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

Not Even Past

Stephen F. Austin’s bookstore receipt

This is the first in an occasional series of articles highlighting the fascinating collection of historical documents in the Briscoe Center for American History at UT Austin.

by Brenda Gunn

In July 1835, after two years in Mexico, part of that time confined to a jail cell, Stephen F. Austin received a passport issued by the Mexican government. Austin had gone to Mexico on a diplomatic mission, when Texas was still under Mexican rule, but set off to return home to Texas, where the political climate had shifted and tolerance for Mexican rule had deteriorated. On his way back, he spent time in New Orleans, purchasing several books that might provide clues to his state of mind.

Austin’s passport and the receipt for his book purchases are part of a collection held at The Briscoe Center for American History at UT Austin. The passport confirms that Austin boarded the Wanderer and set sail from Veracruz bound for the United States. The exact date of Austin’s landing in New Orleans is unclear, but the New Orleans Bee mentions Austin’s stay on Aug. 12, 1835.

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Stephen F. Austin’s 1835 receipt for Hotchkiss & Co. Booksellers and Stationers in New Orleans (Image courtesy of the Briscoe Center for American History)

While in New Orleans, Austin visited Hotchkiss & Co. Booksellers and Stationers on Chartres Street, where he spent $27 on books. It is clear that Austin was interested in conflicts. Listed on the receipt were two recent publications: A History of the Fall of the Roman Empire by J-C-L Sismondi and History of the Revolution in England 1688 by Sir James Mackintosh (both published in 1834). Austin also purchased Washington Irving’s military history, Spanish Conquest of Granada.

These choices suggest a shift from Austin’s long-held moderate outlook regarding Texas’ relationship with Mexico toward resignation that conflict was inevitable.

Other purchases listed on the receipt, however, reflect very different preoccupations.

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19th century depiction of Stephen F. Austin (Image courtesy of the Briscoe Center for American History)

An issue of the monthly literary magazine, Atkinson’s Casket: or Gems of Literature, Wit, and Sentiment and a copy of Penny Magazine, which focused on British culture, exhibit the cultural interests of the future revolutionary. Since Austin wrote often and at length, it also seems fitting that the receipt includes a copy of Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language.

Austin also bought the Young Man’s Own Book: A Manual of Politeness, Intellectual Improvement, and Moral Deportment and Sacred Classics, or Cabinet Library of Divinity, featuring sermons on a variety of topics. Most of the books Austin bought that day are works of nonfiction and convey a serious frame of mind in August 1835.

He did leave room for a novel: Pelham: Or the Adventures of a Gentleman, a tale of a young man with political aspirations — a topic that may not have been far from Austin’s heart.

***

Check out more DISCOVER pieces: 

Ann Twinam explains how a 19th century Peruvian “bought” his whiteness

And Danielle Sanchez discusses her family’s confusing, and often painful, history of immigration, race and prejudice.

Zeitoun by Dave Eggers (2009)

by Jessica Wolcott Luther

Abdulrahman Zeitoun, a Syrian immigrant turned US citizen, owned a home repair and painting business with his wife, Kathy, in New Orleans in 2005.   When Hurricane Katrina hit the city on August 29 of that year, Kathy and their three children fled the city for Baton Rouge.  Zeitoun, a devoted businessman and neighbor, refused to leave his impending projects.  He hunkered down, readied his canoe (just in case), and rode out the storm.  When the hurricane finally passed, he set out in his canoe to assess the damage to the city, his rental properties, the homes he was repairing and painting, and the offices of his business.

In Dave Eggers’ telling of Zeitoun’s story, the focus is the aftermath of Katrina.  Many of the neighbors that he comes across are elderly, disabled, and trapped in their flooded homes.  More often than not, Zeitoun’s attempts at rescue are impeded rather than helped by the national and local officers and soldiers who feign assistance and then ignore his pleas.  He takes on the daily task of feeding local dogs.  Each day at the same time he returns to a working pay phone in one of his rental units to call Kathy and check in, a mundane ritual that keeps him connected to his family and alleviates Kathy’s worries about Zeitoun’s condition.  When he traveled to his office to take stock of the damage there, he came across a gang of armed men (“criminal opportunists” he called them) stealing from a local gas station and decided to go in the opposite direction.   At one point, while surveying the damage on Tulane’s campus for a professor friend of his, Abdulrahman comes across an acquaintance, Nasser Dayoob, another Syrian immigrant who had fled to the campus when his own home had been flooded.  Zeitoun gave Nasser a place to stay in one his rental units where a renter, Todd Gambino, had weathered the storm.

zeitoun book coverOn Tuesday, September 6, when Zeitoun went to the rental unit after making his daily rounds to feed the dogs and check on neighbors, he came across a man he had never met named Ronnie.  Nasser was also there, as was Todd.  Shortly after Zeitoun had finished taking a shower, Nasser yelled for him to come downstairs.  A group of armed and uniformed men were bursting into the house.  They put Adbulrahman, Nasser, Todd, and Ronnie in a boat and took them away.

The second half of Zeitoun’s post-Katrina story, the one that begins with his disappearance at the hands of these men, is riveting.  You follow Kathy as she struggles for weeks to locate him without knowing if he is alive.  She tries to hide her worry from her children while she physically and emotionally unravels at the seams.  It eventually takes a brave act by a person that she does not know for her to find Zeitoun.  Where he is and what has happened to him is both shocking and obvious.

Zeitoun was a man at the intersection of multiple tragedies: the destruction by the hurricane, the chaos of the aftermath, the post-9/11 fears about Muslim Americans, and the pervasiveness of the “war on terror” into our own cities, homes, and lives.  Dave Eggers’ Zeitoun leaves you understanding that no matter what mother Earth can do to us, we can always do worse to each other.

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