20th century history Archives

Mother is a Verb: An Unconventional History by Sarah Knott (2019)

The easy correlation contemporary American and British cultures build from sex to pregnancy, pregnancy to birth, and birth to childrearing within a nuclear family is far from uniform throughout history. Mother is not an identity. Not all women will mother during the course of their lives. In Sarah Knott’s words, “mother is a verb,” and it is a deeply ambiguous and sometimes ambivalent one at that.

More than any historian I have read, Knott writes for herself. Her book is driven by self-reflection and personal memory. She does not create her questions simply out of academic interest or a curious piece of archival evidence, but out of a need to make sense of her own experience. Knott eschews the conventions of historical writing. Gone is any pretense to objectivity. And she sees no need to discuss the historical development of mothering chronologically or genealogically. Rather, she writes within a genre of self-help and maternal memoir. Her history reflects experiences like the realization of “the glimmer of novelty… the sheer peculiarity of adding reproduction to sex.” And the “privilege of relative stillness” that allows her to sit reflexively with her hand on her stomach, waiting for the baby to move. Her book is complex and expansive, covering twenty-two stages of mothering. Each addresses a particular discomfort, anxiety, or hope.

Knott draws her questions from personal experience, but her archival explorations are diversified outside of her race, class, and gender identities. As she notes early on, certain developments over the past half century or so – capitalism’s low valuing of caregiving, the emergence of queer families, and more egalitarian parenting amongst some working partners, to name but a few – demand a history that pushes beyond the idea that there is a single labor of mothering in any historical period. Biologically producing a baby and mothering were not always synonymous historically. Black enslaved women and children often did the labor of mothering on plantations in the early nineteenth century. Such attention frequently meant that other women (usually with the title Aunt or Aunty) mothered these women’s children for significant parts of the day, month, or year. Lower- class women in seventeenth-century England frequently brought other women’s babies into their own homes, acting as wet nurses to maintain a stable income for their family while they cared for their own infants. And Ojibwe women nursed the infants of women who died in labor, making them their own. Mothering is necessary labor that varies dramatically depending on the society and its structures.

Knott’s chapters wander through broad histories of time periods, specific historical sources, and personal anecdotes. If a single thread runs through her book, a single theme that ties all who mother together, it is interruption. Mothering interrupts life in both momentary and continuing ways. Knott’s morning sickness risked interrupting her lectures. In the eighteenth century an infant interrupted a woman’s ability to work and bring needed income to her family. On a homestead, the infant interrupted the domestic labor of doing laundry, cooking, and cleaning. But interruption is not unidirectional. Those who mother are also interrupted from time otherwise spent mothering. For instance, Knott recounts an anecdote about an enslaved women separated from her children by trips to Washington D.C.. However, mothers also found ways to mitigate interruptions, such as a women in a factory who hung her child in a basket from the ceiling so she could watch the infant while she worked. These interruptions certainly vary between time, place, and person, but from the seventeenth century on, they collectively define mothering.

Mother and Child: Pablo Picasso, 1921 (via ARTIC)

Knott is not the first historian to write herself into her book, but her method offers an important contribution to a growing genre. Her evidence is in the form of anecdote, mirroring what Lisa Baraitser terms the “constant attack on narrative that the child performs.” (264) Her stories are short and interrupted. And her own anecdotes about the way her son’s crying, or her concern over his reflux interrupts her work, are interspersed with historical voices. Through these moments of memoir, she acknowledges herself as a historical actor who plays a role – equivalent to other historical mothers – in the long-embodied history of mothering. Her theoretical framework reflects some of the most important feminist writings of the past forty years. In her appendix on methods, she discusses Joan Scott’s warning that historians of women must move beyond the study of normative women exclusively, or risk repetition of the political marginalization of all women in their future writing. For Knott, writing a history of mothering, of mother as a verb, makes room for glimpses of trans, queer, and on rare occasion even non-female voices. However, she is also honest about the dominant role cis-women often play in her history. It seems that Scott’s warning both antagonizes and entices her throughout the book, but she resists a definitive answer.

One of the most impressive aspects of Knott’s book is how she invokes queer theories of embodiment, plasticity, and normativity without relying on the difficult terminology that is so common in theoretical works on gender. These theories allow Knott to see mother as something people continuously make themselves, through the labor they do, through the conversations they have, and through their own perceptions of their bodies. “Mother” used as a verb insists that there is nothing inherent, biological, or natural about the action, but it is physical, bodily, and constitutive of identities, if always imperfectly and incompletely.

As a white male in my mid-twenties, who has had little interaction with mothering, I may seem an odd reviewer for this book. However, “Mother is a Verb” is as important for those of us who never intend to become mothers, as it is for people who have been and will be. For non-academics who want access to intricate innovative histories, this book offers a novel approach to the fields of gender studies and women’s history. At the same time, historians who hope to write scholarly books that address wide audiences should take note of the clarity and concision of Knott’s wonderful prose. While asking lots of questions about child care both in the past and the present, Knott offers few answers about the proper way to mother. Instead, she demonstrates the historical centrality of the physical and emotional labor of mothering.

City in a Garden: Environmental Transformations and Racial Justice in Twentieth-Century Austin, Texas by Andrew M. Busch (2017)

Austin is a global city, home to some of the most technologically advanced and successful corporations in the world as well as a renowned university system that provides highly trained and educated employees to those same top companies. All the while, Austin’s constant obsession with building a sustainable and environmentally friendly city contributes to the growth of a largely white upper-middle class demographic who can afford living in proximity to Austin’s finest and natural recreational spaces. A look at Austin’s past reveals a pattern of racial discrimination as the city constantly places the needs of white residents, boosters, developers, and investors above those of Black and Latino residents.

Andrew M. Busch’s new book, City in a Garden traces one hundred years of Austin’s urban, environmental, political, and social history. Busch explains that Austin’s investment in big business and innovative environmental development projects was and still is an investment in the social construction of whiteness that has paid off beautifully for upper-middle class white people. Busch argues that no matter how sustainable Austin is, or remains, there is a troubling “shadow” constantly growing behind the “garden” that combines the urban and the natural. The shadow is a century of racial discrimination in the form of federal, state, and local urban development policies that built an environmentally sustainable and desirable playground for white upper-middle class people. Simultaneously these policies and city planning projects kept Black and Latinx people out of any real decision making processes, leaving them with the least desirable spaces in the city, spaces that remain underfunded and subject their residents to constant threat of removal and displacement.

Busch’s main purpose is to expose the complexities that arise when space is racialized through the process of urbanization. He foregrounds Austin as an exceptional case that further complicates the relationships between city leaders and developers, environmentalists, and the Black and Latinx communities as they all make claims for their ideas of how Austin’s space should be utilized. Furthermore, Busch suggests that the “history of human-environment interaction in Austin has revolved around managing water as well as enhancing access to and preserving unique environmental characteristics that have high use and exchange value” (14). This is apparent from the beginning of Austin’s city planning history.

From the late 1890s to the 1930s, city leaders focused on subduing the water system in and around Austin and successfully dammed the Colorado River. The project signified the capability of harnessing nature to provide residents, farmers, and especially companies with cheap power and flood control. In the 1930s, as the population grew, and new land became available to build on and to accommodate new types of labor, suburbanization and the Federal Housing Association (FHA) continued to place white communities’ needs above all others. While the FHA demarcated Black and Latinx spaces as “dilapidated” and ripe for redevelopment, the Home Owners Loan Corporation made sure that white neighborhoods remained white through restrictive covenants and other illegal methods that kept most people of color in south and east Austin. By the 1950s, rampant deindustrialization in Austin made working-class industrial jobs harder to get in the city. The process of ridding Austin’s inner city of heavy industry incentivized middle and upper-class labor and the companies that would employ them with new recreational spaces, the convenience of suburban life, and tax breaks for oil and high-tech companies. For Black and Latinx communities, the removal and redevelopment projects that resulted from mid-century urban renewal only served to exacerbate racial segregation as new housing was built on the east side of Austin.

Downtown from Austin's Famous Zilker Park — *Downtown from Austin’s Famous Zilker Park. Source: Wikimedia.*

As the book enters the 1960s, Busch strengthens his argument. Austin’s environmentalists started to challenge urban and environmental projects that posed a threat to the natural environment and recreational spaces. The best example here is their fight to ban motorized vehicles from the west side of Town Lake while the east side had to contend with massive motorboat races that drew thousands of people throughout the year and posed a threat to Latinx communities. Destroying the east Town Lake community’s park to build a stadium for the races sparked the organization of people in the community as well as organizations active in the Chicano and Civil Rights Movements. After six years of protest, the city finally moved the boat races without the aid of white environmentalists who never considered the negative effects that their efforts had on Latinx communities. Overall, the 60s and 70s proved that liberalism fell short for marginalized communities and white environmentalists only considered natural spaces as an environment in need of protection from city development projects.

In the 1980s, Austin leaders began to aggressively diversify the local economy as defense, oil, and high-tech industries effectively sparked the process of globalization. The University of Texas was integral in this economic transformation and supplied these new industries with skilled labor and state-of-the-art research capabilities funded mostly by federal defense contracts. This massive shift caused the city’s white population to expand residential areas in the north and the west. While these residential areas began to threaten physical spaces that environmentalists considered pristine and worthy of protecting, Black and Latinx residents living to the east and south saw production facilities move in to their neighborhoods making life more hazardous.

In examining the 1990s, Busch focuses on the bifurcation of the environmental movement in the fight against aggressive private and federally funded urban expansion. Traditional white environmentalists took on the encroachment of private development in pristine and untouched natural space. For this group, unchecked development threatened the Edwards Aquifer, an essential source of water and important part of Austin’s ecosystem. East Austin environmentalists agreed that the aquifer needed protection but added that their communities needed just as much protection from both old and new environmental hazards facing Black and Latinx people. For eastsiders, environmental injustice was a civil rights issue. They constructed “the environment as a hybrid landscape, one where natural and built reinforced one another and combined to undermine minorities health and access to jobs, education, and recreation…” (226). But, as Busch argues in the epilogue, eastside environmentalists lost to their white counterparts as the 2000s saw an increased development in east Austin because building east would not disturb any protected environments, eased the increasingly expensive housing crisis, and proved to be extremely profitable. Using the epilogue as a kind of policy proposal, Busch argues for a more equitable city planning and economic structure by way of creating jobs that do not just serve a certain sector of Austin’s growing population. He asserts that historical exclusion should be met with contemporary inclusion in every aspect and that gentrification poses an immediate threat to impoverished communities who are already being pressured to leave because of a lack of economic opportunity. Busch suggests that rent control, direct subsidies, and other mechanisms should be employed to create “a holistically livable environment” for all Austinites.

Busch’s book is important for students in a variety of disciplines, residents interested in city development and planning, city planners, housing and economic justice activists, as well as environmental activists. City in a Garden also leaves the history of Austin ripe for further research. In what ways did Black and Latinx residents challenge, participate, and/or survive the growing spatial disparities of their white counterparts? A research project on the historically Black Wheatsville community could provide some answers. What was life like in pre-WWII Austin for residents living in areas affected by environmental changes and hazards? An inquiry in to Mexican agricultural workers living in colonias around Austin might shed light on how changes in Austin’s economy – transitions from agricultural, to industrial, and in to oil and technology – affected where Latinos’ in Austin lived and worked over time. Readers interested in education might also be intrigued by the brief mentions of educational segregation and its lasting problems in Austin. With a hundred-year historical sweep the questions this book fosters seem endless, which is an excellent problem to have.

Overall, City in a Garden reveals a complicated past littered with good and bad decisions in hopes that people in the present and future might reckon with and correct the inequality literally built in to Austin’s city limits.

_________________________________________________________________________________________

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.

The Gorbachev Factor by Archie Brown (2003)

By Marcus Golding

The fall of the Soviet Union is usually understood from two angles. One argues that the Soviet state could not keep up with the United States’ military superiority and, therefore, collapsed under economic strain. The other perspective suggests that western Europe and the U.S., and specifically the administration of President Ronald Reagan (1981-1989), played a crucial role in pressuring diplomatically for the end of the “Evil Empire.” Archie Brown suggests that there is another interpretation that rules out military or diplomatic pressures in explaining the undoing of the Soviet Union. Brown argues that the end of the system was exclusively due to the political (glasnost) and economic (perestroika) reforms launched to reform the state. In this process, the author contends that the implosion of the Soviet Union had more to do with the will of one man than with any outside forces in play.

The Gorbachev Factor is a compelling and persuasive analysis that underlines the agency of Mikhail Gorbachev as the most crucial factor explaining the end of Soviet rule. The book is a painstaking examination of Gorbachev’s leadership as a head of state, and the importance of his policy reforms in enacting the political transformation of the Soviet system. As the author argues, despite the structural problems of the USSR during the 1980s, there was no sign of an impending collapse. However, the central thesis of the book is that Gorbachev’s interest in seeking political and economic change led him to believe that those goals were unattainable unless the whole system was transformed. By analyzing the changes introduced by the Soviet leader in the political structure of the state, the economy, the center-periphery relations, and in foreign policy, Brown successfully shows how the Soviet system transitioned from a relative stable state of decline into a phase of terminal crisis. Despite failing to prevent the end of the USSR during his term (1985-1991), Gorbachev oversaw the emergence of political pluralism, the democratization of the former Soviet Republics, and the inauguration of a new foreign policy with the west that ended the Cold War.

From the four areas he deemed necessary for a complete transformation of the system, Brown identifies political reforms and the reformulation of Soviet foreign policy as the most successful ones. The introduction of contested elections to create a legislature with real powers in 1988 is perhaps the most significant reform in explaining the growing democratization of the Soviet Union but it also accounts for the gradual erosion of state control over the political process. Domestic political changes also reflected a new foreign policy mentality. Gorbachev reconfigured Soviet diplomacy by emphasizing the freedom to choose and by renouncing violence as a way to sustain other communist regimes in power. As Brown contends, the Gorbachev factor in Soviet foreign policy cleared the way for the overthrow of Communist systems in Eastern and Central Europe from 1989 on.

The liberalization of the system presented Gorbachev with intractable problems. In relations between the central Soviet state and the non-Russian republics within its borders, the delegitimization of Marxism-Leninism triggered by the political reforms, and the revelations of the failures and atrocities of the Soviet system, left an ideological vacuum for which nationalism was the most obvious candidate. Unable, or unwilling to control the centrifugal forces unleashed by his reforms, Gorbachev’s ability to keep the Soviet Union intact imploded when political rivals, such as Boris Yeltsin, torpedoed any opportunity for a union-wide arrangement. In the implementation of economic reforms, Gorbachev’s zig-zag approach not only proved to be ineffective because of the opposition of the ministerial bureaucracy to the full implementation of his policies, but also because the Soviet leader was more hesitant and less clear on how to proceed towards the gradual adoption of a market economy.

Mikhail Gorbechev (left) with President George Bush (right) – (via Wikipedia)

Finally, Gorbachev’s personality played a key role in the political transformation of the system. His status as a consensus-builder served him well to implement several reforms without facing concerted resistance from the Communist Party or the emergent cohort of Soviet dissidents and liberals. However, this same trait later exposed Gorbachev to the attack of radicals on both sides of the political spectrum, undermining his power. This, coupled with the misplaced trust in some of his appointees, seriously complicated Gorbachev’s plans to control the transformation of the system.

Brown’s book succeeds in providing a refreshing and persuasive angle that underlines the domestic causes in the demise of the Soviet Union. The author relies primarily on personal interviews and memoirs from the most influential Soviet political leaders of the time (including Gorbachev) to build his argument. For anyone interested in this momentous historical process of the 20^th century Brown’s insightful interpretation will not disappoint.

Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England, by William Cronon (1983)

By Jesse Ritner

Thirty-five years ago William Cronon wrote Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England. It has aged well. The continued relevance of the book is likely a result of two things. First, it is eminently readable. Flipping through the pages, one can imagine the forests that Cronon describes and feel his connection to them. Second, the problem he poses about the limits of disciplinary work in writing the history of environmental change are more poignant now than ever before, as humanists across disciplines attempt to write to current concerns about climate change and the relationship between humans and nature. Cronon argues that the cultural and ecological consequences of colonization are deeply connected. As such, they demand the tools of both a historian and an ecologist. He traces the process by which Indigenous communities and European communities made meaning of the environment to the ecological changes that resulted from the influx of a new culture. His book is not meant to suggest a single material cause of conflict, but looks at how cultural histories of diverse issues – such as land acquisition, the development of capitalist economies, the growth of towns, and the fur trade – can benefit from studying the relationship between human action and ecological consequence.

Cronon offers transparency about his methods and sources as well as any other author. He begins his book with an explanation of what ecological sources might be for a colonial history of New England. He pinpoints four varieties: naturalists’ accounts written by early colonists and their ancestors, town records that register disagreements over ownership and property, the work of historical ecologists, and then what he terms “interpolations,” which use modern ecological literature to assess the probability of past change. By looking at these materials together, Cronon demonstrates that changes in people’s livelihoods and the means of production are not simply social, but are often dependent on ecological changes. As a result, his book is not about two landscapes, one before colonization and one after, but about two different ways of belonging to an ecosystem.

Following his discussion of methodology, Cronon moves on to explore the relationship between property ownership and human interactions with ecosystems. He begins by analyzing the diversity of New England woodlands in the pre-colonial era. He makes a clear distinction between the northern and southern halves of New England, determined mostly by the lack of agriculture further north. This created a different relationship to property and different modes of production for northern Indians. As a result, the makeup of the forests was different. Different modes of production also occurred, however, as a result of different relationships to seasonality. Cronon argues that European conceptions of poverty often disguise the importance of seasonal practices to Indigenous peoples. This has also led to a false perception that European societies do not also adjust their work and technologies to the seasons. Mobility was central for Indigenous populations, who hunted, fished, or farmed depending on the season. In contrast Europeans relied on storing food over the cold winters. This demanded a type of non-mobile settlement that was previously uncommon in New England. Cronon contends that the conflict over seasonality, not over a specific resource, was the root of European and Indigenous conflicts. The role of stability in European seasonality necessitated the creation of a new property regime in New England that limited Indigenous abilities to interact with the ecosystem and profoundly changed the land. In his estimation we live today with the consequences of this new property regime.

In the final parts of the book, Cronon looks at the fallout from this conflict through the commodification of furs, trees, and livestock. In each of these cases. Cronon shows that transformations of property regimes and the effects these transformations had on the ecosystems surrounding them were a process, rather than an immediate change. Through examining this process, he deconstructs the development of European property regimes, the commodification of resources, and the changes in both European and Indigenous means of production. The most notable result of these changes was the destruction of “edge areas” that were home to diverse flora and denser populations of fauna. These “edge areas” gave the woods the park-like appearance that early naturalists encountered in New England and that Thoreau mourns the loss of in Walden.

There are moments when the age of Cronon’s book shows. The lack of local ecological specificity, the omission of variations in specific Indigenous communities, and the overshadowing of violence and direct human conflict by broad ecological changes all demonstrate that the politics and principles of writing Native American histories have changed in the past few decades. Yet, the connections that Cronon draws powerfully denaturalize the idea that humans exist outside of nature. The clarity of his argument, and the pleasure of reading his work allow this book to maintain its place as a staple in everything from undergraduate introductory classes and grad-student seminars on Native American and Environmental histories, to bookstore shelves, and as a gift for friends and relatives who love history and camping. Few books are so intellectually satisfying and casually readable at the same time. For this reason, and many more, Cronon’s book will continue to worth reading in years to come.

King: Pilgrimage to the Mountaintop by Harvard Sitkoff (2009)

by Tiana Wilson

As we approach the life and legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr. on the 50^th anniversary of his death, April 4, 1968, it is crucial to appreciate King entirely. Beyond his push for nonviolent direct action and racial integration, we should recognize his expansive human rights activism, anti-war advocacy, and ground-breaking thinking.

Harvard Sitkoff’s biography of King shows him as a heroic but flawed leader and emphasizes his radicalism rather than his pacifism. Sitkoff does not shy away from King’s shortcomings. He brings attention to King’s adultery and highlights the criticism he faced from others within the movement. His portrait of King shows him to be a man who made mistakes, feared death, belittled women, gambled, partied, and often compromised. However, it was also clear that King was intelligent, strategic, pious, courageous, radical, well spoken, passionate, and loving at heart. Sitkoff argues that King’s view of the civil rights movement shifted. At the beginning of the movement, the goal was to end Jim Crow and obtain voting rights. However, after King’s experience in the urban north, he knew that the civil rights movement needed to expand to include economic and job security as well as housing reform. By the end of King’s life he was a firm advocate of anti-colonialism and opponent of war and he took a global perspective: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. after meeting with President Johnson to discuss civil rights, at the White House, 1963. Source: Warren K. Leffler, Library of Congress

Stikoff’s book is organized around the key events that shaped King’s leadership. The most compelling argument Stikoff makes is that King was an activist first and then a preacher. He argues that King resisted becoming a pastor and only decided to go into ministry because he knew that it was the best strategic method to get his political agenda across. However, I do think that King was deeply spiritual and used religion to strengthen himself as he became the symbol of the movement and a target of its opponents. King also knew that the south was deeply religious and biblical references would appeal to his supporters. On the other hand, using the black church as the center point for the movement worked in the south but was unsuccessful in the north. De facto segregation complicated urban issues in Chicago and New York, where nonviolent direct action was not as effective as it had been in the south. Shadowing King’s life as the leader of the civil rights movement was was the infamous harassment of the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover. The FBI’s strict surveillance of King was made prevalent throughout the book, which shows how the system that was supposed to protect King was actually out to destroy him.

Reexamining the legacy and life of Martin Luther King gives us insight into the ways that social movements can be used to make radical changes in the United States and the ways those changes can make their leaders into targets.

You may also like:

1863 in 1963 by Laurie Green
Stokely Carmichael: A Life by Peniel Joseph
Matt Tribbe reviews Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice

Dorothy Parker Loved the Funnies

by David Ochsner

Interminable…The last thing Dorothy Parker wanted in her funnies was some fine print. In Frank King’s Gasoline Alley strip from 1927, Walt gets full custody of the orphan Skeezix (via hoodedutilitarian.com)

“It is amazing, it is even a little terrifying to see how the spirit of the comic strip has changed,” wrote Dorothy Parker in her Dec. 3, 1927 “Reading and Writing” column for The New Yorker. Time was, she lamented, when the daily strips concerned themselves “with chubby children blowing their elders to hell with generous charges of dynamite,” and “each set of pictures ended gloriously, with a Bam and Pow, in the portrayal of the starlit delirium induced by a cracked skull.”

Dorothy Parker in the 1920s (via Wikipedia)

Most of us know Parker as one of America’s great satirists and a founding member of the Algonquin Round Table. She could also be a tough critic. No author was sacred in her book review column, which ran in The New Yorker from 1927 to 1931. She summed up the beloved “Pooh” poems in A.A. Milne’s Now We Are Six as “affected, commonplace, bad,” and when Sinclair Lewis published The Man Who Knew Coolidge, she dismissed it as “an outrageously irritating book.”

So it was a bit of a surprise to discover that Parker was also a dedicated reader of the funny pages, which doubtless offered her respite from the bouts of depression she suffered throughout her life. When favorite strips such as The Gumps abandoned broad humor in favor of long-form melodrama, Parker was crestfallen, lamenting that she hadn’t “seen a Pow or a Bam in an egg’s age.”

Andy Gump, in simpler times, from a 1920 strip featuring The Gumps, by Sidney Smith (via newspapers.com)

Sidney Smith, creator of The Gumps, is often credited as the originator of the comic strip melodrama. Unlike a daily, stand-alone gag, this serial approach kept readers waiting for the next installment. Smith was also the first cartoonist to kill off a regular character. His “Saga of Mary Gold,” which ran during 1928-29, ended with sweet Mary’s tragic death and prompted a flood of letters from readers demanding her resurrection.

Busying himself with charity work while being mixed up with spies, Andy Gump had “lost his touching and epic sympathy,” Parker wrote. On top of that, Little Orphan Annie had also gone soft, Annie helping a widowed neighbor with her housework rather than “fighting various gangs of desperadoes.”

Not Your Broadway Annie…Before she went domestic, Harold Gray’s Little Orphan Annie could kick some butt, as she did in this 1927 strip

Over in Gasoline Alley, a gag strip that featured the simple life of guys and their cars, the strip’s creator, Frank King, was allowing his characters to age naturally. “That hurts, Parker wrote. “We ask our comic artists for bread, and they give us realism.” She lamented the strip’s “interminable” storyline, which at the time was mired in a custody battle in which “Unca Walt” (the strip’s patriarch) was desperately trying to adopt little Skeesix, who had been left on Walt’s doorstep in a 1921 strip. Parker feared that by the time the custody battle was settled, “Skeesix is going to be a kindly old gentleman with a flowing beard” (Skeesix, now 96, is still occasionally featured in the strip).

Parker concluded that the melodramatic comics “are unquestionably what the readers want,” and was “surely indicative of something…I cannot bear to analyze it. My great heart is broken for my people. What this country needs is more Bams and more Pows.” If Dorothy were still around today, she would find plenty of Bams and Pows at the Multiplex.

David Ochsner writes the blog, A New Yorker State of Mind, in which he chronicles his experiences reading every issue of the New Yorker magazine. He is currently mired in the fall of 1928.

Also by David Ochsner on Not Even Past:

Reading Every Issue of the New Yorker

You may also like:

Hearing the Roaring Twenties: The New Archive (No. 12)
The Civil War, as seen by the artists of Harper’s Weekly
Digital Teaching: Mapping Networks across Avant-Garde Magazines
Media and Politics From the Prague Spring Archive , by Ian Goodale

The National Museum of Anthropology in San Salvador

Picture of a mural at the Museo Nacional de Antropología (National Museum of Anthropology), San Salvador — Museo Nacional de Antropología (National Museum of Anthropology), San Salvador (via Brittany Erwin)

By Brittany Erwin

With its multiple universities, extensive commercial sector, and fast-growing population, the city of San Salvador has become an important axis of cultural production for the Salvadoran nation. As the country’s capital city, it houses many notable institutions, including the National Archive, The Museum of Art, and the National Theater, in addition to several historic churches. Included in these important institutions is MUNA, the Museo Nacional de Antropología.

Founded in 1883, MUNA was a product of cooperation between Salvadoran president Rafael Zaldívar and David J. Guzmán, a politician and scholar. Today the full name of the museum is the David J. Guzman National Museum of Anthropology in honor of his contributions to natural and archaeological knowledge in the country.

Located in the heart of downtown San Salvador, this museum offers the nation’s most comprehensive exhibition of Salvadoran history. With five exhibit halls, space for temporary displays and artists’ showcases, MUNA serves as a pillar of El Salvador’s effort towards cultural preservation.

The current temporary exhibit explores the legacy of the last significant eruption of the San Salvador Volcano a hundred years ago, in 1917. Seismic activity and its effects on all aspects of daily life is an important reoccurring theme in the historical narrative that this museum presents.

As visitors enter, they encounter a large, striking mural on the interior courtyard wall. Its vibrant colors and graphic scenery illustrate the significant historical impression that this small country has made. Painted by Antonio Barilla and completed in 2011, the work illustrates the story of the nation. Over centuries, struggles for power among different social, cultural, and ethnic groups have manifested in cycles of conquest, internal conflict, and war. In this sense, Barilla’s mural represents the history of this country as a story about people who have turned a legacy of suffering into one of perseverance and triumph. In that same sense, the mural also provides a thematic map to enhance the museum visitor’s examination of the artifacts that make up that history.

The quantity of exhibits in this museum is impressive, ranging from early-Mayan ceramics to modern-day markers of Catholic culture. Three of its more prominent specialties are the agricultural foundations of El Salvador’s early civilizations, the ongoing role of ritual worship in community life, and the consequences of living in a highly volcanic region.

For the student, this institution offers a wide range of historical, biological, and anthropological information about the interesting dynamics between the past, present, and future in this Central American country. In addition to the artifact displays, MUNA is home to a specialized library. Its collections comprise a variety of primary and secondary works pertaining to the political, economic, social, and cultural history of the nation. These resources are available to local and international researchers.

For the tourist, the historian, or the curious visitor, MUNA allows for a Salvadoran excursion to the past, starting from the earliest days of inhabitance and ending in the contemporary reality of twenty-first century life.

For more information about this museum and its collections, visit: http://www.cultura.gob.sv/museo-nacional-de-antropologia-dr-david-j-guzman/

Also by Brittany Erwin on Not Even Past:

The Museo Regional de Oriente in San Miguel, El Salvador

You may also like:

Too much Inclusion? Museo Casa de la Memoria, Medellín, Colombia, by Jimena Perry
History Museums: Museo Nacionál de Antropología, Mexico, by Robert Wilks
History Museums: the Good, the Bad, and the Beautiful by Joan Neuberger

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.

Studying the Vietnam War: How the Scholarship Has Changed

by Mark Atwood Lawrence

Originally published as “Studying the Vietnam War: How the Scholarship Has Changed” in the Fall 2017 issue of Humanities magazine, a publication of the National Endowment for the Humanities.”

Editors Note: The Ken Burns and Lynn Novick documentary The Vietnam War premiered on PBS last Sunday, September 17. Mark A. Lawrence, Associate Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin and preeminent historian of the Vietnam War, reflects on what we are learning from historians’ renewed interest in the subject, especially with new scholarship based on Vietnamese sources.

These are boom times for historians of the Vietnam War. One reason is resurgent public interest in a topic that had lost some of its salience in American life during the 1990s. At that time, the end of the Cold War and surging confidence about U.S. power seemed to diminish the relevance of long ago controversies and the need to draw lessons from America’s lost war. But then came the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq: grueling conflicts that, in key respects, resembled the war in Southeast Asia three decades earlier. Critics complained that George W. Bush had mired the nation in “another Vietnam,” and military strategists focused anew on the earlier war for clues about fighting insurgents in distant, inhospitable places. For their part, historians seized the opportunity to reinterpret Vietnam for a younger generation and especially to compare and contrast the Vietnam conflict with America’s new embroilments.

More recently, intense public interest in the war has been sustained by fiftieth anniversaries of the war’s most harrowing years for the United States. Publishers have used these occasions to release high-profile histories, including Mark Bowden’s widely reviewed Hue 1968, a sprawling account of the largest battle between U.S. and Communist forces during the 1968 Tet Offensive. The media are taking part as well. During 2017 and early 2018, the New York Times is publishing an online series of approximately 130 op-eds focused on the events of 1967. The biggest moment of all is due in late September: the premiere of the much anticipated 18-hour documentary on the war from Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, an event certain to inspire new waves of commentary about Vietnam and to rekindle debate in living rooms across the nation.

Footage of Vietnam being broadcast in an American living room, February 1968 (via Wikipedia). The first episode of the highly anticipated The Vietnam War by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick premiered on Sunday, September 17, once again bringing a divisive and contested history into American living rooms.

But there is another, less noticed reason for renewed attention to the Vietnam War: Spectacular new source material has transformed the possibilities for writing about the subject. Some of this new documentation has emerged from U.S. archives as a result of declassification in the last decade or so. Records from the Nixon and Ford presidencies (1969–1977), especially, are making it possible for historians to write with more confidence and in greater detail about the final stages of U.S. involvement in Vietnam, long a relatively neglected era of the war.

Indeed, the last phase of U.S. military operations has recently spawned an especially contentious debate on one of the most fundamental controversies about Vietnam: Could the United States and its South Vietnamese allies have won the war if the American public had not turned against it? Provocative new works by Lewis Sorley and Gregory Daddis lead the way in arguing for and against, respectively, the notion that the U.S. military could have secured overall victory, if not for crumbling political support within the United States.

Meanwhile, writing about every phase of American decision-making has been enhanced by the release of audio recordings that U.S. presidents from Franklin D. Roosevelt to Richard Nixon made of important meetings, telephone conversations, or both. Because these often convey the mood and emotions of senior policymakers, they are invaluable in helping historians gain a richer understanding of the motives that underlay decision-making about the war. It is now possible, for example, to hear Lyndon Johnson’s anguish about escalating the U.S. role in 1964 and 1965. LBJ’s doubts, along with his obvious awareness of the problems that would beset U.S. forces if he escalated the war in Vietnam, have led many historians to scrap the once dominant idea that leaders in Washington, ignorant of Vietnamese politics and blinded by Cold War assumptions about the dangers of communism, walked step-by-step into a “quagmire” that no one had anticipated. The old question—How could Americans have been so ignorant?—has been replaced by a new one: Why did U.S. leaders commit the nation to war despite abundant doubts and accurate knowledge of the obstacles they would confront?

President Lyndon B. Johnson at a National Security meeting on Vietnam, July 1965 (via Wikimedia Commons)

The most impressive new source material, however, has emerged from countries other than the United States. As recently as 30 years ago, historians were limited to U.S. and West European sources, making it impossible to write with authority about Vietnam itself or decision-making by North Vietnam’s allies, China, the Soviet Union, and Eastern European nations. Everything changed with the end of the Cold War. East European nations went furthest in opening their archives to researchers. For its part, the Russian government opened some Soviet-era records, most notably the records of the Communist party. China and Vietnam, where the end of the Cold War did not produce dramatic political change, lagged behind, yet even those governments gradually permitted access to some records from the Cold War years. Most strikingly, the Vietnamese government opened troves of material amassed by the defunct regime in Saigon that ruled below the seventeenth parallel during the heyday of U.S. involvement.

The result has been a large and growing body of new work by ambitious and linguistically skilled scholars eager to explore fresh dimensions of the war. Historians Mark Philip Bradley, Robert K. Brigham, William J. Duiker, Christopher Goscha, David S. Marr, and Sophie Quinn-Judge led the way in examining Vietnam’s experience, drawing on newly available Vietnamese sources to produce pathbreaking studies around the turn of the century. A younger generation of scholars, most of whom wrote dissertations rooted in extensive research in Vietnam, has built on those accomplishments and even, for the first time, begun delving into decision-making by the Communist government in Hanoi. Meanwhile, historians of Soviet and Chinese foreign policy, most notably Ilya Gaiduk, Chen Jian, and Qiang Zhai, have used new documentation to examine the complex relationships between the Vietnamese Communists and their superpower patrons.

Unquestionably, archival openings in Russia and China, just as in Vietnam, remain partial and selective, leaving studies rooted in newly accessible material—stunning as it may be—highly susceptible to debate and revision as more documentation becomes available. Yet, measured against the near impossibility of doing this kind of work just three decades ago, historians have made remarkable progress toward rethinking the Vietnam War as an episode not just in U.S. history but also in Vietnamese and world history. Historians, in short, increasingly appreciate the war for what it was at the time: a multisided conflict involving numerous Vietnamese and international actors and driven by extraordinarily complicated and shifting motives.

What precisely has this new research in non-U.S. sources revealed thus far? Three examples point to the variety and significance of the new discoveries. First, studies of Chinese foreign policy have revealed details of North Vietnam’s dependence on its mighty neighbor to the north in the years before the Cultural Revolution, which greatly diminished China’s ambitions abroad. Despite historical tensions between Vietnam and China, newly available sources show definitively that Chinese military helped train and advise Vietnamese Communist forces from as early as 1950 and played an especially pivotal role in the 1954 Battle of Dien Bien Phu, the Vietnamese victory that ended French colonialism and dealt a major blow to the West in the Cold War.

The Battle of Dien Bien Phu, 1954 (via Wikimedia Commons)

More strikingly, new documents clarify the vast amounts of equipment and even manpower that China provided to North Vietnam during the later fighting that involved U.S. combat forces. According to historian Qiang Zhai, China sent everything from military gear and weapons to table tennis balls, playing cards, sewing needles, and vegetable seed under a series of agreements with North Vietnam. At the same time, Qiang Zhai asserts, a total of 320,000 Chinese soldiers served in North Vietnam between June 1965 and March 1968, peaking at 170,000 during 1967. To be sure, Chinese forces were not assigned combat roles. But Zhai observes that they enabled North Vietnam to send more of its own forces to southern battlefields by performing valuable functions such as repairing bridges and rail lines, building and relocating factories, and manning antiaircraft guns. Such tasks could, of course, be hazardous, not least because of U.S. bombing of some parts of North Vietnam. According to Zhai’s sources, 1,100 Chinese soldiers died in North Vietnam and another 4,200 were wounded.

Second, new sources from Vietnam are exposing the complexity of decision-making among Communist leaders in Hanoi. For many years, historians assumed that North Vietnamese leaders marched in lockstep and permitted no dissent. This view was sustained in part by the belief that the regime in Hanoi was totalitarian to its core and utterly subservient to its most powerful leaders, above all Ho Chi Minh. Recent discoveries have, however, called all of this into question. For one thing, historians Lien-Hang Nguyen and Pierre Asselin have revealed that Ho Chi Minh—long assumed to have been the preeminent North Vietnamese leader all the way to his death in 1969—in fact, lost a great deal of influence around 1960.

The pivotal figure thereafter was Le Duan, a Southern-born revolutionary who remained relatively obscure to Western historians until recent years. Thanks to recent publications, though, it’s clear that Le Duan, a firebrand eager to throw enormous blood and resources into the effort to reunify his country under Communist leadership, dominated decision-making in Hanoi during the peak years of American involvement. Understanding the importance of Le Duan and the hawks who surrounded him helps enormously to appreciate the escalatory pressures that operated on the Vietnamese side, even as Lyndon Johnson and his aides stepped up the American commitment in the mid 1960s. We can now see that leaders on both sides rejected diplomacy and banked on military victory, a tragic convergence of hawkishness that fueled escalation.

The dominance of the hawks in Hanoi does not mean, though, that there were no contrary voices once they were in the driver’s seat. Scholars working with Vietnamese sources have discovered evidence of substantial factionalism within the Hanoi regime throughout the late 1950s and 1960s. Broadly speaking, some high-ranking North Vietnamese leaders, including Ho Chi Minh, prioritized consolidation of Communist rule above the seventeenth parallel and were wary of major expenditures of lives and treasure to bring about reunification. Others, including Le Duan, strongly favored reunification—even at the cost of a major war likely to draw in the United States—over all other North Vietnamese priorities. New studies of the war show that North Vietnamese policy flowed from the interplay of these two points of view. During the late 1950s, the moderate faction held sway, and the result was a period of relative peace in Vietnam. With the triumph of the hawks, however, Hanoi embraced a new war and transformed North Vietnam into a full-fledged police state in order to keep the skeptics at bay.

Third, the new scholarship has shed valuable new light on the nature of the South Vietnamese state that endured from its beginning in 1954 to its collapse in 1975. Was South Vietnam merely a puppet of the United States, an artificial creation doomed to fall apart whenever Washington withdrew its economic and military assistance? Or was it a viable nation with a legitimate government that, absent the onslaught by northern Communists, could have endured as a stable, pro-Western entity into the indefinite future? For many years, the debate was more a matter of polemics than historical inquiry. Opponents of the war argued that the United States hitched itself to a hopeless Potemkin experiment led by venal, authoritarian leaders, while supporters saw South Vietnam as a beleaguered young nation that, for all its faults, was doing its best to resist Communist aggression.

Leonid Brezhnev during talks with Le Duan, October 1975 (via Flickr)

Unsurprisingly, much of the new scholarship rooted in Vietnamese sources has argued for a gray area between these two extremes. Historians such as Edward Miller and Jessica Chapman focus especially on the late 1950s and early 1960s, suggesting that the South Vietnamese government headed by Ngo Dinh Diem possessed a degree of legitimacy and popular support unrecognized by Diem’s critics at the time or since. To be sure, they also point out the government’s inability to expand its base further among the South Vietnamese population. But they show that the South Vietnamese state possessed a remarkable amount of agency that its leaders might have exercised differently. All in all, these historians have helped restore the Vietnamese to the center of their own history.

What do all these revelations mean for how we should understand the Vietnam War in its totality? Clearly, the new work in non-American sources holds implications for primordial questions about the U.S. role in Vietnam. Was the U.S. commitment to Vietnam justified by any genuine security interests in the region? Why did the United States fail to achieve its objectives despite monumental effort? Might different decisions by American leaders have led to a different outcome? Knowing more about the international and Vietnamese contexts makes it far more possible than ever before to form authoritative opinions about questions that cannot logically be answered fully on the basis of U.S. sources alone. But the new work also underscores the possibility of addressing questions that transcend the American experience and viewing the Vietnam War within the context of, for example, decolonization, the international Communist movement, and the Sino-Soviet split. The good news is that, given the range of new and still-to-be-released source material and robust interest in the war four decades after it ended, historians are sure to move forward energetically on both tracks. The boom times may stick around for a while.

Also by Mark A. Lawrence on Not Even Past:

Must Read Books on the Vietnam War
The Prisoner of Events in Vietnam
Changing Course in Vietnam – or not
LBJ and Vietnam: A Conversation

You may also like:

Aden Knaap reviews Kill Anything that Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam
Janet Davis on cultural memory and the Vietnam War
Clay Katsky reviews Kissinger’s Shadow

Too Much Inclusion? Museo Casa de la Memoria, Medellín, Colombia

By Jimena Perry

In 2013, a memory museum opened in Medellín, Department of Antioquia Colombia. Its founding was part of the Victim Assistance Program created by the city’s mayoralty in 2004. Known as one of Colombia’s most violent cities, due mainly to the drug cartel of Medellín led by Pablo Escobar, this urban area suffered severe violence (bombings, targeted killings, kidnappings, bribes, threats, and massacres) from the 1980s to the mid-1990s. The communes of Medellín ‒16 divided into neighborhoods and institutional areas‒ acquired a very bad reputation during this period because most forms of violence happened there. According to official sources, such as the National Registry of Victims, 1,383.988 of 8,421,627 registered victims nationwide, are from the Department of Antioquia.

The house-museum (casa museo) is conceived as part of the symbolic reparation of victims the state must pursue, as a space in which they can grieve, come together to tell their stories, and heal. The museum has 378 testimonies that can be heard, viewed, and read. The building in which it is housed has three stories. The first one is a temporary exhibition space, the second is where the permanent display is, and the third is a documentation center. Located downtown, the museum is at the Bicentenario Park and behind a traditional theatre.

Museo Casa de la Memoria, Medellín (Jimena Perry, 2017).

The permanent exhibition of the museum is divided into 16 topics. The first one, named Absences, opens the hall with a mirror wall in which people can read fragments of testimonies related to the sadness of losing loved ones, homes, lands, and domestic animals. The second one, Nostalgic Landscapes, is an audiovisual projected on a wall in which one can observe Antioquia’s rural sceneries affected by the armed conflict. It is meant to convey the pain of forced displacement. The third one, called simply Medellín, is a narrative of the city’s history since 1541. It includes indigenous peoples, afrodescendants, and peasants, trying to be as inclusive as possible. The fourth, Sensitive Territories, is composed by three interactive cartographies which show the numbers of the department´s municipalities, facts of victimization that are remembered collectively, and memory sites in Medellín. These cartographies are intended to highlight how the people from Antioquia resisted the conflict, to denounce atrocities, and to call the viewers’ attention to social mobility.

Interactive Cartographies. People can touch the screens and navigate through information related to violence, victims, and memory (Jimena Perry, 2017).

The fifth space is called Medellín in Movement. It is also a video in which spectators can see the city in action. It shows streets, people, activities, traffic, day, night, and the different ways of inhabiting the urban center. The sixth one, Children’s Words, is a touching panel in which kids define words such as love, violence, fear, dead, displacement, and murder. This is one example: “Murder: To take away the best of a person.” This sentence was written by a nine-year-old boy. The seventh, is an interactive chronology, from 1946 to 2013, in which the history of Colombian violence is told. This piece sticks out due to its grand size and the information it contains. A person can click on its links to find out specific data about certain events, such as the creation of the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia, FARC-EP (Armed Revolutionary Forces of Colombia-People’s Army), peace processes, and institutional efforts to end the country’s armed conflict.

Interactive Chronology (Jimena Perry, 2017).

Space number eight is perhaps one of the most impressive of the displays. It is called Multiple Faces of Violence. This is a sample of approximately 50 pictures taken by four known photographers. The images are displayed in triptychs which the observer can turn and alternate. They are shocking and capture many violent moments that deserve reflection. Besides the pictures there is an interactive screen where the photographers tell their experiences taking the images. The following pictures are the work of Natalia Botero, Jesús Abad Colorado, Albeiro Lopera and Steven Ferry. I chose only a few of them. The images reproduced here were taken by Jimena Perry.

The ninth topic of the permanent exhibition is named Words. Like with the children’s definitions, here children and adults play with the meanings of fear, solidarity, resiliency, memory and difference. The tenth space, Whispers, as shocking or more as the former, is composed by 13 wooden boxes attached to a wall. If someone places his or her ear to a box, a testimony of violence can be heard. The narrative of each box is different and some of them are very hard to listen to.

Wooden Boxes (Jimena Perry, 2017).

The eleventh space is a composition of 16 cases with artistic pieces in which the armed conflict is represented. They are in the middle of the permanent hall and include topics such as violence against the earth and indigenous communities. The twelfth one, Present Histories, is made of three person-size panels in which recent victims — survivors of violence, politicians, activists of human rights, and priests — give their views and experiences of war. Twenty-four different voices can be heard here. Space thirteen is a recompilation of recent songs with social meaning. Here people can stop to listen to the music, which is mainly hip-hop and rap. The fourteenth one, Art’s Point of View, is also an interactive panel that presents artistic works in which violence is depicted. The fifteenth one, Memory Enclosure, is a wall in which the viewer observes images that come and go over a black screen. The pictures allude to birthdays, baptisms, and everyday life activities and chores to remind the viewer how life was interrupted violently. The last part of the permanent exhibition is a long hall in which there are fragments of speeches of human rights activists, writers, and other people who had fought for peace in Colombia.

“To close old wounds. And that from death new life arises.” (Jimena Perry, 2017)

Medellín’s House-Memory Museum is a place intended to give voice to Medellín’s victims of violence and provide them a site to grieve, reunite, remember, and develop strategies to avoid future violence. The institution’s first director defined this mission clearly enough, however the second and current one is implementing some changes. She said publicly that the museum should not only be for victims and perpetrators but for every citizen. This statement caused uneasiness in the city’s inhabitants because the space is supposed to represent symbolically the people directly affected by violence. So, here big questions come up: How much inclusion is desirable? Which is the audience of the institution?

Another issue worth mentioning is the absence of drug trafficking victims at the museum. Even though Pablo Escobar was born in Rionegro, his business was all run in the capital of Antioquia. Escobar and his organization, the Medellín Cartel, committed 623 attacks that left hundreds of dead civilians and thousands wounded. The Cartel also was responsible for the murder of 550 policemen, 100 bombs in Bogotá and Medellín in malls, official institutions, airplanes, and newspapers. Approximately 15,000 people died due to the actions of the Medellín Cartel between 1989 and 1993. Among the deceased were presidential candidates, journalists and politicians. Kidnappings of politicians and journalists were very common as well. It is surprising that the museum does not mention these victims. This is a part of Colombian history that remains absent from most institutions, drug lords are not part of museum narratives leaving big silences that need to be filled. Perhaps telling this part of history should also be part of the healing process.

Also by Jimena Perry on Not Even Past:

Time to Remember: Violence in Museums and Memory in Colombia, 2000-2014
My Cocaine Museum, by Michael Taussig (2004)

You may also like:

Magical Realism on Drugs: Colombian History in Netflix’s Narcos

Digital Teaching: Mapping Networks Across Avant-Garde Magazines

In “The European Avant-Garde in Print” (REE 325), students explored the unique and vibrant print culture in Central Europe between the two world wars and the social and political context that produced it. I sought to expose students to the networked qualities of magazines that were published in Czech, Hungarian, Serbo-Croatian, Polish, and German. We examined contributor lists, the aesthetic qualities of the “New Typography,” and the way that the magazines cross promoted each other through advertisement.

Students discovered the transnational and multilingual interconnectivity of these magazines through the use of various digital mapping and open source publishing resources, such as Kumu and Scalar. Using Kumu’s Social Network Analysis tool, for instance, I could help students visualize how one figure, such as Karel Teige, the leading member of the leftist Czech avant-garde group Devětsil, leveraged his connections with editors elsewhere to make magazines that facilitated relations with major figures of a pan-European avant-garde. To offer just one example, through the Brno-based magazine, Pásmo, the Czech avant-garde actively collaborated with the Russian born and Berlin-based artist El Lissitzky, the German Bauhaus director Walter Gropius, and French-German correspondent Yvan Goll.

(via author)

I used digital mapping in my lectures to make this fluid exchange more concrete and dynamic for students. Then, a major component of the class was built around students developing their own digital mapping and visualization group projects. In this way, students had the opportunity to engage critically and interactively with the materials covered in the course.

One group drew on our extensive discussion of Dada periodicals published both in Europe and the United States—which we had the opportunity to view in person at the Harry Ransom Center—to reveal how some prominent artists appeared in Dada publications on both sides of the Atlantic. They also used their map to comment on who did not figure in these publications—namely, women, with the exception of the New York-based 291 contributor Agnes Meyer, whom they featured.

Another group of students chose to document connections across a series of publications not via their contributors or geographic locale, but rather in relation to shared principles of design, such as color, shape, and textual form. This group even built their map to visually reflect in its own design the various components that they chose to highlight.

Another project focused on a single magazine—the Italian Poesia—to make manifest the various personal connections between the leading figure of Italian Futurism, F.T. Marinetti, and other artists and authors related to the movement.

The digital mapping component of the course was largely made possible with the assistance of UT’s Slavic and Digital Scholarship librarian, Ian Goodale, who made multiple class visits in which students had the opportunity to workshop their digital projects, and who also held weekly office hours in the Slavic Department. Ian also created a Scalar platform that holds all the mapping projects in one place, with the Kumu maps embedded, and includes other analytical content generated by students, allowing for further connections to be drawn across the group projects.

I observe in my own classroom, and in the work of my peers both across UT and at other institutions, the need for universities and colleges to commit to allocating funding for their libraries so that they may train and hire staff who are able to support digital pedagogy. For example, this past semester, Ian Goodale also helped my colleague in the Slavic Department, Vlad Beronja, create another digital project, Yugoslav Punk, with students in his course on Punks & Divas in Southeastern Europe.

Another aim in teaching “The European Avant-Garde in Print,” was to expose students to non-European periodicals, to explore the variety of responses to inter-war social and political conditions, and also to find actors outside of a European male cohort largely not represented in the Central European set. By giving students the opportunity to create their own mapping projects, I hoped to reveal unexpected connections between these cultural products. There is more work to be done in achieving these goals in a future iteration of this course, and data visualization and digital mapping tools will facilitate students’ active learning towards this end.

You may also like:

Digital Learning: Starting from Scratch, by Joan Neuberger
Media and Politics From the Prague Spring Archive, by Ian Goodale
The Prague Spring Archive Project, by Mary Neuburger and Ian Goodale

_________________________________________________________________________________________

Recent Posts