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Not Even Past

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

by Jonathan Parker

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

LBJ Presidential Library (via Flickr)

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

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

Enver Hoxha via Forrásjelölés Hasonló/ Wikimedia Commons

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

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

Map of Albania via Library of Congress Geography and Map Division Washington, D.C.

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

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“Stand With Kap”: Athlete Activism at the LBJ Library
Más de 72: Digital Archive Review
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The views and opinions expressed in this article or video are those of the individual author(s) or presenter(s) and do not necessarily reflect the policy or views of the editors at Not Even Past, the UT Department of History, the University of Texas at Austin, or the UT System Board of Regents. Not Even Past is an online public history magazine rather than a peer-reviewed academic journal. While we make efforts to ensure that factual information in articles was obtained from reliable sources, Not Even Past is not responsible for any errors or omissions.

The Prague Spring Archive Project

By Mary Neuburger and Ian Goodale

The Prague Spring Archive project, a collaboration between the Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies (CREEES) and UT Libraries, is now live. This open access online archive is the first step in a longer-term initiative by CREEES Director Mary Neuburger to digitize significant collections of primary documents from the the Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library that shed light on the Cold War. While select documents from the LBJ collection can already be found online, CREEES is working to digitize National Security country files from the former Eastern Bloc in their entirety. Because these documents are open record, the LBJ Presidential Library has allowed unlimited scanning and open access presentation of such documents. The hope is that they will appeal to a wide and inclusive audience of students, instructors, scholars, and the general public.

PSAP

Phase One of this project, largely comprised of National Security Files on Czechoslovakia, is nearly complete. The bulk of the documents in this collection focus on the so-called “Czechoslovak Crisis,” otherwise known as the Prague Spring, and its aftermath. The Prague Spring was one of the most dramatic and popular experiments in Communist Party reform, which took place in Czechoslovakia beginning in January 1968, only to be crushed by an invasion of Soviet and Warsaw Pact troops on August 21 of the same year.  This event was a major turning point in the Cold War and the history of communism more generally as the wave of reforms brought such a high degree of hope and enthusiasm and its suppression precipitated such deep disillusionment in the region and among the global left. It was the end, in a sense, of any hope for the communist system to be reformed and as such could be seen as the beginning of the end for the system itself.

The LBJ Library documents on Prague Spring are a treasure trove for historical research as they chronicle the event through detailed intelligence reports and day-by-day commentary by US policy makers. They include briefs on global reactions to the crisis, which many at the time thought could precipitate World War III. These documents are valuable both from a US policy standpoint and for a deeper understanding of the events and developments within the region itself. As the documents are all in English, they have the potential to be used for everything from academic historical research to student research.

Helsinki_demonstration_against_the_invasion_of_Czechoslovakia_in_1968

Helsinki demonstration against the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 (via Wikimedia Commons).

Ian Goodale, the new Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies & Digital Scholarship Librarian, worked closely with graduate students from the School of Information at UT Austin and undergraduate students from CREEES to photograph the documents in the reading room at the LBJ. He then collaborated with the UT Libraries to process the images into archival-quality PDFs for ingestion into Texas ScholarWorks, the university’s digital repository. These PDFs were made machine-readable so that they are full-text searchable in the repository and Ian worked to create extensive metadata for each document to make the collection more discoverable. Finally, the students in Mary Neuburger and Vlad Beronja’s Graduate Seminar on Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies worked with Ian over the last semester to create a guide to the collection. Ian did an amazing job of building a Scalar website as a portal for the guide, which provides summary descriptions of most of the folders and specific links to some of the most interesting documents.

Careful attention was paid to making the site accessible both to academic researchers and to patrons conducting personal or non-academic research, with additional features planned that will extend the breadth of the site’s audience. A module that will include materials aimed at high school and middle school teachers and students, including sample lesson plans and educational activities, will be added in the future. For researchers who would like to explore what is available in the physical collections of the LBJ Library, the finding aid for the entire archival collection is also available on the site.

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UT CREES is located in Burdine Hall (Zug55 via flickr).

The Prague Spring Archive portal is a resource that will continue to grow, with new content and features continually added and expanded upon. By providing open access to important primary source materials, the project will continue to contribute to international scholarly communities, utilizing practices and tools of the digital humanities to freely share its content in an attractive, easily navigable portal.

Digitization work on the larger Cold War project is ongoing, with new materials currently being photographed, processed, and added to Texas ScholarWorks by graduate student Nicole Marino and Russian, East European, & Eurasian Studies and Digital Scholarship Librarian Ian Goodale.

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More by Mary Neuberger on Not Even Past:
Balkan Smoke: Tobacco & Smoking in Bulgaria.
The Museum of Sour Milk: History Lessons on Bulgarian Yogurt.

You may also like:
Restless Youth: The CIA, Socialist Humanism, and Yugoslavia’s 1968 Student Protests.
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The Seldoms Bring LBJ and the 1960s Into the Present in Their Investigation of How Power Goes

By Michael J. Kramer

History & American Studies, Northwestern University

Dramaturg, The Seldoms

 

“I can see them now, Clio and Terpsichore…I can feel them spinning, lurching, sidling and smashing up against one another, laughing knowingly as they wipe the sweat of foreheads and from the skin between lips and nose; in a standoff, carefully calculating each other’s weight and flexibility, careening toward one another, rolling as one body and then falling apart, only to circle around for a fast-paced repartee, trading impersonations…. This duet rejuvenates itself endlessly. It has an insatiable appetite for motion.” Susan Leigh Foster, “Choreographing History”

 

“It is all here: the story of our time with the bark off…” Lyndon Johnson at the dedication of the LBJ Presidential Library, 1971

Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon at the White House in 1968. Via Wikimedia Commons.

Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon at the White House in 1968. Via Wikimedia Commons.

In the contemporary dance theater work Power Goes, which arrives at McCullough Theatre on the campus of the University of Texas on September 16th and 18th, courtesy of Texas Performing Arts, the Briscoe Center for American History, and the LBJ Presidential Library, the Chicago-based dance ensemble, The Seldoms, propose that we can dance our way deeply into the historical past. So too, they stake out the claim that the past, arriving through dance performance, has important work to do in the present. Presiding over Power Goes is the figure of Lyndon Baines Johnson, who serves as a guiding spirit for an exploration of physicality, power, and social change. Using videography, spoken text, distinctive lighting, sound design, and, most of all, dynamic, innovative movement, The Seldoms ask audiences to join them in drawing upon LBJ’s legacy and his times to consider what power is exactly and how, as the work’s title suggests, it goes.

TheSeldoms_PG_Hair2chairs_Frederking-4435Power Goes relies significantly upon archival sources to pursue this investigation. In this sense, it is a work of public history, except that it adds the body, movement, and performance to text, image, and sound as means for discovering and communicating its findings. History is all over this piece. Even the title of Power Goes comes from an oft-cited saying coined by Johnson, “Power is where power goes,” meaning that he could exercise political influence and control in any office he occupied. The Seldoms take this line and run—or better said (of course) dance—with it. Power Goes refers to everything from Johnson’s childhood in Texas Hill Country to his political prowess as an intensely physical leader to the broader civil rights and social movements for equality in the 1960s to Johnson’s tragic political demise after his decision to escalate US military involvement in the Vietnam War. But this is no biography of Johnson, and it is certainly not hagiographical. Power Goes is certainly not history in the conventional sense. By presenting history in dance, it asks us to reconsider what public history is and what it can be.

PG_Frederking_TinaMJ_Hairmouth_6966At a time when scholarly historians are working to make academic history more accessible to broader audiences, looking to other fields that confront similar issues might be stimulating. Contemporary dance faces oddly parallel issues to academic history. Both have typically been made for smaller, specialized audiences even though both history and dance are important activities for a far broader swath of the population. To witness how The Seldoms use innovative choreographic tactics, cross-disciplinary collaboration, sustained studio practice, ongoing self-scrutiny, continued public dialogue, and, most importantly, the body itself, as avenues to deeper interpretive understanding of both the past and the present (and perhaps as a way to imagine the future) is to consider new areas of possibility for public history as well.

The choice of Lyndon Johnson as subject matter brings history and dance together quite directly. Johnson, as a character, is no stranger to the stage. Bryan Cranston, of television series Breaking Bad fame, took on the role of LBJ in the recent Broadway play All the Way (soon to be an HBO biopic), which tells the story of Johnson’s efforts to push through civil rights legislation in the aftermath of his landslide Presidential victory in 1964. Johnson also turns up as an opponent of civil rights legislation on screen in the recent film Selma, directed by Ava DuVernay. In the 1960s themselves, LBJ was even placed in the villainous position of Macbeth in Barbara Garson’s satirical and angry radical theater work MacBird!

PG_Seldoms_Frederking_DamonCaraJKT-4495In Power Goes, however, he is more like Banquo’s ghost. He haunts the piece, looms over it, even gives it the infamous “Johnson treatment” that he was renowned for when he leaned his six foot four frame over allies and adversaries alike to get them in line for his legislation. The Seldoms are less interested in retelling Johnson’s story than allowing it to work its way into the present moment. This is not historical reenactment or naturalistic dramatic realism. Instead, The Seldoms demand that audiences enter into a version of history that is lively, weird, uneven, palpable. No one member of The Seldoms alone plays the role of LBJ, for instance, or remains in the position of any other specific historical person consistently. Stable identities give way to the porous flow of power as it courses through the bodies of the dancers.

Similarly, The Seldoms do not stick to one historical time period or level of historical action. Past and present blur. Official and informal intermix. Access to haircut stylists and self-help audio tapes become issues of power relations right alongside pressing issues of national import. The micropolitics of everyday life interweave with public spectacles of political theater. History jumps around, we cut between and across time periods, and between fantastical interactions (a conversation between LBJ and Obama) and realpolitik (Johnson intimidating a segregationist business owner into hiring African-Americans).

History pulsates here. Sometimes it pummels bodies with trauma. At other times, we witness the power of bodies that are massed in stillness and endurance. Sometimes these bodies are vulgar. At other times, they are quite tender and vulnerable. History disappears into the bodies onstage, but the dancers also become historical vessels, bringing the past into the present moment. Power Goes does not offer a “history of the body,” as historians have done in the past decades; rather, it presents history through the body. LBJ’s physicality is the beginning of a much larger inquiry into how history surfaces through skin and bones, exertion of muscle and tangle of nerve.

TheSeldoms_PG_EqualsignChairs_Frederking_4055But what a perfect starting point LBJ is. Whether it be something as crass as taking aides into his bathroom while he urinated or something more kindly such as wrapping his arms around friends to show his fondness for them, LBJ’s physicality was crucial to his politics. He was often awful on television, but a master of face-to-face glad-handing. Johnson’s body was, in some sense, his politics. Presidential bodies are significant anyway, beyond LBJ alone. As Ernst Kantorowicz wrote of Medieval political theology in his classic study The King’s Two Bodies, and as Michael Rogin translated into the American context, leader’s bodies have always borne a close relationship to the body politic. We think about the larger nation-state, sometimes, through linking the literal body of a leader to the metaphorical social body. The President is not called the head of state for nothing.

A leader’s body, however, is not the only one that matters, particularly in a democracy. When The Seldoms pivot from LBJ to other people from the 1960s—civil rights protesters, antiwar demonstrators, everyday citizens, fearful political adversaries, potential political allies—the range of the dance piece’s exploration of physicality and power grows dramatically as well. Scales and sizes, individual bodies and masses of bodies, stillness and motion, duration and action, all contrast with each other. Varying tones and intensities of assertion, rejection, conflict, and concordance register. The Seldoms loosen history from its moorings, embodying its implications and giving them a physical presence. Power Goes enlarges historical awareness through embodiment. The company even hold a workshop, “Bodies on the Gears,” in which participants explore the historical gestures with their own physical being; these workshop attendees then join in the performance itself.

TheSeldoms_PG_Hell_MJTina_Frederking-4373The oscillations in Power Goes between bodies then and now—the way that The Seldoms move from the 1960s and the present, the archives to the stage, a straightforward retelling of the past to something far more adventurous, even delirious—also raise questions about history and memory. Aligning physical exploration with evidence, argument, and interpretation, The Seldoms create a deeply intellectual investigation that is also a sensorial séance. Ghosts from the past shoot through the bodies of The Seldoms into the present moment, but they never settle into place. Instead they mutate and change as their stances and positions get reworked, abstracted, reconfigured, re-physicalized, redistributed, redirected, and recontextualized by the dancers. Memory itself becomes alive, suddenly happening now, a tailwind that must be negotiated in the moment, a highly charged experience in which structures of power grow fluid and unruly.

The Seldoms have created a piece that allows audiences to experience history, with a thrilling combination of visceral immediacy and meditative contemplation. LBJ oversees this affair, and protesters and others from the 1960s show up to play their parts, but it is the relationship between history and power, between what things persist and how things change, between what gets remembered and how we remember it, that ultimately takes center stage in Power Goes. As a kind of epic duet choreographed between dance and history, Terpsichore and Clio, this is a version of public history that has got serious moves.

Watch a one minute trailer or the entire piece (80 minutes).

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All photographs by William Frederking

 

Cited Sources:

Susan Leigh Foster, “Choreographing History” in Choreographing History, ed. Susan Foster (1995).

Lyndon Johnson, Dedication of the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum, May 22, 1971, http://www.lbjlibrary.org/page/library-museum.

Ernst Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (1957).

Michael Paul Rogin, “The King’s Two Bodies: Lincoln, Wilson, Nixon, and Presidential Self-Sacrifice,” in “Ronald Reagan,” The Movie, and Other Episodes in Political Demonology (1987).

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