cultural history Archives

Review of Our America: A Hispanic History of the United States, by Felipe Fernández-Armesto (2014)

From the editors: One of the joys of working on Not Even Past is our huge library of amazing content. Below we’ve updated and republished Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra’s brilliant and moving review of Felipe Fernández-Armesto’s magisterial Our America: A Hispanic History of the United States.

I first came across Felipe Fernández-Armesto many more years ago than I care to admit: I met his words first, before I met him. I was dazzled by Felipe’s Columbus: the flow, the style of his writing, the power of his argument. And then I came across Millennium. I had just finished graduate school and I was earning my bread and butter teaching large survey classes of Latin American History, and even larger ones of World History. I was to offer kids sweeping panoramas: from the age of the dinosaurs to current events, namely, the Cold War. Global history was yet to produce a multimillion dollar textbook industry. So Millennium came to me as a breadth of fresh air: irreverent, fast paced, learned, entertaining, full of strange and fascinating vignettes, from Ming China to Peronist Argentina. I was then writing my How to Write the History of the New World. I had a fellowship to the John Carter Brown Library.

One of the first things I learned at the JCB was that Felipe occupied the office right next to ours. We had 8 cubicles. His was for him, alone. He kept sherry in his office. His accent and demeanor made him seem unapproachable. I don’t remember the official title he was given, some kind of JCB lordship: The Lord of the Rings, I think. During the fellows’ luncheons he would tear into the other fellows’ arguments with probing, disarming questions, prefaced always by a learned and most insightful comment on any and every field of expertise. When asked about his own research, he would reply “civilizations.” It turns out, that year, he was writing that book. The whole thing was frightening to me at the time.

The John Carter Brown Library's MacMillian Reading Room: a large, richly decorated hall with a high ceiling. Low bookshelves and large pieces of art line the walls.; desks with work stations stand in the middle of the room. A few researchers are visible at the desks. — *The John Carter Brown Library’s MacMillan Reading Room, Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island. Source: Wikimedia Commons.*

And then one day, I noticed Felipe spoke Spanish. I approached him for the first time in Spanish and a friendship emerged. He came for dinner and met my kids, Sebastian and Andrea, both then toddlers. Later Felipe would read my manuscript and help me improve it before it became a book; he wrote a blurb when it was published; promoted it in England and beyond; got it noticed in The Economist; passed judgment on my tenure; followed me around with letters of support in my peripatetic existence. Felipe and his awesome power changed my career and buoyed up my self-esteem. I owe him big.

Felipe and I share something beyond friendship and a common language: our view of the past. The book before us, Our America, epitomizes that shared view. It is about turning perspectives upside down. It is about reading self-satisfying narratives of the past irreverently, mockingly, unsparingly. It is about elucidating the political work that History, with capital H, does. History creates myths that move and inspire, but it also creates myths that silence. Our America is a book about myths: the fountain of youth, the cities of Cibola, the pursuit of King Arthur, the realm of Queen Calafia, the curse of Zorro, the revenge of Moroni, the republic of Hesperus. Our America narrates the history of the United States from a perspective I have often tried to use myself: from the South, rather than the East.

The book is divided into three periods: 1) when Hispanics loomed large over the colonial territories that are now the United States; 2) when Hispanics lost power in the 19th century as the Anglo-imperial frontier expanded into the West, Mexico, the Caribbean, Central America, and the Pacific, and when Hispanics came to be seen as racially inferior, misbehaving children to spank and educate; and 3) when Hispanics in the 20th century slowly crawled their way back from marginalization to claim forcefully a central role in the polity, demographically, politically, and culturally.

The first period uses the myths of the fountain of youth, the cities of Cibola, the knights of King Arthur, and the realm of Queen Calafia to demonstrate how the Hispanic dimensions of US colonial history shaped its every detail, from Roanoke to Jamestown, to Plymouth, to Massachusetts Bay, to Charleston, to the Ohio River Valley, to the siege of Yorktown. From the Puritan plantations to the American Revolution. Hispanics shaped every colonial event described in college textbooks.

The second period makes for tearful, tragic reading: losses, lynching, brutality, and racial slurs aimed at Hispanics, Indians, and Blacks, all lumped together. Felipe follows El Zorro and the Mormon prophet Moroni to describe the losses of California, Texas, the Rockies, the Marianas, Guam, the Philippines, and Puerto Rico, where Hispanics, Blacks, Comanche, Sioux, Apache, and Pacific Islanders had created shared worlds together for generations. Those shared worlds were found in the prairies, on the Mississippi (from the Ohio all the way to Louisiana), and on the Pacific coast (from Monterrey and Baja to Manila). These worlds surrendered to industrialization, machine guns, railroads, steamboats, industrial tractors, and millions of land hungry illegal immigrants from England, Germany, Italy, Ireland, Norway, and Central Europe, who came to the land to act as, say, Texas Rangers and carry out genocide.

The third period is not less tragic; it narrates the age of braceros and forced deportation, from the Great Depression to the Great Recession. Felipe reminds us that liberal Obama, who won his first and second presidency on the back of the Hispanic vote, has deported 1.4 million undocumented immigrants, four times as many as George W Bush, who only managed to deport 400,000. But this age of violence and racism, and merciless labor exploitation, has also experienced the Return of Aztlan: a huge demographic explosion, the Chicano movement, Cesar Chavez, and Civil Rights. And it also seems to be on its way to turning the Anglo republic into a republic of Hesperus, the king of the Hesperides, whose islands the chronicler Fernandez Oviedo claimed where in fact Hispanic colonies.

Seven men in work clothes pose for a photograph in a beet field near Stockton, California in this black-and-white photograph. — *Marjory Collins, photographer.* Stockton (vicinity), California. Mexican agricultural laborer topping sugar beets. 1943. Source: Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

There is little with which to take issue in this book. I share Felipe’s perspective and passion. I wish I could claim I also share his panache, wit, and style. The book is filled with insight, one-liners, and striking reversals of traditional narratives. Let me share with you a few:

Describing how millions of acres were stolen from rancheros in Texas, Nuevo Mexico and California in the 19th century to create large Anglo latifundias, Felipe points out: “The notion that US rule always broke latifundias and introduced morally superior smallholders is risible.”
His account of guerrilla fighters and rebels like Joaquin Murrieta who acted as social bandits in Texas and California explores also the emergence of the literary character of El Zorro as the first superhero to emerge in the US. Felipe then adds: “It is to me a delicious irony that a great line of American superheroes, with their lone trajectories, their alienating experiences, the disguises that place them outside society, and the astonishing dexterity with which they stun evildoers, goes back to a prototype who was a legend of anti-US resistance.”
His description of what the arrival of Anglo capital and law into New Mexico meant, is guided by the reading of the autobiography of Agnes Morely Cleaveland. After a description of her romantic narrative of frontier violence and odd Anglo characters, Felipe bitingly concludes: “Agnes Cleaveland was the chronicler of the Americanization of New Mexico, and her evidence, because it is neutral, is decisive in demonstrating that the United States was not a “civilizing influence.” On the contrary it brought more lowlifes, scapegraces, and refugees from civilization to the colony than ever before.”

I could multiply the examples, but you get the point.

I would not do my job if I were not to deliver some critical comments on Felipe’s book. So to conclude, let me offer a few.

I enjoyed the first section more than I did the second and the second more than I did the third. The third section on the revitalization of Aztlan and the return of Hispanics into the mainstream of America follows the Chicano narrative too closely to offer fresh insights. How to present Hispanics as something more than undocumented or exploited laborers? How to populate the more recent history of the Hispanic diaspora with Nobel Prize winners, scientists, philosophers, economists, opera singers, and captains of industry to offset the dominant image of popular culture, one of curvaceous Shakira and awesome yet corrupt baseball players? And there is the history of the reverse: the “USification” of Latin America, namely, the transformation of a region by capital, values, and returnees from the United States. In the South there lies the Anglo just as deeply within as lies the Hispanic within the North. We can no longer sever the Hispanic from the Anglo, neither here nor there.

The second section on tragic outcomes, therefore, could have been balanced by a more continental approach of mutual influences, cutting both ways. It could have yielded a narrative of Hispanic influence and continental creativity beyond the bandit and the pistolero. I have in mind the printing presses of Philadelphia that in the first half of the nineteenth century became an endless source of books and ideas, shaping Latin America’s public sphere, just as much as did the books printed in London or in Paris in Spanish in the nineteenth century. There is also the case of the origins of American international law and the law of nations that Greg Grandin has so insightfully described in a recent article in the American Historical Review. Grandin shows that jurisprudence and identities, both in the North and South, were the product of codependences and mutual influences. In short, the Hispanic 19th century in the US is much more than dispossession and violence (for other examples of what is possible, see also Gregory Downs’ provocative essay on the Mexicanization of 19th-century American Politics).

The first section is for me the most satisfying and the one about which I know most. It manages to do what was a call to arms for me in 2006, namely, to Iberianize the early modern Atlantic. There are a few Puritan Conquistadors walking through Felipe’s pages. I therefore felt confirmed, justified, in short, delighted. But even here more could be done. I have encountered, for example, English Calvinist debates on colonization, in the 1610s in 1629 that were thoroughly shaped by Iberian categories of dominium and sovereignty. The odd figure of Roger Williams with his radical ideas about religion and state can better be interpreted if we put him in dialogue with Las Casas. Williams knew well the ideas about the radical separation of spiritual and temporal sovereignty so forcefully presented by Bartolomé de Las Casas and Francisco de Vitoria to undermine any Spanish claims of rightful possession of property and authority in the Americas. Williams got to his ideas about state and religion by first offering a critique of Calvinist and Stuart notions of dominium and sovereignty in America. This facet of Williams completely escaped Edmund Morgan’s pioneering study published 50 years ago. In 2012 it continues to escape John Barry, whose Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul remains as parochial as Morgan’s. Both Barry and Morgan should have known better had they not be so provincially Anglo: to study Williams is to study Las Casas and Vitoria. To paraphrase Berry and to capture Felipe’s spirit, to study the creation of the American soul is in fact to study the creation of the Hispano-American soul.

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.

Review of Ruan Lingyu: Her Life and Career (2022)

A child of poverty, luckless in love, her hour upon the stage mostly lost to history, and dead before the age of 25: all too true for Chinese silent film star Ruan Lingyu. Yet there was also a prophecy that “her artistry will one day serve all mankind,” and this too has proved true. The slim yet thorough and persuasive new book Ruan Lingyu: Her Life and Career by Patrick Galvan explains the contradiction, the tug-of-war between tragedy and imperishability that defines so many of the 20th century’s great artists. After reading it, no one could exclude Ruan Lingyu from the pantheon.

Galvan’s study follows the parallel paths of Ruan Lingyu, born Ruan Fenggen in 1910 to Cantonese migrant workers, and the Shanghai-based film industry of the young Republic of China. There were growing pains for both. The Ruan family grew and then shrunk, wounded by toil and illness. Young Lingyu found work as a movie actress, not an entirely respectable profession, but one poised to come into its own as the medium grew in popularity and matured in technique. Chinese films struggled to compete with more popular Hollywood imports, and Chinese directors struggled with low budgets and capricious government censorship. What got audiences hooked was not so much the martial arts spectacles and romantic melodramas, but the stunning actresses who appeared in nearly every movie from their respective studios. Popular polls consistently ranked Ruan Lingyu near the top of the list of Chinese starlets, and after her untimely death in 1935 she became a bonafide legend, her story inspiring movies (see 1991’s Center Stage) and TV miniseries (in 1985, 1988, and 2005) decades later.

“Growing pains” is not quite the phrase to describe the tumult in Ruan’s short life and in the Chinese silent film industry. One grows out of growing pains; neither Ruan nor her kind of cinema outlived their moment, as Ruan died young and once-powerful studios folded amid the shift to talkies and political upheavals that truncated many creative careers. Yet their painful and ultimately fatal struggles were rewarded with growth of a sort. Galvan expertly recounts the dense years of the late 1920s and early 1930s, specifically the effects of internal Chinese politics and the Japanese invasion on the nation’s movies. In the wake of the patriotic May Fourth Movement of 1919, domestic film studios gained ground against foreign-owned studios. By the mid-1920s up to 60 production companies of varying size operated in Shanghai, collectively releasing hundreds of shorts and ever-more features per year, but the 1930s brought economic and political crises that radically changed China’s film landscape. While telling this larger story Galvan summarizes of each of Ruan’s films, a great many of which are lost, with close attention to how their fictional narratives reflected and challenged prevailing ideas about gender, class, and nationhood.

Ruan Lingyu poses against a stucco wall next to an open French door in this color photograph, which appeared on the cover of a Chinese magazine in December 1934. Ruan is smiling with her head cocked to one side; she wears a long green patterned dress. — *Issue 99 (1 December 1934) of the the Chinese magazine* Liángyǒu–called The Young Companion in English–displayed this photo of Ruan Lingyu on its cover. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Concerned about leftist content in popular media, the government of Chiang Kai-shek provided studios with a list of prohibited themes, and censorship became more strict after 1931 when the Nationalist government contended with both an internal communist threat and an external Japanese one. Depicting social problems was acceptable as long as movies did not suggest solutions or issue calls to action, since this would be tantamount to supporting revolution. Even with such restrictions, directors and cinematographers became more confident in their craft, and their stories tended to become more ambitious and nuanced. Ruan and her costars became more sophisticated performers, and Ruan in particular reached such heights that later critics compared her to Brando in terms of her ability to convey depth and authenticity.

Galvan’s book is primarily a work of history, not film criticism, but he does not shy away from assessing the merit of Ruan’s work, which varied depending on the studio, director, and subject matter. 1934’s The Goddess and 1935’s New Woman receive especially detailed attention befitting these films superior quality and messaging. Director Wu Yonggang’s The Goddess is “a hauntingly emotional portrait” of a Shanghai sex worker and her child that features creative camera work and Ruan’s most harrowing extant performance. New Woman is based partly on the short life of novelist and screenwriter Ai Xia, the second woman to author a Chinese feature film, and its critiques of social injustice make it “the most aggressively left-wing film in Ruan Lingyu’s career.”

Galvan is passionate when writing about the relationships in Ruan’s life. They were the source of the tabloid controversies that dogged her in her final months, and they likely played a key role in her two suicide attempts, the second of which was successful. She had two common-law marriages, the first of which fell apart due to financial stress brought on by her partner’s gambling addiction. Her second partner was violent and jealous and reportedly falsified Ruan’s suicide notes. Galvan’s notes and wording are precise, but one may still wonder about facets of Ruan’s life that never entered the written record and whether it is fair to speculate, as the tabloids did, on the circumstances of her death. Still, Galvan’s evidence-based assessments feel correct.

Ruan Lingyu: Her Life and Career is divided into chronological chapters with subheadings for her over two-dozen films. The subheadings note if films are lost, making the book an easy-to-use guide for readers who want to familiarize themselves with Ruan’s filmography. Most of her surviving films are easy to access in the internet age, and Galvan helpfully notes when this is not the case. His chosen images are generally high-quality or highest-available quality, and they depict a range of Ruan performances while also centering the particular aesthetic that made her stand out from her cohort. Galvan finds opportunities to contextualize Ruan’s career in comparison to some of her leading peers, many of whom shared remembrances of her over the years. The book also points to larger themes in Chinese film history, such as the challenges of being a Cantonese-speaker (as Ruan was) in a Mandarin-oriented industry as it shifted to sound in the 1930s, how the center(s) of Chinese-language filmmaking shifted to Hong Kong and Taiwan after the communist victory in 1949, and the effect of the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s on the old guard of mainland filmmaking.

And what of the prediction of one Chinese critic, who used the pen name “Yun,” that Ruan’s talent would one day benefit all humanity? Yun likely hoped that the actress would promote social change through her powerful performances in topical movies that spotlighted social problems and national crises. Whether Ruan or her films actually affected the trajectory of history is one measure of success, but as we approach the centennial of Ruan’s 1927 big-screen debut there is another, equally important legacy to consider. Ruan’s work now serves as a window to the past, a body of evidence about what hardworking filmmakers wanted people to know and think about at crucial, contested moments in Chinese history. Thanks to Ruan’s talent, it is a window we can enjoy gazing through.

Review of Akira Kurosawa and Modern Japan (2022) by David Conrad

Akira Kurosawa (1910-1998) must be one of the most written-about directors in film history. There are over 20 books in English exclusively devoted to Kurosawa. These include Donald Richie’s The Films of Kurosawa (1965), David Desser’s The Sa murai Films of Akira Kurosawa, (1983), Stephen Prince’s The Warrior’s Camera: The Cinema of Akira Kurosaw a (1991), Yoshimoto Mitsuhiro’s Kurosawa:
Film Studies and Japanese Cinema (2000), just to name a few—not to mention studies in which Kurosawa serves as a crucial point of reference.

As the first Japanese director to win at an international film festival and the most well-known outside of Japan, Kurosawa has attracted prolonged interest and extensive studies not only because of his idiosyncratic style but also to the shifting cultural and historical contexts under which his films were conceived and produced. The director remained active throughout his career of over 50 years from the mid 1940s to the 1990s and made 30 films in total.

While many existing studies strive to articulate the enticing form and aesthetics of this film master, historian David Conrad’s Akira Kurosawa and Modern Japan (2022) contributes to the large body of Kurosawa scholarship by putting the turmoil and transformation of Japanese society in the latter half of the 20^th century under the spotlight when reading Kurosawa’s films.

Unlike many previous studies, which tend to focus on a small body of Kurosawa’s films (such as his samurai films, for example) or on a single film at length, Conrad pays equal attention to all Kurosawa’s films. The plot, narrative, film technique and style of the film play only a partial role in Conrad’s appreciation of Kurosawa, and he seamlessly interweaves biographical information, anecdotes, and sociopolitical context into his readings. Each one of Kurosawa’s films, in their own way, provides a window into a specific moment of Japan’s modern history and captures the zeitgeist of that moment. In this way, Conrad sees even the “historical dramas” (jidaigeki) of the director as “contemporary drama” (gendaigeki), and as he aptly puts it, all of Kurosawa’s films could be treated as “products of the jidai (meaning “period” or “era” in Japanese) that make up Japan’s dramatic, painful, inspirational, contradictory 20^th century” (1).

The author often opens a new chapter by laying out the social backdrop and historical events around the year when the film was released, before diving into the film. Kurosawa’s career spanned the Shōwa era (1926-1989), the reign of emperor Hirohito, to the Heisei era (1989-2019), with the accession of his son Akihito. Conrad divided the director’s oeuvre into four periods: “The War Years” includes 3 films from Sanshirō Sugata (1943)to Sanshirō Sugata Part II (1945), “The Occupation Years” with 10 films from The Men who Treaded on the Tiger’s Tail (1945) to Ikiru (1952), “The Miracle Years” includes 10 films from Seven Samurai (1954) to Redbeard (1965), and “The Global Years” with 7 films from Dodesukaden (1970) to Mādadayo (1993). This reminds us that this study is as much about Kurosawa the auteur as it is about modern Japan.

Each chapter deals with one film, and the author reads the scenes, images and dialogues closely to excavate details in which history seeps through. Several recurring motifs come to the fore in Conrad’s study of the correlation between Kurosawa and modern Japan. First is the U.S.–Japan relationship. The role played by the U.S. in shaping Japan’s postwar domestic and foreign policies cannot be overemphasized, and Conrad maps out a well-rounded picture of the changing power dynamic between the two nations through Kurosawa’s Drunken Angel (1948), The Bad Sleeps Well (1960), Yojimbo (1961), and Kagemusha (1980), among others.

The second key issue is censorship, from the wartime military government (1940-1945) to the Occupation forces (1945-1952) and the post-occupation Japanese government. Referencing both the production records and interviews with the director, Conrad identifies the varying nature and logic of these different censorship regimes and the ways that Kurosawa navigated multiple transitions from one phase to another or within one dominant regime. For example, Conrad points out that despite the fact that “feudal themes” were prohibited after the beginning of the Occupation, Rashōmon (1950), a film set in premodern Japan and containing obvious “feudalistic” content, was produced and made its way onto the big screen only because the start of the Korean War (1950-1953) had rendered it imperative for American censors to loosen control in order to show “democracy” in action. Kurosawa seized the opportunity and exploited the fertile ground of Japan’s past for storytelling.

The third topic central to Conrad’s reading of Kurosawa is the shifting gender politics of modern Japan. From Taishō women’s rights movements in the 1920s to women working in the military factories during wartime, from the pan-pan phenomenon (i.e., street prostitutes who served mainly the GIs) during the Occupation to the emerging feminist activists since the 1960s, Conrad shows how Kurosawa engages through his films with matters of women’s rights and status in modern Japan.

One of the merits of Conrad’s approach is the ways in which he reads the social dynamics and history of 20^th-century Japan out of Kurosawa’s jidaigeki (films situated in premodern Japan before the mid-19^th century). He argues persuasively that “jidaigeki imitate the past but tell us about their present.” (101) For example, Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai (1954) takes place in 1586 Sengoku Japan and tells a story focused on seven masterless samurai helping farmers repel a group of bandits who harass the village and loot their crops. Despite the temporal distance between the story’s setting (1586) and the time when the film was made (1954), Conrad thoughtfully demonstrates how the 16^th-century peasants’ conundrum in the film mirrors that of Japanese farmers working under American’s land reform policies after 1947. Moreover, the feudal caste structure between peasant and samurai in the film sheds light on the enduring social inequalities and fixed class hierarchy in post-Occupation Japan when the nation as a whole got wealthier. The elaborate village defense plan and the ad hoc soldiers in the film offer a political parallel to Japan’s de facto army, the Self Defense Force, established with the help of the U.S. in 1950 as a reaction to Korean War.

Historical drama meets modern Japan: three male actors--all dressed incongruously in period clothing, two of whom are holding wooden spears--pose for a photo in alongside an American-made Jeep during the filming of a Kurosawa movie in 1945. — *Three actors in period clothing pose for a photo in front of an American-made Jeep during the filming of Kurosawa’s historical drama* The Men Who Treaded on the Tiger’s Tail (1945). Source: Wikimedia Commons.

This kind of analysis is what makes this book distinct from both the conventional historical textbooks and even film studies. It focuses on the contextual dimension of an auteur’s oeuvre without ever losing sight of the films themselves. It uses film as a portal leading its readers to an understanding of the entangled and layered nature of wartime and postwar Japanese history. Readers learn both political and historical “hard facts” but also aspects of Japanese culture including traditional wedding attire, garbage disposal regulations, folk monsters, evolving beauty standards, and even the Japanese obsession with cats.

Akira Kurosawa and Modern Japan is a historically- and culturally-grounded study of the director. It is both an informative and enjoyable read for anyone who finds the director’s works appealing and wish to know more about the historical and social condition that made them possible.

Yunfei Shang is a PhD student in the Department of Asian Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She works on East Asian cinema, film and media theory, digital cinema and media revolution. Her dissertation project deals with the popularity and influence of Japan’s media products especially film, TV documentary and drama in mainland China since the late 1970s.

Review of Pulp Empire: The Secret History of Comic Book Imperialism (2021)

Over the last decade, the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) has grown into the most profitable media franchise in history. As of January 2022, the MCU accounted for four of the top ten-grossing films of all time. The expansive collection of films ranging from Iron Man (2008) to Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021) has captured the imagination of new generations of viewers and taken the genre to new heights of commercial and critical success. In Pulp Empire: The Secret History of Comic Book Imperialism, Paul Hirsch explores the origins of these superheroes who have experienced such a profound renaissance in recent years. Hirsch examines comic books as instruments of American empire and unpacks the complicated relationship between government and publishers that have shaped these comic books’ imagery and messages over their eighty-year history.

book cover for Pulp Empire: The Secret History of Comic Book Imperialism

Hirsh’s book marks an impressive effort to elucidate the political, cultural, and diplomatic legacies of an artifact that has been regarded by many as “trash.” Such attitudes have meant that cartoons’ history has “been obscured through shame, malice, and benign indifference.” Yet, Hirsch has turned up treasures through his tenacious research and the full-page, full-color reprints splendidly illustrate his analysis throughout.

Pulp Empire traces the dynamic relationship between the industry and state and federal governments, a connection that influenced comic books’ development throughout the twentieth century. Hirsch characterizes the emergence of comic books in the 1930s as products that exploited the creative energies of marginalized men and women. Writers and artists were stingily compensated for their work, while publishers began profiting handsomely as the pamphlet’s popularity rose. American entry into World War II led the industry in a new direction as the US government sought to use comic books as propaganda to generate support for the war effort and promote racial stereotypes about the nation’s adversaries. The government largely stopped regulating the medium following the war and, during subsequent decades, the industry began to depict darker stories as American society lived under the pall of nuclear warfare. Pages were soon filled with gruesome images of crime, violence, and the destructive effects of atomic explosions.

cover for "The Fighting Yank," on the cover of Startling Comics — *“The Fighting Yank,” on the cover of Startling Comics #10, Sept. 1941. Art by Elmer Wexler. Source: Digital Comic Museum*

Such seedy scenes and pervasive racist attitudes in comic books invited criticism on several fronts. Hirsch profiles anti-comic campaigners who decried these pamphlets as corrupting influences on American youth that contributed to rises in crime and juvenile delinquency. Others took a different tack and warned that stories effused with racial enmity eroded American credibility as a beacon of hope and democracy abroad during the intensifying ideological conflict of the Cold War. Hirsch shows how these efforts ultimately resulted in self-imposed censorship. New covert collaboration between the government and publishers crafted fresh characters and narratives to serve as propaganda designed to condemn communism and improve attitudes toward the United States. Several superheroes who have gained acclaim in recent films, such as Iron Man, Thor, and Spider-Man, were born from this public-private partnership and acted as implicit (or in some cases explicit) agents of US foreign policy.

Pulp Empire is filled with fascinating anecdotes and incisive analysis of the ephemera of the US empire. This book offers something for an array of audiences, from fervent comic book fans to historians of American foreign policy. Hirsch deftly deals with several dimensions of comics’ hidden history, from their perpetuation of racist and sexist tropes to their use as a unique tool of soft power popular abroad across class lines. Finally, Hirsch’s analysis of the debates over the atomic age played out in comic book pages proves both entertaining and enlightening. Pulp Empire effectively interrogates the intersection between politics and popular culture and profiles how superheroes have been deployed to serve American expansionist goals.

Jon Buchleiter is a third-year Ph.D. student in the Department of History at the University of Texas at Austin. He studies United States history with particular interest in US foreign policy of the Cold War. His current research examines the institutionalization of arms control and disarmament efforts and successive administrations approached and prioritized arms control initiatives. At UT, Jon is a Graduate Fellow with the Clements Center for National Security and Brumley Fellow with the Strauss Center for International Security and Law. Jon received his BA in Peace, War, and Defense and Political Science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

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.

IHS Talk: Debt: A Natural History

Debt is a human constant. The social implications of systems of credit and debt, however, are not; they can vary significantly over time and space. Traveling freely across the human past, this paper explores the paradoxical nature of the borrowing and lending and provides signposts for writing the natural history of debt.

Daniel Lord Smail is Frank B. Baird, Jr. Professor of History at Harvard University, where he works on the history and anthropology of Mediterranean societies between 1100 and 1600 and on deep human history. In medieval European history, his work has explored the social and cultural history of the cities of Mediterranean Europe, with a focus on Marseille in the later Middle Ages. He has covered subjects ranging from women and Jews to legal history and spatial imagination, which was the subject of his first book, Imaginary Cartographies: Possession and Identity in Late Medieval Marseille (Cornell University Press, 1999). His recently published book, Legal Plunder: Households and Debt Collection in Late Medieval Europe (Harvard University Press, 2016), approaches transformations in the material culture of the later Middle Ages using household inventories and inventories of debt recovery from Lucca and Marseille. Smail’s work in deep history and neurohistory has addressed some of the methodological and theoretical underpinnings of these approaches to the human past. His most recent article in this vein asks whether there is a history of the practice of compulsive hoarding. His books include The Consumption of Justice: Emotions, Publicity, and Legal Culture in Marseille, 1264-1423 (Cornell University Press, 2003); On Deep History and the Brain (University of California Press, 2008), and, with Andrew Shryock and others, Deep History: The Architecture of Past and Present (University of California Press, 2011).

Smail has received awards and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, and his publications have received several prizes. In 2007, he received the Joseph R. Levenson Memorial Teaching Prize from the undergraduates of Harvard University, and, in 2014, the Everett Mendelsohn Excellence in Mentoring Award from the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.

“Reclaiming the Pre-Modern Past” is an IHS lecture series that examines how new technologies and approaches are enriching our understanding of pre-modern eras and cultures

Other IHS Talks:

Climate and Soil: The Environmental History of the Maya
The Influenza Pandemic of 1918-1919

“London is Drowning and I, I Live by the River”: The Clash’s London Calling at 40

By Edward Watson

On February 7, Seattle’s non-profit broadcaster KEXP headed to London for their seventh annual International Clash Day. In celebration of The Clash’s London Calling turning 40 in December 2019, KEXP organized a 4-day live broadcast in Seattle and London, featuring performances from contemporary bands and covers of The Clash’s songs. Their intention was to highlight the “enduring influence” of The Clash’s music as well as their “human rights message.” Released in the UK in December 1979 and in the US in January 1980, London Calling is widely recognized as one of the most influential albums of the twentieth century. Rolling Stone listed it as the eighth best album of all time, Q Magazine listed it at number 20, and the NME placed it at number 39.

The Clash are tied to punk’s emergence in 1976. After the band made its live debut supporting the Sex Pistols in Sheffield in 1976, The Clash became one of the key players in London’s punk scene. By January the following year, The Clash had signed with CBS Records for £100,000 and in April they released their self-titled debut album. The record deal was considered an astronomical fee by the music press and fans alike. Mark Perry, founder of influential punk fanzine Sniffin’ Glue, claimed, “punk died the day The Clash signed to CBS.” Nonetheless, The Clash’s debut record was still recognizably a punk record. London Calling, however, reflected the band’s exploration into styles of music that transcended their punk origins, such as rock and roll, reggae, and ska. In spite of their substantial record deal, The Clash struggled financially. By 1979, The Clash was largely in debt and they were at war with their record company. They needed a commercial success and fast. London Calling delivered, selling around two million copies upon its release. In the UK, it was certified gold in December 1979 and in the US it peaked at number 27 on the Billboard Pop Albums chart.

Cover of the first edition of Sniffin’ Glue (via Wikipedia)

In addition to its diverse range of musical influences, London Calling’s success derived from its sociopolitical content. In the album’s title track, Joe Strummer declared, “we ain’t got no swing, ‘cept for the ring of that truncheon thing.” Strummer was referring to the collapse of what Time had labeled “Swinging” London in the 1960s, evoking police truncheons and riots in the city to elucidate a growing sense of turmoil in the 1970s. After the optimism of the 1960s, London seemed culturally and politically stagnant. But these changes were not just limited to the city of London. London Calling was released at a critical moment in Britain’s post-war history: unemployment was on the rise; there were frequent trade union strikes in 1973 and 1974; the British government sought a loan from the IMF in 1976; and ongoing disputes between James Callaghan’s Labour government and trade unions during the coldest winter for 16 years was dubbed the “Winter of Discontent” in 1978 and early 1979. Britain, once a manufacturing and imperial powerhouse on the global stage, was perceived to be in sociopolitical disarray. The overarching sense of doom and disorder was a large factor in Thatcher’s election in May 1979. Not only this, but the punk movement seemed to have lost its early momentum as an articulation of political and cultural discontent. “Phony Beatlemania” Strummer dubbed it, had “bitten the dust.”

Even though historians such as Jim Tomlinson and Andy Beckett have argued that the doom and gloom of the 1970s tends to be exaggerated, The Clash spoke to genuine political discontent and a seemingly desolate socioeconomic climate. Their earliest songs were particularly scathing about the state of the world. “White Riot” expressed exasperation at the lack of white working-class struggle, claiming “all the power’s in the hands, of people rich enough to buy it, while we walk the street, too chicken to even try it.” “London’s Burning” reflected on cultural stagnation and crippling boredom and “I’m so Bored with the U.S.A.” critiqued American imperialism: “Yankee dollar talk, to the dictators of the world, in fact it’s giving orders, and they can’t afford to miss a word.” The Clash was one of the more overtly political punk bands, using punk’s fast-paced, urgent, and aggressive style to critique 1970s society from the left.

London Calling continued in this vein, with most of its songs predictably centered on London. “Jimmy Jazz” and “Guns of Brixton” tell the stories of fictional characters in the city’s criminal underbelly. “Rudie Can’t Fail,” a heavily ska-influenced song, documents how young first-generation immigrant men, known as “rude boys,” were often subject to scorn from the British white middle class. The Clash also described how young people often neglect their idealism and political views once they get older and more comfortable in “Clampdown.” In “Spanish Bombs” the band drew comparisons between the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s and the rhetoric of Basque nationalists of the late 1970s. “Lost in the Supermarket,” offers a critique of consumerism as a key reason for political apathy and “Lovers Rock” endorses safe sex and family planning. Finally, the title track and album opener depicts a scene of rising unemployment, racial tensions, and drug use. London Calling is a scathing sociocultural commentary of the 1970s. This was reflected on International Clash Day when KEXP spotlighted various social justice organizations “because The Clash was anti-racist, anti-fear, pro-solidarity, pro-unity, pro-inclusion.”

But questions about whether The Clash had sold out never went away. To some, these doubts undermined the legacy of London Calling with regard to its political message. Others see a more complex history. American artist and activist, Mark Vallen, argued in 2002 that even though The Clash had sold out by allowing Jaguar to use “London Calling” to advertise cars, its original composition had been in keeping with the punk ethos. “When The Clash released London Calling,” he claimed, “the song was one of the band’s most chilling works. Ominous and dark, it foretold of the Western world collapsing in a spasm of war and out of control technologies, it addressed our fears of government repression.” Although some people in the punk movement believed The Clash had already sold out by this point, the initial excitement that London Calling generated was contingent on the authenticity of its political message.

London Calling’s continued popularity is largely down to a careful balancing act. The album could be called the greatest punk rock record of the era or it could be said that it is not a punk rock record at all. From a musical perspective, it is an amalgamation of various styles. Particularly, it pays homage to rock and roll. The album cover captures bassist Paul Simonon smashing his bass guitar on stage. This rock cliché is anchored by a logotype referencing Elvis Presley’s 1956 debut album. Musically, it was a nod to the past while incorporating an eclectic blend of contemporary styles. The three cover songs on the album emphasize this: “Wrong ‘em Boyo” and “Revolution Rock” were first recorded by reggae artists and the other was “Brand New Cadillac,” originally a rock and roll song from 1959. All three sound at home on the album next to the Clash’s original compositions.

London Calling undeniably helped bridge the divide between punk as music and punk as a historical moment. It normalized punk as a credible genre of music while articulating the sociopolitical grievances that British punks were reacting to: high unemployment, racial politics, and the sense that society around them was falling apart. The album has the feeling of a party during the apocalypse. From a historical perspective, even though The Clash had signed to a record label – a cardinal sin for a 70s punk rock band – their wide-ranging sociopolitical commentary encapsulated the cynical mood of the late 1970s. At the end of the title track there is a message in Morse code, created using Mick Jones’ guitar pickups, that spells out S-O-S. Amidst political crises in Westminster, London Calling’s apocalyptic tone is as relevant to Britain in 2019 as it was in the winter of 1979.

Film Review – Dazed and Confused (Dir: Linklater, 1993)

by Ashley Garcia

Borrowing its title from Led Zeppelin’s first album, Richard Linklater’s classic film Dazed and Confused continues to resonate with filmgoers and critics decades after its release. This September marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of Linklater’s cult hit and the overwhelming surge of Dazed and Confused viewing parties along with its re-release in theaters reveals the staying power of this small budget high school comedy. Linklater’s film is difficult to describe to those who have never seen it. In fact, the plot can seem quite uneventful. It lacks the drama, heartbreak, and seemingly high stakes of conventional high school stories and instead takes its viewers on a journey into the everyday banalities that make our lives what they are. Linklater’s film shows us how many of our life defining moments occur in the daily minutiae we experience.

The film takes place within a twenty-four-hour period on the last day of high school in Austin, Texas. Freshmen are hazed, the teens party under one of Austin’s legendary moontowers, and the story ends with a trek to purchase some killer Aerosmith tickets. The film perfectly encapsulates both the silly and startling aspects of high school. Whether you’re the anxious senior grappling with questions of the post-graduation unknown or the vulnerable freshman dazed by a new high school student hierarchy that feeds off freshman fear, the film captures the ethos of the high school experience. However, it would be easy to simply brush the film off as a lighthearted comedy that oozes nostalgia and brings its viewers back to the glory days of kegs, cruising, and classic rock. Linklater’s film exposes a new type of youth culture and lifestyle movement, referred to as slacker culture, born out of the failures and successes of radical domestic political and cultural movements collectively referred to as the American counterculture.

From left to right: Don (Sasha Jenson), Wooderson (Matthew McConaughey), Pink (Jason London), and Mitch (Wiley Wiggins) outside the bowling alley (via IMBd)

This new slacker culture emerged in the 1970s and consisted of a new type of cultural persona that fused the hippie with the dispirited misfit. The slacker embraced aspects of hippie culture that reinforced the right to be whatever type of individual you felt like being, but abandoned hippie political projects and radical ideologies. Slackers embodied an optimistic aimlessness while their politics celebrated choice and championed individual liberty. Slacker politics valued personal autonomy but rejected ideology and overarching political programs. Slackers were the non-participating participants. People with a point of view who lacked a cause.

The most vivid example of this slacker politics is represented in the storyline of the film’s most prominent character, Randall “Pink” Floyd. At the beginning of the film, Pink’s coach asks him to sign a sobriety pledge. The coach is concerned with winning a championship and does not want any of his players jeopardizing their chances of a winning season. Pink’s ambivalence toward the request lasts throughout the film as he grapples with options that include refusing to sign the pledge, quitting the football team altogether, or submitting to his coach’s authority. He ultimately refuses to sign the coach’s pledge but states that he will continue to play football regardless. Pink cites his right to privacy and above all else his independence when he refuses to sign the pledge. His refusal is more than teenage disobedience or protest for the sake of protest, yet the refusal is not an attempt to change the coach’s views on drug and alcohol use or pressure the coach into dropping the pledge requirement in its entirety. His protest is a statement about individual autonomy and the right to choose how to engage with the world on your own terms. The pledge is not portrayed as a collective issue that can be challenged by the gripes of the student body, but one that each football player must come to terms with on their own. If Linklater’s film was set in the sixties one cannot help but imagine the hippie version of Pink’s character staging an all-night sit-in or demonstration to protest the pledge with his fellow classmates.

Michelle (Milla Jovovich) in Dazed and Confused (via IMDb)

Pink’s decision at the end of the film embodies a slacker culture equipped with its own set of new cultural attitudes and political understandings. Slackers were indebted to a countercultural revolution that altered societal norms and changed the way America’s youth engaged with sex, drugs, and of course rock ‘n’ roll. However, these seventies slackers were left to face the fallout of a post-hippie and post-countercultural society where a new generation of young Americans lacked a cause or revolutionary project. By the late 1970s, the radical political movements that emboldened America’s youth for over a decade faded away and a new personal politics that emphasized individual choice and personal growth emerged. The high school slackers portrayed in Dazed and Confused embody this new personal politics and illustrate the evolution of youth culture following the death of the counterculture.

Linklater’s teenage characters can easily seem apolitical, inward thinking, or even lazy. One could view the characters’ priorities of getting high and hanging out as humorously pathetic, or a symptom of a group of teens with little professional and academic drive and nothing better to do. However, it would be a mistake to think that the film simply portrays a group of idle and self-centered teens looking for a good time. The film is punctuated with moments of self-reflection when its characters expose the depths of a new political attitude. Throughout the film, characters contemplate inherently political questions such as how to live a happy life, how to be true to yourself, and what it means to be free.

Director Richard Linklater (via Flickr)

While cruising the boulevard on the way to the moontower party, nerdy student Mike Newhouse reveals to his friends that he has decided not to go to law school. His dream to become an ACLU lawyer and “help the people that are getting fucked up and all that” has vanished. It only took a disastrous trip to the local post office where he witnessed a room full of pathetic people drooling in line to realize he is a misanthrope. When his friend asks him what he plans to do instead of going to law school he simply replies that he wants to dance. Linklater’s film is littered with these short but insightful moments that expose the ins and outs of slacker culture. Mike’s statements are laughable, yet they represent a decision to reject conventionalities and embrace an honest life. Mike believes it would be a lie to become a lawyer, even though he would be helping people in need. Linklater’s collection of stoners, slackers, and dreamers believe in staying true to themselves and being honest about who they are even if that means withdrawing from the world. Slacker politics is based in the banalities of everyday life and encourages individuals to follow the whims of their own hearts.

As the twenty-fifth anniversary of Dazed and Confused approaches, it is worth recognizing the indisputable contribution Richard Linklater has made through his reflective storytelling. In Dazed and Confused, Linklater offers us more than a stoner cult classic or sentimental high school comedy. The film not only captures the zeitgeist of the slacker movement but also provides insight into a cultural moment in American history. Dazed and Confused showcases a young generation’s struggles, dissatisfactions, pleasures, and truths. It navigates the rocky terrain of adolescence as young misfits, dreamers, and stoners discover who they are and how they want to live their lives.

Also by Ashley Garcia:

A Nation of Outsiders: How the White Middle Class Fell in Love with Rebellion in Postwar American by Grace Elizabeth Hale (2011)

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Crossing Borders: Modernity, Ideology, and Culture in Russia and the Soviet Union by Michael David-Fox (2015)

By Stuart Finkel

One of the pivotal issues that western historians of the USSR have debated since its collapse more than 25 years ago is its so-called “exceptionalism.” That is, to what extent should the history of the Soviet Union be considered as but one variation of the remarkable process of state modernization in the twentieth century, and to what extent might we posit a distinctively “Soviet modernity,” distinguished by its communist ideology, its party-based state, and its social and/or nationalist “neo-traditionalism.” In Crossing Borders, Michael David-Fox, a prolific scholar and one of the founding editors of the field-defining journal Kritika, brings together significantly revised versions of earlier publications with new material in a volume that takes aim at a comprehensive, holistic reframing of these much-debated questions. The very sensible central thrust is that we should and can transcend the binarisms that have developed — modernity vs. neo-traditionalism, exceptionalism vs. likeness. As he asserts in an ambitious introduction that sets a frame for the disparate chapters that follow, there is a way to “thread the needle” between the various interpretations that will allow scholars to arrive at richer understandings.

David-Fox determinedly asserts that the way out of historiographical and theoretical conundrums is not to abandon the terms of debate but rather to expand them. In particular, he suggests, that the way out of the impasse between proponents of Soviet modernity and neo-traditionalism is to utilize the concept of “multiple modernities,” which can resolve or at least contain some of the paradoxes. Of course, deconstructing binaries to arrive at a more sophisticated synthesis is not in itself a radically novel solution to historical debates, and the author strives to avoid oversimplifications of the numerous scholarly works that he examines. Threading the needle requires more than simply saying that the answer lies “in between,” and to his credit David-Fox claims to be aiming at that (or, more precisely, beginning the process of doing that) in compiling these essays and articles.

1924 pro-literacy poster by Alexander Rodchenko (via Wikipedia)

The chief features of this interpretation include a rigorous examination of what is denoted by modernity, and, in particular by an approach that is not merely comparative but aggressively transnational. Any evaluation of Soviet modernity must be done not only via comparison with multiple other modernities (and not just a stereotype of Western modernity), but also through an empirical examination of international interactions at the time. Focused primarily, but not exclusively, on the interwar period, David-Fox aims to demonstrate – in work building on his previous scholarship, in particular the recent Showcasing the Great Experiment – that patterns of influence were complex and multifaceted and cannot be reduced to a simple question of imitation. This volume aims not to resolve these complexities but rather to show empirically how intricate these interactions could be, and thus to suggest the need for still further examination by the field.

The book aims to “cross borders” not just between nations but also among various subdisciplines and approaches. In a new essay entitled “The Blind Men and the Elephant,” David-Fox examines definitions of “ideology,” asserting that for a concept so ubiquitous it has been curiously undertheorized by Soviet historians. This explication of six different modalities for studying ideology (as doctrine, as worldview, as historical concept, as discourse, as performance, as faith, and in the mirror of French revolutionary and Nazi historiography) offers a useful, concise, and comprehensive overview. Together with the examination of Soviet modernity and a significantly revised and expanded version of the author’s well-known “What is the Cultural Revolution?” the historiographical and theoretical chapters might offer, among other things, a precise introduction to the basic questions of Soviet history for graduate students and general readers.

Poster of the experimental Soviet silent film “Man with a Movie Camera,” 1929 (via Wikimedia Commons)

The other major new inquiry in this volume is “The Intelligentsia, the Masses, and the West,” which provides a sort of précis of the author’s own original interpretation of what he calls “intelligentsia-statist modernity.” Impressively integrating the work of a diverse array of scholars, David-Fox posits that Russian/Soviet modernity was marked by “the way long-standing traditions of state-sponsored transformation were wedded to Westernized elites’ attempts to overcome Russian backwardness, and they all revolved around enlightenment from above and a search for alternatives to the market.” At the center of this conception is the well-known impulse of the Russian intelligentsia, the Kulturträger tradition, to disseminate “culture” to the masses. Here and in the revised version of his piece on the Communist Academy and the Academy of Sciences included later in the volume, David-Fox studiously avoids reducing the complexities and paradoxes of the Soviet integration of long-standing intelligentsia traditions. At the same time, in a book that strives to analyze and deconstruct major interpretative categories (modernity, ideology, etc.), it might be argued that this essay reifies a notion of “the intelligentsia” that is not sufficiently complicated. From at least the turn of the century, intelligentsia conceptions had been debated and contested, so that the original, more integral understanding had already been broken down. While there were undoubted strong étatist and tutelary propensities among the Russian/Soviet intellectual classes, there were also contradictory tendencies, including anti-intelligentsia sentiment and debates over fundamental concepts of social and intellectual life.

But it is clear that both this essay and the rest of the volume’s impressively erudite analysis represent far from the author’s last word on these matters. One expects an even more comprehensive framework will be built on these thought-provoking foundations.

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Demystifying “Cool:” A Brief History

by Kate Grover

Elvis Presley promoting the film Jailhouse Rock, 1957 (via Wikimedia Commons)

When I was nineteen, I was bestowed with some of the highest praise a person can receive.

It happened at a rehearsal for The Vagina Monologues (go figure…) when some cast members I hadn’t met approached me for the first time:

“You’re Kate, right? Cool Kid Kate?”
“What?”
“Cool Kid Kate. There’s another Kate in the cast, so we’ve been calling you that to know which one we’re talking about.”

I was stunned. “Wow. Thank you,” was all I could say. We talked for a few more minutes, but at that point, I had completely checked out of the conversation. The compliment pinballed around my brain, igniting pleasure centers that I didn’t even know existed.

Cool kid Kate. Cool kid Kate. Ohmigosh…that is so cool!

This anecdote highlights a more-or-less universal truth: cool—as a concept, a descriptor, and a category—is potent force. For me, hearing someone say I was cool was much-needed validation, reassurance that the way I was living, acting, and being in that moment was acceptable. Better than acceptable—cool!

But while I had no doubt what cool meant to me, it remains an elusive concept. What is the mysterious power of cool? And where does it come from?

Believe it or not, scholars have been asking these questions for the last thirty years. Since the late-1980s, several writers have attempted to define cool and position it as a distinctly American concept. In the 1940s, African-American jazz musicians first popularized cool as a way of describing both the new, more restrained style of jazz and a form of emotional and aesthetic self-possession. For example, jazz saxophonist Lester Young, the figure scholars most widely cite as the first to bring cool into American vernacular, used the phrase “I’m cool” to communicate being in control and relaxed. Cool was different from hip, another staple in the lingo of African-American jazz culture, which meant being streetwise and aware of new trends and ideas.

Lester Young in New York, 1946 (via Flickr)

Though cool and hip have similar roots, it is important to distinguish these two concepts and validate their specific meanings in postwar African American culture. At the same time, it is also important to recognize that, for many people in decades past, cool and hip have come to mean the same thing: what is new, what is now, and what’s in vogue. Consequently, some of the early scholars studying cool have used the term in different ways. Two of the first major studies to explore ideas about coolness, by Richard Majors and Janet Mancini Billson, and by Peter N. Stearns use cool to connote a specific way of being—a usage akin to the meaning of cool promoted by 1940’s jazz artists. Conversely, Thomas Frank and Susan Fraiman rely on a formulation of cool that reflects its conflation with hip. While these early texts provided the groundwork for later studies, their diverging approaches and lack of consensus on cool’s origins and function in American life meant that cool remained an obscure area of scholarly research for quite some time.

Joel Dinerstein and Frank H. Goodyear’s 2014 book American Cool, has played a major role in popularizing, legitimizing, and catalyzing the scholarly study of cool. Published as a companion to the exhibition Dinerstein and Goodyear curated for the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, American Cool examines what it means for someone to be cool. The study introduces cool as an American concept, theorizes how cool acts as a marker of distinction, and showcases portrait photography of “cool figures” throughout American history—the same portraits that appeared in exhibition. But most importantly, the study outlines the ways these cool figures (mainly iconic politicians, musicians, or actors) provide us with new, innovative ways of being. According to Dinerstein, cool people are important to Americans because they teach us methods for living life that we would have not otherwise known. Cool figures are special among ordinary people because they take what other cool people before them have done and transform that into something new for subsequent generations. People emulate cool figures and new forms of coolness develop that provide even more people with models for being that enliven and inspire. Cool, in this construction, is a way of describing someone you admire for being and doing something you could not do and be on your own. This explains, perhaps, why the quippy compliment “Cool Kid Kate” meant so much to me.

The American Cool exhibition and its glossy-yet-scholarly coffee-table book companion attracted media attention and public interest to the study of cool. In particular, news outlets focused on Joel Dinerstein, the educator who had been teaching college courses on cool decades before the American Cool exhibition. Dinerstein has subsequently become the most prominent—and in-demand—scholar working on cool today. In 2014, writers at TIME consulted Dinerstein for their “coolest person of the year” series. A couple years later, the fashion brand Coach asked Dinerstein to write a book celebrating the company’s 75^th anniversary. This year, Dinerstein published the first cultural history of cool in the Cold War era, The Origins of Cool in Postwar America. As the title suggests, this nearly 400-page text is American cool’s origin story and gives the most comprehensive research on cool’s roots to date.

But the study of cool is far from complete. There are many more questions to ask, especially about what cool means to different groups of people in the U.S. today. Is cool still important to people? How does cool change in different environments? Who gets to be cool, and why? The answers to these questions promise to reveal major insights about American life and culture.

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The Museo Regional de Oriente in San Miguel, El Salvador

By Brittany T. Erwin

In the tiny nation of El Salvador, the West dominates. As a result of commercial and political relationships that developed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, there has been significant influence in this Central American country from the United States and Western Europe. However, within the Salvadoran context, the predominance of western history and culture refers to the marked differences between the eastern and western regions of the country, and the east often gets the short end of the stick. One institution born in 1994 pushed back against this enduring stigma by celebrating the difference of the east.

In the west of this mountainous and volcano-ridden country lies the capital city of San Salvador. Founded in 1524, this sprawling metropolis is home to busy streets and extensive networks of both interregional and international exchange. Far away from that hustle and bustle, and at the foot of the frequently active Chaparrastique Volcano, lies San Miguel. This city, the third-largest in the nation is the proprietor of the first museum built in the eastern half of the country.

Museo Regional de Oriente (Brittany Erwin, 2017)

Housed in a former textile factory and one-time military complex, the Regional Museum of the East (Museo Regional de Oriente) tells the story of the east through the multidisciplinary lenses of archaeology, ethnography, and history. Under the direction of Saúl Cerritos, this institution promotes a celebration of the distinct history and heritage of the East. Even without capital-city resources, it tells the important stories of indigenous life in the pre-hispanic era, the complexities of sociocultural interactions during centuries of conquest and immigration, and the resulting diffusion of cultural practices that continues today.

The collections begin with a display of ceramic artifacts whose particular motifs and production techniques place them firmly outside the Mayan influence that permeates western El Salvador. Extensive historical context in Spanish and English accompanies these carefully preserved pieces, dating from the Paleo-Indian period through the post-Classical period, which ends around the time of Spanish contact.

The exhibitions then shift to reflect the living culture of the zona oriental. Displays of artisanal products and pottery with both a modern presence and historical roots reveal the enduring influence of indigenous culture. The final permanent exhibition hall showcases the dozens of local festivals that guide public life in the city and throughout the east. From the elaborate costumes they inspire to the coordinated offerings and ritualized dances that they require, these fiestas reveal an important aspect of local identity. On that note of energetic cultural pride, the tour concludes.

Inside the Museo Regional de Oriente (Brittany Erwin, 2017)

The museum also houses two temporary exhibits, which change several times a year to reflect contemporary issues of historical interest and investigation. Currently on display are a photographic history of the railroads that connected the people and markets of the East until the early 2000s and an exhibit reflecting on the nation’s anniversary of peace after the civil wars of 1980-1992.

This modest museum, constructed in the shadows of its influential western rival leaves a strong impression. Through a careful selection of local artifacts and the presentation of a region-centered dialogue, it encapsulates both the history and culture of the proudly idiosyncratic eastern region of El Salvador.

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