Stacy Vlasits, Author at Not Even Past

Digital History: A Primer (Part 2)

Each fall I take my first-year seminar students to one of UT’s archives. They’re pretty sure this will be the most boring class ever. The archivists and I talk a bit about the people whose things are stored in the cardboard cartons and plastic containers piled up on the table, lowering their expectations even further. But then we open the boxes. Someone pulls out a local journalist’s datebook and starts flipping through the weeks of alternating banal and extraordinary events. And someone else finds a poet’s meticulously detailed correspondence with her lawyer. Another student opens a container to find an abstract sculptor’s childhood sketchbook that’s filled with ornate fantasy drawings. Skeptical silence gives way to animated conversation and suddenly everyone is walking around sharing their treasures with their friends. It never fails. Even if you don’t love history, there is nothing like original documents for connecting us to the past.

Russian State Archive of Literature and Art

Historians won’t be giving up their visits to archives or their days picking notebooks and letters out of boxes any time soon. But the path to those boxes has changed dramatically as institutions and history enthusiasts have been digitalizing and posting their treasures online. Virtual documents are not the same as little leather bound notebooks and papers signed by presidents, but they are the next best thing and now you can find a lot of them while sitting at home on your couch. Scholars and graduate students can do substantial research at their desks and undergraduates can do much more sophisticated original research using online documents collections. And history enthusiasts can create personal archives for every niche interest just by setting up a Tumblr or Pinterest account.

Like blogging, the world of online collections is too large to cover fully here –- or probably anywhere these days. I’ve picked a few representative collections to give you a sense of what’s out there.

But first, the big news in online collections is the launch this week of the Digital Public Library of America.* The DPLA, in the words of its founding director, Dan Cohen, a leading digital history pioneer, will be

connecting the riches of America’s libraries, archives, and museums so that the public can access all of those collections in one place; providing a platform, with an API [application programming interface] for others to build creative and transformative applications upon; and advocating strongly for a public option for reading and research in the twenty-first century. The DPLA will in no way replace the thousands of public libraries that are at the heart of so many communities across this country, but instead will extend their commitment to the public sphere, and provide them with an extraordinary digital attic and the technical infrastructure and services to deliver local cultural heritage materials everywhere in the nation and the world.

The DPLA is poised to become the main hub in the universe of online collections. The US National Archives has already “donated” 1.2 million of its objects and documents to the DPLA and other public institutions are lining up to make their collections available there. This is one to watch.

In the meantime, the growing number of online collections fall roughly into three categories: big and varied collections of documents, photographs, and other objects, smaller curated collections focused on a specific topic, or blog-like publications of images on a single topic.

In the first category, one of the earliest and best major online collections is just celebrating its tenth anniversary. The Proceedings of the Old Bailey, London’s Criminal Court, 1674-1913, with documents on almost 200,000 trials and biographical information on 2500 individuals, is the largest collection of “texts detailing the lives of non-elite people ever published.” The individual documents are available as typed text and as scanned facsimile. In addition to the documents, background essays offer the historical context for understanding the court proceedings and the place of the court in London social history. A variety of search techniques are offered (and very clearly explained), some using quite complex digital technologies. The site also offers essays and smaller, curated collections on specific topics, like Black Communities in London or Gender in the Proceedings that require no prior knowledge and can be of interest to general readers as well as specialists. These features make The Old Bailey website a model of organization and accessibility.

The Portal to Texas History is another huge collection with close to 300,000 items, including full runs of rare local newspapers, photographs, books, and maps. The Portal’s education pages, linked to the state history standards for 4^th and 7^th grade, are especially good. Individual topics (The Battle of San Jacinto) come complete with primary sources, visual and text, instructions on reading sources, and classroom activities. Sets of primary sources on broader topics (Native Americans in Tejas, Cowboy Culture, Civil Rights, and individuals including Sam Houston and Quanah Parker), are a good place to start a research project, but they’re fun to read for anyone interested in history, especially local history.

Smaller, curated collections can present a wide variety of sources on a single topic. My favorite recent discovery is Women’s Worlds in Qajar Iran (1786-1925) at the Harvard website. Like a lot of these sites, WWQI can be used for research or it can be browsed for fun: texts of letters, poetry, essays, diaries; legal documents on wedding contracts and dowry agreements, wills and finances; photographs and works of art; everyday objects and oral histories on a topic that was completely new to me, can all now be enjoyed by anyone with a computer.

Another thematically focused collection is the Digital Archive from the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, which makes available declassified government documents from all over the world. The documents are organized by topics like Sino-Soviet Relations (242 documents), The Berlin Wall (28 documents), or Intelligence Operations in the Cold War (111 documents). Want to read up on the history of North Korean foreign policy? The home page has Featured Collections, which today include what they call North Korean Military Adventurism (72 documents dating back to 1967). We often have students who want to write an honors thesis or research paper on an international topic but don’t know the languages well enough to do research; sites like these make international research projects possible. World History Matters is another George Mason site that offers links to online collections, both specific, such as Women in World History, and general, Finding World History, which includes an annotated list of sites organized by world region and time period.

These smaller curated collections allow readers to see connections between various media or authors or historical actors. They can give a newcomer to the field a broad familiarity with the kinds of documents, objects, opinions, experiences, and forms of communication produced by a discrete group. They differ from the big collections like The Old Bailey or the Texas Portal because their pages have been carefully selected from an even larger pool of raw documents. None of these sites or collections claims to be definitive; just the opposite. They all offer links to other collections, or lists of further reading for placing their materials in historical context.

Another form of curated documents can be found on websites that publish clusters of documents organized primarily for classroom use. The National Humanities Center runs a site, America in Class, that is also organized for teachers but is fun to explore on its own. Sources (including visual images and sound files) and classroom guides, as well as links to many other online collections, cover US History from 1492 through the 1920s. I found the collections on the Revolution and on African American history especially interesting. Similar US History collections that select and organize documents with teaching in mind include History Matters from George Mason University, Digital History from the University of Houston, and Primary Sources at the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. These are similar to documents collections published in books, except that they often include audio or visual clips and they can take advantage of the web’s primary function and provide links to related material. The reading experience is enhanced by these possibilities for expansion.

Internet technology has been especially useful for any libraries with collections of photographs and other visual images to make their collections available. The Library of Congress and the New York Public Library have enormous image collections. The NYPL collection, for example, is divided into topical collections, the richness of which is hard to capture. Just scratching the surface these include: Russia and Eastern Europe in Rare Photographs, cars, cigarette cards, nature, New York City, the Middle East, more than 2000 Medieval and Renaissance illuminated manuscripts are a few of the topics listed in their index. Wikimedia Commons, the visual branch of Wikipedia, contains some 16 million images that are all in the public domain. More specialized collections are becoming available as well. On a smaller scale, the Winterton Collection of East African Photographs is a stunning collection of over 7000 photos. And like most of the collections that come from educational institutions, this one comes with a page devoted to Winterton in the Classroom that provides historical analysis (timeline, essays, links to other historical sources) and context for thinking about the images.

The context is what’s missing from many popular history collections online. The Tumblr Spotlight: History page links to blog after blog of related but skimpily identified images. One of my favorites is called Turn of the Century, which describes itself as “everything strange and beautiful from 1850s-1920s.” I also like “My Daguerreotype Boyfriend,” a collection of handsome men in early photographs.

As a professional historian and public history promoter, I have mixed feelings about these sites. They’re fun and very popular and I enjoy the time I spend looking at them, but they exist only to be collected, quickly glimpsed, “liked,” maybe “shared,” and soon forgotten. Half the time, this doesn’t bother me at all: people have been collecting random objects and displaying them for all of recorded history. If nothing else, these sites show us that there’s a real public interest in history; these uncontextualized collections may even represent the dominant public interest in history. And are they that different from the Wilson Center’s selected collections or the images posted by The Library of Congress? The historian in me wants more information about provenance and historical context, but lacking that, there is still a visceral pleasure in the looking, which is worth cultivating, and may inspire the kinds of questions that lead people to seek more.

Optimism about the desire to both look at and learn more about such images comes from an unlikely place: the enormous link aggregator, Reddit, which has pages of links on every topic under sun. The aptly named HistoryPorn, is a subreddit for posting pictures of historical events. It’s not that different from a Tumblr blog, except that instead of being organized chronologically, the image links that appear at the top of the page are the ones that have received the most votes from other subreddit readers. The top link today as I write is “Burst of Joy,” a 1973 photo of ecstatic family members greeting their father who has been in a POW camp in North Vietnam. But there are also dozens of subreddits on major historical topics. The “History of Ideas” subreddit, for example, leads off with podcasts from Oxford on Shakespeare, a review of a book about Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Rousseau, and a lecture by Stanford professor Paul Robinson on Darwin. There is even a subreddit for recommended books in history and a page devoted to links to other history websites and resources on line.

The history pages on Reddit lack consistency but offer a way for history lovers to talk to each other, ask questions, and share their discoveries. HistoryPorn readers can look-and-run if they want, but if they’re curious, they can google “Burst of Joy,” and find themselves at Iconic Photos or Mechanical Icon or the Newseum to read or watch a video or listen to the photographer talk about the Pulitzer Prize winning photograph and its surprising back story. And then if one wants more, anyone can go straight to the website of the US National Archives to find original documents on photojournalism during the Vietnam War. These virtual images and texts can’t replicate the pleasure of holding original documents in your hands, but they make up for that by being so easily accessible and searchable, by being so seamlessly linked, and in many cases, by being so pleasurable to see.
*
Stay tuned for Part 3: Digital History For Real.

You might also enjoy:
Digital History: A Primer (Part 1).
Daniel J. Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig, Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving, and Presenting the Past on the Web
Blog post about whether the DPLA will define what counts in Digital Humanities

*The Launch of the DPLA was postponed after the bombing at the Boston Marathon.

Co-Winner of April Essay Contest: They Would Never Hurt a Fly by Slavenka Drakulic (2005)

by Daniel Rusnak

In They Would Never Hurt a Fly, Slavenka Drakulic follows the stories of the Hague War criminals from the former Yugoslavia. Drakulic argues that ordinary men transformed into war criminals gradually through intensifying rhetoric containing a perfect storm of prejudice, myth, propaganda history and culture. Becoming a war criminal is a process, she claims, that does not affect only those who are “predisposed” or “inhuman.” Indeed, anyone can become a war criminal under the right circumstances. Even well meaning, civilized people like you and me.

Ordinary people become monsters, Drakulic argues, through steady alienation of the “other” group. Individuals slowly grow accustomed to hatred and absorb it into their daily lives. It begins with trivial things like refusing association with the “other” ethnicity for fear of public ridicule and evolves to accepting – and even profiting from – the ethnic cleansing of an entire town: “This policy of small steps, of everyday decisions and concessions, of a collaboration on a much smaller scale.” Propaganda made neighbors enemies, demonizing one another over ten years. The psychological groundwork for genocide was already in the works long before the war, based on “prejudices and myths rooted in reality either in history of earlier wars or in cultural or religious differences.”

When asked why Serbians carried out war crimes, Bijana Plavsic, former President of Serbia, stated that it was blind fear of repeating the events of World War II saying, “In this obsession not to become victims ever again, we allowed ourselves to become perpetrators.” Such history of conflict is hard to forget. In addition, none of the leaders of the war could have ordered the things they did without the support of the people. Moreover, the collective culture, coupled with little personal responsibility resulted in no debate regarding the means to victory. The war criminals that transformed from innocent fishermen to mass killers, Drakulic argues, did not arise from nowhere — they came from an extraordinary historical and cultural context.

Drakulic continuously searched among the war criminals for a wild, bloodthirsty “look” or pathology that could explain how these criminals were non-human psychopaths capable of carrying out their horrific orders in the Yugoslav War. Instead, she found that the generals and soldiers were remarkably unassuming and articulate. Their stories includes very wrong moral decisions, but the extent and severity of their situation and indoctrination matched the crimes they carried out. In this sense, Drakulic positions the war criminals as victims to their extreme circumstances and historical context. Although the details regarding the war criminal’s biographies were clearly fictionalized to a certain extent, Drakulic conversely levies fair treatment regarding their atrocities.

UN Peace keepers collecting bodies from Ahmići, Bosnia and Herzegovina, April 1993 (Image courtesy of the ICTY)

They Would Never Hurt a Fly is a persuasive and controversial work that delivers an unconventional moral and daring historical perspective on the Yugoslav War. The book skillfully articulates a chilling and disconcertingly candid illustration of the war’s atrocities and their perpetrators. Although Drakulic does not identify with the war criminals, she ultimately disapproves of their non-human representation because it puts them in a classification in which we ourselves can never identify. They Would Never Hurt a Fly is most quintessentially a warning. Yugoslavs never thought there could be war criminals among them – but there were.

Co-Winner of April Essay Contest: Another Face of Empire: Bartolomé de Las Casas, Indigenous Rights, and Ecclesiastical Imperialism by Daniel Castro (2007)

Bartolomé de Las Casas has been long renowned as a religious reformer, champion of indigenous rights and an advocate of the freedoms of the Indians in the Americas. He has been lauded as the “Father of America” and “noble protector of the Indians.” Conversely, he has also been much disparaged and criticized by historians. In Another Face of Empire, Daniel Castro examines the life and work of Las Casas and addresses the reasons why the controversial Dominican reformer has been both adored and vilified throughout history.

In this in-depth study of sixteenth-century ecclesiastical imperialism, Castro illustrates the goals, accomplishments, and failures of the religious orders in the Americas, and examines the lives of the indigenous people themselves, including the myriad of ways they were perceived, treated and subjugated by the Spanish during the conquest of Mexico. Although the religious conversion advocated by Las Casas and other reformers of his ilk was thought to provide a “humanitarian element,” Castro stresses that it was nevertheless a “benevolent form of imperialism” forced upon the natives by the Spanish, who considered themselves inherently superior. His discussion of Las Casas” reform efforts in the New World effectively reveals how the priority of Spain during the conquest was not religious conversion, but the “possession of the land and its resources.”

Castro argues convincingly that while Las Casas may have thought his goal to be spiritual conversion, his actions nevertheless contributed to the priorities of the Crown, and that he directly assisted in Spain’s economic imperialism through his tacit acceptance of Spain’s “dominion and jurisdiction over America and its” inhabitants.” His ongoing written communication with the Crown in an attempt to denounce the “atrocities committed in the Indies” by the Spanish colonists was in actuality a conduit for valuable information, and as such, became a “useful tool in the imperialist designs of the monarchy.” Ergo, despite an earnest desire to secure humanitarian treatment for the natives, Las Casas was complicit in the “extraction of wealth from America,” and while he may have sincerely believed in the righteousness of religious conversion, his actions nevertheless became “a viable justification for the Spaniards to conquer.”

An illustration of Spanish atrocities against native Cubans published in Las Casas’s “Brevisima relación de la destrucción de las Indias” (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

Castro does not hesitate to reveal the less altruistic face of the “Father of America,” and unabashedly portrays Las Casas as a vociferous defender of indigenous rights, who nevertheless seemed unconcerned with the destruction of their established cultural, social and political way of life at the hands of the Spanish. Nor does Castro shy away from the dichotomy of Las Casas, who, while proclaiming that the natives should be treated as “equal subjects of the Crown, and not as slaves,” simultaneously advocated the importation of slaves from Africa to work for the colonizers.

Although Las Casas defended the rights of the indigenous people of Mexico, he inevitably served to perpetuate the imperialism and subjugation imposed upon those he was sworn to defend. A reformer he may have been, and his intentions were undoubtedly good, but he was nevertheless a servant of the Spanish Crown and its” imperialist aims. Another Face of Empire is a compelling read which affords a fascinating glimpse into the life of a controversial religious reformer who, according to Castro, was the “incarnation of a more benevolent, paternalistic form of ecclesiastical, political, cultural, and economic imperialism.”

And be sure to check out the other co-winning submission from Daniel Rusnak

Lady Bird Johnson, In Her Own Words

by Michael L. Gillette

Between 1977 and 1991, Michael L. Gillette, executive director of Humanities Texas and former director of the LBJ Library Oral History Program, sat down with Lady Bird Johnson to discuss her childhood, family life and experiences as First Lady. For the first time anywhere, Not Even Past is publishing audio segments from these incredible conversations.

Lady Bird, 1915 (Image courtesy of the LBJ Library)

What happened when a young Lady Bird and a friend traveled to New York City in June 1934? Hear her impressions of Chinatown, Depression era poverty and a “museum for fish” she visited.

How did Lady Bird and LBJ meet? In this segment, she describes their very, very brief courtship and Lyndon’s almost immediate proposal.

After LBJ’s proposal, Lady Bird went out to San Marcos to meet Lyndon’s parents. Here she talks about first meeting Mr. and Mrs. Johnson and her impressions of the old Texas family.

“You’ve brought a lot of boys home, and this time you’ve brought a man.” These were the words of Lady Bird’s father after meeting Lyndon for the first time. Hear more about that initial encounter and life at the “Brick House,” Lady Bird’s family home in Karnack, TX.

Credits:

Claudia “Lady Bird” Johnson Oral History Interviews, by Michael L. Gillette, LBJ Library

Good-Bye to All That: An Autobiography by Robert Graves (1929)

by Jack Loveridge

Reflecting on his motives for joining the Royal Welch Fusiliers at the outbreak of the First World War, Robert Graves wrote: “I thought that it might last just long enough to delay my going to Oxford in October, which I dreaded.” So began a five year pause in Graves’ life, in which the main action of his autobiography unfolds. In Good-Bye to All That, Graves powerfully explores the horrors of the First World War, while also providing a compelling look at the inner workings of British society.

On the front lines at Cuinchy and Laventie, divisions between the men who fought became clear. Graves highlights the bravery of Welsh soldiers who, as former miners, prove pessimistic but particularly well-adjusted to the trenches, but he adds a Welsh comrade’s sentiments regarding Scottish battalions, noting that they, “run like hell both ways.” While stationed in Ireland near war’s end, Graves comes down with Spanish influenza and flees for London to avoid suffering treatment in a “horrific” Irish hospital. In this way, Graves also relays the prevalence of regarding class and racial divisions in imperial Britain.

Throughout, Graves drives the social analysis implicit in his work with a dark sense of humor. For instance, as though schoolboys at Charterhouse, soldiers roll a defused bomb through the trenches to play a cruel joke on a shell-shocked comrade. Graves finds himself naked in a public bath in Béthune with the Prince of Wales, who was “graciously pleased to remark how emphatically cold the water was.” In a burned-out French village, the troops organize an impromptu cricket match using a birdcage as the wicket – with the dead parrot still inside. These vivid images reveal men far from home and in close proximity to death, struggling to maintain the regular routines of English life. With his humor and gently sardonic prose, Graves’s autobiography yields a depiction of the First World War and its domestic aftermath that says as much about British society as it does about the author’s own life.

English soldiers in the trenches at Nieuport Bains, Belgium, 1917. The sergeant in the foreground is watching the German line through a periscope fixed on his bayonet. (Image courtesy of the United Kingdom Government)

Following the war, Graves picked up his life almost exactly where he left it. He matriculated at Oxford and launched a long career as a writer, poet, and scholar of antiquity. Yet, like so many of Graves’s generation, the war years left psychological scars that would linger for life. Good-Bye to All That investigates those scars and gives readers a crystalline sense of the trauma that left them.

You may also like:

Yana Skorobogatov’s review of The Pity of War, Niall Ferguson’s history of British involvement in the First World War.

Jermaine Thibodeaux’s piece on African-American soldiers in WWI.

Por Ahora: The Legacy of Hugo Chávez Frías

by Edward Shore

On March 5, 2013, Vice President Nicolás Maduro confirmed what many Venezuelans had long anticipated: President Hugo Chávez Frías (r. 1999-2013) had died after an eighteen-month battle with cancer. He was 58 years old. News of Chávez’s death prompted an outpouring of grief among his red-clad supporters in downtown Caracas and a smattering of cheers in the exile communities of Miami. Chávez was an outsized, divisive, and complicated figure who aroused passions on both left and right throughout his fourteen years in power. To his supporters, Chávez was a symbol of Latin American independence and revolution, an heir to Simón Bolívar, and a “champion of the poor” who bucked neoliberalism by redistributing Venezuela’s oil riches to the poor. To his detractors, he was a “strongman” and a “dictator,” an enemy of free enterprise and democracy who consolidated political power in his Bolivarian Revolution and repressed his opposition.

Who was the “real” Hugo Chávez and how will history judge his legacy? Pundits have rehashed and recycled the “hero v. villain” binary in the days after his death, but Hugo Chávez was more complicated than either his allies or his enemies would care to admit. To understand Chávez and his Bolivarian Revolution we need to contextualize the comandante and his movement within the longer history of the Cold War, imperialism and popular mobilization in Venezuela and Latin America more broadly.

President Chávez appearing in Guatemala, 2005 (Image courtesy of Agência Brasil/Wikimedia Commons)

Hugo Chávez Frías was born in the rural state of Barinas in central Venezuela on July 28, 1954. The son of schoolteachers, young Hugo professed a love for history that was matched only by his passion for baseball. At 17 years old, he entered the Venezuelan Academy of Military Sciences in Caracas and became one of the army’s best ballplayers and brightest cadets. However, he soon demonstrated a greater propensity for politics than baseball.

Chávez came of age at the height of the Cold War in Latin America and engaged in the major debates of the era: socialism v. capitalism, electoral democracy v. armed struggle, the United States v. the Soviet Union. In his early twenties, the young army officer criticized U.S. interventionism in Latin America and expressed indignation at the 1973 CIA-backed coup in Chile that toppled Salvador Allende and installed General Augusto Pinochet as dictator. In 1974, Chávez participated in a military exchange program in Peru where het met President-General Juan Velasco Alvarado, a progressive who had seized power in 1968 and initiated a reformist program supported by revolutionaries in the army. Impressed by Velasco’s achievements, Chávez envisioned nationalist, state-led development program in Venezuela steered by a vanguard of progressive military officers. In 1975, Chávez was assigned to counterinsurgency operations in his native Barinas where he encountered a small band of Marxist guerrillas. He developed sympathy for the revolutionaries and grew disillusioned with corruption in the military and Venezuela’s political system. It would not be long before Chávez would express revolutionary ambitions of his own.

Chávez as a young second lieutenant at the Military Academy, Caracas (Image courtesy of Venezuela’s Ministry of Information and Communication)

Throughout the 1980s Venezuela was in chaos. A foreign debt crisis spurred by falling commodity prices pushed the economy into a tailspin. The recession had erased the growth of the so-called “Saudi Venezuela” period of the mid-1970s, when an oil boom had led many Venezuelans to believe they might one day inherit a rich and developed nation. Venezuelan policymakers and technocrats responded by embracing the neoliberal prescriptions of the so-called “Washington Consensus” — devaluing the Venezuelan currency, slashing social programs, and privatizing key industries. However, in the short term these policies only exacerbated poverty and social strife.

On February 27, 1989, Venezuelans took to the streets of Caracas to protest fare hikes on city buses. The demonstrations quickly devolved into riots and looting as President Carlos Andrés Pérez declared martial law and deployed the National Guard to suppress the revolt. After the dust had settled, more than 500 people had been killed, many of them at the hands of the military, while thousands of businesses were either damaged and destroyed in what later became known as the Caracazo. The Caracazo also had the effect of exposing the incompetence and vulnerability of the country’s civilian leadership. Lt.-Col Hugo Chávez Frías and a clique of leftist officers in the army’s parachute regiment known as the Movimiento Bolivariano 200 began plotting a coup d’état against the Pérez government.

Rebelling Venezuelan civilians and soldiers carry one of their wounded during the failed coup of 1992 (Image courtesy of the Venezuelan National Library)

Chávez led five army units to the Presidential Palace on February 4, 1992, in an attempt to detain the president and arrest the high command of the armed forces. Unbeknownst to the comandante, his plans were betrayed and his rebellion was suppressed by the military. Before his surrender, Chávez asked for and was granted permission to speak on national television. It was a decision the Venezuelan establishment would soon live to regret. Chávez, in full military uniform and donning a red beret, spoke without notes directly to the camera.

“Comrades: unfortunately, for the moment, the objectives that we had set ourselves have not been achieved in the capital. That is to say that those of us here in Caracas have not been able to seize power. Where you are, you have performed well, but now is the time for us to rethink. New possibilities will arise again and the country will be able to move definitively towards a better future.”

Chávez spoke for only a minute, but one phrase managed to capture the imaginations of millions of Venezuelans who had backed the aborted coup: “por ahora” or “for the moment.” The comandante had conceded defeat, but his struggle against the oil oligarchy and their allies in the military had only begun. He spent two years in prison, but his Bolivarian movement had attracted a mass following. Six years later, Chávez was elected president of Venezuela with 56% of the vote.

Chávez addressing the nation over Venezuelan television after the 1992 coup attempt (Image courtesy of Soberania)

What were some of Chávez’s accomplishments? For starters, he managed to reform Venezuela’s ossified and unpopular party system. In April 1999, Chávez called for a national referendum to support his plans to rewrite the Venezuelan Constitution, a proposal that passed with 88% of the vote. The Bolivarian Constitution established a unicameral legislature, mandated protections for indigenous and women’s rights, and expanded access to healthcare, education, food, and housing. Chávez’s supporters claim these reforms have democratized the political process by mobilizing working-class, poor, indigenous, and black Venezuelans who were largely ignored by all previous governments. These were the people who rushed to his defense after a U.S.-backed coup in 2002 removed Chávez from power. His supporters took to the streets in protest and Chávez returned to the presidency two days later.

Second, Chávez pioneered a “Twenty-First Century Socialism” that offered a regional alternative to neoliberalism and market reforms. His administration reversed privatization by nationalizing key sectors of the economy, particularly in the oil industry. His government redistributed petroleum dollars through its ambitious misiones, or social programs that slashed illiteracy in half, reduced extreme poverty by 75%, and expanded free healthcare and education to all Venezuelans. Finally, Chávez’s election triggered the emergence of the so-called “New Left” in Latin America that saw the elections of left-wing presidents in Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Ecuador, Bolivia, Peru, Chile, Argentina, Paraguay, Uruguay, and Brazil during the 2000s. Chávez was a major supporter of Latin American integration and made the creation of a Bolívar-inspired Gran Colombia the axis of his foreign policy. In 2008, he lobbied for the establishment of the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) that merged Mercosur and the Andean Community of Nations . Most recently, the Venezuelan president managed to bring FARC guerrillas and the Colombian government to the negotiating table to discuss an end to that country’s fifty-year-long civil war.

Chávez’s achievements, however, only tell part of the story. While Chávez’s supporters applaud the rebirth of mass politics, his detractors insist that his constitutional reforms have weakened liberal democracy in Venezuela. They criticize Chávez for eroding checks and balances by stripping legislative powers, packing the courts with chavistas, and enhancing the power of the executive branch. They point to Chávez’s declaration of “enabling powers” in 2007 which allowed the president to rule by decree for eighteen months. They also claim that Chávez cemented an insurmountable political advantage by injecting oil revenues into the legislative and mayoral campaigns of his supporters, thereby crowding out the Venezuelan opposition. Human Rights Watch reported in 2008 that Chávez and his administration have engaged in “discrimination on political grounds by eroding the independence of the judiciary and engaging in policies that have undercut journalists’ freedom of expression, workers’ freedom of association, and civil society’s ability to promote human rights in Venezuela.”

Chávez’s critics allege that his misiones reinforced patronage and clientelism. They claim that welfare distribution was contingent upon support for the president’s policies, especially during election years. Meanwhile, a lack of transparency clouded his administration, particularly after he contracted cancer in July 2011. Chávez refused to disclose the severity of his condition throughout his 2012 presidential campaign and the government published scant information on the president’s status following his departure for Cuba in December 2012. Finally, Chávez’s detractors blame his “twenty-first century socialism” for Venezuela’s skyrocketing inflation, free-falling currency, and renewed dependence on imports, especially foodstuffs. Venezuela’s economic woes, alongside soaring rates of violent crime, homicide, and kidnapping in Caracas are part of Chávez’s legacy.

Street mural of Chávez in Caracas (Image courtesy of La Patilla)

What lies ahead for Venezuela and Latin America after Chávez? His handpicked successor, Nicólas Maduro, is likely to defeat opposition candidate Henrique Capriles Radonski, the governor of Miranda, in special elections slated for April 14. Maduro, a former bus union leader, has pledged to expand Chávez’s social programs and has reaffirmed Venezuela’s commitments to its allies, particularly Cuba. However, Maduro lacks charisma and military experience and is unlikely to win over his predecessor’s supporters in the armed forces. Chávez succeeded in broadening the civic responsibilities of the military but he also presided over a fragile coalition of leftist and centrist officers that had grown dissatisfied with Venezuela’s economic performance, soaring crime, and burgeoning narcotrafficking activity along the western border with Colombia. A military coup, carried out by an alliance of military officers and the Venezuelan opposition, remains a possibility, especially given the country’s history of military uprisings.

Finally, the days of leftist populism in Latin America appear numbered, at least for now. Venezuela’s recent economic downturn and the departure of its most charismatic and popular leader threaten statist programs in Nicaragua, Ecuador, and Bolivia. Centrist and center-left coalitions in Brazil, Chile, and Colombia are poised to expand leadership and influence over Latin American affairs. Nevertheless, the specter of Hugo Chávez Frías looms large over Venezuela. Chavista parties promise to dominate the political environment and even centrist leaders like Capriles will be hard pressed to reverse the popular misiones. Future presidential candidates must appeal to Chávez’s broad coalition of poor farmers, slum dwellers, trade unionists, teachers, and workers should they hope to win executive office.

Chávez will be remembered as one of the most influential Latin American leaders of the last one hundred years, entering the ranks of Castro, Perón, Vargas, Pinochet, Cárdenas, and Lula da Silva. The comandante is gone, but the fierce blend of nationalism, populism, and anti-U.S. sentiment he refashioned and recycled will find new voices in Latin America. Adiós and so long, Hugo Chávez Frías…por ahora.

Digital History: A Primer (Part 1)

by Joan Neuberger

Internet technology is starting to have a profound influence on the ways we do history. Historians have found new places to write history, new ways to make sources available, and some historians have mastered the digital technology to create new kinds of data and new kinds of sources for asking new kinds of questions about the past.

How important are these changes? At this year’s annual convention of the American Historical Association, there were 43 panels on some aspect of what we are calling digital history. The two main showcase sessions, the Presidential and the Plenary panels, were also devoted to topics in digital history.

At Not Even Past we are committed to making good history accessible online, so I have developed an interest in all the ways history was becoming available to anyone with access to a computer. Over the last few years, digital history and digital humanities more broadly have moved from the esoteric margins of the profession to center stage.

In this series of blog posts, I will offer a survey of the digital landscape. That landscape has become so large and varied that it is impossible to cover completely. The good news is that the world of digital history is deeply interlinked. When you click onto one website or blog, you will find links to many more projects, blogs, sources, visualizations, and more. If you’re not careful, and if you’re like me, you could get lost on the enticingly unfamiliar pathways and spend far more time exploring than you expected. But you will have fun!

Digital History refers to many things, but I’m dividing it into three basic categories:

Putting history writing online. That’s what we’re doing at Not Even Past, and there are many other forms that great history writing takes online.
Putting sources online that used to be harder to learn about or harder to get your hands on or that required a walk to the library or a research trip halfway around the world.
Creation of new kinds of sources that make use of digital, web-based technology to tell historical stories in new ways or answer questions that require massive digital power or even make new kinds of documents.

Today I will write about how you can find high quality history writing online. There are far too many history blogs to attempt a representative survey so I have listed sites that I like because they consistently offer compelling writing on subjects that interest me even if they are outside my own field. Most blogs also include a “blogroll” of related sites, so once you start clicking you will find much more of what interests you; far more, probably, than you have time to read. And if you have a favorite history blog or two, send them with using the “Comments” and we’ll share them with the rest of our readers. Let’s start talking about Digital History.

Modern aeronautical map, from “Mapping the Earth, Mapping the Air,” by Felipe Cruz

Not Even Past is unusual in that it offers articles on a wide range of topics and in a wide range of formats. It’s also unusual in that it’s a collective project that makes accessible the research of professional historians in a single history department at a single university. Some other groups at The University of Texas at Austin have also developed some magazine-like collective blogs that are excellent. Four of our graduate students have started what they call “a new journal of narrative and experimental history.”

The Appendix posts long-form articles and short blog posts on sources and topics that don’t usually find their way into professional publications. They play with different styles of narrative – including an article written as a dialogue and an adaptation of a sixteenth-century travelogue by a Portuguese merchant as a graphic novel. Articles are both informative and provocative, encouraging us all to think about what it means to write history. The End of Austin is another group blog, this one produced by the American Studies department. It is devoted to thinking about Austin’s peculiar culture as a “city of perpetual nostalgia… where rapid change pulls against profound attachments to the way things are (or how they are imagined to be).” Another great collective effort from my own field of history can be found at Russian History Blog. A pretty eclectic site, they publish articles on historical documents, contemporary films, teaching issues, and several very interesting group discussions of recent books in the field. Asian History is superbly well served by Frog in a Well, a collective blog on Korean, Japanese, and Chinese history. Religion in American History and the US Intellectual History Blog are two excellent blogs that post just what the titles say. What’s the Deal With and Origins offer historical background to contemporary events; as does the behemoth History News Network.

Many blogs are written by individual historians about their specialized fields. Some very popular blogs include The Chirurgeon’s Apprentice, by medical historian Lindsey Fitzharris devoted to the horrors of pre-anesthetic surgery. Renegade South is Victoria Bynum’s blog about anti-slavery, mixed-race, and other unconventional southerners.

Timothy Burke’s Easily Distracted is an eclectic blog that might broadly be described as covering the encounter of professional history and contemporary public intellectual issues. BibliOdyssey is a primarily visual blog of historical book illustrations. Some mainstream publications have experimented with various kinds of history blogs. The New York Times, for example, has been running Disunion, a blog begun by Adam Goodyear and continued by additional historians, that is devoted to the history of the US Civil War.

If you don’t want to take my word for it you can Google “history blog” to find blogs that interest you. If you’d like a more reliable guide to the best history blogging you can check out the History Carnival.

History Carnival is a monthly selection of the best individual history blog posts from the previous month, chosen and posted on a different blog each month. (Not Even Past hosted the History Carnival in May 2012.) There’s a general History Carnival and then there are HCs on specific topics: Carnivalesque covers early modern Europe and others are listed here.

There are also a number of good blogs about Digital History. Two of the earliest and best digital historians blog at Dan Cohen’s blog and Miriam Posner’s blog. Benjamin Schmidt’s digital history blog, Sapping Attention, can get very technical but is innovative and interesting. Digital Humanities Now and Global Perspectives on Digital History keep up with the latest news on projects, people, software, and conferences about digital history and other fields.

Some sites invite the equivalent of public blogging. One of the most popular is History Pin. Anyone can pin a photo on this site and tell a story about it, or join it to a group of similar photos. History Pin is used by individuals as well as institutions. The US National Archives, for example, has its own “collection” on History Pin.

Finally, there are a number of photoblogs that run photography rather than text. Three of the best are produced by mass media news publications so they are usually focused on the contemporary, but they often run historical series. This month The Atlantic’s In Focus is running a series on the Bosnian War of the 1990s. The Big Picture, produced by the Boston Globe, recently ran a series called “Searching for America,” that displayed photos from the DOCUMERICA project run by the Environmental Protection Agency in the 1970s. Lens, the photoblog of The New York Times often features historical photographs. There are also blogs that post older historical photos. Shorpy runs several new historical photographs a day, usually from US history. The Retronaut is more international in scope, such as color photos of China in 1912, or, today’s post, Korean Girls playing on a see-saw.

The posting of historical photographs online begins to shift us away from the blog-world of historians writing history toward the massive project of digitalizing historical documents and making them available to the public. In the next blog in this series, I’ll turn to the availability of online sources for studying history and introduce you to everything from smaller sites with sources on, for example, women in 19c Iran to large collections of documents on US History from the National Archives and the National Humanities Center.

Digital History: A Primer (Part 2). Putting Sources Online.

Great Books on Possession, Exorcism and Witchcraft

Want to read more about demonic possession, exorcists, and witchcraft?

A selection of classics:

Aldous Huxley, The Devils of Loudun (1952).

The most readable account of the mass possession and exorcism of nuns at Loudun in the 1630s.

James Sharpe, The Bewitching of Anne Gunter: A Horrible and True Story of Football, Witchcraft, Murder, and the King of England (1999).
An entertaining study of one of the most remarkable cases of possession and witchcraft in early seventeenth-century England.

Carol F. Karlsen, The Devil in the Shape of a Woman: Witchcraft in Colonial New England.
A study of witchcraft in New England that focuses on the relation between witchcraft and possession, especially at Salem, Massachusetts in 1692.

Giovanni Levi, Inheriting Power: The Story of an Exorcist (1988).
The story of an uneducated priest in northern Italy who performed hundred of exorcisms as a strategy to bolster his authority as a priest.

Matt Baglio, The Rite: The Making of a Modern Exorcist (2009).
The true story of the training of an American priest as an exorcist at the Vatican in the late twentieth century.

Brian Levack on Possession and Exorcism

By Brian Levack

Ever since the beginning of Christianity, the belief has existed that demons can enter the bodies of human beings and take control of their physical movements and mental faculties. Those people who reportedly have experienced such possessions, known as demoniacs, have displayed a wide variety of symptoms, including convulsions, rigidity of the limbs, and vomiting extraneous substances such as pins, nails, or stones. A few demoniacs were reported to have levitated. The possessed also reportedly conversed in languages of which they had no previous knowledge, spoke in deep voices that were different from their normal voices, displayed contempt for sacred objects, uttered blasphemies, went into trances, and foresaw the future. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the period of the Reformation, there was an “epidemic” of such possessions. Some of them were group possessions in which many people in small communities, such as convents and orphanages, displayed the same symptoms.

The challenge for historians is to make sense of this bizarre, pathological behavior. For most people living at the time, the afflictions experienced by demoniacs made perfect sense, since they believed that the Devil or one of his demonic subordinates had the power to enter people’s bodies against their will. Others, however, including many who believed in the existence of the Devil, posed alternative rational, natural explanations why these demoniacs acted the way they did. The most common “rational” explanation of what was “really happening” to the possessed was that they were either physically or mentally ill: either epileptics or victims of hysteria. In the view of most modern psychiatrists, demoniacs were simply experiencing some sort of disorder, such as dissociative identity disorder, commonly known as multiple personality syndrome. Another rational explanation was that demoniacs were faking their possessions so that they could engage in anti-social or anti-religious behavior without being prosecuted for a criminal or religious offense. They were able to do so because demoniacs were not legally or morally responsible for anything done or said while possessed, since the Devil was believed to have forced them to speak or act.

The only human being who could be held responsible for causing a possession was a witch who commanded the Devil to enter the body of another person. Many of the cases of witchcraft in the Reformation era began when demoniacs accused a person of causing their possession by means of witchcraft.

Medical and other rational explanations of possession can contribute to an explanation of some possession cases, but they cannot account for all the symptoms displayed by demoniacs, especially those that reflected the religious views of the possessed. The key to understanding this phenomenon is to recognize that all demoniacs, either consciously or unconsciously, were following scripts that were encoded in their religious cultures. They were, in a sense, performers in a sacred drama. Demoniacs learned their scripts from observing other demoniacs or by reading the many published narratives of other possessions or by hearing sermons that related the details of famous possessions. Some of them acquired knowledge of possession scripts from their exorcists, who suggested things they might say or do while in the state of possession. Nuns in convents often imitated the symptoms of those who had already exhibited some of the signs of possession. In the most famous case of possession in seventeenth-century Europe, the nuns in a convent at Loudun in France, after witnessing the convulsions and sexual gestures of the Mother Superior, Jeanne des Anges, began to act in a similar manner. This group possession resulted in a mass exorcism, and it led to the execution of a parish priest, Urbain Grandier, in 1634 for having caused their possession by means of witchcraft.

The scripts followed by Catholic and Protestant demoniacs and by the exorcists who tried to dispossess them were different. Catholic demoniacs, for example, were repulsed by the sacraments, especially the Eucharist, which is the most distinctive feature of Catholic sacramental culture. Protestant demoniacs on the other hand often reacted violently to hearing or even seeing a copy of the Bible, which was the foundation of Protestant faith. Catholic exorcists appealed to the Virgin Mary and other saints to help them expel the invasive demons, whereas Protestants, who emphasized the sovereignty of God to whom individuals prayed directly, left that task to God alone. Catholic demoniacs, especially young Catholic women, tended to display unconventional or prohibited sexual behavior during their possessions, whereas Protestants, who did not believe in a hierarchy of moral offenses, exhibited a wide range of sinful activities, including disobedience and playing cards. In more general terms, Catholics emphasized the innocence of demoniacs, whereas Protestants stressed their sinfulness. This helps explain why there were far more Catholic than Protestant demoniacs, since admitting one’s guilt might lead to the assumption that they were predestined to eternal damnation.

The incidence of demonic possession declined notably in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but in the late twentieth century the number of reported cases increased dramatically. Celebrity exorcists in Italy, Poland, and Latin America have been in large part responsible for this increase. The demoniacs who have flocked to these exorcists have not, however, displayed many of the classic symptoms of possession. They have not, for example vomited pins or blasphemed. In most cases they were plagued by medical or psychological problems and have sought the assistance of exorcists who promised to cure them. The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries remain “The Golden Age” of demonic possession.

The Many Histories of South Austin: The Old Sneed Mansion

By Dennis Fisher

You wouldn’t think much of the limestone walls hanging on for dear life as you walked along Bluff Springs to get to the grocery store or the bus stop. Not least because they are set back about thirty feet from the road and concealed by trees. I first heard something about the walls and the Sneed mansion they once supported while walking along the Onion Creek greenbelt in South Austin. “The mansion on the hill was built by slave labor,” a local told me.

I decided to explore for myself on a recent drizzly Sunday. The entire neighborhood, mostly apartment complexes, a few empty lots, and bus stops, has grown up around this small patch of land, which has been just barely “preserved” (given its dilapidated state) by city officials. Walking past the crumbling walls of the Sneed mansion, marked by graffiti and littered with plastic bottles, evokes not only Austin’s past but also a sense of loneliness.

A black and white 1936 photograph of the Sneed House still intact taken by the Historic American Buildings Survey

A 1936 photograph of the Sneed House still intact taken by the Historic American Buildings Survey (Image courtesy of the Library of Congress)

Sebron Sneed Sr. was born in Kentucky in 1802. He spent his early years bouncing around—first in the Missouri militia in 1823 and later in Arkansas practicing law. He married Marinda Atkins of Tennessee in 1824 and they both ended up in Austin, Texas in 1848 after the conclusion of the War on Mexico, making a new home for themselves. They both joined the Pleasant Hill Baptist Church—which still stands today on William Cannon across IH-35. Sebron started the local Democratic Party chapter in 1857. It’s probably not too hard to discern what the Sneed family thought about Texas in the 1850s. Coming from the Appalachian borderlands into newly conquered territory they probably hoped to prosper in a land that would soon expell its Native inhabitants—Tonkawa, Apache, and Comanche peoples around here—and in a place where black slavery was firmly entrenched and outside of the reach of the troublesome former Mexican government as well as the current Federal one—up until 1861, that is, when Lincoln was elected to the presidency. Sebron Sneed Sr. owned 21 people as property in 1860. One of them, Nancy Jane, was purchased by Sneed as “the highest bidder . . . of a certain mulato girl” in Arkansas in 1848 just before he relocated to Texas. We have no idea what Nancy Jane, almost entirely lost to us in the historical record, must have thought, felt, and dreaded–torn from her relatives and brought to a strange land.

Daguerreotype of Marinda Atkins (1809-1878), wife of Sebron Sneed, ca. 1849-1850 in an ornate gold frame

Daguerreotype of Marinda Atkins (1809-1878), wife of Sebron Sneed, ca. 1849-1850 (Image courtesy of Southern Methodist University, Central University Libraries, DeGolyer Library)

The location chosen for Sneed’s mansion still makes good sense. It stands on a hill that lifts slightly to the west but then drops down to where IH-35 currently sits. The land gently slopes downward on all remaining sides. Close by on the north and east sides of the house wind small streams that gently make their way downhill. Limestone, soft and porous, is readily available in this area. All of south Texas (and extending down into Guatemala and Belize) was covered by a shallow sea some sixty million years ago, which left behind as its primary legacy a thick layer of limestone—great for building houses and pyramids as well as collecting and channeling water into natural wells, creeks, and aquifers.

Sneed made his money in the legal profession. His papers, located at the Briscoe Center for American History at The University of Texas, are full of promissory notes from clients. In 1860, he paid fifty dollars in “occupation taxes” as a lawyer. By looking at his tax receipts we find that he owned enslaved people, horses, cattle, and land in Del Valle (just east on Highway 290)—the numbers vary from year to year suggesting he sold people as well. In 1864, he paid his county taxes in kind with 545 bushels of corn. During the war he made money by selling two enslaved men—Peter and Isaac—to Confederate General Magruder for building fortifications at Galveston. If Sebron saw Texas as a promised land, his vision and future rested firmly on the foundation of white supremacy. Furthering that vision, Sneed opened his mansion in south Austin as a recruiting station at the outset of the Civil War and later as a convalescent home for returning wounded soldiers. Both he and his son fought in the war—he as a provost marshall and his son as a captain. Sebron Sr. would die in 1879, at the time engaged in “agricultural pursuits”—the records shed little light on this post-war aspect of his life. He would be buried in the adjoining family cemetery along with his wife, other family members, and “infant Sneed.” After the war, his son moved downtown to Colorado and 3rd and kept busy as a lawyer, acting Comptroller, and later as superintendent of Travis County schools.

Black and white photograph of the second floor fireplace of the Sneed House, 1936

Second floor fireplace of the Sneed House, 1936 (Image courtesy of the Library of Congress)

Today echoes of that era linger in both small and not so subtle ways. Ranch owners along the Onion Creek greenbelt still regularly take their horses out along the trails and locals flock to McKinney Falls to play along the limestone and creeks that crisscross the area. Confederate flags still find a place at rallies at the capitol as well as on t-shirts and pickup trucks. But today south Austin at William Cannon and IH-35 looks very different. Anglo-Americans, African-Americans, Native-Americans, Mexican-Americans, and Mexicans all call this place home. Hispanic Texans constitute the majority of enrolled students in a state that could swing Democratic in a decade or less in a country that has twice elected an African-American to be president. Looking at what remains of the Sneed mansion serves to remind us of the very different histories that have inhabited these places.

If you’d like to learn more about the Sneed family:

A 1982 issue of the Austin Genealogical Society which includes an 1860 letter from Sebron Sneed jr. to his wife

The Sneed House’s city zoning information

A guide to the Briscoe Center’s Sneed family papers

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.

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