20th Century Archives - Not Even Past

Review of No Place Like Nome: The Bering Strait Seen Through Its Most Storied City

Many history books share a lie, not their entirety but a still crucial aspect. They strut and pretend to speak from an authoritative state, authors who know that even a few hundred pages on a topic cannot encompass the multitudes of contexts and perspectives or even the fullness of their research. Pride is often integral to their presentation. Otherwise, what is the point of their existence? And yet, a rebuttal, adjustment, or an alternate take is always in the offing.

Michael Engelhard’s No Place Like Nome is a highbrow raconteur of a read meant for a layperson, though any scholar of Alaska will recognize the significant research underpinnings. Not quite a historical account or an anthropological study, it is instead a woven narrative that seeks to define the Alaska town through snapshots. And it is an honest book for it.

Each of us operates within our various spheres with imperfect knowledge. At best, we possess limited understandings of other people, other systems, and even ourselves. At our worst, there is the utter absence of knowledge, ignorance of context and cultures. Of course, there is no other choice, no other reality to this world. “I don’t know” is the truest sentence ever written, uttered, or thought.

More than most towns, Nome exists partly as myth, particularly as a place understood by the outsider. It is a million things at once to different people at different times. Tall tales from the Gold Rush mix with ancient indigenous culture and the mundanity of everyday modern life. There is no real divide between the present and the past, only shifting quantities of each in uneasy proportions, a weight shifting by moments and preferences. There was indeed gold in the beaches. Dogs of legend like Baldy and Balto and Togo ran here. John Wayne and Willem Dafoe pretended to live here. And there are also people struggling to find proper warm clothing, to scrape a living off the land without time to wonder about how the saloon dancehall ladies did what they did.

Engelhard explicitly acknowledges this uncertainty and does not pretend to a single Nome. Books of that ilk already exist, focused monographs in great numbers and more on their way. In his own words, “I am offering much material of less than earthshaking significance simply to fill in the colors of the personal, the idiosyncratic, or the purely eccentric that too rarely enliven anthropological and historical reconstructions.”

*Eskimo high kick during the July 4th, 1915 celebrations. Library of Congress*

The book’s structure abandons the timeline, bouncing back and forth across the years, between seemingly unrelated topics that share only a geographic proximity. A chapter about the prevalence of jade abuts a yarn about an Italian airship’s demise. A Jesuit priest organizes a football game on King Island, introducing the sport to the middle of the Bering Sea. Locals hunt for precious qiviut (muskox wool).

To be sure, widely recognized characters make passing appearances, from lawman turned saloon proprietor Wyatt Earp to prospector turned author Rex Beach to musher turned Serum Run hero Leonhard Seppala. Bars and gold eventually appear in any sufficiently lengthy Nome narrative, no matter any authorial intent for originality. But there are also fossils, wars ranging from Indigenous to international, drumming, bicycles, and herbalism—both past and contemporary.

*Placer mining on Glacier Creek, 1910. Library of Congress*

Each section is revelatory in its own way, some admittedly more than others. Nome and its gold rush will be more familiar to the average reader than Nome and its reindeer velvet trade. But prospectors and quack male virility supplements exemplify legitimate aspects of this remote outpost. Engelhard willfully ambles through these legacies, histories, cultural detritus, and ongoing capitalistic affairs, revealing the place in much the same way as a literal stroll through the community might. Revelations come in pieces, glances, and curiosities. It is a humble, deeply human approach, denying the possibility of a singular take, offering entertainment and more than occasional enlightenment.

Honesty is neither perfection nor utility, and disparate sampling is not for everyone. Baggage-laden personages, such as missionary educator Sheldon Jackson, photographer Edward Curtis, and geologist-filmmaker Bernard Hubbard, pass uncritically through the narrative. Their relative failings, from cultural genocide to base exploitation, are left to other texts, which is perhaps the intent. The consumer has their choice, between more targeted interventions or the wandering trail laid down by No Place Like Nome.

All books on Alaska must plot their course in relation to the mythos of the territory, whether to accept, contradict, or, more rarely, acknowledge that perception and reality are intimately linked. This choice is particularly relevant in a place like Nome, a town surrounded by older cultures but more often regarded as a relic of a gold rush peak that ended over a century ago. In this way, Engelhard accomplishes what few others have achieved, bridging the lore of a romantically distant Alaska city with the grittier reality of trying to live in an actual place.

David Reamer is a public and academic historian in Anchorage, Alaska. He is the author of a weekly column for the Anchorage Daily News and co-author of the 2022 Black Lives in Alaska.

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.

Converging Roads: Researching and Working at the Forty Acres

I learned a few months ago that the old Star Seeds Café near the UT campus had been demolished, a casualty of the I-35 expansion project. I was sad about this not because I miss the food—the old Star Seeds was always an acquired taste. My sense of loss, rather, has to do with the fact that the Star Seeds Café had been at the nexus of important professional and personal roads for me since my early 20s. And I have never attended the University of Texas as a student or lived in Austin. This requires some explanation…

I am a professional historian. I’ve taught at Portland State University in Oregon, down the highway at Texas A&M University, and, since last fall, have begun what I expect will be my final faculty position at the University of Texas at Austin. So this is an interesting time for me, one of reflection. At the age of 54 after more than three decades of a professional career studying U.S., Mexican American, and Texas history at these other institutions, these days I find myself spending a good deal of time learning how things work at my new university, where to go, and building relationships with a lot of new folks in and out of Garrison Hall.

*Garrison Hall, the University of Texas at Austin. Source: Not Even Past*

As exciting as it is, this newness can also be humbling. For example, I participated in a faculty orientation process before fall classes began. This old dog was eager to learn new tricks. In those training sessions I distinctly remember a presenter chuckling about the first time they experienced the “passing period.” I had no idea why everyone thought this was funny, though context clues told me it involved students leaving class early. Oh well, I thought, each school has its own traditions. I resolved to be on the lookout for this so-called passing period on my teaching schedule, did not see it, and felt relieved—too bad for all those other suckers whose classes abutted this mysterious time! And then on my first day, I found out what it really was and how class times really worked. I had a chuckle…this time at myself. I’ve had additional little, surprising revelations in my new job, none of them quite so foolish. This is all a part of joining a new university, a universal experience for all faculty. And yet, I am in a slightly different position in that I’ve known this place in an entirely different context for decades. In fact, I’ve been coming to the University of Texas at Austin (and the Star Seeds Café) for over 30 years. The road to my historical research runs through this place.

As a historian of U.S., Mexican American, and Texas history, I have visited libraries and other archival repositories all over the country, though none so often and so deeply as the places of learning on this campus. The products of this research are my published books and essays. My first major research project, an extension of my Rice University dissertation, was a study of education policy and bilingualism in Texas schools. This resulted in some published essays in academic journals as well as a book, The Strange Career of Bilingual Education in Texas, 1836–1981 (Texas A&M Press, 2004). My next major project was a biography of the famed University of Texas educator and civil rights advocate, Dr. George I. Sánchez, whose name graces UT’s College of Education building. That project resulted in another book, George I. Sánchez and the Long Fight for Integration (Yale University Press, 2014). All told I’ve authored over 20 essays in books, journals, or magazines and edited one other book, but it is those two major projects that have cemented my longstanding connection to this university and the treasures in its libraries. In all this work I find hidden, obscured voices of the past and bring them to light; I study not just conflict and injustice, but also the passion and joy that infuse those who try to make their worlds better places; I connect the dots between past and present, always believing that our shared future can be positively shaped by studying our shared past. It’s hard not to feel romantic about that mission! For years now, I have experienced those feelings whenever I conduct research. And I’ve had many of those feelings here on the 40 acres.

Book cover for The Strange Career of Bilingual Education in Texas

I find research highly personal. I form a strong emotive connection to the places it takes me. Whether I am spending a week or two in Sleepy Hollow, New York to work in the General Education Board papers, in Nashville, Tennessee to work in the Julius Rosenwald Fund papers, in Pasadena, California at the beautiful Huntington Library, or College Park, Maryland’s mammoth National Archives II facility, each place I visit leaves an imprint. For example, the panoptical monitoring in the reading room at the Rockefeller Archives with constant reminders about breaking the rules of how many pages one can access on one’s desk or how folders are filed back in their containers are as vivid to me as are the New York-style pies from The Horsman, the neighborhood pizzeria, and its views of the spectacular Hudson River. And that was two decades ago.

As a historian with my particular interests in Texas and Mexican American history, most of the sources I need, however, are in Austin and, more specifically, in the libraries here at UT. I started doing work at the Perry-Castañeda Library (PCL) in 1993-94 working on my history MA at nearby Southwest Texas State University in San Marcos (now Texas State University) where I researched the history of higher education expansion in Texas during the 1960s. In the second half of the 1990s my PhD research at Rice University on bilingual education in Texas involved exploring the university’s archival holdings, including the Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library, the Barker Texas History Center (now the Briscoe Center for American History), and the Benson Latin American Center. Since then I have continued to visit these archival repositories (and others in town) for biographical research on the University of Texas faculty member Dr. George I. Sánchez and for other projects.

So UT Austin has been an integral part of my professional life for decades now. What was all this time on campus like? It had a monotonous rhythm that, I’m sure, must seem tedious to anyone without a passion for history. These trips for the past three decades have entailed staying at several hotels, but most often at the I-35 Rodeway Inn near campus for a week or two at a time. This was usually during the summer months. On these trips I would get up early, scarf down a heavy breakfast knowing that I would work through lunch, and hustle across Dean Keaton Street to the Benson, Brisco, or LBJ archives to begin the day’s work as soon as they opened. I worked non-stop until closing time near 5:00 PM.

What scholars actually do in archives might seem mysterious. It’s not really. My day typically involved sifting through hundreds of pages of old documents, including old carbon copies of letters on onionskin paper. Unfortunately this work creates for me a wave of allergy-related ailments ranging from cold-like symptoms to uncomfortable skin rashes. It is a small price to pay for learning about the past as I see it. I try my best to ameliorate the expected physical response by daily prophylactic antihistamine doping, an obsessive regime of handwashing every hour or more, using gloves and masks, and a habit (learned the hard way) of not touching my face with my hands or fingers while handling documents. It may sound like odd workplace behavior, but I’ve often thought of this as equivalent to a professional athlete’s pre-game stretching and taping rituals or a singer’s voice exercises. It is necessary to get the job done. It is a built-in cost rather than a burden.

After being kicked out of the archives at closing time, I would seek an early dinner (and an urgent one due to having skipped lunch) at nearby eateries, which frequently involved the now extinct Star Seeds Café. After dinner I would walk around campus to stretch my legs. Since most of my research happened in the summer, this meant sweltering walks in athletic gear with copious amounts of sunscreen in a mostly empty University of Texas campus. These post-workday walks were solitary. I wandered campus lost in thought about what I learned that day and how it could inform the larger project.

When I was working on the Sánchez biography, I would walk past the education building bearing his name, touch the plaque, and sometimes have a few silent moments in which I reflected about the remarkable human being I was studying who taught oversubscribed courses to decades of UT students all while running his department and quietly organizing groundbreaking civil rights efforts (and suffering consequences for it) from his office in Sutton Hall. My long day of allergy-related symptoms that ended with quiet reflection on hot concrete seemed like a small lift next to Sánchez’s herculean burdens. After these walks, I placed an evening call to my girlfriend who eventually became my spouse and in time these calls also involved our growing children. They punctuated a very long day and lead to a much-needed sleep to prepare for another similarly long day. I can still remember one evening during a two-week research trip in the late 1990s having an evening cheeseburger and a Shiner Bock (or a few…) at the Star Seeds while reading a monograph on early 20^th century anarcho-syndicalism along the U.S.-Mexico border by the dimmed, neon light of the bar. In that moment I was as happy as a lark, doing what I loved, though with enough self-awareness to realize I must have seemed a weird sight to the other bar patrons, who left me to my book.

*A plaque at the entrance to the George I Sánchez Building, the University of Texas at Austin. Source: Not Even Past*

However, these trips to Austin and the University of Texas contained much-needed moments in which the world outside of work joyfully broke up my owlish solitude. In the first half of the 1990s, for example, after my visits to the PCL, I would spend time with a dear cousin. We would have the kind of long chats about life that are such a part of being in one’s early 20s. In those days I also would visit a high school friend who happened to be a Longhorn football player. On one occasion this resulted in my tagging along with some very large guys to a country dance hall off of Ben White Boulevard, one of my few ventures into the famed Austin nightlife. That was fun! By the 2000s I was more personally settled. My Austin trips brought me to visit family who had moved to the area—tias, tios, and primos—at lovely dinners they provided for their vagabond relative temporarily living in a hotel near the interstate. We traded family stories and I would listen, especially to the older generations, to their lived experiences of the very things I was reading about in the archives that day.

Book cover for George I. Sánchez and the Long Fight for Integration

My sense of this campus and city is, in part, also an idealized connection. As the center for intellectual and cultural life in this state, Austin always had a special meaning for me even going back to when I was an aspiring, wannabe teen intellectual living a small South Texas town. And my academic research has always felt as if it were tapping into different parts of my personal history. Going through letters written by a young Lyndon Johnson in the 1920s about teaching Mexican American children at a segregated school brought to mind my mother and her family and the stories they told me. They would have gone to the same kinds of schools from their ranches, farms, and towns in the South Texas brush country of that era; they also would have been as unknowledgeable of the English language as young Lyndon’s students in Cotulla, Texas. For my biography of George I. Sánchez, I could not but help to compare his life and choices to my own as his work gradually revealed itself to me over many years of going through his manuscript collection at the Benson Latin American Center. I even caught myself using his own rhetorical flourishes in my daily emails!

All those experiences, the jumbling of my personal and professional selves that are so firmly rooted to this university, have now evolved. In my early 50s I find myself no longer on the outside looking into an idealized UT, but on the inside looking out in a very real and now lived-in space. Being here regularly means a different kind of connection. Now I can feel the bustle of the university when the students are going to and from class (in the passing period, of course). I now teach my classes and attend meetings in the very buildings that I once only knew as exteriors from my middle-of-summer, sweaty, evening hikes. And I now notice how many things have changed since the 1990s: the campus is more walkable, but less drivable than it once was; the massive Jester parking lot has been replaced by an art museum bearing my surname (no relation); and for the first time ever I got to actually go up “The Tower” for a reception. It was a revelation after so many years staring at it from the outside wondering what it was like on the inside. I am making all-new personal connections to this place, which remains the site of so much of the intellectual odyssey that led me here. My excitement at having new colleagues and students is only enhanced by my sense of how they are deepening and expanding upon those existing memories.

The 40 acres is a special place. For me, it’s a site both familiar and unknown—one that I’m constantly rediscovering as my roads of personal and professional discovery merge in ways I couldn’t have imagined. Sadly I’ll be having these new experiences without the Star Seeds Café, but I’m sure there is plenty more to discover on the converging road ahead.

Dr. Carlos Kevin Blanton is the Barbara White Stuart Professor of Texas History at the University of Texas at Austin in the Department of History. Blanton’s books and articles involve the intersection of Chicana/o history with education, civil rights, immigration, politics, and Texas history. His George I. Sánchez: The Long Fight for Mexican American Integration (Yale University Press, 2014) won the NACCS Best Book Award; The Strange Career of Bilingual Education in Texas, 1836–1981 (Texas A&M University Press, 2004) won the TSHA’s Tulls Award; and the article “The Citizenship Sacrifice: Mexican Americans, the Saunders-Leonard Report, and the Politics of Immigration, 1951–1952” in the Western Historical Quarterly (2009) won the WHA’s Bolton-Cutter Award. He has edited A Promising Problem: The New Chicana/o History (Texas 2016) and published additional articles in professional journals such as the Journal of Southern History, the Pacific Historical Review, the Teacher’s College Record, the Journal of American Ethnic History, and Texas Monthly. Carlos holds a 1999 PhD from Rice University, a 1995 MA from Southwest Texas State University (now Texas State University in San Marcos), and a 1993 BA from Texas A&I University (now Texas A&M University-Kingsville). He has held faculty positions at Portland State University (1999-2001) and at Texas A&M University, College Station (2001-2024) before joining the University of Texas at Austin community in the fall of 2024.

Review of Utopia of the Uniform: Affective Afterlives of the Yugoslav People’s Army, by Tanja Petrović (2024)

Utopia of the Uniform is a powerful book that challenges historians to broaden their approach to the archive and their sources. It asks how affect and feeling can add nuance to our study of the past, significant historical shifts, and the future. When we met for the first time, Tanja Petrović signed my copy with the note, “To David, for all the stories and feelings he will bring to us from the Yugoslav men”. It stuck with me for some time as I wondered what that word, feeling, meant in that context. It confused me as a historian because I had not really been trained to analyze feelings rather than historical fact. However, after reading Utopia of the Uniform I am left with a sense of wonder in seeing how the author showcased the affective afterlives of the Yugoslav People’s Army and how she skillfully wove a web that connected periods of time that have traditionally been shattered in post-conflict discourse.

To what degree is nostalgia useful for a society torn asunder by catastrophe? Perhaps a nostalgia that gazes fondly to a period prior to catastrophe might serve as a metaphorical balm, one that eases the lingering pain for the survivors of violence. Or perhaps it could serve as a temporary escape from a grim reality in which contemporary life is contrasted against life in the past, against the ‘better times’. But where does this nostalgic path lead if not to simple daydreaming? Is it capable of inspiring positive change? Tanja Petrović strives to change how scholarly discourse interacts with nostalgia in her 2024 book, Utopia of the Uniform: Affective Afterlives of the Yugoslav People’s Army.

Petrović views nostalgia as an ineffectual tool of historical analysis and seeks to craft a new frame of reference for temporal progression. As such, she encourages a more nuanced investigation of historical processes and actors in both post-socialist and post-conflict societies. Utopia of the Uniform guides the reader through a nontraditional archive of felt and affective history to showcase how shared memories, photographs, and friendships continue to influence and affect the lived experience of individuals and collectives in the lands that now make up the former Yugoslavia.

To accomplish this, the author foregrounds her study in the past and present lives of male Yugoslav conscripted soldiers. By analyzing a rich archive of personal narratives, interviews, soldiers’ photography, as well as other forms of artistic and documentary expression, she claims that this archive of felt and affective history inherently possesses its own agency; an agency that Petrović argues is capable of dismantling the limitations of hegemonic ethnic binaries that politicians exploit to keep a grip on power. It is these limitations that have kept the region of the former Yugoslavia and its history wrapped “in an ethnic straightjacket” (p. 178) by binding it to the traumatic destruction of the 1990s. A time period when the fall of state socialism coincided with the rise of nationalist politicians into power (such as Serbia’s Slobodan Milošević and Croatia’s Franjo Tuđman). This shift saw warmongering nationalism call for a dramatic reorientation of society that violently bifurcated Yugoslavia’s rich ethnic and religious diversity practically at every level. By the end of the decade the wars in Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo would kill hundreds of thousands, displace millions, and destroy the social and physical infrastructure of the country. Petrović tells us that this profound pain created limiting ethnic binaries that keep this region chained to a destructive past.

Slobodan Milošević, former President of Serbia and President of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, 1988.
Source: Wikimedia Commons

That past, however, did not begin at the end of the 20th century. Petrović argues that the ideological motivations found within Yugoslav socialism and the way its distinctive federal system was structured allowed for the potential of a utopian perspective. The Yugoslav socialist project after World War II could be seen as unique because of the Yugoslav Partisans’ National Liberation Struggle and their self-led victory over fascist occupation. A new understanding of Yugoslavism that “acknowledged and approved enduring separate nationhoods and sought federal and other devices for a multinational state of related peoples with shared interests and aspirations” (p. 23) emerged after the war. As a result of the mass intercommunal and ethnicized violence of World War II, the new Yugoslav movement made Brotherhood and Unity (Bratstvo i jedinstvo) one of its defining pillars of legitimacy. Thus, a system that sought peace and cooperation among Croats, Serbs, Bosnian Muslims, Kosovar Albanians, Slovenians, Macedonians, and others. The JNA and the accompanying mandatory universal male conscription was a key piece of the unifying project to create Yugoslavs.

The story that Tanja Petrović tells across the book’s nine chapters (including one interlude and an epilogue) is situated along temporal lines that are not limited to narrow linear boundaries. Her narrative examines how forces of the past interacted with each other along a trajectory that moved toward an ideal future, a future that historical actors dreamt would come to fruition. However, as a result of the catastrophic violence and destruction seen in the 1990s during the Yugoslav Wars of Succession, those hopes or utopian ideals and the temporal continuum upon which they progressed was shattered. Therefore, ideal futures that were not only possible but imminent were lost forever, while this rupture forced the former soldiers and their loved ones in Petrović’s study to be left adrift (during the period she coins as the ‘event-aftermath’) in a hostile world where arbitrary ethnic or religious affiliation determines life or death, belonging or ostracization, or prosperity or neglect.

On the left: A map of Yugoslavia, 1990; On the right: Former Yugoslavia during War, a snapshot of the front lines, 1992.
Source: Wikimedia Commons (L), Wikimedia Commons (R)

On the left: A map of Yugoslavia, 1990; On the right: Former Yugoslavia during War, a snapshot of the front lines, 1992.
Source: Wikimedia Commons (L), Wikimedia Commons (R)

Even three decades after the wars’ end this rupture still dictates how life in what was once Yugoslavia is lived and perceived. Petrović argues that the citizens of the states that emerged out of the the corpse of the Socialist Federal Republic (SFR) of Yugoslavia (the republics include Slovenia, Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Montenegro, North Macedonia and Kosovo) live in neo-fascistic and highly ethnicized societies. Within this post-war world people face a grim present, one in which continuous governmental neglect for peoples’ livelihoods, a general disregard for their safety, and rampant corruption offers no hope for a better future. The author centers an unlikely hero in her story to serve as a utopia of hopeful thought forged in the past and lived in the present: the institution of the Yugoslav Peoples’ Army (JNA) and universal conscription of Yugoslav males for one year of military service. Utopia of the Uniform brings forth a potent contribution in that it is paradoxically within the enclosed barbed-wired bases of one of the most strict, disciplined, and conservative institutions resistant to change in SFR Yugoslavia where utopia could be found.

The bases where these soldiers served became key locations for a utopia, not necessarily because life there was perfect; in fact, Petrović discusses throughout her work that many young men felt that the army was robbing them of a year of their youth when the world was at their feet. The idea of going to someplace far away from your home, a base that was isolated from urban centers, to be molded into a good soldier with domineering discipline constantly watching your every move understandably was a source of frustration for many young Yugoslav conscripts. However, the early foundational leadership of the JNA in the postwar era intentionally designed this feature of the military in order to take Yugoslavs from all different ethnic, religious, social, and educational backgrounds and send them to serve somewhere far away from the region in which they were raised. This had the significant effect of intermingling the whole male population with people who might have been different, thus institutionally reinforcing the idea of Brotherhood and Unity in the country’s fighting force. It was in these bases where JNA soldiers forged bonds, memories, and deep friendships with their comrades in arms that would last a lifetime, especially forging strong ties with people of different ethnicities.

Welcoming Tito in Pirot, 29 September 1965
Source: Wikimedia Commons

Petrović utilizes the affective feeling of these soldiers to shatter the restrictive ethnic binary that has held the Ex-Yugoslav region in a chokehold since the 1990s. Through her gripping narrative that bridges Yugoslav times, the rupture of violence, and the eventual event-aftermath, the author colors significant nuance and elaboration into the picture of the (post)socialist and post-conflict society. Utopia of the Uniform demonstrates that the friendships and positive remembrance of former JNA soldiers’ time in military service take on what the author defines as an ‘affective afterlife,’ that is a phenomenon that lives on inspiring happiness, hope, or a fondness in the present despite unimaginable trauma. Additionally, Petrović significantly diversifies and debunks the dominating ethnic narratives that local politicians have hijacked to dictate that ethnic homogenization is the only viable path forward for the successor states.

Utopia of the Uniform demonstrates that the desires of good will and the strong friendship between soldiers of one background to their army buddies of another ethnic background refute the divisive propaganda that stubbornly lives on from the 1990s. The book articulates how the unique context of Yugoslav socialism and the philosophy of Workers’ Self-Management created an “infrastructure for feelings,” or a new social organization that “makes possible responsible decision-making under conditions of interdependency, mutual social responsibility, and solidarity, and that leads to the liberation of individuals.” (p. 189) Petrović argues that this system, despite its flaws, provided space for people to create their own dreams of utopia of the future. This utopia, found in the past within JNA bases across what used to be Yugoslavia, possesses an affective afterlife for the people who survived the 1990s and still offers them happiness, fond remembrance, and even a glimpse of hope for the future.

David Castillo is a doctoral student at the University of Texas at Austin, focusing on the former communist Yugoslavia and its successor states. His research explores the links between inter-communal violence, toxic masculinity, gender dynamics, propaganda, and mass manipulation. With academic foundations from the University of Texas at El Paso and Indiana University, David combines cultural history with international politics. Drawing from his experience in the region, he aims to compare post-Yugoslav masculinity shaped by the 1990s wars with Chicano/a/e ‘Machismo’ in Mexican-American borderlands, investigating how violence becomes integral to both identities.

Review of Zhivago’s Children: The Last Russian Intelligentsia, by Vladislav Zubok (2009)

banner image for Review of Zhivago’s Children: The Last Russian Intelligentsia, by Vladislav Zubok

Zhivago’s Children is a thorough account of the experiences of Russian intellectuals who formed the Soviet Union’s second-generation intelligentsia. The book’s primary strength lies in the author’s nuanced depictions of the interactions between Moscow intelligentsia and the changing political environment. Drawing extensively from memoirs and interviews of its members, Zubok points out that these intellectuals remained vocal advocates of reformist socialism for most of the Soviet era, contrary to common stereotypes that portray them as anti-Soviet dissidents. As writers, artists, and scientists in prestigious social positions active in post-Stalin Russia, their life experiences were entangled with the course of Soviet history, contributing to the growth of state power, advocating reform in times of political turbulence, willingly or not, undermining the Soviet system in its last decade, and finally, fading in the post-collapse turmoil. Their rich Russian culture and humanist ideals shaped the universe of Zubok’s parents and his upbringing. Thus, more than a genuine scholarly project, this book is also an homage paid to a past etched in memory.

A major contribution of the book lies in its convincing depiction of a constructed socialist affinity among the second generation of Soviet intelligentsia, whom the title Zhivago’s Children refers to — a term borrowed from Boris Pasternak’s Nobel Prize-winning novel, Doctor Zhivago. It traces this back to the Stalinist education and complex experiences of World War II, strict cultural control and dogmatization under the influence of hardcore Stalinist official Andrei Zhdanov, and antisemitic persecution in the last days of the dictator. In so doing, Zubok reveals the material and ideological background that shaped the generations’ socialist and reformist inclinations, which contributed to the intelligentsia’s ambivalent sentiment and changing affinity to the regime in the Khrushchev years (1953-1964), resonating with his volatile cultural policies. This forms the core of his chapters.

The historical perspective maintained by Zubok crucially permits a fascinating exploration of the hybrid culture that emerged from this intelligentsia: the embrace of Western culture coexisted with the antagonism against capitalism, while criticisms of Soviet bureaucracy coexisted with an aspiration for genuine, “humane” socialism. To be sure, this generation of intelligentsia had diversified entering the 1960s, seeing the growth of liberals and the Russian nationalists. Yet, as Zubok points out, the deeply rooted socialist affinity only collapsed in 1968, when the Soviet Union forcefully ended the Prague Spring—a lethal disillusionment at the zenith of a global atmosphere of leftist change. In his view, dissidents, the conventional focus of liberal narratives, only played a contributing role in the course of history instead of the pioneering one.

*Soviet tanks and soldiers at Hradčany Square to suppress the Prague Spring. Source: Wikimedia Commons*

What deserves greater attention in assessing Zhivago’s Children, however, is the unparalleled historical significance the author placed on the pivotal turn of 1968. It seems that for Zubok, more than a disillusionment of one generation of intelligentsia amongst many, the crackdown of Prague Spring marked the decline of the last Russian intelligentsia in general. This can be seen clearly in the book’s arrangement. As if writing in haste, the author condenses the long decade from 1968 to 1985 into a single chapter, ominously titled “The Long Decline,” followed by the epilogue, “The End of the Intelligentsia.” Given that he devotes seven chapters to the years between 1956 and 1968, one has to ask, why is it so?

In the book’s conclusion, the author summarized its story as the struggle of intellectuals to “regain autonomy from an autocratic regime.” Nonetheless, an answer to the above question may lie in the author’s implicit theme: the tense yet unbroken and mutually dependent relationship between the Soviet regime and the Russian intelligentsia. Whilst the intelligentsia maintained a critical stance against the state and pursued high culture, the Stalinist and post-Stalinist systems were essential for their survival because they provided social privileges, economic benefits, proper education, incorporation into the field of power, and a dream of searching for a utopian society. In short, those “Zhivago’s Children” may be critical to the autocratic regime precisely because they were constituents of it. Just as the author notes, “the preoccupations and aspirations in the intellectual milieu remained essentially non-capitalistic.” This significant irony of history became most apparent at the end of the USSR: when the intelligentsia finally envisioned its revival in the reformist-minded Gorbachev, the lifting of censorship in the glasnost tore the system apart, as with the dreams and livelihoods of millions of intellectuals. On top of the corpse of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic now stood a new capitalist Russia, whose ruthless force of the market left little place for “Zhivago’s Children.” Thus, as the book’s subtitle suggests, they were the “last Russian intelligentsia.”

*Mikhail Gorbachev, the last General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Moscow, October 1991. Source: Wikimedia Commons*

This tragic downfall of “Zhivago’s Children” raised my expectations for a more profound reflection on the characteristics of this generation of intellectuals and, moreover, on the cultural and ideological system of the Soviet Union. This can be formulated as two preliminary sets of questions. First, what was the relationship between this intelligentsia and the broader Soviet masses? To what extent did these socialist intellectuals identify with the people? Or did they see themselves as a privileged group, de facto distant from the rest of the population? Second, what were the theoretical and ideological implications behind the humanist ideals of “Zhivago’s Children?” This deserves particular attention if one attempts to situate the “genuine” Marxist intelligentsia mentioned by the author in the conflict between humanist and structural Marxists (e.g., Louis Althusser) in the 1960s, where the latter tried to correct the perceived humanist distortion of Marxist theories that emerged with Khruschev’s denunciation of Stalin’s guilt. Unfortunately, Zubok does not explore either of these two topics, likely due to his deep commitment to the stories and values of “Zhivago’s Children.”This dedication leaves little room for critical reflection on their potential theoretical shortcomings or intellectual elitism. Considering the subject matter of this book, I think the above problems are more serious and intriguing as well than other issues, such as the author’s reliance on memoirs.

In sum, Zhivago’s Children is an exciting but problematic read. As a nuanced chronological intellectual history, it deserves high praise. The author, Zubok, is no doubt passionate about his subject. However, perhaps because of his strong opinions, several vital topics remain regrettably unexplored, which means that readers should approach this book critically.

Shutong Wang (王庶同) was born and raised in China. He earned a B.A. in History at McGill University and is currently a PhD student at the University of Texas at Austin. He studies the social movements of the 1950s, with a particular focus on the interactions between grassroots communities in Modern and Contemporary China.

The Weak and the Powerful: Omar Torrijos, Panama, and the Non-Aligned Movement in the World (IHS Book Talk)

Dr. Jonathan Brown, emeritus professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin, followed an unconventional path to academia. Following a master’s degree in history at the University of Arizona, he received a commission in the Army R.O.T.C. program. Brown served as a lieutenant in the Panama Canal Zone from 1968 to 1970. Later promoted to captain, he completed his final tour of duty in Thailand in 1971 before enrolling in the history doctoral program at UT-Austin. His first book, A Socioeconomic History of Argentina (1979), won the Bolton Prize for the best book in English on Latin American history. Over his career, Brown has published six books. Spanning centuries and continents, his scholarship explores labor, nationalism, and revolution among other themes

In October 2024, the Institute for Historical Studies hosted a book talk for Dr. Brown’s latest publication, The Weak and the Powerful: Omar Torrijos, Panama, and the Nonaligned Movement in the World. This most recent work reflects the contours of his career—both within and outside academia. His initial exposure to Panama and General Torrijos began when he was stationed in the Southern Command from 1968 to 1970. However, Dr. Brown would not undertake a study of the canal until nearly five decades later. The impetus was another project. His 2017 book, Cuba’s Revolutionary World, traced the Cuban Revolution’s influence on hemispheric affairs and ultimately renewed his interest in the Canal Zone. Where Cuba’s Revolutionary World de-centers the United States and focuses on Cuban foreign policy, The Weak and the Powerful positions Panama as a critical yet understudied player in regional politics.

Book cover of The Weak and the Powerful: Omar Torrijos, Panama, and the Non-Aligned Movement in the World

The Weak and the Powerful opens with a provocative question: “How does a small country, without resort to war, convince a great power to give back valuable real estate?” This framing shifts the focus away from traditional spheres of influence in Cold War studies. During his talk, Brown shared that he aimed to write about imperialism while focusing on its victims. The Weak and the Powerful largely succeeds in centering Panama, although this history filters through the biography of the nation’s strongman. The United States and its political leaders remain on the periphery of this transnational study. Instead, the book devotes considerable attention to Panama’s relations with the Global South and members of the Non-Aligned Movement. General Torrijos proactively engaged these countries to build solidarity and to unite many “weak” powers against the United States. “He made it difficult for American diplomats to engage with international organizations without living up to their own democratic principles,” concludes Brown.

Picture of Omar Torrijos photographed in the countryside with Panamanian farmers — *Omar Torrijos with Panamanian farmers. Source: Wikimedia Commons*

Omar Torrijos, who took power through a military coup in 1968, successfully negotiated an end to nearly a century of U.S. occupation of the Canal Zone. Remarkably, he did so not through force but through negotiation. For this accomplishment, Brown argues that “the Panamanian strongman deserves a study of international dimensions” (7). Thus, The Weak and the Powerful devotes considerable attention to Torrijos’ biography. The author traces the dictator’s rise through the Panamanian National Guard, which offered economic and social mobility to many Panamanians. Perhaps surprising to many readers, military service also provided Torrijos with “a greater sense of social inequities in the mountains, plains, and jungles of the nation” (24). The dictator came to see himself as a progressive, championing issues of social justice and offering a reformist domestic agenda.

Black and white picture of General Omar Torrijos and with President Carter. — *General Omar Torrijos with President Carter [Panama Treaty]. Source: Library of Congress*

Inclusionary policies and social reforms allowed Torrijos to cultivate popular support and to consolidate his power. Brown also maintains that the Torrijos regime made scant use of repression in contrast to other Latin American dictatorships of the era. Ultimately, this leadership style allowed Torrijos to hold power as long as it took to sign the Panama Canal Accords. Illuminating this history, The Weak and the Powerful offers a compelling reexamination of Panama’s role in hemispheric politics. The book highlights Torrijos’ strategic use of international alliances to pressure the United States into granting historic concessions. This achievement came at a time of significant U.S. intervention in Latin America—an irony that reinforces Brown’s larger argument that “no model of international relations can explain [Torrijos’] accomplishments” (269). Ultimately, Dr. Brown’s return to the Panama Canal offers a fresh perspective on treaty negotiations and enriches existing Cold War historiography.

Gabrielle Esparza is a Ph.D. candidate in Latin American history, with a focus on twentieth-century Argentina. Her dissertation examines the evolution of President Raúl Alfonsín’s human rights policies from his candidacy to his presidency in post-dictatorship Argentina. At the University of Texas at Austin, Gabrielle has served as a graduate research assistant at the Texas State Historical Association and as co-coordinator of the Symposium on Gender, History, and Sexuality in 2020-2021. Gabrielle was also Associate Editor and Communications Director of Not Even Past from 2021-2022. Currently, Gabrielle works as a graduate research assistant in the Institute for Historical Studies and as an Editorial Assistant for The Americas: A Quarterly Review of Latin American History.

Chuco Punk: Sonic Insurgency in El Paso (IHS Book Talk)

On September 30, 2024, Dr. Tara López, Assistant Professor of Ethnic Studies at Winona State University, presented her new book, Chuco Punk: Sonic Insurgency in El Paso, at the Institute for Historical Studies. Part of The University of Texas Press’ American Music Series, the book traces El Paso’s influential Chicanx punk rock scene from its evolution in the 1970s through the early 2000s. López uses ‘Chuco punk’ as a lens to explore broader political, social, and cultural forces in the borderlands.[1] In doing so, she reveals how this music scene reflected a longer history of cultural and musical resistance among El Paso’s predominantly Chicanx community.

Chuco Punk is deeply embedded in the cultural and geographical specificity of El Paso, a city marked by the realities of militarization and segregation along the U.S.-Mexico border. “Dr. López’s work is impressively propulsive—weaving her expertise as a sociologist, a musicologist, and a transnational historian,” praises Dr. Annette Rodriguez, Assistant Professor of History at UT-Austin. “She elevates late-20th century El Paso, Texas, and Ciudad Juárez to their proper historical significance by documenting this long insurgent sonic landscape.” As Dr. Rodriguez notes, López explores how El Paso’s punk music scene created an outlet for marginalized voices while also responding to the wider social and political environment.

Punks in El Paso found ways to create their own space, sound, and community outside mainstream venues by staging shows in backyards and mechanic shops. The DIY and underground spirit of the scene often garnered dismissive attitudes. Bobby Welch, a concert promoter interviewed by López, recalled feeling that many people dismissed punk musicians as “stupid people who [couldn’t] play two chords.” However, Chuco Punk upends that narrative, showing that these El Paso artists forged a platform to vent frustrations and express solidarity while also pushing back against broader social expectations. By taking these musicians seriously, López emphasized that punk music in El Paso was more than just a rebellious subculture. The genre was also a form of political memory and protest.

López’s research draws on over seventy interviews with punks as well as unarchived materials, such as flyers, zines, photographs, and other ephemera. For the punks of El Paso, personal collections became informal archives. They carefully preserved their own history, which challenges the conventional narrative that punk music is predominately white and male. López’s work resists this framing. Instead, she illustrates how Chicanx women, in particular, carved out their own space within the punk scene.

Alongside these unarchived materials, oral histories serve as the backbone of López’s historical research. However, she initially faced some hesitation within the punk community, whose members were wary of academics seeking to document their story. This skepticism—rooted in the sense that punk itself was never taken seriously by mainstream culture—eventually gave way to rich collaboration. In gaining the punk community’s trust, López is able to elevate marginalized voices and materials by drawing on their rich, informal archives.

Ultimately, López offers more than a history of punk music in El Paso. She also challenges scholars to rethink their assumptions about what sources, archives, and communities are worthy of academic study. In her presentation, she recounted stories of fellow scholars who framed her research as “fun” or “a hobby.” Pushing back, she argued that these attitudes marginalize important narratives and constrain academic scholarship. The power of centering communities at the periphery became apparent during the talk’s question and answer session. Multiple attendees, themselves from El Paso, became emotional as they thanked López for telling the story of their community. Their reactions demonstrate the project’s ability to awaken and animate historical memory. Chuco Punk thus opens new possibilities for how we think about archives, memory, and the role of subcultures in shaping broader historical narratives.

SBITCH – Onion Street, Austin, TX 2000. Video of local punk band discussed in book.

Sicteens, August 27, 1996 at The Attic. Video of local punk band discussed in book.

[1] El Chuco is a common nickname for El Paso. Scholars attribute the term’s origins to the pachuco subculture that originated in El Paso in the 1920s. Pachucos were particularly well-known for their jargon and style, which included ‘zoot suits.’ See Dictionary of Chicano Folklore (2000)by Rafaela G. Castro for more on this term.

5 Books I recommend from Comps: The History of Psychedelics

Banner - 5 books I recommend from comps. By Timmy Vilgiate.

The therapeutic potentials of substances commonly known as “psychedelics”—drugs like psilocybin, lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), and mescaline—have received increasingly favorable coverage in newspapers and TV programs around the world in recent years. Although it was by a relatively small margin, the state of Colorado decriminalized several psychedelic molecules as “natural medicines” through a 2022 ballot initiative; the 2023 conference of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies in Denver featured appearances by NFL quarterback Aaron Rodgers and former Texas governor Rick Perry. In his 2018 New York Times best-seller How to Change your Mind, Author Michael Pollan describes the revival of interest in these substances as a “psychedelic renaissance”.

Those who embrace this optimistic interpretation of recent trends argue that the mainstream acceptance of psychedelics through patented, carefully regulated treatment models (“containers” in the words of Pollan) has beneficial implications for humanity as a whole. The benefits of the so-called “psychedelic renaissance”, have not been equally distributed, however. Indigenous activists at the aforementioned 2023 MAPS conference interrupted the proceedings to criticize the ways in which the processes of patenting and commodifying psychedelic medicines reinforce pre-existing power structures. Patent claims to therapies involving psilocybin, mescaline, dimethyltrypatmine, or ibogaine often build on the work of generations of Indigenous medical practitioners. In the case of lab-born substances like LSD or ketamine, companies borrow techniques and insights developed outside of institutional settings by underground therapists in the years following the global crackdown on psychedelics in the 1970s.

History plays an important role in the debates surrounding reciprocity, justice, and equity in the emerging psychedelics industry. As indicated by the success of Pollan’s book and its Netflix adaptation, a popular demand for information on the topic has grown in recent years. Unfortunately, much of the literature available on the history of psychedelics relies on a more-or-less standardized list of anecdotes and episodes, usually focused on white, US American or European men: Albert Hofmann, R. Gordon Wasson, or Timothy Leary. Stories of these figures have been told so many times that authors will often assume the reader has already heard them if they have read other books on psychedelics, and may hesitate to deviate from a standard retelling, however. A wide range of other historical actors ends up left out, providing a shallow understanding of these substances. The academic historiography of drugs also often accepts these anecdotes at face value do to their ability to provide globally oriented surveys with coverage of “halluciogens”, substances that otherwise fits uncomfortably into theoretical models used to understand stimulants and depressants. The books that I highlight in this essay expand the chronology and scope of the history of psychedelics to examine actors, episodes, and substances that have otherwise received little attention.

Glauber Loures de Assis, Clancy Cavnar, Beatriz Caiuby Labate, Ibrahim Gabriell, Erika Dyck, Patrick Farrell, eds. Women in Psychedelics: Uncovering Invisible Voices (Santa Fe: Synergetic Press, 2024).

Banner of Women in Psychedelics: : Uncovering Invisible Voices (Santa Fe: Synergetic Press, 2024) for 5 Books I recommend from Comps

The edited volume Women in Psychedelics, published last year, features 44 short chapters by academics and independent researchers highlighting “some of the diverse and impressive contributions women have made to our understanding of psychedelics.” Selections range from pieces focusing on the wives of well-known researchers—Rosemary Leary, Valentina Pavolvna Wasson, and Jane Osmond—to chapters examining women’s work as lab assistants, patients, and therapists. While some of the more biographical chapters take on a kind of memorializing tone, the section “The Limits of Feminism” explores some more challenging themes, such as the problem of sexual abuse within ayahuasca communities. One chapter in this section that stood out to me, written by PhD candidate Taylor Dysart from the University of Pennsylvania, argues that historians, “must go beyond merely recovery to reconstructing these histories in all their messiness and intricacy.” Dysart connects the work of anthropologist Marlene Dobkin de Rios among Indigenous and mestizo communities in Peru to discourses within the history of science surrounding the relationship between science and coloniality.

Benjamin Breen. Tripping on Utopia: Margaret Mead, the Cold War, and the Troubled Birth of Psychedelic Science (New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2024).

Banner of: Tripping on Utopia: Margaret Mead, the Cold War, and the Troubled Birth of Psychedelic Science (New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2024) for 5 Books I recommend from Comps

The 2024 book Tripping on Utopia by UT alumni Benjamin Breen also draws the historiography of psychedelics into greater conversation with themes of both gender and sexuality, by studying the work of bisexual anthropologist Margaret Mead and her third husband Gregory Bateson. Mead’s long-standing relationship with her colleague Ruth Benedict and her unpublished criticisms of hegemonic gender binaries are not reduced to background information but are shown to have played an important role in shaping her interests in altered states of consciousness and eventually psychedelics. Besides aligning with the goals of Women in Psychedelics, the book’s also makes an important intervention in the historiography by expanding the standard chronology of psychedelics beyond the 1950s and 1960s. Breen underscores the often overlooked role of interest among anthropologists in the years following World War I in trance states and shamanism among Indigenous peoples around the world, linking their interests to a wider sociopolitical context. He draws attention, for instance, to links in “the midcentury scientific imagination” between the discovery of sex hormones like estrogen and psychedelics, “due to the perception that these two categories of drugs, uniquely, had the ability to reshape one’s core identity.” This intervention into the historiography allows for a better understanding of how these substances can fit into standard models of drug history, which tend to focus on the overarching power structures and interest groups involved in drug prohibition and, alternatively, commodification.

Erika Dyck and Chris Elcock, eds. Expanding Mindscapes: A Global History of Psychedelics (Boston: MIT University Press, 2023).

Banner of: Expanding Mindscapes: A Global History of Psychedelics (Boston: MIT University Press, 2023)

The prominence of the “great men of science”-centered narratives as reference points for the history of psychedelics as a whole not only tends to exclude the roles of women and LGBTQ+ people, but also can reinforce an entrenched Americentrism within the literature. Erika Dyck of the University of Saskatchewan, one of the editors for Women in Psychedelics, along with independent researcher Chris Elcock, attempt to address this problem through the edited volume Expanding Mindscapes, which was published in 2023 by MIT University Press. Contributions highlight the history of ergot cultivation in Switzerland (used to produce LSD), the use of iboga by followers of the Bwiti religion in west Central Africa, and the popularization of ayahuasca in China. By understanding the history of psychedelic science on a more transnational scale, the book contributes a better understanding of the global power structures and inequalities involved in the present-day mainstreaming and commodification of psychedelic substances. The topics and themes explored by the various contributors have received little attention elsewhere, providing multiple promising jumping-off points for future researchers.

Joseph Patteson. Drugs, Violence, and Latin America: Global Psychotropy and Culture (New York: Springer, 2022).

Banner of: Drugs, Violence, and Latin America: Global Psychotropy and Culture (New York: Springer, 2022)

Joseph Patteson’s book Drugs, Violence and Latin America: Global Psychotropy and Culture similarly approaches psychedelics within the context of global power structures. Providing a theoretical synthesis of significant value to the historiography of drugs as a whole, he understands altered states of consciousness in terms of a dialectical relationship between two modalities. He links a “xenotropic” modality of intoxication (implying the “opening of the self to the other”) to psychedelics, on the opposite end of a spectrum from drugs like cocaine, connecting such substances to what he refers to as “narcocissism”, (intensifying the perception of the self through the “radical exclusion of the other”). By building on the concepts of psychotropy, he links the cultural discourses and forms involved in the use of drugs to the politics of consciousness more broadly, highlighting in particular the xenotropic and narcocisstic potentialities of literature. The book places the depictions of drugs in Latin America—whether the peyote-inspired writings of French poet Antonin Artaud or contemporary descriptions of the War on Drugs in Latin America—into the context of transnational power structures. While the theoretical orientation of the book may be intimidating to a non-academic audience, it provides valuable insight into not only the discourses around psychedelics, but into broader issues regarding drugs and US relationships with Latin America.

Citlali Rodriguez Venegas. Mazatecos, Niños Santos y Güeros en Huautla de Jiménez (México: UNAM, 2017).

Banner of: Mazatecos, Niños Santos y Güeros en Huautla de Jiménez (México: UNAM, 2017)

Finally, the book Mazatecos, niños santos, y güeros en Huautla de Jiménez by Citlali Rodríguez Venegas examines the history of a city in the Sierra de Flores Magón (Sierra Mazateca) in Northern Oaxaca, the place where US American amateur ethnomycologist R. Gordon Wasson was photographed participating in a “magic mushroom” velada led by the Mazatec curandera (chjóon chijne) María Sabina for Life magazine in 1955. A long list of inaccuracies have long gone unchallenged in retellings of this episode—though discussing the flood of hippies into the Sierra prompted by Wasson’s article often serves as one of the few steps outside a narrative otherwise focused on the United States. In general, a monolithic and overly simplistic understanding of the historical context of Huautla de Jiménez has often prevailed. Building off of a combination of ethnohistorical and archival research, Rodríguez Venegas destabilizes dominant understandings of Huautla as an “isolated village”, while also drawing attention to the diversity of Indigenous responses and adaptations to the arrival of outsiders in the pueblo. Notably, the book also avoids casting the “hippies” who arrived in the 1960s as a homogenous bloc of outsiders, shining light on their diverse motivations and relationships with Indigenous people. Often authors lean into a black-and-white analysis of this history, denying Indigenous agency by casting them monolithically as victims, without considering the wider historical context of Huautla de Jiménez itself. Overall, Rodríguez offers a valuable and nuanced account of a story that many of the most popular books on psychedelics largely take for granted.

Timmy Vilgiate (they/them) earned their MA at the University of Colorado Colorado Springs, and is currently in the 5th year of the PhD program in History at UT Austin. Their research looks at the relationship between assimilationist development projects and the study of psychedelic flora in the Sierra Mazateca from the late 19th Century to the mid-20th Century. Outside of history, they also enjoy playing music, sewing, and spending time with their cat Pedro.

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.

Abolitionist and Civil War Chronicler: The Unique Perspective of the Thomas Jackson Letters

Thomas Jackson’s story has been largely untold, but the record he left behind demands historical analysis. His erudite letters have much to contribute to our understanding of the abolitionist movement, the evolution of attitudes to race, and everyday experiences of the U.S. Civil War. Jackson’s status as a British immigrant also provides us with an added analytical layer in which to view American abolition, race, and the Civil War in a transnational context.[1] In this article, I introduce the Thomas Jackson Collection and what we can learn from it.

Following in his father’s footsteps, Thomas Jackson, whose life came to be absorbed by the spirited abolitionist movement of his day, became a successful rope-making trader not long after his relocation to America, circa 1829. His father, John Jackson, who “suffered persecution of a year’s imprisonment and three times in the pillory for what he spoke and published in the cause of the revolted colonies,” served as a consistent moral compass for his son.

Born into England’s working class, Thomas Jackson admired the newly christened American Republic.[2] Although he knew, by his own account, next to nothing about slavery in America before he emigrated there, Jackson found his spiritual calling in political activism—abolitionism, in particular.

Jackson’s path to American politics was far from linear. Born on December 7 1805, Thomas grew up in the rural town of Ilkeston, roughly fifty miles northeast of Birmingham. There he was raised, along with six siblings, by working-class parents and likely received no more than a basic education. Despite his modest upbringing, by the time he passed away in Reading, Pennsylvania in 1878, he came to be known more for his impassioned abolitionist work than for the trade he was born into.

Jackson empathized with the anti-slavery cause after witnessing the stunning inhumanity of an American slave market. Because of this, he supported the Union when the war broke out, hoping that the terrible violence would at least serve a worthy purpose: bringing an end to slavery. In October 1862, with the war grinding on perhaps longer than anticipated, Thomas wrote that “the traitors [i.e. the confederate states] have now [received] fair warning; that if they do not lay down their arms by Jan. 1. 1863. slavery will be abolished in all rebellious states and districts…I most devoutly pray that they may continue obstinate…That is now the only hope for freedom every were [sic] in the United States.”[3]

Image of the original Thomas Jackson letter to the editor. All scans are reproduced with permission from the owner. — *Images of the original letter to the editor. All scans are reproduced with permission from the owner.*

Image of the original Thomas Jackson letter letter to the editor. All scans are reproduced with permission from the owner.

Judging by his letters alone, it’s clear that Thomas Jackson embraced abolitionism as a core part of his identity. By extension, he considered himself a purist when it came to honoring the “free principles and republican government” for which the United States ostensibly stood.[4]

Because values like individual liberty and freedom of expression transcended national borders, it mattered little to him that he was born in England and, therefore, lived in the United States as an immigrant.

The collection

These strongly-held ideals shine through in almost every letter and newspaper editorial that make up the bulk of the Thomas Jackson Collection. His reports on slavery and the Civil War have been painstakingly transcribed, organized, and curated to offer historians a rare glimpse into a unique abolitionist who was entangled in both American and British politics. While the original letters are now safely housed in the Library of Congress’ Manuscript Division, their digitized copies are fully accessible online thanks to the efforts made by Jackson’s descendant, John Paling, and his team, to organize and digitize the collection.[5]

The Civil War and the nineteenth-century abolitionist movement have of course been studied in depth. Many of these studies take a top-down perspective. Thomas Jackson’s collection of letters provides a valuable and much-needed grassroots perspective. It is rare to find source material written from Jackson’s vantage point, that is letters penned by someone from a working-class background who also understood the value of recording and commenting on the magnitude of his historical moment: America’s mid-nineteenth-century political crisis.

Jackson arrived in the United States in 1829. Still in his twenties, he held an idealized view of the country that would soon be complicated by his encounter with the brutalities of slavery and violent division. Like other immigrants, he primarily sought fresh opportunities that had been closed off to him in his home country. In this case, his father’s political imprisonment drove the family to bankruptcy.[6] As such, Thomas and his brother Edward suffered from meager resources once setting foot on the American continent. Despite the initial challenges, he and his brother managed to secure their footing in Reading, Pennsylvania, by using the local Schuylkill Canal to establish a rope-making business.

“…we are doing a large business. Generally employ about 20 men and eight boys…Annexed is an engraving of our wheel houses, Hackle lofts, and engine house & a part of the walk & the office. We have a very nice place here now and fast improving.”[7]

Lithography of two enslaved people that reads: Am I not a man and a brother? Am I not a woman and a sister? — *From the cover of the 1866 annual report of the Edinburgh Ladies Emancipation Society. Source: Wikimedia Commons*

Despite facing near penury, Thomas Jackson’s entrepreneurial spirit eventually allowed him to rise to a prosperous position, giving him resources very different from those he was born to. His relative financial success enabled him to become a kind of working-class autodidact. His lucid letters, which are notable for the quality of the prose and the artistic flourish of his penmanship, suggest a level of learning that was mainly confined to the privileged elite of the day.

Although he became a successful businessman in America, the country failed to fully live up to his expectations. The young republic, a self-proclaimed land of opportunity and equality, was also home to what he considered a blight on the American experience: the continuation of slavery.

In a letter to his cousin, Caleb Slater, back in England, which was subsequently published in a local newspaper, Jackson claimed to have first witnessed a slave market in 1833. Given the “glowing ideas of free America” his father had instilled in him as a boy, he “never dreamed that such a thing was possible as liberty and slavery existing together under a free government, and just laws.” He was adamant: I “Never thought such a thing could be; do not now think it can be; know now it cannot be.”[8]

Stereograph showing a man with a rifle sitting outside a commercial building used as a slave market, bearing a sign "Auction & Negro Sales" on Whitehall Street. — *The Slave Market. Atlanta, Georgia. Source: Library of Congress*

From this introduction, Thomas went on to describe the slave auction scene underway in Richmond, Virginia, where a “most interesting young woman…as white as [his] own English wife” stood at the auction block before a “queer-looking crowd [of] dirty mouthed, rum-drinking tobacco chewers…liable to become the property, and entirely subject to the power and the lust of the grossest brute among them, if he bid high enough!”[9]

Jackson was enraged by the harsh realities of a slave republic. He used his unique perspective to approach the abolitionist movement with a distinct strategy. He leveraged his connections in England to provide British citizens firsthand reports of slavery in America, as he did with the letter above. In doing so, he hoped his visceral and emotional first-person stories about slavery’s horrors would influence British public opinion. Eventually, he hoped the British government would be discouraged from supporting the American cotton trade, which was intertwined with slavery. When the Civil War came, he doubled down on these efforts, as he became aware that Britain’s “freedom-hating” aristocracy, with the government’s tacit support, secretly aided the “villainous rebels” as a means of keeping the cotton industry alive.[10]

Examining Jackson’s rhetoric and the political positions they reveal enable us to answer questions about the nature of nineteenth-century abolitionism. Were the aims of British abolitionists living in the United States more radical than those of their compatriots living back in England?[11] If so, were the political differences more a matter of class or of vantage point? In other words, did it require witnessing slavery firsthand for an abolitionist to draw a harder line on the issue, or were other factors, such as social standing, more important in delineating the moderates from the radicals?

*Abraham Lincoln and his Emancipation Proclamation / The Strobridge Lith. Co., Cincinnati. Source: Library of Congress*

If we were to view Jackson’s political discourse alongside the writings of the British metropole’s largely elite circle of abolitionists, it’s easy to discern a more fiery, visceral retelling of slavery’s horrors—and of the urgent need to abolish it immediately and by any means necessary.[12] Early in the war, before the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation, Jackson witnessed the country “in all directions…being desolated by fire and sword and shell” and declared that “slavery must perish, with all its abettors.”[13] Perhaps traveling to Harrisburg and seeing firsthand the rebels and Union soldiers make preparations for further carnage enabled him to imagine not a gradual but rather an immediate—and, if necessary, violent—end to the institution of slavery, a “doom it so richly deserves.”[14]

Thomas Jackson’s letters reveal an unwavering commitment to abolition; they also show striking ways in which race underpinned life both in the US and in Britain. There is little doubt as to the value of this source material for scholars studying race, particularly in early America, for Jackson’s writings betray his struggles to come to terms with race and racism in his adopted country.

As an abolitionist, Jackson clearly intended to convince readers of the fundamental humanity of Black slaves and the need to guarantee equality to vulnerable non-white groups.[15] But Jackson was also a product of his time and he displayed attitudes rooted in this.

Depiction of the Anti-Slavery Meeting on the Boston Common held in 1851. People are gathered under a tree, there is text on the meeting on the lower end of the picture. — *Anti-Slavery Meeting on the [Boston] Common. Source: New York Public Library*

As shown in his account of the slave market above, Jackson obsessed over the surprising “whiteness” of many enslaved people he encountered. He was scandalized to see men and women with complexions similar to his own being held in bondage. Returning to his account of the slave market, we find a long digression into the racial characteristics of both the slaves and their would-be owners:

I suppose I saw 15 or 20 sold, of all shades of colour [sic.] from black to three-quarters white. Then they brought out a good-looking, well-dressed, modest, and most interesting young woman, about 23 or 24 years old, and, to all appearance to me, as white as my own English wife. She had a little daughter about three years old by her side, and a beautiful babe of about a year old in her arms, both, for all I could see, as white as my own children at home…the offspring of slave mothers have been whitening, until the very small taint of negro blood is not perceivable in many.[16]

Jackson went on to describe the men placing bids as “dirty-mouthed” and “seemingly not half as white as their victims,” preparing to subject an example of “feminine loveliness” to their “power and [their] lust.”[17]

To him, the white complexion of many of these Black slaves seemed to underline the patent absurdity and cruelty of slavery, especially when placed against the “brute” status of the southern whites he encountered.

There’s little doubt, too, that Jackson knew evoking whiteness would be effective in garnering sympathy from white readers. In a later letter describing the lecture tours organized by abolitionists, in which runaway slaves featured prominently, he doubled down on this rhetoric. Many of the former slaves, he writes, were “so white that no one would ever suspect that they had a drop of African blood in their veins.”[18] In this way, whiteness became a term loaded with value for Jackson even as he denounced the racism that underpinned slavery.

The work of Mary Niall Mitchell and Martha Cutter, among others, points out that American abolitionists readily employed the language of whiteness as a tool to sway public opinion on the issue.[19] Although he was born in Britain, Thomas Jackson, used a similar rhetorical strategy. He may have arrived at this independently or adopted it from wider writings.

It is worth considering the implications behind an English immigrant’s echoing of American attitudes about race. Given that Jackson largely aimed his writing to English readers, his apparent confidence that an English readership would be equally moved by American racial rhetoric is significant. Indeed, this challenges assumptions about the uniqueness of American racial thought.

None of this is to say that Thomas Jackson ignored enslaved people who could not “pass” for whites. Nor did he mean to suggest that slaves with darker skins were somehow less deserving of sympathy or equality. Further down in his letter concerning former slaves, he mentions he employed darker-skinned freedmen, one of whom was a “smart fellow,” another a “deep thinker,” and another who demonstrated “intellect…of a high order.”[20] Yet when quoting them directly, he transformed his interlocutors into characters out of a minstrel show, capturing their voices with terms like “day” instead of “they” and “den” instead of “then.”[21] In short, his commitment to abolitionism was sometimes contradicted by his racialized language.

Most people don’t know Thomas Jackson but he left behind a remarkable historical record. This provides an opportunity for further reflection on a critical moment in the nation’s history. As such, this collection deserves a broad readership.

[1] For representative scholarship, see Mason, Matthew. “The Battle of the Slaveholding Liberators: Great Britain, the United States, and Slavery in the Early Nineteenth Century.” The William and Mary Quarterly 59, no. 3 (2002): 665–96. https://doi.org/10.2307/3491468.

[2] “Article_1859-03-01 – Thomas Jackson Letters.” 2023. Thomas Jackson Letters. July 28, 2023. https://thomasjacksonletters.com/articles/article_1859-03-01/.

[3] “TJ_Letter_1862-08-12 – Thomas Jackson Letters.” 2023. Thomas Jackson Letters. August 25, 2023. https://thomasjacksonletters.com/letters/letter_1862-08-12/.

[4] “Article_1844-10-26 – Thomas Jackson Letters.” 2023. Thomas Jackson Letters. July 28, 2023. https://thomasjacksonletters.com/articles/article_1844-10-26/.

[6] “Article_1825-12-24 Bankruptcy – Thomas Jackson Letters.” 2023. Thomas Jackson Letters. March 25, 2023. https://thomasjacksonletters.com/other-documents/np_1825-12-24-from-london-gazette/.

[7] Thomas Jackson in letter to cousin Caleb Slater, June 3, 1856. “TJ_Letter_1856-06-03 – Thomas Jackson Letters.” 2023. Thomas Jackson Letters. March 22, 2023. https://thomasjacksonletters.com/letters/letter_1856-06-03/.

[8] “A Native of Ilkeston in an American Slave Market.” Thomas Jackson Letters. August 25, 2023. https://thomasjacksonletters.com/letters/letter_1862-08-12/. Published in Eastwood, England area newspaper September 11, 1862.

[9] Ibid.

[10] “TJ_Letter_1864-09-01 – Thomas Jackson Letters.” 2023. Thomas Jackson Letters. March 22, 2023. https://thomasjacksonletters.com/letters/letter_1864-09-00/.

[11] For British abolitionism, see Huzzey, Richard. “The Slave Trade and Victorian ‘Humanity.’” Victorian Review 40, no. 1 (2014): 43–47. http://www.jstor.org/stable/24497035.

[12] For comparative analysis of British and American abolitionism, see Mason, Matthew. “The Battle of the Slaveholding Liberators: Great Britain, the United States, and Slavery in the Early Nineteenth Century.” The William and Mary Quarterly 59, no. 3 (2002): 665–96. https://doi.org/10.2307/3491468, and Mason, Matthew. “Keeping up Appearances: The International Politics of Slave Trade Abolition in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World.” The William and Mary Quarterly 66, no. 4 (2009): 809–32. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40467542.

[13] “———.” 2023d. Thomas Jackson Letters. August 25, 2023. https://thomasjacksonletters.com/letters/letter_1862-08-12/.

[14]“TJ_Letter_1863-08-20 – Thomas Jackson Letters.” 2023. Thomas Jackson Letters. March 22, 2023. https://thomasjacksonletters.com/letters/letter_1863-08-20/. In addition to political commentary, this letter provides detailed description of Confederate movements at this time which would also prove useful to military historians of the Civil War.

[15] Since Thomas Jackson expressed disapproval of universal voting rights, we should interpret his understanding of equality to be of a limited nature, i.e., the guarantee of “natural rights” for all. For his criticisms on full democracy, see for instance: “TJ_Letter_1862-10-12 – Thomas Jackson Letters.” 2023. Thomas Jackson Letters. March 22, 2023. https://thomasjacksonletters.com/letters/letter_1862-10-12/.

[16] “———.” 2023e. Thomas Jackson Letters. August 25, 2023. https://thomasjacksonletters.com/letters/letter_1862-08-12/.

[17] Ibid.

[18] “TJ_Letter_1864-04-18 – Thomas Jackson Letters.” 2024. Thomas Jackson Letters. March 27, 2024. https://thomasjacksonletters.com/letters/letter_1864-04-18/.

[19] Cutter, Martha J. “‘As White as Most White Women’: Racial Passing in Advertisements for Runaway Slaves and the Origins of a Multivalent Term.” American Studies 54, no. 4 (2016): 73–97. http://www.jstor.org/stable/44982355. Mitchell, Mary Niall. “‘Rosebloom and Pure White,’ or so It Seemed.” American Quarterly 54, no. 3 (2002): 369–410. http://www.jstor.org/stable/30042226.

[20] “———.” 2024b. Thomas Jackson Letters. March 27, 2024. https://thomasjacksonletters.com/letters/letter_1864-04-18/.

[21] Ibid.

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