Stacy Vlasits, Author at Not Even Past

“For a Gunner”: A World War II Love Story

by Jacqueline Jones

They met on the boardwalk of Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, on Labor Day of 1941, introduced by mutual friends. She was a self-described ambitious career girl; an English-major graduate of the University of Delaware, she would spend the war years working first in the advertising department of the DuPont Company, and then as the editor of RCA Victor’s company newsletter. He was a mail clerk for DuPont when he enlisted in the Army Air Forces in December of 1941 and began a three-month stint of basic training. Following through on what was apparently a classic case of love at first sight, for four and a half years they carried on a passionate correspondence, seeing each other only during his infrequent furloughs. On one of his last furloughs (in 1944) he proposed, and told her that he wanted to get married within two weeks of coming home, whenever the time came. She said yes.

Sylvia Phelps and Albert Jones were born only a few weeks apart, in 1919, and they grew up only a few miles from each other—she in the tiny crossroads of Christiana, Delaware, and he a dozen miles away in Wilmington, the state’s largest city. Perhaps they learned of those connections during their first conversation on the boardwalk. Over time though they would realize that they came from different worlds. She was the somewhat spoiled youngest child of eight, born to sturdy native New Englanders transplanted to Delaware. Her father first worked as a surveyor for coal mining operators and railroad companies. Of necessity the family led a peripatetic existence; the birthplaces of the children chronicled his responsibilities from the Alleghenies to the Blue Ridge Mountains, with the kids born in Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Kentucky, West Virginia, and Virginia. When he settled his family for good in Christiana (in 1924), he prospered from his own sand and gravel business; most of the profits went into paying the college tuition of the children. Sylvia’s parents, finding no Congregational Church in the vicinity of Christiana (or anywhere in Delaware, for that matter), instead joined and became strong supporters of the local Presbyterian Church. The congregation had been founded in 1732, part of the First Great Awakening, and in the twentieth century was still propagating a stern Calvinism based on the doctrines of predestination and original sin.

Albert was the younger son of an alcoholic father who abandoned his wife and two children during the Great Depression. His mother was the daughter of a prominent Wilmington businessman. Although her family’s fortunes declined precipitously in the late nineteenth century, in 1908 her widowed mother managed to send her on an extended grand tour of Europe. Because of a sheltered upbringing, the young woman was not prepared to support the family when her husband left her a “grass widow” in the 1930s. Both Albert and his brother learned to fend for themselves and pick up odd jobs here or there to help support their mother. Moving from one small apartment to another, surrounded by the beautiful dark mahogany furniture their mother had inherited, they lived an irreligious life of genteel poverty. After graduating from high school, Albert started work in a mailroom in a DuPont office building in Wilmington; on his lunch hour and weekends he took flying lessons at the tiny Ballanca airport in nearby New Castle and earned his civilian pilot’s license.

After a variety of wartime assignments that took him to Tennessee, Mississippi, Colorado, North Dakota, and California, he finally arrived at his final destination in the fall of 1944—Twentieth Air Force, 498 Bomber Group, based on the South Pacific island of Saipan. He was a technical sergeant on a B-29 (the so-called “Superfortress”) and served as Central Fire Control (“Top Gun”) on the top of the plane. Through an intercom he radioed the tail gunners below and directed their machine-gun fire to oncoming targets in the air. In the summer of 1945, he and the other crew members successfully completed their quota of thirty bombing missions, mostly raids over Japanese cities.

A published history of the Twentieth Air Force supplied the numbers that represented so much death and destruction inflicted on Japan those last months of the war—65 principal cities obliterated or severely damaged; 602 major war factories destroyed; 1,250,000 tons of shipping sunk by aerial mines; 83 percent of oil refinery production and 75 percent of aircraft engine production destroyed; more than 2 million homes leveled; 330,000 men, women, and children killed and another half million wounded; 8,500,000 people rendered homeless and 21,000,000 displaced.

Albert, my father, was wounded, though not seriously, on one of his missions. Other facts and figures are obscure: How many planes he saw explode and spiral downwards, out of the sky; how many comrades he lost; how many nightmares he endured; how many times he longed for my mother and home. For her part, my mother Sylvia tried to keep busy with work, but could not tamp down the constant anxiety she felt. A devout Presbyterian, she went over in her mind the questions that religion could not seem to answer: Why would an all-powerful deity make this sensitive young man whom she loved so much the instrument of so much pain? How could he, a good person, live with the fact that he had his comrades had killed so many people—so many innocent civilians—whom they had never known or seen? Not until after her death (in 2008) did my brothers and I discover a poem she had written sometime in the summer of 1945, trying to reconcile her faith in an omnipotent God with her fears for my father’s safety—and perhaps for his soul.

For a Gunner

Lord, Thy Glory fills the Heaven—
Will he ever find you there,
In his plan on war-bent mission
Speeding death bombs through the air?

What have You to do with bombers,
Lord, the God of peace and love?
Will you speed him on his journey?
Guide, protect him from above?

Lord, he doesn’t like the killing;
His was not the choice to fight…
It’s so hard to feel Your mercy
In the tense blackout of night.

Lord, Thy Glory fills the Heaven—
Let him glimpse You there on high;
Calm his fear and hate and turmoil
In the vast peace of Your sky.

My father was mustered out of the service on September 1, 1945, and my parents married two weeks later, on September 15. Theirs was a happy and an enduring marriage, severed only by the death of my father a few months shy of their fiftieth wedding anniversary in 1995.

Photo Credits:

Photographs of Sylvia Phelps and Albert Jones, the author’s parents

Purchasing Whiteness in Colonial Latin America

The castas, or mixed race populations, suffered numerous forms of discrimination in colonial Latin America, but in practice pardos and mulatos could still achieve some social mobility. A rare few, by the mid eighteenth century, were able to petition the Spanish crown through a process known as the gracias al sacar, to purchase whiteness.

The accompanying watercolor provides a rare visual of one of those so whitened. Dr José Manuel Valdes was born illegitimate in Lima, Peru, in 1767, the son of a mulata named María and an Indian named Baltasar. Placed in a primary school at the age of three, by the time José was five his teacher concluded that he was so precocious that he needed advanced education. A childless couple subsidized his advanced learning.

José Manuel apprenticed to become a surgeon, for even though his talents would have permitted him to become a physician and receive a doctorate from the university, royal legislation prohibited that he receive these degrees. He found a mentor in the distinguished physician Hipólito Unanue, who promoted the young José Manuel’s career. Unanue practiced in “all the great houses” of Lima, and he introduced José Manuel into elite circles, famously proclaiming, when faced with a difficult case, that his patients should “call José Manuel to come so he can ‘do his witchcraft here.’”

As his practice flourished, José Manuel donated significant proceeds to charity; he continued his education, teaching himself to read French, Italian and English while collecting a notable medical library. Residents of Lima were accustomed to see him on his way to medical calls with the windows of his carriage drawn, so he might read and not be distracted. This was how popular water colorist (costumbrista) and fellow pardo Pancho Fierro portrayed him in this image. It was because José Manuel was “so esteemed in Lima” that the Viceroy, the audiencia and the city council successfully petitioned the Spanish king to whiten him, which permitted him to receive his doctorate, become a physician, teach at the university and serve as the chief medical officer in Lima. His story is just one example of the very different ways that the Spanish world facilitated the mobility of deserving individuals, no matter their race.

Photo Credits:

Lavalle, José Antonio. El Dr. D. José Manuel Valdés. Lima: Torres Aguirre, 1886. (Courtesy of the Latin American pamphlet digital project at Harvard University and the Museo de Arte de Lima)

You may also like:

Susan Deans-Smith’s Discover piece on artistic depictions of racial mixing in Colonial Spanish America

And Kristie Flannery’s review of Imperial Subjects: Race and Identity in Colonial Latin America

Divided Together: The United States and the Soviet Union in the United Nations, 1945-1965, by Ilya Gaiduk (2013)

by Michelle Reeves

Renowned Russian historian Ilya Gaiduk, Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of World History of the Russian Academy of Sciences and author of two monographs on the Soviet role in the Indochina conflict, did not live to see the completion and publication of Divided Together. But he undoubtedly would have been pleased with the result. The book is the first multi-archival English-language exploration of how the politics of the Cold War suffused the functioning and evolution of the United Nations, often to the detriment of the international organization’s fundamental purpose and goals. Though the historical literature on the Cold War is dauntingly vast, not much of it has focused on the United Nations as an arena of superpower conflict.

Great power disunity in the United Nations often prevented the organization from fulfilling its basic mission. At the heart of the dilemma was the dual nature of the U.N., as both an instrument for negotiating disputes among states and a forum to influence international opinion. Like no other organization that had come before, the United Nations provided a venue for national leaders to appeal to the court of world opinion. Yet the latter function frequently inhibited the efficacy of the former. The use of the U.N. as a Cold War propaganda platform impeded its utility as a mechanism for resolving conflicts. At the same time, however, the United Nations played a key role in de-escalating crisis situations and facilitating their peaceful resolution. The Suez and Cuban missile crises stand out as examples of U.N. efficacy.

Soviet and U.S. views of the U.N.’s utility evolved in response to dramatic changes in the international arena. In the early postwar period, when the creation of the United Nations and the drafting of its charter seemed to many to be dominated by the United States and its Western European allies, the Soviets considered the U.N. to be a mere tool of American foreign policy. Soviet leader Joseph Stalin even went so far as to consider sabotaging the U.N. and replacing it with an organization that would be subordinate to Moscow. The stark bipolarity of the early Cold War period, however, softened in the face of international developments, particularly decolonization, that irrevocably altered the way the Cold War was waged. An influx of members from the newly independent states of Africa, Asia, and the Middle East not only transformed the composition of the U.N., but also sought to influence its agenda. These countries, many of which would later become members of the Non-Aligned Movement, were understandably dissatisfied with the way that the Cold War competition had dominated U.N. proceedings, and sought to redirect the energies of the organization toward easing the transition to independence.

For an academic who was educated while the Soviet Union was still extant, Gaiduk evinces an impressive degree of scholarly professionalism and does not shy away from sharply criticizing Soviet behavior at the U.N. Though the English translation is at times awkward, the content of Gaiduk’s monograph is original, coherent, and persuasive, and successfully bridges the historiography of the United Nations with that of the Cold War.

Photo Credits:

Ambassador Adlai Stevenson displays photos of Soviet missiles to the United Nations, October 1962 (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

Nikita Khrushchev, leader of the USSR, at a meeting of the UN General Assembly in New York, September 1960 (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

Passing for Portuguese: One Family’s Struggle with Race and Identity in America

by Danielle Porter Sanchez

My father’s family came from Cape Verde, a tiny archipelago off the west coast of Africa near Senegal. Cape Verde was part of the Portuguese empire until a bloody fight for freedom initially led by my personal hero, Amilcar Cabral, brought independence to nation in July 1975. Nevertheless, my great grandfather immigrated to the United States from Cape Verde long before Cabral’s revolutionary days. My great grandfather, a carpenter, and great grandmother, a Cape Verdean palm reader and medium, whose family was from Portugal, settled in Nantucket in the early twentieth century. It would be naïve to say that Cape Verdeans found an accepting Massachusetts waiting for them upon their arrival, but the large diasporic community banded together and created an enclave that shielded them from the outside world in places like Nantucket and Fox Point. My family was part of that community until racial tensions began to build and fewer people associated themselves with their Cape Verdean heritage. The family that my great grandfather and my great grandmother created faced an immense amount of discrimination as they attempted to build a life in America. Like many other Cape Verdean families, they denied their African background and started telling people that they were Portuguese. This allowed them to navigate the color line and sit in the front of buses, eat at segregated diners, and drink from whites only water fountains during a racially tense time in American history. However, attempting to pass as white during this time period did not completely erase their African ancestry in the eyes of their neighbors.

My father was raised in Boston during the 1960s and 1970s, a very tough place to be a young black boy, even if he did not identify as black. He had bricks thrown at him and was called a nigger more times than he can count. He was chased out of neighborhoods and threatened on a daily basis, which was perplexing for a young child who believed he was Portuguese. My brother faced some of the same challenges growing up in suburban Texas. He was called derogatory names and beaten up for being what others perceived as black. I’m not sure why, but instead of hiding from my ethnicity, I embraced the indisputable fact that I am, in fact, black and, through my mother, Mexican American.

In an attempt to trace my ancestry, I learned Portuguese to get closer to my grandmother, Irene. I remember when I called her and said “Bom dia” for the first time, she hung up on me. I did not understand why at the time, but as I look back, I can see the connection to the harsh sting of racism and the complications of racial identities in America. My grandmother never learned Portuguese. Rather, she was fluent in a creole language from Cape Verde that was spoken around her home. My ability to speak Portuguese was jarring because it illuminated this issue of a racial fabrication that began soon after her family moved to Nantucket and still exists today among my relatives. Whenever I mention Cape Verde to my aunts or uncles, it creates a tension in the room. Our heritage is something that has been silenced continuously from generation to generation. It is with great sadness that I write that I am one of the few self-identifying black people in my family. Yet, I have pride in who I am and where I came from. I have great love for the sacrifices that my family made, and my love for Cape Verde stems from a desire to know my family’s past more than words can explain.

Five years ago, I gave my father a framed copy of the census document from 1930 that recorded our family’s immigration and is posted here. Lines 39-47 list my great grandparents and their children as immigrants from Cape Verde. Just looking at the document made me feel so much closer to a Cape Verdean community that I would never know. I swelled with pride as I wrapped it for my father and gave it to him on Christmas morning. I was surprised and saddened to discover that this gift caused great pain to my father and brother because they could no longer deny that our lineage led to Cape Verde. I do not know what my father did with my gift. A family member told me that he threw it out after I left, but I suppose it does not matter. Ultimately, I am part of a diasporic community that believed that it was necessary to redefine itself in the midst of some of most painful and degrading parts of American history.

I noticed something new when I examined the census record today; Joseph, Mary, Joseph Jr., Catherine, Rose, Antone, Cecelia, Irene, and Richard Lobo were the only “Negroes” identified by the census on their section of Orange Street in Nantucket. I am not sure what to think about this. Were they already attempting to pass at this point? Did they identify themselves as “Negroes” or did Anthony F. Sylvia, the census enumerator, give them that designation? Unfortunately, I will never know the answers to these questions, but what I can say is that I am almost positive that my great grandfather’s dream of finding prosperity and stability in the United States was drastically different from the harsh reality he faced as an immigrant in early twentieth-century America.

I cannot fathom the immensely painful experiences of my great-grandparents, grandparents, father, or even brother, but what I can do is push forward. For me, that means that instead of denying who I am, I can reflect upon the sacrifices of those that came before me, and I can take ownership for my heritage by learning from the hardships of my elders. Ultimately, I want to raise my son to know that he is (partially) Cape Verdean and to never be ashamed of that fact.

Photo Credits:

Danielle Porter Sanchez and Irene Rowe (nee Lobo), 2004

The 1930 census document showing the author’s Cape Verdean lineage

Austin’s Municipal Abattoir

By Betsy Frederick-Rothwell

In late October 1939 a photographer from the Bureau of Identification spent the day among both warm and chilled beef carcasses, shrouded sides of pork, and racks of washed and dried offal, documenting the daily activities of the Austin Municipal Abattoir. The building’s foreign name (abattoir is French for slaughterhouse) and the photographer’s dramatic black and white images obscure the rather prosaic purpose of the documentation effort. The photographs illustrated not a volume of contemporary art, but rather an annual report written by the superintendent of the city-owned slaughterhouse for the City of Austin council members, informing the city managers of monthly revenues, recent building improvements, and new markets for slaughter by-products. A formal report such as this, with detailed operational descriptions and illustrations, was probably necessary because the city council members likely would not have visited the abattoir—then located at Pleasant Valley and East Fifth Street—in the regular course of business in the same way they may have toured the earlier-built public library or even the soon-to-be-completed Tom Miller Dam. Although the abattoir was a signal of Austin’s “modernity,” and its operation was critical to a hygienic life in Austin, most residents likely preferred that it be out of sight.

While a municipally funded and operated slaughterhouse may seem strange to Austin residents today, the city abattoir was a common feature of many urban centers in the early twentieth century. The French term for the facilities implies their origins in the large cities of Europe, but the widespread construction of city-owned slaughterhouses in American cities was a response to the exclusion of domestic slaughterhouse inspection in the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906. The statue only required federal inspection of meat intended for interstate or foreign trade; for meat produced in slaughterhouses intended for sale within the city or the state, inspection was not required. The city abattoir, where inspection of meat for local markets could be assured, was proposed as a remedy.

Black and white image of Austin's Municipal Abattoir as it appeared in 1939

Austin’s Municipal Abattoir as it appeared in 1939 (Photo Credit: PICA 00609, Austin History Center, Austin Public Library)

A bond issue passed in 1929 funded the Austin Municipal Abattoir’s 1931 construction as a concrete-frame building with brick and hollow-tile infill. The building’s legislated purpose, easily sanitized construction materials, and highly controlled inspection, slaughter, and rendering processes conjure a narrative common to almost all cities in the United States that wished to be “modern” and hygienic. The plant’s highly standardized workflow as described in the 1939 report gives a sense of why many radical writers at the time presented the modern slaughterhouse (or more pointedly the slaughter “factory”) as another step in the march toward the technological control of nature. Area ranchers bringing their animals to the Austin Municipal Abattoir for slaughter surrendered their yield not to an individual butcher but rather to an Abattoir intake clerk, who issued the rancher a “slaughtering ticket” that would eventually be exchanged for the finished product, a processed carcass with the adequate number of inspection stamps to make it acceptable for delivery to markets in Austin and surrounding small towns. The work of the Austin Abattoir was executed in carefully defined steps to increase operational efficiency. According to the abattoir’s annual report, in 1938 alone, the seventeen employees of the Austin Abattoir responsible for inspection, killing, butchering, washing, and chilling processed 22,975 cattle, 6,825 hogs, and 1,239 sheep and goats, with similar numbers adding up for 1939.

Black and white photograph of the Austin Abattoir's slaughter room from the Bureau of Identification

Bureau of Identification image of the Austin Abattoir’s slaughter room, October 1939 (Photo Credit: University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, http://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Austin History Center, Austin Public Library, Austin, Texas)

The building’s relatively late construction date and location within the city evoke a story particular to Austin at the beginning of the twentieth century. The City of Austin considered sponsoring a municipal abattoir as early as 1913, and Paris, Texas, a town somewhat smaller than Austin, was the first city in the United States to build a city-owned slaughterhouse in 1909. However, heavy municipal debt resulting from the construction of the Austin Dam limited funds for other citywide improvements until the late 1920s, when an official city plan for beautification and improvement was passed by the city council. That plan, passed in 1928, also served the purpose of instituting racial segregation on a citywide scale. African Americans, who prior to 1928 lived in neighborhoods throughout Austin, were refused city services in all locations except those neighborhoods east of current-day Interstate Highway 35. Not surprisingly, the city located the Austin Municipal Abattoir at the city boundary on the far east side of this segregated neighborhood. Although proximity to the primary railroad lines was certainly a factor in locating the facility at the city’s eastern limit, the plant’s location in a segregated neighborhood and its distance from downtown embodies contemporary city leaders’ desire to keep this necessary public utility “invisible” to the city’s most prominent residents. However, the plant would not have been easy for its immediate neighbors to ignore; anecdotal accounts from other cities with similar abattoirs tell of terrible smells emanating from such buildings.

The Austin Abattoir’s closing in 1969 represented yet another shift in city dwellers’ relationship to the meat they consumed on an ever increasing scale. Changes in meat distribution networks and widespread availability of in-home refrigeration made city support of a local processing and preservation plant seem less critical.

Research for this article is based in part on:

Eldred Perry, “City of Austin Municipal Abattoir – Annual Report for the year 1939,” Austin History Center, Austin, TX.

The views and opinions expressed in this article or video are those of the individual author(s) or presenter(s) and do not necessarily reflect the policy or views of the editors at Not Even Past, the UT Department of History, the University of Texas at Austin, or the UT System Board of Regents. Not Even Past is an online public history magazine rather than a peer-reviewed academic journal. While we make efforts to ensure that factual information in articles was obtained from reliable sources, Not Even Past is not responsible for any errors or omissions.

Handbook of African American Texas

By Joan Neuberger

Do you love Texas history? The Texas State Historical Association, which makes Texas history readily accessible through its Digital Gateway to Texas History, now offers a huge, new, terrific series of readings in the Handbook of African American Texas.

Launched on Juneteenth, 2013, the anniversary of the day in 1865 when news of the Emancipation Proclamation reached African American Texans, this 800 article online encyclopedia includes more than 300 new entries and is part of the 26,000 article collection called the “Handbook of Texas.” The project was envisioned and spearheaded by Merline Pitre of Texas Southern University and former TSHA president. She worked with Randolph B. “Mike” Campbell of the University of North Texas and TSHA chief historian.

Read articles about the Victory Grill, originally opened in 1945 for servicemen returning from fighting in World War II (and pictured below).

Or the history of the African Methodist Episocpal Church in Texas (this is the Wesley Chapel AME Church in Georgetown, built in 1904).

Photograph of the front facade of the Wesley Chapel AME Church in Georgetown, Texas

You can read about everything from Black Cowboys to Black Visual Artists, and everything in between: African American Texans in the arts, business, community organizations, education, the military, journalism, religion, sports, and slavery & civil rights.

You can find an introduction to this wonderful new resource in the Newsletter of the TSHA.

Photo Credits: Wikimedia Commons.

Laws of Chance: Brazil’s Clandestine Lottery and the Making of Urban Public Life by Amy Chazkel (2011)

by Darcy Rendon

Amy Chazkel’s Laws of Chance explores the rise of a cultural phenomenon that has engrossed the Brazilian imaginary since the turn of the twentieth century: the lottery game jogo do bicho. Its multifaceted analysis ties the “animal game” to the rise of urbanization, consumer capitalism, positivist criminology, and the cash economy in the First Republic (1889-1930). Chazkel focuses on the “gray area” between law criminalizing the popular practice and what actually happened to gambling Cariocas in the streets and in the courtroom. The close-to-the-ground view that she offers reveals that ineffectual criminalization—9 out of 10 cases ended in acquittal—forged a symbiotic relationship between state actors and city dwellers. She intervenes in the study of urban public life by showing that, like sumptuary laws, anti-vice laws were not premodern projects, as scholars have argued, but features central to the governing of cities and the growth of informal economies in Latin America.

Chazkel effectively weaves archival records, photographs, and charts to tell a larger story about bureaucratic efforts to control public spaces and retail economies in modernizing republican Brazil. The game began as a state-sanctioned daily drawing in 1892 to increase the revenue of Baron de Drummond’s zoo. By 1895, the game had “escaped the zoo” as bicheros and banqueiros operated unlicensed lotteries throughout the city that relied on the zoo’s winning animal and corresponding numbers. State officials responded by banning all games of chance in 1896 and inadvertently giving the game its paradoxical status as a criminal offense and widespread cultural phenomenon. The author principally shows that gambling was not only subject to regulation because of its perceived moral degeneracy, but because its revenue fell outside of the state’s purview. These ill-gotten gains flouted the system of concessions the state crafted to control the consumer economy while maintaining a laissez-faire façade.

Chazkel also examines the ways formal legislative codes were redefined in popular legal customs to show how the criminal justice system used the law to repress the growing network of clandestine games in Rio de Janeiro. The fact that the courts acquitted the majority of defendants reveals that judges had great discretionary powers when it came to interpreting the law.

João Batista, the zoo keeper who created jogo do bicho (Image courtesy of Coisas de Florani)

Furthermore, courtroom testimonies expose the law as a pliant tool in the hands of police officers, who used it to line their own pockets and empower themselves through illegal policing methods such as intimidation, blackmail, and the fabrication of evidence. In practice, the legal code meant to suppress games of chance informally taxed them as court fees and fines filled the state’s coffers. The eclectic code also ensured that the game would survive as an extralegal and entrepreneurial aspect of the police profession. Those who suffered in both cases were the ones who, according to Chazkel, could have benefited the most from games of chance: the working poor.

The streets of Rio de Janeiro, ca 1909-1919 (Image courtesy of Library of Congress)

But the informal lottery became a salient feature of urban street commerce. The monetization of Rio’s financial markets trickled down to the laboring classes, as they developed the need to handle currency, and fueled the expansion of petty gambling. Those who bought and sold jogo do bicho tickets understood that the anonymity the milreis granted them made it harder for authorities to trace their monetary transactions. These exchanges also took cover within the established infrastructure of petty commerce. The open-air markets and small shops Cariocas frequented for everyday necessities provided “the perfect medium in which the jogo do bicho would become institutionalized as a normal yet illegal part of Carioca society.” Chazkel convincingly argues that the state regulated petty gambling because the practice threatened their process of enclosure, which sought to control the use of public spaces and privatize leisure activities, and not because it led to moral decay, as reformists maintained.

A jogo do bicho ticket (Image courtesy of Coisas de Florani)

Laws of Chance is an engaging and well-written legal and social history that offers a glimpse into the cultural and economic processes that shaped Brazil’s emergence as a modern nation state. One of its greatest achievements is that it forces us to question “the artificial division between jogo and negócio, between play and business, that underlies both historical and contemporary conceptions of social history of the turn of the twentieth century.” Chazkel shows how little playing “the animal game” differed from engaging in legitimate commercial transactions. Rather, the consolidating state created this false dichotomy in its zeal to control all dimensions of consumer commerce. Her historical and theoretical insights will undoubtedly appeal to readers interested in urban studies, informal economies, citizenship, and extralegality in Brazil and Latin America.

You may also like:

Eddie Shore’s review of The Cuban Connection, a history of gambling, smuggling and drug trafficking in pre-revolution Cuba

Historians Reflect on the March on Washington, August 28, 1963

We start the 2013-14 academic year on the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington. It’s been nearly impossible to escape the media commemoration of the March for Jobs and Freedom, of Martin Luther King’s speech, of speeches and songs. But it’s worth really pausing and asking some specific questions about topics that often get overlooked. On the UT Austin university homepage, UT historians (and several other faculty and students) offer some poignant and pointed reflections.

You can find recordings and many more stories on the National Archives website here.

You can read Peter Dreier about one of the key organizers of the march, Bayard Rustin, marginalized for being gay and a former communist.

Finally, you can reread Laurie Green’s essay, posted here in January, on the ways the Marchers were thinking in 1963 about the unfulfilled promises of the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863.

Dolly the Sheep Transforms History

by Kriti Korula and Myra Kurjee

In 1997, scientists in Scotland announced that they had successfully produced the world’s first cloned animal–a sheep named Dolly. Created entirely from one mammary gland cell, Dolly disproved the scientific law that “once a cell is differentiated it can no longer be any other cell.” Newspapers around the world heralded the development as an historic breakthrough of modern science. However, not all reaction was positive. Many politicians and religious leaders challenged the ethics of cloning and questioned whether scientists ought to be performing this kind of work.

For Texas History Day, Kriti Korula and Myra Kurjee created “Dolly the Sheep Transforms History,” a website exploring the complicated story behind this incredible animal. The site describes how Dolly was cloned, the varied international reaction it received, and even includes first person interviews with four of the scientists involved in Dolly’s creation. Kriti and Myra argue that Dolly represented a significant moment in the history of science, politics and culture at large:

“The cloning of Dolly the sheep was a major turning point in the history of science and medicine. The event surprised many people but also generated conflicts about the ethics of cloning, especially human cloning. Dolly’s birth opened the door to human cloning. This caused governments to create new laws against stem-cell research and human cloning. Her birth was a turning point that had a long lasting impact on the world.”

Kriti Korula and Myra Kurjee
Group Website
Junior Division

Photo Credits:

Dolly with her companion lamb, Bonny (Image courtesy of the Roslin Institute)

Dolly with Dr. Ian Wilmut, lead scientist on the research team that created her (Image courtesy of the Roslin Institute)

The Hadamar Trial: Inadequacies of Postwar Justice

By Madeline Schlesinger

Download “The Hadamar Trial”

The UT history department has announced that Madeline Schlesinger is the winner of this year’s Claudio Segre Prize, which recognizes each year’s best History Honors Thesis. For her award-winning project, Madeline researched the infamous Hadamar Institution, a German hospital in which Nazi officials undertook a mass sterilization and euthanasia program against “undesirable” elements of society. Madeline’s project specifically focuses on the legal proceedings that took place after Allied Forces discovered the facility and placed its personnel on trial for crimes against humanity. You can read her project’s abstract below or download the entire paper in the link above.

Abstract:

Throughout the Second World War, the Third Reich used facilities at the Hadamar institution to carry out the Nazi euthanasia program—an operation that targeted German citizens suffering from mental illness and physical disabilities. Just months after Allied victory and the American liberation of Hadamar, a United States Military Commission led by the young Leon Jaworski tried personnel from Hadamar for violation of international law in the murder of 476 Soviet and Polish forced laborers. The Hadamar War Crimes Case, formally known as United States of America v. Alfons Klein et al., commenced in early October of 1945 and figured as the first postwar mass atrocity trial prosecuted in the American-occupied zone of Germany.

Smoke rising from the crematoria at Hadamar, probably 1941 (Image courtesy of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum)

Hadamar Institute personnel socializing, sometime between 1940 and 1942 (Image courtesy of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum)

Although often overlooked in the shadow of the subsequent events at Nuremberg, the Hadamar Trial set precedent for war crimes trials and the rewriting of international law to include the charge of crimes against humanity. In its historical context, the Hadamar trial tells a story much larger than the conviction of seven German citizens. It tells the story of the Third Reich’s murderous euthanasia program, one of the United States’ first confrontations with the crimes of the Holocaust, the inadequacies of international law in the immediate postwar period, the impossibility of true retribution in the aftermath of Nazi atrocities, and the slow erosion of justice in the years following the war.

Three inmates of the Hadamar Institute soon after the U.S. military discovered the facility, April 5, 1945 (Image courtesy of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum)

Irmgard Huber, chief nurse at Hadamar Institute, after American soldiers liberated the facility (Image courtesy of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum)

My thesis aims to accurately depict the crimes committed at Hadamar, present the collision of German and international law during the proceedings, and prove the inadequacy of contemporary legal infrastructure to prosecute the crimes against humanity committed during World War II.

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