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Not Even Past

NEP’s Archive Chronicles: An experiential approach to the Archive of the Indies

NEP’S Archive Chronicles explores the role archives play in historical research, offering insight into the process of conducting archival work and research. Each installment will offer a unique perspective on the treasures and challenges researchers encounter in archives around the world. NEP’s Archive Chronicles is intended to be both a practical guide and a space for reflection, showcasing contributors’ experiences with archival research. This two-part installment explores the Archive of Indies in Spain and shares research tips on how to navigate its digital platform, PARES.

For nearly a decade, I experienced the largest imperial archive of the Americas from afar. In Mexico City, Guadalajara, and Austin I logged countless times onto a website called PARES (Portal de Archivos Estatales), a clunky but essential tool for those in need to peruse the Spanish State Archives. The most recent iteration of the PARES website allows you to create an account called a “Notepad” where you can save archival references and digitized documents. Below a selection of documents that I vowed to myself I would look in person one day:

  • Dibujo de un bisonte
  • Plano, elevación y perfil de una casa para habitación del Catedrático de Botánica
  • Alojanieve, pulperías, salinas y solimán
  • Consulta del Consejo de Indias
  • Ensalada de los Navegantes: Disertación phisicobotánico-médica

I have yet to see these documents.

Even though PARES contains the online catalog and millions of digitized documents from twelve archives, most of the items I have collected over the years come from a single repository, the Archivo General de Indias, known to most scholars as the AGI. In 2013, I did not understand what kind of archive the AGI was, let alone grasp the magnitude of its holdings. All I knew is that I had to visit someday if I wanted to become a respected Historian (una historiadora consagrada). Why such a visit was necessary truly escaped me. Up to that point, I had learned that historians of science worked mostly with print material and archives of renowned scientists and scientific institutions. As I tried to piece together the dispersal and loss of the visual culture produced in the Royal Botanical Expedition to New Spain, I longed to visit the Royal Botanical Garden of Madrid and its archive. This kind of repository was closer to the natural history collections I had known as an undergraduate while I worked at Mexico’s National Herbarium. And yet, I continued filling my PARES notepad with items from the Archive of the Indies and collecting archival references from the secondary literature I consulted.

It would take me at least another five years to learn why this archive was relevant to those studying the history of science and knowledge in the early modern Iberian world and beyond. Important books and scholars (including my own advisor and fellow colleagues) helped me understand that the Spanish Empire was held together by a large bureaucratic apparatus that was capacious enough to collect information about almost anything and anywhere. From taxes and commercial disputes to the number of trees planted in Chapultepec, the bundles of documents or legajos at the Archive of the Indies are a true unknown to the researcher, each carrying in their pages a unique blend of calamity, confusion, hope, excitement, and occasional boredom. However, finding what you need is rarely a straightforward journey. The AGI’s vast holdings are spread across seventeen main archival sections, including a relatively new addition listed in PARES as ADAGI (Archive of the Archive of the Indies). How then, does one determine where your archival journey should begin at the AGI?

Picture of boxes of Casa de Contratación for NEP's Archive Chronicles
Figure 1. These boxes at the original building of the AGI, La Casa de Lonja, emulate the classic cover of a legajo. The archive’s reading room is now located at the Cilla del Cabildo building. Image taken by the author.

The easiest and most practical answer lies, of course, in PARES. In principle, it should simply be a matter of compiling the archival references saved in one’s notepad and then tallying the sections that appear most frequently. For this purpose, one could use the thorough guides made by Scott Cave or recent ones posted on H-Net by William Cohoon and Grant Kleiser. Indeed, this is the method I initially followed in preparation for my dissertation research on the commerce and cultivation of New World dyes in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. My numerous PARES searches indicated that the section of the archive that dwelled on dyes was Contratación (commercial affairs, very broadly understood). Based on these references, I realized my time at the AGI would largely involve examining commercial disputes over dye shipments. To be honest, I was not thrilled by this prospect and thus decided to prioritize a different archival thread that drew me to the history of cochineal some years earlier.

Hailed as one of the largest exports from Colonial Mexico, cochineal is a red dye obtained from parasitic insect females that sap nutrients from its plant host, the prickly pear cactus or nopal. Archival materials about this dye are quite scattered but there are a few illustrated documents (Fig. 3) that explain how Indigenous laborers in Central and Southern Mexico aptly managed parasites, plants, and the landscape to produce a highly specialized dye at a large scale. Like other scholars before me, I was interested in this striking visual culture. This led me to pursue a distinct archival journey from the one charted by the results I had collected in PARES.

I. Through the archival weeds

Among historians, the Spanish State archives are notorious for their cumbersome and restricted approach to digitization. Until only recently, researchers were strictly forbidden from taking photos at the AGI and therefore had to request the archivists to digitize sections of the archive, a process that could take many months if not years. Yet, it would be surprising for many to hear that the AGI and other Spanish state archives were pioneers in digitization, launching PARES online fourteen years ago. From then on, researchers and accidental historians like me have been able to use this archive at a scale, speed, and distance unimaginable three decades ago. For better or for worse, virtually every scholar of Colonial Latin America now begins their archival journey with digitized documents from PARES, which account at best for about 10% of their holdings. The AGI has now fully digitized diverse subsections such as Listas de Pasajeros (located in Contratación), Patronato, most of the bound books in the Gobierno Section (see Part 2), and a good portion of illustrations, maps, and material culture contained in Mapas, Planos y Estampas (MP-Estampas).

Drawing of Bison found in documents of AGI - for NEP's Archive Chronicles
Figure 2. “Dibujo de un Bisonte”, MP-Estampas-1, Archivo General de Indias, ca. 1598. This bison, originally described as a “cow from Cíbola” was originally part of the 389 folio digitized file on Juan de Oñate’s exploits in New Mexico (Patronato,22,R.13), shown below.

Screenshot of PARES system for NEP's Archive Chronicles

It is in MP-Estampas where one can find a charming drawing of a bison originally sighted in the Zuni town of Hawikuh. This drawing brings into view something I completely missed when I first read an illustrated report on cochineal production in Yucatán located in this same section. The cropped version of the bison drawing suggests it was taken from a larger document. To fully understand its purpose, it is crucial to refer to its original location in Patronato. In contrast, the seventeenth-century dye production report, featuring an image of a prickly pear, appeared self-contained. I initially only verified that its associated documents in Guatemala’s section were fully digitized. However, many months later, when I took the time to look more carefully at the documents in the original location of the report, I finally asked the most important question about the prickly pear image: Why was a document referring to prickly pears in Yucatán deposited in the papers of Guatemala?

Image of text describing the process of cultivation of the grana or cochineal
17th century drawing of the process of cultivating the grana or cochineal

Figure 3. “Dibujo de la obtención de la grana o cochinilla”, MP-Estampas, 70, Archivo General de Indias, 1620. The illustration of the prickly pear cactus (nopal) is part of a brief report detailing how to cultivate these plants so they could sustain cochineal, an insect parasite that bore one of the most valuable red dyes in the early modern world.

Through this archival discovery I learned that I should not take digitized items from PARES for granted. Our time as researchers at the AGI seems so precious that we tend to prioritize legajos (bundles of documents)that are only available to consult in situ. Yet, it is also important to read in tandem relevant digitized documents for they might lead us to different sections of the archive. This is especially relevant for sections at the AGI that archivists curated long after the documents came to the archive such as MP-Estampas or Patronato. When documents are plucked out of the original trail that brought them to the archive, it is easy to miss what was their original purpose and the creators behind them.

My lack of diligence in reading digitized documents was compensated by my stubbornness to find out more about prickly pears in the Yucatán Peninsula. Since the report was one of the first documents that caught my attention when I first articulated my dissertation project, I was determined to find more about it. Yet, when I looked for traces about prickly pears or dyes in Yucatán, my PARES search results were disappointing. This is not entirely surprising as Yucatán was considered a remotely communicated region during Spanish colonial rule. But my inability to find relevant documents about my inquiry was rooted in the heterogeneous cataloging of the archive, not its remoteness. That is, the level of description of each legajo varies greatly across sections. There are legajos that archivists have thoroughly, or at least decently described, thus allowing for easy identification of relevant documents amidst hundreds of folios. Others, like many legajos from the infamous miscellaneous section of Indiferente General, have just a broad identification label with a range of years, sometimes without any geographic attribution.

Figure 4. Comparison between two legajos with contrasting levels of description: The left one lists correspondence from different viceroys in New Spain and has been fully digitized and organized by year. The right one is only available to consult in situ and covers over two-hundred years of Council and Board reports.

I decided to immerse myself into the world of scantily described legajos and started to look for anything remotely related to Yucatán. To navigate the heterogeneous cataloging of the AGI, I established the main coordinates of my search in terms of geography –any jurisdiction related to colonial Yucatán; people: any colonial bureaucrat related to prickly pears and cochineal; time frame: three decades before or after 1620, the year of the report. I also relied on three strategies: 1) use print catalogs to understand the organization of different archival sections; 2) look for archival clues and references on expert literature; 3) ask for help from the authors or readers of expert literature.

These somewhat obvious strategies allowed me to find numerous fragments scattered across various legajos in the sections of Gobierno and Escribanía. While there were many days when I poured over dozens of pages thinking I had not found a single thread, I came to realize that I needed this time to get acquainted with the archive and the voices spread across its sections. It taught me how to ask the archive better questions and start using PARES not as a fishing net to simply see “what’s out there”, but as a navigational chart. 

II. Labyrinth shortcuts

My weeks-long search for Yucatán’s prickly pears was mostly successful because the AGI has an extraordinary scholarly community that extends beyond its walls at the Cilla del Cabildo building. The famous 11 am coffee break that AGI users take every day certainly captures the enthusiasm and collaborative spirit surrounding the archive. Even if one does not partake in this ritual every day, it is incredibly easy to meet local and international scholars working on a wide array of topics related to the Spanish Empire and the early Americas. I was lucky enough to meet two researchers working on Yucatán that pointed me to key legajos and kept an eye for anything related to my dissertation. Additionally, the in-site archive’s library, the Hispanic American School Library, and the unmatched expertise of local scholars became the best way to learn about other Spanish archives and become acquainted with new historiographies.

Entrance of the Escuela de Estudios Hispano-Americanos in Seville
Figure 5. Entrance of the Escuela de Estudios Hispano-Americanos in Seville. Wikimedia Commons

To venture into the archival weeds of the AGI, more than patience or resourcefulness, one needs time and money. A prolonged stay in Seville is cost- and time-prohibitive for most scholars. Thus, making the most of each archival visit is vital. Over the past decade, the Spanish State Archives have made substantial changes that have increased their accessibility: longer operating hours, self-digitizing initiatives, an online system to book appointments, and the use of WeTransfer to send digitized files. And while their implementation at the AGI has been slow, I cannot stress enough how transformative some of these have been. They allow for better planning and use of time in the reading room. There is still plenty to improve especially on the cataloging front. In the second part of this piece, I will share a few tips that helped me improve my use of PARES and understand better their cataloging and organization.

Now that the AGI has loosened its strict policies about digitization, scholars will not need to spend as much time in Seville as older generations of historians did. Those of us who had the privilege of making a long research stay at the AGI might fear that the increase of short visits and indiscriminate use of cameras will erode the archive’s strong community. I do not know the AGI well enough to predict whether this will happen or not, but I do know that my colleagues’ love for coffee, gossip, and archival adventures is as timeless as the cover design of an AGI legajo. I do not expect to see a shortage of researchers sharing over coffee their grievances and archival finds any time soon.

Diana Heredia-López is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History at the University of Texas at Austin. Originally trained as a biologist in Mexico, she has specialized in the history of science and colonialism since 2012. Her current research examines dye cultivation and commerce as a framework to investigate early modern Hispanic extractivism, knowledge production, and material culture.

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.

A visceral turn: Dr. Zeb Tortorici and queer alterities to the archives

Banner for A visceral turn: Dr. Zeb Tortorici and queer alterities to the archives by César Iván Alvarez-Ibarra

In honor of the centennial of the Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection, the 2022 Lozano Long Conference focuses on archives with Latin American perspectives in order to better visualize the ethical and political implications of archival practices globally. The conference was held in February 2022 and the videos of all the presentation will be available soon. Thinking archivally in a time of COVID-19 has also given us an unexpected opportunity to re-imagine the international academic conference. This Not Even Past publication joins those by other graduate students at the University of Texas at Austin. The series as a whole is designed to engage with the work of individual speakers as well as to present valuable resources that will supplement the conference’s recorded presentations. This new conference model, which will make online resources freely and permanently available, seeks to reach audiences beyond conference attendees in the hopes of decolonizing and democratizing access to the production of knowledge. The conference recordings and connected articles can be found here.

En el marco del homenaje al centenario de la Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection, la Conferencia Lozano Long 2022 propició un espacio de reflexión sobre archivos latinoamericanos desde un pensamiento latinoamericano con el propósito de entender y conocer las contribuciones de la región a las prácticas archivísticas globales, así como las responsabilidades éticas y políticas que esto implica. Pensar en términos de archivística en tiempos de COVID-19 también nos brindó la imprevista oportunidad de re-imaginar la forma en la que se llevan a cabo conferencias académicas internacionales. Como parte de esta propuesta, esta publicación de Not Even Past se junta a las otras de la serie escritas por estudiantes de posgrado en la Universidad de Texas en Austin. En ellas los estudiantes resaltan el trabajo de las y los panelistas invitados a la conferencia con el objetivo de socializar el material y así descolonizar y democratizar el acceso a la producción de conocimiento. La conferencia tuvo lugar en febrero de 2022 pero todas las presentaciones, así como las grabaciones de los paneles están archivados en YouTube de forma permanente y pronto estarán disponibles las traducciones al inglés y español respectivamente. Las grabaciones de la conferencia y los artículos relacionados se pueden encontrar aquí.

…Soy ese amor que negarás para salvar tu dignidad
Soy lo prohibido…
(Roberto Cantoral, 1970)

The first time I engaged with the work of Dr. Zeb Tortorici was in 2019, at the end of a Texas fall when the idea of a worldwide emergency as COVID-19 seemed improbable, if not impossible. At the time, I was meeting with my future PhD advisor, Dr. Laura Gutierrez, at UT Austin, to explore research into queer disgust, the performance of pleasure, excess, and queer rejection to LGBTT+ hegemony in México. Dr. Gutierrez told me about a book she considered helpful for my research. The book was Sins Against Nature: Sex and Archives in Colonial New Spain (2018). This book would become my introduction to the work of Dr. Tortorici, his affective approach to archived documentation, and the methodological shift to queering archives in the search for possibilities for censured queer alterity.

Once I had the book in my hands, I examined it with care and attention. A medium-sized book, not too heavy, yet not insubstantial. A black and red cover showcased an image of what looked to be a winged devil speaking to various demonic creatures. Navigating the book’s pages was as fascinating as exploring the aesthetic composition of its exterior. Dr. Tortorici introduces the book by re-telling an event from my hometown, Monterrey, in 1656. Lorenzo Vidales, a local thirteen-year-old, was found engaging in bestiality with a goat, an act the civilian and religious courts punished by having Lorenzo whipped and expelled from the city of Monterrey. The death penalty served as a warning and promise for him if he ever thought of returning to the city. Even when the event belongs to the municipal archives of Monterrey and, therefore, to our national and regional historical memory, it is, in no way, part of the collective knowledge of those of us who grew up at La Sultana del Norte, as Monterrey is known. It was too repulsive, too nefarious; and simply too deviant to have a place in the official narrative of the city, a space constructed around industrial myths where the will and determination of the industrial catholic bourgeoise made the desert fertile.

State Archive of Nuevo León. Images taken by the author.

Having the opportunity to speak to Dr. Tortorici in person shortly after encountering his work doubled my excitement and curiosity about his research into excess and memory. The start of that conversation, which I hope to continue over the years, was marked by what I felt to be a meeting of kindred spirits of a sort who haunt archived excess and academic curiosity. These spirits surely welcome gracious archival accidents. So are the questions and conceptual possibilities that archival accidents allow. What I found most valuable, however, as I venture into my own research on the possibilities of excess in performance art in Monterrey, were the questions of embodied viscerality and excess, and its trans-temporal archival presence.

Dr. Tortorici’s research has a particular connection to my own work on the visceral and excess and to my analysis of queer possibilities in the face of hegemonic normalcy. For context, two special issues of A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies (to which Dr. Tortorici contributed) give theoretical weight to embodied and archival vicerality by defining it as “a phenomenological index for the logics of desire, consumption, disgust, health, disease, belonging, and displacement that are implicit in colonial and postcolonial relations.”[1] Tortorici’s contribution adopts a microhistorical lens to show how vicerality can structure and baffle archival impulses. Incidents of necrophilia, fellatio, masturbation, and erotic religious visions from colonial Mexican archives reveal the layered and complex “gut feelings” of historical actors – including the archivists and historians who registered these events.[2] In short, although Dr. Tortorici’s work covers an earlier period than my scholarly interests, I was eager to engage in dialogue with him—especially when it comes time to sort out affective approaches that queer the archives and confront the excessive elements that have been intentionally overlooked.

Let me zoom out briefly from my first reading of Sins Against Nature and my exciting first conversation with Dr. Tortorici about our shared research interests, to offer a brief overview of his research trajectory. From there, we can begin to explore how his understanding and work with the archives of “No” are opening up archival possibilities for radical alterities to institutional respectability. By archives of “No”, I refer to that which is too excessive to be archived, or even remembered by institutions; therefore rejected on a “anti” archive category, a “No” category .

Manuscript text of a sodomy trial in Monterrey
Archivo Historico Monterrey / Causas Criminales Vol 10 B Exp 958 / 1704 / Contra Lorenzo Aspitia por haber cometido el pecado Nefando.
Manuscript text of a sodomy trial in Monterrey
Archivo Historico Monterrey /Causas Criminales Vol 26 Exp 465 / 1786 / Contra Martin de los Reyes por delito que se le imputa del pecado Nefando.

Dr. Tortorici is an Associate Professor of Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Literature at New York University. His research interests center around queer colonial history and archives in Latin America, with particular attention to pornography, dissident sexualities, pleasure, desire, and censorship. In addition to several prestigious fellowships and visiting professorships, Dr. Tortorici also has a remarkable publication record. Sins Against Nature won the John Boswell Award from the Committee on LGBT History and the Alan Bray Memorial Book Prize. Dr. Tortorici’s work recognizes the value of intellectual community building for advancing valuable scholarly projects. This includes his co-editing different volumes on Ethno-Pornography, Centering Animals in History, Trans*historicities, and Medical reproductive knowledge in 18th-century Latin America.

Dr. Tortorici’s work in many ways represents a navigation of the archives of the “No.” As a historian of the “No”, his focus and methodology have centered on looking for different moments of non-history, non-citizens, and undesirable non-humans.[3] He hopes to guide academic curiosity toward that which has been historically silenced and those who have been double censured by the creators and the user-researchers of archives. A methodological turn toward the “No” should not be understood within the limits of orthodox archival order and logic but rather as queer interruptions to academic normalcy. His approach to queering the archives is not reserved solely for diverse expressions of gender and sexuality. The implications of his questions around archival materials productively open broader alterities to the colonial order, which, in turn, make the “nefarious” episodes of the “no” histories he reconstructs transcendental.

Perhaps somewhat ironically, “pleasure,” despite the positive affect it connotes, nevertheless overlaps with the realm of the “No.” I’m fascinated by Dr. Tortorici’s work on pleasure for presenting a platform to speak of something that has been purposefully ignored, surveilled, and exoticized, and as a response to imposed contemporary archival respectability. Dr. Tortorici’s research opens a space for queer pleasure, embodied desires, and the erotic. His efforts are even more admirable precisely because they must work against the structural limits imposed by institutions holding archival traces of these pleasurable moments.

Book cover Sins Against Nature
Book cover Sexuality and the Unnatural in Colonial Latin America

The good news is that visceral rejections of queer pleasure hold the key that can free over-silenced stories. Queer embodied conversations with archived pasts must be understood primarily as that: conversations. Dr. Tortorici leads us towards these conversations, which must necessarily turn towards careful coded dialogues that those queering archival research can affectively understand. These embodied visceral conversations inherently involve provocations, consumptions, and reactions. In this sense, Dr. Tortorici reveals how queering colonial archives means showing how archives hold and censure stories of consumption that have provoked disgust within those who created the archive. These visceral tensions open a “beyond time” affective encounter with those who study and translate queer codes of the archive and engage in visceral dialogues with the present, past, and future. Dr. Tortorici is careful to point out the need for accurate translations of queer viscerality. The provocation censured, persecuted, and archived during the colonial period does not have the same affective meaning for contemporary audiences. These conversations, therefore, are very much in the translation.

I keep returning to a term Dr. Tortorici brought into our dialogue: imagination. In order to affectively navigate and queer the archives there is a need for radical imagination. Radical imaginaries permit deeper explorations of the “what if?” These historical possibilities, in turn, contribute to queer contemporary life beyond utopia. In this sense, Dr. Tortorici’s radical imaginaries regarding the archive contribute to a greater genealogy of academic shifts toward radical archival work. I am thinking here of Black feminist scholars such as Saidiya Hartman, Tina Campt, and Riley Snorton, who have opened up radical affective possibilities for queer archives of color.

Dr. Tortorici was featured in the panel “Histories of Collecting and Collecting Stories” for the 2022 Lozano Long Conference, titled “Archiving Objects of Knowledge with Latin American Perspectives.” It is my sincere hope that this introduction may help situate his work as it continues to expand discussions of radical queer archival alterities.

Cuir norteño from Monterrey (México), member of the House of Majesty. PhD student at the Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies. Currently, he’s a Student Resident at CIESAS Noreste (Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social). He is interested in the possibilities for cuir radical futurity-building via excess, cuir rejection, and alternatives to hegemonic LGBTT+ respectability. He is the father of Carmela, a calico cat.

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.

[1] Sharon P. Holland, Marcia Ochoa, Kyla Wazana Tompkins; On the Visceral. GLQ 1 October 2014; 20 (4): 391–406. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-2721339

[2] Zeb Tortorici; Visceral Archives of the Body: Consuming the Dead, Digesting the Divine. GLQ 1 October 2014; 20 (4): 407–437. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-2721375

[3] For the history of the “no,” I am referring here to the work of “unthinkable” histories like those examined by Haitian anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot (1995) Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History.

Bibliography

Collections, F. L. (2017). Fales Video Archive . Obtenido de Sex in the Archives: Seeking Sex, Procuring Porn: https://vimeopro.com/nyutv/fales-library/video/208568051

Tortorici, Z. (2014). Visceral Archives of the Body: Consuming the Dead, Digesting the Divine. GLQ A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 20(4), 407-437.

Tortorici, Z. (2018). Sins Against Nature: Sex & Archives in Colonial News Spain. Duke University Press.

University, N. Y. (s.f.). Zeb Tortorici. Obtenido de https://as.nyu.edu/faculty/zeb-joseph-tortorici.html

Notes from the Field: Reflections on Dictatorship and Democracy in Argentina

In January 2023, I traveled nearly three hundred miles from my apartment in Buenos Aires to meet a stranger in Paraná, Argentina. We had chatted sporadically via WhatsApp, but I had agreed to spend a long weekend in her home months before we ever met. As I stepped off the bus, I had little sense of what awaited me, yet I was excited to finally meet Luz.

Our meeting happened by chance. A few months earlier, I started research in the Archivo General for my dissertation on President Raúl Alfonsín. He had led Argentina’s 1983 democratic transition, following the country’s longest and most brutal dictatorship. Between 1976 and 1983, the military junta forcibly disappeared an estimated 30,000 people. I had mentioned this project to Álvaro, another doctoral student working in the archives. That weekend he texted me from his friend’s home. “You’ll never believe this,” he said, “but my friend’s parents were friends of Alfonsín.” Accompanying his text was a photo of Luz, walking alongside the president. Álvaro said that he had told Luz about my project, and she had invited me to visit.

Raúl Alfonsín and Enrique Pereira at a book talk in the Biblioteca Popular in Paraná (courtesy of Luz Buscema)

Luz’s invitation was unexpected and unusual but also very exciting. I quickly followed up by WhatsApp. She promised to share books and photos from her late husband Enrique’s personal archives. Enrique had held local political office for Alfonsín’s party, la Unión Cívica Radical (the Radical Civic Union, UCR). He had also spent thirty years writing a history of the UCR and its important figures. After Enrique’s death, Luz had undertaken the process of editing and publishing his life’s work. Now she offered to share these materials and her memories of Alfonsín’s presidency with a curious historian from the United States.

Luz alongside President Alfonsín (courtesy of Luz Buscema)

Arriving in Paraná in January, I immediately felt overwhelmed. The bus ride from Buenos Aires lasted a little over eight hours, and Luz greeted my tired face with a flurry of questions. I worried that my Spanish would sound rough or that she would regret inviting me. On the way to her home, I tried to organize my thoughts. I had never collected interviews in such an intimate way, and I was anxious not to overstep or offend my host. Luz, on the other hand, seemed eager to begin sharing her stories.

I spent the first full day in Paraná sorting through Enrique’s papers and photos. As I read his work, I gained a better sense of his life and career. Luz helped fill in the gaps—the tiny details that remained outside of her husband’s papers. She remembered difficult years under the military dictatorship. Prior to 1976, Luz and Enrique had participated in local politics and labor unions. The military regime would criminalize these activities, and those who participated risked arrest, torture, or disappearance. Despite the high levels of repression, Luz and Enrique continued to engage in their old social circles and to organize secret political meetings.

This framed photo of President Raúl Alfonsín greets all visitors to Luz’s home (author’s photo)

A palpable sense of fear permeated Luz’s memories. She spoke of how the couple navigated the constant threat of repression. “We thought one of us should stay . . . stay alive to take care of the children,” Luz said. Often this meant that she stayed home while her husband attended meetings. Other times the couple ignored their fears and opened their own home as a space for political gatherings. They hosted a talk by future president Raúl Alfonsín at their home in 1981—two years before the dictatorship’s end. Luz explained how they had carefully instructed guests to arrive at varying times and in small groups to avoid suspicion. “The only one who wasn’t afraid was Alfonsín,” recalled Luz.

Raúl Alfonsín in the backyard of Luz and Enrique in December 1981 (courtesy of Luz Buscema)

Later, I asked Luz why she agreed to host meetings in her home despite her fears. “I always liked open doors,” she replied. Perhaps that also explained why she willingly invited a stranger to spend the weekend in her home. This openness struck me as remarkable, and our conversations enriched my project. Luz’s recollections might not become the focus of my dissertation, but her stories echo throughout its pages. Often overshadowed in the official narratives, experiences like those of Luz and Enrique are a powerful reminder of the everyday courage and resilience that quietly shaped Argentina’s path toward democracy.

Gabrielle Esparza is a Ph.D. candidate in Latin American history, with a focus on twentieth-century Argentina. Her dissertation revisits President Raúl Alfonsín’s democratic project to examine the intersection of welfare policy and democratization in post-dictatorship Argentina. She holds a B.A. in History and Spanish from Illinois College and received a Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship to Argentina in 2017. There she taught at the Universidad Nacional de La Plata. Gabrielle graduated with her M.A. in History from the University of Texas at Austin in 2020. Her master’s thesis The Politics of Human Rights Prosecutions: Civil Military Relations during the Alfonsín Presidency, 1983-1989 examines the evolution of President Raúl Alfonsín’s human rights policies from his candidacy to his presidency, which followed Argentina’s most repressive dictatorship.

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.

Saving History: Cultural Heritage, Preservation and Public Service

In 2018, I was on a research expedition in Caracas, Venezuela. My days were filled with scheduling visits to libraries and repositories to start research for my dissertation on foreign oil companies and their activities in twentieth-century Venezuela. One sunny afternoon, an old mentor from my undergraduate years invited me to his private club. We were joined by another historian who shared an interest in my Ph.D. research at the University of Texas at Austin.

Sitting beside the swimming pool, our conversation revolved around our respective research projects. It quickly became evident that accessing primary sources in Venezuela posed a significant challenge. To start, there was minimal online information available. Most public and private libraries lacked online repositories accessible to researchers. Furthermore, many of the country’s archives and libraries were in dire condition. Underfunded and understaffed, they needed help to keep their doors open. To make matters worse, they had to limit their weekly operating hours.

Aware of these hurdles, my colleague, Guillermo Guzmán, and I began contemplating ways to preserve the country’s cultural heritage. Over the next few months, we explored various avenues to address this problem. Our attempts to secure funding for digitizing historical collections from the National Assembly (the equivalent of the U.S. Congress) proved futile. It soon became apparent that, as individual researchers, obtaining financial resources for digitization projects was an uphill battle. The logical step was establishing an organization dedicated to preserving the country’s history.

Marcus Golding (to the right) and Guillermo Guzmán Mirabal (co-founders of Red Historia Venezuela) at the Research Department. Academia Nacional de la Historia.
Marcus Golding (to the right) and Guillermo Guzmán Mirabal (co-founders of Red Historia Venezuela) at the Research Department. Academia Nacional de la Historia. Photograph by the author.

Incorporated in Venezuela and founded in 2021, the Fundación Red de Historia Digital Venezolana, known in English as The Venezuela History Network, simplified the application process for international grants. As this initiative unfolded, we were contacted by the National Academy of History of Venezuela, a prestigious public institution with a rich tradition of physically preserving archival materials and generating new knowledge about Venezuela’s and Latin America’s past. One of its colonial collections, the Civil-Slaves Section, faced infrastructural issues. This repository’s contents document the trials, civil cases, and petitions for freedom involving enslaved Afro-Venezuelans. Severe rains at the end of 2020 had compromised the ceiling where the collection was stored, prompting the archivists to relocate it. This institution sought our assistance in digitally preserving the collection. Through an inter-institutional agreement between the Venezuela History Network and the National Academy of History, we devised a plan to initiate the digitization of the Civil-Slaves Section. We also started looking for international grants. Our best supporter emerged in the form of the Gerda Henkel Stiftung from Germany. Thanks to the generous support of the Gerda Henkel Stiftung in 2022, the Venezuela History Network embarked on a digitization and preservation project for the Civil-Slaves Section.

Red Historia Venezuela logo
Red Historia Venezuela logo. Source: Red Historia website

After eight months of intensive labor, the project concluded. The Venezuela History Network successfully digitized 381 bound volumes and 23 boxes containing unbound documents, totaling 123,800 pages or 61,900 digital captures. This collaborative effort also facilitated infrastructural improvements to the room housing the collection, the acquisition of essential equipment such as scanners and laptops, and the creation of our current website and open-access digital library. Notably, this project allowed our team of paleographers, archivists, and researchers to train in best practices for digitizing historical materials. It’s worth mentioning that neither the Venezuela History Network nor the National Academy of History had any prior experience with digitization and metadata creation. The Conservation Center for Art & Historic Artifacts provided the necessary training to accomplish this vital task.

Paleographer Zully Chacón removing dust and debris from a colonial volume
Paleographer Zully Chacón removing dust and debris from a colonial volume. Photograph by the author.

The successful execution of the digitization project on the history of enslaved Afro-Venezuelans enabled us to reach new audiences. We promoted this new collection through online channels, social media, and public events, such as the one hosted at the Institute for Historical Studies at the University of Texas in Austin in October 2022. This first effort brought forth new challenges as well. In 2023, we were given numerous opportunities to digitize additional historical archives and diversify our collections catalog. Currently, the Venezuela History Network is engaged in at least six ongoing or soon-to-commence projects in collaboration with prestigious organizations like the Modern Endangered Archives Program at the University of California Los Angeles and the Center for Research Libraries through the Latin American Material Project (LAMP) initiative. We plan to create collections covering the history of Cocoa, the private papers of former Venezuelan presidents, two cultural and political magazines from the twentieth century, and an archive documenting the HIV and LGBTQIA+ movements in the upcoming year. These initiatives are collaborative efforts involving public institutions, private individuals, and non-profit organizations. We’ve also presented our mission at universities, local radio and YouTube channels, and even tech events in Las Vegas, of all places! Although we remain a relatively small organization, the Venezuela History Network is eager to establish new partnerships and connect with individuals interested in collaborating with us.

Colonial records are temporally relocated after intense rains undermined the ceiling
Colonial records are temporally relocated after intense rains undermined the ceiling. Photograph by the author.

In my capacity as a historian, these achievements have illuminated a profound truth: that we can do more as activists, historians and social entrepreneurs. History should serve a purpose beyond academia. In my case, I am contributing to the digital preservation of my country’s history. What’s more, through our open-access library, the Venezuela History Network is bringing history directly to the people, facilitating their reconnection with their own past.

A team of paleographers from Red Historia Venezuela and the National Academy of History createing metadata for each colonial document
A team of paleographers from Red Historia Venezuela and the National Academy of History creating metadata for each colonial document. Photograph by the author.

The digital copies retained by our partners after each project’s completion ensure that, even if circumstances change in the future, the historical collections we are digitizing will endure. To further this cause, we also extend our assistance to local partners in getting their collections online. Admittedly, this isn’t a definitive solution. Our current scope of work remains confined primarily to Caracas and its surrounding areas. There exist numerous archives and libraries in other provinces that find themselves helpless. The country urgently requires substantial investments in the infrastructure and human capital of libraries and archives to genuinely safeguard our cultural heritage. In the meantime, the Venezuela History Network is endeavoring to fill this void, leveraging every bit of experience we gain to assist in this monumental undertaking. Through local and international alliances, we hope that new organizations and groups will join us in this titanic effort, hence the word network in the name of our institution.

The need to provide reliable and easy access to historical materials is crucial. Communities and individuals alike want to discover and access their own histories. If you’re a historian or another type of scholar with a drive or calling to contribute to the world of history, follow your instincts, get organized, and embark on collaborative work with your community. Your impact, however small, will leave an enduring legacy for generations to come.

Marcus Golding is a Ph.D. candidate in the History department. He holds a B.A. in Liberal Arts from Universidad Metropolitana in Caracas, Venezuela, and a M.A. in Latin American Studies from Georgetown University. Born and raised in Venezuela, Golding’s research interests as a Ph.D. student include business and labor histories in Latin America during the Cold War and the cultural, social, and economic influences of US petroleum businesses in the region and in Venezuela specifically. Marcus is also the co-founder of the Venezuela History Network, an organization focused on the digitization of archives at risk in Venezuela and the promotion of the digital humanities in general. 

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 New World and Beyond: A Review of New World Nature

The New World and Beyond: A Review of New World Nature

In honor of the centennial of the Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection, the 2022 Lozano Long Conference focuses on archives with Latin American perspectives in order to better visualize the ethical and political implications of archival practices globally. The conference was held in February 2022 and the videos of all the presentation will be available soon. Thinking archivally in a time of COVID-19 has also given us an unexpected opportunity to re-imagine the international academic conference. This Not Even Past publication joins those by other graduate students at the University of Texas at Austin.  The series as a whole is designed to engage with the work of individual speakers as well as to present valuable resources that will supplement the conference’s recorded presentations. This new conference model, which will make online resources freely and permanently available, seeks to reach audiences beyond conference attendees in the hopes of decolonizing and democratizing access to the production of knowledge. The conference recordings and connected articles can be found here.

En el marco del homenaje al centenario de la Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection, la Conferencia Lozano Long 2022 propició un espacio de reflexión sobre archivos latinoamericanos desde un pensamiento latinoamericano con el propósito de entender y conocer las contribuciones de la región a las prácticas archivísticas globales, así como las responsabilidades éticas y políticas que esto implica. Pensar en términos de archivística en tiempos de COVID-19 también nos brindó la imprevista oportunidad de re-imaginar la forma en la que se llevan a cabo conferencias académicas internacionales. Como parte de esta propuesta, esta publicación de Not Even Past se junta a las otras de la serie escritas por estudiantes de posgrado en la Universidad de Texas en Austin. En ellas los estudiantes resaltan el trabajo de las y los panelistas invitados a la conferencia con el objetivo de socializar el material y así descolonizar y democratizar el acceso a la producción de conocimiento. La conferencia tuvo lugar en febrero de 2022 pero todas las presentaciones, así como las grabaciones de los paneles están archivados en YouTube de forma permanente y pronto estarán disponibles las traducciones al inglés y español respectivamente. Las grabaciones de la conferencia y los artículos relacionados se pueden encontrar aquí.

Focusing on the development of early modern nature and science, New World Nature is a delightful online resource for anyone interested in the Spanish Americas, the history of science, and an innovative comparative approach to history that connects the Spanish Americas from Europe to China. Website creator Dr. Mackenzie Cooley at Hamilton College intends for New World Nature to be a platform to highlight her multiple projects and collaborations. This website demonstrates how scholars in the humanities can maintain an organic online presence and a shared space for research.

Website of New World Nature
Website of New World Nature

New World Nature makes several significant contributions. The first is creating a research tool for the Relaciones Geográficas, a corpus of responses collected for the 50-question survey sent to Spanish Americas in the 1570s during the reign of Spanish King Philip II.[1] Various Relaciones Geográficas in the Spanish empire are known, originating from Peru and the Caribbean to even Spain. The section “Searching the Relaciones Geográficas” offers René Acuña’s magisterial critical editions from Mexico, Guatemala, Tlaxcala, Michoacan, Antequera, and Nueva Galicia. As a result of collaboration with student researchers on translation and data management, this tool not only assisted Cooley’s students in their research but is also helpful for others who are interested in these documents.

The second contribution is its organic approach. Rather than an end product of a particular project, the website highlights Cooley’s ongoing scholarship. After introducing the Lesser Antilles archives at Hamilton College and the Relaciones Geográficas, New World Nature spotlights Cooley’s body of work which includes her book, The Perfection of Nature: Animals, Humans, and Race in the Renaissance, her current research on sex, medicine, and empire this academic year, as well as Natural Things: Ecologies of Nature in the Early Modern World co-edited by Cooley, Anna Toledano, and Duygu Yildirim. This edited work has resulted from the project Natural Things/Ad Fontes Naturae, an ongoing endeavor in global natural history that the aforementioned trio of scholars co-founded during Cooley’s graduate training at Stanford University.

A digital archive on the Relaciones Geográficas
A digital archive on the Relaciones Geográficas

The third main contribution of New World Nature is its comparative approach that will appeal to audiences in various geographical fields. Beyond the Atlantic connection between the Americas and Europe, the comparison between the early modern Spanish and Chinese empires brings forth an innovative – and previously overlooked – perspective in the scholarship of the early modern world. In addition to the works mentioned above, Cooley has also co-edited another volume, Knowing
an Empire: Imperial Science in the Chinese and Spanish Empires, 1500-1800 (under review). Through a pioneering comparison between the Relaciones Geográficas and local gazetteers (difangzhi), a centuries-long Chinese genre, this work connects early modern Spain and China via the broad themes of empire, science, and local epistemologies.[2] This work argues for the striking parallels between these two seemingly unrelated genres, offering a model of comparability and emphasizing the polycentricity of power. It also challenges the linear progression to modernity by seeking to understand the development of early modern Spanish and Chinese knowledge production that differed from the European experience. This work is a powerful intervention in the scholarship of the early modern world that connects two of the biggest empires of the time.

The team behind this website further speaks to the collaborative and global nature of this project. Through the efforts of the Australian designer Katie Dean, New World Nature features great images from the Relaciones Geográficas that immediately grasp the readers’ attention.[3] Cooley has also been working with a team of student researchers with various academic interests at Hamilton College, including Latin American history, history of medicine, race, human rights, and archaeology. Cooley and her team have traveled to Europe and Latin America for research and co-published their works.

Chinese Gazetteers
Chinese Gazetteers

While an exciting series of works, two minor suggestions for the website might be helpful. The first is to feature an introduction that provides a road map highlighting the resources and multiple projects mentioned above. A quick orientation of the website content would help readers (especially first-time visitors to the website) more easily understand the rich resources available. Related to that, reframing and expanding the “About” section would help reflect the website’s growth and scholarship over the years. The second suggestion would be to highlight Cooley’s manuscript-in-progress more explicitly on the website.

New World Nature has created a visually appealing platform that not only aids in the research on the Relaciones Geográficas but also introduces multiple exciting works that help interested readers to further understand the dynamic nature of the early modern world.

Shery Chanis is a doctoral candidate in the Department of History at UT Austin. She researches Ming China (1368-1644) and its connection with the early modern world. Chanis focuses on the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Her current project analyzes the Chinese elites’ ordering and descriptions of the southernmost maritime province of Guangdong that were attentive to the people both inside and outside of its physical boundaries. She has presented her research at UT Austin, the Newberry Library in Chicago, the AHA Annual Meeting (poster session), and the University of Warwick in the United Kingdom. She has also published on H-Net and Not Even Past.

Mackenzie Cooley is an Assistant Professor at Hamilton College and is a historian of science and ideas in early modern empires. Her research focuses on the natural world and the Columbian Exchange. In 2021-2022, she was a Deborah Loeb Brice Fellow at Villa I Tatti, the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies. At the Lozano Long Conference, Dr. Cooley participated in a panel entitled “Modern Institutional Networks Visualize Early Modern Archives: The Case of the Relaciones Geográficas y Topográficas.”

I wish to thank Dr. Mackenzie Cooley for the wonderful email exchange and for her thoughtful and enthusiastic input for this piece.

[1] The Benson Latin American Collection at UT Austin houses part of Joaquín García Icazbalceta’s Collection of Relaciones Geográficas of Mexico and Guatemala from 1578 to 1586. See https://www.arcgis.com/apps/Cascade/index.html?appid=1fcabf740a844d9d80d5bf0248416f47. For more on Relaciones Geográficas, see Barbara E. Mundy, The Mapping of New Spain: Indigenous Cartography and the Maps of the Relaciones Geográficas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000). For additional analyses and bibliographical references on the Relaciones Geográficas and a more personal story, see Rafael Nieto-Bello’s recent piece on Not Even Past (https://notevenpast.org/bringing-together-the-relaciones-geograficas-and-topograficas-of-the-spanish-empire/).

[2] Co-edited by Cooley and Huiyi Wu, Knowing the Empire in Early Modern China and Spain (under review) features essays from an interdisciplinary group of scholars including Maria Portuondo, Barbara Mundy, sinologist Joe Dennis, digital scholar Shih-Pei Chen, Mario Cams, He Bian, Marcella Hayes, and Stewart McManus. This volume follows the “Knowing the Empire” Conference in November 2019 at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, sponsored by the MPIWG’s Department III under the leadership of Dagmar Schäffer. (https://www.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/event/knowing-empire-imperial-science-early-modern-chinese-and-spanish-empires). The conference was inspired by Shih Pei Chen’s work on early modern Chinese local gazetteers (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/343605827_Local_Gazetteers_Research_Tools_Overview_and_Research_Application) and Huiyi Wu’s research on the appearance of Jesuits and the partial transmission of their European knowledge in these sources.

[3] Dean is also a design collaborator in Cooley’s co-edited Natural Things: Ecologies of Nature in the Early Modern World, which includes twelve essays that explore the relationships among natural philosophy, science, medicine, and European colonialism to chart the expansion of natural science from 1500 to the early 1900s.

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.

Digital Archive Review: The University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology

Digital Archive Review: The University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology

The University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology—often called the Penn Museum—contains an extensive collection of objects originating from “ancient Egypt, Greece and Italy, Mesopotamia, Asia, Africa, and the Americas and more.” Many of those pieces are available for viewing online. The Penn Museum website offers in-depth descriptions of each item, along with high-resolution images, short entries on historical context, and related videos.

The Granite Sphinx of Ramses II
The Granite Sphinx of Ramses II

The homepage offers users several options for exploring the museum’s contents. As a starting point, it displays featured items, such as The Granite Sphinx of Ramses II. The site also utilizes a a keyword search and allows visitors to narrow their results by a range of categories, including: record type, if it has an associated image or video, whether it is currently on display, geographic section, whether it has a 3D model, historical period, inscription language, material, and technique.

A keyword search for “Jewelry” yields over 37,000 results
A keyword search for “Jewelry” yields over 37,000 results

One standout piece helps illustrate the quality of the pieces housed at the Penn Museum. The Dowager Princess Crystal Sphere, a glass ball that sits atop a metal stand in the shape of a roaring wave. Dating from Qing Dynasty China (nineteenth century), the mysteries of its origins have enchanted museum goers for decades. The website provides images of this item from many angles, along with a description and a short historical context.

A 1954 image captures the smiling reaction of some children examining the Crystal Sphere
A 1954 image captures the reaction of some children examining the Crystal Sphere

An interesting feature that the site offers is an interactive map illustrating the origins of the museum’s collections. It includes approximately 92% of the items that the Penn Museum contains, which come from more than 1000 locations around the world. 

The Object Location Map appears on the homepage
The Object Location Map appears on the homepage

Through all of these options, the website allows visitors to build their own virtual, self-guided tour based on their particular interests. For those seeking a more in-depth discussion, the museum posts videos of its monthly lecture series. In 2012, the lecture theme was “Great Riddles in Archaeology.” More introductory activities are also available on the site, including the “Write like a Bablyonian” text translator. 

This text translator helps users write their name in Cuneiform
This text translator helps users write their name in Cuneiform

The digital collections of the Penn Museum are extensive and easily accessible through their online portal. Its written, visual, and audio sources invite many groups to explore world history by browsing its pieces.

A Small Country Lost in the Files: Albania’s Absence in an American Archive

by Jonathan Parker

Research projects don’t always go as planned. When venturing into the archives, historians are confronted with mountains of documents – boxes upon boxes of government memos, letters, records, etc. Knowing what you want to find can help, but the task of finding is still the proverbial needle in a haystack. This is especially true at the LBJ Library, an archive that contains more than 45 million pages of documents from the political career of President Lyndon Baines Johnson. There are plenty of materials for those interested in the Cold War and the United States’ relations with the Soviet Union and its satellite states in Europe, like Poland and Czechoslovakia.  However, other countries, despite being part of the communist bloc, are far more difficult to find in the archive.

LBJ Presidential Library (via Flickr)

Approaching the LBJ archive, I thought it would be interesting to read about Albania since it seems to receive little attention here in the U.S. I duly looked Albania up in the Country Files of the archive and requested the relevant single box of papers. Some countries like Czechoslovakia have documents spread across several boxes, but Albania only merits one. This box arrived at my desk and I was intrigued when I noticed how heavy it was, apparently full of papers. I opened the box and quickly discovered, with a sinking feeling in my stomach, that while the box was indeed quite full with seven folders of documents, there was but a single folder labelled, perhaps optimistically, “Albania, Vol. 1.” Opening the folder I was even more disappointed to discover that it contained a single, two-page (really a page and a half) memo from October 10, 1966, by Nathaniel Davis, with the all-too-appropriate subject line “A Brief Rundown on Albania.”

Feeling a little silly (I had hoped to write a research paper on Cold War Albania), I nonetheless read through the memorandum in the space of a few minutes. Several things struck me as I sat there in the archives. First, the memo consists of mostly unconnected fragments of information. Each paragraph jumps from one topic to another, mostly dealing with Albania’s foreign relations. Second, much of this “information” could be characterized, for lack of a better word, as hearsay or diplomats’ gossip. Nothing came directly from the Albanian government, only through diplomatic backchannels and third-parties. At this point it might be worth mentioning that the U.S. and Albania had no formal diplomatic relations from 1939 (when the country was occupied by Fascist Italy) until the collapse of communist rule in 1991.

Enver Hoxha via Forrásjelölés Hasonló/ Wikimedia Commons

This lack of formal relations probably explains the absence of other documents. However, it is not clear that this was due to an isolationist attitude on the Albanian side. Enver Hoxha, the communist leader of Albania from World War II until his death in 1985, was famously paranoid and ideologically rigid even by Stalin’s standards. Among other things, this paranoia has left a very physical mark on the Albanian countryside in the form of 173,000 concrete pillbox bunkers, for an average of nearly 15 such bunkers per square mile (5.7 per square kilometer). On the other hand, this 1966 memo from the LBJ archive claims that “Albania is casting out some lines toward the West.” For evidence, the memo’s author, Davis, cites Albania’s establishment of relations with Turkey, a series of talks with West Germany, and “vague proposals” to the Austrian government for “coming nearer to the West.” In addition, Davis reports that early in 1966 “an Albanian Vice Foreign Minister asked the Italian ambassador how relations with the U.S. might be established.” The Albanian government was also perturbed that its UN representative had not been invited to President Johnson’s reception for UN delegates.

Given the apparent interest on the Albanian side for formal relations with the U.S. and its European allies, why are there not more documents in the LBJ archive’s Albania folder? It seems that there was little appetite at the U.S. State Department for extending relations. The memo lays out the reasons why various people in the State Department were unenthusiastic about Albania while also dismissing most of them out of hand. In general, the main concern seems to have been the impact that establishing relations with Albania would have on other foreign relationships, particularly regarding the Soviet Union since Albania had recently sided with China in its quarrel with the Soviets. There were also fears of inter-communal violence (between whom exactly is unclear) backed by Albania’s neighbors (namely Greece, Yugoslavia, and Italy), with explicit comparisons to the Greco-Turkish confrontation in Cyprus from 1960 to 1964. The memo also mentions Greek apprehension at the prospect of Albania reaching out across the Iron Curtain, at least in part due to the Albanian decision to side with Turkey over the Cyprus issue.

Far from being isolated and obscure, Albania appears tangled in a web of contentious international relations involving both its neighbors and powers further afield. In fact, it is this very web that prohibited U.S. relations with Albania, for fear of upsetting more than one delicate element of the status quo. Consequently, if paradoxically, Albania is largely absent from LBJ’s files. In other words, just because Albania does not appear among these files, does not necessarily mean that it was doomed to be a hermit on the international stage, holed up in a fortress overlooking the Adriatic and Ionian Seas. Albania’s obscurity in these papers is rather a product of the contentious position it carved out for itself on the world stage.

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The views and opinions expressed in this article or video are those of the individual author(s) or presenter(s) and do not necessarily reflect the policy or views of the editors at Not Even Past, the UT Department of History, the University of Texas at Austin, or the UT System Board of Regents. Not Even Past is an online public history magazine rather than a peer-reviewed academic journal. While we make efforts to ensure that factual information in articles was obtained from reliable sources, Not Even Past is not responsible for any errors or omissions.

Dean Page Keeton and Academic Freedom at UT Austin: Three Archival Letters

banner image for Dean Page Keeton and Academic Freedom at UT Austin: Three Archival Letters

One bonus of archival research is discovering documents irrelevant to the topic but so evocative that they can’t be ignored. In the State Bar of Texas archives, I found three letters from June 1960 between Werdner Page Keeton (1909-1999), Dean of the School of Law of The University of Texas, and two lawyers. Those letters caused me to detour from my project for a while.

Black and white image of W. Page Keeton, Dean of the UT Law School, 1949-1974
W. Page Keeton, Dean of the UT Law School, 1949-1974
Source: Law School Yearbook, 1959.

Homer L. Bruce, a tax-law partner of the Houston law firm Baker & Botts, sent the first letter to Keeton on June 15, 1960, with “carbon copies” to nine prominent members of the legal profession in Texas. Six days later, one of those nine recipients, a renowned oil and gas lawyer in a Fort Worth firm, Robert E. Hardwicke, also wrote Keeton. Both letters complained strongly about an article just published in the law school’s Texas Law Review by a UT tax-law professor, J. Henry Wilkinson, Jr. The article was titled “ABC—From A to Z,” and the letter writers were outraged that Wilkinson criticized a tax benefit for oil and gas companies known as the “percentage depletion allowance.” The third letter is Keeton’s June 28 response.

Image of letter from Homer L. Bruce to Dean Keeton dated June 15, 1960
Image of letter from Homer L. Bruce to Dean Keeton dated June 15, 1960
Homer L. Bruce to Dean Keeton, June 15, 1960
Source: State Bar of Texas, Archives Dept., via author.

The challenged article seems unremarkable today. Wilkinson’s topic was the “ABC” transaction, common in the oil-and-gas business. A producing property’s owner may sell a “production payment,” or a fixed quantity of the minerals to be produced, to a purchaser in a manner that takes advantage of the federal income-tax “allowance,” or deduction, of 27-1/2% of the property’s income, available to oil-producing taxpayers for the “depletion” resulting from the extraction of the minerals in the ground. Through patient examples, Wilkinson demonstrated that the ABC deal was not always as tax-advantageous as was believed. The article did refer to the allowance as “gratuitous.” And that observation drew the ire of Bruce and Hardwicke, who amplified their criticism by insisting that enemies of the depletion allowance—specifically, Hubert H. Humphrey—would use Wilkinson’s characterization of the percentage depletion allowance as “ammunition.”

Image of J. Henry Wilkinson, Jr's June 1960 article in Texas Law Review
Wilkinson’s June 1960 article in the Texas Law Review
Source: www.heinonline.com

In June 1960, when these letters were written, the Democratic Party’s national convention was a month away, and one still-active candidate for the presidential nomination was indeed Hubert Humphrey, then a two-term Senator from Minnesota who had consistently fought the depletion allowance in Congress. His fight against that and other “tax loopholes” had been unsuccessful but earned him respect as a reformer. In Texas, however, the depletion allowance was a sacred cow. The Texas Law Review had published an earlier article defending the depletion allowance, and the Chair of the Texas Railroad Commission, Ernest O. Thompson, wrote and spoke in favor of the allowance, and virtually all of the national legal literature and newspaper coverage in Texas about the allowance defended it. And Humphrey’s rival from Texas, Lyndon B. Johnson, was a protector of it. Humphrey later became LBJ’s vice-president but “never gave up” and, finally, in 1975, was gratified to see Congress abolish this tax “loophole.”

Black and white photograph of Hubert H. Humphrey
Hubert H. Humphrey
Source: WikimediaCommons

The addressee of the two letters, Keeton, was well acquainted with the oil and gas industry and its issues. He had earned the LL.B. in 1931 at UT, was hired to teach there, and quickly gained recognition in the field of torts, the law of civil injuries, and wrongful death. During World War II, he served in Washington as an executive of the Petroleum Administration for War. After a stint as dean of the Oklahoma University Law School, he accepted the deanship of UT’s law school in 1949, serving until 1974. He distinguished himself at both law schools by fostering racial integration and by continuing to teach torts as well as serving as dean. The law school grew during his deanship, and UT law alumni/ae revere Keeton. The city of Austin renamed the street alongside the law school for him, and he is buried in the State Cemetery by gubernatorial proclamation.

Moreover, Keeton was stalwart and adept, in protecting academic freedom at the law school. One innovative key to his success there was to liberate the school from overreliance on legislative appropriations by creating the UT Law School Foundation to receive alumni/ae contributions. Important supporters of this initiative were law graduates who attained positions of power within the oil and gas industry. For instance, Rex G. Baker of Humble Oil was a key supporter of the Foundation—and also a staunch defender of the depletion allowance.

Those relationships did not deter him. Keeton formulated a masterful response to the two letters that foreclosed any further discussion. “You realize, of course,” he began, “that I cannot act as any kind of a censor and do not even attempt to act as such with respect to what goes in the Review.” Having matter-of-factly vindicated academic freedom, the Dean added that he did not read Wilkinson to make any judgment about “merits or demerits of the percentage depletion allowance.” And by pointing out that the ABC structure does not always work as expected, “Wilkinson may have done a service to the oil industry.” Keeton also observed that the challenged word “gratuitous” was simply “a descriptive term,” indicating that the amount of the tax deduction was not tied to the cost of the property; the tax benefit was indeed essentially free to the oil and gas taxpayer.

Picture of a letter from Dean Page Keeton to Homer L. Bruce dated June 28, 1960
Dean Page Keeton to Homer L. Bruce, June 28, 1960
Source: State Bar of Texas, Archives Dept., via author.

Academic freedom at UT has had a long history. In 1917, when Governor James E. Ferguson vetoed appropriations for UT because the President would not dismiss faculty to whom Ferguson objected, the Legislature, at the urging of UT alumni/ae, impeached and removed him. In his 1986 oral history interview, Keeton recounted less spectacular but nonetheless significant instances during his tenure of politicians and the Board of Regents seeking to meddle with the faculty and academic matters, efforts Keeton successfully repulsed. But Keeton’s defense of academic freedom was not always public, as in the example of these previously unknown letters in the archive. Keeton’s handling of that situation in June 1960 highlights the ongoing task of University leaders to protect academic freedom, and it burnishes both Keeton’s legacy and the reputation of UT as a place for the free exchange of knowledge and viewpoints.

The State Bar of Texas’s Archives Department, also known as the “Gov. Bill and Vara Daniel Center for Legal History,” contains the Bar’s permanent records. The Archives’ professional archivist also manages and provides access to the collections of the Texas Bar Historical Foundation there. The archives are located in the Texas Law Center in Austin, Texas. The three letters were contributed to this archive in 1992 by J. Chrys Dougherty, a historically minded lawyer; his father-in-law, Ireland Graves, was one of the nine cc recipients of the three letters.

Josiah Daniel (UT Law, J.D. 1978; UT History, M.A. 1986) is a Retired Partner in Residence of the international law firm Vinson & Elkins LLP in its Dallas, Texas office. After four decades of law practice, he now is focusing on the history of the legal profession in Texas and is writing a biography of Dallas congressman Hatton W. Sumners (1875-1962), based on his papers in the Dallas Historical Society’s archive. His C.V. is on his blog: http://blog-josiahmdaniel3.blogspot.com/2018/03/cv.html. He may be reached at jdaniel@velaw.com.

Sources for this article include:

Lewis L.Gould, Progressives and Prohibitionists: Texas Democrats in the Wilson Era (Austin: UT Press, 1973).

“W. Page Keeton, An Oral History Interview” (Austin: UT Austin School of Law, Tarlton Law Library, Legal Bibliography Series No. 36 (1992) 49-52, 69-74.

Theodore H. White, The Making of the President 1960 (N.Y., Harper, 1963)

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 Public Archive

Doing History Online and In Public

by Joan Neuberger

Millions of tweets and millions of state documents. Intimate oral histories and international radio addresses. Ancient pottery and yesterday’s memes. Historians have access to this immense store of online material for doing research, but what else can we do with it? In Spring 2018, graduate students in the Public and Digital History Seminar at UT Austin experimented with ways to make interesting archival materials available and useful to the public; to anyone with access to a computer.

Links to their projects can all be found below on this page.

We built these digital, public projects in four main steps.

First, with the help of UT librarians, the students identified collections related to their research that were not yet available to the public. These collections of documents come from the many wonderful archives on our campus: the Harry Ransom Center, the Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library, the Perry-Castañeda Library, the Briscoe Center for American History, and the Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection. Then we digitized them.

Second, we each wrote a series of blog-essays to share our archival finds with the public. Each blog is meant to show something historically significant about our documents and to open them up in ways that any curious reader, without any background in the subject, can understand and appreciate.

Third, we wrote lesson plans based on our documents to allow educators at the K-12 and college levels to bring our archives into their classrooms.

Finally, we each built a website to introduce our topics, to share our digitized documents, and to make our blogs and lesson plans openly available.

Here are the results:

Qahvehkhaneh: Reading Iranian Newspapers: by Andrew Akhlaghi

The coffeehouse, qahvehkhaneh, was an important political and cultural institution in Iran. As men drank coffee, played backgammon, and discussed business, they also listened to impassioned pleas for democracy and reform from newspapers published in the Ottoman Empire, Russian Caucasus, and British India, smuggled into Iran and read aloud. This qahvehkhaneh is meant to spread the issues of one newspaper, Etella’at, to those curious about Iran.

Bureaucracy on the Ground: the Gálvez Visita of 1765:  by Brittany Erwin.

This project examines the localized consequences and on-the-ground implications of the royal inspection, or visita general, administered by José de Gálvez in New Spain from 1765-1771.

After the Silence: María Luisa Puga and the 1985 Mexico City Earthquake by Ashley Garcia

María Luisa Puga (1944-2004) was a talented Mexican novelist from the Post-Boom movement whose personal notebooks, manuscripts, correspondence, and related documents are held in the Benson Latin American Collection. On this site you will find digitized selections from Cuaderno 118, which contains both Puga’s coverage of the earthquake that struck Mexico DF (now Mexico City) in 1985 and her reflections on those original pages, written in 2002.

Building a Jewish School in Iran: The Barmaïmon-Hamadan Manuscript by Isabelle Headrick

Where do you go when you want to change the world? For Isaac and Rebecca Bassan in 1900, the destination was Hamadan, Iran, to establish a French-language, Jewish school for the small Jewish community in that city. About  fifty years another teacher at the school, Isaac Barmaïmon, wrote an 81-page manuscript that describes the first twenty years of the school’s existence.

Food Migrations: Texas Czech Culinary Traditions by Tracy Heim

Texans with Czech heritage have been able to preserve their culture in America through organizations, cultural events, church groups, and especially through food.  Two books of recipes and other documents contextualize the process of migration into life in Texas and create a framework for understanding the Texas Czech culture.

Indian Revolt of 1857 by Anuj Kaushal.

South Asia witnessed an event during 1857 which altered the history of India, Britain, and the British East India Company. The event, known as a mere “mutiny” by the British and as an anti-colonial revolt by Indians, was reported in the English language press around the world.

The Road to Sesame Street by Peter Kunze

The Road to Sesame Street features government documents tracing the development of the Public Broadcast Act of 1967, the landmark legislation that established the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, PBS, and NPR. Using materials from the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library in Austin, this project provides a behind-the-scenes view of the power players, interest groups, and decisions that laid the groundwork for American public media.

Animating Italian Immigration: Sicilian-American Puppetry by Megan McQuaid.

Attending a puppet theatre performance with familiar characters acting out well-known stories gave some Italians living in New York City a regular taste of the homeland they had left behind.

Frederic Allen Williams: Citizen-Artist with a Magic Lantern by Jesse Ritner

Frederic Allen Williams (1898-1955) was a prominent sculptor, lecturer, intellectual, and rodeo rider based in New York City, where he became known for his talks on Native American art, illustrated with magic lantern slides, which he gave in his midtown studio near the then recently built Museum of Modern Art.

Woven Into History: Living Cultural Fabrics by Alina Scott

The nineteenth and twentieth-century Navajo rugs in this collection aims to provide a platform for respectful collaboration and discourse to recenter the discussion of Navajo culture and commodity production around them and to diversify traditional conversations about Navajo textiles and their communities.

Mercenary Monks by Jonathan Seefeldt

These texts are windows into a thriving monastic world whose varied activities included: raising mercenary armies, caring for widows and child brides, providing credit and other banking services, collecting tax revenue from farmers, providing merit and prestige to an emerging merchant class, and asserting a (short-lived) form of political independence.

Guards and Pickets: The Paperwork of Slavery by Gaila Sims.

The documents in this collection provide a glimpse into the paperwork created to control the movement and relationships of the enslaved, as well as the financial documentation used to make money off the institution of slavery.

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the following people for sharing their expertise in digital and public history with us: Dale Correa, Liza Talbot, Ian Goodale, Stephanie Malmros, Christina Bleyer, Albert Palacios, Andrea Gustavson, Elizabeth Gushee, Astrid Ruggaldier, Penne Restad, and Stacy Vlasits.

Missing Signatures: The Archives at First Glance

On February 21, 1831, a petition containing the signatures of over 800 Connecticut residents was submitted  to the United States Congress on behalf of the indigenous population in the South who were facing relocation. The petition acknowledged Native peoples as the “original proprietors of the soil” and its authors claimed that to remain silent would be criminal and cowardly. The petition was not unique, as archivists recognized when organizing it in a folder containing several other petitions with fairly similar appeals. The threat of the forced relocation of Native Americans caught the attention of many activists and benevolent societies in the North as well as the South.

Guaranteed by the first amendment, the right to petition is granted to individual Americans by the United States constitution, however, petitions were in effect long before the foundation of the United States and its Declaration of Independence from English rule. It has been a particularly useful tool for marginalized groups in the U.S. including Native and African Americans. Women were particularly engaged in petitioning efforts, advocating on behalf of others during the threat of indigenous removal, the anti-slavery and abolitionist movement, and eventually the women’s suffrage campaigns.

(via National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, DC)

Nineteenth-century petitions had the potential for several unintended ramifications. They could receive a favorable a government response, but sometimes the response was negative, and in some cases, petitions were met with silence. The gag rule, for example, immediately tabled petitions related to the antislavery cause in Congress from 1834 until slavery was repealed in 1844. Nineteenth-century petitions served a purpose to the individual or group that canvassed for the petition, helping to add to a running list of potential supporters for future campaigns and movements. This function is helpful for historians who can use the locations and names of signatories in retracing the steps of canvassers.

The layout of each petition is also important. They typically included the statement of a grievance, support, or evidence, and a signatory list. The first name on the list was typically someone of importance or the sponsoring canvasser, so as to add validity and clout to the document. The consequent names were often divided into the categories of “legal voters”(white men),  “women” (white women),  “colored men,” “colored women”, etc. In some cases, that division came in the form of a line drawn down the middle of the signatory list or in the drafting of two separate petitions, one for “legal voters” and the other for women or people of color.

This brings me back to the petition from February 1831. Originally, I went to the National Archives and Records Administration in Washington D.C. in search of  women and people of color who were involved in petitioning efforts. After several days of finding very little evidence of women’s involvement in anti-removal petitioning, I stumbled upon the petition in question. It was one of several files in a box in the dense Record Group 75, which contains documents from the Bureau of Indian Affairs. (RG 75 contains documents ranging from the BIA’s administrative history to records of the secretary of war, and correspondence and documents related to individual BIA tribal offices). This particular box contained petitions and memorials to the House of Representatives and the Senate related to forced Cherokee removal.

(via National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, DC)

The statement of grievance consisted of several pages folded together with the third containing the start of a signatory list. The first and only signature on the final page of the petition belonged to Benjamin Tallmadge, a former Continental Army officer and Representative of Connecticut to the U.S. House. Attached to the original document with a red adhesive was the start of the first full page of signatures under “Litchfield,”, the first town canvassers stopped at in Connecticut. From Litchfield the petition was taken to Kent, Roxbury, New Milford, New Preston, Salisbury, Goshen, Norfolk, South Farms, Torrington, Northfield, Harwinton, Colebrook and Winchester.

By the time I’d unfolded the petition it was more than six feet long, contained more than 800 signatures from fourteen Connecticut towns, and at first glance, none of them belonged to women. Upon closer inspection though, I found a Sally, Caroline, and Martha who signed the document in Salisbury. Next to their names was a piece of paper glued to the original document with a red adhesive, comparable to the kind used to stick the different signatory lists together. It was just under a foot long and glued at all four corners. To my surprise, underneath the flap were the names of 30 women. I was ecstatic. Not only had I found evidence of a large number of women participating in this expansive petition, but their names had been covered up for reasons impossible to gather from the document itself. I immediately called an archivist over to ask whether the adhesive could be partially removed to see the full list of names. The archivist told me that a request for review would have to be submitted and that process takes up to several years, more than the time than I had in DC. Still the existence of a covered list of women’s names on this petition raises important questions about the open and surreptitious role of women in these petition drives.

So what conclusions can be drawn from this discovery? It is not clear at what point along the journey from Litchfield to Congress the names were added or when they were covered, whether the canvassers permitted women’s signatures initially but changed their minds, if the names were added afterwards and covered before finally being turned in, or, if there was something about the three women who signed below the men that made them different from the 30 or so that were covered up. Despite these uncertainties, it’s not unlikely that the names were covered up to prevent delegitimizing the document and the issues at stake. And for historians, this document provides important evidence of the involvement of women in nineteenth-century petitioning efforts, the social value of their signatures (or lack thereof), and overall, the thrill of archival research.

You may also like:

A Historian’s Gaze: Women, Law, and the Colonial Archives in Singapore by Sandy Chang
Secrecy and Bureaucratic Distancing: Tracing Complaints through the Guatemalan National Police Historical Archive by Vasken Markarian
Justin Heath reviews Peace Came in the Form of a Woman by Juliana Barr (2007)

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