Stacy Vlasits, Author at Not Even Past

Securing Africa: Post-9/11 Discourses on Terrorism ed. Malinda S. Smith (2010)

Islam has a long tradition in Africa dating back to the seventh century. Today, Islam plays a crucial role in the political, socio-cultural, religious, and economic lives of the population. The inhuman event of the 9/11 attacks and the upsurge in terrorism in the world have forced western countries, especially, the United States, to re-examine their relationship with Africa. Securing Africa: Post-9/11 Discourses on Terrorism, scholars from Africa, Canada, and the US contribute cogent discourses on the significance of Africa to the US. They especially emphasize the ways that Africa is represented in public discussions of political violence and terrorism. The authors address the impact of 9/11 on Africa, and how 9/11 has informed American policies and attitudes towards Africa.

Securing Africa begins with Malinda S. Smith’s examination of the historical context in which terrorism can be placed. She claims that 9/11 gave impetus to scholars, politicians, and civil society to view terrorism as an attack on ‘civilization’ by ‘evil men’ and she engages readers on the ironies of this construct. She cautions against wholesale labeling of peoples as terrorists. She draws instances from the past such as Africans fighting colonization and the African National Congress fighting apartheid, which in her rationalization, were legitimate means of securing freedom, though labelled by the West as acts of terrorism. She analyzes how violent attacks on US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania (1998), and flight bombings in Libya, Spain, and India were not treated with the same urgency as terrorist attacks.

A timeline of African decolonization. Many African anti-imperial groups were initially labelled as ‘terrorists’ in the West.

This opens discussions in “Part I: 9/11, Terrorism and the Geopolitics of the African Spaces,” that examine the role of intellectuals in questioning political authority, the place of Islam in Africa, and the impact of post 9/11 American rhetoric and policies on Africa. These chapters present the extent of the US war on terror on the African continent, especially in East Africa and the Sahel region. They also show that Africans’ inability to perceive European machinations perpetually leave them in a position “Part II: Africa in Post 9/11 International Relations” deals with the Cold War paradigms of relationships between democracies and containment, America’s interest in the oil reserves of the Gulf of Guinea and how oil factors into US security measures, and how the US foreign policy is linked with its economic interests in Kenya and Somalia.

The authors employ a rich selection of books, newspaper articles, and online materials to discuss such controversial issues such as Africa’s position in the war on terror, the significance of Africa to America’s security, and America’s foreign policies towards Africa. Cross-cultural and territorial comparisons enable readers to understand the authors’ points. The multi-disciplinary approach used by these contributors situates their arguments in specific contexts and reduces abstractions, bringing the issues at stake to non-specialist readers.

The US recognizes Africa as an important arena in its bid to win its war on terror but more importantly, African intellectuals also recognize that the US fight against terrorism has ideological, socio-economic, and political implications for Africans. This book is an important addition to the literature on terrorism. I recommend it for everyone interested in Africa.

Further reading:

Publisher information on Securing Africa, with an extract from the book.

A short essay from the Metropolitan Museum of Art on the spread of Islam into Africa.

The Atlantic Monthly on terrorism in Uganda.

George on the Lege, Part 5 – School Finance

Interior view of the Texas State Capital Building looking up into the building's dome depicting the dome's many layers

By George Christian

Public education has long commanded the lion’s share of state resources and, consequently, controversy over how the money should be raised and spent. Texas has historically spent nearly half of its general revenue on the maintenance and operation of “public free schools,” which supplement state aid with property taxes raised at the local school district level. Nothing in the Texas Constitution, however, explicitly requires that the state finance public education through any particular mechanism (such as the state-local share), just that the legislature has a duty “to establish and make suitable provision for the support and maintenance of an efficient system . . .” (Art. VII, Sec. 1).

This modern system of making public education a shared responsibility of state and local governments originated in legislation enacted by the 50-th Legislature in 1949. Prior to this time, public schools had largely been funded at the discretion of local taxpayers, whose interest in the quality of education could (and did) vary widely. In addition to inequality of funding and the lack of minimum educational standards across the state, claims of racial discrimination in the school system became increasingly prevalent in the 1930s and 1940. When the legislature deadlocked over a minimum salary schedule for teachers in the 1947 legislative session, Governor Beauford H. Jester appointed a joint legislative committee to study Texas’ public education system and make recommendations to the next legislature. The landmark Gilmer-Aiken Act, named after its sponsors Rep. Claude Gilmer and Sen. A. M. Aiken, was the product of this study.

For the first time, Gilmer-Aiken required the state, through the operation of funding formulas for schools, to provide a minimum level of funding for poor school districts based on average daily attendance. It also created an elected State Board of Education and the Texas Education Agency, made public schools available to every student for grades 1-12, and established a minimum 175 days of instruction in the school year. It should be noted that despite several rounds of school finance litigation and major legislative changes in school finance since 1949, the basic framework of Gilmer-Aiken remains intact to this day.

Despite the advances Gilmer-Aiken made in equalizing school funding between rich and poor school districts, constitutional litigation has been a central feature of the system, especially in the past 40 years. In May, 1968, more than 400 students of the Edgewood Independent School District in San Antonio walked out of class and marched on the district administrative office, complaining of inadequate funding for facilities, supplies, and teachers. In July of the same year, eight Edgewood ISD parents, backed by advocacy groups such as the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), the American G.I. Forum, and the Mexican-American Legal Defense Fund (MALDEF) filed suit to invalidate Texas’ public school finance system on federal constitutional grounds. Ultimately, a divided U.S. Supreme Court rejected their claims, holding that education was not a “fundamental right” under the federal constitution. Rodriguez et al v. San Antonio Independent School District, 411 U.S. 1 (1973).

In 1984, the Edgewood plaintiffs filed a lawsuit in state district to invalidate the school finance system, this time on state constitutional grounds. The basis of the lawsuit involved the vast disparity in property wealth per student among the more than 2,000 Texas school districts. Since the basic funding mechanism of the Gilmer-Aiken system was (and remains) the property tax, districts with more taxable wealth—for example, industrial facilities, power plants, mineral property, commercial office buildings or shopping malls, or expensive homes—could raise far more revenue per pupil than property poor districts. This funding scheme, according to the plaintiffs, violated the Texas constitutional requirement for an “efficient” system of public free schools. The late Harley Clark, the Travis County district judge who heard the case, ruled that the system was unconstitutional and ordered the legislature to devise a more equitable one in the 1989 session. The Austin Court of Appeals reversed the decision, letting the legislature temporarily off the hook, but in October, 1989, the Texas Supreme Court reaffirmed Judge Clark’s judgment: Texas’ public school system was unconstitutional. Edgewood ISD vs. Kirby, 777 S.W. 2nd 391 (Tex. 1989).

The fallout from the so-called Edgewood I decision (there have been subsequent modifications of the original ruling, Edgewood II, III, and IV) is still in the air. The basic principle of Edgewood I—that an “efficient” system of public education requires school districts to enjoy “substantially equal access to similar revenue per pupil at similar levels of tax effort”—may have been settled, but the devil was and continues to be in the details. Following the Court’s ruling, then-Governor William P. Clements called four special sessions of the legislature, each of which failed to produce a plan. When a special master appointed by the Texas Supreme Court devised a finance mechanism whereby money would be transferred from property-wealth districts to poor ones (the so-called “Robin Hood” plan), the legislature promptly passed and Governor Clements signed a bill that, while it increased funding for public education by more than $500 million, did not force rich districts to share.

The Edgewood plaintiffs went back to court and once again prevailed, both at the district court and the Texas Supreme Court. On January 22, 1991, the high court held that rich and poor districts alike must participate in the school finance system. Although the court made it clear that it did not mean that funding per student had to be precisely the same in all districts, the legislature still had to come up with a way to redistribute at least some of the wealth from rich districts to poor ones. Governor Ann Richards, who had been elected in 1990 partly on the promise that she would solve the school funding crisis, backed legislation that created 188 county education districts (CEDs) with substantially equivalent property wealth. Revenue raised within a CED would be shared by all school districts. Each district could elect to impose an additional tax to enrich its own local programs. Problem solved? Not by a long shot.

Continued here, school financing in Texas from 1991 to the present.

Previous installments of George on the Lege:

Part 4: Concealed Weapons

Part 3: Redistricting

Part 2: Cutting Spending

Part 1: Budget Crises, Today and Yesterday

The Texas Legislature: Online

Texas Public Education at The Texas Tribune

Photo: Wing-Chi Poon [CC-BY-SA-2.5] via Wikimedia Commons

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.

Banana Cultures: Agriculture, Consumption & Environmental Change in Honduras and the United States by John Soluri (2005)

The title of this book is plural for a reason. John Soluri ranges across borders in both directions to show the links between the culture of banana consumption in the United States and its effects on workers and the environment in Honduras, as well as how the realities of banana plantations shaped the banana culture in the United States. While many authors focus on the fruteras, banana companies such as United Fruit (present day Chiquita), Soluri shows how the companies, the workers, and even banana pathogens were all actors in shaping what he calls “banana cultures,” even if they are not equal in their power to do so.

The early banana trade came at a time when few North Americans had ever tasted a banana; the now familiar fruit was still strange and exotic. Some early twentieth-century cookbooks even warned mothers to cook bananas before serving them to children. Soluri traces the first transactions, when islanders sold bananas at dockside to passing schooner captains, who soon figured they could make a handsome profit importing the exotic fruit. Residents of the Bay Islands on the North coast of Honduras soon started farms, but within a decade, their production declined heavily as soils weakened. This would be just the first of many problems encountered in the cultivation of bananas as a monoculture, problems that would shape the history of its cultivation as various pathogens affected large plantations in the prominent Honduran north coast, where a good percentage of United States supply was grown. As the fruteras started planting on the north coast, the political interference that other historians have so well documented soon followed, such as the planters’ involvement in a coup d’etat to secure government concessions. Soluri, however, argues that political machinations are not the greatest concern in this history, since the fruit companies would soon find that dealing with workers, independent growers, and banana pathogens would prove much harder than bribing or pressuring politicians.

*Bananas being unloaded from mule carts at a market in Belize circa 1890. Source: Wikimedia Commons*

With the banana monoculture spreading along the Honduran north coast, the importance of workers and pathogens as two principal actors in this book comes to light. The advent of the Panama disease, which was not a problem in dispersed small scale farms, but now spread like wildfire in massive plantations, brought about monumental changes. Soluri very meticulously documents the scientific struggle to fight the disease and its correlation to market pressures in the North American market. Because it was easy for the fruteras to get land concessions from the Honduran government, and because they failed to solve the problem through the creation of hybrids, the companies set about shifting plantation grounds to escape the disease, a land grab with great impact on the north coast and its availability of fertile soils.

Soluri narrates the struggles of workers and independent banana growers based on a number of sources, including censuses, local papers, letters between organizations and officials, worker organizations, literature and more. He dispels the notion that leviathan fruit companies completely pushed out small growers, and rather documents how, in many cases, they were able to use their strength to gain bargaining power. Later on after the 1950s, company employees did the same thing.

Growers and workers used nationalist rhetoric, proposing colonization projects to plant in Indian lands, and they used the fruit companies’ discourse of bringing modernity to the indomitable and disease ridden jungles. They requested the same kind of land concessions the fruteras obtained from the government, but did so as “true sons” of the Honduran nation. Growers and employees, Soluri demonstrates, had more power to shape the banana monoculture than previously thought, although expensive treatments against banana pathogens favored the large fruit companies whose massive operations could better absorb the new costs.

*Unloading Bananas, Galveston, Texas circa 1916. Source: Wikimedia Commons*

Soluri’s narrative, well-written and informed by popular culture and oral histories, is also very engaging for readers of any background. By providing a comparative perspective in his last chapter, he also highlights the implications of his approach and points to some other commodities, such as coffee and sugar, that could benefit from his approach.

Considering that literature on Honduras is so scant, Soluri could have written an exciting and easily publishable narrative of the fruteras’ involvement and strong-arming of the Honduran government. Instead, Soluri breaks the mold with Banana Cultures and shows us that borders, national or disciplinary, should have little meaning for a historian if his subject of study is constantly crossing them.

Further reading:

Author Dan Koepel’s Banana Blog.

An excerpt from Banana Cultures, courtesy of the University of Texas Press.

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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.

Sounds of the Past

By Karl Hagstrom Miller

Interested in popular music and the music industry in the early twentieth century? The Cylinder Preservation and Digitization Project at the University of California at Santa Barbara has built perhaps the most useful archive on the planet for you.

Their website features a growing mountain of streaming and downloadable songs that were originally released on fragile cylinder recordings. To publicize the site and demonstrate its richness for both scholarship and teaching, this is the first in a series of posts that will feature cylinders I find particularly interesting or noteworthy.

First up is an early recording of one of the important ancestors of hillbilly music and humor.

LISTEN: Len Spencer, “The Arkansas Traveler,” Edison Ambersol 181 [1909]

“The Arkansas Traveler” was a fiddle tune and comedy skit that has been traced back to the 1840s. The tune itself long ago entered the traditional fiddle repertoire. It is one of the standards that beginners learn, virtuosi use to impress the judges at fiddle contests, and many kids know through its modern lyrics about smashing up a baby bumblebee. What is less well known is that the tune was part of an elaborate and ubiquitous comedy routine that addressed tensions between city and country.

The skit portrayed a traveler (usually from the city or the East) coming across a squatter in rural Arkansas. As the squatter repeatedly saws the first strain of the tune on his fiddle, the two engage in pun-riddled banter. “Where does this road go?” the traveler asks. “It don’t go nowhere. Stays right where it is,” comes the reply. Tension grows as the traveler’s questions become more antagonistic and the squatter continues to dissemble. It is finally eased when the traveler grabs the fiddle and finishes the tune that the squatter had started. Laughter ensues, and the squatter welcomes the traveler to stay the night.

The humor of “The Arkansas Traveler” cut two ways. The rural fiddler’s apparent inability to comprehend the traveler’s questions pegged him as comically unsophisticated, reinforcing urban fantasies about the rural South. Yet it is easy to see the squatter’s naiveté as an act. He feigns ignorance in order to deflect the city’s slicker’s condescension, deflate his pretensions, and get him to leave. The traveler looks down on the backwoods primitive without realizing that the joke is on him.

Yet ultimately, “The Arkansas Traveler” tells a story of commonality rather than difference. In the skit, the tensions between the urban and rural characters dissolved as the two discover that they know the same music. The white hayseed and city slicker were not so different after all. White rural listeners thus could imagine holding their own in cities populated by the likes of the gullible yet ultimately endearing traveler, and their urban counterparts could identify with the fiddler, who may have expressed shared contempt for urban pretensions and represented the simplicity and straight-talk of their own real or imagined rural heritage.

“The Arkansas Traveler” provided the template for hillbilly humor from Fiddlin’ John Carson in the 1920s through the popular 1960s television show “Hee Haw” and Jeff Foxworthy’s “You might be a redneck if…” bit in the 21st century. It also demonstrated the market value of simultaneously promoting poor, white, rural southerners as both unprepared for participation in civilized society and the smartest ones in the room.

Great Books on Women in US History

By Megan Seaholm

As one of the students in my U.S. women’s history class put it, “Women are just like men; except that they are different.” For all that men and women have had in common these many millenia, women’s experience has often been different. Women’s History Month gives us the opportunity to talk about two new and one not so new “good reads” on the subject.

The University of Texas Press has just published the latest from the impressive authorial team, Judith McArthur and Harold Smith, faculty at the University of Houston-Victoria. Texas Through Women’s Eyes: The Twentieth Century Experience (2010) begins with “Social Reform and Suffrage in the Progressive Era, 1900-1920,” discussing the civic reforms pursued by white and black clubwomen, labor activism, settlement houses and prostitution districts, and the state woman suffrage campaign.

Black and white photograph by Richard Arthur Norton called Suffrage Hikers showing a line of women and men holding protest signs and flags

Texas suffragists were among the few southern suffrage associations to win partial voting rights for women before the federal amendment was passed. These Texas women pulled a “fast one,” and you will want to read about it.

McArthur and Smith continue through the Great Depression, World War II, the Civil Rights Movement, the Women’s Rights Movement, and the backlash to same in the last decades of the twentieth century. They make the history they reveal personal with selected documents like “Hallie Crawford Stillwell Gets a Sink and Builds a Bathroom,” “Jessie Daniel Ames Urges Women to Vote against the Ku Klux Klan,” “Army Nurse Lucy Wilson Serves in the Pacific Theater,” “Ceil Cleveland Becomes a Teenage Bride in the Fifties,” and “Ann Richards Moves from Campaign Volunteer to County Commissioner.”

McArthur and Smith are also the coauthors of Minnie Fisher Cunningham: A Suffragists’ Life in Politics (2005) which won the Liz Carpenter Award for Research in the History of Women from the Texas State Historical Association and the T.R. Fehrenbach Book Award from the Texas Historical Commission.

Christine Stansell, a well-regarded historian at the University of Chicago, provides a national perspective in her latest publication,The Feminist Promise: 1792 to the Present (2010). Don’t be daunted by the title. This is not a polemic, nor is it a weighty treatise on social theory. Rather, it is an exceptionally readable narrative of the efforts of American women to improve their social, political and legal situation. Stansell notes the efforts of women of color and of working class women alongside the more well-known white middle-class activists. She provides the general reader, as well as the scholar new to women’s history, with a splendid survey of women’s rights activism beginning with the days of the early republic. Her discussion of the woman suffrage movement is particularly strong because she explains the divisions in the movement and its culminating diversity, which led to the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. From the racism of the movement’s “southern strategy” to the dramatic protests of the National Woman’s Party in front of the White House even during World War I, Stansell’s unflinching history is good reading. Stansell barely pauses once women have won the vote. Her story continues through the interwar years to the “second wave” of feminism in the 1960s and 1970s.

Black and white photograph by Evert F. Baumgardner from 1958 entitled by Family Watching Television

Again, she explains that the “movement” was far from monolithic in goals or tactics, but she acknowledges the accomplishments as well as the internal politics.Stansell’s subject is organized women’s activism, which like activism of all sorts, was viewed with suspicion in the early years of the Cold War, aka “the McCarthy Era.” Fortunately, Elaine Tyler May moved into the breach with Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (1988). Who knew that Cold War foreign policy and its home front counterpart had such important implications for family life? May’s first chapter “Containment at Home: Cold War, Warm Hearth,” shows the ways that the Cold War foreign policy of “containing Communism” was reflected in family life.

The Fifties have been canonized as the nostalgia decade of domestic tranquility before the tumultuous Sixties. Professor May confounds, or, at least complicates, this happy myth. The frenzied public celebration of family life introduced new stresses into families and to couples, as social norms regarding dating, birth control, marital sexuality, consumerism, and divorce were in flux. A history of family life, a history of women’s experience, Elaine Tyler May’s Homeward Bound is a young classic.

Photo credits

Suffrage Hikers, By Richard Arthur Norton, via Wikimedia Commons
Bessie Colman, First African-American Pilot, National Air and Space Museum, via Wikimedia Commons
Family Watching Television, 1958, by Evert F. Baumgardner, via Wikimedia Commons

Thurgood (2011)

By Jennifer Eckel

The new HBO Films production of George Stevens, Jr.’s one-man play, Thurgood, is a portrait of a man who knows and respects the power of the law as a force in American society. Laurence Fishburne’s characterization of Marshall is multifaceted and gripping in its depiction of his warmth, humor and above all, determination, and while the biographical format offers only one point of view on the Civil Rights Movement, Thurgood’s is a likeable and authoritative one.

Simply staged and filmed, Fishburne appears throughout the play alone on stage except for a wooden table, chairs, a pitcher of water, and a wall dressed with a white-on-white stucco American flag that serves as a projection screen. The performance and the sheer drama of the events of Marshall’s life—his personal experiences growing up in Baltimore with Jim Crow; arguing Brown v. Board before the Supreme Court, twice; speaking to LBJ in the Oval Office; confronting General MacArthur over the treatment of Black troops in Korea—do not need bells and whistles to make short and enjoyable work of the 105-minute running time.

Throughout the film we hear in Marshall’s voice his mentor Charles Hamilton Houston’s motto: “The law is a weapon, if you know how to use it.” Marshall is certainly a master of martial strategy as we see him working against the clear-cut injustices of segregation, from his first big victory at the state level against the segregated University of Maryland, later affirmed nationally in Gaines v. Canada,through the 1954 Brown decision. Marshall is a man of the law, and we never see him question the wisdom or efficacy of his chosen strategy. This makes it difficult to maintain the drama in the second half of the film, when Marshall’s purpose and guiding principles are presented less clearly.

Marshall describes in a few lines of the monologue his frustration with Martin Luther King Jr.’s strategy of civil disobedience—a strategy which greatly taxed the resources of the NAACP’s legal defense fund—by recounting a imagined conversation where King relates the bona fides of civil disobedience by citing Thoreau. Marshall reminds King that Thoreau penned that essay “IN JAIL,” not after being sprung by a team of lawyers working overtime. While this moment offers both a laugh and some insight into Marshall’s role in the Civil Rights Movement beyond Brown, it misses an opportunity to explore the limitations of Marshall’s legal strategy. Once Marshall is appointed to the court, we hear that Richard Nixon was not among his fans and that Nixon’s enquiries after his health during a hospitalization were met directly with the words, “Not Yet!” Yet we hear little about the bussing decisions that inspired Marshall’s conflicts with the President.

Perhaps this limited perspective is a necessary evil of biography. Marshall’s son, John, who spoke at a pre-screening Q&A at the Texas premiere of the film at the LBJ Library, suggested depths of Marshall’s thought about the role of law in society not displayed in the film by quoting his father speaking in 1992:

The legal system can force open doors and, sometimes even knock down walls. But it cannot build bridges. That job belongs to you and me. We can run from each other but we cannot escape each other. We will only attain freedom if we learn to appreciate what is different and muster the courage to discover what is fundamentally the same.

Watching the film with these words of Thurgood Marshall ringing in my head, I hoped to see more of Marshall the bridge builder, rather than a champion over segregation (however charming and human). Thurgood Marshall certainly was a champion, but he was not one to rest on his laurels, and while Stevens’ screenplay offers a moving portrait of a man, it could have more successfully captured the complexity of the world he lived in.

The Culture of Time and Space, 1880-1918 by Stephen Kern (2003)

by Julia Rahe

The modern individual, living in an era of high-speed technology, international travel and an increasingly worldwide community, may be surprised to learn that there have not always been only four time zones in the continental United States, or that there existed a era when having one’s picture taken was an anomalous, threatening experience. Stephen Kern’s fascinating book, The Culture of Time and Space, investigates these and other radical changes that occurred in people’s temporal and spatial reality at the turn of the twentieth century. Kern calls time and space the universal, “essential” realities through which humans perceive, experience and live life, and he uses them to understand historical change.

According to Kern, the forty years between 1880 and 1918 were a period of unprecedented cultural renovation and refiguring, when changes in perceptions of speed, space, form, distance and direction broke down traditional hierarchies and reconstructed conventional values and understandings. The proliferation of technological advances such as the telephone and the telegraph altered perceptions of time by allowing individuals in one place to experience simultaneous events in another for the first time. The result was a “thickening” of the present as events occurring in different places convened in a single moment. At the same time, advances in transportation created a “cult of speed,” as bicycles, trams and railroads allowed people to travel at faster velocities than ever before.

‘What hath God wrought’?: a map showing the global reach of the Eastern Telegraph Co. System, 1901.

While technological advances altered traditional understanding of time, cultural trends in art and philosophy challenged classical perceptions of space. New artistic movements such as Impressionism and Cubism broke down the illusion of three-dimensional space displayed on the two-dimensional canvas by presenting multiple perspectives to the viewer. These multiple points of view reflected the growing pluralism and confusion of the modern age. New philosophical trends such as Perspectivism also supported ideas about plurality and the subjectivity of personal experience by challenging the notion of an absolute, homogeneous reality.

New art movements such as Futurism, Cubism and Dadaism challenged old notions of perspective and drew inspiration from modern technologies such as the telegraph, the radio and the airplane. This detail from Umberto Boccioni‘s 1911 painting The Noise of the Street Enters the House exemplifies the frenetic energy of this new aesthetics based on speed, urbanism and technological prowess.

Through the juxtaposition of seemingly unrelated cultural and scientific phenomena, Kern successfully draws conclusions about broader social changes occurring across Europe and the United States at the turn of the twentieth century. The Culture of Time and Space is a captivating read for a wide audience. Kern’s broad and sweeping, yet detailed, discussion of new trends in art, philosophy and architecture will thrill lovers of material culture, and science and technology buffs will lose themselves in Kern’s explanation of the profound impact of new technological advances on individuals’ perceptions of the world.

All images in this review were published on Wikimedia Commons under a GNU free documentation license.

A Poverty of Rights: Citizenship and Inequality in Twentieth-Century Rio de Janiero by Brodwyn Fischer (2010)

by Salvador Salinas

Brodwyn Fischer’s A Poverty of Rights: Citizenship and Inequality in Twentieth-Century Rio de Janiero explores the heterogeneous class of the urban poor in Brazil’s national capital from 1920 to 1950. At the center of the book are the favelas, Rio’s infamous shantytowns, where the majority of the urban poor resided. Although the favelados engaged the legal and political system to win property rights for their makeshift neighborhoods, they failed to achieve full civil rights, which compounded the problems they faced as impoverished city dwellers. Using a wide array of sources such as criminal court cases, oral histories, samba lyrics, newspapers, legal codes, and the correspondence of presidents, prefects, bureaucrats, and governors, the book presents several paradoxes and contradictions. Most twentieth-century Brazilian laws were written in a universal language, yet the urban (and rural) poor were excluded from full citizenship. Marginalized, Rio’s poor still played a crucial role in city politics. City ordinances outlawed favela settlements, but the residents of the shantytowns, in many cases, gained recognition of their neighborhoods and remained anchored to Rio’s hillsides. Informality, however, became critical to the poor’s pursuit of rights. Civil rights in twentieth-century Rio de Janeiro became privileges of social and economic class, not universal entitlements.

From the beginning, the capital’s poor residences were left out of the city’s planned development. Sanitation campaigns in the early 1900s pushed the destitute to the city’s fringes – the hillside and suburbs.

The Rocinha favela, one of the largest and oldest in Rio.

These neighborhoods were outlawed because of sanitary conditions and building codes, and then received little or no public sanitation, running water, paved roads, electricity, or public transportation. Yet in-migration to Rio in the 1930s and 1940s caused a housing crunch to turn into a housing crisis as the population of the illegal city reached some one million inhabitants. The favelados demanded public services, and politicians at least paid lip service to the causes of Rio’s poorest residents. Illegality, in other words, became a cheap form of political currency.

The culture of the poor and their ideas of work and family differed from those of President Vargas, the so-called “father of the poor,” which further marginalized them. The Vargas regime in the 1940s-50s, extolled workers as vanguards of economic progress and national identity, but rarely dignified occupations such as washerwomen, janitors, and servants. While the regime idealized women as housewives, poor women often worked all day to sustain their families and lived in informal unions with their partners.

Rio’s Vidigal favela viewed at dusk.

Furthermore, the majority of poor workers were excluded from Vargas’s labor legislation because they could not meet the requirements or obtain the numerous official documents necessary to gain labor benefits. The documents were expensive, the bureaucratic red tape was complex and the process slow, and many poor people did not even have birth certificates to begin the whole process.

Documents, in other words, became passports to citizenship. But the kinds of work the poor performed were not even reflected in the worker legislation, which favored industrial labor.

In the courts as well, Brazilians received differential treatment based on social and economic standing. Middle class defendants were more likely to have their cases dismissed, while the poor were more likely to receive guilty verdicts and harsher punishments. Again, the fact that the poor lacked documents to prove their citizenship undermined their judicial identity status.

By honing in on the diverse group of the urban poor and their relation to the state through civil rights, Fischer explains why and how the destitute of Rio de Janeiro remained only partial citizens. The book is a fascinating read for anyone interested in the connections between politics and economics and anyone concerned with democracy in twentieth- and twenty-first-century Brazil.

Further reading:

The Favela Painting Project

Life in the Rocinha Favela

All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Normal Pictures in Abnormal Times

by David F. Crew

Private family photographs document events, such as births, marriages, and reunions, that are important in the history of individual families, but they can also teach us about the events we think of as real history. Jewish wedding photographs taken during the Second World War and the Holocaust take us into a world of private family events but also give us new ways to understand the big questions of the twentieth century.

The newly married couple, Herman de Leeuw and Annie Pais, pose with members of the wedding party shortly after the ceremony. [Photograph #08725]

The first photograph here shows a perfectly normal wedding scene. Visually, it is no different than thousands of other wedding pictures of both Jewish and non-Jewish couples taken all over Europe before the war—except for one crucial detail. At least four members of this wedding party are wearing Jewish stars. They, and presumably all the other Jews in this picture, have already become the victims of Nazi racial persecution and most, if not all, of them will not survive the war. The single detail of the Jewish star injects a chilling note into the private happiness recorded here.

I was surprised to find this photograph. Until I saw it, I did not know that Jews were still getting married in Nazi-occupied Europe or that they were having photographs taken to commemorate the event. I found this picture in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s photographic archive and it is not an isolated example. A search in the museum’s online data base for photographs of Jewish weddings produced 496 responses. The Holocaust Museum archive has photographs of Jewish couples getting married in many different occupied European countries, in foreign exile in Shanghai and Kenya, and in transit camps such as Westerbork, the Dutch way station on the deportation route to Auschwitz, and even in the Warsaw ghetto.

Portrait of a Jewish couple in the Warsaw ghetto taken at the time of their wedding. Pictured are Pawel Tabaczynski and Bela Szrut. The couple married in the Warsaw ghetto in November 1941.

The fact that these Jewish wedding photographs exist at all is quite remarkable. We would probably not expect Jews to be getting married despite Nazi occupation, and the threat of deportation and annihilation. Marriage presupposes an expectation of some kind of future, even in the darkest times. We know that many of the people in these pictures would not survive. Did they have no idea what might soon happen to them? Were they deluding themselves that they would survive? The caption attached to the second photograph here, which shows a couple in the Warsaw ghetto, certainly supports such a reading; “During the suppression of the Warsaw ghetto uprising, they were both deported to the Poniatowa concentration camp, where they perished.” Another picture of a wedding party in Salonika, Greece, taken in 1942-43, tells us that the couple’s “marriage was hastily arranged two months before their deportation so that they might be able to stay together. The couple perished in Auschwitz.” The caption of yet another wedding photograph tells us that no one in the picture survived.

Yet, knowing what happened after these photographs were taken makes it difficult for us to understand what the pictures originally showed. When we look at photographs of Holocaust victims who are still alive in a Polish ghetto we already know that they will soon be murdered, but most of the victims probably did not know their fate. Life in the ghetto was seen as a gamble with the future, a desperate attempt to stay alive long enough for the war to end. We know that this gamble would not succeed. The Jews in these photographs did not.

Recognition of the distance between our “now” and their “then” can allow us to understand why these Jewish couples and their relatives are smiling and why they devoted so much effort and ingenuity to finding the wedding gowns and all the other accoutrements of a “proper” wedding under the extreme conditions of wartime scarcity and Nazi persecution. These Jewish wedding photographs can be seen not as attempts to deny the horrible reality of the Holocaust but as conscious efforts to defy its grotesque abnormality by claiming a small scrap of normality, a tiny hope for the future.

The bride and groom, Victoria Sarfati and Yehuda (Leon) Beraha, pose with family members at their wedding.

Pictures of Jewish weddings might also suggest that Jews could sometimes use photography to challenge the vicious anti-Semitic images produced by Nazi propaganda. In these private photographs, Jews showed themselves as they wanted to be seen, not as the Nazis portrayed them. This does not mean that we should see these wartime wedding photographs as a previously undiscovered form of resistance to Nazi tyranny, but it does mean that we can see attempts to claim private happiness as something more than irrelevant, futile or misguided gestures.

If you want to learn more about these photographs, you can start at The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum; or you can read, The Years of Extermination. Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945 (2008) by Saul Friedländer.

Photo info and credits:

Figure 1.
Date: 1942
Locale: Amsterdam, [North Holland] The Netherlands
Credit: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Samuel (Schrijver) Schryver
Copyright: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

Figure 2.
Date: Nov 1941
Locale: Warsaw, Poland; Varshava; Warschau
Credit: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Eugenia Tabaczynska Shrut
Copyright: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

Figure 3.
Date: 1942 – 1943
Locale: Salonika, [Macedonia] Greece; Saloniki; Salonica; Solun
Credit: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Mary Beraha Rouben
Copyright: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

George on the Lege, Part 4 – Concealed Weapons

Interior view of the Texas State Capital Building looking up into the building's dome.

By George Christian

This spring the Texas Legislature will consider numerous proposals expanding the right to carry a concealed firearm. Two of these proposals—one prohibiting colleges and universities from barring concealed firearms on campus and another restricting the ability of an employer to prevent employees from carrying weapons in vehicles parked on the employer’s premises—are particularly contentious. In view of the strongly conservative cast of the present legislature and state leadership, most observers agree that little stands in the way of either one.

Given the widely held perception that Texas is one of the most “pro-gun” jurisdictions in the nation, it may come as a surprise that Texas was a relative latecomer to conceal-carry laws. By the time Governor George W. Bush signed the first Texas concealed handgun licensing law in 1995, nearly half the states in the nation had one form or another of concealed handgun permitting. Vermont and New Hampshire have the longest history of concealed-carry, the former with no restrictions at all and the latter with a licensing law that dates back to the early 1920’s. Georgia’s 1976 concealed-carry law, however, marked the beginning of a concerted campaign by the National Rifle Association and allied groups to promote concealed firearm licensing laws on a national basis.

In Texas, concealed-carry legislation was introduced in each regular legislative session beginning in 1983. Democratically-controlled legislatures blocked the proposals, although a watered-down version came close to passage in 1991. That same year, a gunman opened fire in a Luby’s Cafeteria in Killeen, Texas, killing 23 people, including the parents of future State Rep. Suzanna Gratia Hupp (served 1997-2007), who subsequently led a spirited and well-financed public campaign for a Texas concealed-carry law. A veto threat from Governor Ann Richards blocked the bill during the 1993 session, though the Legislature did pass legislation calling for a referendum on the issue. Governor Richards vetoed that bill, assuring that concealed-carry legislation would become one of the most hotly debated issues during the 1994 gubernatorial election. George W. Bush’s victory cleared the way for concealed-carry legislation during the 1995 legislative session. Authored by then-State Senator and current Texas Land Commissioner Jerry Patterson (R-Pasadena) and passed over bitter opposition in both the Texas Senate and House (it was amended 41 times on the House floor alone), the bill established Texas’ first licensing regime for concealed handguns. When the new law went into effect on September 1, 1995, more than 200,000 Texans applied for a CHL license.

Since its initial passage, the Legislature amended the law in 1997, 2001, 2003, 2005, and 2007. Most of these bills dealt with the definitional ambiguities, administrative processes, and fees, though in 2007 the Legislature enacted an important bill recognizing the “Castle Doctrine,” which shields a person from criminal or civil liability for using deadly force to repel an invasion of one’s home. At the same time, various legislative proposals to restrict places in which licensees may carry concealed weapons (e.g., places of worship, school parking lots, public streets, public facilities) have generally failed.

In the wake of the Virginia Tech shootings in May, 2007, the Texas Senate passed bills expanding concealed carry to public college and university campuses and employer parking lots during the 2009 session. Both proposals made it out of committee in the House but did not get to the floor before the time clock ran out. With the make-up of the Texas Senate virtually the same as it was in 2009 and a far more conservative House, it appears nearly certain that both bills will pass this time. Throw in the possibility that Governor Perry will make a run for national office in next year’s presidential election on a conservative platform, and the recipe for expanded concealed-carry laws is complete.

Sources:

Larry Arnold, The History of Concealed Carry, 1976-2009, Texas Concealed Handgun Association, http://www.txchia.org/history.htm (accessed 2/23/11)

Hilary Hilton, “The Gun Lobby’s Counterattack,” Time, April 18, 2007, http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1611939,00.html (accessed 2/23/11)

Christopher Smith Gonzalez, “Colin Gardner’s Right to Bear Witness to a Campus Massacre,” Texas Tribune, February 23, 2011 http://www.texastribune.org/ (accessed 2/23/11)

If you want to read more on the topic, try:

Guns in America: A Reader, ed. Jan E. Dizard, Robert Merrill Muth and Stephen P. Andrews (1999)

Photo: Wing-Chi Poon [CC-BY-SA-2.5] via Wikimedia Commons

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