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The History of the Present Time in Mexico: A Field in Formation

Banner for The History of the Presnt Time in Mexico by Josué Portillo Motte.

This article has a Spanish version

The History of the Present Time (HPT) in Mexico is emerging as a historiographical field in formation—open, evolving, and still being defined. It constitutes an essential space of reflection for understanding the fractures, continuities, and forms of violence that shape contemporary national reality. Unlike traditional historiography, which focuses on a closed past and privileges official documentation as its primary source, the HPT is concerned with the unfinished: social processes whose historicity remains open because their actors, victims, and witnesses are still alive. From this perspective, linear divisions of historical time (past–present–future) are questioned in favor of contemporaneity, generational experience, and the simultaneous coexistence of multiple temporalities.

The relevance of the HPT in Mexico extends beyond national borders, establishing itself as a necessary framework for both local and international scholars. The Mexican case demonstrates that the HPT is far more than a chronicle of the recent past; it is an analytical tool that provides historical depth to some of today’s most pressing challenges. Structural problems such as narcotrafficking, feminicide, forced disappearances, and state violence are often analyzed primarily through the immediacy of journalism or the synchronic lens of sociology. While these disciplines are valuable, their epistemological orientations tend to privilege the “here and now,” often obscuring deeper roots, long-term continuities, and historical processes that have shaped these conflicts.

As Carmen Collado notes, interpretations offered by journalism and the social sciences are important, but “what is missing in this panorama is a perspective that contains the density provided by both diachronic and synchronic knowledge that history can offer.”[1] By incorporating a historiographical approach, it becomes possible to move beyond the immediate conjuncture and understand these phenomena not as isolated events but as outcomes of complex processes that require historical explanation.

Panoramic view of Alameda Central of Mexico City during the 20th century.

Alameda Central 20th century. Mexico City. Source: Wikimedia Commons

To fully grasp the Mexican case, however, it is essential to situate it in relation to broader regional and global developments. In Europe, the HPT was institutionalized beginning in the 1970s, marked by milestones such as the creation of the Institut d’Histoire du Temps Présent in France (1978), driven by the need to process the traumas of World War II, the Holocaust, and the Vichy regime. In this context, the HPT emerged in connection with the experience of the “last catastrophe”—a defining event that shattered the previous historical order and reshaped collective consciousness.

In the Southern Cone—particularly Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay—the field, often referred to as “Recent History,” arose from the political and moral urgency to denounce, document, and understand the crimes of civil-military dictatorships. This historiography is born of pain,[2] closely tied to activism, struggles for truth and justice, and the effort to make visible systematic forms of state violence such as forced disappearance, torture, and state terrorism.

The military junta and Augusto Pinochet Ugarte at the Diego Portales Building for another celebration of the Constitution. In the front row, from left to right: César Mendoza, José Toribio Merino, Augusto Pinochet, Fernando Matthei, and Humberto Gordon.

Pinochet’s Military Junta. Source: Wikimedia Commons

The development of the HPT in Mexico, however, displays distinctive features. Unlike the European and South American cases, it is not structured around a single abrupt rupture but rather around persistent violence embedded in a long-standing authoritarian system. Scholars generally identify at least two key moments in its formation:

  1. The student movement of 1968. Widely considered a pivotal turning point, 1968 not only exposed the exhaustion of the official narrative of the Mexican Revolution but also generated its own historians. The Tlatelolco massacre revealed the repressive capacity of the state and opened an irreversible fracture in the regime’s legitimacy, prompting new questions about power, memory, and violence.
  2. The political transition of 2000. The electoral defeat of the PRI after more than seventy years in power compelled the Mexican state to confront, at least partially, its repressive past. The creation of the Special Prosecutor’s Office for Social and Political Movements of the Past (FEMOSPP) and the limited opening of the so-called “archives of repression” in 2002 legitimized the present as a field of historiographical intervention.

In Mexico, however, violence is not perceived as an anomaly confined to a closed period, but as a constant linking the Dirty War (periodized between 1965 and 1990) with contemporary tragedies such as Ayotzinapa, feminicide, and narcotrafficking-related violence. The present thus appears as a “suspended time,” in the words of Camilo Vicente Ovalle, or as an unfinished temporality in which the persistence of radical evil and impunity prevents the symbolic closure of the past.[3]

Photograph of soldiers standing guard in Tlatelolco Square during the 1968 student movement

The ’68 Student Movement. Source: Wikimedia Commons

One of the principal obstacles facing HPT in Mexico is institutional opacity. Although in 2002 records from the Dirección Federal de Seguridad (DFS) were transferred to the Archivo General de la Nación (AGN), a substantial portion of documentation remains under the discretionary control of state intelligence agencies. This is compounded by a significant legal setback: the 2012 Federal Archives Law introduced the category of “historical-confidential document,” which allows access to information related to human rights violations to be restricted under the pretext of protecting personal privacy—even in cases involving perpetrators. For many researchers, this legal category functions as a mechanism for the archival management of impunity, concealing state secrets under the formal language of transparency and data protection.

At the same time, this historiographical perspective opens alternative avenues. Faced with restrictions in official archives, historians of the present encounter an overabundance of alternative sources: press, television, digital platforms, and social media. The proliferation of devices such as smartphones and tablets, along with the expansion of the internet, has radically transformed regimes of information production, enabling citizens themselves to become producers of sources by documenting police abuses, acts of violence, and everyday life. Yet this documentary richness poses technical challenges of verification, preservation, and analysis, exacerbated by the volatility of digital media and the absence of robust audiovisual preservation policies.

Within this landscape, oral history occupies a central role as a tool for recovering subaltern memories and giving voice to those historically silenced. However, working with contemporaries raises profound ethical dilemmas—from interviewing perpetrators, with the risk of trivializing or normalizing violence, to the responsibility of critically interrogating testimony through rigorous historical methods. In Mexico, historians of the present often assume the role of expert witnesses, intervening in public uses of history and contributing to the construction of critical consciousness in a society that, as Javier Sicilia has warned, has been hollowed out by extreme violence.[4]

Javier Sicilia delivering his speech after the march for peace from Cuernavaca to Mexico City on May 8, 2011.

Javier Sicilia. Source: Wikimedia Commons

Researching the present in Mexico is therefore not merely an academic exercise but an ethical and political commitment. The HPT responds to a social demand to render historically intelligible painful phenomena that official history has often silenced, fragmented, or depoliticized. Institutions such as Instituto Mora and the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) have fostered seminars and projects aimed at thinking through these “histories of the living,” recognizing the present as a laboratory for new forms of historical writing—more attuned to complexity, uncertainty, and the density of human experience.[5]

As a field in formation, the HPT in Mexico holds enormous potential to deepen understanding of the country’s most urgent problems. Despite the legal, archival, and emotional challenges posed by studying ongoing violence, this approach opens the possibility of exploring “virgin archives” and narrating history as it unfolds. Ultimately, as many specialists agree, it is a living history that seeks to prevent the mechanisms of forgetting from overtaking the experiences of contemporary generations.

In this context, historiographical practice cannot be limited to distant observation or mere chronological updating. To study the present is to actively contest the meanings of the past in a country where violence, impunity, and institutional silence are not residues of a bygone era but ongoing structures. In the face of a state that administers forgetting through archival control, memory fragmentation, and the normalization of violence, HPT emerges as a form of intellectual resistance.

Recent episodes—such as outbreaks of violence in Culiacán or Guadalajara following the capture of key figures from the Sinaloa Cartel or the Jalisco New Generation Cartel—should not be read as isolated events but as symptoms of a deeper security crisis. This is compounded by the alarming escalation of gender-based violence, evident in cases such as that of Kimberly Ramos, a student at the Universidad Autónoma del Estado de Morelos, or the recent feminicide of Edith Guadalupe in Mexico City. These realities, alongside the sustained rise in disappearances, reveal a troubling pattern of state negligence, in which authorities often prioritize the management of public image—even in globally visible contexts such as the upcoming World Cup—over the protection of life and justice. The study of these conditions lays the groundwork for further lines of inquiry within the HPT in Mexico.

Mexico fans waving the national flag and celebrating at the feet of the Angel of Independence.

World Cup 2026- Celebration at the Angel of Independence: Wikimedia Commons

In light of this panorama, it is imperative to move beyond immediate chronicle. Unlike disciplines such as sociology, anthropology, or journalism, the HPT insists on revisiting the recent past to uncover the structures, logics, and mechanisms of power that have enabled these problems to persist and intensify. Far from being a retrospective exercise, the HPT is an indispensable analytical tool for understanding the continuities, ruptures, and transformations that shape the present conjuncture. Only through this critical historiographical practice—one that exposes how complicities have been forged and how institutions have operated in recent decades—can we make sense of our current reality and, ultimately, lay the groundwork for transforming Mexico’s political and social horizon.

To treat the present as a historical object is to reject the comfort of narrative closure and confront the persistence of a past that refuses to pass. The historian of the present does not produce knowledge from a position of neutrality; rather, they intervene in the struggle over lives that resist disappearance, over violences that power seeks to erase, and over historical responsibilities that the present must claim. In a country marked by the repetition and normalization of violence, writing history becomes an act of insubordination against impunity—an effort to prevent terror from becoming naturalized and to ensure that the experiences of generations are not absorbed into the logic of forgetting.

[1] Collado Herrera, María del Carmen, “Historia del tiempo presente: algunas reflexiones metodológicas” en Presente y Pasado. Revista de Historia, Universidad de Los Andes, Mérida, 2021, p. 18.

[2] According to Eugenia Allier, this is an observation made by researchers Marina Franco and Florencia Levín regarding this historiographical field in Argentina. Allier Montaño, Eugenia, “El tiempo presente en la historia: generaciones, memoria y controversia,” in Allier Montaño, Eugenia, César Iván Vilchis Ortega, and Camilo Vicente Ovalle (eds.), En la cresta de la ola: Debates y definiciones en torno a la historia del tiempo presente, Mexico, Instituto de Investigaciones Sociales, UNAM, Bonilla Artigas, 2020, p. 59.

[3] Vicente Ovalle C. [Tiempo Suspendido] Una historia de la desaparición forzada en México, 1940-1980. México: Bonilla Artigas Editores, 2019.

[4] Gamiño Muñoz, Rodolfo, “La historia vivida y el estudio de la violencia en México: conflictos historiográficos y dilemas metodológicos” en Allier Montaño, Eugenia, César Iván Vilchis Ortega y Camilo Vicente Ovalle (coords.), En la cresta de la ola. Debates y definiciones en torno a la historia del tiempo presente, México, Instituto de Investigaciones Sociales, UNAM, Bonilla Artigas, 2020, p. 418.

[5] For further information, see “Introduction” in Collado H., María del Carmen (ed.), Nueve ensayos sobre historia del tiempo presente, Mexico, Instituto Mora, 2021, pp. 7–26.

Josué Portillo Motte holds a bachelor’s degree in history from the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters at UNAM, a master’s degree in history from the Autonomous Metropolitan University, and is currently a doctoral student in modern and contemporary history at the Dr. José María Luis Mora Research Institute. His research focuses on student movements, political police forces, and Mexican intelligence services during the second half of the 20th century.

Author of banner picture: Santarrana Wikimedia Commons

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 Long-Lasting and Perpetuating Effects of Lynching Postcards and Photography

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Throughout U.S. history, Black Americans have been victims of a range of violent and coercive systems, including slavery, segregation, and state-sanctioned violence, leaving enduring strains on the nation’s past and present. Among the most overt and brutal manifestations of this history was lynching, which made racial domination visible through public acts of terror. Emerging in the early nineteenth century, lynching in the United States functioned as widespread extrajudicial violence, most often carried out by White mobs against Black Americans and other marginalized groups[SH1] .[1] These killings typically involved an accused individual being seized by a mob and publicly executed, often after prolonged torture that included burning, cutting, drowning, or shooting.  Victims were frequently left hanging in public spaces as a warning to others.[2]Such acts were routinely justified under the language of “social justice” and rarely resulted in legal consequences for perpetrators.[3]

Dogwood trees in bloom in Dixieland, postcard

Dogwood trees in bloom in Dixieland, postcard. Ca. 1930

Crucially, lynching was not only enacted as violence but also staged, documented, and circulated. Many of these events were photographed, with images reproduced as postcards and distributed among White communities, extending the spectacle beyond the immediate site of the killing and embedding it within a broader visual culture of racial domination.[4]

Since the mid-nineteenth century, photography has played a significant role in shaping popular culture and historical memory through the use of violent imagery. [SH2] During the American Civil War, photographs of battlefields and soldiers’ daily lives were widely produced to document the conflict. Yet Black soldiers, who also fought in large numbers, appear only rarely in this visual record. Instead, Black people were more often depicted as civilians attached to the military or as refugees, a pattern that reinforced racial hierarchies by presenting Black subjects in subordinate or dependent roles relative to their White counterparts.[5]

Postcards, known as “Patriotic Covers”, started appearing at the end of the Civil War era in 1865, with portraits of White patriots to commemorate and honor them for their service and sacrifice.[6] To most people during the late nineteenth century, postcards were a modern form of visual communiqué mainly marketed to White audiences as pictographic collectibles of important places, events, and individuals. By 1908, 677 million postcards were mailed, increasing to nearly one billion in 1913.[7] Picture postcards became a popular visual communication medium in the United States and are often used as a tactile method to commemorate leisure outings and activities.[8]

Photo postcard of a man seated in front of a postcard display in a souvenir shop.

Papa Jony, Farmers City, IL sitting in a store, which sold postcards. Source: Wikimedia Commons

Purchasing and collecting postcards became a way to signal taste and social identity, with the style and quality of the images reflected in the postcards people possessed, mailed, and exchanged with others.[9]Within this broader visual culture, racialized imagery also circulated widely. Some postcards depicted Black figures deliberately darkened with ink and positioned alongside White subjects, reinforcing racial hierarchy and representations of Black inferiority.

Therefore, postcards produced and disseminated racist stereotypes, particularly through images of Black children depicted as primates or ape-like figures in degrading and stylized poses, such as eating watermelon, sitting on the ground, or walking barefoot in cotton fields.[10] Consequently, since the 1860s, lynchings also started being photographed across the country, especially in the South. These visual depictions of racial violence were widely reproduced and sold on the streets and local shops, primarily to White southerners from Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia.[11] These states, where most lynchings happened, sold postcards for an average of ten cents each, which would later be sent throughout the country to relatives who shared the same racist views.[12] The dissemination of these postcards conveyed the message of the superiority of White individuals in the picture, who often posed in front of the camera with a grin of satisfaction.[13] These expressions not only asserted White superiority and power but also framed Black suffering as an expected outcome for those accused of defying the dominant group, regardless of guilt. 

Image from 1908 that reads: The Dogwood Tree. This is only the branch of the Dogwood tree: An emblem of WHITE SUPREMACY. A lesson once taught in the Pioneer's school. That this is a land of WHITE MAN'S RULE. The Red Man once in an early day, Was told by the Whites to mend his way. The negro, now, by eternal grace, Must learn to stay in the negro's place. In the Sunny South, the Land of the Free, Let the WHITE SUPREME, forever be. Let this a warning to all negroes be. Or they'll suffer the fate of the DOGWOOD TREE. -Pub. by Harkrider Drug Co., Center, Tex. Copyrighted. Fig. 6. "US. Postcard", 1908.

The Dogwood Tree, 1908. Credit: Without Sanctuary

In Sabine County, Texas, in 1905, the lynching of Will Manuel, Cleve Williams, Moses Spellman, Will Johnson, Jerry Evans, and a male whose last name was [SH3] identified as Williams was preserved in postcard form (See Figure above) and remains one of the few surviving examples to include pro-lynching poetry. Such postcards often featured explicit language that endorsed and reinforced White supremacy, whether through printed text or handwritten annotations. Not only did these postcards show the contemporary mindset of that time, but they also influenced future generations and their connotations of non-white people, as families often saved these postcards as memorabilia. Indeed, the writer’s supposed sense of righteousness and objectivity present in their words are material proof of their views and attitudes toward minorities and their support for a White supremacist America and the perpetual subjugation of Black people.

Public understanding of lynching remains uneven, and discussions of this history are often avoided or marginalized within broader narratives of the nation’s past.[14] Many White Americans have the perception that extremist racist behavior in society is an issue of the past and that the nation is long past violent and racially driven crimes and behaviors.[15] However, the legacy of lynching, and particularly its visual documentation, has influenced public policy and social attitudes, with lasting consequences for Black communities. Public lynchings continued until the mid-twentieth century, and so did the dissemination of postcards and photographs through the mail, even after the outlawing of their mailing in 1908.[16] Presently, lynching postcards and physical souvenirs of the deceased, such as clothing items, locks of hair, and bones, can be found in family albums, attic trunks, online sales, thrift stores, pawn shops, and flea markets, with some selling for up to thousands of dollars. Therefore, this indicates that objects considered to be lynching memorabilia were frequently hidden among family possessions or discarded as a means of avoiding the law or, in contemporary times, out in society, ready for acquisition by those who actively seek the items out.[17]

While the historical contexts differ, scholars note that visual documentation of racialized violence continues to shape public perception today. Similarly, lynching photographs have given way to “othering” of Black Americans in the US by the general population and the police force. The brutality shown in those postcards can still be seen today in the proliferation of images featuring police violence against Black people. Historically, many police forces have been “official” perpetrators of violence against African Americans in the South. In some cases, law enforcement agencies carry out a brutal and lengthy legacy of maintaining peace through state-sanctioned coercion and fearmongering among the minority population because of preconceived, racist, and stereotypical notions that are woven into the threads of American society.[18] For example, in contemporary conversations around police body cams, the proliferation of images of police violence against Black people is evident. The evidence can tell us that this Black person is doing nothing and is not a threat, yet they are handcuffed, or worse, their lives are taken from them.[19]

Memorial corridor at the national museum for peace and justice

Memorial Corridor at The National Memorial for Peace and Justice. Source: Wikimedia Commons

The photographs act, still to this day, as a moment frozen in time where lynching victims were suffering at the hands of the White mob and are a permanent display of power, race, and White supremacy. Indeed, lynching photographs today stand as tokens of the most sensationalistic aspects of lynching: photographers selling torture and death through pictures and postcards for profit and spectators who bought them, sent them to friends and family, and preserved them for generations. Nevertheless, at the turn of the last century, they served as “proof” of something more; the shots photographers chose to take, develop, and sell, and how senders chose to present themselves through writing, ultimately came to visually substantiate the ideologies of White supremacy and White solidarity that both justified and incited lynching.[20] These images have allowed racist individuals throughout time to rationalize or obscure the brutality of lynching by reframing it as social justice or civic duty. In this sense, lynching photography not only documented racial terror but also functioned as a tool of denial—reinforcing the shared narratives and symbols of the past that both celebrated White dominance and concealed the depth of Black suffering. Regardless of the era, whether it involves a lynching postcard or the killing of a Black individual at the hands of the police, visual evidence of outright violence against the Black community struggles to raise awareness of the structural problem in a society that has long been accustomed to the inequalities and subjugation of Black Americans. Treating and understanding lynching photography as historically rooted yet still active in shaping the present enables us to recognize its enduring influence on the way race is perceived. Confronting these images, therefore, is not only about acknowledging a dark past but also about addressing the ongoing structures of racism they helped create, to prevent their repetition in new forms.

Alejandro Soto Camacho is a Ph.D. student in sociology at The University of Texas at Austin. He earned his BA in Sociology and Anthropology with a minor in Forensic Science from North Carolina State University. Currently, his research interests are in historical and environmental sociology. 

Rasul A. Mowatt is the Department Head of Parks, Recreation, and Tourism Management in the College of Natural Resources and Affiliate Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at North Carolina State University. His interests and concerns are strongly centered on critiquing society for issues that are most prevalent in impacting quality of life.

Full article link: https://www.proquest.com/openview/240faeda045d4a5bb108212017cc5541/1?pq-origsite=gscholar&cbl=5531555

References:

Brown, Kimberly J. 2024. “The Absence of Black Soldiers in Civil War Photos Speaks Volumes.” The MIT Press Reader, June 19. https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/theabsence-of-Black-soldiers-in-civil-war-photos-speaks-volumes/.

Haydel, Nia Woods. 2007. “Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America, a Case Study of a Higher Education Partnership for Social Justice Education.” PhD diss., Georgia State University. ProQuest (3301005). https://www.proquest.com/dissertationstheses/without-sanctuary-lynching-photography-america/docview/304843783/se-2.

Jordan, Meghan Lynn. 2017. “Lynching Photographs and Their Aftermath: The Overlay of the Gaze.” PhD diss., The University of Arizona. ProQuest (10622868). https://www.proquest.com/dissertations-theses/lynching-photographs-theiraftermath-overlay-gaze/docview/1966211490/se-2.

Mowatt, Rasul A. 2012. “Lynching as Leisure.” American Behavioral Scientist 56 (10): 1361– 1387. https://doi.org/10.1177/0002764212454429

Natividad, Ivan. 2022. “Confronting America’s Traumatic History of Lynching.” Berkeley News, June 16. https://news.berkeley.edu/2022/06/16/confronting-americastraumatic-history-of-lynching

O’Neill, Aaron. 2024. “Lynchings by State and Race in the U.S. 1882–1968.” Statista, February 2. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1175147/lynching-by-race-state-and-race/.

Raiford, Leigh Renee. 2003. “‘Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare’: History, Memory, and the Photography of Twentieth-Century African American Social Movements.” PhD diss., Yale University. Pro Quest (3084356). https://www.proquest.com/dissertationstheses/imprisoned-luminous-glare-history-memory/docview/305285177/se-2.

Scott, T. A. 2015. “‘Don’t Fail to See This’: Race, Leisure, and the Transformation of Lynching in Texas.” PhD diss., The University of Chicago (3725551). https://www.proquest.com/dissertations-theses/dont-fail-see-this-race-leisuretransformation/docview/1734444871/se-2.

Staff, Frank. 1966. The Picture Postcard and Its Origins. Frederick A. Praeger.

Stewart, Amy R. 2014. “Witnessing Horror: Psychoanalysis and the Abject Horror of Lynching Photography.” Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society 19 (4): 413–434. https://doi.org/10.1057/pcs.2014.40.

Tucker, Linda. 2005. “Not Without Sanctuary: Teaching About Lynching.” Transformations: The Journal of Inclusive Scholarship and Pedagogy 16 (1): 52–69. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/trajincschped.16.2.0070

Wood, Amy Louise. 2005. “Lynching Photography and the Visual Reproduction of White Supremacy.” American Nineteenth Century History 6 (3): 373–399. https://doi.org/10.1080/14664650500381090.

[1] Haydel 2007; Jordan 2017

[2] Haydel 2007; Jordan 2017; Mowatt 2012.

[3] Haydel 2007; Jordan 2017; Mowatt 2012.

[4] Raiford 2003; Stewart 2014.

[5] Brown 2024. 

[6] Brown 2024. 

[7] Scott 2015. 

[8] Scott 2015

[9] Staff 1966. 

[10] Scott 2015. 

[11] O’Neill 2024; Scott 2015

[12] O’Neill 2024; Scott 2015

[13] Mowatt 2012.

[14] Jordan 2017; Tucker 2005

[15] Jordan 2017; Haydel 2007

[16] Scott 2015

[17] Jordan 2017

[18] Raiford 2003

[19] Natividad 2022.

[20] Wood 2005.

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.

Memories of War: Reflections on Japanese Borderlands Experiences and Nikkei Incarceration

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Introduction to Memories of War by Lucero Estrella, Assistant Professor of Ethnic Studies at Lawrence University

When developing my syllabus for ETST 110: Introduction to Ethnic Studies, I thought of ways to have students at Lawrence University engage with the themes of race, ethnicity, borders, gender, indigeneity, and migration beyond the United States. Each week, we discussed themes such as settler colonialism, racialization, criminalization, and resistance and how these appeared across various temporalities and global geographies.

For our week on resistance and exclusion during the mid-twentieth century, I decided to have my students read my NEP piece “Memories of War: Japanese Borderlands Experiences during WWII,” alongside Karen M. Inouye’s article “No Simple History: Nikkei Incarceration on Indigenous Lands.”[1] My goal was to have students engage with alternative histories of Japanese internment that they might not have encountered in the past. While my NEP piece approaches Japanese incarceration and family separation through a hemispheric lens and discusses Japanese wartime experiences on both sides of the Texas-Mexico border, Inouye’s work centers Nikkei women’s narratives of incarceration on Indigenous land to highlight the interconnections between racial capitalism, settler colonialism, and wartime incarceration. Both works discuss the importance of memory in historical studies of the wartime period as a way of uncovering the continuing legacies of state violence.

Japanese internment detainees, 1942.
Japanese internment detainees, 1942. Source: Wikimedia Commons

For my class, students were expected to write one weekly, in-class free writing exercise based on a few guiding questions. During the week we read both works, students were required to tackle one or more of the following questions: How do Estrella and/or Inouye use memory in their works? Who do these memories belong to? What new perspectives and possibilities emerge from the use of memory as a historical source?

The four reflections below are from four Lawrence University students who took my Fall 2024 term Introduction to Ethnic Studies course: Tahlia Moe, Niranjana Mittal, Nicholas Lubin, and Riya Jehangir Stebleton. Their short preces include reflections on some themes and methodologies that structured our class discussions for the term, such as relational race, racial capitalism, settler colonialism, and incarceration.

Student Reflections

Tahlia Moe

Memory serves as the gateway to a hidden archive. Employing memory as a historical source unearths relations, stories, intimacies, and experiences that traditional historical methods often overlook. “Memories of War: Japanese Borderlands Experiences during WWII” by Estrella and “No Simple History: Nikkei Incarceration on Indigenous Lands” by Inouye explore the hidden archive as they prioritize memories as primary sources. Estrella highlights memories from Japanese families and activists in the U.S. and Mexico to display the legacies of violence and anti-Asian exclusion on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border. Meanwhile, Inouye writes about Nikkei incarceration on Indigenous lands in Arizona, featuring memories from Japanese women who were imprisoned as children in Poston. The memories of these women reveal legacies of racial capitalism and settler colonialism that are downplayed, erased, or otherwise not found in the archives. Their memories reveal interactions between the Japanese prisoners and the Indigenous people as they created their own economies and forms of resistance. A relational race approach becomes significant to understanding the interactions between the groups and the effects of state-sponsored violence and settler-colonialist ideologies and policies. Compiling these memories helps form a fuller, more empathetic picture that cares about and honors subjects of violent histories. Emerging perspectives from people involved thus introduce the personal perspective and intimate value, combatting traditional historical methods.

Poston, Arizona, 1945
Poston, Arizona, 1945. Source: Wikimedia Commons

Niranjana Mittal

Estrella’s piece titled “Memories of War: Japanese Borderlands Experiences during WWII,” explores lived experiences from the Texas-Mexico borderlands through the lens of memory. By using oral histories and personal recollections, Estrella centers the humanity of these historical events, presenting an intimate narrative that contrasts with more traditional archival sources. Memory in her work becomes a vital tool for uncovering some overlooked aspects of history. Estrella’s use of memory is particularly powerful in reconstructing histories that lack extensive documentation or have been marginalized in mainstream narratives.

The memories she draws upon belong to individuals who lived through the upheaval of war. These are ordinary people whose voices are often absent from official records but whose experiences illuminate the complexities of war beyond its grand strategies and political machinations. For example, recollections of displacement and resource scarcity challenge the monolithic view of Japan as solely a wartime aggressor, adding nuance to our understanding of suffering in Japanese Mexican communities during the war. Estrella uncovers the brutality of imperial policies and how individuals navigated and survived these oppressive systems.

One of the most significant effects of Estrella incorporating these memories is how it opens up new perspectives on history. Memory, unlike official records, is subjective and malleable, shaped by individual experiences and the passage of time. This fluidity allows us to reveal dimensions of history that might otherwise remain hidden. For instance, memories often preserve emotional truths and everyday experiences that are absent in traditional state sources. They bring to light stories of resilience, survival, and moral ambiguity that challenge simplistic narratives of victimhood or villainy. Estrella shows how the memories of those at the margins, such as borderland communities, challenge nationalistic accounts that erase the interconnected and often contradictory realities of the war.

A dentist's office at the Granada Relocation Center, Amache, Colorado, 1942.
A dentist’s office at the Granada Relocation Center, Amache, Colorado, 1942. Source: Wikimedia Commons

Moreover, memory as a historical source opens up possibilities for reconciliation and healing. By including voices that have been silenced or ignored, Estrella’s work fosters a more inclusive understanding of history that acknowledges shared pain and loss across national and cultural boundaries. This approach humanizes history and highlights how memory itself is contested and politicized as individuals and communities negotiate their relationship with the past.

Ultimately, Estrella demonstrates that memory is not just a supplement to traditional historical sources but a vital means of understanding the complexities of human experiences. By foregrounding memory, she shifts the focus from the macro-level forces of war to the lived experiences of individuals – offering a richer, more empathetic perspective on the past.

Nicholas Lubin

In both Estrella’s and Inouye’s works, memory functions as a significant tool for recovery from the deterioration of Native American and immigrant narratives. Due to the United States’ history of isolation and displacement, many families are left with gaps in their history. However, memory functions to fill this gap. Although instances of displacement and isolation are not always documented, memory and oral histories help fill this gap. Memory in Inouye’s piece serves as a connector for the experiences of Japanese Americans who were subjected to incarceration following Executive Order 9066 and those of Native Americans who were displaced from their lands.

Inouye illustrates this overlap through the locations of campsites on Indigenous reservations mirroring the state-imposed limits and borders for the “allowed” spaces for Native peoples. Despite the differing circumstances of the two groups, the process of isolation and extermination is one and the same. Both works feature minority groups that were forcibly relocated because of the unsettling habits that hegemonic powers hold onto, such as settler colonialism and xenophobia. In Estrella’s work, she details this, showing the reader the widespread cross-border relocation of Japanese nationals following the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Families across the Americas were torn apart, and many never returned to their homes, causing this impactful moment to fall under the radar. Estrella’s inclusion of oral history and memories of a Japanese Mexican family illustrates how the attempt to silence these voices with equivocation can be combated by preserving the narratives and memories of those who experienced violence and displacement during the wartime period.

Riya Jehangir Stebleton

The erasure of immigrant and Indigenous stories in the United States is a constant theme within hegemonic white narratives. Many families are unable to retrace the steps of their ancestors due to the history of exclusion, internment, and forced separation of ethnic groups. In the works of Estrella’s “Memories of War” & Inouye’s “No Simple History,” memory and empathy are used as powerful mechanisms to bridge historical gaps in the lives of both Japanese and Indigenous communities in the Americas. Although these communities endured different forms of injustice, an overarching system of racism in incarceration and exclusion can be seen through a relational race lens.

Civilian exclusion order #5, posted at First and Front streets, directing removal by April 7 1942 of persons of Japanese ancestry, from the first San Francisco section to be affected by evacuation
Civilian exclusion order #5, posted at First and Front streets, directing removal by April 7 1942 of persons of Japanese ancestry, from the first San Francisco section to be affected by evacuation.
Source: Library of Congress, Reproduction Number: LC-USZ62-34565. 

Estrella discusses the mass displacement of Japanese immigrants after WWII, as well as the obscured and unknown history of Japanese Mexicans. In addition to the criminalization of Japanese migrants following the bombing of Pearl Harbor, working-class migrants in Mexican states such as Coahuila encountered discrimination through forced relocation. Similarly, Inouye highlights the misconstrued narrative of the Nikkei community in the U.S., which is made up of Japanese descendants who have permanently settled abroad. These communities were placed in incarceration camps under the War Relocation Authorities on land where native tribes’ reservations were located. Wartime systems of relocation and incarceration draw direct comparisons to the processes of settler colonialism. Due to the consistent reinforcement of white power, the stories of Japanese migrants and the entanglement of injustices are left unheard of in social spheres, education, and sometimes within families. So, how can these narratives be retold and amplified? For many, the answer lies in the ability to convey memory and empathy in a historical context. 

Fragments of memory, combined with empathy, can be utilized to translate and preserve the overlooked histories of both immigrant and Indigenous communities. The usage of memory as a historical source allows for these stories to be retold, drawing connections between systems of incarceration, racialization, and dispossession that affected numerous non-white populations in the United States. For example, there are major gaps in the poorly documented history of Japanese Mexican families, and the usage of empathetic agency can bridge connections across the divide. Narrating history through a first-hand perspective also allows for the descendants of those affected to share the intergenerational impacts of settler colonialism and exclusion, demonstrating the long-term impacts. The preservation of these hidden narratives offers new perspectives on the underrepresented history of Japanese migrants while also integrating emotional analogy, remembrance, and personal influence. Incarceration rooted in white dominance continues to be a relevant issue in the United States. Consequently, it is crucial to remember and extend the narratives of Japanese migrants through mechanisms of memory, empathy, and knowledge, to break the cycle of ethnic erasure and carceral systems of injustice.

Lucero Estrella is an Assistant Professor of Ethnic Studies at Lawrence University

[1] Karen Inouye, “No Simple History: Nikkei Incarceration on Indigenous Lands,” Journal of Transnational American Studies, 15(1), 2024.

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.

13 Ways of Looking: JFK’s Missing Wreath

Banner for 13 Ways of Looking: JFK’s Missing Wreath

Over sixty years ago, in November 1963, President John F. Kennedy took a fateful trip to Texas. It would be the last of his life. The trip had four planned stops: San Antonio, Houston, Dallas, with a final planned fundraiser dinner in Austin. In the days after his shocking assassination, JFK was buried at Arlington National Cemetery. Four years later in 1967, he was reinterred in his final resting place, marked by the Eternal Flame at the official presidential gravesite. The evolving design of the gravesite at Arlington had been publicized after his initial burial. However, behind the scenes, plans developed for an encircling memorial artwork. This missing wreath has remained undisclosed for decades.

With the Oak Spring Garden Foundation, I revealed the story of “The Missing Wreath: On JFK’s Grave & Mrs. Mellon’s Maquette” in an article published this fall in Ploughshares (the full text can be read here). Told as a detective narrative, it is woven like the structure of a wreath, exploring the planning, creation, and eventual disappearance of the artwork over time.

A short version of the story goes like this: 

After JFK’s assassination and his initial interment in Arlington National Cemetery in November 1963, an architectural firm owned by John (Jack) Warnecke was commissioned to design the formal gravesite. Detailed research reports were created in conjunction with consultations by prominent family, scholars, architects, art critics, and clergy, along with a public exhibit of design plans at the National Gallery of Art and coverage in major news outlets. First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy wanted the gravesite to be publicly accessible yet personal and intimate as befitted a family grave. In 1964, she designated her close confidant, Rachel “Bunny” Lambert Mellon—who had designed JFK’s beloved White House Rose Garden—to represent Jackie’s wishes in the grave design.

Arligton cementary JFK memorial.
President John F. Kennedy Gravesite, Arlington National Cemetery, Arlington, VA. Photo by author, November 2021.

With her sophisticated landscaping eye, Bunny softened Warnecke’s design around the Eternal Flame. As the final reinterment approached in 1967, she also worked behind the scenes on a secret memorial sculpture with another close confidant: the French-born Tiffany jewelry designer, Jean Schlumberger.

Bunny Mellon and Jean Schlumberger took as inspiration a wreath of military hats around the Eternal Flame that had been laid by JFK’s funerary Honor Guard in an impromptu gesture at his initial interment. Robert “Bobby” Kennedy, JFK’s brother, had been so moved by the gesture that he said the hats should remain around the grave until they “crumble to dust.” By 1969, the memorial wreath had been secretly made by French-born sculptor Louis Féron. Yet due to series of events and issues that delayed installation, the sculpture went missing by the early 1970s and was essentially lost to time—until it was rediscovered earlier this year.

Through the diligent sleuthing of Elinor Crane and Nancy Collins at the Oak Spring Garden Foundation (the Mellon’s former estate outside Upperville, VA), and with thanks to the memory of a stonemason named Tommy Reed, who had worked for essentially a half-century at Oak Spring, the lost artwork was finally found after a multi-year search. It was found disassembled in packing crates in an offsite storage facility at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum.

Originally written when the artwork was still missing, the story of “The Missing Wreath” aimed to inspire a search for the lost sculpture. In the process of writing, the search to me became a meditation on who and what gets lost and found in retellings of history. As I wrote in the longer article:

Original memorial wreath, JFK’s Missing Wreath
Cast and assembled memorial wreath for JFK’s gravesite, unknown location and date, photographer unknown. Photo acquired in 2021 by OSGF from an eBay sale of unidentified photos of “War Art Work” by Louis Féron (from the 2018 estate sale of Louis Féron and Leslie Snow). Courtesy of Oak Spring Garden Foundation.

“Historical artifacts never exist in a vacuum, and inanimate objects have lives and even afterlives. Public and private events color retellings; an artwork can be curated dozens of ways, even to the point of disappearing behind variations of accounts. The aura around the memorial wreath’s absence makes it almost more powerful than if it were present. When public celebrity is involved, when privacy is fiercely guarded, when privilege can determine what is noticed or neglected or even erased, stories can constellate between private records and the public imagination … Histories can get lost between lines and behind headlines—just as a crumbling stone maquette in a rural cemetery can lie for decades without notice.”

In the two years since “The Missing Wreath” was finished and accepted for publication by Ploughshares, additional puzzle pieces have emerged from different corners of the country, aiding in the search for the artwork’s final resting place. A brief coda notes the memorial’s rediscovery, highlighting its journey from lost to found, while leaving room for future historians.

As I reflect back on this remarkable story, what remains of interest to me are different ways to see the memorial wreath. Any history is always incomplete, as acts of remembering grow spaces for future storytellers to fill more gaps. With a nod to Wallace Stevens’ poem “13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” I offer here some frameworks for interpreting and re-interpreting the wreath:

1. Histories of Art and Design: JFK’s memorial wreath was co-created by the American gardener and philanthropist Rachel “Bunny” Lambert Mellon, French-born jewelry designer Jean Schlumberger, and French-born sculptor Louis Féron. When lines between artist, craftsman, and commissioner blur, who is credited as the creator of an artwork? How do historical traditions and cultural systems influence this valuation and reevaluation where art and design meet?

Nancy Collins hanging holiday wreath on headstone of Rachel “Bunny” Lambert Mellon
Nancy Collins hanging holiday wreath on headstone of Rachel “Bunny” Lambert Mellon, in Trinity Episcopal Church Cemetery, Upperville, VA. Photo by author, December 2021.

2. Histories of Labor: In addition to the co-creators in name, JFK’s memorial wreath owes much to contributions by highly skilled tradesmen including stonemasons, gardeners, servicemen, foundry workers, and more. The story of the missing wreath surfaced at the Oak Spring Garden Foundation (the former estate of Paul and Bunny Mellon in Virginia), thanks largely to a stonemason, who originally worked on a stone maquette in the early 1970s in the Oak Spring cemetery, where the sculpture briefly weathered. Since many people played a role in this memorial, how are such layers of labor credited?

3. Histories of Memorials: Plans for JFK’s Gravesite included commissioned reports in the 1960s by interdisciplinary critics and experts who considered distinctions among graves, memorials, and monuments in shaping the design. This was complemented by public-facing exhibits and family engagements with the process. Whether a national or personal memorial, how do incorporated elements do more than reflect a singular era to stand the test of time? Since the memorial wreath was not installed on JFK’s grave, how does its rediscovery offer a different reading of the same object in a different historical context?

4. Histories of Cemeteries: Multiple cemeteries in Virginia help to illuminate the story of the missing wreath: Arlington National Cemetery (where JFK is buried), Oak Spring’s Fletcher Cemetery (where the stone maquette was constructed based on JFK’s grave), Trinity Episcopal Church Cemetery (where the Mellons are buried), not to neglect other marked graves, along with unmarked cemeteries in neighboring mountains (largely interring free Black communities). Cemeteries balance preservation of memories with residual presence of physical bodies, cycles of life and death, shaped by beliefs about afterlives rooted in culture and ecology. JFK’s Gravesite sits in a national cemetery; he is one of only two presidents buried at Arlington. How do considerations of burial and commemoration reflect not only the person who died but also the values of the living?

5. Histories of Gardens: Bunny Mellon designed JFK’s White House Rose Garden during the president’s life, his Gravesite at Arlington after his death, and later the bayside grounds in Boston for his Presidential Library and Museum. After her death, the Mellon estate at Oak Spring transitioned from a private estate into a “garden foundation” to cross-pollinate the humanities, arts and sciences. One of its responsibilities includes stewarding the property’s cemetery, which caught the attention of Elinor Crane. Crane began asking questions about the crumbling stone maquette and enlisted Nancy Collins, the Foundation’s archivist, to help her search. Histories of gardens and cemeteries overlap. As landscapes change over time, how do attentions to plants help to support living histories and reparative futures, including attending to climate change?

6. Histories of Materials: JFK’s grave is composed of engraved slate headstones around a large round stone sourced from New England, in a sea of wavy pink granite, surrounded by specimen trees and other signature plantings. The design of the memorial wreath symbolically interweaves materials from bamboo to rope, driftwood to military hats, which inspired the wreath after JFK’s Honor Guard laid their hats in that shape at his initial interment. His memorial artwork was cast at a metal foundry and brought outside for a brief time to weather on an oyster shell stone maquette at Oak Spring. Considering both natural and manmade resources, how does materiality contribute to this story of the memorial wreath?

7. Histories of Ecology: After her multi-year search for the missing memorial wreath, Elinor Crane finally witnessed the artwork in early 2024 disassembled and crated at the JFK Presidential Library and Museum in Boston. On one of the disassembled pieces, she spied an unexpected detail: some bird droppings which she surmised came from Oak Spring when the memorial had been laid to rest for a short time on the outdoor stone maquette in the cemetery in the early 1970s. Since Oak Spring has transitioned from a private estate to a garden foundation to focus on cross-pollinating research, would it be possible to test and trace those droppings to identify the avian species? What foods might that bird have eaten, and does its kin still migrate through this ecosystem? This detail may seem insignificant but reveals the living world that surrounds such memorials.

Stone maquette related to JFK gravesite in Fletcher Cemetery at Oak Spring Garden Foundation
Stone maquette related to JFK gravesite in Fletcher Cemetery at Oak Spring Garden Foundation, Upperville, VA. Photo by author, November 2021.

8. Histories of Lands (Ancestral, Colonized, Enslaved, Emancipated, Legislated): Established in 1864, Arlington National Cemetery is relatively young. It occupies land once owned by Robert E. Lee, which was requisitioned during the Civil War as a national burial ground. On the heels of the Emancipation Proclamation, part of the land was designated Freedman’s Village to support free Black women and men escaping enslavement. In centuries before colonization, the intersecting waterways of the Potomac and Chesapeake region served as homeland for hundreds of Indigenous communities. How are these ancestral lands recognized and represented in national and regional cemeteries, and who else may be buried in marked and unmarked graves in and beyond this region?

9. Histories of Witnesses: Most of JFK’s contemporaries have died, but after the memorial wreath was found in 2024, Elinor Crane and Nancy Collins learned that an important member of JFK’s funeral Honor Guard still lives. James L. Felder was only the tenth Black American to serve with the Honor Guard (with the other nine preceding him by only months), and he wrote an account of his experience, I Buried John F. Kennedy (1994). When the Oak Spring Garden Foundation gathered experts for a private meeting in September 2024 to share news of the lost-and-found memorial, Felder spoke about his experience and also shared his personal album of JFK’s funeral, made for him personally by First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy. Attendees also received a copy of Felder’s book with an advanced copy of “The Missing Wreath.” His album was reproduced for an exhibition on the memorial wreath that will run at the Oak Spring Garden Foundation from October 2024 into 2025. “The Untold Story of a Lost Memorial” exhibition invites attendees to share their own intersecting memories.

10. Histories of Libraries & Museums: Many museums and libraries figure in this story, including the Oak Spring Garden Library, Museums of Fine Arts in Virginia and Boston, the JFK Presidential Library and Museum, and others. Collections are never complete by themselves. Primary research often requires years for researchers to piece together a story. Large collections  may take years to process, catalogue, and create finding aids to make items accessible. Versions of cataloguing can leave items relatively invisible. Conservation and preservation of a single item may take months or longer. Events like a global pandemic can separate curators from collections. Scholarly trends may neglect aspects of objects that hide in plain sight. Historical events influence why items were collected in the first place, leaving gaps in historical records. Collaborations help to reconnect parts that have been disassembled over time. How do related histories influence the lost-and-found memorial wreath and other aspects that may be missing from this story?

11. Histories of Speculative Futures: If the memorial wreath been installed after JFK’s reinterment, what would its reception have been in the era of the late 1960s or early 1970s? Would it have distracted from the timeless simplicity of the Eternal Flame, and what other unrealized memorial plans for the president’s grave lie buried in other archives? Now that the memorial wreath has been found, what are its possible futures, from its current resting place disassembled in Boston to an anticipated exhibition reassembled in Virginia, or otherwise? Why does the specter of JFK’s unrealized presidency continue to haunt our current moment, including vulnerabilities around civil rights and other social concerns that remain pressing issues? Beyond surmising what the world might have been if JFK had survived, would it be more helpful to consider: What descendants have we become, and what kind of ancestors do we wish to be?

12. Symbolic Histories: Many symbols are woven into JFK’s memorial wreath—military hats, ropes, driftwood, a leaf, and more—not to neglect the symbol of the wreath itself. Why have the symbol of wreaths played such an important role over time? What does the choice of a memorial in the shape of a wreath resembling a crown of thorns offer to this larger encircling story? Now that over a half-century has passed since the memorial wreath was created, what symbols still carry resonance or not, depending on the eye (and age and background) of the beholder? Beyond the memorial wreath, how might the living symbol of the Eternal Flame illuminate a path forward, among other eternal flames that have existed across centuries and cultures?

13. Public Histories and Public Memories: For many, the memory of that day remains remarkably vivid. If you were alive in 1963, consider what do you remember? If you weren’t alive then, ask someone who was to share generational knowledge—not only about JFK but also about their daily lives. How do generations connect to learn about the arc of evolving and intersecting histories? What other questions arise? What knowledges emerge by sharing these stories? As I wrote:

“Even as this story tells the arc of an artwork that went missing, it is as much if not more a story of those who co-created a memorial and who cared to go searching for an artifact that got lost, about the ephemeral or privileged materiality of human lives, how cultural collections are acquired and stewarded in ways that evolve, laying groundwork for future researchers and historical understandings.” ~ GEH, “The Missing Wreath”

These are 13 ways of looking at JFK’s lost-and-found memorial wreath, offering more questions than answers. There are surely more. But these questions provide a starting point to look again at this traumatic and critical moment in modern American history, as we work to imagine and co-create possible futures.  

Gretchen Ernster Henderson is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Texas at Austin and writes across environmental arts, cultural histories, and integrative sciences. Her publications, exhibitions, and performances include five books, arts media, and opera libretti. She previously served as Associate Director for Research at the Harry Ransom Center at UT-Austin and Co-Director of a National Endowment for the Humanities Institute on Museums: Humanities in the Public Sphere at Georgetown University with UC-Santa Cruz.

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.

Banner picture: Oak Spring Garden Library, Oak Spring Garden Foundation, Upperville, VA. Photo by author, April 2021.

Two Bombings, Two Movies: From Hiroshima to Grave of the Fireflies

Banner for Two Bombings, Two Movies: From Hiroshima to Grave of the Fireflies by David Conard.

An orphaned boy and girl wander helplessly through a destroyed Japanese city toward the end of World War II. The boy, older but not old enough, has frustrating interactions with the adults they meet, most of whom are preoccupied with their own struggles to survive. Despite his earnest efforts, he cannot keep his little sister safe. He finally wanders alone into a train station full of other displaced people. The station is a literal junction but also a metaphorical one: the boy’s world ends here, but beyond it a new Japan will rise from the ashes.

The plot briefly described above comes from Hideo Sekigawa’s Hiroshima, a 1953 docudrama that used real survivors of the atomic bombs to bring the city’s darkest days to the big screen. From 1945 to 1952, Japanese movie studios followed the dictates of media censors in American occupation headquarters by avoiding discussion of wartime bombings, depictions of American occupation troops, and a host of other topics that Americans found uncomfortable. With the end of the occupation came a rush of bomb-themed movies, from Kaneto Shindо̄’s Children of Hiroshima (1952) to Ishirо̄ Honda’s Godzilla (1954) to Akira Kurosawa’s Record of Living Things (1955). Sekigawa’s Hiroshima, perhaps the most literal of the bunch, had little box office impact but exerted significant influence on cinema’s international New Wave movement that lay just around the corner.

The aftermath of Hiroshima.
The aftermath of Hiroshima. Source: Wikimedia Commons

It also foreshadowed a movie that the first paragraph of this piece describes equally well: 1988’s Grave of the Fireflies. When it came out 35 years after the release of Hiroshima, Grave of the Fireflies was largely forgotten outside of the cinephile community. But in the intervening years, its audience has only grown. Its Blu-Ray and streaming releases have allowed it to impact – one might say traumatize – new viewers around the world.

Fireflies is set in Kobe, not Hiroshima or Nagasaki or the even more heavily-bombed Tokyo, but it is grim enough all the same; the brother dies in a train station not long after the sister succumbs to illness. In Hiroshima, which has less finality but more overt messages for the present, the brother does not die in the station but leaves to find work in a factory until, seven years later, it begins to produce artillery for American soldiers in Korea. Unwilling to contribute to more war deaths, the young man quits and disappears into the drop-out world of pachinko gambling. He never discovers what became of his sister after they lost each other in the ruins of their childhood city, and that uncertainty underlines the movie’s message that Hiroshima’s agony is not over. As long as war goes on, nobody is safe from Hiroshima’s fate.

Grave of the Fireflies (1988) has its messages, too, though they can be harder to detect beneath the intense tragedy of its protagonists. More than the story of doomed siblings, the movie is an uncompromising critique of Japanese society in the waning months of World War II. It is also a milestone in the development of Studio Ghibli’s Japan-centric but universalist storytelling.

Grave of the Fireflies poster
Grave of the Fireflies poster: Image: https://image.tmdb.org/t/p/original/2jwQhzuP1RefkUI4PCaEgioCHrv.jpg

1988 was a year of firsts for the young Studio Ghibli. The studio’s creative frontman Hayao Miyazaki directed My Neighbor Totoro, his first film set in historical Japan rather than in a fantasy world. The studio did not expect Totoro to be a financial success, so it decided to package it with an adaptation of a wartime melodramatic novel titled Hotaru no Haka, or Grave of the Fireflies. Fireflies was Ghibli’s first film neither written nor directed by Miyazaki. Instead, it was helmed by longtime animator Isao Takahata, who would go on to direct other adult-oriented features like Only Yesterday (1991), My Neighbors the Yamadas (1999), and The Tale of Princess Kaguya (2013).

The studio’s calculation was correct in the short term, but when Totoro aired on television – paired with the release of an adorable plushy – it found massive success. It soon became an international hit too, and Totoro’s title character is now Ghibli’s mascot and studio logo. Fireflies’ success has been quieter but also impressive. Disney, which for many years owned the foreign distribution rights to Totoro and most other Ghibli films, didn’t touch Fireflies, but the movie has received English dubs and frequent home media releases nonetheless. It appears on numerous Best Films lists and is many people’s go-to answer to the question: “What’s the saddest movie you’ve ever seen?”

Yet in many ways it cuts against the studio’s grain. Miyazaki’s renowned fantasies, Takahata’s later stories, and other Ghibli directors’ efforts are almost always characterized by capable people working toward clear-cut, laudable objectives. Not so much with Fireflies. Its protagonists, a boy named Seita and his younger sister Setsuko, think irrationally, make bad decisions, and don’t ever seem to know what they should do next. They are, in the most difficult ways, children, and they are caught up in terrible events.

This is particularly true of Seita. As the older sibling, he is responsible for the care of his sister when their mother dies in a bombing raid that destroys their house and their father is killed in battle. At first he does well enough. He finds lodging for himself and Setsuko in the home of a woman who provides them with food in exchange for their mother’s clothes. This woman embodies the attitude that, in wartime, everyone must make sacrifices for the good of the nation. The most poignant touches of visual detail in the movie come as she scrapes burnt leavings from the bottom of a cooking vessel, and when her young lodgers eat every grain of rationed rice and each infinitesimally-small crumb of candy in front of them.

Isao Takahata
Isao Takahata. Source: Wikimedia Commons

Seita begins to go astray, though, both from his familial duties as a caregiver and his social duties as a Japanese citizen. He quarrels with the woman sheltering them and leaves the comparative comfort of her house. At 14 he is old enough to work, to “contribute to the war effort” as the woman commands him to do, but he opts not to seek employment at a munitions factory or other work detail. He never articulates his reasons, but it is not anti-war sentiment; Seita is as emotionally invested in the success of Japan’s imperial mission as are all of the adults he knows. Rather, he seems to be motivated by a vainglorious search for individual autonomy.

Seita takes Setsuko to an abandoned bomb shelter near a small lake outside of town. In his mind, and at first glance, this appears to be an idyllic retreat from the horrors of the war. They spend their first night there catching fireflies, delicate creatures that live a lifespan of mere days before winking out of existence. The symbolism is obvious, and it leads to the movie’s most haunting images.

It is not long, though, before it becomes clear that Seita is not equipped to handle life in exile. Setsuko develops a rash that grows increasingly painful, and she begins to exhibit the disturbing physical symptoms of malnourishment. Though Seita has some money in a bank account, he turns to stealing food, a serious and increasingly common crime during the American naval blockade of Japan. Perhaps unconsciously, in his orphanhood Seita becomes obsessed with living outside the strictures of society. The death of the four-year-old Setsuko is a consequence of that determination, and Seita himself dies homeless and starving in a dilapidated train station.

The movie is a cautionary tale about young people who recklessly buck social mores, but Seita is not portrayed as solely responsible for his and Setsuko’s deaths. In fact, he hardly seems to realize what he is doing or what is happening to them. He is a child, well-intentioned but confused and psychologically shattered. The movie reserves its moral censure for the adult characters. Director Takahata, who also wrote the screenplay, shows adults to be willfully apathetic about the children’s desperate plight. The woman who takes them in and takes their mother’s possessions as payment also drives them out with harsh criticism and justifies it as an act of patriotism. A doctor diagnoses Setsuko with malnutrition, but he refuses to give her medicine and sends the brother and sister away with no food. The worker who discovers Seita’s body in the movie’s flash-forward prologue seems unmoved, poking his and other corpses and searching their possessions before casting them aside. During the course of the movie only a police officer shows Seita some kindness when he declines to press charges for theft, but in Seita’s case it might have been a greater kindness to take him into custody. Takahata has said that Fireflies is not an anti-war film, as many of Miyazaki’s movies quite clearly are, but it is certainly a bleak portrayal of the material and social conditions that Japan faced at the end of its last great war.

Yokohama residents, 1945.
Yokohama residents, 1945. Source: Wikimedia Commons

Like its predecessor Hiroshima, Fireflies is tightly rooted in place and time, so why does it continue to resonate with global audiences? Hiroshima’s artistic influence, for example, on French filmmaker Alain Resnais, whose film Hiroshima, mon amour (1959) stars one of the lead actors from Sekigawa’s film, is thanks in part to the unique nature of the atomic bombings. That film’s comparative scarcity for many years also made it especially alluring for those who knew about it. Released at the other end of three decades of miraculous economic growth, Fireflies has always been readily available, and it has become something of a rite of passage for anime fans. Starting with an anonymous bombing, one of thousands of similar aerial attacks, it follows marginal lives that leave no historical record. That has increased its universal appeal. People born long after the war and on the opposite side of the globe can see themselves in Seita and Setsuko. They might have been them, if they’d been born at the wrong time and place. If all-ages Ghibli fantasies like Kiki’s Delivery Service (1989) and Spirited Away (2001) work because of universalist “hero’s journey” elements, Fireflies speaks to people because its arcs are so pathetically pedestrian. Its lives, like the titular insects, are brief and leave no trace on a world that moves quickly on.

As a work of art and a piece of historical fiction set during an especially difficult era, Grave of the Fireflies is a valuable achievement. Embracing Defeat, John Dower’s 1999 Pulitzer-winning nonfiction book about early postwar Japan, would make an excellent non-fiction pairing with Fireflies. The movie is also an unconventional herald of Studio Ghibli’s turn-of-the-millennium dominance in sophisticated animated entertainment. If the recent success of Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer is any indication, movies that touch on Japan’s unique wartime experience – whether through well-known stories like Hiroshima’s or obscurer ones like Fireflies’ – will continue to fascinate international audiences for a long time to come.

David A. Conrad received his Ph.D. from UT Austin in 2016 and published his first book, Akira Kurosawa and Modern Japan, in 2022. He is currently working on a second book, which will also focus on postwar Japan. David lived in Japan’s Miyagi prefecture for three years and can’t wait to go back to his home away from home.

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.

Archiving the Brazilian Dictatorship: Dr. Inez Stampa and the Memórias Reveladas Reference Center

Archiving the Brazilian Dictatorship: Dr. Inez Stampa and the Memórias Reveladas Reference Center

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

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

The 2022 Lozano Long Conference at UT Austin brought together historians from the United States and Latin America for conversations around the “archival turn” in history, a reflexive movement to examine how traces of the past in the form of documents and other artifacts arrive in the archives. In line with this theme, Dr. Inez Stampa of the Brazilian National Archives presented about her work with the Memórias Reveladas Reference Center, a critical node for an international network of non-governmental organizations and research institutions, including both historians and members of other disciplines, interested in interrogating the legacy of Brazil’s 1964-1985 military dictatorship. A social worker by training, Dr. Stampa understands her work with archives in relation to a broader process of transitional justice–a term referring to the judicial and political measures put in place “to redress legacies of massive human rights abuse” (International Center for Transitional Justice, 2021). This process is especially important in Brazil, as many continue to downplay or deny the atrocities committed under military rule.

The Revealed Memories database cooperatively gathers information on the archival collection related to political repression in the period from 1964-1985
The Revealed Memories database cooperatively gathers information on the archival collection related to political repression in the period from 1964-1985

In 1985, military rule in Brazil gave way to a civilian government, ending a period of censorship and political repression that restricted access to the archives and threatened dissenting voices in the Brazilian academy with imprisonment or exile. The documents from Brazilian national security organizations from the dictatorship remained protected under the custody of the Brazilian Intelligence Agency (ABIN). Dr. Stampa, who completed her undergraduate degree in sociology in 1988 at the Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro, described an absence of information about the history of the dictatorship in her early education, along with an atmosphere of fear surrounding discussions of the recent past in her university classes. This was despite growing agitation by victims of dictatorship-era human rights violations for justice. After the closure of the Brazilian Social Assistance League (LBA) in 1995, she pursued a position with the National Archives, cognizant of the importance of reckoning with the past for society writ large and of the silences surrounding the recent past. 

The 2002 electoral success of the Partido Trabalhista (the Workers Party) brought many victims of imprisonment and torture under the dictatorship to power, strengthening cries for accountability and the release of documents from the period of military rule. After nine months of legal and logistical meetings concerning the release of the previously classified material, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva ordered the transfer of documents from three now extinct national security organizations to the National Archives in 2005. Four years later, a presidential decree established the Centro de Referência das Lutas Políticas no Brasil (1964-1985) – Memórias Reveladas (The Reference Center for Political Struggles in Brazil (1964-1985) – Revealed Memories). This center was later directed by Dr. Stampa and her husband Dr. Vicente Rodrigues, with the goal of processing the documentation and facilitating public engagement with the material, housed at the National Archives.

The Brazilian National Archives.
The Brazilian National Archives. Source: Agência Brasil

With more than 18,000,000 documents from the National Information Service (SNI), the Brazilian National Security Council (CSN), and General Investigation Commission (CGI) and other agencies of the dictatorship, the collection offers a look at the nerve center of the 21-year authoritarian regime. However, Dr. Stampa and Dr. Rodrigues both noted in our conversation, documents from the branches of the military themselves as well as provincial organs of the regime still remain unaccounted for. Moreover, even the documents themselves include distortions of their own. For this reason, Dr. Stampa and her colleagues interviewed victims of the regime and their relatives to help fill in the gaps in the archival record. 

Both academic and popular discourse tends to construct the Brazilian military dictatorship as less violent and more restrained than the regimes in Argentina and Chile. Dr. Stampa traces this conception to the regime’s sophisticated organization and pervasive intelligence apparatus, in addition to the low number of casualties relative to Brazil’s neighbors in the Southern cone. On this latter point, she stressed that, “The people doing the calculations don’t include the more than 8000 indigenous victims of the regime, since their deaths occurred for ‘non-political’ reasons–they weren’t communists, they just happened to stand in the way of development.” Faced with a general lack of awareness of the human rights violations occurring under the dictatorship, the goals of the project go beyond simply storing, indexing, and digitizing material. The reference center provided documents to the National Truth Commission established in 2011, distributes a biennial prize for researchers making innovative uses of the archival material, and coordinates with a diverse network of 171 national and international partners to maximize the projects usefulness for transitional justice and engagement with Brazilian history. 

Members of the National Truth Commission delivers its final report to President Dilma Rousseff in 2014
The National Truth Commission delivers its final report to President Dilma Rousseff in 2014. Source: Isaac Amorim

Dr. Stampa’s work with the National Archives intersects with her work as a professor at the Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro, a position that connects her with both other academics and students interested in engaging with the archival collection at the Memorias Reveladas reference center. In her own research, she examines the condition of workers under the dictatorship, a complex issue with ongoing resonance today as neoliberal reforms oriented at privatization have undermined protections dating back to the Vargas era, from 1930-1945. Despite efforts under Worker’s Party governments in past decades to establish welfare programs like Bolsa Familia, the position of workers in the service industry and the informal sector have grown especially precarious. The instability of their employment renders things that more well-off Brazilians might take for granted, like healthcare and housing, inaccessible. Dr. Stampa understands the contemporary circumstances as continuing the policies created during the dictatorship, whose understanding of development saw maximizing profits for corporations and the wealthy as the key to national prosperity. 

My own research focuses on the transnational history of psychedelic plant science and its intersections with nationalist state-building projects in the late 20th Century, specifically in Brazil and Mexico. The Brazilian military dictatorship occurred in the context of a hemisphere-wide campaign of authoritarian repression and capitalist development projects spearheaded by the United States to prevent the spread of communism. Reactionary elements came to use the word “communism” as a catch-all term for seemingly deviant or non-conforming behavior more generally, particularly drug use. The CIA funded research into hallucinogens like lysergic acid amide, psilocybin, and atropine, all derived from plants found in Latin America, through the MKULTRA program, and numerous governments in the Western hemisphere used the substance as an aid to interrogation. While not knowing of any similar programs in Brazil, Dr. Stampa noted that the Brazilian government also invoked substance use by alleged subversives to discredit them, sometimes planting drugs in their homes or personal belongings to provide grounds for an arrest. The hypocrisy of their rhetoric on drugs manifests in the archival documentation collected by the reference center–one torturer with the federal police later admitted to conducting his interrogations, which sometimes involved violent sexual abuse, under the influence of cocaine.

The work of Memorias Reveladas today unfolds against the backdrop of a challenging political context. Since the 2015 impeachment of Dilma Rousseff (described by many of her supporters as a coup), subsequent administrations have reduced funding for the project. Moreover, current President Jair Bolsonaro, vehemently opposed to the creation of the National Truth Commission in 2011 and today vocally defends and praises the 1964-1985 dictatorship. With the national press focused on his disastrous handling of coronavirus, he overturned the 2005 decree authorizing the transfer of documents from ABIN to the National Archive on May 11, 2020. Buried in a superficially administrative revocation of more than 300 other decrees, Dr. Stampa and Dr. Rodrigues explained that the order had little impact on their work since ABIN already concluded the transfer of documents. However, they noted that, “If the agency uncovered any more documents that belong in the collection, we’d need another decree to receive them,” drastically limiting the project’s ability to receive and incorporate new documentary material. To learn more about the project, consider watching the recording of Dr. Stampa presentation at the LLILAS Benson Conference, which took place February 24-25, 2022.

Timothy Vilgiate grew up in Colorado and earned his BA and MA in History at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs. Currently in the 2nd Year of the History PhD program at UT Austin, he studies the intersections between hallucinogenic plant research, national development projects, and discourses about indigeneity in Brazil and Mexico. In his spare time, he enjoys astrology, hiking, and recording music. 

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. 

Preservation and Decay as Public History at the Moon-Randolph Homestead

Preservation and Decay as Public History at the Moon-Randolph Homestead

By Gwendolyn Lockman

Past the local dump and the interstate, and separated by foothills from the nearby historic neighborhoods of Missoula, Montana, the Moon-Randolph Homestead can be found, steeling itself against the modern world but not quite stuck in the past. It is an unusual historical site where the ecological and the human, and the past and the present melt into one another.

Figure 1: Entrance gate for the Moon Randolph Homestead Site, June 2019. Photo by Gwen Lockman.

Before U.S. westward expansion and federal homesteading efforts, Indigenous people traversed the North Hills of Missoula on the Trail to the Buffalo. They passed through nearby Hell Gate Canyon, named both for the cold, rough waters of the river and for the ambushes between tribes that occurred at the canyon. Once the U.S. seized the land in the late nineteenth century, homesteaders in the Missoula valley tried to raise subsistence crops and livestock there. These small parcels of land had little of the potential for profit that large, thousand-plus acre ranches enjoyed.

Ray and Luella Moon came to Missoula from Minnesota staking their homestead claim in 1889. They came to “prove up,” sell the land, and move on. Ray Moon sold his land to his relatives, George and Helen Moon, the same day he acquired the deed to the property in 1894. Then Ray and Luella left Missoula. George and Helen Moon had moved to Seattle by 1907. William and Emma Randolph came to Missoula from White Sulphur Springs, Montana to buy a farm so Emma could raise chickens and get William to settle down. The Randolphs tracked down the Moons in Seattle and wrote to them to purchase the land.[1]

William and Emma lived the rest of their lives in Missoula, alternating between the homestead, which they called the Randolph Ranch, and a home in town. They raised their three sons there and often let extended family stay with them for long stretches of time. William and Emma passed away in 1956 within months of each other. Their youngest son, Bill, continued living at ranch until his death in 1995. In 1992, Bill put a conservation easement on his land, which protected it from development after his death. The City of Missoula purchased the nearly 470 acres in 1997 and created the North Hills open space and trail system. Of those acres, 13 became the Moon-Randolph Homestead site. The North Missoula Community Development Corporation, a local nonprofit, created the Hill and Homestead Preservation Commission in 1998 to advocate for the Moon-Randolph Homestead. [2]

Figure 2: Panorama of the Moon Randolph Homestead Site from the Barn looking South and West, August 2019. Photo by Gwen Lockman.

In 1998, the city began a program to house caretakers on site to oversee the Moon-Randolph Homestead, raise livestock, host events, and interface with the public. The Department of Interior listed Moon-Randolph on the National Register of Historic Places in 2010. It is open to the public on Saturdays from 11 am to 5 pm, May through October, and is used by several groups during the week, including the Montana Conservation Corps, Opportunity Resource, Youth Homes, and Parks and Recreation Homestead Camps.[3] Dr. Caitlin DeSilvey, Associate Professor of cultural geography at the University of Exeter, was the first caretaker for the Moon-Randolph Homestead. She wrote her dissertation about her work in the late 1990s and early 2000s cataloging the Randolphs’ belongings.[4] DeSilvey’s scholarship contemplates the role of decay in heritage sites. She advocates for what she calls “encounter[s] with the debris of history,” allowing deterioration to proceed as a mode of historic interpretation.[5] Her approach to Moon-Randolph was to interfere as little as possible with anything on site. Though DeSilvey catalogued all of the artifacts and documents at Moon-Randolph, the decision to curate decay combined with a lack of dedicated city resources left much of what was on site to erode away or be eaten by the mice that inhabit the site.

Figure 3: Photos of decay at the Moon Randolph Homestead Site, June 2019. Photos by Gwen Lockman.

DeSilvey acknowledged in her dissertation the virtual impossibility that the city-managed property be allowed to totally decay. She suggested that, “Future management of the site will have to find a compromise between a celebration of entropic heritage and the conservation of material traces.”[6] As an intern for the City of Missoula Historic Preservation Office and Department of Parks and Recreation, the priority for my summer job at the Homestead was to help the preservation and interpretations methods for the site to evolve.

Figure 4: Photo of winch, still standing after original Mining Shed Collapse in 2014. Photo from Moon Randolph Homestead/City of Missoula.

My duties included the curation of the reconstructed Mining Shed. The Mining Shed had been entirely reconstructed, out of both new and salvaged materials, after collapsing in 2014, and exists in direct contradiction with the decay at the Homestead. The original Mining Shed stood from around 1900 until its collapse in 2014. It sheltered a hoist for the small-scale coal mining operation that William Randolph maintained on his land. Coal mining was not an especially profitable venture in Missoula, though at least one company, Hell Gate Coal, successfully mined the North Hills in the early 1900s. The naming of the Coal Mine Road, which led to the family ranches of the North Hills, Randolphs’ included, suggests Missoulians knew the area to bear coal. One must still use Coal Mine Road to get to Moon-Randolph and its neighbors, the city dump included.[7] Coal at the Homestead was likely found by George Moon, if not Ray Moon. Mining was a special interest for William Randolph, who was more of a dreamer and tinkerer than a farmer. The Randolphs’ quaintly named “Little Phoebe” mine produced low-grade coal, mostly traded with neighbors or used at home. They hired men to work in the mine, signaling either some profit or William’s financial dedication to his side projects. Robert, the middle Randolph son, wrote about the mine in his boyhood diary during the winter of 1916-1917. The Randolphs used coal from Little Phoebe until the 1930s, then let it fill with water to use to irrigate the pasture. In 1937, Robert wrote from Spokane, Washington to ask his father if he had given the coal’s use any further thought. William converted the building into a workshop but worked around the hoist, which still stands in its original place. Snow in the winter of 2014 caused the original building’s collapse. City and private crews completed the reconstruction in 2018. The new building is slightly larger than the original structure but is a close reproduction of the old shed.[8]

Figure 5: Photo of reconstructed Mining Shed, July 2019. Photo by Gwen Lockman.

My curation of the Mining Shed sought to more formally interpret the space while maintaining the Homestead as a place both lost to time and still writing its history. The floor space must be kept free so that the building can be used as a gathering space in inclement weather. It is the safest and largest covered space on site, which will be slow to change, because historic site classification restrictions prohibit new permanent foundation construction. The Mining Shed interpretation does not recreate a specific year of its lifespan but instead illustrates the several layers of its use over time and restoration. We arranged artifacts from mining and shop work. We integrated elements of the original building into the structure of the new building. This protects the intact remains of the old shed and makes the reconstruction apparent through comparison. I wrote limited interpretative signage and selected for display original documents from the Moon Cabin archive related to William Randolph’s mining ventures away from the Homestead.

One of my goals for the Mining Shed was to connect the Homestead to Montana’s economic history from statehood in 1889 through the post-war era. The Moon-Randolph history connects Missoula’s river, trade, agriculture, timber, mining, and railroad economy and history. William Randolph’s investments and work in Montana and beyond call attention to the several ways he sought to make money outside of agriculture. His ventures included work for Standard Brick Company in Missoula, management of the Sibley timber property in Lolo, Montana, and attempts at placer mining in the Nine Mile Valley east of Missoula. Presenting this history highlights piecemeal economic survival in Montana prior to the 1960s and the survival of the Randolphs’ story through material and documentary evidence.

Figure 6 Photo of “Little Phoebe” Mining Adit, June 2019. Photo by Gwen Lockman.

These changes marked a shift toward formal curation at Moon-Randolph. However, we sought to maintain “The Spirit of the Homestead,” a term defined in the Moon-Randolph Strategic Plan Update for 2015-2024. The Spirit of the Homestead aims to maintain Moon-Randolph as “a living place, where historic activities continue and new uses are established, and a place where natural processes of aging and ecological renewal can be appreciated.”[9] The idea of “living history” at the site is not produced as reenactment or period restoration. Rather, the Homestead is kept “alive.” Trees overtake metal refuse from rusty, repurposed farm equipment. There are mice, chipmunks, rabbits, songbirds, hawks, snakes, deer, and the occasional bear. Buildings collapse. Caretakers raise pigs and chickens, haul non-potable water for irrigation from a cistern, and tend to a 130-year-old orchard that still produces cider apples. There is almost no signage and very little written interpretation. The site is left to speak for itself, otherwise visitors must speak to a caretaker or volunteer to ask questions, enjoy a tour, or help with chores.

Figure 7: Photo of Summer 2019 curation in the Mining Shed, August 2019. Photo by Gwen Lockman.

And speak for itself it does: when I returned to the Homestead in May 2020 for a socially distanced excursion, the mining shed had new tenants. Magpies built their winter nests in the rafters of the reconstructed shed. Springtime bunnies darted in and out of the shed. Their curation enhanced ours. As much as there is curated decay at the site, there, too, is resplendent life. History and the present, decay, life, and curation, negotiate their coexistence in the North Hills of Missoula.

Figure 8: Photo of magpie nest in the Moon Randolph Homestead Mining Shed, May 2020. Photo by Caroline Stephens, Moon Randolph Homestead.

[1] DeSilvey, Butterflies and Railroad Ties; DeSilvey, Salvage Rites; Moon-Randolph Homestead, “History,” https://www.moonrandolphhomestead.org/history; Montana Association of Land Trusts, “About Conservation Easements,” http://www.montanalandtrusts.org/conservationeasements/; North Missoula Community Development Corporation, “Moon Randolph Homestead,” http://www.nmcdc.org/programs/moon-randolph-homestead/; United States Department of the Interior, National Parks Service, National Register of Historic Places Continuation Sheet, Moon-Randolph Ranch, March 1, 2010, https://www.nps.gov/nr/feature/presmonth/2010/Moon-RandolphRanch.pdf; “Moon-Randolph Strategic Plan Update: 2015-2024,” 2-5. 

[2] Caitlin DeSilvey, Butterflies and Railroad Ties: a History of a Montana Homestead, second edition (Missoula, MT: Hill and Homestead Preservation Commission, 2002); Caitlin DeSilvey, Salvage Rites: Making Memory on a Montana Homestead, doctoral dissertation, Open University (2003); Moon-Randolph Homestead, “History,” https://www.moonrandolphhomestead.org/history; City of Missoula, North Missoula Community Development Corporation, and Five Valleys Land Trust, “Moon-Randolph Strategic Plan Update: 2015-2024,” Final, Adopted by Missoula City Council May 4, 2015, 7, https://www.ci.missoula.mt.us/DocumentCenter/View/31846/MoonRandolphHomestead_StrategicPlan_2015?bidId=. 

[3] Moon-Randolph Homestead, “History,” https://www.moonrandolphhomestead.org/history; North Missoula Community Development Corporation, “Moon Randolph Homestead,” http://www.nmcdc.org/programs/moon-randolph-homestead/; United States Department of the Interior, National Parks Service, National Register of Historic Places Continuation Sheet, Moon-Randolph Ranch, March 1, 2010, https://www.nps.gov/nr/feature/presmonth/2010/Moon-RandolphRanch.pdf; Moon-Randolph Homestead, “Welcome,” https://www.moonrandolphhomestead.org/.

[4] University of Exeter, “Professor Caitlin DeSilvey,” College of Life and Environmental Sciences, Geography Department, http://geography.exeter.ac.uk/staff/index.php?web_id=Caitlin_Desilvey; DeSilvey, Salvage Rites; “Moon-Randolph Strategic Plan Update: 2015-2024,” 4-5.

[5] DeSilvey, Salvage Rites, 10.

[6] DeSilvey, Salvage Rites, 176.

[7] City of Missoula, Historic Preservation Office, Moon-Randolph Homestead Records; DeSilvey, Butterflies and Railroad Ties; DeSilvey, Salvage Rites; National Register of Historic Places Continuation Sheet, Moon-Randolph Ranch, March 1, 2010; J.T. Pardee, “Coal in the Tertiary Lake Beds of Southwestern Montana,” Contributions to Economic Geology, Part II (1911);

[8] DeSilvey, Butterflies and Railroad Ties; DeSilvey, Salvage Rites; National Register of Historic Places Continuation Sheet, Moon-Randolph Ranch, March 1, 2010; Robert Randolph, Diary, 1916-1917, Moon-Randolph Archive; City of Missoula, Historic Preservation Office, Moon-Randolph Homestead Records.

[9] “Moon-Randolph Strategic Plan Update: 2015-2024,” 7.

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Review of Fifth Sun: A New History of the Aztecs (2019) by Camila Townsend

2021 marks the five-hundred-year anniversary of the fall of Tenochtitlan. The Aztecs, the arrival of the Spanish to the New World, and the clash of cultures that happened in Tenochtitlan on 12 August 1521 (in the Western calendar) have long captured the world’s attention. It has given shape to how we think of adventure, discovery, history, and time. It also taught humanity a valuable yet painful lesson: if societies do not document their histories, their memory is bound to disappear. When faced with this truism after all the plagues and wars, a small but important number of Aztec intellectuals born in New Spain wrote down the history of their people as it had been told and lived by their elders. They did so in the Nahuatl language and, as Camila Townsend argues, with the explicit intention of conserving Aztec memory. These documents are called the “Nahuatl Annals,” and they are the main source from which the history of this book is told. Townsend’s use of the Nahuatl Annals laid the foundation for a new history of the Aztecs. 

The Nahuatl Annals tell the history of the Conquest and rely on Nahuatl sources for these narrations. Indigenous intellectuals, who had recorded their experiences with the intention of preserving Aztec history, wrote these sources. In doing so, they recollected Aztec memory by recording the voices of their elders and their communities both through narration and song and by placing them in dialogue with their new reality. Because these sources were written in Nahuatl, the intended audiences were Nahuatl speakers. 

A facsimile of the Aztec Codex Borbonicus, a compilation of monthly celebrations, painted with natural materials on amatl bark paper.
A facsimile of the Aztec Codex Borbonicus, a compilation of monthly celebrations, painted with natural materials on amatl bark paper. Source: Xuan Che

For Townsend, writing a new history of the Aztecs means two interrelated things. First, it means changing the analytical perspective from Spanish-language sources to Nahuatl-language documents. The latter, the author argues, have been neglected as non-reliable source materials, while the former has been exalted as the model for truth in this historical narrative. Furthermore, Nahuatl-language documents interpretation, relevance, and reliability has long been a subject of contestation. By using them to tell the story, Townsend makes an argument for their use as useful and reliable historical sources. She argues that they are valuable sources of information that contain coherent narratives of pre-conquest and conquest processes in Central Mesoamerica.

This is not an isolated scholarly insight, but rather is the result of a historiographical process of interpretation of Nahuatl-language sources that goes back to the mid-twentieth century. Fifth Sun engages fully with debates on how to understand the sources in “their own terms” alongside the arguments presented by the school of New Philology. Ultimately, the book functions as a call for historians of Mesoamerica to translate and transcribe their sources themselves. Second, Fifth Sun aims to broaden the readership of Aztec history without overwhelming the non-specialist public with historiographical and highly technical debates on how to approach the sources. Instead, the author leaves room for the interested reader to approach this metadiscourse in the footnotes or in the superb Appendix “How Scholars Study the Aztecs.” 

book cover for Fifth Sun: A New History of the Aztecs

Anyone who has read Townsend’s work knows that she is, above all, a very talented writer. Fortunately for all of us, Fifth Sun proves to be another beautifully written publication that keeps her readers engaged with the story from beginning to end. Each chapter begins with a small, fictionalized vignette that opens the way to the history encapsulated within each of the book’s ten chapters. As I heard her explain in a graduate zoom-course this semester, (one of the truly valuable things of zoom-graduate-school) these descriptions flow from her imagination but have a material basis in the repertoire of sources the author has read. Given that the objective of the book is to make public history socialize this strategy proves to be successful. Townsend’s style of writing history allows her to present the voices of the individuals she has encountered in the sources with a fuller narrative body, inviting readers to find and seek representation in the humanity of these historical characters. 

This invitation extends to the historically contingent experiences of women. This episode holds an important place in how western thought conceptualizes its historical time. However, due to the highly militaristic, and political approach to its study, the telling of this history has overwhelmingly been told through the actions and participation of masculine figures. In the mainstream writing of this history, “la Malinche” appears as the only female character of this episode only because her role was undeniable fundamental to the process of conquest. However, and as has been documented in relation to Hernán Cortes, attempts to erase her from the sources were made. “Some later said it was a woman who first saw them and shouted aloud, sounding the alarm” (117), Townsend writes when describing the escape of Cortés from Tenochtitlan the night of the 1st of July of 1520, a night remembered in history as la noche triste. When highlighted, small episodes, such as this one, reframe the readers appraisal of the social composition of Aztec society and of the active participation and involvement of women throughout the process of conquest. We, like the author, can now hear the voice of this anonymous Aztec woman living in Tenochtitlan bursting through the pages of history, a history that had erased her. 

Drawing of la Malinche, looking forward
Donna Marina (La Malinche). Source: “The Mastering of Mexico” by Kate Stephens (1916) New York: The MacMillan Company

Throughout Fifth Sun, the reader will encounter both small interventions like this and larger examples of participation of women’s participation. This emphasis on women’s roles gives a refreshing and most needed additional dimension of analysis to one of the most studied historical episodes in history. Furthermore, through these women and gender history perspectives, Townsend engages deeply with sexual and social relations and the problems that the change in paradigm brought on, such as the highly contested debates and confrontations around the issue of monogamy and polygamy. The reader will also find information on the history of homosexuality in Aztec culture—an overlooked (or ignored) subject.

Townsend explains that her book explores the tension between those who argue that the contemporary reader is trapped in their own particular anachronistic positionality and can never fully interact with the past, be it because of the language of the sources or because of the passing of time itself; and between those who argue that, in the end, and no matter our differences, we are all humans after all. If this is true, the argument goes, by reading the sources in their own language and relating to historical people in this way, some part of their persona can be reincarnated through the written word. The author aligns her research along the lines of the latter point. Thus, her ultimate goal is to vivify these characters and their histories from a different and as yet untold perspective that embellishes their existent multiple facets with new historical contour. Fifth Sun makes a big historical argument on the uses of sources and on the way to write history while remaining accessible to the general public. No doubt, Fifth Sun sets the bar very high, and its method should be replicated.  

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

Digital Archive Review – Más de 72

by Ashley Nelcy García, Department of Spanish and Portuguese

An earlier version of this review was published on halperta.com.

 What is a digital archive? I asked myself this question in the weeks before submitting this review. While digital archives are typically defined as a coherent set of digital objects that have been put online by a library or an official archival institution, Más de 72 challenges the notion of what we can identify as a digital collection of records.

Screenshot of Más de 72

Más de 72 is a digital project that collects primary sources pertaining to the massacre of 72 migrants from Central and South America and India. The documents and media shared on this site shed some light on the mass murder that occurred in San Fernando, Tamaulipas, Mexico in 2010, under the administration of Felipe Calderón. The collection was created by Periodistas de a Pie, an organization of active journalists that seeks to raise the quality of journalism in Mexico. The International Center for Journalists  (ICFJ), CONNECTAS, and journalists who were invited to participate in the project supported the development and completion of this project.

The collection is a valuable resource for individuals interested in Mexico’s recent history, memory, and human rights issues. Visitors can access primary sources such as official documents from Mexico and the United States, including some judicial records and declassified files. Testimonies from surviving family members recorded in video and audio by journalists, as well as photographs and maps are also available. Additionally, journalistic investigations and reports published by human rights entities provide context to users unfamiliar with the case.

via Más de 72

Más de 72’s primary strength is its presentation. The site contains six different tabs or capítulos (chapters) that provide different types of information. For instance, the sections titled “La Masacre” (The Massacre) and “Después de la Masacre” (After the Massacre) include official and visual documents associated the mass murder of the 72 migrants. Under these tabs, visitors can access documents like the press release from the Secretaría de Marina (Secretary of Marine) and the diplomatic cable that the U.S. Embassy sent to the Department of State. Online browsers with an interest in the role of official documents can also download more than 50 files under the tab titled “Transparencia” (Transparency). On the other hand, users interested in criminal records and procedures and migration studies can access a list of objects found in the location where the massacre occurred and the names of the victims under “Después de la Masacre.” In regard to organization, it is important to note that the names of the victims are listed under their country of citizenship and under the month and the year they were identified.

On the other hand, the tabs titled “Las Víctimas” (The Victims), “Los Culpables” (The Culprits), and “Sobre San Fernando” (About San Fernando)  provide more detailed information regarding people and location. These sections can benefit visitors interested in oral history, memory, gender studies, and digital cartography. Under “Las Víctmas”, users can listen to four testimonies provided by victims’ surviving family members. “Los Culpables” has a list of the men and women involved in the mass murder; this section includes the names, the photos, the list of crimes they committed, and external links that provide additional information. The section titled “San Fernando” includes a digital map from Time Mapper that helps users identify the mass graves and the people that have been disappeared in Tamaulipas by geographic location.

Overall, the site benefits users who cannot visit Mexico or Tamaulipas. Aside from scholars, people who can potentially benefit from this repository include but are not limited to: family members of migrants and people who have been disappeared, residents from the state of Tamaulipas, people with relatives in the northern part of the Mexico, journalists, lawyers, and activists. Although the project is not affiliated with libraries, governmental, or academic institutions, Periodistas de Pie is open to working with community members. As stated in “Creditos” (Credits), users can share documents or materials by sending an email to the listed email address. In addition, the organization invites visitors to collaborate–either with skills or donations–to continue developing the site.

The website has some technical problems. It would be difficult for someone who is unable to read Spanish to understand the majority of the information included on the platform. Additionally, some links, hyperlinks, and images need to be updated. More descriptive metadata would also benefit the project and there is a need to assist with the second part of the collection titled, “Segunda Entrega: Fosas de San Fernando” (Second Delivery: San Fernando’s graves).  While these are minor setbacks, they also provide an opportunity for archivists, scholars, and web developers to get involved with the project.

Capítulo 5: Sobre San Fernando (Chapter 5: About San Fernando) via Más de 72

Even though Más de 72 is not described as a “digital archive” by the journalists at Periodistas de Pie, this platform serves as a repository of digitized primary documents associated with an historical event. In this regard, it is important to consider how the digital humanities field can be co-opted by elites to control historically politicized spaces. We need to be thinking about what is at stake when the term “archive” is used to control information. The politics of archiving is especially important where journalists–the authors of many of the documents in Mas de 72–find themselves in a violent climate and are rarely protected by institutions of power.


Read More:
Más de 72

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This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War by Drew Gilpin Faust (2008)

In Eric Remarque’s 1921 novel, The Road Back, a group of veterans (now enrolled as students at a local university in Germany) quietly seethe at the back of a classroom while their professor eulogizes their fallen comrades. The professor’s platitudes cause them to wince, but his romanticism of death makes them boil over in angry laughter. The professor speaks about how the fallen have entered a “long sleep beneath the green grasses.” After the laughter subsides, the veteran Westerholt spits out a tirade: “in the mud of shell holes they are lying, knocked rotten, ripped in pieces, gone down into the bog—Green grasses! … Would you like to know how young Hoyer died? All day long he lay out on the wire screaming, and his guts hanging out of this belly like macaroni … now you go and tell his mother how he died.” The scene dramatically underlines the painful tension that arises in a culture between realistic and romantic memory after a dreadful war.

Two unidentified Civil War soldiers in Union uniforms via Library of Congress

Like Remarque’s The Road Back, Faust’s This Republic of Suffering is a cartography of sorts—mapping how people respond to trauma, defeat, and above all mass death. Faust’s originality is grounded in a rudimentary social fact—that during the civil war, a lot of people died (over 620,000) and those who lived had to deal with it. In a similar-sized conflict today, that would mean about 7 million Americans or 2 percent of the population perishing. For Faust, the sheer magnitude of this number meant that “the United States embarked on a new relationship with death.”

Civil War Militia via Library of Congress

The elegance of Faust’s concept is illustrated by her simple chapter titles: Naming, Numbering, Burying, Accounting. Her point here is that to respond to death is to work. It takes time, thought, effort, and energy to name, number, bury, and account for the dead. But this work can also be figurative as alluded to in chapters titled Realizing, Believing and Doubting, Surviving:  “the bereaved struggle to separate themselves from the dead … [they] must work to understand and explain unfathomable loss.” Like Remarque’s soldiers, civil war Americans struggled to come to terms with the reality of death—not just its sheer volume, but also its individual reality. In “Dying” Faust outlines the established concept of the “good death” in antebellum American culture, which she claims was prevalent across classes and regions. The “good death” was peaceful and relatively painless, with its resolute subject at home, full of religious faith and surrounded by their family. The Civil War exploded such notions, and left society reeling. Soldiers might die in tremendous pain, far from home amidst the chaos of combat. Corpses were often left strewn across battlefields or hastily buried. Exploding shells might mean there was little left of a person to bury.

Battle of Antietam via DPLA

In wake of the death of the “good death,” Faust captures a culture in transition, forced to innovate at the level of the individual, the market, and the institution. At the individual level, Faust perceives a challenge to traditional religious belief. Whether evangelical or traditional in their Christian affiliations, most Americans believed in an afterlife that assumed the restoration of their body in a heavenly realm, contingent upon a mature profession of faith in the present life. But how was one’s body to be resurrected if it were blown to bits? Were teenager soldiers as accountable for their beliefs as their elders? Thus, “the traditional notion that corporeal resurrection and restoration would accompany the Day of Judgment seemed increasingly implausible to many Americans who had seen the maiming and disfigurement inflicted by this war.”

Republic of Suffering isn’t a religious history, but it is certainly a book about the self. What most Americans came to believe about the self was based not on “scripture and science but on distress and desire.” Works such as Elizabeth Phelp’s The Gates Ajar (only Uncle Tom’s Cabin sold more books in the 19th century) catered to death as effectively as did the churches.  In this sense, Faust’s book has as much to say to scholars of secularization as it does to cultural historians. Americans yearned for a more benevolent God—one who respected personhood beyond the grave, and one who operated a liberal gate policy—so they invented one.  Other needs arose as well. Embalmers and morticians, burial scouts and gravediggers, coffin makers, private detectives, and journalists all found work during the Civil War. They were entrepreneurs in an economy of death, an ontological marketplace where a new concept of the self was born—a self that (with the help of God and the market) would survive the transition from life to afterlife.

In addition to the market, government too had to respond to the new reality of mass death. There was the basic need for national cemeteries and provisions for the burial of unknown soldiers. However, Faust sees beyond such responses to detect an acceleration of nation-building: “execution of these newly recognized responsibilities would prove an important vehicle for the expansion of federal power that characterized the transformed postwar nation.” The significance of the sacrifices of the enlisted pivoted from being individual, local, or religious to being national.

Map of Antietam National Cemetery at Sharpsburg, Maryland (1867) via Library of Congress

Or was this simply the case on the Union side? Faust tends to flatten the experiences of northern and southerners into the category of “Americans.” However, the South lost around 18% of its fighting-age men, compared to 6% in the North. Surely this made a difference, but Faust chooses not the broaden her inquiry in this direction. Furthermore, for all the book’s originality, it lacks historiographical context. In particular, Faust chooses not to engage directly with the scholarship on trauma.  Perhaps doing so would have disrupted a book that brings letters, memoirs, photographs, and diaries to life. On the other hand, by relying mostly upon written sources, Faust limits herself to the most articulate people of the past. How might we better understand the emotional life of those who left little historical trace, those like Remarque’s Westerholt who responded with angry laughter?  Nevertheless, This Republic of Suffering provides a moving snapshot of Americans responding to calamity. Using death as a lens furnishes Faust with an original and effective framework for understanding the more national, more secular, and more nostalgic America that arose during the Gilded Age. It reasserts the Civil War as a truly transformative event in American history, that should be seen not only as the midwife of modern America but also as a truly, chillingly modern conflict.


More from Ben Wright:
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Episode 60: Texas and the American Revolution

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Harper’s Weekly’s Portrayal of the Civil War: The New Archive (No. 11)

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