of the UT Institute of Texan Cultures at San Antonio

Phootgrapher unknown, “U.S. San Antonio Texas Jewish Synagogue,” 1917.

Courtesy of stephaniecomfort/Flickr Creative Commons

Artist unknown, Untitled, 1918. Courtesy of Addoway.com Frances Perl Goodman, “Sam Perl,” Undated.

Courtesy of Frances Perl Goodman via the Goldring/Woldenberg Institute of Southern Jewish Life

You may also like:

Professor Robert Abzug’s DISCOVER piece, in which he shares photographs and memories of trips throughout historically Jewish communities in South Texas.

Professor Miriam Bodian’s DISCOVER piece – titled “A Dangerous Idea” – about a young Jew who went on trial before the Portuguese Inquisition in Lisbon in 1495 after being captured in Brazil.

From Poison to Pure Joy: The Revolution in Milk Safety

by Sidarth Subramanian and Henry Roseman

From the beginning, our goal was to have a fair amount of primary as well as secondary research. We knew that there was a well-known local dairy, Lucky Layla Farms, close-by. When we contacted them, we found out that they pasteurized locally and offered tours. We interviewed some of the technicians and toured the plant. We also toured a dairy farm, and while there, bought a bottle of raw milk for our experiments.

A Wisconsin milk pasteurization facility.

We conducted a number of experiments on raw milk and pasteurized milk. We started by doing a pH test using pH strips and a starch test using iodine. Then we looked at milk under a microscope. We also cultured the milk in an incubator for 48 hours then looked at it under microscopes. In addition, we consulted with Professor Ellen Jordan, a dairy specialist at Texas A&M University.

Checking the temperature in a pasteurization facility.

In addition to this primary research, we did a great deal of research online and discovered the contributions of Louis Pasteur and Nathan Straus. We also read many books, including Straus’ book on his journey. We continued researching even after completing the video for the regional competition. In fact, we discovered an interesting connection between Nathan Straus and Anne Frank in our research after the state competition, but it was unrelated to our topic.

A woman takes home milk from a milk station.

1912 Newspaper. Headline reads: "Milk for 2,200 babies: Straus stations gave 2,193,684 bottles during year just closed."

We like technology and cinematography, so we chose the documentary category. We started our documentary by collecting a lot of research. Then, we wrote the script outline. We used Power Director, Google Docs, and Dropbox to work on it together. We took turns editing the script, finding pictures, splicing video, and updating the bibliography. The last few weeks were spent editing, adding final touches, and wrapping up loose ends. After every stage of the competition, we incorporated feedback from the judges.

Nurses weigh a newborn baby at a milk station.

We do not think much about the milk we drink everyday. However, at the turn of the 20^th century, milk was a harbinger of death to many infants. It took great science, many battles, and much persistence to reform milk production in the United States. The pasteurization of milk has revolutionized our lives today. We can consume tasty dairy products without fear of contamination because of Louis Pasteur’s discovery and Nathan Straus’ work. Furthermore, Straus’ reaction to the problem posed by raw milk led to reform in the milk industry and directed us toward national food safety. The Federal Department of Agriculture (FDA) was created as an indirect result of Straus’ campaign. Strauss’ fight for safe milk has been forgotten, but his legacy lives on every time someone drinks pasteurized milk.”

Awards:

Group Documentary (Junior Division)

Greenhill School, Addison, TX

(Teacher: Monica Bullock )

Photo credits:

All images courtesy of the Library of Congress

The Fiery Trial by Eric Foner (2011)

By Henry Wiencek

Eric Foner’s The Fiery Trial examines Abraham Lincoln’s views on American slavery, southern secession and the convergence of events that produced the Emancipation Proclamation.

Although Foner’s narrative relies on speeches, correspondence and newspaper materials many scholars have previously engaged, the author seeks a new “Lincoln in motion” by “tracking the development of his ideas and beliefs.” Rather than framing emancipation as an inevitable outcome, Foner approaches it as a confluence of both ideological and contingent forces: Lincoln’s personal desire to curtail slavery, the military necessity of destroying its economic value and, above all, the President’s determination to preserve the Union.

Beginning with Lincoln’s childhood years in Kentucky, Foner’s sees in the future President a moderate temperament and perpetual anxiety over division—a judicious disposition that helped shape his views on slavery. As a state legislator, Lincoln spoke out against the institution’s divisive nature, anticipating its potential to threaten America’s social and political stability. However, the author is careful not to cast Lincoln as an arbiter of total race equality, revealing instances in which he was all too willing to engage, and manipulate, contemporary racial ideologies. One notable example is the presidential campaign of 1858, during which Lincoln accused the Democratic candidate, Franklin Pierce, of encouraging racial “amalgamation” by opposing the Fugitive Slave Act. Foner depicts these attitudes as fairly ordinary within the Republican Party of antebellum America, at that moment between “radical abolitionism” and the Democratic Party’s virulent racism.

Foner argues that Lincoln’s instinctive moderation continued to inform his presidency throughout the Civil War. Calming sectarian tensions and reestablishing legal authority across the Union persisted as his chief objectives. During the early years of the war, abolition was not an inherent objective for Lincoln, but rather a bargaining chip to encourage reunification. While he sought to avoid the slavery question on a national level, the President was simultaneously courting border states with offers of compensated emancipation, leading one contemporary writer to note that to “soothe southern wrath…the negro is thrown in as the offering.”

At The Fiery Trial’s conclusion, Foner directly challenges the dominant view of the Emancipation Proclamation, namely that it represented a uniquely progressive decision impelled solely by the moral evil of slavery. Stressing the document’s political and military objectives, Foner depicts the pronouncement as one final effort to entice slaveholders back into the union. Although its language eschewed the gradualism of Lincoln’s earlier views on abolition, the Proclamation’s emancipatory edict was borne out of wartime necessity. In addition to providing fresh soldiers for the Union cause, it effectively gutted the Confederacy’s labor pool and, by extension, larger economic system.

Foner ultimately portrays the Emancipation Proclamation as a pragmatic means of achieving both political and military objectives; and very much in keeping with Lincoln’s inclination to be “propelled” by provisional events rather than moral imperative. Lincoln himself even acknowledged as much: “I claim not to have controlled events…but confess plainly that events have controlled me.” By forgoing the inevitability of emancipation, Foner removes Abraham Lincoln from the idealism of history and recasts the 16th President as a practical administrator, intent on restoring political control over the United States. Emancipation, despite its broader significance in American history, was a means of attaining that outcome.

You may also like:

Our blog post debating the origins of the American Civil War.

George Forgie’s offers a list of his favorite history books about the Civil War.

Kristie Flannery reviews a book about the very visible legacy of the American Civil War.

Professor Jacqueline Jones talks about her latest book Saving Savannah.

Photo credits:

Alexander Hay Ritchie (engraver), F.B. Carpenter (artist), “The First Reading of the Emancipation Proclamation Before the Cabinet,” 1866. (Image courtesy of the Library of Congress)

History Carnival, May 2012

Welcome to the History Carnival for May, 2012. The blog at Not Even Past is one section on a public history website made up of blog posts on books, movies, documents, oral histories and podcasts, with a special little section on Texas, and this blog for everything else.

It’s written by the faculty and grad students at the UT Austin History Department in order to make our research available and accessible to the public. We hope you’ll look around while you’re here.

This month we’ve chosen some outstanding blogs of three kinds: posts with stories on specific events or sources, posts on digital history and digital sources, and posts on visual history sources.

Stories

Invisible Ink, by Kristie Macrackis at Wonders and Marvels
The curious history and interesting uses of invisible ink

The Free Russian Press in London, by Sarah J. Young on her blog.
Censorship in tsarist Russia compelled some of the best writers on current events to publish abroad and smuggle their works back into the country

Anglo-Saxon Astronomy Over Easy, by Christopher Cevasco at ZOUNDS!

Images of a New World: The Watercolors of John White, by Ben Breen at Res Obscura
A beautifully told record of the exquisitely detailed 16c watercolors of Native Americans

A History of the American Bachelor, by Bret and Kate MacKay at The Art of Manliness

Shooting the Bolsheviks by Bert Patenaude on the Hoover Institution blog
The political uses of atrocity footage:In the late afternoon of May 26, 1919, in a field about thirty miles outside Riga, Latvia, a squad of nine German riflemen executed eighteen Latvian Bolsheviks. And it was filmed.

Ballyhoo: The Art of Selling the Movies, by Nancy Kaufman on the George Eastman House Blog

Alice Austen: Photographs, by Liza Cowan and Penny House at Dyke: A Quarterly
Remarkable photographic chronicle of Austen’s life among her friends, her partner Gertrude Tate, and their everyday things.

American Islam in Dearborn: A Portrait, by Dan Bryan at Religion in American History
A short but revealing history of Muslims in Dearborn, MI

Digital History Projects

Reflections on Building the Digital Blue Ridge Parkway, by amwhisnant at Visualizing the Past
An extensive consideration of the problems, successes, and prospects of creating this wonderful digital history project

Neighborhood visualizer at Infothetics
This digital mapping project allows users to see the material and energy uses of neighborhoods in cities around the US.

Review of Tice and Steiner’s Vasi Map of Rome by Elijah Meeks at Visual Humanities Specialist
A discussion of the terrific digital project, Imago Urbis: Giuseppe Vasi’s Grand Tour of Rome and what makes it so unusual.

Visual Historical Sources

Revolutions (33, 45, 78): USSR in Construction (1935), by Chris George, at Fans in a Flashbulb, the blog of the International Center for Photography
Photomontages of records and gramophones from USSR in Construction, the international journal produced in the Soviet Union to promote its industrial achievements.

South Pacific, by Anna Krentz at The Passion of Former Days
Sometimes photographs dispel illusions formed by fiction; these are so faithful to the visual record in my head they make me want to stand up and sing, “there ain’t nothing you can name…”

Twenty Years Since the Bosnian War, by Alan Taylor at In Focus (Atlantic’s photo blog)
A photo essay on the worst fighting in Europe since World War II and the destruction of the multi-ethnic city of Sarajevo.

Erika Bsumek on Navajo Artisans at the Trading Post

In 1935, when Navajo weaver Lousia Alcott wrote to Indian trader Lorenzo Hubbell, Jr. requesting aid due to an illness, she reminded Hubbell of their long-standing, mutually beneficial economic relationship. “Whenever I make a Navaho rug,” wrote Alcott, “I always take it to your store in Tenebito.” Referencing the quality of the rugs that she made, she chided him for the fact that she felt her labor was occasionally undervalued: “Sometimes the price (paid for the rugs) is so low I do not get much out of what I weaved.” Alcott asserted that Hubbell owed her the groceries she needed not simply because she had been underpaid for rugs in the past but also because “I do much for you” and “I help you all the time.” Thus, Alcott’s main point was that a mutually beneficial trade relationship hinged upon both parties’ willingness to “help” each other. She concluded her letter by placing an order for flour, coffee, sugar, and baking powder. Hubbell provided Alcott with the goods she requested because he too recognized the importance in keeping his customers and workers alive and happy.

This correspondence between a Navajo weaver and a Trading Post owner suggests that trade relationships on Indian reservations were complex affairs, not easily reduced to economic formulas and principles. Hubbell purchased Alcott’s rugs because his business depended on the products Navajos had to sell. The fact that Navajos also needed the products traders stocked fortified his position on the reservation, socially as well as economically. Even so, the correspondence also reveals that exchange relationships extended beyond single economic transactions. These exchanges followed modern economic trends, but they did not always conform to straightforward market exchanges that ended once goods and services changed hands. Alcott’s request and remonstration, demonstrate that social accountability had a role in the business of trading.

Except for brief periods in American history, cross-cultural trade relationships between American Indians and non-Indians were plagued by problems of communication, uneven power relations, and a seemingly unyielding demand for the natural resources that Euro or Anglo Americans wanted from indigenous peoples. Most scholars who have documented such encounters tend to focus on trade between Indians and whites in the early contact or colonial era. Yet, trade between American Indians and non-Indians continued well into the twentieth century. The escalation of industrialization, the growth of vast transportation systems, and the rise of a consumption-oriented American public influenced trade relationships between Navajos and non-Navajos. Exchanges at trading posts reflected more than immediate economic interests or cultural expectations; both the national demand for Navajo-made products and the popular representation of Navajo producers as “primitive” artists played a part in this apparently localized trade. We can see these factors in action when we examine the operation of Navajo trading posts.

So, what form did exchanges between Navajos and traders assume as a result of the melding of broad market trends and local concerns? How did pre-conceived notions, cultural mores, and power relationships mediate and affect connections between Navajos and traders from the 1890s through the 1930s? Trading posts were important because that’s where Navajos learned of American consumer demand for the products that they made and because traders shipped the majority of Navajo-made goods from these trading posts to consumers across the nation. And, it was at trading posts that a large majority of Navajos had their first exposure to a consumption-oriented marketplace. Navajos used trading posts to enter the modern industrial economy.

By the late nineteenth century, the term Indian trader described a non-Indian (usually a Euro-American or Hispanic) who exchanged manufactured goods with American Indians for raw materials or handmade crafts on an Indian reservation. By the early twentieth century some businessmen, like Julius Gans of Santa Fe and Maurice Maisel of Albuquerque, had co-opted the term for their own purposes because it signified not only an occupation but also a mythologized lifestyle. By 1900, the trading post itself had become a key economic center and one symbolic of Indian-white encounters more generally.

The commerce that developed between Navajos and traders on the reservation existed because the Navajo economy had been transformed in two fundamental ways. First, the reservation system regulated the movement of Navajos and strictly limited the hunting practices and trade networks that had antedated 1867. In addition, the inter-tribal raiding, a centuries-old method of acquisition among the once nomadic Navajos, had been outlawed. As a result, Navajos developed new subsistence, agricultural, and survival skills that revolved around trading posts. As Navajos manufactured goods to meet non-Navajos’ demand, they also consumed the staples available at the trading posts such as calico and velvet, canned milk, peaches and tomatoes, and manufactured sewing machines, hammers, and hoes. These actions linked them into a larger economic network. Navajos accrued both credit and debt at trading posts. Some debts were seasonal in nature while others could last for years.

Traders like Lorenzo Hubbell and his sons created continual commerce in an area known for its seasonal business cycles by sponsoring ceremonies, accommodating tourists, trading with Navajos, and selling to external markets. When trade with Navajos slowed in the late summer and early fall, tourists would show up. J.L. Hubbell, for instance, hosted thousands of tourists per year in Ganado and Oraibi, Arizona. When the tourist season ended, Navajos again provided the bulk of the business into the winter months. Curio stores and retailers placed large orders for Navajo made jewelry and blankets in November and December to stock-up for the holiday season. After that, in the lean winter season, traders again relied on Navajos who gathered wood, pine nuts, and other resources to supply posts or to be sold in specialty markets. By early spring traders acquired lambs for trade and Navajo sheep for wool to buy or sell. Cash rarely changed hands between trading partners. Instead, throughout the year, Navajo weavers brought in rugs, jewelry, or raw materials to trade for staple items. Traders accepted pawn, to ensure that Navajos would continue to patronize their stores.

Bartered exchanges reflected varied cultural manipulations on both sides of the counter. For instance, one weaver in particular, Mrs. Glish seemed to understand how to use white gender norms to her advantage. Mrs. Glish wove beautiful rugs but, according to Lippencott, was such a tough barterer that it was difficult “for the men behind the counter…to deal with her.” Bill Lippencott especially had a hard time bargaining with the weaver because she had a tendency to weep. On the other hand, Sallie Lippencott Wagner claimed to have the higher hand and she asserted that she was not fooled by Mrs. Glish’s tears and would not pay an elevated price when the weaver cried. Once the price was agreed upon, weavers conducted additional business with traders by obtaining goods. Traders reciprocated by providing something extra, usually canned tomatoes or peaches, in order to maintain good will. Such strategies were used across Navajo country in trading exchanges. While exchanges tended to benefit traders more than weavers, trading post exchanges show us that the nature of trade, and the meanings associated with it, depended upon a mutual understanding of both contemporary economic practices and cultural mores.

From Marfa to Mauritania in Forty Years

By David A. Conrad

Four hundred and fifty miles west of the University of Texas at Austin, thirty-seven miles (as the car drives) north of the town of Marfa, Texas, and almost 6,800 feet above sea level sit the white and silver domes of the McDonald Observatory. Each dome shelters an enormous, yet delicate, tool: a combination of mirrors, metal, and electronics capable of gathering light from long ago and far, far away. Decades are a relatively tiny unit of temporal measurement on an astronomical scale, and the distances between terrestrial points are vanishingly small compared to the distances between celestial bodies. In historical terms, however, the transformation of the McDonald Observatory from a peripheral startup into an internationally recognized hub of scientific research was no small step. The forty-year interval between 1934 when the observatory came into existence and 1973 when McDonald personnel and UT faculty traveled to Mauritania to study the longest solar eclipse of the twentieth century was a period of truly giant leaps for science in America and in the southwest in particular. It was during these years that the National Science Foundation (NSF) was born and grew into an institution of enormous financial importance for researchers. The McDonald Observatory, like many other science facilities, owes a great deal of its success to the Foundation and to the political environment that prompted the Foundation’s creation.

Image of the McDonald Observatory sitting faraway on a shrub covered hill overlooking surrounding grasslands

The land and money for the observatory came from the estate of one William Johnson McDonald, born in the Republic of Texas in 1844. McDonald served in the Confederate army during the Civil War and later became a wealthy banker. When he died in 1926, his will bequeathed nearly one million dollars to The University of Texas to build an Astronomical Observatory. By 1934, UT had an astronomical observatory in the mountains of west Texas but no astronomers to staff it. The school’s lack of trained astronomers reflected a gap in the scientific capabilities of western and eastern universities prior to the Second World War. Historian George Webb describes the southwest in the early twentieth century as a “colony” of American science: the region was valuable to eastern-based researchers as a source of exotic flora and fauna, and to astronomers for its dark, clear skies, but it lacked top-tier research institutions of its own. New facilities like UT’s McDonald Observatory began to narrow the gap, but it had to fill positions with scientists from the University of Chicago.

World War II brought about a major restructuring of federal financial support for academic science research. Scientists’ contributions to the war effort proved invaluable and the sparsely populated southwest had offered an ideal testing ground for dangerous and highly classified projects. McDonald Observatory staff, for example, took part in military rocket propulsion studies in the New Mexico badlands near the secret atomic research complex at Los Alamos. Toward the end of the war Vannevar Bush, head of the military’s Office of Scientific Research and Development and a former MIT administrator, drafted a proposal for a new federal agency devoted to science funding. Bush’s vision was realized in 1950 with the creation of the National Science Foundation, whose mission was to support the development of academic science programs and research facilities throughout the nation. Prior to the establishment of the NSF, university science departments had received the bulk of their funds from state governments, private donors, and student tuition. Over the course of the 1950s the NSF’s purse grew to surpass anything these sources could have matched. The Foundation’s first annual budget was a modest $3.5 million, but when the Soviet Union launched the satellite known as Sputnik in 1957 Congress raised the figure to $130 million. By 1970, the NSF commanded half a billion dollars each year and had distributed a grand total of $4.72 billion to science departments around the country.

Black and white image of Vannevar Bush sitting at a desk covered in papers

Universities turned NSF grants into state-of-the-art facilities and cutting-edge equipment. The McDonald Observatory was one of many university-affiliated institutions that received new equipment and made significant discoveries in the postwar decades. At the close of the 1940s Gerard Kuiper, a University of Chicago astronomer, used McDonald Observatory equipment to discover new moons around Uranus and Neptune. Between 1963 and 1967 NASA granted five million dollars to the McDonald Observatory to help build a new reflector telescope with a 107-inch lens, a substantial upgrade from its original 82-inch device. It was also during the 1960s that the University of Texas severed the McDonald Observatory’s ties with Chicago and created its own Department of Astronomy.

Interior view of the McDonald Observatory featuring the observatory's giant telescope

Texas recruited Harlan J. Smith, a Yale astronomer, to chair the new department and head up the observatory. To the Harvard-educated Smith, leaving Yale for Texas was like entering an “astronomical wilderness.” But Harlan Smith dreamed big, and saw opportunities where others saw obstacles. For example, he spoke publicly and often of his desire to see humans colonize the moon and Mars. He imagined setting up an observatory on the far side of the moon, and eventually made sketches of such a hypothetical extraterrestrial installation. He also directed his energies toward more immediate projects. In addition to overseeing the construction of the new, NASA-funded reflector, Smith won a NASA grant to refurbish the observatory’s two original telescopes. He also reached out to the general public by helping to create a syndicated radio program devoted to astronomy news and facts, Stardate, which still airs on public radio stations nationwide.

By the early 1970s the McDonald Observatory was ready to embark on its most ambitious project to date: an expedition to the deserts of northwest Africa to conduct delicate observations of a solar eclipse that would take place on the morning of June 30, 1973. By photographing stars that become visible near a fully eclipsed sun and comparing those images to photographs of the same stars at night when the sun is not present, slight differences in the apparent positions of the stars should become visible. The disparity is the result of the sun’s gravity bending the path of starlight that passes near it. Ever since Albert Einstein predicted this gravitational deflection of light as part of his theory of relativity, scientists realized the importance of measuring the exact amount of bend. Among its most familiar applications today, the calculations are used to acquire more precise GPS satellite measurements. The 1973 eclipse, however, would not be visible over McDonald or any other such structure in North America. Scientists would have to journey to a part of the globe few outsiders knew well, where sandstorms and 110-degree heat threatened to wreak havoc on their delicate instruments. The eager scientists of the McDonald Observatory hoped the NSF would agree to finance the high-risk, high-cost, high-reward expedition to a site in the newly-independent Islamic republic of Mauritania.

In May 1972 the observatory’s planning team drafted a NSF grant application for the amount of $302,848. Several factors made approval of the grant unlikely. First, the UT team was not the only group requesting NSF money to travel to Africa for the eclipse. Second, the amount the team requested was unrealistic in the political and economic climate of 1972. The NSF requested $622 million in 1972, a record high, but the funding it received still didn’t compensate for inflation. Using 1972 dollars as a baseline, federal funding for academic research grew by an average of thirteen percent each year between 1953 and 1968, but zero percent for the period 1968 to 1974. Economic problems, social turmoil, and the ongoing war in Vietnam drove policymakers in Washington toward greater fiscal austerity. In 1971 scientists feared that the NSF was becoming more sensitive to federal politics than to their research needs. From June 1970 to March 1971 the NSF received 20,000 grant requests for a total amount of 2 million dollars. Of these, the Foundation approved fewer than 7000 grants and distributed only $320,000 to support new projects. In September 1972 Smith received a form letter from the NSF bearing the worst possible news: the Foundation had rejected the team’s grant application. Yet hope was not lost. The team scrambled to find other sources of funding and eventually received sizable grants from NATO and the National Geographic Society. They slashed their budget by trimming the expedition to its bare essentials, and submitted a new proposal to the NSF for $65,000. The University of Texas received notification of NSF approval on December 19, 1972. The McDonald expedition was officially a go.

The story of the team’s travels in Mauritania is fascinating from cultural, political, and scientific perspectives. Interested readers should consult team member David Winget’s memoir of the experience, Harlan’s Globetrotters: The Story of an Eclipse. The team faced persistent heat and a sandstorm on the morning of the eclipse that only cleared ten minutes before the long-awaited event. Despite these obstacles they successfully captured high-resolution images of a starfield near the eclipsed sun and used those photographs to calculate a value of light deflection consistent with Einstein’s predictions. Though this was not the final experiment to put Einstein’s theory to the test, it was perhaps the last of its kind. Later efforts would employ new technologies such as space-based telescopes and radio astronomy rather than risking ground-based visual observations under challenging field conditions.

Yet it is precisely the difficult and costly nature of the 1973 McDonald expedition that makes it a significant event in the history of American scientific research. The ambitious project was possible only because of the revolution that had taken place in science funding during World War II and the early Cold War, a development that breathed new life into once-marginal facilities like the McDonald Observatory. The Mauritania mission was a demonstration of how far the observatory—and American and southwestern science writ large—had come, and how far each party to the process was willing to go to uncover the universe’s secrets.

Photo credits:

Dan Pancamo, “McDonald Observatory 107″ Telescope,” 20 May 2009

Dan Pancamo via Flickr Creative Commons

Photographer unknown, “Mr. Vannevar Bush. Chief of Scientific Research and Development, Office of Production Management (OPM)”

Unknown photographer via The Library of Congress

Michael Cummings, “McDonald Observatory,” 10 June 2011

Michael Cummings via Flickr Creative Commons

Artist unknown, Mauritanian Stamp, 4 February 2012

John C. McConnell via Flickr Creative Commons

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