Stacy Vlasits, Author at Not Even Past

Summer, Interrupted

Since we are launching our blog as August crawls towards September and our thoughts are turning to the classroom, it is fitting to begin with an essay about what historians do during the summer.

Summer, Interrupted by Rachel Herrmann

“Summer vacation” is a misnomer for what we academics do from mid-May to late-August. Most of us are not on vacation, but many of us are definitely a little unreachable. Professors become difficult to chase down. Not Even Past goes a bit off the grid. Grad students might go to the pool, or to coffee shops that play slightly more rousing music, but they do so with a book in hand. During this period, we all become somewhat selfish with what we see as our few uninterrupted months of reading, research, and writing time. Other academics have written about this phenomenon: Gabriela Montell over at The Chronicle of Higher Education has dubbed it “The Fantasy of the Faculty Vacation,” and Mark R. Cheathem, Associate Professor of history at Cumberland University, has blogged about what makes summer funding essential for research and writing support. This year has been my first year of dissertation research, and I have spent it traveling around the country to various archives and libraries. My summer, consequently, was not significantly different from the rest of my year.

The fact that other people were suddenly on summer break, however, meant that I traveled more widely, and engaged in a few other activities besides research. If the fifth grader inside of me had to describe my summer vacation, she would say, “It was super cool.” She might also say, “It was totally awesome!” but that’s probably because she doesn’t know how to drive, and thinks that it will be exciting to travel halfway across the country from Austin to Los Angeles. Oh, the things my fifth-grade self doesn’t know; she hasn’t seen what West Texas looks like after six straight hours of scraggly brown bushes. But more on that later.

This is the point where I should stop and admit that I did, in fact, go on a vacation—a brief one—at the beginning of May. I have a younger sister who is majoring in International Relations, and who had just spent a semester at Cape Town University, in South Africa. Before that she was in Cairo, and before that, Morocco. Except for a brief visit over Christmas, I’d not seen her for a year. My mother—after reminding me that life is not all about research, guilting me about not seeing my family enough, and whispering tempting words like “safari” and “leopards” into my ear—lured me to Zimbabwe, Botswana, and South Africa for a family vacation.

Cheetahs, elephants, leopards, lions, water buffalo, zebras, and antelopes of various sizes notwithstanding, I wasn’t really in powered-off scholar mode, not even on standby. On our sixteen-hour flight to Johannesburg, I read a book I was supposed to be reviewing, and started making notes on a yellow legal pad. I began writing a sentence or five after meals of crocodile and kudu (a type of antelope), and soon felt like I had a good enough grasp of the book to begin stringing paragraphs together. I put the finishing touches on the review a week and a half later while sitting in a camp bed that was placed on a raised wooden platform that was covered with canvas tent walls—and that was, at the time, being bounced on by a troupe of baboons. We got up at 5 a.m. for safari game drives, and in the long stretches of Botswanan bush not occupied by lazing lions, I crafted dissertation sentences in my head. I planned my research schedule for the next four months. I lay awake at night and worried about pending grant applications.

At the end of the trip, my family was probably glad to see me go so that they didn’t have to gaze into my panic-stricken face any longer. My mother boarded a plane home to New York, and I got onto a plane bound for London: or, more particularly, the British Library and the National Archives. I landed on a Sunday and lamented the fact that all the archives were closed, and that it was too early to check into my hostel. I made the best of things by walking to Buckingham Palace to see the changing of the guard, and ate a sandwich in a state of jetlagged stupor while listening to people ranting at Speaker’s Corner over the benefits of atheism. Finally, I collapsed at the hostel for a long-awaited nap, and woke up a few hours later to the new arrivals in my room. The upside to staying in a hostel is the amount of money you save. The downsides involve noisy, rude roommates, and never knowing who will end up in the bunk bed on top of yours for the coming week. I prefer light, noisy sleepers to smelly feet, but that’s just my personal preference.

The next morning I ate the universal hostel breakfast of strong tea and a bowl of cereal, while reflecting on my budding caffeine headache and wondering how soon it would take to kick my coffee addiction. Thankfully, at least, this hostel did not subscribe to the apparently general British idea that whole milk is the only thing that belongs on cereal. After breakfast, I made the short walk to the British Library, and breathed a sigh of relief. Not only was I back in the research saddle, but I’d been to this library before and knew how the system worked.

What follows is my prescriptive advice for staying sane on a research trip (or trips).

When you are in London for research, you should bounce back and forth between the British Library and the National Archives. Sundays are the only days when both archives are closed, and on these days you should sleep later, and then see as much of London on foot as you can. Go to the Churchill War Rooms so that you can talk about them at UT’s British Studies; browse the stalls at Covent Garden for cheap gifts for friends. You should time your moment of exhaustion with your arrival in Chinatown, where you should drink copious amounts of green tea and eat an embarrassing amount of Dim Sum. Obviously, if you’re lucky enough to be sharing London with current and former UT grad students, you should meet them for Indian food, Italian fare, and drinks as frequently as possible. I recommend skipping the Mexican restaurants, however, as they will only disappoint you.

Once you’ve squeezed every primary source you can from the archives (or the money runs out), get back on a plane and fly to New York City. Borrow your mother’s car to drive to SUNY New Paltz for a conference. Attend as many panels as you can on the first day, but slink back to your dorm room on the second day to give in to your jet lag with a three hour nap. Then, get Chinese food from a strip mall and eat it in your room because sometimes, you just don’t have the energy to network with anyone else. Rally for the third day of panels, hand out business cards at the reception, ask postdocs about how they got their fellowships and jobs, and have two sentences at the ready to describe your dissertation to anyone who asks. Drive back to New York City, pack your suitcases for what feels like the twentieth time in a year, get on a plane, and enjoy the feeling of being wheels-down in good old Austin, Texas.

Stuff your face with Italian specials at Vespaio, Tex-Mex at Trudy’s, Thai food at Titaya’s, and sushi at Maru. Plan your life while consuming half-off coffee before 11 a.m. at Dolce Vita. See friends for happy hour and spontaneous barbecues. Pack your bags, again.

Take a deep breath, and get into your car. Drive to Arizona. Stop and sleep. Finish the drive to California. Begin your month of research in San Marino with a daily commute with some of the fastest (and worst) drivers in the country. Cling to David Sedaris on CD as the only thing that will keep you sane as you sit bumper-to-bumper on I-10 and the 101. Give a talk to a group of 40 donors during your first week at the archives, on a topic you haven’t spoken on yet, so that you are forced to fine-tune two dissertation chapters. Attend another conference in Philadelphia and get back to California while the 405 is still ostensibly closed and L.A. is supposed to be mired in Carmageddon. Breathe a sigh of relief when Carmageddon fails to occur. Hyperventilate upon realizing that your commute still exists. Write another book review. Locate UT graduate students in California who want to meet you for happy hour, and high school and college friends who are willing to indulge your growing obsession with Dim Sum.
Finish your research in California, and start the drive back to Austin. Smile fondly at the red rocks of New Mexico, border checks in Arizona, and windmills dotting the dry landscape of West Texas, because you’re going home, home, home sweet home. Caution: resist the temptation to speed on TX-71; it never ends well because there are too many traffic lights.

Settle back into the Texas heat by jogging before noon, after which the sun makes exercise an unreasonable struggle. Pick up books from the Perry-Castañeda Library. Run into another grad student at Titaya’s who’s a week away from his dissertation defense, and take comfort in the fact that he looks calm. Vigorously scrub the bathroom in the apartment so that you are exhausted enough not to repeat the night where you decided that sleep was a fruitless endeavor and your dissertation needed a new introduction at 1 a.m. Buy Anthony Bourdain’s books on the cheap at Half Price Books, and use his food writing to inspire you. Schedule ten million meetings with professors as they begin to reappear on campus. Get your oil changed. Visit your storage unit, and obtain a slew of clothes for winter in Philadelphia. Resist the urge to “rescue” every single pair of shoes you own from storage. Pack.

Summer vacation, indeed. My inner fifth grader can’t wait for the start of the school year.

Photo Credits:

All Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons

Woman Sitting on a Beached Boat, Reading a Book, c. 1925, John Oxley Library, State Library of Queensland

Child in Tanzania reading a book, Frank Douwes

Old section of Natchez, Mississippi. Woman sitting on park bench reading, Infrogmation of New Orleans

Portrait of a woman, reading a book in a lounge chair in the garden, F.W.M. Kerchman, Tropenmuseum

Reading Woman in the Forest, Gyula Benczúr

A muslim woman reading the koran in the mosque on the first day of Ramadan, by

Dhr. J.D. (Jacob Derk) de Jonge,Tropenmuseum

African-American children line up outside of Albemarle Region bookmobile, State Library of North Carolina

A Real Page Turner… By dregsplod from Tulsa, Oklahoma, USA, Creative Commons

Woman Reading, Utagawa Kuniyoshi

Two women reading on a verandah at Ingham, ca. 1894-1903, Harriett Pettifore Brims, John Oxley Library, State Library of Queensland

Changing Course in Vietnam — or Not

by Mark Atwood Lawrence

Democratic governments often have a hard time changing their minds, as recent U.S. decision-making about Iraq and Afghanistan has made clear. Even when the United States encountered monumental frustrations and setbacks, Washington kept fighting, adjusting its strategy and tactics but not its overall goals or the assumptions that underpinned them. To withdraw from either country before achieving stated U.S. objectives would, the Bush and Obama administrations agreed, expose the United States to national-security risks. Both administrations surely also feared the domestic political consequences of failing to achieving U.S. goals after thousands of Americans had already died in the effort.

So it was more than forty years ago, when U.S. officials responded to setbacks in Vietnam not by rethinking their goals or assumptions but by affirming their commitment to the war and, for a time, increasing the number of U.S. troops. Indeed, the vast documentary record of the Vietnam War makes abundantly clear that American leaders rarely revisited the fundamental assumptions that guided their decisions to escalate U.S. involvement.

A rare exception was an extraordinary study written by the Central Intelligence Agency in September 1967. By that time, the United States had encountered virtually all of the problems that would eventually doom its war effort in Vietnam. While Lyndon Johnson and his top advisers remained adamant that the United States would suffer intolerable geostrategic reverses if it failed to press on to victory, the CIA report suggested otherwise.

Nations would not fall to communism like a row of dominos if the North Vietnamese won, it insisted. The U.S. reputation for anticommunist resolve would not be forever destroyed. And the Soviets and Chinese would not go on an anti-U.S. rampage around the globe. In short, the study insisted, “such risks are probably more limited and controllable than most previous argument has indicated.”

It is hardly surprising that President Johnson ignored the CIA’s position and continued to escalate the war. The study, while extraordinary, was just a drop in the ocean of memos and reports that passed through the Oval Office, many of them suggesting that U.S. objectives were still obtainable. And the prospect of winding down the U.S. commitment was no doubt deeply distasteful to a president who had invested a huge amount of his personal and political capital in waging war in Vietnam. Yet the document stands out nevertheless for the clarity and prescience with which it saw beyond preoccupations of the moment and questioned the conventional wisdom that had led the United States to make a gigantic commitment to a small, distant, and impoverished land. It reminds us, at a minimum, of the value of taking the long view and asking whether the expenditure of resources corresponds to U.S. interests broadly conceived.

Read the original study: “Implications of an Unfavorable Outcome in Vietnam,” dated September 11, 1967

Related Reading:

Mark Atwood Lawrence, The Vietnam War: A Concise International History (2010)

Fredrik Logevall, Choosing War: The Lost Chance for Peace and Escalation of War in Vietnam (2001)

Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: A History of the CIA (2008)

A longer version of this essay: “The Consequences of Defeat in Vietnam”

Photo Credits:
Paddler: A US. Medic paddles a three-man assault boat down a canal during Operation Tong Thang (1968). By Department of Defense. Department of the Army. Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations. U.S. Army Audiovisual Center. (ca. 1974 – 05/15/1984) (U.S. National Archives, ARC Identifier 530622) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
LBJ: By Yoichi R. Okamoto [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
Gunner: A U.S. Navy river patrol boat crewman maintains vigilance at the .50-caliber machine gun during the boat’s day-long patrol on the Go Cong River (1967). By R.D. Moeser, JOC, U.S. Navy [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches from the Fault Line between Christianity and Islam by Eliza Griswold (2010)

by Joseph Parrott

There exists a fault line near the tenth parallel north of the equator where the two great proselytizing religions of the last two millennia meet. In centuries past, desert traders and merchant seamen carried Islam along with their goods, halting only where they confronted unsurpassable natural barriers or the expansion of European Christianity in the colonized regions of Asia and Africa. The diverse peoples of these lands found ways to live alongside each other, yet the past decades have seen this relative peace come unglued. New Yorker reporter and poet Eliza Griswold traveled along this increasingly chaotic border, documenting the day-to-day realities of the growing conflicts between the world’s largest monotheistic faiths. She finds that more than mere ideology motivates these men and women; instead, “growing numbers of people and an increasingly vulnerable environment are sharpening the tensions between Christians and Muslims over land, food, oil, and water.”

In Nigeria, Sudan, Malaysia, the Philippines, and elsewhere, Griswold reveals that religious identity serves as a refuge from the constant challenges of the modern way of life. Climate change, the expansion of the nation state in search of natural resources, political conflict, and the globalization of the market economy all undermine traditional beliefs that rely heavily on local community and close association with the environment. Colonial legacies and ethnic differences have inspired deep political divides.

In these developing countries, state institutions and social organization often lag behind economic growth and fail to fill the place of ailing traditions. Here, religious community provides stability and scripture proves “a more practical rule of law than the government does.” Faith offers a support network, a form of advocacy, and a unifying identity where life is difficult and the control of valuable resources contentious. The transnational nature of both Christianity and Islam means that these parochial negotiations of power often invite foreign assistance from evangelical missionaries and radical Islamists with their own agendas, meaning that battles are “fought locally and exploited globally.” The ease of communication and common beliefs connect disparate peoples, but such interactions also work to inspire divisions among coreligionists who reject the perceived superficiality and wickedness of the more secularized spiritual practices of developed states. Griswold finds that both Christianity and Islam prove complicated beliefs, neither inherently contradictory nor monolithic, powerful stabilizing forces abused by self-interested leaders. Faith in this context becomes a coping mechanism for unfamiliar world; it “could mean whatever one wanted it to; it could hold a link to the past or forge a vision for the future.”

Displaced Persons camp in Sudan resulting from the conflict in Darfur.

Griswold offers a fascinating, poignant, and insightful account of global religious conflict. Part history, part travelogue, and part theological mediation, the work successfully dissects the “compound of multiple identities” that drives the mass conversion of whole populations and motivates pious believers to take up arms against their neighbors. The daughter of Episcopal bishop Frank Griswold, the author situates this discussion of devotional violence within the context of her own spirituality, offering a personal and accessible view of a highly charged subject. Her pithy, graceful writing clothes this complicated story in an understated elegance. The Tenth Parallel demands attention as an insightful piece of historically informed news reporting and a truly engrossing account of one woman’s theological journey across the globe.

Further reading:

Eliza Griswold discusses Christian-Muslim relations on NPR Books.

Darfur photograph via Wikimedia Commons.

The Snows of Yesteryear by Gregor Von Rezzori (2008)

by Tatjana Lichtenstein

A swarm of plump and colorful waxwings are feasting on rowanberries. Suddenly, a shot rings out. “A good dozen of the birds tumble from the fruit clusters down into the snow amidst fallen berries and drops of blood. Who can tell whether the survivors will ever return?” With this scene Gregor von Rezzori begins his memoir of a boyhood in Czernowitz, a city that in the course of the twentieth century was variously located in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Romania, the Soviet Union, and today’s Ukraine. A sense of irretrievable loss and dislocation, amid images of beauty and destruction, are central themes in this intimate story of the disappearance of Habsburg Europe.

Born on the eve of the First World War, Gregor von Rezzori grew up in a family that, much like his hometown, was profoundly shaken by the collapse of Austria-Hungary. Czernowitz, the capital of the region known as Bukovina, was one of the empire’s most eastern outposts. Nevertheless, it was known as “Little Vienna” due to its vibrant cultural life and architecture. This was a city shared by Jews, Orthodox Christians, and Catholics, in which a multiplicity of languages could be heard. A place that, through the eyes of young Gregor, was deeply connected both to the land around it and to the imperial capital Vienna.

Von Rezzori’s parents belonged to the city’s German-speaking elite. His father was an Austrian public servant in charge of inspecting the province’s Orthodox monasteries, a position he used ostensibly to indulge his passion for hunting on the large estates owned by the Church. An inattentive husband living well beyond his means and with little patience for domestic traditions and social norms, he saw his fatherly duties as limited to raising his son as a huntsman. His high spirits and love of life stood in stark contrast to his wife’s demeanor. Von Rezzori’s mother, frustrated by a life that didn’t conform to her sense of stature nor her expectations of domestic bliss, escaped their home in Czernowitz to spas and health resorts as far away as Egypt. If weak health had been a pretext for her earlier absences, as a mother of two, she became obsessed with illnesses, smothering her children, Gregor and his older sister Lisa, with overprotection and anxiety. In von Rezzori’s world, parents set expectations. The nurturing, however, was done by others: his peasant nurse Cassandra, known in the household as “the savage one,” and later by Bunchy, his worldly and cheerful governess.

The memoir is deeply personal, organized around stories of family members rather than chronology. Its locus is Czernowitz in the years following the First World War when the old order has collapsed. Although its inhabitants were now Romanian subjects, life in some ways went on as it had before. However, the gradual crumbling of the world of Austria-Hungary manifested itself in the anxieties that filled his boyhood home. His parents—reduced from social, cultural and political elites to relics of the old order—divorce, thereby adding new layers of uncertainty. Gregor’s mother, for example, seeks to uphold her family’s elite stature even as its social foundations disappear. She does so by quarantining her son in the house and garden, thereby protecting him from the contamination that was sure to result from play with other children or from venturing out into the world beyond the yard fence. His father, whose pension vanishes with the Austrian state, retreats to live and hunt among Transylvanian Saxons, a German-speaking minority in Romania’s north.

Although infused with a sense of dislocation, von Rezzori’s recollections are at the same time intensely rooted in the city’s streets and squares, its sounds and smells, in the landscapes that surrounded it, and in its rich mixture of peoples and cultures.

Gregor von Rezzori eventually left Romania for Austria, Germany, the United States, and Italy. He wrote many works of fiction drawing on his own experiences. He died in 1998. The Snows of Yesteryear is a deeply moving reflection on belonging and displacement and offers a glimpse into a multicultural world that was eventually obliterated in the calamitous Second World War.

Related Reading:

Gregor von Rezzori, Memoirs of an Anti-Semite: A Novel in Five Stories (2007)

Gregor von Rezzori, An Ermine in Czernopol (2011)

Tatjana Lichtenstein elsewhere on Not Even Past: The Shop on Main Street

The Help

By Daina Ramey Berry, Tiffany Gill, and the Association of Black Women Historians

Historical films and books always distort the historical record for dramatic purposes. Sometimes that doesn’t matter and sometimes it does. The Help, a best-selling book and now a film playing nationwide, elicited this statement from the Association of Black Women Historians.

On behalf of the Association of Black Women Historians (ABWH), this statement provides historical context to address widespread stereotyping presented in both the film and novel version of The Help. The book has sold over three million copies, and heavy promotion of the movie will ensure its success at the box office. Despite efforts to market the book and the film as a progressive story of triumph over racial injustice, The Help distorts, ignores, and trivializes the experiences of black domestic workers. We are specifically concerned about the representations of black life and the lack of attention given to sexual harassment and civil rights activism.

During the 1960s, the era covered in The Help, legal segregation and economic inequalities limited black women’s employment opportunities. Up to 90 per cent of working black women in the South labored as domestic servants in white homes. The Help’s representation of these women is a disappointing resurrection of Mammy—a mythical stereotype of black women who were compelled, either by slavery or segregation, to serve white families. Portrayed as asexual, loyal, and contented caretakers of whites, the caricature of Mammy allowed mainstream America to ignore the systemic racism that bound black women to back-breaking, low paying jobs where employers routinely exploited them. The popularity of this most recent iteration is troubling because it reveals a contemporary nostalgia for the days when a black woman could only hope to clean the White House rather than reside in it.

Both versions of The Help also misrepresent African American speech and culture. Set in the South, the appropriate regional accent gives way to a child-like, over-exaggerated “black” dialect. In the film, for example, the primary character, Aibileen, reassures a young white child that, “You is smat, you is kind, you is important.” In the book, black women refer to the Lord as the “Law,” an irreverent depiction of black vernacular. For centuries, black women and men have drawn strength from their community institutions. The black family, in particular provided support and the validation of personhood necessary to stand against adversity. We do not recognize the black community described in The Help where most of the black male characters are depicted as drunkards, abusive, or absent. Such distorted images are misleading and do not represent the historical realities of black masculinity and manhood.

Furthermore, African American domestic workers often suffered sexual harassment as well as physical and verbal abuse in the homes of white employers. For example, a recently discovered letter written by Civil Rights activist Rosa Parks indicates that she, like many black domestic workers, lived under the threat and sometimes reality of sexual assault. The film, on the other hand, makes light of black women’s fears and vulnerabilities turning them into moments of comic relief.

Similarly, the film is woefully silent on the rich and vibrant history of black Civil Rights activists in Mississippi. Granted, the assassination of Medgar Evers, the first Mississippi based field secretary of the NAACP, gets some attention. However, Evers’ assassination sends Jackson’s black community frantically scurrying into the streets in utter chaos and disorganized confusion—a far cry from the courage demonstrated by the black men and women who continued his fight. Portraying the most dangerous racists in 1960s Mississippi as a group of attractive, well dressed, society women, while ignoring the reign of terror perpetuated by the Ku Klux Klan and the White Citizens Council, limits racial injustice to individual acts of meanness.

We respect the stellar performances of the African American actresses in this film. Indeed, this statement is in no way a criticism of their talent. It is, however, an attempt to provide context for this popular rendition of black life in the Jim Crow South. In the end, The Help is not a story about the millions of hardworking and dignified black women who labored in white homes to support their families and communities. Rather, it is the coming-of-age story of a white protagonist, who uses myths about the lives of black women to make sense of her own. The Association of Black Women Historians finds it unacceptable for either this book or this film to strip black women’s lives of historical accuracy for the sake of entertainment.

Ida E. Jones, National Director of ABWH and Assistant Curator at Howard University.

Daina Ramey Berry, Tiffany M. Gill, and Kali Nicole Gross, Lifetime Members of ABWH and Associate Professors at the University of Texas at Austin.

Janice Sumler-Edmond, Lifetime Member of ABWH, Professor at Huston-Tillotson University.

Any questions, comments, or interview requests can be sent to:
ABWHTheHelp@gmail.com

Suggested Reading:

Fiction:

Like one of the Family: Conversations from A Domestic’s Life by Alice Childress

The Book of the Night Women by Marlon James

Blanche on the Lam by Barbara Neeley

The Street by Ann Petry

A Million Nightingales by Susan Straight

Non-Fiction:

Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household by Thavolia Glymph

To Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors by Tera Hunter

Labor of Love Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family, from Slavery to the Present by Jacqueline Jones

Living In, Living Out: African American Domestics and the Great Migration by Elizabeth Clark-Lewis

Coming of Age in Mississippi by Anne Moody

Related articles on Not Even Past:
Tiffany Gill on African American women and beauty shop politics
Daina Ramey Berry on former slave narratives
Matt Tribbe on Raymond Arsenault’s Freedom Riders

Photo Credits:
“Beaumont, Texas. Mrs Elsie McMullen, a laundry truck driver returning home from work. A maid takes care of her children during the day.” Library of Congress

“Washington, D.C. Negro maid inthe home of a government worker.” Library of Congress

Dressing Up: Cultural Identity in the Renaissance by Ulinka Rublack (2010)

by Benjamin Breen

Matthäus Schwarz of Augsburg was, in many respects, a rather typical (if unusually successful) early modern merchant: he worked his way up from an apprentice clerk to a chief accountant in the powerful Fugger banking dynasty, he married, went to war, had children, and, in 1574, he died. Schwarz’s life may well have been forgotten if he had not taken the unusual step of memorializing it in an extraordinary manuscript. In his Klaidungsbüchlein, or “Book of Clothes,” Schwarz commissioned one hundred and thirty seven vivid watercolor paintings depicting the clothes he wore at each stage of his life, from his “first dress in the world” as a days-old infant to the somber robes of mourning he wore as a world-weary man of sixty-seven.

In her brilliant study Dressing Up: Cultural Identity in Renaissance Europe, Cambridge professor Ulinka Rublack uses Schwarz’s book and other largely unexplored visual evidence to argue that clothes matter in history. In the early modern period, the focus of her study, Rublack sees clothing as comprising a “symbolic toolkit through which people could acquire and communicate attitudes toward life and construct visual realities in relation to others.” Personal adornment could create communities and assert individuality; it could display wealth, express political allegiances, proclaim nationality, and visualize inner emotional states. Indeed, owing to harsh “sumptuary laws” forbidding commoners from wearing luxury goods such as pearls, silks or cloth-of-gold, clothing choices could even be a matter of life or death.

Perhaps the most admirable aspect of Dressing Up is the manner in which Rublack combines sophisticated theoretical arguments about the role of clothing in the “self-fashioning” of Renaissance individuals with concrete, lively details and startlingly vivid illustrations (there are one hundred and fifty six in all, many in color). Rublack has a particularly discerning eye for interesting anecdotes. In the introduction alone, we learn that a gang of youths known as the “Leather Trousers Group” terrorized the streets of 1610s Kyoto, that the French essayist Montaigne hated codpieces, and that medieval contemporaries blamed the defeat of the French knights at the Battle of Crécy on their passion for “clothing so short that it hardly covered their rumps.”

Mathhäus Schwarz’s Klaidungsbüchlein, or “Book of Clothes,” documented the Augsberg merchant’s personal adornment from infancy to old age. In the image at left, he stands proudly as a youth of nineteen; at right, we see him in the more sombre dress of a middle-aged man.

Jan van Eyck’s 1433 Man in a Turban, a probable self-portrait, forever immortalized a flamboyant fashion choice in the then-new technique of oil paint.

The book’s illustrations range equally widely. Rublack revisits famous self-portraits by Albrecht Dürer and Jan van Eyck to show how Renaissance artists employed their own bodies to exemplify their creative gifts, and uses evidence from a number of well-chosen woodcuts and etchings to demonstrate how clothing choices expressed national and religious allegiances. Particularly interesting — because they are so rarely used as historical evidence — are the photographs of actual clothing from the medieval and early modern periods. Rublack analyzes an incredibly closely-fitted silk doublet once owned by a medieval French duke, for instance, to argue that the rise of tight-fitting male clothes in the fourteenth century “reinvented masculinity and femininity, as well as a sense of what critics regarded as effeminate.”

Dressing Up draws much of its evidence from the German-speaking lands of the sixteenth century, and a notable secondary argument running through the book is that early modern Germany was far more connected to the wider world than has typically been admitted. Banking houses like Matthaüs Schwarz’s employer, the Fuggers, played an especially important role as financiers of long-distance trading voyages, and Rublack’s book shines in its exploration of how German printed texts made sense of the sartorial choices of indigenous groups beyond Europe (Chapter Five, “Looking at Others”). Throughout, Rublack’s clear writing style admirably balances intellectual heft and archival expertise with a spritely and quietly humorous authorial voice.

Like the “Book of Clothing” of Matthaüs Schwarz, this book is much more than a catalogue of obsolete clothing styles. It is an exploration of human nature, and of how human beings throughout history have expressed their inner lives through their exterior coverings.

Further reading:

Ulinka Rublach on “Renaissance Fashion: the Birth of Power Dressing” in History Today.

More images from Matthäus Schwarz’s Book of Clothes via Res Obscura.

Manhattan Projects: The Rise and Fall of Urban Renewal in Cold War New York by Samuel Zipp (2010)

by Kyle Shelton

In the 1970s the United Nations complex and the public housing projects of East Harlem projected two disparate images of New York City. If the UN displayed the city’s position as a global capital of culture, politics, and economics, the deteriorating housing projects showed the city’s struggles with overcrowding, high crime rates, and poverty. According to historian Samuel Zipp, the roots of this contradictory double-identity reach back to the rise and fall of the city’s post-World War II urban renewal efforts.

The usual story of urban renewal in America is one of powerful officials, such as New York’s Robert Moses, wielding great power to remake entire cities as they saw fit. Zipp’s Manhattan Projects departs from this narrative by arguing that urban renewal represented a more complicated, contentious process carried out by New Yorkers from all races, classes, and city neighborhoods. For Zipp, renewal politics highlighted questions about what the city should look like, whose interests it should serve, and who would control its remaking. Starting with the celebrated construction of the United Nations complex in 1948 and moving up through the battles over public housing projects in East Harlem in the late 1960s, Manhattan Projects shows how competing visions of renewal and the contests that revolved around its implementation could create symbols of both cultural significance and urban decline.

In the early years of the Cold War, many New Yorkers viewed urban renewal as a “benevolent intervention” that would turn run-down and crowded streets into modern showcases for American democracy and strength. Early renewal efforts stemmed from an “ethic of city rebuilding” that focused on creating an ordered and open city. Zipp argues that the United Nations represented America’s attempts to help remake the world through internationalism and remake the city through modern architecture and superblock construction. In both cases, the goal was to order chaos, whether it was caused by war or overcrowding. Few complained about the UN’s destruction of an old meatpacking district. Instead, the city celebrated renewal’s ability to bring a site of international significance to life from a collection of abandoned abattoirs.

Celebration of redevelopment ebbed, however, when renewal officials sited several projects in the heart of old residential neighborhoods. Rather than accepting the destruction of their homes and communities, many New Yorkers pushed back against renewal. Zipp argues that the rise of resident activism had a contradictory impact on the shape of the city. On the one hand, activism helped preserve historic neighborhoods and prevented displacement of many New Yorkers. On the other, these protests led to the decline of urban renewal as a viable public project. That decline led to the deterioration of public housing and, when combined with segregation that limited the occupational and residential opportunities of many people of color, helped precipitate the urban crises of 1960s and 1970s. Using the building of Lincoln Center and the development of public housing projects throughout the city as examples, Zipp demonstrates the irony of this anti-renewal activism. It protected the close-knit, older neighborhoods of the activists, even as it pushed officials to abandon the residents of public housing projects to a fate of faltering services and non-existent civic support.

By delving deeply into the local politics surrounding the construction of several of New York City’s most iconic landmarks, Manhattan Projects demonstrates that urban renewal’s legacy stretched well beyond the concrete foundations of its projects and the large personalities of its leaders. Renewal fostered competing imaginings of the city’s future, jumpstarted important debates over the meanings and pursuit of progress, and resulted in the formation social issues that continue to shape the city—and its growth—to this day.

Gender and Decolonization in the Congo: The Legacy of Patrice Lumumba (2010)

by Tosin Abiodun

In the 1960s the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) emerged as a political ‘hot spot’ in Africa. The transition from decades of Belgian colonial brutality and paternalism to independence, as historical records reveal, did not go smoothly. Gender and Decolonization in the Congo departs markedly from most work on this process by focusing on gender. There is a tendency on the part of scholars to neglect gender in their histories of decolonization in Africa. Political scientists, for instance, are apt to focus on the rise of the Cold War rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union. Much historical scholarship on the DRC shows enthusiasm for resolving puzzles arising from the perennial question: who assassinated Patrice Lumumba? Karen Bouwer delivers on her stated goal, to draw attention to Congolese women’s active role in the politics of decolonization. Overall, the study goes a long way toward presenting the first truly groundbreaking investigation of women’s political participation in the DRC.

Bouwer illustrates women’s contribution to politics with a narrative woven around the life and popular representation of Patrice Lumumba. Bouwer privileges Lumumba’s legacy, writing, and personal experience not to glorify his image, but to expose the complex system of social and political relations that shaped Congolese women’s lives. This gendered analysis integrates a wide variety of evidence in a compelling manner, including Lumumba’s writings and speeches, literary works such as Aime Cesaire’s A Season in the Congo, and cinematic works dealing with Lumumba’s legacy. Of particular importance is the discussion of films produced by Haitian director Raoul Peck such as Death of a Prophet, Sometimes in April, and Lumumba.

Patrice Lamumba in his official portrait as Prime Minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, 1960. Image via Wikimedia Commons.

These critical assessments of film and literature are some of the strongest passages in the book. Equally interesting are the chapters that testify to the high level of women’s involvement in politics. These include the life portraits of frontline female politicians such as Leonie Abo, Andre Blouin, Pauline Opango, Martine Mandinga and Madeleine Mayimbi. In addition, the author brings into sharp focus the role of women as preservers of historical memory: we learn about efforts on the part of Leonie Abo to preserve the memory of the slain revolutionary, Pierre Mulele. We also learn about Justine M’poyo’s effort to preserve Joseph Kasavubu’s memory by all means necessary.

Perhaps the greatest achievement of this study lies in the fact that it offers a promising new approach to the history of decolonization in the DRC. It offers a valuable new perspective on interesting subjects such as the Kwilu Rebellion of 1963-1965 and Haitian migration to Congo. Decolonization in the Congo will be able to stir the minds of anyone interested in gender studies, history, politics, diaspora studies, development studies and literary studies. It presents rich documents including a useful index, an impressive bibliography as well as extensive notes and rare photographs of Congolese female activists.

Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America’s Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion by Edward L. Larson (2006)

by Brian McNeil

Like most teenagers growing up in Alabama during the late nineties, my first encounter with the 1925 John Scopes Trial came on the first day of my ninth grade biology class. Inside the front cover of the textbook a message from the Alabama State Board of Education stated: “This textbook discusses evolution, a controversial theory some scientists present as a scientific explanation for the origin of living things, such as plants, animals, and humans.” Passed by the Board of Education in 1995, the supplement went on to say, “No one was present when life first appeared on earth. Therefore, any statement about life’s origins should be considered as theory, not fact.”

The disclaimer in Alabama biology textbooks was the product of a decades-long debate in the United States over science and religion in the classroom. In Summer for the Gods, Edward J. Larson examines this oft-contentious dispute from Darwin to Darrow to Dayton—host of the Scopes Trial and present home of Bryan College, one of the leading institutes of creationist biology. He demonstrates how contemporary thought influenced the debates surrounding the Scopes Trial and, in the last section of the book, how dramatic portrayals such as Inherit the Wind shape our own thinking on evolution today. Yet, as Larson skillfully notes, the “Trial of the Century” stays with us not because of the scientific questions it raised but because the Scopes Trial embodied “the characteristically American struggle between individual liberty and majoritarian democracy.” The Scopes Trial, in other words, asked who would control curriculum in classrooms? Would it be the local many that clung fast to their bibles and looked up to the heavens for the answer to the origin of man? Or, would it be the distant few who studied science and looked down into the earth at the fossil record for the answer to the origins of species?

These are the questions that drew the major antagonists to the Scopes Trial: William Jennings Bryan and Clarence Darrow. Bryan—known as the Great Commoner for his support of the Populist Party in the 1890s—was a reformer who steadfastly held to religion and popular politics. Darrow, the most prominent lawyer in early twentieth-century America, used his sharp legal mind to challenge popular notions of morality and religion. The most memorable aspect of the trial was the back and forth between these two American giants on the lawn outside the courthouse (the trial had to be moved outside to accommodate the interested public). Darrow asked questions that had nothing at all to do with human evolution and everything to do with casting doubt over Evangelical Christianity in general and Bryan’s faith in particular. “Did you ever discover where Cain got his wife?” Darrow asked at one point during Bryan’s testimony. “No sir; I leave the agnostics to hunt for her,” the Commoner acidly replied.

The great strength of Summer for the Gods is Larson’s ability to demonstrate how the debate over science and religion has changed over the decades. As unbelievable as it may sound today when the battle lines are so firmly demarcated and the trenches are so deeply dug, there was a time when fundamentalist Christians attempted to accept evolutionary biology on its own terms. The first section of the book details how this era of good feelings changed following the end of the First World War. Believing that modernism, natural selection, and eugenics caused both the Great War and the social unrest that followed it, fundamentalist Christians fought back against evolutionary biology. Because of this rising tide of conservatism, many states in the early 1920s passed laws that restricted teaching Darwinism in the classroom and ultimately led to the Scopes Trial.

I currently live in Texas, and the great debate in the Lone Star State over curriculum in the classroom has in many ways shifted away from science toward social studies and history. Conservatives and Progressives are now debating the origin and character of the United States, not the origin of human beings. But if Larson were to comment on this dispute over history textbooks, he would surely argue that the debate is not new at all. Instead, he would insist that the same struggle between majoritarian democracy and individual liberty that guided the Scopes Trial frames the present debate over history textbooks in Texas. Larson’s lucid writing, command of detail, and ability to connect the Scopes Trial to longstanding debates in American history make Summer for the Gods a great read.

Sounds of the Past #2

by Karl Hagstrom Miller

Anyone interested in early sound recordings can find a treasure trove at the Library of Congress website.

“In the Baggage Coach Ahead” is a great example of the sentimental ballads that became popular in the United States during the 1890s. The classic ballads were maudlin tearjerkers, narrative tales of lost love or dead mothers designed to pull at the heartstrings. They featured snappy melodies that lodged themselves in the heads of anyone within earshot. New York sheet music publishers churned them out by the score, hoping that a few would prove popular with theater audiences and the legions of young women who played the latest hits at the family piano. The assembly-line composition process marked the industrialization of American popular music.

Listen to “In the Baggage Coach Ahead”

“In the Baggage Coach Ahead” from 1896 hits all the requisite stops. The song takes place on the sleeping car on a train, where an inconsolable baby cries in its father’s arms. Other passengers demand silence, complaining that they cannot sleep. One woman then suggests that the father take the baby to its mother, a request that set up the song’s kicker. “I wish I could,” the father replies, “but she’s dead in the coach ahead.”

The song was the most popular composition of Gussie L. Davis, a pioneer in breaking down segregation in the music business. He was one of a very few African American songwriters who successfully published sentimental ballads during the decade. Most black writers were either barred from the industry or constrained to writing comic minstrel songs about black inferiority.

The performer, Vernon Dalhart, was a struggling opera singer who moved from Texas to New York around 1911. He eventually became a popular recording artist for the Edison phonograph company, waxing everything from light opera and minstrel songs to popular hits of the day. In 1925, he re-imagined himself as a hillbilly singer and achieved his greatest popularity with “The Prisoner’s Song,” often touted as the first country record to sell a million copies.

Sentimental ballads such as “In the Baggage Coach Ahead” were popular, in part, because they could help Americans grapple with the dramatic social changes they were experiencing. Urbanization, industrialization, immigration, the expansion of railroad travel, and the availability of thousands of new consumer goods (including phonographs and commercial theater) brought increasing contact with people, products, and ideas from elsewhere. Sentimental ballads helped negotiate the intersection of public and private spheres. Davis’ last verse finds all the mothers and wives on the train helping the lone father sooth his crying child. It concludes, “Every one had a story to tell in their home of the baggage coach ahead.” Mothers saved the day and helped transform a public tragedy into a private morality lesson when witnesses shared the story with their loved ones back home.

Embracing “In the Baggage Coach Ahead” and its kin meant not having to choose between public and private allegiances. Sentimental ballads were commercial leisure that celebrated private domesticity. Listeners could identify with both by singing along with the odes to private virtue echoing from the public stage.

Karl H. Miller’s “Sounds of the Past #1” on Not Even Past

Sheet music cover: Historic American Sheet Music collection, Duke University Libraries Digital Collections
Portraits of Davis and Dalhart via Wikimedia Commons

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