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

Not Even Past

2019 History PhDs on Not Even Past

This month on Not Even Past we are celebrating the accomplishments of seventeen students who completed their doctoral dissertations and received their PhDs in History in 2018-2019. Above you see some of them pictured. Below you will find each of their names and the title of their dissertations.

Many of these students were also contributors to Not Even Past throughout their time here, developing their skills as public historians alongside their training as a academics. Here we offer a comprehensive index to all our new PhDs’ publications on Not Even Past.  Congratulations to all!

Ahmad Tawfek Agbaria
Dissertation: The Return of the Turath: Arab Rationalist Association 1959-2000

Ordinary Egyptians: Creating the Modern Nation through Popular Culture by Ziad Fahmy (2011)

Israeli tanks advancing on the Golan Heights. June 1967 (via Wikipedia)

Christopher Babits
Dissertation: To Cure a Sinful Nation: Conversion Therapy in the United States

The Miseducation of Cameron Post (Dir: Desiree Akhavan, 2018)

Digital Teaching: A Mid-Semester Timeline

The Blemished Archive: How Documents Get Saved

Age of Fracture by Daniel T. Rodgers (2011)

Nature Boy, 30 for 30 (Dir: Rory Karpf, 2017)

Doing History in the Modern U.S. Survey: Teaching with and Analyzing Academic Articles

Finding Hitler (in All the Wrong Places?)

The Rise of Liberal Religion by Matthew Hedstrom (2013)

Encountering America: Humanistic Psychology, Sixties Culture, and the Shaping of the Modern Self by Jessica Grogan (2012)

Another Perspective on the Texas Textbook Controversy

Religious Book Week Poster from 1925 (via Library of Congress)

Bradley Joseph Dixon
Dissertation: Republic of Indians: Law, Politics, and Empire in the North American Southeast, 1539-1830

Facing North from Inca Country: Entanglement, Hybridity, and Rewriting Atlantic History

Map of Virginia, discovered and as described by Captain John Smith, 1606; engraved by William Hole (Via Wikimedia commons)

Luritta DuBois
Dissertation: United in Our Diversity: The Reproductive Healthcare Movement, 1960-2000

Historical Perspectives on Marshall (dir. Reginal Hudlin, 2017)

UT Gender Symposium: Women’s Bodies and Political Agendas

Thurgood Marshall in 1957 (Library of Congress)

Dennis Fisher
Dissertation: To Not Sell One Perch: Algonquin Politics and Culture at Kitigan Zibi During the Twentieth Century

The Many Histories of South Austin: The Old Sneed Mansion

A 1936 photograph of the Sneed House taken by the Historic American Buildings Survey (via Library of Congress)

Kristie Flannery
Dissertation: The Impossible Colony: Piracy, the Philippines, and Spain’s Asian Empire

A New History Journal Produced by Students

#changethedate: Australia’s Holiday Controversy

Acapulco-Manila: The Galleon, Asia and Latin America, 1565-1815

Notes from The Field: The Pope in Manila

Outlaws of the Atlantic by Marcus Rediker (2014)

Among the Powers of the Earth: the American Revolution and the Making of a New World Empire by Eliga Gould

Sixteen Months in a Leaky Boat

The Sapphires (2012)

2012 and the End of the World: The Western Roots of the Maya Apocalypse by Matthew Restall and Amara Solari (2011)

Imperial Subjects: Race and Identity in Colonial Latin America edited by Andrew B. Fisher and Matthew D. O’Hara (2009)

True History of the Kelly Gang by Peter Carey (2001)

Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War by Tony Horwitz (1999)

detail of an 18c map depicting a pirate ship sailing near the Philippines.

Pedro Murillo Velarde and Nicolas de la Cruz Bagay. Mapa de las yslas Philipinas (1744) (Detail: Benson Latin America Collection, UT Austin)


Travis Michael Gray
Dissertation: Amid the Ruins: The Reconstruction of Smolensk Oblast, 1943-1953

Every Day Stalinism, by Sheila Fitzpatrick (2000)

Stalin’s Genocides by Norman Naimark (2011)

Soviets fighting during World War II (via wiki commons)

William Kramer
Dissertation: Faith, Heresy and Rebellion: Resisting the Henrician Reformation in Ireland, 1530-1540

Henry VIII, Elizabeth I, and Edward VI (via Art Institute of Chicago)

John Lisle
Dissertation: Science and Espionage: How the State Department and the CIA Deployed American Scientists during the Cold War

What Killed Albert Einstein

This New Ocean: The Story of the First Space Age by William Burrows (1998)

Soviet postage stamp celebrating the 10th anniversary of the launch of the Sputnik satellite

James Martin
Dissertation: In Search of the Nixon Doctrine on Latin America: Levers of Influence and Resistance in Hemispheric Relations

Vice President Richard Nixon’s motorcade drives through Caracas, Venezuela and is attacked by demonstrators, May 1958 (National Archives via Wikipedia)

Kazushi Minami
Dissertation: Rebuilding the Special Relationship: People’s Diplomacy and U.S.-Chinese Relations in the Cold War

Peeping Through the Bamboo Curtain: Archives in the People’s Republic of China

Cold War Crucible: The Korean Conflict and the Postwar World by Hajimu Masuda (2015)

Past and Present in Modern China

Historical Perspectives on Hayao Miyazaki’s The Wind Rises (2013)

shot from animated film of a boy looking up at airplane in the sky

from Hayao Miyazaki’s film The Wind Rises

Elizabeth O’Brien
Dissertation: Intimate Interventions: The Cultural Politics of Reproductive Surgery in Mexico, 1790-1940

Partners in Conflict: The Politics of Gender, Sexuality, and Labor in The Chilean Agrarian Reform, 1950-1973 by Heidi Tinsman.

Gendered Compromises: Political Culture and the State in Chile, 1920-1950 by Karin Rosemblatt

The Deepest Wounds: A Labor and Environmental History of Sugar in Northeast Brazil by Thomas D. Rogers (2010)

“Women Advance with the Flag of the Motherland” La Unidad Popular poster (1970).

Nakia Parker
Dissertation: Trails of Tears and Freedom: Black Life in Indian Slave Country,1830-1866

Popular Culture in the Classroom

The First Texans: An Exhibit in Jester Hall

Confederados: The Texans of Brazil

Black Slaves, Indian Masters: Slavery, Emancipation, and Citizenship in the Native American South by Barbara Krauthamer (2013)

Chickasaw Freedmen filing for allotment in Oklahoma (Oklahoma Historical Society)

Christopher Rose
Dissertation: On the Home Front: Food, Medicine, and Disease in WWI Egypt

You’re Teaching WHAT?

Wrong About Everything

Mapping & Microbes: The New Archive (No. 22)

Searching for Armenian Children in Turkey: Work Series on Migration, Exile, and Displacement

Industrial Sexuality: Gender in a Small Town in Egypt

Texas is Adopting New History Textbooks: Maybe They Should Be Historically Accurate

Exploring the Silk Road

The Ottoman Age of Exploration by Giancarlo Casale (2010)

What’s Missing from ‘Argo’ (2012)

Chris is also the co-founder and main force behind our podcast, 15 Minute History, where he has done many of our interviews.

Map showing typhus outbreaks in Egypt, September 1, 1914 – May 31, 1919 (created by Chris Rose)


Edward Flavian Shore
Dissertation: Avenger of Zumbi: The Nature of Fugitive Slave Communities and Their Descendants in Brazil

 

History and Advocacy: Brazil and Turmoil

Sanctuary Austin: 1980s and Today

Beyonce as Historian: Black Power at the DPLA

Remembering Willie “El Diablo” Wells and Baseball’s Negro League

The Public Historian: Giving it Back

The Quilombo Activist’s Archives and Post-Custodial Preservation, Part II

The Quilombo Activist’s Archives and Post-Custodial Preservation, Part I

An Anticipated Tragedy: Reflections on Brazil’s National Museum

The Public Historian: Quilombola Seeds

Getz/Gilverto Fifty Years Later: A Retrospective

Por Ahora: The Legacy of Hugo Chávez Frías

The Cuban Connection by Eduardo Saénz Rovner (2008)

Che: A Revolutionary Life by Jon Lee Anderson

Narco-Modernities

Photo from Edward Shore’s Collection

Eyal Weinberg
Dissertation: Tending to the Body Politic: Doctors, Military Repression, and Transitional Justice in Brazil (1961-1988)

Our History Mixtape: Embracing Music in the Classroom

Ex Cathedra: Stories by Machado de Assis: Bilingual edition (2014)

For Social Peace in Brazil: Industrialists and the Remaking of the Working Class in Sao Paulo, 1920-1964 by Barbara Weinstein (1996)

The Works Progress Administration’s music project employed musicians as instrumentalists, singers, concert performers, and music teachers during the Great Depression (via Library of Congress)

Zhaojin Zeng
Dissertation: Nourishing Shanxi: Indigenous Entrepreneurship, Regional Industry, and the Transformation of a Chinese Hinterland Economy, 1907-2004

 

Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics: Entrepreneurship and the State by Yansheng Huang (2008) 

Cantonese bazaar during Chinese New Year at the Grant Avenue, San Francisco, circa 1914 (via Wikipedia)

Pictured in photo: Dr. John Lisle, Prof Daina Berry, Dr. William Kramer, Dr. Nakia Parker, Prof. Ann Twinam, Dr. Christopher Rose, Dr. Elizabeth O’Brien, Dr. Eyal Weinberg.

Underground Santiago: Sweet Waters Grown Salty

Underground Santiago: Sweet Waters Grown Salty

By Nathan Stone

Preso en su lecho mi rio pasa, pero se acerca su libertad.
Sus aguas dulces ya son saladas; ya no eres rio, eres el mar.

A prisoner within its banks, my river rolls on, soon to find freedom.
Your sweet waters now have grown salty; you’re no river, now, you are the sea.

                                                       Charo Cofré

Colegio Andacollo was a K-through-12 parish school in old town Santiago.  The Holy Cross Fathers took it as their new mission when the military government kicked them out of Saint George’s, their traditional academy for the elite.  Andacollo was another world.

The original Andacollo was a mountain town in the north where Our Lady of Deep Rocky Mines granted solace and safety to her devoted followers.  Our Andacollo was on the corner of Mapocho and Cautín, in a barrio of old multifamily dwellings, cheap bordellos, and the local seafood market.  The place had a history of union struggle, fiery passion, and a profound commitment to the miracle-working Virgin of Andacollo.  It also had a secret tale of tragedy.

Teatro Municipal in Santiago, Chile
Teatro Municipal in Santiago, Chile (via wikimedia)

Old town Santiago sat atop an ancient network of canals.  Some were small but others were regular aqueducts, lined with stone and brick.  Built for irrigation, they carried quantities of water from Canal San Carlos to the Mapocho River. Before there was pavement.  When Matucana and Avenida Matta were still just vegetable gardens and chicken coops.  Back when every home had tomatoes, basil, and cilantro growing out back.

The central region of Chile is still crisscrossed with canals that were built by a dozen Jesuit missionaries and several thousand local Indians. The intention was to strengthen the native communities against European invasion. Taking advantage of the melting snowpack in the mountains, they transformed a semi-arid wasteland into the now-famous fertile green valleys.

The effect on the indigenous population was the opposite of what had been intended.  In 1550, the conquistadors said that Nueva Extramadura was too poor and not worth the trouble.  By 1750, they had changed their conquering minds. Irrigated and green, the Spanish liked it.  So, they threw out the Indians and the Jesuits, and they set up their haciendas.

One hundred and fifty-three “nice families” colonized with all the rapacious vigor of their prestigious lineages.  They were Spaniards, Basques, and some French.  They brought their cattle and their vineyards.  They brought their illusions of noble breeding and Chile criollo was born.

Their descendants became the barrio alto, the GCU, as they say, Gente Como Uno, (People Like Us), a code that only legitimate members of their tightly-closed circle were supposed to recognize.  It wasn’t about money, comrade, though the GCU did tend to be rich.  It wasn’t about land, either, though they controlled most of it.  The GCU sustained an Old World fantasy of hereditary aristocracy.  They really believed it, and they insisted on marrying their children to each other.  A rich man without a pedigree was called, roto con plata, more or less, a bum with lots of cash.  If he had not descended from the legendary hundred families (who were, in reality, one hundred and fifty-three), he was and always would be an outsider.

The canals in the central valleys are still functional.  They are the reason why there is Chilean wine and fruit at Whole Foods.  Building a canal is no joke.  It has to always go downhill so that the water flows forward and never backs up.  In 1600, that was an engineering masterpiece.

As the population grew in old town Santiago, the canals lost their reason for being.  Family gardens became parking lots and chicken coops became bus stops. They are mostly dry today, an underground labyrinth for which there is no known map.  Only the rats know their way around.

But, until the late ‘60’s and early ‘70’s, the water continued to flow, and there was access at strategic places.  Neighbors would draw a bucket or two to water a shade tree, or to dampen the streets and vacant lots in the summer.  That kept the dust down as boys upheld an important tradition, the continuous game of pick-up soccer, la pichanga.  No shirts, no shoes, no score, house rules.  Everyone played until it was too dark to see your hand in front of your face.  As the brown water flowed constantly down into the rocky Mapocho.

Flowing water was an urban temptation.  Children learned early in life to toss all their trash into the open mouths of Santiago’s filthy underside.  The subterranean monster swallowed everything, without complaining.  What’s more, most homes still had no indoor plumbing.  The canal was where people dumped their chamber pots.  Anyone who drew a bucketful had to watch out for floaters from upstream.  That was emblematic of the ongoing relationship between the barrio alto and los de abajo, the people down below.   It just seemed natural that those in high places would dump their refuse on those who were geographically and socially below them.  That was also the reason why typhoid and hepatitis were so common, down there.

La Iglesia de Andacollo (the church of Andacollo)
La Iglesia de Andacollo (the church of Andacollo) (via wikipedia)

There was an opening in the schoolyard at Andacollo.  It was about two feet wide and three feet long, rimmed with discarded railroad ties.  The canal water rushed by about a foot below the ground level.  Like everywhere else, at Andacollo, the canal water was used to keep the dust down and get rid of the trash.  There was a big willow tree in the middle of the schoolyard that provided shade on hot afternoons.  The groundskeeper would make a trench around it with his trowel, and fill it with water from the canal, using his big iron bucket.

The school was all boys back then, and la pichanga never stopped.  One day, the ball bounced close to the opening.  As tradition demanded, the boy closest ran backwards with reckless abandon, to make the save.  It’s a passion, comrade.  When the ball was in play, nothing else mattered.  He fell into the canal and disappeared.

The foul waters dragged him through their labyrinth.  No rescue was possible; nothing anyone could do.  They found him the next day in the Mapocho River.  His clothes had been ripped off.  His body was twisted and broken, but he was recognizable.  He had been dragged through hell in an unexpected, surprising, and unavoidable way.  I don’t know his name.

Back then, it never occurred to anyone to cover a hole in a schoolyard because someone might fall in.  They told the boys to be careful.  That was part of their education.  They had to learn that any one of them could drop into the abyss at any moment.

That awful day, the dead boy’s classmates learned that destiny could betray you; that there were tragic, violent accidents; that the lives of poor boys didn’t really matter; that in five seconds, it could all be over and done with; that they, too, could disappear and be forgotten.  That day, the boys learned that you have to be clever to survive in a cruel world.

Nowadays, we cover holes like that.  We deceive our children with the illusion that the world is safe and trustworthy.  That has never been true, but if you are under thirty, you were probably brought up to believe it and expect it.

The fickle nature of fate is the elephant in our proverbial living room.  Everyone pretends it isn’t there.  And the willow tree, silent witness to everything, grows tall.

The national anthem says that Chile is the copia feliz del Edén.  That means a happy copy of paradise.  But it’s just a copy, not the real thing.  And Eden was a tricky place, comrade. You do remember what happened there?


You May Also Enjoy:

Partners in Conflict: The Politics of Gender, Sexuality, and Labor in the Chilean Agrarian Reform, 1950-1973, by Heidi Tinsman

Civil War and Early Life: Snapshots of Early War in Guatemala by Vasken Markarian

Wrong About Everything

by Christopher Rose

Originally posted on Christopher Rose’s blog on April 12, 2018.

I know, not the best title for my first blog entry, right?

A couple of months back, I presented some of initial findings on epidemic and epizootic disease in Egypt during the first World War at a symposium. (Ok, I’ll tell you the symposium was at Oxford. Yes, you may touch me.) I was flattered to be asked, especially since, as an ABD candidate, I got to be part of a two-panel session with speakers like Khaled Fahmy and Marilyn Booth (I’m still not entirely convinced I didn’t embarrass myself and everyone else, but that’s impostor syndrome for you).

The paper–which you can read here–is a short synopsis of human suffering during the war, especially among the poor, rural classes in Egypt, which are largely undocumented. It’s a works-in-progress presentation, very much based in preliminary findings, as one does at this stage in writing.

My dissertation focuses on breakdowns in public health during the war–the topic sentence could be summed up as “1918 was a deadly year for the Egyptian populace.” Even if one heeds Roger Cooter’s warning about reifying a positivist relationship between war and disease[1] –and I’ve compiled statistics for nearly a decade before and after the war–the demographic anomalies in Egypt between 1914 and 1918 are unmistakable. Four times as many Egyptians died of disease during the war than from military actions.

1918 also saw the birth rate decline to its lowest rate in a quarter century.

BirthDeath
source: Annual Reports of the Department of Public Health, Ministry of the Interior, 1911-1919.

I described a number of issues: food shortages that were documented as early as 1916. As residents complained about shortages of soap, eggs, cheese, and meat the Anglo-Egyptian administration, concerned with keeping the protectorate profitable, maintained a positive trade balance, exporting goods that were dearly needed at home. The cost of some basic household items rose over 200% between 1914 and 1918.

Likewise, relapsing fever and typhus cases increased substantially — both are louse-borne diseases, which can likely be tied to the increased movement of troops and support staff (including the men of the Egyptian Labour Corps). The war ended with the “Spanish flu” outbreak, which killed almost 140,000 Egyptians in just under three months.

There were also epizootics of both cattle plague (rinderpest) and foot-and-mouth disease that lasted over 18 months in large swaths of the country. Is there a relation between this and the soaring price of meat? It’s almost certainly the source of much of the protein that was sold on the black market in major cities.

As I said. Cheerful stuff.

During the break that followed my panel, a member of the audience approached me, identifying himself as a member of the landholding class from the Sharqiyya province in the Nile Delta (for the record, he is not an academic).

He insisted that I was completely wrong about nearly everything that I had said.

“We had hygiene!” he declared. “People didn’t die from these diseases in the 20th century!”

He suggested that I extend the dates of my study by decades in each direction; for example, he inquired if I had I looked at the number of deaths incurred through the construction work on the Suez Canal (1863-69), or knew how many more people died of disease in Egypt in the 18th century.

I won’t lie. This was my first outing with this material, and this was … not the sort of feedback I had hoped to get. The more I tried to explain the nuance of my argument, the more pushback I got. Having spent 3 months mapping the country from cataract to Delta, I tried to change the subject and ask where he was from–meaning where, specifically, in Sharqiyya. He looked at me as if I might just be the stupidest man on earth and responded, “Egypt?!”

Map showing typhus outbreaks in Egypt, September 1, 1914 – May 31, 1919 (created by Chris Rose, featured in the blog Mapping & Microbes)

As you can tell, I’ve let this episode roll right off my back.

However, I think there is something significant in the greater picture about his defensiveness, one that pushed me to think about the puzzling collective silence in nearly every history book about what I’m looking at. Even the Spanish flu is described in only two medical reports from the time; I’ve seen it mentioned nowhere else.

The notion of Egyptians dying in elevated numbers from disease was clearly distasteful to him–largely, I suspect, for the reason that it was undignified. People—at least not those of his class—did not die from disease in high numbers in the early 20th century.

In short, Egypt was modern. If it had not ascended, as the Khedive Ismāᶜīl had optimistically pronounced in 1869, to being among the ranks of countries which should be considered European, it had developed more rapidly than much of the Arab east, which languished in such a state that one scholar discussing the “Spanish flu” influenza pandemic in the Arabian peninsula (1919) could legitimately wonder whether medical officials in central Arabia were capable of distinguishing the influenza apart from other diseases with similar symptoms, such as typhoid.[2]

Indeed, my interlocutor is correct about that hygiene and medical care had been introduced under Muhammad Ali Pasha in the mid-19th century as part of a national campaign to improve public health. This has been described by LaVerne Kuhnke and Hibba Abuguideri (although the project had peaked in the 1850s and all but vanished under British administration).[3]

 

A market scene in Cairo during World War One (via Australian National Maritime Museum)

I struggled to explain in my response that afternoon that my interest was the significance of the war’s anomalous blip in the statistical record. The public health scheme in Egypt had, to a certain degree, brought epidemic disease under control, which is why the fact that infection and death rates soared during the war comprise a factor of interest. So, too, do the numbers of registered prostitutes in Egyptian cities, as well as the number of reported cases of venereal diseases, both of which increased substantially during the war and comprised their own crises in both medical and social health.

During the First World War, Egypt was a nation at war. Its citizens were recruited into the war effort, and many of those citizens faced bodily harm and death fighting for the Union Jack in far-off lands. Those who remained at home suffered from shortages of basic supplies–although production rates decreased slightly, they dropped nowhere near as much as consumption rates. They were forced to eat tainted meat that they purchased at high prices. They died of disease whose effects were exacerbated by malnutrition. Some turned to prostitution or other illicit activity to make ends meet.

There is nothing heroic about the fight against a virus, perhaps. As the First World War and the 1919 uprising became enmeshed together in the national historiographic project celebrating the nationalist movement and Egypt’s strive for self-determination, there was no space for sympathetic portrayal of poor women desperate to feed starving children and elderly relatives, and those who, in sheer desperation, turned to extreme measures to support themselves.

The commemorations held in Egypt from 2013 onward to celebrate the nation’s contribution to the First World War recognize only one of these groups.

I’m hoping to recognize the second.

[1] Roger Cooter. “Of War and Epidemics: Unnatural Couplings, Problematic Conceptions.” The Journal of the Society for the Social History of Medicine 16, no. 2 (2003): 283–302

[2] LaVerne Kuhnke. Lives at Risk. Vol. no. 24. Comparative Studies of Health Systems and Medical Care. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990; Hibba Abugideiri. Gender and the Making of Modern Medicine in Colonial Egypt. Ashgate Publishing, Ltd., 2013.

[3] Guido Steinberg. “The Commemoration of the ‘Spanish Flu’ of 1918-1919 in the Arab East.” In The First World War as Remembered in the Countries of the Eastern Mediterranean, edited by Olaf Farschid, Manfred Kropp, and Stephan Dähne. Beiruter Texte Und Studien 99. Würzburg: Ergon-Verl, 2006, 159–60.

Also by Christopher Rose on Not Even Past:

Mapping & Microbes: The New Archive (No. 22)
Searching for Armenian Children in Turkey
Exploring the Silk Route
Review: The Ottoman Age of Exploration (2010) by Giancarlo Casale
What’s Missing from Argo (2012)

You may also like:

Charalampos Minasidis reviews Yugoslavia in the Shadow of War: Veterans and the Limits of State Building, 1903-1945 by John Paul Newman (2015)
Book recommendations compiled for the centenary of the outbreak of WWI

How to Survive a Plague: The Inside Story of How Citizens and Science Tamed AIDS, by David France (2016)

By John Carranza

51wo3zzp4bl-_sx341_bo1204203200_In the 1980s, the United States experienced a new disease that seemed to target young, gay men living in New York City and San Francisco. From the beginning, those doctors and scientists willing to treat members of the gay community remained perplexed as to why these men, their ages ranging from their early twenties to their thirties, were falling ill with rare diseases that would not ordinarily affect someone their age. The earliest name given to this new epidemic was gay related immune deficiency (GRID) before it took the name acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS), which was caused by the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). The push for scientific advancement and treatment was not readily available to these young men, and many government officials at the state and national levels refused to acknowledge the epidemic that soon spread across the United States and affected groups other than gay men.

David France’s How to Survive a Plague: The Inside Story of How Citizens and Science Tamed AIDS is a complementary work of history to the 2012 documentary of the same name that documented the early years of the AIDS epidemic to the successful discovery a decade later of combination drug therapies that brought people with AIDS from the brink of death back to life. The main actors in France’s sweeping narrative are a group of men and women who formed the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, or ACT-UP, devoted to demanding action from the government and pharmaceutical companies for treatment. Their initiatives were influential in saving thousands of lives by the early 1990s.

buttons_18168559608

ACT-UP buttons from the 1980s (via Wikimedia Commons).

ACT-UP began as an informal group of gay men who were dying of opportunistic infections related to the compromised immune systems associated with AIDS. However, as time went on, the epidemic took more lives and the government remained silent, so they took it upon themselves to learn about their illnesses in order to demand government intervention and the development of medical treatments. In this way, many of them became citizen-scientists. They compiled the scientific data made available to them by competing scientists and used it to educate one another and the government officials that they lobbied. They pushed for medications that would treat their opportunistic infections, as well as the virus that causes AIDS once it was discovered. They were also first in realizing the safe sex might lessen the chances a person had for catching this new and mysterious disease.

635944716875263811-1398634550_fighting-for-our-lives

AIDS activists in the 1980s (Curve Magazine via the Odyssey Online).

France recounts the activism necessary to win visibility not just for gays, but also for other populations who became affected, such as intravenous drug users and women. ACT-UP’s activism undertook public demonstrations as a means of demanding more scientific research, access to drugs, and lower prices for those drugs once they were identified as possible treatments. In its earliest years of activism, the group modeled itself on the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s by practicing nonviolent civil disobedience and going into traditionally conservative parts of the United States to educate people. ACT-UP petitioned members of Congress for AIDS funding for research, fought with the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to allow lifesaving drugs onto the market faster, set up needle exchanges for intravenous drug users, and protested on Wall Street. The early stages of ACT-UP’s activism included using the infamous symbol of the pink triangle with SILENCE = DEATH written beneath it, which was made into bumper stickers and posters that could be plastered all over the city, as well as hats and T-shirts. One of the enduring symbols of their activism is the AIDS Memorial Quilt, which was created in San Francisco to remember the lives lost in the epidemic. It made its first appearance on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. in the fall of 1987 when it included more than 1,900 panels.

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The AIDS Quilt on the National Mall in 2011 (via Wikimedia Commons).

David France’s book is a great achievement in that he details the events and lives of the people who lived through the AIDS epidemic over the course of approximately thirteen years. France achieves this not simply as a researcher with an eye for historical detail, but also as a person who lived through those events as a journalist. His ability to document the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s resulted in the ability to keenly observe developments while still keeping a certain level of objectivity. France uses extensive archival research, including the papers of the most visible activists and he draws on his own experience. Where possible, France conducted oral interviews with members of ACT-UP who are still alive today. France captures the emotion and frustration of the members of ACT-UP who pushed for access to life saving drugs while negotiating alliances and feuds among members of the group and the scientific community. How to Survive a Plague is essential reading, not only for members of the LGBTQ community, but for everyone who may have been too young or not have been alive during the 1980s and early 1990s when the fight for visibility and medication was still happening. How to Survive a Plague is an excellent example for understanding how activism works, how advocacy for those marginal members of society can be effective, and to show government and public health officials how not to handle a plague.
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You may also like:

Joseph Parrott reviews The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government by David K. Johnson (2006).
Chris Babits explores the Dallas Gay Historic Archives.
Blake Scott reviews AIDS & Accusation: Haiti and the Geography of Blame by Paul Farmer (1992).
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What Killed Albert Einstein?

by John Lisle

On April 17, 1955, Albert Einstein’s abdominal aortic aneurysm burst, creating internal bleeding and severe pain. He went to Princeton Hospital but refused further medical attention. He demanded, “I want to go when I want. It is tasteless to prolong life artificially; I have done my share, it is time to go. I will do it elegantly.” In the early morning hours of April 18, the on-duty nurse heard him say a few words in German, which she could not understand, and then Einstein died.

prince_18_apr_1955_einstein_dies

The Daily Princetonian front page on 18 April 1955 (via the Mudd Manuscript Library blog).

Dr. Janos Plesch, a physician and long-time close friend who occasionally treated the physicist, thought that syphilis caused Einstein’s deadly abdominal aortic aneurysm (AAA). He said that Einstein was “a strongly sexual person” who enjoyed the company of numerous women even while married. Dr. Plesch conjectured that AAAs usually have a syphilitic origin. Why, he thought, would it be so unreasonable to assume that Einstein contracted syphilis on one of his escapades? Some authors have echoed Plesch’s claim, repeating it as undoubtedly true because it came from a close confidant of Einstein. But numerous studies, both before and after Einstein’s death, show that the connection between syphilis and AAAs is small. According to a study in 2012, only around 1% of untreated late vascular manifestations of syphilis result in an AAA in the descending aorta, the kind Einstein had.

Also, no evidence of syphilis was ever reported in Einstein’s body, including his famously dissected brain. These facts do not definitively disprove that Einstein had syphilis, although it appears very unlikely, but they do beg the question: Is there a more probable explanation for why Einstein developed his deadly aneurysm? Strangely, though many scholars eagerly investigate every facet of Einstein’s life, few or none have analyzed the cause of his death.

between-the-folds

Einstein’s brain before dissection in 1955 (via Discover).

The type of aneurysm that Einstein had is statistically linked with being old and male. However, the majority of people developing an AAA also have a history of smoking. Only lung cancer is more closely associated to smoking among tobacco-related diseases. In an analysis of risk factors for AAAs in more than three million individuals, 80% of people who developed the aneurysm were smokers. Another systematic study found that current smokers were 7.6 times more likely to have an AAA than nonsmokers. The aneurysm’s prevalence and size are strongly linked to the amount of smoking one does, and Einstein was a heavy pipe smoker for decades.

Einstein’s doctors ordered him to stop smoking during his various illnesses. He sporadically obeyed. When friends gave him gifts of tobacco during these brief periods of abstinence, Einstein would open the gift, sniff to enjoy the aroma, and then give it away to someone else.  But Einstein always succumbed to the overwhelming temptation of his beloved vice. He often resorted to taking tobacco handouts from friends. Dr. Plesch especially felt sorry for the needy, embarrassed Einstein and provided him with a steady supply of tobacco and cigars despite the orders of Einstein’s other doctors and second wife, Elsa.

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Einstein and his second wife, Elsa (via Wikimedia Commons).

During his doctors’ smoking bans, when Einstein walked to the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, where he had worked since 1933, the old physicist picked up cigarette butts from the street and filled his pipe with bits of discarded tobacco. He initially walked to the Institute across from the nearby meadow, but he switched routes because the street offered more abandoned tobacco. Einstein tried to summon the courage to openly defy the bans, but he worried about offending his doctors.

In late 1948, Einstein had life-prolonging surgery to keep his AAA from bursting. The surgeon wrapped cellophane around the aneurysm. A photograph of Einstein leaving the hospital after surgery shows him inside a car with a pipe in hand. Soon after, Einstein became a lifetime member of the Montreal Pipe Smokers Club and wrote to its president, “Pipe smoking contributes to a somewhat calm and objective judgment in our human affairs.”

einstein_1933

The famous physicist in 1933 (via Wikimedia Commons).

Images of iconic figures associate smoking with intelligence: Einstein, Oppenheimer, Freud, Sherlock Holmes. The pipe gives them a pensive aura. Einstein depended on smoking—not for his genius, as some writers claim, but as a repetitive set of actions to soothe and comfort. For Einstein, this was a tolerable trade-off for his health and, ultimately, his life.

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Read more by John Lisle on Not Even Past:

Review of This New Ocean: The Story of the First Space Age, by William Burrows

Contributions to Behind the Tower

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Propaganda or Progress?

by Virginia Garrard Burnett

These posters were circulated in Nicaragua in 1980 when campaigns to celebrate the end of dictatorship, to increase literacy and to improve public health were central policy concerns.

La niñez es alegria. Alegria es revolución. Asociación de niños Sandinistas ¨Luis Alfonso Velzaquez¨
Defendamos la revolución, controlemos al somocismo. C.D.S. Comites de Defensa Sandinista. Poster shows fist beside the text.
La insurrección popular sandinista triunfara. The popular sandinist insurrection shall be triumphant.
La patria, la revolucion. A dotted line links both words while workers hands form a fist and hold tools

On July 19, 1979, the Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional (FSLN or Sandinistas), a leftist movement that drew its support from a wide sector of Nicaraguan society overthrew the dictator Anastasio Somoza, whose family dynasty had ruled the Central American country with ruthlessness and greed since 1936. The Sandinistas established a revolutionary government that was inspired by Karl Marx and Fidel Castro but was also deeply influenced by Catholic ideas of social justice.

The ascendency of Ronald Reagan to the US presidency in 1981, however, placed the Sandinistas squarely in the crossfire of the new Cold War. Pressure from the United States (especially the US-supported contra war) and Sandinistas’ missteps, along with growing disillusionment of Nicaraguan society, brought about the end of the regime in 1990, when the Sandinistas were voted out of power in a free democratic election.Poster 1

Although the Sandinistas ultimately proved a disappointment to both the supporters and the opponents of the regime, the early days of their rule were full of optimism and hope for a new Nicaragua, where the full rights of citizenship and access to public goods would be accessible to all.

Two programs in particular, the national literacy campaign (more than half the population was illiterate in 1980) and a national campaign for basic public health (life expectancy of Nicaraguans in the 1970s was only 54 years old) formed the heart of the early Sandinista agenda. The posters here promote these Sandinista social programs, and, generally speaking, the Sandinista cause. They are part of a collection held in the Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection at the University of Texas at Austin. Their strong graphic qualities reflect both the aesthetics of the late 1970s and the Sandinistas’ need to convey political information visually to a largely unlettered citizenry.

THE LITERACY CAMPAIGN

One of the first objectives of the revolution was to introduce basic literacy to Nicaragua’s large illiterate population, in order to both improve people’s lives and to inculcate them with the values of the Sandinista revolution. The National Literacy Crusade, headed by Fernando Cardenal, a Jesuit priest, sent “brigades” of young, urban Nicaraguans to remote parts of the country to teach basic literacy to adults.  Many of the early-reader materials utilized explicitly political motifs. Whether or not new readers embraced those ideas, the literacy crusade dramatically improved rates of functional literacy in adults by teaching more than 400,000 Nicaraguans to read and write. The program also introduced the young, urban teachers—brigadistas—to the realities of the poor rural countryside, many for the first time.

Poster showing a young man reading to an older man while a young woman and older woman look on. Poster reads "el deber de un hombre es estar alli, donde es mas util."

The quote printed near the top of this poster, “The duty of a man is be where he is most needed,” comes from the great Cuban nationalist of the late 19th century, José Martí. In this drawing we can see the young brigadista—clearly identifiable not only by his red Sandinista kerchief and CNA hat, but also by the relative whiteness of his skin—sitting on the ground with a rural campesino (peasant) family and exploring a book that bears the hallmarks of the National Literacy Crusade (or CAN).   We see that two of the campesinos are older adults, while a young woman also looks on. The campesinos are surrounded by the tools and implements used by ordinary workers—the man has a hoe and ax, while both women hold manos y matates—corn grinders for making tortillas—all common tools that signify the Sandinsitas’ desire to value to both literacy and labor. In the background are the humble, thatched-roof wattle-and-dab houses common in the Nicaraguan countryside, all in the shadow of a volcano, a geographic feature so characteristic of Nicaragua that it has been used as a signifier for the nation on stamps, coins, the national flag and the Nicaraguan Coat of Arms.

Nuestra tierra, nuestra revolucion.

For more on the resources of the Nettie Lee Benson collection, see http://www.lib.utexas.edu/benson/

Further readings on Nicaragua in this period:

Michel Gobat. Confronting the American Dream: Nicaragua under U.S. Imperial Rule (Duke, 2005)

John A. Booth, The end and the beginning: the Nicaraguan Revolution (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1982)

John Donahue, The Nicaraguan revolution in health: from Somoza to the Sandinistas (South Hadley, MA: Bergin & Garvey, 1986)

English translations of posters (by order of appearance):

“Childhood is happiness. Happiness is the revolution.”  The Luis Alfonso Velazquez Association of Sandinista Children.

“The People and Army United Guarantee Victory. “(FSLN)

“The Motherland…the revolution.” Ministry of Public Education and Propaganda.

“Literacy is liberation. [To be literate] is to follow the road marked out by Carlos Fonseca (a founder of the FSLN who died in 1976) and Sandino. Free Nicaragua!” (National Literacy Crusade)

“The duty of a man is to be here, where he is most needed.” National Literacy Crusade..

“Our Land: Our Revolution.” The Nicaraguan Institute of Agrarian Reform.

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