Stacy Vlasits, Author at Not Even Past

Nat Turner: A Troublesome Property (2002)

By Daina Ramey Berry and Jermaine Thibodeaux

This film tells the story of Nat Turner’s 1831 Virginia slave revolt. For years, historians have grappled with the details of the affair and debated about the ways Nat Turner should be remembered. For some, he was a revolutionary hero; for others, Turner was nothing more than a deranged, blood-hungry killer. After all, it was Turner’s rebellion that sent the South into a frenzy forcing southern legislatures and planters to harden their stances (and laws) on slavery. This PBS movie blends documentary narrative, historical re-enactment, and scholarly reflection to examine the various renditions of the revolt and to uncover the many faces of Nat Turner and slave resistance in general. Directed by Charles Burnett, this is a film worth watching for those interested in slavery, public history, and the history memory. As part of the Independent Lens series, the PBS website provides a wealth of historical material on Nat Turner, slave rebellion, and historical treatments.

Voices of India’s Partition, Part II

by Amber Abbas

In 2009, I spent five months living at the Aligarh Muslim University in the town of Aligarh, Uttar Pradesh, India.I was there to research the role and experience of Aligarh students in the movement for Pakistan during the 1940s. As part of this research, I actively sought out university employees and former students of the university from that period. I was referred to S.M. Mehdi through a chance encounter with a university official and arrived at his home without an appointment. Though he was never an Aligarh student — in fact, said he had an “allergy” to Aligarh as a young man — he moved to the town after his daughter completed her medical degree and settled there. S.M. Mehdi was surprised to see me, but agreed to answer my questions, though he cautioned that he could not be considered an expert on Aligarh. After finishing high school in Bhopal, Mehdi went on to Kanpur for his B.A. and then to Lucknow for his M.A. Degree. During his time living in both places, he was involved with the Students’ Union and began to turn towards Socialism, under the influence of his teacher Christopher Ackroyd, and then to Communism. During 1946 and 1947, he was in Bombay putting out an Urdu paper for the Communist party — a post to which he had been recruited by Sajjad Zaheer. He worked for thirty years in the Soviet Embassy in New Delhi and has been a Communist ever since.

The Communist activist and writer S.M. Mehdi

During the early years after partition, Mehdi was living in Bombay, where he made friends with many well-known Leftists and writers, including Sardar Jafri — an Aligarian — who he mentions here. Throughout 1947 and 1948 these young activists and thinkers printed and distributed the Communist Urdu paper especially in the Muslim areas. Mehdi tells me that Bombay was not affected by partition’s violence in the same way as places in Punjab; violence was sporadic and casualties were few. He himself felt little fear, but had a friend who was so terrified that he could hardly travel safely in the city without “betraying” that they were Muslims.

He tells a long story about his experiences on the day Gandhi was killed. He is one of the few people whom I interviewed who does not suggest that he or she heard “immediately” that the assassin had been a Hindu rather than a Muslim. He describes the anxiety that dogged his colleagues and him all day as they wondered whether the assassin was a Muslim, and recalls how he felt fear, to which he had previously believed himself to be immune. His story is both terrifying and funny, and thoroughly dramatic. The disjunctures that that day created are still fresh in his mind — the stillness of life outside the Victoria Terminus station, the silence on the roads. “There was no person!” he exclaims. That is, until a car pulled up besides his Hindu companion, Munish, and him. The driver of the vehicle was a Sikh off to “Pakistan,” the colloquial name for Muslim areas that, despite partition’s migrations, is still used in Indian cities today. The Sikh jovially invites these two young men along “to kill.” Betraying that Mehdi could become his first victim.

The young men free themselves from their “generous” driver and head back to the home of newlywed Sardar Jafri, who didn’t know a thing about the day’s events. Not until Mehdi hears the 9 o’clock new bulletin can he finally breathe easily that the assassin was not a Muslim, and therefore, there would be no violence, only mourning. Though he was sympathetic to Gandhi, and describes his own opposition to “communal” thinking, Mehdi depicts how the events of that day temporarily changed his outlook. He was “relieved” to learn that the assassin was not a Muslim, relieved that he belonged to a different community, he, who did not believe in that “nonsense.” The uncertainty and fear that followed him all day completely subsumed his ability to grieve for the fallen leader. Because of the tensions that the assassination threatened to unleash, almost none of the Muslims I spoke to described an immediate sense of grief at the loss. Though they realized the significance of his absence, and even now credit him with bringing peace to the subcontinent after the violent upheavals of partition, on January 30, 1948, all were too concerned for their own safety to indulge in mourning.

LISTEN TO THE ORAL HISTORY INTERVIEW HERE

READ THE ORAL HISTORY INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT HERE

Photo credits:

Genesis Media Pvt., Ltd., Untitled Portrait of S.M. Mehdi

“Mammojan Ki Diary,” a series that chronicles S.M. Mehdi’s life and experience with many famous Indian Progressive Writers of the 1950s and 1960s.

Unititled Portrait of Mahatma Gandhi, Bombay, 1944

www.mkgandhi.org via Wikimedia Commons

Arab Autumn: Egypt Now

by Yoav di-Capua

Almost eight months to the day after the ouster of President Mubarak on February 11th another dramatic set of events set Cairo ablaze. This time, it was not the “people” who were pushing against a corrupt regime but unidentified forces that pushed the army, the riot police, the plainclothes police and some of the 165,000 gangsters who were previously employed by Mubarak (and apparently were still on someone’s payroll), to violently attack a peaceful Coptic Christian demonstration. By the end of a long day, 25 Christian protestors were confirmed dead and dozens were wounded. Three soldiers found their deaths as well though their names and pictures were never released. Sunday, October 9th became Egypt’s “Bloody Sunday.” “What exactly happened,” writes journalist and blogger Yasmine El Rashidi, in a moving post, “when, amid a great deal of confusion, a peaceful protest turned into something of a massacre, has become a question of enormous implications” for Egypt’s transition towards civic democratic life.

Indeed, this transition, or what some already skeptically call the mirage of transition, has increasingly become the object of severe doubt. And much of this doubt is directed toward Egypt’s de facto ruling authority; the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces. Though a civic interim government is charged with the everyday business of Egyptian life, all major decisions, as well as the general political tone of the state, is determined by hitherto anonymous military officers. As such, they are almost solely responsible for the nature, direction and overall success of the transition. This is hardly an easy task, as the very meaning of transition is still shrouded in mystery and raises far more questions than it answers. “The revolutionaries are traitors, The revolutionaries are traitors.” This cartoon shows Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein (Tantawi), head of Egypt’s Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, using state media in order to incite against the revolutionary forces.

Here is a partial list of what is publicly at stake since the fall of the previous regime. First, Egyptians are struggling with the traditional, or chronic, issue of social justice. This question has been the subject of politics for much of the previous century and it is still unresolved as levels of poverty and social inequality continue to rise and expand. The quest for better wealth distribution, social equality, opportunity, and mobility opened the nature of the post-revolutionary economic system for debate. In the last half century, Egypt has already experimented with radical socialism and deep neo-liberalism, both of which failed miserably. Which ideas should inform the next economic agenda? Should the reliance on elite capitalism and its global partners should be swapped for a different order, and if so which one? Most problematically, how precisely to accomplish an orderly economic transition when the military industrial complex is the largest economic sector and the chief benefactor of decades of a neo-liberal orientation?

A second concern is how to institute human dignity and the various democratic freedoms that guarantee it, such as freedom of expression and political association, the right to a just trial, transparency and accountability in public affairs, and the end of police brutality and abuse. In theory, there is a sweeping consensus in support of these rights and safeguards. In practice, beyond laws, the entire political and bureaucratic culture of the state would need to be transformed. As Egyptians have discovered since February 11th this is challenge as enormous as it is elusive.

Third, and most sensitive, is the relationship between church and state, or, put differently, the cultural orientation of Egypt. Should Egypt become an Islamic state, a Western-oriented liberal democracy or some combination of the two? And related to this, should the Islamic legal code, or Sharia, dominate legislature or should it be a flexible, man-made civic legal code? Likely, as most commentators predict, the choice is not between two polar opposites but rather something resembling a healthy and constructive dialectic between the two. But how exactly should this dialectic occur? No one knows. The current process of transition stipulated that following a lengthy process of national elections (which would stretch from November 2011 to March 2012) a new Parliament will draft a new constitution which, in turn, will bring these concerns toward successful resolution. But, rather than reducing the level of anxiety, the lengthy constitutional process ahead only raises it. Especially concerned are the roughly nine million Coptic Christians (about 10% of the Egypt’s population) and the liberal forces that started the revolution in the first place. They have their reasons.

Calls for unity during the spring demonstrations. The posters read: “No to sectarian war” and “Egypt: A United People”

Seven months ago, in order to legalize the actions of the interim government and the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, Egyptians participated in a national referendum to amend the previous constitution. The Copts and the liberals demanded the wholesale discarding of the old constitution, wishing to declare it null and void. It is a constitution that viewed the Sharia as a major source of legislation and which was, historically, instrumental in turning the Copts into second-class citizens. Yet, following the recommendation of a specially nominated constitutional committee headed by a neo-Islamist judge, the old constitution prevailed, a few obviously undemocratic articles were tossed away and the Copts and liberals lost the referendum by a landslide. Backed by the army, reformist Islamists, as well as conservative Islamists, radical Salafis (fundamentalists) and other ordinary Muslim citizens, triumphed. To one degree or another, the next constitution will most likely be Islamically-oriented.

Though this fact, in and of itself, is not necessarily a cause for concern, especially when the transition in Tunisia seems to point towards a moderate and democratic Islamic option, Coptic suspicion nonetheless runs high since the lost referendum. Indeed, the marginalized status of the Coptic community serves as a constant reminder that the Muslim-Christian unity which made this revolution happen is fragile and that national unity is at stake. The smoke of several churches burned since the revolution is still in the air. On September 30th, another Coptic church, this time in the southern city of Aswan, was set on fire. The unfortunate events of “Bloody Sunday” were meant to be a collective and peaceful expression of Coptic anxiety and a plea for government and army action against Islamic fundamentalists. Yet, instead of assuring the Copts and their liberal allies that the transitional process would conclude to their relative satisfaction, the army made things considerably worse. This dent in the transitional process brings many to conclude that the forces of counterrevolution are in full swing and that, eight months after Mubarak’s fall, hardly any major institution of the previous regime has been meaningfully challenged. Instead, one can identify more structural, if not personal, continuity than change. The revolutionaries are surely tired, but it looks like their real work has not even begun yet. The first round of parliamentary elections, scheduled for late November, will take place amidst this atmosphere of suspicion, fatigue and a prevailing sense of the army’s betrayal.

Photo Credits:

Cartoon by Carlos Latuff, July 23, 2011, TwitPic via Wikimedia Commons

Photo by Gigi Ibrahim via Wikimedia Commons

Plaza of Sacrifices: Gender, Power, and Terror in 1968 Mexico by Elaine Carey (2005)

by Andrew Weiss

On October 2, 1968, the Mexican government sanctioned the killings of an estimated three hundred student protesters in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas, the main square in Mexico City’s Tlatelolco neighborhood. Hundreds more were arrested, many subjected to torture. Plaza of Sacrifices is the first English-language monograph of the events leading up to and following this massacre. Carey, Associate Professor of History at St. John’s University, offers a gendered analysis of the Mexican student movement of 1968. While Carey focuses on Mexican issues and events, she places the movement into the larger context of international student protests. Because student demands went beyond academic concerns to include calls for democracy and civil liberties, the 1968 movement was unprecedented. The protests revealed a public crisis of confidence in the Mexican government. Mexicans had come to see the divergence of the state’s policies from its revolutionary rhetoric of social justice. Young people protested for change.

Carey reveals how the student movement challenged gender norms and placed women into the public sphere as never before. Young, educated, middle-class women subverted traditional femininity as they engaged in public political discourse. Organizing protests and debating issues in public spaces traditionally reserved for men, female protesters constructed new identities and possibilities within the movement and in public and private life at large. Participant interviews demonstrate the significance of renegotiating gender roles among student protesters. After challenging the established gender order, many female protesters were forever changed; these women never again considered public life to be the exclusive realm of men. Carey contends that the mobilization of women in 1968 set the stage for a second wave of Mexican feminism in the 1970s.

Carey provides insight into the relationship between the individual and the state under the rule of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which held power in Mexico from the late 1920s to 2000. She analyses the paternalistic language used by the PRI, which had cast itself as the protector of the Revolution and student protesters as unruly children needing to be brought back into the fold of the revolutionary family, thus revealing how the party conceived its sociopolitical role. This dynamic was both challenged and reified by the events surrounding the movement of 1968. The student movement represented a direct challenge to government paternalism, but was eventually suppressed, ultimately confirming the state’s position as head of the revolutionary family. Nevertheless, Mexican society was reshaped. The events of 1968 threatened the legitimacy of PRI rule as well as traditional notions of femininity. The impact of 1968 was still being felt in 2000, when a non-PRI candidate became president for the first time in over seventy years.

Student protesters in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas

Carey’s approach sheds light on many important aspects of the student movement and its aftermath. Her sources include participant interviews, both conducted by the author and others, student and government propaganda, newspapers and other periodicals, novels, plays, poetry, music, films, and photos. Her detailed interpretations of visual media, including editorial cartoons and student propaganda, are particularly useful in understanding the nuances of government and student rhetoric. And, by tapping formerly unreleased U.S. and Mexican state records, Carey provides a valuable look past the government and student propaganda.

While a welcome addition to the historiography of modern Mexican history, Plaza of Sacrifices has some shortcomings. Carey’s emphasis on government control of the public response to the movement takes away popular agency, so the book misses a large aspect of the sociopolitical discourse related to the formation of this response. While government propaganda surely influenced the public, students and other ordinary people did find their own voice, as the large scale demonstrations show. Carey’s overwhelming support of the student movement comes across in her writing. For Carey, public opinion is either pro-student or influenced by government propaganda and pro-government. She could have explored more fully how public opinion was formed, giving more agency to the public.

Plaza of Sacrifices provides a valuable narrative of events surrounding the Mexican student movement of 1968. Accessible to both lay and academic readers, this book should be read by anyone interested in this important chapter of Mexican history.

Group photograph: Anonymous Mexican students on a burned bus, July 28, 1968.

Credit: Marcel·lí Perelló via Wikimedia Commons

You may also like:

John McKiernan-Gonzalez’s article Onda Latina The Mexican American Experience.

The Doubtful Strait/El Estrecho Dudoso by Ernesto Cardenal (1995)

by Adrian Masters

“Historical sense and poetic sense should not, in the end, be contradictory,” wrote Robert Penn Warren in a preface to a poem on Thomas Jefferson in 1953. “For if poetry is the little myth we make, history is the big myth we live, and in our living, constantly remake.”

Warren’s poem, Brothers to Dragons, was an objection to Jefferson’s complicity in the slave trade as well as an appeal for the conciliation of poetry and history. Nicaraguan priest, poet, and revolutionary Ernesto Cardenal has enlisted in this select brigade of historian-poets with a remarkable work of art and history. The Doubtful Strait is entirely composed of dozens of historical documents rearranged, but not rewritten, to form an epic poem made up of 25 cantos. Originally published in Spanish in 1966, Cardenal uses the chronicles of Nicaragua’s discovery, conquest and sordid colonial misrule in the sixteenth century to condemn its present under the Somoza regime.

If Warren’s Brothers to Dragons is a condemnation of a revered but long-dead American head of state, Cardenal’s poem is an indictment of a considerably bolder nature, targeting the infamous contemporary Somoza dynasty that ruled Nicaragua from 1937 until the 1979 Sandinista revolution. The method employed by The Doubtful Strait is similarly bold. In the early 1960s, Cardenal combed the Nicaraguan archives, the Colección Somoza, retooling the archive’s documents into a poetic arsenal. From the Colección was born a collage comprised of otherwise unaltered historical documents arranged into a seamless body of poetry. The woes of 1960s Nicaragua are in this way masked in the historical documents of the 1500s and early 1600s, and dictators Luis (1922-1967) and Anastasio Somoza (1925-1980) are transfigured into reviled colonial governors Dávila (1440-1531) and de Contreras (1502-1558). The struggles of those trodden upon by the Spanish colonists and governors reflected in colonial petitions and chronicles implicitly mirror oppression in 1960s Nicaragua. The idioms of divine Judgment and liberation theology are brought to the fore with the masterful subtlety of a seasoned priest. A hypnotic rhythm of archaic legalese, often masking brutal acts of violence committed by Dávilas and de Contreras against Indians and colonists, regiments the poem’s flow. By enticing the reader to engage with rather restricted historical documents with the interpretive eye of the poet, The Doubtful Strait achieves a rare and lasting power as a condemnation of the Somoza monocracy.

Cardenal’s vulnerable position under the watchful eye of the Somoza dictatorship ultimately drives The Doubtful Strait to its most curious aspect – an outward absence of authorial fingerprints. Obscured behind historical documents from the Colección Somoza, the poet fades into his sources. Present only as an unseen Creator in a constellation of testimonies by oppressors, champions, and victims of Nicaragua’s past, Cardenal creates his diatribe without once authoring a line of prose. The result is a subversive work of poetry reminiscent of Ezra Pound and favorably likened to Pablo Neruda’s masterpiece, the Canto general, and yet created without a single stroke of the quill.

Ernesto Cardenal Martinez

Written in prose constructed exclusively from centuries-old documents, The Doubtful Strait may appear of limited interest to the casual reader. But the questions its format raises are intriguing and have broad appeal: should such works be shelved under history, or poetry, or both? Are poetry and history altogether unlike? What responsibilities do poets and historians each come to shoulder in shaping our societies?

“The chronicler must not fail to do his duty.” Cardenal borrows verbatim these words aimed by historian Antonio de Herrera (1549-1626) in condemnation of brutal Governor Dávila. Surely enough, as insurgent Nicaraguans began to unravel the Somoza regime in 1977, Cardenal’s socialist community on the island of Solentiname would be bombarded and the poet sent into exile for subversive beliefs. After fighting for the Sandinista cause and serving as the Minister of Culture for the victorious insurrection, today Cardenal claims political persecution under a new “family dictatorship” – that of Sandinista strongman Daniel Ortega.

Following in the footsteps of Antonio de Herrera and Robert Penn Warren, this historian-poet uses memory to devastating effect. And like many historians and poets, Cardenal fulfills the chronicler’s duty – to remind us that, however different the façade, the past is often not even past.

You may also like:

Cristina Metz’s review of Greg Grandin’s The Last Colonial Massacre: Latin America in the Cold War.

The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938)

By David A. Conrad

In 1938, Warner Brothers released a movie destined to become a classic. The Adventures of Robin Hood starred Errol Flynn, the greatest action hero of his generation, in top swashbuckling form. His lovely leading lady was Olivia de Havilland, a show-stealing actress who later landed a memorable supporting role in 1939’s Gone with the Wind. The production team included director Michael Curtiz and producer Hal B. Wallis, who later teamed up to create 1943’s enduring wartime romance Casablanca. Erich Wolfgang Korngold, one of the top film composers of the day, set The Adventures of Robin Hood to music. The film was shot in brilliant Technicolor on a then-exorbitant budget of two million dollars. It raked in twice that amount at the box office and went on to win three Oscars at the 11^th Academy Awards.

Brilliant casting and top-quality production do not, however, fully explain The Adventures of Robin Hood‘s success. The timing of its release coincided with an economic downturn. The year 1938 saw the United States hit 19% unemployment, an increase of roughly five percentage points over the previous year. Gross domestic product also declined. It was a recession within a depression, a particularly bad year in a string of bad years stretching back to 1929. Warner Brothers’ lighthearted (and very expensive) Robin Hood movie seems, at first glance, incongruous within this context of real economic pain. No doubt filmgoers enjoyed the chance to immerse themselves in a fantasy world of costumes and chivalry, but escapism was only part of The Adventures of Robin Hood‘s winning formula.

Beneath its colorful pageantry and epic adventure, The Adventures of Robin Hood contains a message of sympathy and hope that likely resonated with Depression-weary moviegoers. The bandit of Sherwood Forest is well-known as a champion of the poor and downtrodden. While some Robin Hood productions over the years have downplayed the hero’s penchant for wealth redistribution (see, for example, 2010’s Robin Hood starring Russell Crowe), the 1938 version has no shortage of “robbing from the rich to give to the poor.” A turning point in the film occurs when Robin, having captured a tidy stash of food and clothing intended for Prince John (Claude Rains), gives a skeptical Maid Marian a firsthand look at the impoverishment of Nottingham’s people. This lengthy scene depicts poor, huddled masses standing in line to receive the stolen food, while Robin’s band of outlaws forces Prince John’s men to exchange their finery for the peasants’ rags. By the end of the scene, Marian has a new admiration for Robin’s noble cause, and the audience is left with no doubt as to the moral righteousness of his actions.

The Adventures of Robin Hood spoke to the economic sensibilities of the 1938 viewing public. This factor, combined with the movie’s high production quality and pure entertainment value, helped to guarantee its success with critics and audiences. The film remains in print over seven decades after its initial release, and it attracts new fans with each passing year.

The Death of Qaddafi by Historians

The death of Muammar al-Qaddafi and the end of his rule in Libya marks the end of an era. Our untiring colleague in International History, Jeremi Suri, blogs about the historical background. More historical perspective, in particular about the backseat role the US played in these events, can be found at NPR’s website. And on the photoblog of The Atlantic is a collection of photographs from the last battles.

Syria´s President Hafez al-Asad (sitting on the right side) signing the Federation of Arab Republics in Benghazi, Libya, on April 18, 1971 with President Anwar al-Sadat (stting left) of Egypt and Colonel Muammar al-Qaddafi of Libya (sitting in the centre). The agreement never materialized into a federal union between the three Arab states.
Photo Credit: The Online Museum of Syrian History via Wikimedia Commons

For more on and by Jeremi Suri, see his website, which begins with another version of this article.

You may also like:
Chris Dietrich on Oil and Weapons in Libya
Lior Sternfeld on Asef Bayat’s book about Democratic Islam

Posted Saturday, October 22, 2011

Historians on Occupy Wall Street: Protest, Dissent, and the Search for Order

by Christopher Dietrich

Occupy Wall Street has captured national attention for over a month now. In fact, the durable energy of the movement—which has cropped up across the country, including here in Austin—has led some media outlets to argue that it is the most important left-of-center movement of its type since the 1960s. Commentators from the New York Times’ Paul Krugman to the Daily Show’s Jon Stewart have even compared Occupy Wall Street to the Tea Party, a comparison both groups are sure to shudder at, but one that is valid nonetheless, given the growing public profile of Occupy groups, especially with the success of the “global day of Occupation” on October 15.

For historians who have commented publicly on the movement, the central question has been whether Occupy Wall Street will have legs. One measure of this may be whether Occupy Wall Street remains atop The History News Network’s “Hot Topics” list. For most historians, the history of dissent and protest has framed this discussion. If academic humanists filled the liberal stereotype into which they are often shoe-horned, one would expect uniform and unmitigated support for the protesters. However, a more cautious consensus has emerged. Judith Stein, a historian at City College of New York who has visited the movement in Foley Park, expressed most clearly the liberal pessimists’ view in a magazine that, ironically, is called Dissent. “These kinds of endeavors have a long history in the United States,” Stein reminds her readers, “from the creation of utopian communities in the nineteenth century to the formation of communes in the 1960s and 1970s.” However, her point is not to celebrate Occupy Wall Street as the culmination of what came before. Rather, she warns that left-leaning movements’ “track record as a vehicle for change is poor.”

The editor of Dissent, the historian of the left Michael Kazin, said as much in a recent editorial in The New York Times. “Stern critics of corporate power and government cutbacks,” Kazin believes, “have failed to organize a serious movement against the people and policies that bungled the United States into recession.” Although Occupy Wall Street could dovetail with the demonstrations that roiled Wisconsin earlier in the year, Kazin’s message of warning is as clear as Stein’s. Using a set of historical analogies—the link between the Gilded Age and the rise of organized labor in the 1930s and the link between the proto-conservative movement of the 1970s and the Tea Party—Kazin worries that today’s movements on the left lack the institutional strength to “articulate and fight for the vision of a more egalitarian society.”

It would be foolish to describe Kazin and Stein’s warnings as cynical. Still some scholars, notably two from a younger generation, seem more optimistic about Occupy Wall Street, though they share the same concerns. In an interview with American Public Media’s Market Place, University of Texas historian Jeremi Suri told Kai Ryssdal, “Unfortunately they’re not offering any cohesive or coherent alternative to the capitalist system as we know it.” However, Suri ended on an optimistic note: “Give them some time.” On NPR’s All Things Considered, Yale historian Beverly Gage also began by noting the lack of coherence in the movement’s message. Historically, “lots of different sorts of people” have been involved in protests, Gage said, “and they haven’t always necessarily gotten together.” Still, like Suri, Gage prefers to look at the possibilities presented by the movement’s momentum. “They’ve pressed questions about inequality, about the role of Wall Street and finance in the American economy, and just big moral questions about what do we want out of our society,” she said.

Indeed, today’s movement may be similar to the shared critiques of populists, anarchists, and communists at the turn of the previous century, described in Gage’s engaging book on the 1920 bombing of the J.P.Morgan headquarters, The Day Wall Street Exploded. This is especially true in the sense that the protests both reflect a broad sense of frustration shared by much of society and represent the diversity and disjointed nature of that frustration. So, the question follows, how can Occupy Wall Street move beyond these big moral questions and provide coherence? What does history tell us?

The central thread that ties the above historical perspectives together is a warning to the new denizens of the left: if Occupy Wall Street remains disjointed, its chances of having an enduring historical legacy will be slim. At some point in the near future, the leaders of the movement must come together and present a coherent narrative for change. One step towards doing so would be the convening of an Academic Advisory Board. This would do more than lend, in a much-repeated but patronizing phrase, “intellectual heft” to the protests. More importantly, it might also help the movements’ leaders articulate their goals more clearly.

The primary organizers of the movement should realize that the risk of giving up some control of the movement weighs far less than the possibility that it could lose relevancy and slowly peter out. I’m sure the historians above, as well as other scholars who have come out in support of Occupy Wall Street—like New York University economist Joseph Stiglitz, who told protesters at a recent teach-in that they had the right to be indignant—would be happy to comply.

Photo Credits
All via Wikimedia Commons
David Shankbone, Occupy Wall Street, October 5, 2011
Crispin Semmens, Occupy London, 16 October 2011, St. Paul’s Cathedral
Victorgrigas, Sign at Occupy San Francisco, October 13, 2011

Shinohata: A Portrait of a Japanese Village by Ronald P. Dore (1994)

by David A. Conrad

Ronald P. Dore’s Shinohata brings to life the recent history of rural Japan. Shinohata is a small, wooded village in Tochigi prefecture, part of Japan’s central plain. Dore, an English sociologist who first came to Japan during the American occupation after World War II, wrote the book after more than two decades of intermittent visits and observations in the town. Shinohata is a unique blend of scholarship and anecdote, insight and humor. The book goes beyond simple facts and impersonal statistics, and offers a memorable narrative of small town life in postwar Japan.

The first three chapters describe the town’s prewar history. Nineteenth-century famines, Meiji-era tax reforms, and twentieth century market fluctuations all affected the residents of Shinohata. Naturally, the war with America and the occupation that followed left their marks as well. But the basic social structures of the traditional village survived the upheavals of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries relatively intact. In Shinohata in 1955, Dore says, “[n]obody subjectively felt that the world had fundamentally changed.”

By 1978, though, change was everywhere. Over the preceding twenty-three years, Dore and his friends in Shinohata had witnessed major shifts in the material aspects of village life. Items that once were luxuries, such as bicycles for children, now abounded. Virtually everyone had remodeled their homes to install tiled floors, tatami mats, modern bathtubs, color televisions, and so-called “Western” toilets that, as anyone who has been to Japan will confirm, are far superior to actual toilets in the West. Farming, the traditional mode of employment in Shinohata, had become mechanized, and almost nobody relied on it anymore for income. Household finances in Shinohata compared favorably with urban household revenues, and people in the town enjoyed more leisure time than they had in the past. Japan’s postwar economic boom proved more influential than all the crises and violence of the prewar decades.

Throughout the book, Dore provides a respectful and intimate look at the lives of Shinohata’s residents. A chapter called “Couples,” for example, deals with marriage and relationships, while “Growing-up” examines the habits of children and young adults. The townspeople Dore writes about are colorful and friendly, and he intersperses his clear prose with a chorus of local voices. He shares personal anecdotes and long passages of villagers’ conversations, and is careful to replace real names with pseudonyms to safeguard the privacy of people who were his neighbors and friends. The charm and poignancy of this rustic Japanese town will linger with readers, as will Dore’s important observations about the nature of twentieth-century rural Japan.

You may also enjoy David Conrad’s review of Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II

Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War by Tony Horwitz (1999)

by Kristie Flannery

In his introduction to Confederates in the Attic, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author Tony Horwitz recounts the very strange moment when his weekend sleep-in was rudely interrupted by the loud cracking of gunfire.

The noise came from an unexpected Civil War re-enactment being filmed outside of his bedroom window. Horwitz had once been a little boy who would spend hours engrossed in an old, enormous book of Civil War sketches, captivated by images of Yankee and Dixie soldiers engaged in battle. But despite spending a number of years working as a war correspondent, it was this surprise encounter with the “men in grey” that prompted Horwitz to turn the critical gaze of the journalist upon his own and his country’s enduring fascination with the bloody conflict that pitted American against American in 1861-1865.

Confederates in the Attic is an informative and entertaining record of the extended road trip that Horwitz made through the Confederate heartland of the United States to investigate how Americans and southerners in particular continue to remember the war, and to make sense of that strange and enduring Confederate pride. Along the way Hortwitz gets to know a number of interesting people. His exchanges with Civil War enthusiasts from all walks of life spur the narrative along. They include the famous Civil War Historian Shelby Foote, female members of the Daughters of the Confederacy who devote considerable effort to finding Dixie soldiers in family trees, and bands of modern day “hardcore” Civil War re-enactors; factory workers who devote much of their free time and money to re-living as authentically as possible the experiences of nineteenth-century Confederate soldiers. For these rough and ready men who are perhaps the most interesting Horwitz introduces us to, this means sewing their own Civil War uniforms, dressing up to march for miles through wild country in ill-fitting boots, and spending nights in open, near-freezing conditions under thin blankets, spooning together for warmth.

Of course race cannot be left out of a book about the Civil War past or present. Horwitz does not meet one Civil War-obsessed African American in his travels. He concludes through his many conversations with white southerners who cherish the memory of the Confederacy that slavery has been conveniently forgotten in popular conceptions of why the South ceded from the Union and went to war against it. Horwitz provides a sobering account of the role the Civil War plays in modern racial violence; how in 1995 the ostentatious display of the confederate flag could lead one young man to kill another young man, and how the Klan is never really far away.

Horwitz demonstrates that the Civil War is very much still alive in the imaginations of Americans and shapes the way in which many perceive themselves and the world they live in. Confederates in the Attic is a must read for anyone studying the US Civil War and modern US history, or history and memory. It is a wonderful resource for teachers who want to get their students excited about this history and its continued influence on the present. It is truly a delight to read and would make a perfect gift for anyone who enjoys history.

You may also enjoy hearing UT professor of History Jacqueline Jones read from her book “Saving Savannah: The City and the Civil War.”

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