Stacy Vlasits, Author at Not Even Past

The Eastern Mediterranean and the Making of Global Radicalism, 1860-1914 by Ilham Khuri-Makdisi (2010)

The era of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century in the Levant, became known as the period of the ‘Nahda’- the Arab renaissance. New ideas flourished and the emergence of Arab nationalism is often attributed to this time and place. Ilham Khuri-Makdisi has written an intellectual history of this period from an angle neglected so far, that of radical-leftist thought. Khuri-Makdisi focuses on three cities: Beirut, Alexandria, and Cairo, which maintained special connections as cosmopolitan centers, and she links the roots of radical movements found in these cities with early globalization.

The narrative challenges previous perceptions that identified radical thought as a European product. As Makdisi shows, it started simultaneously in Europe, the Middle East, and the urban centers of Latin America. She chooses to focus on the Anarchist movement that both competed with Marxism as an international ideology and manifested itself in popular culture. More importantly, anarchism helped give rise to a new social order: the intellectual middle class. Under Sultan Abdul-Hamid II (ruled 1876-1909), the Ottoman Empire witnessed major social and political changes. Makdisi breaks down these changes to smaller components: the international networks that developed under anarchist notions, the development of the press, and the construction of institutions to disseminate anarchist ideas. The contributions of the anarchist movements in this period included mass education, mutual aid societies, and intellectual centers. The theatre, for example, functioned as a “subversive institution” used by the movement to raise general awareness about its international networks. Makdisi points to a play about the anarchist movement in Spain that gained great success in Beirut. She also dedicates part of the story to diaspora communities and their place in the international movement, thanks to the connections they had in their homelands.

Anarchist movements are often regarded as the most radical form of political and social activity; this book, however, reminds readers how significant and mainstream the institutions that they established are. The successful use of interesting and varied sources, the prose, and the engaging story make this book to a worthy read.

Joe Jamail Delivers 2011 Commencement Address

On May 20, 2011, the UT Department of History was pleased to welcome one of our most illustrious graduates to deliver this year’s Commencement Address. Renowned trial lawyer and generous UT supporter, Joe Jamail (JD 1953, BA History, 1950), treated graduates and their families to his thoughts on the ways that studying History at UT made him the lawyer he became. We are publishing the entire speech for all our readers here because it exemplifies our belief in the value of studying History, as well as our belief that “the past is never dead.”

“You are very fortunate to have been able to study History. So was I. History does more than tell us about the past. It shows us the way to have a wider view of the world. We cannot possibly understand the present without a knowledge of the past.

The record of pre-historic times.

The record of pre-civilization.

The record of civilization.

The record of human and pre-human ancestors and their exploits and progress.

History presents the major records from around the world in a manner that preserves their appeal as fine literature.

History reflects human nature, with its needs and desires, hopes and fears.

History satisfies the need to have roots.

History is not a narrow view of all things but it is the one educational tool that reveals the different ways in which human beings respond to the issues that unite them.

The study of world history leads us to gain insight into ourselves and to evaluate the nature of our own lives and the events that occur. Like the heroes of every culture, all people today confront choices that force them to reconcile their personal wishes with their responsibility to others. Like these heroic figures, all people today must confront tasks in the course of their daily lives that appear to be insurmountable. They, too, must be courageous and determined if they are to achieve their goals. The study of the hero teaches that great character is as important as great deeds.

History continues to inspire many creative and intellectual pursuits. It enriches the appreciation of literature, art, and music and can lead to greater interest in all things.

History has been a very large role in my life. It not only has brought me great pleasure, it taught me and enabled me to be a very good lawyer.

Because of my fascination with history as a student and up to today, I was able to use it to better understand and explain to courts and juries the reasons for my presentation.

How is this so? It is because life is a continuing process. Not an isolated incident. What we are is a continuing process of all that went before us.

The legal system of the Western world rests on a large body of philosophical, social and literary history. It is important for students to learn that history so they can be people of understanding, breadth and learning. It is important for them to recognize that our system of law and justice grew out of our own past; and that we are trustees and not owners of that past, including our laws and institutions. Perhaps the best thing we might do to improve the society would be to launch a crusade to improve the liberal arts education. They should be encouraged to take courses in science, history, literature, philosophy and psychiatry as part of their training.

The legal profession has always been criticized, condemned and cursed but let me give you another view.

Other professions erect buildings that fall down, bridges that wash out, planes and ships that rust into obsolescence. Even the steel of sacred symbols like our Statue of Liberty wore out in one hundred years.

We don’t build with steel or stone, but with sturdier stuff. We build monuments with ideas and principles based on History.

Homer never built of rock or steel, nor did Socrates, nor did Jesus, nor Moses. They built with more enduring stuff – ideas and inspirations – beauty and truth.

We know this because it is part of our History.

Knowing the history of law, its beginnings and growth and the history of great lawyers and how they related to problems gave me an advantage over those who were not well versed in history.

Let me tell you about a very important part of our lives, we learned from a lesson of fact recorded in History. This is what history tells us. It proves once again that history is entwined in every important event that profoundly affects our lives.

It is August 14, 1670.

History tells us the story of William Penn and the jury system that protects us. This would never be known if it had not been recorded, preserved forever to teach us. Penn had been charged with treason for preaching peace. He was a Quaker. The war-like king didn’t like it – they tried him.

It is critical because it truly defined the rights of people and it was the landmark moment for freedom.

Not only for the jury system but for our own freedom of speech, religion, and the rest of our freedoms

In the Penn case the leader of that great, courageous group of jurors was not a lawyer, but a student of history. He knew and understood the “Magna Carta”. That historical document that ensured Jury trials in England and later in America. They challenged the judge and established the Jury system. A lawyer named Andrew Hamilton years later was called on to defend a small pamphlet published by Peter Zenger. Andrew Hamilton had been a young boy in the English courtroom during the Penn case. He remembered. Before we were the United States, still under Britain, using that history, he convinced the jury to find Zenger not guilty of treason by publishing a paper criticizing the Crown. Lawyer Hamilton convinced the jury that they had a more moral and higher responsibility than the command of the king’s appointed judge. The jury agreed and found Peter Zenger innocent and history recorded then tells us that established free press in US.

History was the most important ingredient in establishing our freedoms. England’s freedom.

That is why we now have embedded in our law – Freedom of Speech, Freedom of the Press, Freedom of Religion.

In many cases I have tried, I have used the history of William Penn to illustrate the independence of the jury and to remind them of courage.

I believe it is the most significant legal case of the last thousand years. It wasn’t the Scopes Monkey trial. It wasn’t Brown v Board of Education, although the Warren court’s opinion changed the face of American society forever. It wasn’t Pennzoil v. Texaco, that I tried – the largest jury verdict at the time in the history of the law. It was upheld and changed the way corporate American conducts its affairs in the mergers and acquisitions field. The answer, I believe, was a case involving the arrest of a young man more than 330 years ago.

It was August 14, 1670, a Sunday. A congregation comes to their church in London, intent on peaceful worship. Their church is barred by heavy iron bars and chains. Soldiers guard the entrance. The soldiers are determined to deny the worshipers access to their church. The claim was these people were dangerous to King Charles II and decided to close it down. His father Charles I was executed by Cromwell. Charles II now reigns with power far greater than that for which his father had been put to death.

This congregation were Quakers who believed in love, friendship and universal brotherhood. More importantly, they were pacifists who believe that war is wrong. Such teachings represent a threat to the despot expanding his empire or authority, by use of force.

The young leader of the Quakers made his way through the crowd and confronted the captain.

“Friend,” he says, “we beg of you as men of peace to stand aside and allow us to open the house of our Lord that we may properly honor and worship.”

“We gather in peace and we are determined to honor our Lord upon His day, and will not return home until we have done so.”

The young man is familiar to all of us. He was William Penn.

Since the church is barred, Penn declares that they will have their service in front of the meeting house.

Penn is charged with preaching treason. The criminal trial under law requires a jury of lay citizens. Impaneling a jury then is a simple matter. Constables arrest people at random off the streets.

Edward Bushell is one of the twelve men brought to the courtroom in the Old Bailey to sit judgment of Penn. He was the leader in the jury room. The man I spoke of earlier. He was not a lawyer. He was a history enthusiast. He had read and had with him a copy of that great historical document, The Magna Carta.

Penn tries to offer a defense. What the Quakers were doing is not illegal. For the prosecution, Alderman Browne interrupts, “You are not here for worshiping God but

for breaking the law.”

After the third witness testifies that he saw Penn preaching but could not hear what he was saying, the court instructs the jury to retire to the jury room and deliberate its verdict. The men elect Thomas Veer as foreman. After a short deliberation, Bushell argues innocence, relying on a copy of the Magna Carta he has in his pocket. They have deliberated a little over an hour and thirty minutes when the bailiff knocks on the door. He tells the twelve that the court is growing impatient with their delay and “order you to come below at once.” Bushell replies that since the jury has no verdict, they cannot come. Eight of the jurors leave the jury room and take their seats in the box. Four others, including Bushell and Veer, remain. Within a short time the bailiffs are pounding on the door again, demanding that the four follow them down to the Court.

The Judges say, “If the jury does not show respect for this Court, you shall all be fined and denied your dinners. You will have your noses slit and tongues cut out.”

They wait for the bailiff. At 9:30 they are back in court. The Mayor again demands the verdict and asks who will speak for the jury. He is told, “Our foreman, Thomas Veer.” Veer rises. The courtroom is quiet and still. He hands the paper to the clerk who recites that the jurors have found Penn guilty of speaking to an assembly on August 14, 1670. No treason.

“Will you be led by such a silly fellow as Bushell?”, screams Judge Starling. Judge Howell tells them that the court will not accept the verdict. They will be locked up, without meat, drink, fire and tobacco. “We will have a verdict by the help of God, or you will starve for it.”

Bushell rises to address the Court. He reminds them that the jurors are to abide by their oaths and find according to evidence. There is no power in the Magna Carta to dictate the jury’s verdict. The Lord Mayor replies,”This Court has any power it chooses.” Bushell again tries to argue the rights of the Magna Carta.

The Judge says, “These rights will starve you.”

The jury is back. The court inquires whether the jurors agreed. They all respond in a defiant tone that they are. The court asks who will announce the verdict. The twelve men shout, “Our foreman, Thomas Veer.” The court calls for the verdict. “Is William Penn not guilty or guilty?” Veer musters what little strength he has. He speaks but two words, “Not guilty.”

“You say William Penn is not guilty in manner and form as he stands indicted and so say you all?”

The jurors reply, “We do!” The court polls the jury. Each juror answers to his name and takes responsibility for the verdict. Bushell stands up. “My Lords, as the jury has now delivered its verdict and it is recorded, we asked to be released with all deliberate speed as we are all in great want.” The court refused to excuse them. Instead, for their actions you are each fined forty marks and imprisonment until paid.” Bushell argues with the court that they jury has performed its duty in good conscience and has undergone a heavy ordeal. He reminds them that the laws of England require that they be released at once.

“Pay your fines and you shall be discharged. Until you do, you will be taken to Newgate Prison with William Penn, there to remain until your fines are paid.”

Foreman Veers’ daughter can hold back no longer. She descends to the pit, berating the judges. She opens her purse and takes out some coins. Others in the audience come up to help her with the fine. She flings the coins on the clerk’s desk. Veer speaks feebly. “No daughter, don’t pay it. Let me die in prison than yield to them.” Veer, with his daughter holding him announces again, “not guilty.” Then, he falls to the floor of the courtroom and dies.

The jurors and William Penn are taken to prison. Days later a lawyer who heard of it appears. One of the six carrying Veers from the courtroom is a fourteen year old boy, Andrew Hamilton. He will carry the memory of the trial all his life. He comes to America and sixty-five years later, as an aged Philadelphia lawyer, he remembered a jury years ago in London.

Richard Newdigate, in his role as lawyer, appeals and wins. No, the people win. The higher Court denounces the decision of the court. It is an astounding victory. In holding that no juror can be imprisoned for his verdict, Sir John Vaughn sets out words that echo today against those who would abolish juries or limit their independence.

“Every man sees that the jury is but a troublesome delay, a great charge and of no use in determining right and wrong and therefore trials by them may be better abolished than continued but this would be the greater mischief to the people.”

Without history, I would never have been able to do this. One does not become a good lawyer by going to Law School. Law School teaches us the way to practice law, – but not how.

Becoming a good trial lawyer or a successful person requires one to make use of all experiences – studies in philosophy and the rest. But what better place is there than knowing history – where all of the meaningful events that ever happened are recorded for us to use.

It’s so important.

Thank you for honoring me by allowing me to come and talk with you. I wish you good health and much pleasure and success.

Today should be one of the happiest, proudest days of your life.

Your sense of pride is earned and deserved because of your achievement.

You have been confronted with obstacles and opportunities.

You have succeeded in overcoming the obstacles and have made good use of the opportunities.

Not only are you proud but you have made everyone who helped you proud – your parents, your family, your counselors, your professors, and I as a history student am proud of you. There are an estimated 7 billion people alive on our planet.

You are part of a group that is a minuscule number of these people who have a college degree.

We are privileged – but along with this privilege comes a responsibility, a duty.

As an educated human we owe it to all people to be the best we can and to individually strive to leave the earth and its people better than it was when we arrived.

That is how progress in civilization is measured.

Original photograph: UT Law Alumni & Friends

Black Loyalists and “The Book of Negroes”

by Cassandra Pybus

The Book of Negroes is an extraordinary historical resource, a meticulous list drawn up by the British authorities between May and November 1783, in which they recorded the personal details of some 3,000 African Americans evacuated from New York. The great majority of these people were originally enslaved workers who had defected to the British and were now leaving America as free people. The most significant thing about the Book of Negroes is that most people are recorded with surnames that allow them to be tracked through the archives. It is organized by ship with each person given a name, in many cases with a surname, age, brief description, owner’s name, date of absconding, geographic location and, where appropriate, the name of a loyalist sponsor. Even though the surnames of listed individuals are often misheard, the ages are wildly inaccurate and the time of absconding is ambiguous, we simply don’t have demographic data like this about enslaved people in the eighteenth century in any other source.

In addition to the Book of Negroes, a related resource is the muster of black settlers at Birchtown 1783/1784, which was created by the British authorities for the purposes of distributing rations at the biggest black settlement in Nova Scotia. This list provides first names and surnames, ages and sometimes occupations and, crucially, it is organized by households with the names and ages of wives, children and other household members. In addition, the British archives yield other lists of black refugees including Revolutionary musters, land grant schedules in Nova Scotia; Nova Scotia parish records of the settlements of Birchtown, Digby and Annapolis and lists of people migrating to Sierra Leone. These are all partial lists and frustratingly opaque, but they all provide surnames and some demographic information.

In order to interpret the data and unlock the meanings and implications of the vital demographic information contained in the Book of Negroes and other British sources, the data on each person needs to be read against American colonial sources such as lists of tithable slave property, minutes of county Committees of Safety, runaway notices, parish vestry books, wills and probate records, letters and diaries of prominent individuals, petitions to government, shipping records, plantation records, court records, and county militia records. The seemingly impossible task of locating individuals and their kin is made viable for the largest single cohort from the Lower Chesapeake region of Virginia. By a stroke of luck the Norfolk Tithable lists from 1730 to 1780 survive largely intact and these provide a single name for slave property, aged between 16 years and 60 years, belonging to heads of households in Norfolk County.

By meticulous cross referencing the information in the Book of Negroes and other British sources I have been able to construct life trajectories, kin relationships, naming patterns and religious affiliations for hundreds of people. These biographies form the first phase of the website Black Loyalist, a repository of historical data about the African American loyalist refugees whose names are recorded in the Book of Negroes

A passport for Cato Ramsay to emigrate to Nova Scotia in 1783. Black refugees behind British lines needed passports to leave the United States. Without this document, they risked a return to their place of origin, which meant a return to enslavement. Source: Nova Scotia Archives

Here is brief sketch of one individual:

James Jackson is said to be fifty years old in the Book of Negroes and described as “Formerly slave to late Robert Tucker, Norfolk, Virginia; left him with Lord Dunmore when he left that country & was employed as a pilot.” In 1775 his owner was the Norfolk merchant and mariner Robert Tucker Jr, and he was inherited from Colonel Robert Tucker, whose extensive estate was mostly sold after his death in 1767. He must have defected to Lord Dunmore sometime between June and November 1775 when Lord Dunmore had taken refuge on a British warship in the James River, just offshore from Norfolk.

Years later the widow to Robert Tucker Jr lodged a claim for property lost to the British at the burning of Norfolk in December 1775 and during the British occupation of the spit of land known as Tucker’s Mill Point in April 1776. The property list includes the names of nine enslaved men, two women and a boy but does not list James, who is appeared in Tucker’s tithables in 1774. This evidence strongly implies that, like several other pilots, James Jackson had defected to Dunmore earlier in the conflict.

During the revolution James Jackson worked as a pilot for the Royal Navy and in 1783 he travelled to Nova Scotia in the company of Captain Henry Mowatt, commander of HMS La Sophia. Travelling with him was another pilot named London Jackson, aged 32, who was apparently his brother and was described as “Formerly slave to William Ballad, Hampton, Virginia; left him two years past.” According to the Norfolk Tithables, London’s owners were Daniel Barraud and his son William, merchants in Norfolk and Hampton, who had close business and kin connections to Robert Tucker. He would have have defected to General Leslie who made a foray into Hampton in 1781. The Jackson brothers did not go to Birchtown but were given a land grant on nearby Nutt Island where they settled with their respective families.

474px-4thEarlOfDunmore — *John Murray, 4th Earl of Dunmore, depicted in 1765 by Sir Joshua Reynolds. Dunmore’s Proclamation of 1775 offered freedom to American slaves who joined the Loyalist cause.*

Also travelling with London and James Jackson is a woman named Nelly Jackson, aged 33, said to be “Formerly slave to Hampstead Bailie, Hampton, Virginia; left him two years past.” She appears to have run away with London Jackson, but there is no apparent connection between their owners to suggest a kinship connection, and she does not settle at Nutt Island or Birchtown. It is most likely that Nelly was actually the wife of John Jackson who was travelling on the Clinton, which sailed some months later. He was said to be 26 and described as “Formerly the property of Anthony Walk, Princess Ann, Virginia left him 3 years ago.” He must have run to the British forces of General Leslie in late 1780 at the same time as London Jackson; there is a difference in the stated time they ran because of John Jackson’s later departure from New York. He settled at Birchtown where he was said to be 41, with his wife Nancy, aged 32, whom I believe to be the same woman as Nelly Jackson. Johnny can be found in the Tucker Tithables 1765 and in Tucker’s estate in 1768 and listed with Tucker’s widow until 1774. After Mrs Tucker’s death in 1779 he must have been sold to Anthony Walke, who lived in Princess Anne County Norfolk, who also had a mercantile business in Norfolk with connections to Tucker.

The strong circumstantial evidence — close connections between their owners, their shared occupation, the times and places at which they defected—lead me to conclude that these Jackson men are all from one family. There was no reason for me to presume a connection between this family and several other Jacksons from Norfolk who settle at Birchtown. Then I made the chance discovery of a land transfer deed for the Nutt Island grant that states that Jane Thompson was the mother of James Jackson and by extension the mother of London and John.

Jane Thomson was said to be aged 70 and worn out. The Book of Negroes indicates that she was travelling with a five-year-old grandchild and that she “Says she was born free; lived with Col. Tucker, Norfolk, Virginia; left him 6 years ago.” Jane Thompson is one of the oldest members of the cohort of Black Loyalists from Virginia evacuated to Nova Scotia. At Birchtown she is living with Hannah Jackson and two grandchildren, Robert and Peter Jackson. Close examination of the opaque and fragmentary documentary record about Jane Thompson in colonial Virginia reveals an extraordinary narrative of determination and family resilience.

For more on the Book of Negroes, the Black Loyalists, and the historical recovery of the lives of African American slaves, see the website Black Loyalist: http://www.blackloyalist.info

And Cassandra Pybus, Epic Journeys of Freedom: Runaway Slaves of the American Revolution and Their Global Quest for Liberty

Images via Wikimedia Commons.

The Atomic Bomb and the Origins of the Cold War by Campbell Craig and Sergey Radchenko (2008)

by Yana Skorobogatov

Any work of history that attributes the start of the Cold War to a single factor will surely invite criticism, but Campbell Craig and Sergey Radchenko’s The Atomic Bomb and the Origins of the Cold War makes a compelling case for running that risk.

Craig and Radchenko arguethat the specter of the atomic bomb shaped the ways in which the U.S. and U.S.S.R. designed their own and reacted to each other’s foreign policy agendas during the early years of the Cold War. The authors trace the first signs of an impending Anglo-American split with the Soviet Union to August 1943, when FDR and Winston Churchill decided to keep information about the building of an atomic bomb in Los Alamos a secret from the world, or from the Soviet Union in particular. Failure to establish a system of international control over atomic weaponry before FDR’s death further polarized American and Soviet relations during the Truman presidency, a period of haphazard atomic policy that coincided with the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Secrecy and mistrust plagued Soviet-American relations from then on, sentiments that grew manifest in clandestine Soviet bomb construction projects and atomic espionage. News of Soviet espionage made cooperation with Stalin a matter of political suicide for Truman and left dismal chances for creating an international body to neutralize the threat of nuclear war.

Craig and Radchenko offer valuable insight into the practical concerns that plagued American and Soviet deliberations over atomic weapon development, use, and policy. Indeed, at certain points the book more closely resembles a work of diplomatic policy than diplomatic history. For instance, they outline in great detail precisely why the advent of atomic technology prevented Soviet-American cooperation from fomenting during the immediate postwar years. For cooperation to occur, both countries would have had to submit to a larger international body that would seize their atomic bombs, monitor their operations, and have the power to intervene in their internal affairs when necessary. Essentially, the U.S. and U.S.S.R. would have had to relinquish claims to their own national sovereignty and positions of power and answer to an international body in semblance of an all-powerful state. The likelihood of this happening, as Craig and Radchenko state with hints of humor, was slim to none.

A nuclear test carried out at the Nevada Test Site on March 29, 1955 as part of Operation Teapot. Image via Wikimedia Commons.

One point where Craig and Radchenko’s analysis runs astray from the historical record is during their discussion of American scientists and their impact on early atomic diplomacy. The authors boldly assert that “when one is interested in assessing American policy about the bomb after 1944…one must recognize that the scientists’ actual effect on it had become inconsequential.” Surely this is a contentious point. As the historian Matthew Evangelista notes in his survey on the role of scientists in affecting Cold War nuclear policy, U.S. and Soviet scientists met at the Conference on the Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy in Geneva in as early as 1955. Craig’s claim, however, is made less egregious by his astute discussion of Igor Kurchatov and other Soviet scientists lobbying the Politburo for the resources to build a Soviet atomic bomb before the Americans built their own. The battle between the U.S. and U.S.S.R. for scientific prestige and innovation in the modern age resonates throughout this book, and infuses the authors’ historical intervention with a contemporary flavor that speaks to the present-day relevance of the subject.

Further reading:

Atom Days: the History of the Nuclear Age

Matthew Evangelista’s Unarmed Forces: The Transnational Movement to End the Cold War

The Atomic Bomb and the End of World War II: A Collection of Primary Sources courtesy of the National Security Archive

Che’s Afterlife: The Legacy of an Image by Michael Casey (2009)

How can we make sense of the coexistence of bumper stickers depicting Rambo and Che Guevara in a traffic jam in Bangkok, Thailand? Although this book never answer its opening question, such an insight might allow us to understand Casey’s attempt to explore the different uses of an image that remains remarkably vital decades after its capture. In this sense, Casey insists, the book is less about Guevara himself and more about what we, as society, have created as “Che.” The icon is a repository for a collective set of dreams, fears, beliefs, doubts, and desires. The elusive character of such an object, both extremely present and full of competing meanings, took Casey to an impressive array of places and actors. He offers a thorough description of how the original image was taken at the Havana studio of Alberto Díaz Martinez “Korda”; the active role of the Cuban state in promoting the icon before its international appearance in 1967, seven years after the original shoot; the centrality of the European leftist network in disseminating of the image; and the divergent Latin American appropriations of Che’s guerrillero heroico in diverse places like Argentina, Bolivia, Venezuela, and Miami.

In this creative book, journalist Michael Casey follows the trajectory of this commodified image. He traces the connections between peoples, places, and meanings but without establishing direct causalities The apparent paradox of a worldwide-established commodity that does not benefit just one producer elucidates how commodity chains are webs and exchanges that are not always clearly guided. Casey identifies one tension as central to understanding Che’s afterlife: “the commoditization of an anticapitalist rebel who opposed all that his hypercommercialized image now represents.” The author inserts Che’s powerful icon into a larger chain of meaning in which the Cuban revolution has become a successful brand, a logo, an ideal abstraction. In short, what Casey explores in his book is not Ernesto Guevara’s biography but, to borrow Arjun Appadurai’s words, the “cultural biography” of one thing, and he finds a symbol that links diverse persons, places, and ideas. In his attempt to understand this object he draws on the entangled stories of the person related to that abstraction, the actors who contributed to creating and distributing it, and some of those who constantly give meaning to a now-immortal picture.

While Che’s Afterlife offers an extraordinary amount of evidence and revealingly inter-connected stories, the author’s conception of Latin America is ahistorical — a timeless world of magical realism. In addition, Casey insists throughout the book upon a paradoxical and ambivalent representation of Che as an anticapitalist symbol subsumed by the capitalist vortex and he revives the old western/non-western tension once prevalent in Latin American studies, without showing any interest in explaining why we “still” consider Latin America to not be part of the West. Nonetheless, the very stories he highlights complicate the simple image he wants to maintain. In the context of a growing literature on Guevara’s life and the continued iconic power of Che’s visual image, this book offers a satisfying account of the intertwined stories of the icon, the historic persona, and the specific agents and spaces that shaped the popularity of this symbol.

An image of Che in Kasaragod India, 2004. Via WIkimedia Commons.

George on the Lege, Part 8 – Public Higher Education

With budget cuts of between $1.2 and $2 billion (9-15%) looming for the 2012-2013 fiscal biennium, Texas public institutions of higher education confront the same task as public primary and secondary schools: educating more students with less state aid. But unlike public schools, whose percentage of state funding has increased dramatically in the wake of school finance litigation and as a result of mandatory property tax rate compression, the state’s share of funding for higher education has been in decline for decades. The University of Texas at Austin, for example, receives only about 14% of its total funding from the state, and the average for all public colleges and universities is about one-third. The rest is made up from student tuition and fee revenue, federal funds, and other institutional revenue sources. If current funding trends continue, in the foreseeable future state control of public higher education may well not be accompanied by state funding of public higher education.

In some ways, however, this situation is nothing new. The two major land grant universities, Texas A&M University (1876) and the University of Texas (1883), opened their doors without the benefit of general revenue appropriations for maintenance and operations (the first general revenue appropriation for universities did not occur until 1889). They were funded instead from the sale of state lands originally set aside by the Republic of Texas in 1839, part of the proceeds from federal bonds issued to the state in connection with the 1850 compromise that settled Texas’ claims against the federal government for part of New Mexico, and the state’s share of federal land sales in Colorado to finance the Morrill Land-Grant College Act of 1862 for agricultural and mechanical institutions. In 1856 the Texas Legislature established the initial Permanent University Fund (PUF) for a future University of Texas, which after the Civil War was endowed with one million acres of public land and another million acres of land in West Texas in 1883. At the time it was dedicated to the PUF, this land was good only for leasing to ranchers for grazing; by 1900 it had yielded a whopping $40,000 in annual income. Hardly enough for the “university of the first class” envisioned by the Texas Constitution when voters confirmed the creation of the PUF in 1876.

Everything changed in 1923, when the Santa Rita oil well in Reagan County came in on university land. By 1925 profits from Santa Rita and other wells were reinvested in the PUF at the rate of $2,000 per day. Subsequent oil and gas development in the Permian Basin and adjacent areas of West Texas swelled the PUF into one of the largest university endowments in the world, with a market value of nearly $300 million by the late 1950s, $3.5 billion by 1990, and more than $10.7 billion today. So much money rolled into the PUF that the 1931 Legislature divided the income between the University of Texas and Texas A&M University on a 2-1 basis. Income distributions from the PUF remain exclusively dedicated to these institutions through the Available University Fund (AUF), though in 1984 voters adopted a constitutional amendment to allow other member institutions of the UT and TAMU systems to issue bonds backed by the PUF. In 2010 and 2011, for example, the UT Board of Regents approved total distributions from the PUF to the AUF of more than $500 million each year to UT-Austin and Texas A&M. In addition to funding from the PUF and AUF, UT and TAMU receive general revenue appropriations for instructional costs.

There are four other university systems in Texas that do not benefit from the PUF: the University of Houston, Texas State, Texas Tech, and University of North Texas. In 1984 voters approved a constitutional amendment establishing a parallel fund, the Higher Education Assistance Fund, with a dedicated annual appropriation of $100 million. By a two-thirds vote the Legislature may increase this amount and in fact appropriated more than $500 million to the HEAF for the current 2010-2011 biennium. This funding is allocated by formula among the eligible systems, as well as freestanding public universities and the Texas State Technical College system, for capital projects (purchase of land; construction, renovation, or repair of buildings; acquisition of library materials or capital equipment). In addition, fifty community college districts, created by local voters, levy property taxes to finance capital projects and receive state aid for some instructional and faculty and staff insurance costs. Forty independent colleges and universities (including large ones such as Baylor, Southern Methodist, Texas Christian, and Rice University) indirectly receive state appropriations through the Tuition Equalization Grant program, and the only independent medical school in the state, Baylor College of Medicine, receives a direct state appropriation each biennium.

In 1965, Governor John Connally created The Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board to bring some uniformity to this unwieldy and decentralized constellation of institutions. Composed of nine members appointed by the Governor, the Coordinating Board is charged with approving new campuses, degree and graduate programs, establishing the formulas for state funding of instructional costs, and ensuring transferability between programs and institutions. In practice, however, the Texas Legislature has frequently appropriated or overridden the Coordinating Board’s authority by creating new institutions, specific programs for specific campuses, and providing funding for “special” items sought by individual lawmakers, institutions, and communities. As a result, the political tug-of-war between the Governor, who appoints both the members of the Coordinating Board and the regents of the university systems, the Legislature, and the individual institutions for limited resources is a regular feature of the legislative budget process every two years.

As previously indicated, about one-third of state funding for higher education is provided by the state through dedicated and general revenue funding. General revenue appropriations for higher education, however, have remained stagnant for decades, partly for the reason that higher education is a purely discretionary function for the legislature; it is neither mandated by federal law nor by the Texas Constitution. For example, following twenty years of rapid expansion in the number of campuses and student enrollments between 1965 and 1985, the ten years between 1984-85 and 1994-95 biennia witnessed a dramatic decline in general revenue spending for higher education as a percentage of general revenue from 18.4% to 12.2%, while during the same period real per student expenditures fell by 16%.

There has been little recovery since then. For the 2004-2005 biennium (following the recession of 2002-2003), public higher education received about 12.7% of available general revenue, but it was distributed across a student population of 1.1 million, about 300,000 more students than in 1995. In the 2010-2011 budget, total expenditures recovered somewhat to 14% of general revenue, but this modest increase was spread across 200,000 additional students than five years before. When the bottom dropped out of the economy in the fall and winter of 2008-2009, the legislative leadership ordered higher education institutions to cut that funding a further 5%. With only two weeks remaining in the current legislative session, even under the most optimistic scenario adopted by the Senate budget plan, higher education’s share of general revenue will drop to 11%–the lowest point in half a century.

Sources:

Bracco, Kathy Reeves, “State Structures for the Governance of Higher Education: Texas

Case Study Summary,” California Higher Education Policy Center, San Jose, Spring

1997

Legislative Budget Board, Fiscal Size-Up, 1994-1995 Biennium and 2004-2005 Biennium

Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board, Texas Higher Education Data, http://www.txhighereddata.org/

Texas State Historical Association, The Handbook of Texas Online, http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/khp02 (accessed May 11, 2011); http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/kct08 (accessed May 11, 2011); http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/kcu09 (accessed May 11, 2011)

Family Outing in Austin, Texas

By Madeline Hsu

This photograph captures a 1943 family outing to The University of Texas, in Austin.

Image of an Asian family from July 19, 1943 sitting on the edge of a fountain on the campus of the University of Texas at Austin

The young father, Fred Wong, was a grandson of one of “Pershing’s Chinese“–a group of 527 Chinese who accompanied General John J. Pershing into the United States after the failure of his campaigns against General Francisco “Pancho” Villa in 1917. Villa threatened retaliation against the Chinese for aiding Pershing, who determined to bring them back with him to the United States even though he had to lobby for special federal permission to do so in violation of immigration laws that banned the admission of all Chinese laborers. Many of these refugees settled in San Antonio where they established grocery stores, laundries, and restaurants.

Fred Wong grew up in San Antonio and in 1936 married Rose Chin from Chelsea, Massachusetts. They moved to Austin in 1938 and opened New China Food Market at 714 Red River. Fred served as a Rollingwood Councilman and R.C. became a well-known artist. The couple had three children, Mitchel–reportedly the first Chinese baby born in Austin–and Linda, and Kay. Mitchel went on to attend UT and became a leading ophthalmologist in central Texas, credited with introducing Lasik surgery to the region.

On May 11, 2011, Mitchel Wong was honored with a Legacy Award at the Asian American Community Leadership Awards jointly organized by UT’s Division of Diversity and Community Engagement, the Center for Asian American Studies, and the Texas Exes Asian Alumni Network.

For more information about Chinese in Texas, please visit:
The Institute of Texan Cultures
The University of Texas at Austin’s Asian American Studies website
The Texas State Historical Association online

You can look up materials available at the Austin History Center, here in its finding guide.

More about Asian Americans, in Texas and beyond:
Edward J. M. Rhoads, “The Chinese in Texas,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly 81 (July 1977).
Irwin Tang, ed., Asian Texans: Our histories and Our Lives (2008).
Pawan Dhingra, Managing Multicultural Lives: Asian American Professionals and the Challenge of Multiple Identities (2007).

The photograph of the Wong family is posted here with the kind permission of the Austin History Center; AR.2008.005(027), Wong Family Papers, Austin History Center.

Death and Decadence: Vatel (2000)

By Julia M. Gossard

According to the infamous seventeenth-century gossip, Madame de Sévigné, on April 24, 1671 François Vatel, distraught over the late arrival of fish for a banquet in honor of Louis XIV, committed suicide by impaling himself through the heart with a sword. Sévigné and other nobles speculated that Vatel, a well-known perfectionist, succumbed to the overwhelming pressures of planning an extravagant three-day banquet in honor of the king’s royal visit and decided to kill himself instead of having to face public humiliation for his failure.

Roland Joffé’s 2000 film, Vatel, is a reinterpretation of Vatel’s (Gérard Depardieu) death, portraying him as a victim of the rigid social politics that ruled seventeenth-century French noble society. In 1671 the Marquis de Lauzun (Tim Roth) delivers a message from Louis XIV to the Prince de Condé (Julien Glover) that the king wishes to spend three days at Condé’s chateau, Chantilly. Hoping to use this opportunity to raise his social standing, the Prince de Condé orders his “Master of Festivities and Pleasures,” François Vatel, to organize a lavish affair to impress the king and secure Condé a position as general in the upcoming military campaign against the Dutch Republic.

The film chronicles Vatel’s intense drive to create innovative and delicious meals, sumptuously decorated quarters, and beautiful performances including a water and fireworks show that will be used as the event’s grand finale for the king and the 2,000 other guests expected at the banquet. Despite Vatel’s meticulous plans, when the first day actually arrives mishaps abound. To complicate matters further, Vatel becomes enamored with Anne de Montausier (Uma Thurman), a beautiful women presumed to be Louis XIV’s new lover. Disaster after disaster occurs throughout the three-day festivities, with Vatel becoming increasingly disillusioned with the prodigal nobility, leading to his suicide.

Vatel illuminates the complexity of the early modern patronage system. A hierarchy existed, in which patrons were often clients themselves. In this case the Prince de Condé’s was both Vatel’s patron and the King’s client. The patronage system was so deeply embedded in the minds of early modern people that, as Vatel demonstrates, one misstep resulting in the loss of a patron’s favor could mean social (and even actual) death. Clients worked solely to serve their patrons, knowing that their livelihood depended on their patron’s benevolence. In Vatel, that service involved a luxurious, spectacle of sensory pleasures, the very decadence of which highlighted the costs of failure.

If you are a gourmand this movie will have you salivating within ten minutes. Not only do you learn the origins of whipped cream, aptly called “chantilly” in French, but the many palatable dishes created by Vatel play a prominent role in the film. Additionally, the film is a visual feast for the eyes. Shot primarily on location at the Château de Chantilly in France, the setting is authentic and beautifully presented. While some of the vividly colored costumes and synthetic hairpieces are not necessarily unique to the seventeenth-century, overall the costumes, jewelry, coiffures, and other accessories work together to portray the luxurious ambiance that surrounded the king and his nobility. For anyone interested in the lavish, extravagant, and decadent French nobility of the seventeenth century, this is a must see movie.

For more on the history of French cuisine, you can read Susan Pinkard’s, A Revolution in Taste: The Rise of French Cuisine, 1650-1789 (2008)

A wonderful children’s book, called A Medieval Feast, by Aliki, details the extraordinary lengths the nobility were expected to go to entertain the French king when he decided to come for a visit. Delightful illustrations depict social and cultural events with considerable historical accuracy (though for a somewhat earlier period).

The Splendid Century: Life in the France of Louis XIV by W.H. Lewis (1997) discusses social life under Louis XIV.

In The Fabrication of Louis XIV (1994), Peter Burke explores the ways Louis XIV was represented in painting and other images to show how the Sun King consciously managed his public image and invented a new image of the king.

See also our READ section for Julia Gossard’s recommendation of a book about this period that treats some of the same issues as this film, A Tale of Two Murders.

Hello, Hello Brazil: Popular Music in the Making of Modern Brazil by Bryan McCann (2004)

National identity has been both a dream and a nightmare for historians. When they attempt to historicize the concept, it becomes a thick web of actors, motives, and unintended consequences. Exploring the “invention of tradition” underlying modern national identities proves an appealing but extremely difficult task. In Hello, Hello Brazil, Bryan McCann offers a suggestive method to master this process. By tracing the emergence of Brazilian popular music, he successfully shows how the “traditional” samba was composed in an unequal exchange between regional musicians and composers, state officers, recording managers, radio producers, and radio broadcasters. The history of modern Brazilian music must be understood, then, within the broader debate on “Brazilianness.”

Between the late 1920s and 1950s, three processes converged to foster the emergence of the new popular music: industrialization, urbanization, and bureaucratic centralization. At the same time, the cultural context saw an intensification of exchanges between high culture and popular innovators, a rapid growth of the broadcasting industry, and an activist government under the Vargas regime that aimed to manage cultural production. McCann inserts the history of the samba into the broader struggles around the definition of tradition, authenticity, and national music. He shows that samba was at the center of a broad political and cultural transformation, that allowed converting a “small collection of popular musical forms into both a thriving industry and a consistently vital mediation on the nature and contradictions of Brazilianness.” For example, the quest for authenticity connected with the rise of the samba included purist understandings of tradition that saw the American presence as a threat to Brazilian folklore. While the composer Heitor Villa-Lobos was an active defender of “authentic” Brazilian music and an enemy of international influences, another of Brazil’s famous musical nationalists, Ari Barroso, pointed out that “international influence was inescapable.”

Although the opinions were divided, McCann insists that Brazilians were not immune to American influence, having instead an ambivalent relationship with its seductive and repellent qualities. McCann argues that far from erasing Brazilian traditional music, as Villa-Lobos feared, the international presence fostered the quest for authenticity. An appealing desire for the “exotic” led U.S. record labels like Columbia to make recordings of the “most legitimate Brazilian music.” Furthermore, for MacCann, American record executives did not attempt to “Americanize” Brazilian music. Instead, they sought to make the Brazilian popular cultural market similar to that of the United States.

In brief, McCann offers a textured history of the actors, arenas, and trends that played a role in the making of a national music. Hello, Hello shows how these actors intersected to create the discourse that produced new Brazilian popular music. The Vargas era has been widely explored, the process of Americanization of Brazil during his regime also has received scholarly attention, and more recent scholarship has explored the “unevenness” of these exchanges. Nonetheless, MacCann’s book offers a subtle exploration of the entangled processes that led to the emergence of Brazil’s popular music, drawing in the significance of folkloric realms, quests for authenticity, an ambiguous appropriations in its development. It is the “texture” of this process that McCann offers to the reader.

Prejudice and Pride: School Histories of the Freedom Struggle in India and Pakistan by Krishna Kumar (2001)

by Amber Abbas

Krishna Kumar’s study of school textbooks in Pakistan and India shows that the discipline of history in South Asia has “come under the strain of nation-building rather more than other subjects.” History teaching in these textbooks seeks to settle political and ideological points and guide children’s responses to present day situations.

The two states that were formed in 1947, India and Pakistan, share a history that national textbooks try to claim exclusively for each individual state. The freedom movement remains a controversial and tricky subject, a mere 60 years after independence. As a result of this nationalized education, informed knowledge of the other, neighboring nation, is rare in both places; powerful stereotypes have tended to stifle academic curiosity and serious enquiry. A particularly alarming discovery of Kumar’s study is the extent to which Indian and Pakistani school textbooks teach history by reading back outcomes onto causes. This tactic obscures any complexity in history, hiding the places where ideology and action fail to align, or where leaders changed their minds, altered their tactics, or went back on their word. It precludes any appreciation of the motivation of the historical actors at the time. This is history in reverse.

In both countries, textbooks deploy the freedom movement as a story about national values. The Pakistani narrative is dominated by a triumphal sense of self-protection and escape determined to serve as a unifying national ethos by emphasizing issues of the contemporary significance in the history of state-building. In India, by contrast, this narrative emphasizes the tolerance of different groups for one another in the course of an idealized and varied history. Great personalities of the freedom movement and of earlier periods are treated, not as complex and flawed historical figures, but as vessels for ideals for young readers to follow.

Kumar’s study, pensive and often self-reflective, reveals the importance of history as a practical discipline in schools. He laments the condition of education in both countries, and uses the freedom movement to investigate the political stifling of intellectual curiosity. In neither place is history considered a valuable subject for inquiry, or for students to acquire more practical skills. On the contrary, government and nationalist historians use the school textbook to train patriotic citizens willing and able to perpetuate the prejudices that led to the separation of the two states in the first place.

As textbook revision debates continue here in Texas with politically-motivated concerns about the teaching of Islam and other subjects, it is worth remembering that history is not a neutral field, rather it is often an ideological battle ground for conflicting narratives.

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