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The past is never dead. It's not even past

Not Even Past

Sky Pilot, How High Can You Fly

Sky Pilot, How High Can You Fly

by Nathan Stone 

I started going to camp in 1968. We were still just children, but we already had Vietnam to think about. The evening news was a body count. At camp, we didn’t see the news, but we listened to Eric Burdon and the Animals’  Sky Pilot while doing our beadwork with Father Pekarski.

Pekarski looked like Grandpa from The Munsters. He was bald with a scowl and a growl, wearing shorts and an official camp tee shirt over his pot belly. The local legend was that at night, before going out to do his vampire thing, he would come in and mix up your beads so that the red ones were in the blue box, and the black ones were in the white box. Then, he would twist the thread on your bead loom a hundred and twenty times so that it would be impossible to work with the next day. And laugh. In fact, he was as nice a guy as you could ever want to know.

The Munsters
The Munsters 

Back then, bead-craft might have seemed like a sort of “feminine” thing to be doing at a boys’ camp. We considered it an Indian thing to do. Of course, we didn’t know squat about real Native Americans, but for little boys in the sixties, “the Indians” were the quintessential embodiment of manly courage, righteous rebellion, and strength, so we wanted to be like them in every way. Our camp counselors thought bead-craft was a good way to get rowdy boys to sit still in the shade for thirty-five minutes on a July afternoon in the Hill Country. We accepted. Besides, George did bead-craft with us, and George was cool.

George was one of our counselors. He was almost eligible for the draft and he had a girlfriend. That made him a serious hero for little boys. While he worked, he would comment on the war. Or get quiet and turn the radio up when KTSA played the Sky Pilot.

Soon there’ll be blood, and many will die
Mothers and fathers back home they will cry.

The Sky Pilot was seven and a half minutes, two sides of a 45-rpm single, complete with war noises and patriotic bagpipes, surreptitiously recorded at a solemn military funeral.

Eric Burdon had done his homework. But his song was from another time and another war. His sky pilot was Icarus in a biplane, you’ll never, ever, ever reach the sky. But for us, it was all about Vietnam. It was becoming impossible to rescue gallantry and honor from that quagmire. The Sky Pilot, and George’s reverence for it, had taught us the unthinkable: to question patriotism, religion, and long, hot afternoons hanging with the boys at the rifle range. Trying to keep a steady hand. Trying desperately to earn all the coveted NRA marksmanship medals so that we, too, could become soldiers, one day. But, was that even a good thing, anymore?

You’re soldiers of God, you must understand
The fate of your country is in your young hands

Eric Burdon was on the edge. He had a bad boy image. Not the shirtless mayhem of the ‘80’s; not the wanton outpouring of staged violence that turned the crowd comfortably numb. Eric still wore the coat and tie that you would expect to see on any of his polite contemporaries, but, on him, they looked rough,   as if it were the first time he had ever gotten dressed up. Eric was  on the edge, but not over the edge. Not numbed or comfortable, we were possessed, spellbound, and impassioned.

Eric Burdon & the Animals in 1967. Foreground: Eric Burdon Background (L–R): Danny McCulloch, John Weider (in striped shirt), Vic Briggs and Barry Jenkins
Eric Burdon & the Animals in 1967. Foreground: Eric Burdon Background (L–R): Danny McCulloch, John Weider (in striped shirt), Vic Briggs and Barry Jenkins (via Wikimedia)

We learned everything we needed to know on KTSA. When we were ten, it made us wonder. When we turned thirteen, it made our hands tremble and our hearts pound. That was AM radio, back when broadcast meant broad. You could hear KTSA loud and clear anywhere in South Texas, especially, after dark.  The songs on the radio called on us to step up.

Our consciousness of what a real man was, and what he ought to think, came from our counselors, Kurt and George, that first summer when we were only ten. Kurt was seventeen and already a cancer survivor. He had lost one to the silent beast, but he had more balls than all of us put together. George was only sixteen, but already dark and wise. He would sweat through the chest and pits of his tee-shirt pretty early in the day. We thought that was cool. He had lots of black wavy hair, a wisp of a beard and a deep gaze. To us, Kurt and George were titans.

They were just kids, really, not even old enough to vote but almost old enough to line up at boot camp and die in Vietnam. The draft was on everyone’s mind. Vietnam was the first-ever televised war. We could see bodies like our own, bodies like we wanted ours to be, mangled for reasons we couldn’t understand. We even saw the massacre at My Lai, and we learned to doubt that Americans were always the good guys.

US Army helicopters pour machine-gun fire into the tree line to cover the advance of ground troops
US Army helicopters pour machine-gun fire into the tree line to cover the advance of ground troops (via BBC)

My first summer at camp, Kurt and George were absolutely in charge of us for two whole weeks. There was no adult interference and so, no reason to distrust or suspect. When you were ten, adults were the enemy. They always had a hidden agenda, something they wanted and ways to get it. Adults could blackmail you. They would stop at nothing to gain absolute control of little boys’ thoughts and impulses. And, they swore that what they wanted was good for you.

For fourteen days that summer, we were free. Ours was an ideal world, even if it was only temporary. The influence that Kurt and George had on who we were and who we wanted to be was virtually unlimited. We worshipped them. We would have gone anywhere with them. We would have done anything to please them. We would have given everything to wear what they wore, to smell how they smelled, to know all the mysterious things they knew, and to move through the world as they did, fearless, tall and strong.

One afternoon at rest period, Kurt and George came into the bunkhouse and asked for silence. That was unusual. We were all in our underwear and we listened carefully. Rest period was on your bunk in your underwear. You didn’t have to sleep but you had to be quiet and horizontal. That was when we devoured our DC Comics and our Mad Magazines. Fruit of the Loom was the appropriate attire because it kept you inside, it cooled you down and, most importantly, it gave your favorite clothes an hour to air out.

Sky Pilot cover shows two planes in the air
Sky Pilot cover (via Wikimedia)

Kurt had found a nearly perfect flint spearhead at an Indian mound back in the hills, probably a Comanche artifact. We were in their hunting grounds, their sacred space, where they talked to eagles and buried their ancestors. Kurt’s spearhead was in his sock drawer, by his bunk, which was next to mine. We all knew about it, we all knew where he kept it and we were all proud of it. It was our spearhead. Kurt and George came to tell us that the spearhead had been stolen, and they knew who had done it. They were going to leave us alone during rest period that day, to give the boy who had stolen it a chance to put it back. If he did, there would be no questions asked. If he didn’t, he would be sent home in disgrace.

He did. It was (…). I saw him do it. My bunk was right there. He got up, supposedly to go to the bathroom, but he made a quick, unmistakable stop at Kurt’s sock drawer. It’s hard to hide a spearhead on your person when all you have on is your tidy whities, but it was really the stop that gave him away.

The repentant thief was careful, though, and no one saw him but me. Why he had taken it, we never knew. Insecure, I guess. Afraid that, unless he stole it, he would never acquire the power, the unspoken secret energy that could only be yours if you waited for it, the dynamism would most certainly elude you if you tried to take it by force instead of earning it.

No questions were asked. Kurt and George had practiced compassion to teach instead of punish. We did wonder whether they really knew who it was, or if their bet had been a gamble. We think they did know. When they explained the conditions of our impending ordeal, they were too calm to have been bluffing. When it was over, we would have followed them into battle. We would have followed them onto the streets to protest the war.

Vietnam was the inescapable quandary constantly ringing in our ears. We heard about it on KTSA. Dylan told us the answer was blowing in the wind. Peter, Paul and Mary railed against the cruel war raging; and Johnny having to fight. They taught us how to sing and why. They taught us to demand, with childlike innocence, where had all the flowers gone.

In the 60’s, not all of it was committed protest music. There was a lot of romantic pop, too, but it all came to smell of the war. There were songs about young couples that missed each other, songs that made every GI remember the girl he had left behind. Or, the girl he thought had left him behind. Ruby, are you contemplating going out somewhere? That was the anxiety. If a guy wasn’t around, she would find someone else. If he came home crippled, she might still love him as a friend, but she wouldn’t want him. Yes, it’s true that I’m not the man I used to be. Oh, Ruby, I still need some company. There was more than one way to get your manhood blown off.

Veterans protest and carry a sign that reads "We won't fight another rich man's war"
Veterans Protest (via Zinn Education Project)

The GI anthem, though, was the one written by 16-year-old Michael Brown of The Left Banke. It reached number 5 on the charts in ‘66. Just walk away, Renée; You won’t see me follow you back home. They called it Baroque rock, because of the orchestral arrangement and the long, lonely flute solo. The empty sidewalks on my block are not the same; You’re not to blame. Michael and the boys had a sultry mumbling way about them that gave flesh to the burning a priori adolescent male resentment for adult manipulation, the secret decisions made in smoky rooms that made old men rich and young men die. That was a common feeling back in ‘68. It was generational. We were angry about Indochina. It was killing us.


More by Nathan Stone:
Romero
José and His Brothers
Three-year-olds on the world stage

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15 Minute History | Ep 119: Beatlemania and the 55th Anniversary of the First Beatles Tour to the US
“London is Drowning and I, I Live by the River”: The Clash’s London Calling at 40
Great Books on Early Twentieth-Century Popular Music
Legacies of the Vietnam War


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

The Public Archive: Indian Revolt of 1857

Millions of tweets and millions of state documents. Intimate oral histories and international radio addresses. Ancient pottery and yesterday’s memes. Historians have access to this immense store of online material for doing research, but what else can we do with it? In Spring 2018, graduate students in the Public and Digital History Seminar at UT Austin experimented with ways to make interesting archival materials available and useful to the public; to anyone with access to a computer. Over the Summer, Not Even Past will feature each of these individual projects.

Also known as “Sepoy Mutiny,” the Indian Rebellion of 1857 represented a major, although unsuccessful, challenge to British colonialism. Anuj Kaushal’s digital project, titled “Indian Revolt of 1857”, considers the question of Indian nationalism during the rebellion and British response through blogs, lesson plans, and digitized issues of Illustrated London Times and New York Daily Tribune.

More on Kaushal’s project and The Public Archive here

You may also like:
On Women and Nation in India by Indrani Chatterjee
Sundar Vadlamudi reviews Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India by Gauri Viswanathan (1989)
Isabel Huacuja discusses A Passage to India by E.M. Forster (1924)

 

Yugoslavia in the Shadow of War: Veterans and the Limits of State Building, 1903-1945 by John Paul Newman (2015)

By Charalampos Minasidis

The end of the First World War in Europe signified the dissolution of the old empires, the creation of new states, and the triumph of liberal democracy and the parliamentary system. However, this triumph lasted only around a decade. By the end of 1920s and early 1930s, authoritarianism and dictatorship had replaced both liberalism and parliamentarism.

John Paul Newman uses the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes as a case study to discuss the failed liberal experiments in the successor states of interwar Eastern Europe. The Kingdom was found in 1918 under King Peter, and after 1921 under his son Alexander, of the Serbian Karadjordjević dynasty. Although the new state was a result of the panslavist dream of unifying all the South Slavs of the Western Balkans, its name proved to be a very unfortunate idea, as it did not signal the replacement of local nationalisms with a new national identity.

Newman constructs his study around the various veteran associations, their mobilizations and their remembrance and commemorations. Through documents, newspapers, and memoirs, Newman analyzes the political use of remembrance and Serbian, Croatian, and Slovene veterans’ remobilization after the war. For Newman, the veterans’ reluctance to leave the war experience behind led to the defeat of liberalism by authoritarianism. Belgrade’s official policy of “liberation and unification” viewed the period between 1912 and 1918 as a whole and praised the Serbian veterans and their allies that fought during the First Balkan War (1912-1913) against the Ottoman Empire, the Second Balkan War (1913) against their former ally, Bulgaria, and the First World War (1914-1918) against Austria-Hungary, Germany and Bulgaria. The Balkan Wars led Serbia to annex parts of the ex-Ottoman territories of Kosovo and Macedonia, while the Great War allowed Serbia to be unified with Montenegro and the ex-Austro-Hungarian territories of Bosnia, Herzegovina, Croatia, Dalmatia, Slovenia and Vojvodina. According to the official policy, it was the acts of Serbia and its army alone that liberated the South Slavs of the Western Balkans. The “liberation and unification” policy excluded the rest of the South Slavs from its remembrance and commemorations. They were viewed as just passively waiting for their Serbian liberators.

Alexander I of Yugoslavia and Maria of Yugoslavia in 1933 (via Wikimedia)

This Serbian “culture of victory” alienated all those South Slavs who as subjects of Austria-Hungary had fought under its army and had instead cultivated a “culture of defeat.” Such contradictions were even stronger for those who participated in the Austro-Hungarian campaigns against Serbia or those Slovenes, who fought against Italy, an Entente and Serbian ally, and its expansive designs into the Slovenian territories of Austria-Hungary. Both opposing cultures negated and undermined the idea behind a unified South Slav state in the Western Balkans.

Newman analyzes successfully how these conflicting cultures undermined the new state and nation building. The officers who served in the Austro-Hungarian Army were reluctant to join the new armed forces, where the official policy excluded them from the system of promotions. On the other hand, Serbian officers neither wanted their defeated ex-enemies to join them nor the official remembrance of the war to be abandoned, as it offered them pride and promotions. Similarly, new Kingdom’s welfare programs and land reform did not satisfy the veterans and ex-members of the Austro-Hungarian Army faced constant discrimination.

The Serbian Army enters Zagreb, 1918 (via Wikipedia)

As Newman demonstrates, the inability to improve their economic well-being quickly disillusioned Serbian, and other, veterans with the new state as well. Even more, Serbian veterans blamed parliamentarianism for the government’s failure to provide for them and viewed it as slow, corrupted, and ready to betray their legacy. Many Serbian and Croatian veterans also started gravitating towards fascism and right-wing revisionism. Nevertheless, cases of cooperation between ex-enemies were not rare. People like Captain Lujo Lovrić, a panslavist Croat volunteer in the Serbian army, who became blind during the war, were used by the regime to propagandize South Slav union and its social policies to the disabled veterans, but those policies were not enough.

Newman overall succeeds in explaining a failed nation-building project through a group of people who were mobilized and politicized during the Great War and could not accept the new state of affairs. Newman’s thorough analysis clarifies the catastrophic impact of divisive cultural and social policies in a divided society. As the crisis deepened King Alexander presented to the Serbian veterans the institution of monarchy as the Kingdom’s unifying symbol. In this way he secured their support, which proved crucial for the establishment of his dictatorship in 1929 and constituted his effort towards a new nation and state building project, Yugoslavia.

Also by Charalampos Minasidis on Not Even Past:

Review of The Anatomy of Fascism by Robert O. Paxton

You may also like:

Book recommendations compiled for the centenary of the outbreak of WWI
Restless Youth: The CIA, Socialist Humanism, and Yugoslavia’s 1968 Student Protests by Aleksej Demjanski
Searching for Armenian Children in Turkey by Christopher Rose

Mapping the Country of Regions: The Chorographic Commission of Nineteenth-Century Colombia, by Nancy P. Appelbaum (2016)

By Madeleine Olson

What occurs when elite driven narratives about national identity dramatically different differ from the realities people experienced? During the nineteenth century throughout Latin America, when national boundaries were just beginning to become coherent, the upper echelons of society constructed tales about their nations that often vastly differed from lived experiences.

Between 1850 and 1859, the Chorographic Commission traveled the territory of present day Colombia in an attempt to map the land and the people who lived there, using chorography, or detailed representations of a particular region. Sponsored by the government of New Granada (an older name for Colombia), the commission produced a wealth of maps, texts, illustrations, as well as travel journals and diaries, in order to construct the image of a unified nation. Implicit in the commission’s initial mandate was the assumption that it would justify the existing administrative order by making that order appear natural.

The visual culture it produced, however, depicted a nation that was far from cohesive, with regional individuality and diversity.  Instead of portraying a unified nation, the commission presented the country as fragmented into different, and often opposing regions, inhabited by racially and culturally distinct races, that reinforced assumptions of Andean and white mestizo superiority. In this new book, Nancy Appelbaum expands our understanding of this central paradox, demonstrating that the commission’s materials reveal some of the ways that Colombian elites grappled with the challenges posed by varied topographies and diverse inhabitants.

The leaders of the Chorographic Commission included both foreign members and others who were born and bred in New Granada. Two of the key figures on the commission, whose writings play an important role throughout the book, were Agustín Codazzi and Manuel Ancízar. Born in Italy’s papal states and a Napoleonic war veteran, Codazzi was in fact first contracted to map the Venezuelan provinces, which had seceded from Gran Colombia, in 1830. The secession precipitated Gran Colombia’s dissolution into Venezuela, Ecuador, and New Granada. Manuel Ancízar, a Colombian lawyer, writer, and journalist, joined Codazzi on the Commission in 1850.

Gran Colombia and modern countries (via Wikimedia Commons).

Using personal correspondence between Codazzi and Ancízar, Appelbaum argues that although the creation of the commission reflected nationalist aspirations of the government, it was fundamentally shaped through its leaders’ own exposure to foreign culture. The geographic writings of Prussian Alexander von Humboldt, as well as Italian Adriano Balbi, strongly influenced Codazzi’s and Ancízar’s initial overviews, as they “draped themselves in the ‘mantle of Humboldtianism’ to emphasize their own scientific legitimacy.” Inspired by Humboldt, Codazzi divided the terrain of New Granada according to the differing altitudes, winds, and vegetables that he encountered. The ideological influence of Humboldt, together with Balbi’s schematic list methodology, helped the Commission create a novel and distinct approach to chorography that was more affordable than the fashionable trigonometric survey.

The detailed accounts produced by Codazzi and Ancízar on the commission’s initial expeditions to the highland region of Antioquia and the Pacific lowland, comprised not only field reports, but also included detailed watercolors created by the commission’s first illustrators in order to depict the populations they encountered.  Through comparing the perceptions noted in the field reports with the pictorial representations, the tension comes out between the inclination to show these regions as homogenous when the commission clearly experienced great heterogeneity of the people and customs.

William Price, Typical Inhabitants of the Province of Medellín (via World Digital Library).

This visual culture reflected a literary and artistic current in nineteenth-century Latin America called costumbrismo, or using descriptive prose and dialogue to verbally paint a local scene,  emphasizing the customs and particularities of that locale. Within these works, tipos “types” that organized the population into component parts defined by race, occupation, and place, were created to provide both a visual and discursive way to manage the heterogeneity that the commission encountered. In William Price’s Tipos de Medellin, the commission’s artists displayed idealized images of people one would encounter when visiting these places. These images of the racial types that the commission produced updated the eighteenth-century genre of casta paintings for the republican era.

As the commission moved into the tropical lowlands and the eastern plains, Appelbaum further elaborates how the illustrations were largely aimed at an external audience in order to attract immigrants and economic investment to the region. The commission’s efforts were not meant to simply represent the landscape, they were also to transform it in the service of economic advancement. Codazzi believed that these areas, rich in agriculture and livestock, could support many more people than their sparse, midcentury population.  Elites defined the tropics, for instance, as being filled with disease, poverty, and backwardness, making it a desirable region for colonization and improved methods of production. The commission took on an ethnographic dimension, as studying the population became an integral part in determining the economic capabilities of the land. Reports, maps, and paintings that Codazzi, Ancízar, and others, produced provided abundant information aimed to facilitate the conquest of the regions they mapped and studied.

Manuel María Paz, Provincia del Chocó: Aspecto esterior de las casas de Nóvita (via World Digital Library).

Applebaum goes on to discuss the methods that mid-nineteenth-century intellectuals living in the highlands around Bogotá employed to rationalize their claim over the local populations. By emphasizing the glorious origins and civilization of the Andean region around Bogotá, at the expense of lower “savage” climates, intellectuals reinforced Bogotá’s claim over this topographically disparate territory. Codazzi projected national history into the ancient past by weaving geology, archeology, and history together and referencing the past as “history” rather than prehistory. They placed themselves, not the local indigenous populations, who ultimately were the Commission’s guides, at the top of the intellectual scale to read the cataclysmic past.

Carmelo Fernández, Piedra grabada de Gámesa. Provincia de Tundama (via World Digital Library).

After Codazzi died in 1859, elites left behind tried to make sense of his project and battled each other over meanings and representations of the nation. Although members of the commission had high hopes for the mass reproduction and circulation of the materials they produced, that did not occur.  Chorography and the work of the Chorographic Commission died with Codazzi, supplanted later in the nineteenth century by newer forms of mapping which are still common today, such as topography.

Although the work that the Chorographic Commission created between 1850 and 1859 was not as widely received as hoped, the spatialized and racialized regional hierarchy inherent in its visual materials would be reproduced and refined within Colombian scholarly and popular discourse. By no means the originator of this fragmented discourse, the Commission’s cartographic project formed the basis for most maps of Colombia into the early twentieth century.

Gracefully written, integrating over thirty images and maps, Mapping the Country of Regions ­­­offers a fascinating window into both the visual culture produced during the nineteenth century in Colombia, and the ways that territories, boundaries, and state-lines are constructed. Appelbaum’s contextualization of her source base that she makes explicit within her analysis heightens her claims about the use of geographic, ethnographic, and visual methods to secure territory.  This theme of racialization of geographic hierarchy is not solely limited to Colombia, as ideas about how race and region have historically informed each other throughout Latin America. The blending of analysis with visual representation enables this book to be of use for those interested in not only Latin American nation-state building, but this  methodology of combining visual and textual analysis would be of value for anyone incorporating visual culture into their own work.

Nancy P. Appelbaum, Mapping the Country of Regions: The Chorographic Commission of Nineteenth-Century Colombia (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2016).


Also by Madeleine Olson on Not Even Past:
A Texas Historian’s Perspective on Mexican State Anticlericalism.

You may also like:
Antonio de Ulloa’s Relación Histórica del Viage a la America Meridional, by Haley Schroer.
Casta Paintings, by Susan Deans-Smith.

 

My Alternative PhD in History

By Ben Weiss

A recent piece in The Economist claims that, “One thing many PhD students have in common is dissatisfaction. Seven-day weeks, ten-hour days, low pay and uncertain prospects are widespread. You know you are a graduate student, goes one quip, when your office is better decorated than your home and you have a favourite flavour of instant noodle.”

startup-photos

(via Pexels)

When I was considering enrolling in the University of Texas History PhD program, I heard similar sentiments from peers and discovered many analogous articles. Despite the deluge of criticism I found myself wading through during application season, stubbornness and ambition persevered, and I entered the program in August of 2013. I decided to get a PhD in History as training for pursuing a career in government policy making. Many people making policy decisions lack significant contextual knowledge about their fields, which has a negative impact on overall policy effectiveness. Nearly three and a half years later and having experienced many of the drawbacks associated with grad school, I am still content with my decision.

During my undergraduate years at UT, I took a course with the highly regarded historian Tony Hopkins. Though I often find myself remembering his stirring lectures and exceptional oration skills, one moment in the course especially resonated with my ambitions. One day, he mournfully stated that the last of the generation of economists who were well versed in history recently retired or passed away. His words deeply echoed my feelings about the profound lack of historical and cultural understanding among the vast majority of contemporary policymakers.

A._G._Hopkins,_Cambridge_2013.jpeg

The distinguished economic historian A.G. “Tony” Hopkins taught at UT from 2002-2013 (via Wikimedia Commons).

I work on the history of sexual health politics during the colonial period in southern Africa with the goal of doing policy work for American HIV/AIDS relief efforts in the same areas. Historically, western medicine frequently has produced traumatic and violent experiences in African societies, where perspectives on sexual health and sexual education norms differ from western views and health relief campaigns have a history of becoming politicized within neo-colonial and nationalist power struggles, making American foreign health policy and its reception in Africa problematic. Many policymakers lack the historical background necessary to develop effective policy. For all the discourse on indigenous partnership that occurs as a part of American relief efforts in my focus regions, partnership occurs within the cultural and ideological framework of American public policy. For example, policymakers do not legitimately account for indigenous healing practices within their policy frameworks – either in discourse or practice – because the vast majority of policymakers fail to recognize just how much sociocultural value local medical practices hold while simultaneously overlooking the ways in which Western medicine possesses its own country specific cultural values. Americans have contributed to the tremendous progress made in fighting HIV/AIDS, but we could be doing better by integrating real historical training.

I have made this argument multiple times to potential employers as I look beyond my dissertation defense toward a career in policy making. My contentions have not fallen on deaf ears. Think tanks and other policy research institutes have indicated that my historical training really does bring valuable expertise to the table that few other candidates with other types of degrees possess.

030926-F-2828D-307 Washington, D.C. (Sept. 26, 2003) -- Aerial view of the Washington Monument with the Capitol in the background. DoD photo by Tech. Sgt. Andy Dunaway. (RELEASED)

Historical knowledge and training can inform policy from the local to the federal levels (via Wikimedia Commons).

When considering whether a PhD – and specifically one in History – is worth it, I would consider asking what such a degree can add both to one’s personal goals and to making one competitive on the professional job market. When I was thinking about graduate school, I reflected on Tony Hopkins’ words and realized that I could not, in good conscience, work in HIV/AIDS relief (something I have been passionate about for close to a decade) without acquiring the knowledge that was lacking in the field. I also believed that a PhD would enhance my employment prospects if I articulated the validity of my trajectory in the right way.

There is a tangible void in public policy and I firmly believe that history PhDs could have a critical role to play in filling that void in the coming years. To those who are skeptical of the decision to put so much time, money, and energy into a PhD education, I contend that the versatile PhD holds more weight now than at any other time in recent memory.
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More by Ben Weiss on Not Even Past:

Slavoj Žižek and Violence.
The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective, by Robert C. Allen (2009).

You may also like:
Selling ourselves short? PhDs Inside the Academy and Outside of the Professoriate.
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A New Fascist Revolution?

By Susan George Schorn

Mosse Fascist RevolutionThe Fascist Revolution: Toward a Theory of General Fascism, is a collection of essays written over a 35-year period and published in 1999 (the year of author George L. Mosse’s death). It offers not a comprehensive vision of fascist ideology, but a succession of views, each through a different lens: aesthetics, fascism, racism, nationalism, intellectualism, and so on. The resulting analytical kaleidoscope is particularly thought provoking to read against the current upheaval in American politics, especially the rage that has fed the Tea Party and Bundy Ranch supporters and is now buoying up the presidential campaign of populist billionaire Donald Trump.

Today’s political dialogue shares some obvious attributes with Italian Fascism and German National Socialism, such as the celebration of national identity and an embrace of violence, sacrifice, and brutality. The rhetoric of this year’s Republican primary debates has resounded with such themes. But Mosse identifies two other fundamental tenets of fascism—irrationality and revolutionary activism—that are commonly overlooked, and which have suggestive echoes in the current zeitgeist.

Tea Party protesters walk towards the United States Capitol during the Taxpayer March on Washington, September 12, 2009. Via Wikipedia.

Tea Party protesters walk towards the United States Capitol during the Taxpayer March on Washington, September 12, 2009. Via Wikipedia.

Fascism was inherently irrational, a rejection of Enlightenment ideals, and profoundly anti-intellectual. This irrationality (which Mosse connects, in the case of German National Socialism, to Europe’s late-nineteenth-century embrace of Romanticism), was long ignored by historians as “too outré to be taken seriously.” Yet as Mosse shows, irrationality served an important function in the workings of the party and the ideology. It provided a means for followers to resolve “a very real dilemma: after 1918 the society in which they lived did not seem to function well or even to function at all.” Fascism made an idealist promise to somehow transcend the social instability of the time. The details were purposely left vague, conveniently discouraging adherents from looking too closely at the movement’s methods.

It is intriguing to consider fascism’s use of irrationality in light of modern calls to “Take back America” by processes that range from the improbable (repealing a broadly popular national healthcare policy) to the ludicrous (forcing Mexico to pay for a border wall). A sizeable percentage of America’s electorate, aware that today’s globalized economy does not function well—at least not for them—seems quite willing to suspend rationality and believe such promises. Fortunately, there is scant evidence that today’s promise-makers have either the means or the aptitude to make anything more than symbolic gestures toward fulfilling their promises.

Trump speaks at an Arizona rally in March 2016. Via wikipedia.

Fascism was also, Mosse notes, explicitly revolutionary; an activist doctrine that focused its energy on destroying the existing order and replacing it with something new (though in Germany’s case, the future would be informed by the past). In this way, fascism stood in opposition to conservatism, an arrangement that also resonates strongly with today’s headlines. Witness the consternation of today’s GOP officials, who have lost control of their nomination process and seem to no longer even understand the anger of their own base. But while twentieth-century fascists made devastating use of the revolutionary energy they generated, modern conservative politicians appear caught off guard by voters’ revolutionary zeal, their willingness to destroy institutions in order to bring about the change they perceive as vital to national survival. It is somehow comforting to realize that our politicians are markedly less competent than the fascists in this regard.

And there are other important differences between our era and that, which gave rise to European fascism. Though economic uncertainty is again a factor in our politics, the intense anxiety over “respectability” Mosse identifies as a breeding ground for fascism’s moral code is largely absent today; we are, perhaps, simply more relaxed now. The mistrust of cultural pluralism undergirding today’s pro-nationalist arguments is partly a response to demographic trends that make it all but impossible for those concerns to become mainstream. Our understanding of “nation” has shifted, becoming more diverse. And while the fascist obsession with sexuality, and control of it, has its echoes now, recent attempts to criminalize abortion, birth control, and gender non-conformity have failed at the national level and are likely to be rolled back in the states where they have found purchase. Supporters of such policies are part of a smaller, and shrinking, population.

Still, there are enough eerie similarities in Mosse’s essays to make them rewarding reading for anyone curious about the growth and spread of destructive ideologies—including those presently in circulation.

George L. Mosse, The Fascist Revolution: Toward a Theory of General Fascism (Howard Fertig, 1999)

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You may also like:

Charalampos Minasidis’ review of Robert Paxton’s classic The Anatomy of Fascism (2004)

And our series making social theory easy:

Cali Slair on Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism

Abikal Borah on Dipesh Chakrabarty’s Provincialising Europe

Joshua Kopin discusses Walter Benjamin on Violence

Ben Weiss explain’s Slavoj Žižek’s theory of Violence

Jing Zhai on Jacques Derrida and Deconstruction

Charles Stewart talks about Foucault on Power, Bodies, and Discipline

Juan Carlos de Orellana discusses Gramsci on Hegemony

Michel Lee explains Louis Althusser ideas on Interpellation, and the Ideological State Apparatus

Katherine Maddox on Ranajit Guha’s ideas about hegemony

Great Books on Women’s History: Asia

Not Even Past asked the UT Austin History faculty to recommend great books for Women’s History Month. The response was overwhelming so we have been posting their suggestions throughout the month. This is our last set of book recommendations; this week we feature books on women and gender in East Asia and South Asia. 

chinese womens books

Huaiyin Li recommends:

Zheng Wang, Women in the Chinese Enlightenment: Oral and Textual Histories (1999)

Focusing on the life stories of five prominent women activists in twentieth-century China, this book examines Chinese feminism in the Republican era and its fate under the socialist state.  Its depiction of the feminists’ pursuit of national salvation and self-emancipation contrasts sharply with the Chinese Communist Party’s master narrative of women’s liberation under its leadership.

Gail Hershatter, The Gender of Memory: Rural Women and China’s Collective Past (University of California Press, 2011)

Based on interviews with 72 village women in Shaanxi province, this book shows how the Chinese Communist Party’s policy reshaped women’s agriculture work, domestic routines, activism, marriage, childbirth, and parenting from the 1950s through the 1970s.  It also addresses the intriguing questions of how memories are gendered and how gender figured in the making of socialism in Chinese agriculture. (Reviewed on Not Even Past).

asia womens

Nancy Stalker recommends:

Jan Bardsley, Women and Democracy in Cold War Japan (2014)

(Bloomsbury, 2016) is an engaging new work that reveals gender roles and gender politics in the 1950s through close readings of diverse popular media.  Focusing on newsworthy events centered around women, such as the wedding of the imperial prince to a commoner and Japan’s first Miss Universe title, Bardsley reveals the media construction of the “housewife” embedded within discourses on postwar democracy, Cold War geopolitics, and US – Japan relations.

Cynthia Talbot recommends:

Davesh Soneji, Unfinished Gestures: Devadasis, Memory and Modernity in South India (2012).

This book combines historical research and ethnographic fieldwork to track the fate of South India’s devadasis, originally Hindu temple dancers who came to be regarded as prostitutes as India was transformed by colonial modernity.  Typically unmarried and residing in quasi-matrilineal communities, devadasis often served as concubines or courtesans for elite men but came under increasing condemnation by social reformists beginning in the mid-nineteenth century; they were officially outlawed in 1947.  Soneji goes beyond the standard narrative of social change in colonial India by including an extensive examination of the role of dance in Indian royal courts and a sensitive exploration of the memories of ex-devadasis in this innovative, well-written work.

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For more books on Women’s History:

Great Books (Europe)

Great Books (Crossing Borders)

Great Books (US)

Indrani Chatterjee, On Women and Nation in India

Our 2013 list of recommendations:  New Books on Women’s History

 

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The Anatomy of Fascism, by Robert Paxton (2004)

By Charalampos Minasidis

Anatomy of FascismWhen people think about fascism, two men come to mind: Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini. However, as Robert Paxton shows in The Anatomy of Fascism, fascism was a practice that extended far beyond these two leaders. This is an original approach, as the majority of scholars focus on fascism as an ideology. Paxton instead examines fascism’s variations and focuses on fascists’ actions and he compares them with other successful or unsuccessful versions of fascism. Paxton argues that fascism can be understood only through an examination at the local level. He builds his argument in stages by studying how these movements were created, how they were rooted in the political system, how they seized and exercised power, and if they incorporated into the existing system.

Paxton argues that fascism is not like other political movements. It is not supported by any coherent philosophical system, but is a product of mass politics invented only after the introduction of universal suffrage, the spread of nationalism, and the entry of socialist parties into coalition governments. Coalition politics disenchanted many workers and intellectuals, while many politicians did not have the skills mass politics required. After the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, the foundation of an anti-leftist movement that could adopt elements of the Left’s mass organization was necessary. The aftermath of the First World War and, later on, the Great Depression, were critical for fascism’s spread.

Benito Mussolini in 1917, as a soldier in World War I. In 1914, Mussolini founded the Fasci d'Azione Rivoluzionaria that he led. Via Wikipedia

Benito Mussolini in 1917, as a soldier in World War I. In 1914, Mussolini founded the Fasci d’Azione Rivoluzionaria that he led. Via Wikipedia

As it was not based in any political program, fascism used rituals and ceremonies to appeal to emotions. Paxton demonstrates that fascists were preoccupied with community decline and victimhood. They sought unity, purity, and nationalist mobilization, and wanted unquestioned devotion to the community and its leader. Many fascists played an active role during the First World War and they adored violence and sought to materialize the final victory of their chosen race or nation over what they saw as its inferior opponents.

Explaining the anatomy of fascism, Paxton deconstructs the myth that fascist movements seized power by force. It was liberals and conservatives, frightened not by fascism, but by the Left, who accepted fascists into their coalition governments and gave them the opportunity to govern. In Italy, despite the fact that the pan-Italian fascist march into Rome turned into a fiasco, the conservatives gave Mussolini the chance to enter into a coalition government. What the Italian fascists had proved was that they could successfully crush the Left, as they did in North Italy for the sake of the local great landowners and with the help of the local state apparatus. Similarly, other European fascists tried to convince conservatives and businessmen that only they could handle the communists and protect the social and economic order. German fascists were successful in that task and came to power in the early 1930s with the help of German conservatives and businessmen. In Romania where the Left was not an actual threat, conservatives not only did not need fascists, but they crushed their three coups.

Residents of Fiume cheer the arrival of Gabriele d'Annunzio and his blackshirt-wearing nationalist raiders. D'Annunzio and Fascist Alceste De Ambris developed the quasi-fascist Italian Regency of Carnaro, a city-state in Fiume, from 1919 to 1920. D'Annunzio's actions in Fiume inspired the Italian Fascist movement. Via Wikipedia.

Residents of Fiume cheer the arrival of Gabriele d’Annunzio and his blackshirt-wearing nationalist raiders. D’Annunzio and Fascist Alceste De Ambris developed the quasi-fascist Italian Regency of Carnaro, a city-state in Fiume, from 1919 to 1920. D’Annunzio’s actions in Fiume inspired the Italian Fascist movement. Via Wikipedia.

German fascists created a structure parallel to the state apparatus, while the Italians relied mostly on the existing bureaucracy. The problem that both faced was their radical party members, who did not want the reestablishment of the old authoritarian regimes, but a “permanent revolution” that would succeed in maintaining radicalization in the fascist regimes. However, Mussolini never succeeded in gaining absolute control over his party; he chose normalization, rather than radicalization. Hitler, on the other hand, personally controlled his subordinates and promoted competition between them as to who would prove the most radical. Fascist radicalization reached its ultimate stage in Germany and the Holocaust is an example of what that radicalization meant. Nazi policy on “inferiors” evolved from discrimination to expulsion and to extermination. Hitler’s subordinates in eastern occupied territories competed with each other in implementing the Final Solution and came up with even more extreme actions than the Nazi leadership required, which led to a chaotic situation during the wartime. Ironically, although, war was promoted as a mean to benefit the nation, it was war that destroyed the fascist regimes.

Munich Marienplatz during the failed Beer Hall Putsch, 9 November 1923. Via Wikipedia.

Munich Marienplatz during the failed Beer Hall Putsch, 9 November 1923. Via Wikipedia.

Paxton offers a thorough guide to fascism. In addition to earlier fascism, he also discusses the presence of fascism inside and outside of post-war and post-1989 Europe, and argues that in all democratic countries some citizens flirt with the idea of denying established freedoms to fellow citizens and social groups. He also reviews the various, but mostly short-lived, fascist or proto-fascist movements and parties in the United States and what he considers the paradox of not having a fascist movement against the Civil Right movements in the 1960s.

Paxton’s study is most crucial now in an era with major setbacks in freedoms, massive xenophobia, and openly neo-fascist movements and parties gaining momentum and entering the European parliaments and governments. As Paxton says: “[f]ascists are close to power when conservatives begin to borrow their techniques, appeal to their ‘mobilizing passions,’ and try to co-opt the fascist following.” That’s important to remember.

Robert O. Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism, (Alfred A. Knopf, 2004).

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Ordinary Egyptians: Creating The Modern Nation Through Popular Culture by Ziad Fahmy (2011)

by Ahmad Agbaria

On June 8, 2010 an Egyptian Google executive based in Dubai, named Wael Ghonim, was stunned by a YouTube video that featured a fellow citizen by the name of Khaled Said, bloodied and disfigured. It turned out that the Egyptian police had beaten Said to death and mutilated his body. Appalled by this short video that ran viral through Arab social media, Wael Ghonim created a Facebook page that came to symbolize the involvement of ordinary people in creating change. “We are all Khaled Said” was the name of the Facebook page, adding the motto “today they killed Khaled, and if I don’t act for his sake, tomorrow they’ll kill me.” This internet-based movement contributed to fomenting the uprising in Egypt that ultimately overthrew the corrupt, 30-year regime of Hosni Mubarak. Throughout modern Egyptian history, the media and popular culture have played a crucial role in shaping and informing major political events, as Ziad Fahmy makes evident in Ordinary Egyptians: Creating the Modern Nation Through Popular Culture.

OEFahmy argues that the illiterate and lower classes played an important role in forging Egyptian nationalism. Drawing on otherwise unconsulted sources in colloquial Egyptian, such as songs, popular poems, vaudeville plays, and other sources in the spoken and vernacular Cairene dialect, Fahmy shows that popular culture was instrumental in helping to create a new national identity. Fahmy’s study of these sources fills a sizable gap in the historiography of Egyptian nationalism by lending a voice to the majority of the population. While previous research on Egyptian nationalism was built on intellectual history (Gershoni, Rethinking Nationalism and  Smith The Ethnic Origins of Nations), Fahmy’s Ordinary Egyptians turned the approach to Egyptian nationalism from elites to non-elites.

The primary problem that Fahmy raises relates to many third world societies. How can we investigate nationalism in societies with more than 90 percent illiteracy? Focusing on Egypt in the last quarter of nineteenth century and the beginning of twentieth, when no more than 6.8% of the population was literate, Fahmy unequivocally discards Eurocentric theories as counterproductive when applied to illiterate societies. Thus he supplements the study of print capitalism by a more inclusive media capitalism, which is better able to account for unnoticed or undocumented cultural occurrences. “Cultural products,” writes Fahmy in the preface, “are not socially relevant unless they are communally and socially activated.” In other words, Fahmy is concerned with the ways individuals and communities communicate with and digest cultural information. Print capitalism was a luxury in late-nineteenth century Egypt. The illiterate population, who couldn’t relate to a written newspaper, still actively participated in creating national identity through the new mass media and entertainment industry.  Earlier theories of nationalism that dismissed “orality and direct social interactions” ignored not only the experiences of the vast majority of the population, but more importantly, as as Fahmy notes, paraphrasing Mikhail Bakhtin,they ignored the “social life of discourse outside the artist’s study, discourse in the open spaces of public squares, streets, cities and villages.”

Fahmy stresses the centrality of Cairo and to a lesser extent Alexandria as hubs of cultural activity that radiated and distributed the popular Cairene dialect throughout Egypt. Thanks to the new industrial infrastructure (railroads, telegraph, and post office), the urban areas and the countryside became more connected. New musical and comedic theater troupes could reach more isolated populations. Editors of popular journals, Ya’qub Sannu’, ‘Uthman Jalal, and ‘Abdellah Nadim, defiantly used the colloquial Egyptian language, jokes, azgal (colloquial poetry), and cartoons as a counterhegemonic tools to include the masses in the nascent Egyptian identity.

The second half of Ordinary Egyptians shows popular national identity developing political significance. The more the British colonial authorities (and the elite who were complicit with them) attempted to staunch the press and forcefully impose the press law, the more popular illicit publications became. The masses that took to the streets in the spring 1919 revolution provided undeniable evidence of popular culture’s effectiveness.

Not every popular act, song, or poem, however, should be construed as counterhegemonic or helping in creating the new nation. In Ordinary Egyptians, Fahmy leaves no space for what Rogers Brubaker coined, “National Indifference”. For Brubaker people can be mostly indifferent about their identity and ethnicity. Certainly, people sing national songs, but they also sing and recite poems out of pleasure in the first place, rather than to express sympathy for the nation or animosity toward the British.

Fahmy succeeds remarkably well in discrediting the top-down understanding of cultural diffusion, though he over estimates the role of the capital cities, Cairo and Alexandria, in originating and disseminating culture.  His strong point, however, is the discussion of the role of popular culture in Egyptian nationalism. Thus, the contemporary uprisings in Egypt that ousted Housni Mubarak can be seen as a current reincarnation of previous revolutions that were driven, at least in part, by public mass media and popular culture.

You may also like:

Yoav di-Capua’s FEATURE piece on his recent book, Gatekeepers of the Arab Past.

Yoav di-Capua’s blog post about political and social conditions in Egypt eight months after Mubarak’s ouster in February 2011.

Lior Sternfeld’s review of Erez Manela’s The Wilsonian Moment.

 

Yoav di-Capua on Egyptians Writing History

“History,” at least as Egyptians read, write, think, and know it today, is actually of surprisingly recent origins. As both an idea and a method, it was put to work only at the very end of the nineteenth century, and in a few short decades, it had managed to completely replace a rich and venerable nine hundred year-old scholarly tradition of Islamic historiography. The shift was extremely rapid, almost automatic – and as such, it raised a few interesting questions: could non-Western countries like Indonesia, Kenya, Peru, China, or, in this case, Egypt, import the European historiographical model in a fashion that would satisfy their cultural and political needs, or is history-writing culturally bound? If the European model is adopted, what should these societies do, and what have they done so far, with their centuries-old historiographical traditions? More specifically, which dynamics have characterized the career of modern historiography in Egypt during the past century and what can we learn from them? Below are a few reflections that may bring us a step closer to understanding how some societies outside the European tradition “think with history.”  Most importantly, they challenge us to ask to what degree we can say the modern mode of history writing is universal.

In Egypt, until the mid-nineteenth century, Islamic historiography accounted for all things past through an extraordinarily diverse range of written and oral forms. These genres are unique to the degree that in some cases, we do not have proper equivalences for them in English: khitat (geographical and ethnographic surveys), tarajim and tabaqat (biographical dictionaries), rihla (travel literature), in addition to chronicles, diaries and world histories. By approaching the past through multiple written genres Islamic historiography created a mélange of mythical, literary, poetic and ontological writing that allowed readers to re-experience the past as intimately as possible. Indeed, experiencing the past, that is, invoking the lost aesthetic sense of past times, was an important historiographical ideal.

Similar to all other branches of Islamic knowledge, the procedures for making sense out of the past placed God’s hand, or will, at the center of the work. In that sense, as in many other medieval cultures including European Christianity, history had a strong philosophical bond with theology. With God situated at the center of history, the task that fell to Muslim historians was not so much to explain human actions as it was to exemplify known truths and turn them into moral models. This was another historiographical ideal.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, classic Islamic historiography was still functioning.  It left us, for example, with a rich and beautifully written account of Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798. But just seven decades later, this tradition was dead. How did this happen? The answer is that it was replaced by “historicism,” –the basic modern European mindset which seeks to establish the causal and scientific origins of any given phenomenon. Although it is not well known, historicism was, in fact, Europe’s number one intellectual export to the colonial world. Coupled with Darwinism, it established a new cultural gold standard for thinking about how the past shapes the present. Given the fact that during this time Egypt was drawn closer and deeper into the global economic order, for instance by building the Suez Canal in 1869, historicism became an irresistible habit of mind.

Historicism differed markedly from the Islamic historical model. Islamic historiography recorded all meaningful events on a monthly or annual basis in a kind of immersive fashion, usually without an overarching narrative and without a consistent commitment to establish causal relationships between them or to aspire to find objective empirical truth in the past.  But historicism advocated both causality and objectivity.  By the 1880s, the modernized educated classes had embraced historicism and had begun to view Islamic historiography as a fictional account full of forgery, myth and childish miracles. Losing its cultural credibility and seeing its practitioners marginalized by new classes, the diverse tradition of Islamic historiography completely collapsed.

By the early 1900s it began to be widely recognized that because of its teleological and narrative properties, modern history writing could be used to legitimate and justify political action. As young nationalist politicians began composing their first books, the strong affiliation between history writing and popular nationalism became quite obvious. Increasingly, the subject-matter of history writing became the nation-state and the forces that created it, and, equally important, who should represent it. This new focus situated the historical method at the heart of a political struggle between fervent nationalist parties and a paternalistic monarchy. In 1920, faced with the possibility of losing the historical battle over the place of the monarchy in modern Egyptian history and hence, his very legitimacy to rule, King Fuad established Egypt’s first and only historical archive. The archive was housed in his downtown Cairo residence, the ‘Abdin palace, safely within his reach and just a few floors below his bedroom.

This was no ordinary archive but an all-inclusive, in-house operation that offered custom-tailored collection of documents, translation of source material, guidance on how to do archival work, free office space and paid residency, editing, publishing and international marketing. It thus provided an umbrella of services beginning with collecting source material and ending with the publication of close to eighty thick tomes on modern Egyptian history. All of these publications were written by paid European historians in French, Italian and English and were thus internationally visible.

In supporting this formulation, the ‘Abdin archive manipulated source material, introduced selective translations, and effectively created the myth that there are not now, nor were there ever, alternative sources for the study of Egyptian history. Because of the archive’s politicized and selective structure, all books researched there ended up showing how the monarchy had fathered modern Egypt. The roles of ordinary Egyptians such as peasants, women, and the poor were ignored. Such an undemocratic politics of knowledge instilled the sense that the past is dangerous and must be controlled.

Modern historiography requires institutions: universities, professional associations, conferences, seminars, fellowships and of course, libraries and archives. But it also requires a professional culture or an ethos. In Egypt, as elsewhere in the colonial world, the formation of such an ethos was a middle-class enterprise, which began in the late 1920s in close cooperation with the royal archive. Under the leadership of the Western-trained historian Muhammad Shafiq Ghurbal, a close community of followers developed a professional creed that included four elements: a) the designation of a body of esoteric historical knowledge that practitioners were required to master, (b) professional autonomy in controlling the work and its practitioners, (c) a bid for monopoly of historical knowledge, and (d) the creation of an ideal of service which was both a commitment and an ethical imperative. Given the commanding presence of the royal ‘Abdin project, professionals believed that the methodological process of historical investigation was bound to yield objective scientific truth. This newly-constituted notion of professionalism served as an important identity codifier for these historians, and they used it, along with their ‘Abdin-based notion of scientific objectivity, to fend off competition from popular nationalist historians.

One such excluded historian was ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Rafi’i.  Al-Rafi’i was by far the most prolific and popular chronicler of nationalist Egyptian politics and the author of a series of books that flew in the face of the monarchical party line, arguing that it was in fact the Egyptian people who had created modern Egypt. A political adversary of the King, he was banned from working in the archive and had to make do with journalistic accounts and interviews. In the eyes of the newly-emerging professional academics, his politics and his usage of journalistic sources branded him an unprofessional amateur. Though shunned by the Egyptian academy, his popularity soared among ordinary Egyptians.  He became Egypt’s foremost nationalist historian. The legacy of this early experiment with professionalism was a debate that haunts Egyptian historians to this very day: who has the right to tell the history of Egypt? The absence of a politically neutral archive, providing documents for verifying competing historical arguments contributes to this state of affairs. Yet, the revolutionary events of the last few months are likely to radically change this dynamic.

Contemporary History as Taboo

Reacting to the use and abuse of history under the monarchy, the 1952 Revolution that overthrew the King eliminated the ‘Abdin project and much of the academy that had supported it. Under the guidance of the revolutionary state, a new attitude toward the past promoted celebratory accounts of the nation and its leader. This self-congratulatory historiographical logic prescribed the writing of patriotic accounts of liberation and struggle that were useful for the formation of collective national identity and group cohesion, but useless as public critique. Since the state and the nation were practically indistinguishable, critical historiography of the sort that questioned established political patterns, habits and trends was treated as unpatriotic, dangerous and, ultimately, illegitimate.

And so, beginning in the 1950s, the state refused to share its records with the citizens and systematically frustrated the possibility of using the past in order to establish a critical account of the nation’s affairs. In doing so, it established the notion that contemporary history writing was a taboo. Even after the surprising and crushing military defeat of 1967, civic forces were unable to examine historical documents to investigate the failure and understand its causes. Other major events in contemporary Egyptian history, such as the controversial 1979 Peace Treaty with Israel, also remain virtually unknown. Deprived of state records and with a predominant disdain for historiographical critique, the public-regime interaction lacks transparency and accountability. A few decades later, by the 1980s, a host of Egyptian historians, pundits, writers and novelists began talking about the death of the modern Egyptian historical consciousness. Though at the same time, historians who studied the politically irrelevant medieval past, faced little or no state opposition.

A Universal Practice?

Reflecting on a century of historical thought and writing, one can say that the endurance of the historiographical apparatus that arrived in Egypt a little more than a century ago was dependent on the thriving of a democratic and transparent political culture. The absence of such conditions, the manipulation of the archives by the state, along with the inherently alien philosophical origins of modern history writing, triggered a chronic questioning of the historicist values (objectivity, accuracy, accountability, transparency and truthfulness), historical concepts (change, reform, revolution and continuity), historical themes (the nation-state), and organizational forms (training and accessibility to historical records). Thus, more than questioning the past itself, it is the mode of its interpretation, which was constantly being questioned. Such evidence casts doubt on the alleged universal tradition of history writing. Standing on the doorstep of a new political cycle, one that promises to be more democratic and open, the method of Egyptian history is ready for a new re-configuration.

Yoav di Capua, Gate Keepers of the Arab Past: Historians and History Writing in Twentieth-Century Egypt

Further Reading

Omnia El Shakry, The Great Social Laboratory: Subjects of Knowledge in Colonial and Postcolonial Egypt, (2007).
Not only was modern history writing new to the Egyptian life of the mind, but also new were anthropology, sociology, demography and a host of other disciplines in the social sciences. In this book, intellectual historian Omnia EL Shakry offers an institutional and cultural history of the Egyptian social sciences.  By examining a wide array of historical and ethnographic material, this book illustrates the complex imperatives of race, class, and gender in their specific Egyptian colonial context. In doing so, it uncovers how the social sciences influenced local modes of governance, expertise, social knowledge and a racist imagination that shaped Egyptian national identity in the first half of the twentieth century.

Hanan Kholoussy, For Better, For Worse: The Marriage Crisis That Made Modern Egypt, (2010).
In this original and concise contribution, social historian Hanan Kholoussy takes a close look at the institution of marriage in early twentieth-century Egypt, a time when a new, modern middle class emerged, the extended family declined, and the nation as a whole was striving to free itself from British rule. Situated in the intersection of various political, economic and social forces, marriage became both a metaphor and a battle ground for what young educated Egyptians hoped to achieve. By looking at the historical origins of the ongoing crisis of Egyptian marriage crisis, this book offers critical background for the understanding of contemporary Egyptian youth. 

Israel Gershoni and James Jankowski, Confronting Fascism in Egypt: Dictatorship versus Democracy in the 1930s, (2009).
Since 9/11 public figures in the US and in some European states have debated the existence of an intellectual tradition called Islamo-Fascism. Serious scholars joined the fray arguing that in and around the Second World War Arab thought absorbed the basic tenants of Fascist, mainly Nazi thought to degree that a fusion of sorts between Islamic fundamentalism and Nazism took place. In this remarkable and meticulously researched book, the authors joined hands to offer the most comprehensive analysis of Arab cultural relationship with Fascism and Nazism. Their argument convincingly shows how the Arab intellectual elite repeatedly and successfully resisted Fascism, insisting instead on the durability and benefits of democratic culture.

Jörn Rüsen, ed., Western Historical Thinking: An Intercultural Debate,(2002).
In this unique collection, historians of history writing and philosophers of history question the universality of the Western historical method. Contributors from Europe, Asia and the Middle East reflect on the philosophical foundations of Islamic and Chinese historical tradition and of the causes and dynamics that brought about their demise.

Photo Credits:

Political posters from the 1919 nationalist revolution against British imperial rule. Egypt is represented by a non-veiled and rather French-looking woman, similar to French revolutionary iconography. Pharaonic motifs represent the ancient origins of Egypt as a political community that is now being reborn. The political leadership of the anti-colonial struggle is seen united behind the figure of Sa`d Zaghlul, the grand patriarch of the Revolution, and the semi-independence which followed it.

More posters and more about Egyptian history at Histories of the Modern Middle East: Egypt.

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