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Making History: Jessica Wolcott Luther

Interview by Zach Doleshal

In the second installation of our new series, “Making History,” Zach Doleshal speaks with Jessica Wolcott Luther about her experience as a graduate student in history at the University of Texas at Austin. In the interview, Jessica shares stories about researching in seventeenth century archives (she’s been to eleven so far!), studying history using anthropological documents, and overcoming the frustration of knowing that she may never get the chance to find a direct source from a former enslaved person.

Jessica Wolcott Luther is a PhD candidate in the history department at the University of Texas. Her dissertation focuses on Barbados from 1640 to 1700. It analyzes the impact that the growing English empire, the rapid move toward slavery as the main form of labor, and a new-found desire to document nature through the lens of empirical science had on the way that the English thought about the human body.

The dissertation is mainly a local study using the personal documents (letters, journals, merchant ledgers, etc.) created by people in Barbados, the laws enacted to control certain bodies, and official government documents used to track populations (census, wills, baptisms). It analyzes how the English made sense of the many new bodies and their own bodies’ reactions to the space of the Caribbean as the century progressed and the enslaved population on the island became the majority by large numbers. My project also attempts to trace the ways that those changing ideas about the body affected the lives of everyone in Barbados: Englishmen and women, including servants; enslaved Africans; and native Carib peoples (most of them enslaved). It is also an Atlantic study, as it documents how the expansion to the Caribbean and the novelty of the institution of slavery led to an increasing interest in black bodies in both the Caribbean and England, not limited to but especially within scientific circles.

More broadly, this project intervenes in one of the central debates in early modern historiography — how did the modern concept of race emerge? — and its corollary — when did race become so intertwined with science? My project argues that it was in Barbados in the seventeenth century when Englishmen began to work out, in confusing, contradictory, and experimental ways, some of the kernels of belief that would eventually become central to English notions about race.

Existing at the intersection of cultural and intellectual history, this dissertation is about the process through which a society made sense of itself as it underwent radical, dramatic shifts in fundamental arenas of thought and practice when issues of human difference came quickly to the fore.

Learn more about Jessica Wolcott Luther and her work by visiting her website and following her on Twitter.

You may also like:

The inaugural episode of “Making History,” which features an interview with UT history graduate student – and author! – Christopher Heaney.

Jessica Luther’s blog piece on seventeenth century diarist Samuel Pepy’s hypothetical tweeting history, along with her review of David Eggers’ 2009 book “Zeitoun.”

The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government by David K. Johnson (2006)

by Joseph Parrott

In 1958 Frank Kameny was out of a job. A Harvard trained astronomer and veteran of World War II, he had been working for the Army Map Service. In the wake of the Russian launch of Sputnik in October of 1957, the American government was rushing to catch up, and the young scientist seemed poised to play a role in the new emphasis on space exploration. Yet within just a few months, Kameny’s career was over because he was a homosexual. His story was not unique. He was one of many victims of the Lavender Scare – a manifestation of Cold War paranoia and social bigotry that led to the dismissal of hundreds and possibly thousands of gays and lesbians from government jobs.

Historian David K. Johnson sheds light on this forgotten episode in American history. The Lavender Scare grew from the McCarthy persecutions of the 1950s, but Johnson argues that its policies lasted far longer and became more institutionalized than the anti-communist hysteria. The government dismissed homosexuals on the grounds that emotional weakness and the likelihood of blackmail made them security risks. No evidence supported these accusations and medical experts challenged the idea that homosexuals were in any way different from the majority of employees, but to little avail. Executive departments hurried to dismiss employees suspected of homosexuality, lest ambitious congressmen – already suspicious of the expansion of bureaucratic policymaking – target them for public scrutiny. In the midst of the Cold War, fear, politics, and prejudice combined “to conflate homosexuals and communists.”

The Lavender Scare offers an arresting political narrative, but Johnson also makes sure to present the very human face of this drama. Johnson utilizes extensive interviews to demonstrate the way the purges changed the lives of victims and the social milieu of Washington D.C. itself. The rapid growth of the federal government during the Depression and its relatively egalitarian hiring practices attracted large numbers of young people seeking employment, including many homosexuals hoping to escape the limitations of small town life. By 1945, Washington was, in the words of one resident, “a very gay city,” where vibrant communities thrived and authorities tolerated homosexual activity. In an effortless combination of social and political history, the author shows how the rise of the national security state transformed gay Washington, forcing many to leave and others to endure years of joblessness.

Persecution also inspired a nascent movement in defense of gay lifestyles. Activists like Frank Kameny recast the discrimination against homosexuals as an issue of civil rights. The Mattachine Society of Washington organized picketing and supported challenges to government dismissals, consciously combining “political activism with service to and affirmation of the gay subculture.” Johnson explores how these vocal demands led the government to reevaluate its policies and the connection between the private and public lives of its employees. These early manifestations of homosexual activism not only helped end decades of vocational persecution, but they also informed the networks and tactics that would come to define a movement.

In light of Frank Kameny’s death last October at the age of 86, it is appropriate to look back at the origins of the LGBT activism. The recent repeal of the military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy demonstrates that cause of homosexual equality has made great strides, specifically in regard to government service. But at the same time, the continuing debate over the necessity of this policy and calls to reinstate it remind the country that Kameny’s ultimate goals have not yet been achieved. David Johnson’s smart, well-written, and truly engaging book clearly lays out the history of anti-gay sentiment in the modern federal government. It also, perhaps, hints at ways activists can continue to challenge discrimination in the future.

Photo credits:

United Press, Joseph Raymond McCarthy, 1954

Library of Commons via Wikimedia Commons

Kay Tobin Lahusen, “Barbara Gittings, Frank Kameny, and John Fryer in disguise as “Dr. H. Anonymous,”” 1972

New York Public Library Manuscripts and Archives Division via Wikimedia Commons

Governing the Tongue: The Politics of Speech in Early New England by Jane Kamensky (1999)

by Zachary Carmichael

Governing the Tongue discusses the importance of verbal communication in seventeenth-century New England society. Kamensky argues that early settlers were uniquely preoccupied with the act of speech and held to specific but unwritten rules about correct speaking. Speech was bound up with Puritan religious beliefs and represented a way of directly interacting with God’s word. Right speech could represent a link with the divine, but incorrect speaking constituted a break with the natural order. Regulating oral communication presented both philosophical and practical difficulties that informed larger issues of social status and order, and Puritans thought uncontrolled speech could corrupt their fragile society.

Multiple social hierarchies governed correct speaking, including class, wealth, age, and gender, Kamensky’s most useful lens of analysis. A married woman, she argues, had to be a “goodwife,” supporting the head of the household, her husband. Women made up the majority of the nonconformist congregations and often held radical beliefs, most famously Anne Hutchinson, banished from Massachusetts Bay in 1638. For Puritan leaders, ungoverned speech equaled the threat of uncontrollable women, exemplary of the social disorder they feared. Women faced some of the harshest penalties for violating speech limitation. Ann Hibbens, for example, was brought to court for complaining too loudly in public about a dispute with male carpenters over the quality of their work, but the trial soon became an evaluation of Hibbens’ continued violation of right speech expectations and her failure to support her meek husband. Excommunicated in 1641, Hibbens was executed for witchcraft fifteen years later because of a “quarrelsome” tongue.

Kamensky also focuses on speech expectations among men, emphasizing the contested verbal domains of fathers and sons. Sons often found it difficult to establish patriarchal order in their own households while remaining verbally respectful to their fathers, exemplified by the case of John Porter, Jr., the only Puritan ever brought to trial for rebelling against his father. John, Jr. insulted and criticized his father repeatedly, failing to live up to high expectations in a society that valued the orderly transmission of status and property from father to son. Although John Porter, Sr. was one of the wealthiest men in Salem, his son died destitute after being taken to court for his disobedience. Kamensky contends that Porter’s parental disrespect echoes a larger struggle in New England during the 1660s, when generational tension between the founders and their children brought the issue of verbal respect to a head.

After illustrating the elaborate rules that governed women’s and men’s tongues, Kamensky convincingly argues for the decline of this system at the end of the seventeenth century. A falling away from original ideals for speech behavior, aided by the increased importance of the written word, paralleled the larger religious and intellectual declension of Puritanism. Discussing the witchcraft trials of the 1690s, Kamensky emphasizes the role of speech in the supposed activity of those practicing witchcraft, including curses and demonic possession, and in the public trials, which depended upon verbal testimony. The emotional and physical trauma of the accusations and executions in towns like Salem helped to debase the “currency of speech” for New Englanders. Numerous apologies from both accusers and judges failed to restore social order, as they once had done.

Kamensky acknowledges the difficulty of hearing Puritan voices in the available evidence. Writing a book about speech, solely using written records is a paradoxical and ultimately unachievable task, but she does an excellent job of finding examples of recorded speech in court records, sermons, and other writings.. Kamensky argues that although it is impossible to get back to the “hearfulness” of New England, the careful recording of court documents, responses to sermons, and quotations in diary entries brings us close to being able to hear the Puritans speak.

Kamensky’s study is a valuable account of the people and ideas responsible for the Puritans’ complicated relationship with the spoken word. She ably identifies the tension between free and governed speech, leaving the reader with the impression that, in Puritan New England, public speech could be both necessary and dangerous.

Photo credits:

George Henry Boughton (artist) and Thomas Gold Appleton (engraver), Puritans Going to Church, 31 March 1885

Library of Congress

Plaza of Sacrifices: Gender, Power, and Terror in 1968 Mexico by Elaine Carey (2005)

by Andrew Weiss

On October 2, 1968, the Mexican government sanctioned the killings of an estimated three hundred student protesters in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas, the main square in Mexico City’s Tlatelolco neighborhood. Hundreds more were arrested, many subjected to torture. Plaza of Sacrifices is the first English-language monograph of the events leading up to and following this massacre. Carey, Associate Professor of History at St. John’s University, offers a gendered analysis of the Mexican student movement of 1968. While Carey focuses on Mexican issues and events, she places the movement into the larger context of international student protests. Because student demands went beyond academic concerns to include calls for democracy and civil liberties, the 1968 movement was unprecedented. The protests revealed a public crisis of confidence in the Mexican government. Mexicans had come to see the divergence of the state’s policies from its revolutionary rhetoric of social justice. Young people protested for change.

Carey reveals how the student movement challenged gender norms and placed women into the public sphere as never before. Young, educated, middle-class women subverted traditional femininity as they engaged in public political discourse. Organizing protests and debating issues in public spaces traditionally reserved for men, female protesters constructed new identities and possibilities within the movement and in public and private life at large. Participant interviews demonstrate the significance of renegotiating gender roles among student protesters. After challenging the established gender order, many female protesters were forever changed; these women never again considered public life to be the exclusive realm of men. Carey contends that the mobilization of women in 1968 set the stage for a second wave of Mexican feminism in the 1970s.

Carey provides insight into the relationship between the individual and the state under the rule of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which held power in Mexico from the late 1920s to 2000. She analyses the paternalistic language used by the PRI, which had cast itself as the protector of the Revolution and student protesters as unruly children needing to be brought back into the fold of the revolutionary family, thus revealing how the party conceived its sociopolitical role. This dynamic was both challenged and reified by the events surrounding the movement of 1968. The student movement represented a direct challenge to government paternalism, but was eventually suppressed, ultimately confirming the state’s position as head of the revolutionary family. Nevertheless, Mexican society was reshaped. The events of 1968 threatened the legitimacy of PRI rule as well as traditional notions of femininity. The impact of 1968 was still being felt in 2000, when a non-PRI candidate became president for the first time in over seventy years.

Student protesters in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas

Carey’s approach sheds light on many important aspects of the student movement and its aftermath. Her sources include participant interviews, both conducted by the author and others, student and government propaganda, newspapers and other periodicals, novels, plays, poetry, music, films, and photos. Her detailed interpretations of visual media, including editorial cartoons and student propaganda, are particularly useful in understanding the nuances of government and student rhetoric. And, by tapping formerly unreleased U.S. and Mexican state records, Carey provides a valuable look past the government and student propaganda.

While a welcome addition to the historiography of modern Mexican history, Plaza of Sacrifices has some shortcomings. Carey’s emphasis on government control of the public response to the movement takes away popular agency, so the book misses a large aspect of the sociopolitical discourse related to the formation of this response. While government propaganda surely influenced the public, students and other ordinary people did find their own voice, as the large scale demonstrations show. Carey’s overwhelming support of the student movement comes across in her writing. For Carey, public opinion is either pro-student or influenced by government propaganda and pro-government. She could have explored more fully how public opinion was formed, giving more agency to the public.

Plaza of Sacrifices provides a valuable narrative of events surrounding the Mexican student movement of 1968. Accessible to both lay and academic readers, this book should be read by anyone interested in this important chapter of Mexican history.

Group photograph: Anonymous Mexican students on a burned bus, July 28, 1968.

Credit: Marcel·lí Perelló via Wikimedia Commons

You may also like:

John McKiernan-Gonzalez’s article Onda Latina The Mexican American Experience.

Gender and Decolonization in the Congo: The Legacy of Patrice Lumumba (2010)

by Tosin Abiodun

In the 1960s the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) emerged as a political ‘hot spot’ in Africa. The transition from decades of Belgian colonial brutality and paternalism to independence, as historical records reveal, did not go smoothly. Gender and Decolonization in the Congo departs markedly from most work on this process by focusing on gender. There is a tendency on the part of scholars to neglect gender in their histories of decolonization in Africa. Political scientists, for instance, are apt to focus on the rise of the Cold War rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union. Much historical scholarship on the DRC shows enthusiasm for resolving puzzles arising from the perennial question: who assassinated Patrice Lumumba? Karen Bouwer delivers on her stated goal, to draw attention to Congolese women’s active role in the politics of decolonization. Overall, the study goes a long way toward presenting the first truly groundbreaking investigation of women’s political participation in the DRC.

Bouwer illustrates women’s contribution to politics with a narrative woven around the life and popular representation of Patrice Lumumba. Bouwer privileges Lumumba’s legacy, writing, and personal experience not to glorify his image, but to expose the complex system of social and political relations that shaped Congolese women’s lives. This gendered analysis integrates a wide variety of evidence in a compelling manner, including Lumumba’s writings and speeches, literary works such as Aime Cesaire’s A Season in the Congo, and cinematic works dealing with Lumumba’s legacy. Of particular importance is the discussion of films produced by Haitian director Raoul Peck such as Death of a Prophet, Sometimes in April, and Lumumba.

Patrice Lamumba in his official portrait as Prime Minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, 1960. Image via Wikimedia Commons.

These critical assessments of film and literature are some of the strongest passages in the book. Equally interesting are the chapters that testify to the high level of women’s involvement in politics. These include the life portraits of frontline female politicians such as Leonie Abo, Andre Blouin, Pauline Opango, Martine Mandinga and Madeleine Mayimbi. In addition, the author brings into sharp focus the role of women as preservers of historical memory: we learn about efforts on the part of Leonie Abo to preserve the memory of the slain revolutionary, Pierre Mulele. We also learn about Justine M’poyo’s effort to preserve Joseph Kasavubu’s memory by all means necessary.

Perhaps the greatest achievement of this study lies in the fact that it offers a promising new approach to the history of decolonization in the DRC. It offers a valuable new perspective on interesting subjects such as the Kwilu Rebellion of 1963-1965 and Haitian migration to Congo. Decolonization in the Congo will be able to stir the minds of anyone interested in gender studies, history, politics, diaspora studies, development studies and literary studies. It presents rich documents including a useful index, an impressive bibliography as well as extensive notes and rare photographs of Congolese female activists.

Great Books on African American Beauty Culture

by Tiffany Gill

The past decade has witnessed an explosion of books examining African American beauty culture from various angles.

A’Lelia Bundles, On Her Own Ground: The Life and Times of Madam C.J. Walker (2001)

Madam C.J. Walker is the best known of the pioneering generation of beauty culture educators and manufacturers, and A’Lelia Bundles’ well researched book is the first biography of this industry mogul. Bundles, who is Walker’s great-great granddaughter, takes the reader on a journey from Walker’s humble beginnings as the child of a Louisiana sharecropper to the end of her life when she died as one of the wealthiest black women of the early twentieth century. In addition, the book provides an in depth examination of the entrepreneurial challenges and triumphs of the early black beauty industry.

Maxine Leeds Craig, Aint I a Beauty Queen: Black Women, Beauty, and the Politics of Race (2002)

Examining black beauty contests, personal photographs, political posters, and conducting an impressive array of oral interviews, sociologist Maxine Leeds Craig examines the role that ideas about beauty played in racialized constructions of beauty. Her emphasis on representations of black women since World War II sheds light onto the ways that the modern Civil Rights and Black Power movements were concerned with articulations of political equality, which, for women, included discussions of beauty as political meaningful.

Julliette Harris and Pamela Johnson, eds. Tenderheaded: A Comb-bending Collection of Hair Stories (2001)

This collection of first-person narratives, photos, essays, letters, cartoons, poems, and short stories gives great insight into the complex meanings surrounding hair and beauty culture in the contemporary lives of African American women.

Susannah Walker, Style and Status: Selling Beauty to African American Women, 1920-1975 (2007)

Relying heavily upon print advertisements, periodical literature, and first hand accounts from black beauty culture’s practitioners, Susannah Walker examines the role beauty culture played in forming black women’s racial and gendered identities. Moving beyond a simplistic analysis of the “good hair/ bad hair” debate, that often represents the quest for beauty among African Americans as a mere mimicry of white beauty standards, Walker elucidates the complexities surrounding the business of black female appearance.

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