Public History Archives - Page 2 of 4

Between King and People: Digital Tools for Studying Empire

Governing is complicated. It requires an understanding of both top-tier policy and a recognition of changing circumstances over time. It also involves a comprehensive workforce, who perform different tasks according to their position in the larger hierarchy. The Spanish monarchy ruled over territories stretching from the Caribbean to the islands of Asia, and to the southernmost point of South America, for over 300 years. During that period, there was no neat transference of authority from the court, located in Madrid, to the civilizations of the Americas. Instead, a confluence of contradictory voices and choices paved the way for Spanish imperial rule.

“Bureaucracy on the Ground in Colonial Mexico” is a digital exhibition created to help scholars and the public access the lived experience of colonial rule. Its newest features allow for further exploration of the many actors involved in the processes of governance.

The objective of this project is to follow bureaucratic function on the ground. In partnership with the Benson Latin American Collection, I created an interactive digital exhibition on the 1765 visita, or royal inspection, of New Spain. The visita examined local institutions, evaluated economic policies, and reorganized society in a broad display of royal authority. This procedure helped the king implement widespread political, economic, and social reform in this territory in order to tighten control and increase efficiency. It set the precedent for changing policies throughout the empire over the next several decades.

Designed for a non-specialist audience, the exhibition explores the timeline, spatial breadth, and procedure of the inspection, by providing access to digital versions of the original documents produced by the royal inspection visita. The project provides an accessible forum for understanding how the lengthy and expensive process of royal governance effectively fostered relations between the ruling government in Spain and its many different constituencies on the ground in the Americas.

The site now offers full transcriptions of all the documents. Users could previously read the documents in their original form from high-quality images. Now they can dive deeper into the significance of the text itself. The kinds of words that Spanish officials were using– and the patterns in which they used them–help reveal the way that the Crown’s authority manifested itself locally.

Closer textual analysis also helps identify the multiple actors involved in this process. The Spanish monarch, Charles III, had designated José de Gálvez as the inspector general, or visitador. However, at every point, the inspection required the assistance of a wide variety of local officials, from priests to supervisors at the tobacco factory. Gálvez also frequently consulted with the viceroy, Carlos Francisco de Croix. These personal connections are significant because they reveal both the tensions and the cooperation that royal administration could meet in the Americas.

The new features of the “Bureaucracy on the Ground” site help make the obscure topic of imperial governance more accessible. For the Spanish Crown, 300 years of colonial rule depended on more than the faraway king’s decisions. It was the people on the ground who made the bureaucracy work, and this project aims to acknowledge the many forms of their participation in the process of imperial rule.

This project has received support from Professor Joan Neuberger, LLILAS Benson Digital Scholarship Coordinator Albert Palacios, and the UT Digital Writing and Research Lab

Also by Brittany Erwin

The Museo Regional de Oriente in San Miguel, El Salvador
The National Museum of Anthropology in in San Salvador
Review of The Archaeology and History of Colonial Mexico by Enrique Rodríguez Alegría (2016)
History for Us at the El Paso Museum of History

The Quilombo Activists’ Archive and Post-Custodial Preservation, Part I

By Edward Shore

(This is the first of two articles on a post-custodial digital archiving project being carried out by a group of researchers and archivists from UT Austin’s LLILAS Benson Latin American Studies and Collections together with their colleagues in the Ribeira Valley in Brazil.)

The author dedicates this essay to anti-dam activists on this International Day of Struggle Against Dams (March 14) and to the memory of human rights activist and Rio de Janeiro city councilwoman Marielle Franco, who was assassinated on March 14, 2018

Before dawn on March 14, 2015, I stood against a flickering street lamp at a bus station in the central square of Eldorado Paulista, a frontier outpost in the heartland of Brazil’s Ribeira Valley. Eldorado was the epicenter of a seventeenth-century gold rush that brought the first waves of enslaved West African peoples to São Paulo. With a population of 15,000, the town is hardly known for its raucous nightlife. Yet the thumping bass of baile funk music drowned out the twice-hourly chimes of church bells as young people congregated at an empty gas station to dance and to drink beer. I didn’t travel to Eldorado to party (although I can recommend a few local botecos). That morning, I was waiting for a ride to Adrianópolis, a mining town across the state border in Paraná, where I planned to interview quilombola activists at a demonstration commemorating the National Day of Mobilization Against Dams.

Just after 3 am, José “Zé” Rodrigues, an activist from Ivaporunduva, São Paulo’s oldest quilombo community, pulled up in a grey 15-passenger van.

“Did you have a good time?” he smiled, pointing to the crushed beer cans at my feet.

“Maybe when we get back,” I said.

Under a pitch black sky, we sped along SP State Road 165 into the heart of the Atlantic Forest, stopping at a dozen quilombos along the way to pick up other passengers. I had hoped to catch a few hours of sleep during the five-hour drive to Adrianópolis. But I couldn’t sleep as the activists next to me told jokes, stories, and legends of more than 200 years of struggle for land, citizenship, and racial equality.

During the nineteenth century, the Ribeira Valley served as a hotbed of resistance in the world’s largest and longest-lasting slave society. Rebel slaves escaped the gold mines and rice plantations that dotted the landscape of Eldorado, joining scores of maroon communities of fugitive slaves, known in Portuguese as “quilombos.” The Atlantic Forest provided safe haven to runaways like Gregório Marinho, Bernardo Furquim, and Rosa Machado, who raised farming and fishing villages near the shores of the mighty Ribeira de Iguape River. Many of these quilombos, such as Ivaporunduva, São Pedro, and Pedro Cubas, still exist today. Their survival is in part the result of geographic isolation and territorial mastery. Yet it also derives from the fact that since the nineteenth century, quilombolas and their descendants have drawn on history, ecology, and the law to challenge the efforts of governments and elites to dispossess them. The quilombos’ endurance is a testament to their long history of activism and resistance.

Quilombo Ivaporunduva in the Ribeira Valley, São Paulo. Photo by the author.

Throughout the twentieth century, quilombos confronted an onslaught of government projects to colonize the Ribeira Valley, the final frontier of Brazil’s most heavily industrialized state. The arrival of cattle ranchers, banana farmers, and mining companies led to violent clashes with small farmers, including quilombolas. In 1982, Carlitos da Silva, a rural activist from Quilombo São Pedro, was assassinated after standing up to a local rancher. The creation of state parks and enactment of environmental restrictions on subsistence farming in the Atlantic Forest also posed challenges to maroon descendants, whose livelihoods came under increasing attack. In 1988, the proposed construction of four hydroelectric dams threatened to flood 11,000 hectares of rainforest and submerge several dozen quilombos. But residents fought back.

During the 1990s, quilombolas gained the support of new allies who backed their struggle against the dams. Maria Sueli Berlanga and Ângela Biagioni, Sisters of Jesus the Good Shepherd nuns, founded MOAB (Movement of those Threatened by Dams) in Eldorado. Espousing the tenets of Liberation Theology, MOAB helped to organize rural black communities in opposition to the dams while pursuing legal action against cement giant Votorantim, the corporation behind the dam proposal. In 1988, on the centenary of abolition in Brazil, farmers and fishermen throughout the Ribeira Valley invoked Article 68, a constitutional provision that accorded land rights to remanescentes de quilombos or “maroon descendants.” In 1994, Ivaporunduva became the first quilombo to sue the Brazilian government for its failure to enforce Article 68. Under significant pressure from rural activists and the Catholic Church, the administration of President Fernando Henrique Cardoso finally bestowed a collective land deed to residents of Ivaporunduva. But the threat of the dams, mining companies, and land colonization still remained. Ever since, quilombolas of the Ribeira Valley have staged demonstrations on March 14 to demand land rights and an end to developmentalist projects.

Quilombola activists gather in Adrianópolis, Paraná, to protest developmentalist projects in the Ribeira Valley. March 14, 2015. Photo by the author.

At 8 am, we crossed the Ribeira de Iguape River by ferry, driving another fifteen kilometers until we arrived at a hillside village overlooking Adrianópolis. A delegation from Quilombo Córrego do Franco, Paraná, greeted us as we filed into a one-room schoolhouse for a town hall meeting. The giddy atmosphere of our delirious jaunt through the emerald mountains of the Upper Ribeira turned somber as activists spoke about the challenges confronting their communities.

Sr. Nilton Morato dos Santos of Córrego do Franco decried the devastating effects of lead mining, which has poisoned ground water, killed livestock, and contributed to alarming rates of cancer in Adrianópolis.

Sr. Benedito “Ditão” Alves of Quilombo Ivaporunduva lamented the failure of government agencies to grant special licenses to quilombolas for cultivating subsistence garden plots (roças) in the Atlantic Forest.

Dona Elvira Morato of Quilombo São Pedro blasted the glacial pace of titling quilombola lands.

Of the more than six-thousand quilombos that have petitioned for territorial rights in accordance with Article 68, only fifteen communities possess full titles to their ancestral lands.

At this rate, it will take the Brazilian government more than a millennium to issue land deeds to eligible communities, according to a recent study by the Comissão Pró-Índio.

Finally, Sister Maria Sueli Berlanga, co-founder of MOAB (today known by the acronym “EAACONE,” the Articulation and Advisory Team to Black Communities of the Vale do Ribeira), addressed the crowd.

“We started this fight thirty years ago. We keep fighting because we’re organized! We keep fighting because we know our rights! We keep fighting because we have each other! And we’ll be back here [in Adrianópolis] next year and the year after that and so on until we no longer have to fight anymore!”

MOAB banners commemorating National Day of Mobilization Against Dams. The first sign reads, “Yes to life! No to mining on quilombola lands!” The second sign reads, “For the preservation of our Environment, our History, our Culture, our Lives, and our Peace…[We say] no to mining companies! [We say] no to Dams in the Ribeira Valley!” Photo by the author.

I first traveled to the Ribeira Valley four years ago to carry out field work for my dissertation. But I discovered so much more: purpose, solidarity, and a remarkable history of resistance to slavery, capitalist exploitation, and environmental degradation. In addition to participant observation research and ethnography, I conducted extensive archival research at EAACONE’s field office in Eldorado. This extraordinary collection—spanning over two hundred years and containing newspaper clippings, photographs, film, correspondence, legal documents, and property deeds—demonstrates how runaway slaves and their descendants used historical memory and legal claims predating abolition to challenge territorial dispossession decades prior to the enactment of Article 68. In addition to demonstrating a historical agency that is often overlooked, the archive challenges the allegations of Article 68’s opponents, who have attempted to discredit remanescentes de quilombos by dismissing their territorial claims as the fabrication of outside agitators. In the coming weeks, I am planning to blog about my recent experiences working with LLILAS Benson archivists and EAACONE to create a post-custodial digital repository of the histories and legacies of quilombos, while considering the implications of this project for historical research and human rights in Brazil.

From PhD to Public Advocate: My Path

By Yael Schacher

(via Pexels)

In my first year on the job market in the fall of 2015, with a fresh PhD in American Studies from Harvard, I did not get an interview for a job at another university where I had been teaching as an adjunct (and getting stellar evaluations) for three years. This kind of rejection is not unusual, of course, but it was a wake-up call for me. It prompted me to take several steps which, in retrospect, seem more connected and directed than they did at the time. All of them led toward the job I began in January 2019 as a senior advocate at a refugee policy NGO in Washington, DC., where I am focusing on US asylum policy and immigration issues with humanitarian protection implications.

Refugees International, the NGO where Dr. Schacher works (via Refugees International)

First, I sought out meaningful projects and other institutional homes. Although I continued to teach one course a term at the university that had passed me over, I accepted a lectureship at a different kind of school: a liberal arts college where the teaching and institutional culture was quite different. One of my graduate school advisors suggested that I join a public policy research team led by a colleague at the Harvard Kennedy School. I got paid to do very interesting historical research (related to, but not precisely in, my field of immigration history) and also learned how to collaborate on a policy driven project. Another one of my graduate school mentors, a professor at the Harvard Law School, invited me to give a guest lecture in one of her classes.

Second, I decided to get more involved in advocacy, as I felt I had less to lose and a great deal to give. I ran and was elected to serve on the executive committee of the AAUP (American Association of University Professors) at the university where I had been teaching and focused my attention on two issues: the treatment of adjunct faculty and undocumented students. I also began volunteering one day each week at the legal services office of an immigrant aid organization near my home. I had studied and taught the history of immigration and refugee policy; now I was helping migrants apply for asylum and adjust their status. I went to immigration court with a young boy from Honduras who had crossed the border on his own and was placed with family members all the way in Connecticut. I helped numerous women apply for relief under the Violence Against Women’s Act and as victims of trafficking. The work at the immigration organization was gratifying, especially the conversations about immigration policy and casework that I had with social workers and attorneys there. It was especially rewarding to do this work in the wake of the presidential election in the fall of 2016, when I felt a bit less helpless than some of my fellow academics. I had an outlet to at least try to make a difference in the lives of people who would be most affected by the new administration’s policies.

Still, I had not given up the hope of getting a professorship or of publishing my dissertation as a book. Throughout the fall of 2016, I applied for jobs and postdocs. I paid my way to go to the annual meeting of the American Historical Association for a preliminary interview that did not lead to a campus interview. I also had a skype interview that did lead to a campus interview at a liberal arts college in the early spring—but no job offer. When I learned that I had received a postdoctoral fellowship at UT’s Institute for Historical Studies, I was thrilled, but also unsure if I should take it because it would mean spending so much time away from my school-age children and partner (who could not move across the country for just a year). My partner was supportive and so I went off to Texas in the fall of 2017 (returning home for one or two long weekends each month and all breaks).

Poster for the AHA’s annual meeting in 2016 (via AHA)

At first, being at UT made me all the more determined to find a way to stay in academia. I was treated as a scholar, given time and resources to write and research, and was surrounded by graduate students, postdocs, and professors doing amazing projects. But, so much was going on in contemporary immigration policy—and on the very issue, asylum-seeking, to which I had devoted a decade of study — that I sought out colleagues at the law school and at an immigrant aid organization in Austin to continue working in advocacy. I resented the tremendous amount of time and energy I had to spend, yet again, on job applications—rather than writing my book—and the travel and preparation for interviews and job talks that did not lead to job offers.

In the winter of 2018, I had back to back experiences that most directly led me to where I am now. First, I traveled overseas for an interview and job talk. I realized there that, even if I were to get the job, moving would be a tremendous hardship for my family and I would have little opportunity to do research in US-based archives. Then, when I returned to Texas, I went with the UT law school’s immigration clinic to the Karnes detention center to help women asylum-seekers prepare for their credible fear interviews. I knew then: given the contemporary academic and policy landscape, advocacy was much more appealing to me than academia.

In the spring of 2018, my mentor at the Harvard Law School asked me if I would join her and some colleagues to write a history of the contemporary American asylum system (essentially, picking up where my dissertation left off). I presented a conference paper on asylum advocacy in the 1980s—focusing especially on how contemporary litigation was replaying some of that decade’s battles. Returning to Connecticut, I continued volunteering at the immigrant aid organization, seeing first-hand how new policies influenced casework. When, in June, I saw the advertisement for the job at the refugee policy NGO, I jumped at the chance to apply. This was at the same time that the administration’s family separation policy was in the headlines and I felt an urgency to use what I knew about the past to influence the present.

Pragmatically, I knew I had appropriate writing samples and strong references. When I got the interview, I reached out to academics who had shifted to working at think-tanks and non-profits and they helped me prepare effectively. I was an unconventional candidate for the job—the others had degrees in law or public policy. But I had deep knowledge, a broad network, and evidence of commitment. This was a newly created position for the organization; contemporary policies and events were leading it to focus on asylum policy in the US in a way it had not done before. We made a great match.

Like other historians of immigration, I frequently point to past “crises,” debates, and policies that resonate with those of today. That the present seems so similar to—if not worse than—the past, can lend itself to a cynical throwing up of the hands: the more things change, the more things stay the same; history is cyclical and progress a myth. My new job forces me to do something more: to use what I know about patterns and dynamics in the past, particularly about the dialectic between advocates and officials, to figure out what could effectively push policy in a better direction. I am excited to use my analytical and writing skills in my new job. But I also have to learn to write a bit differently. The historian me tends to try to learn everything I can about a given topic, figure out who wields power and how institutions work in a time and place, and, tentatively, interpret and criticize assumptions and methods. In my new job, instead of starting with a context, I start with a goal–and write about why and how we need to get there. To do this, I will combine the analytical skills I sharpened in my research on asylum with the concrete approach I developed while engaged in direct legal representation of asylum seekers. This pragmatism is new to me, but also feels right, especially right now.

From There to Here: Lina de Castillo

By Lina de Castillo

Map of Columbia (via Wikipedia)

In September of 1980, my mother took a calculated risk. As a talented singer with perfect pitch frustrated by a broken marriage and limiting law career, my mom left Bogotá, Colombia to pursue her dream of opera singing. My father, already starting his second family, agreed that my brother and I needed to go with her. My maternal grandparents followed us to the United States soon thereafter. While my mother worked hard to win first prize at international lyric-opera competitions with the help of a renowned voice coach, my brother and I worked hard to learn English and excel in school with the help of caring teachers, our grandparents, and kind friends. We both were inspired by our mother’s tremendous efforts and her willingness to take risks. Although my daily life during the school year took place in Westchester County, New York, an important part of my childhood also took place in Bogotá, where I spent many summers and occasional winter breaks with my Colombian family. I yearned to learn more about the place of my birth. I also missed my family terribly when I wasn’t with them. At the same time, I appreciated the security, opportunities, and friendships I found in the United States.

Curiously, although Latin America was often included in the content of our social studies textbooks, we rarely got the chance to actually study the region. As an undergraduate student at Cornell University, I finally found courses that began to teach me about Latin America, including a course on US-Latino literature (the gendered sensitivity evoked by “Latinx” had yet to be imagined). For the spring semester of my junior year, I decided to ‘study abroad’ at home in Colombia. Doing so proved to be one of the most eye-opening and academically satisfying experiences of my life up to that point. The international relations seminar I took with Juan Gabriel Tokatlian at la Universidad de los Andes helped me see more clearly the problems that come with treating a public health crisis (drug addiction) through militarization and strategies of war. At the Javeriana University, I signed up for a graduate-level seminar on the Annales school, a style of historiography developed by French historians in the 20th century that stresses long-term social history. A fellow student openly revealed his Marxist leanings and offered memorable critiques of our readings. These conversations for the first time allowed me to realize that there could be different schools of thought when it came time to develop historical analyses. Upon graduation, I decided to return to Colombia, where I taught a version of the US-Latino literature course at the university level, but only until my supervisor required that I teach the 19th-Century Colombian History survey. These experiences, together with the friendships I made with colleagues at la Javeriana and los Andes made one thing clear: if I wanted to be serious about teaching and researching at the university level, I needed to pursue graduate study in the United States. At the end of the day, the only career track that would allow me to bi-locate between my two beloved homes, the United States and Colombia, was the historical profession.

Also in this series:

Tatjana Lichtenstein
Julie Hardwick
Toyin Falola
Yoac Di-Capua
Susan Deans-Smith

Monumental Reinterpretation

On the west side of the Denver Capital building stands a soldier atop a stone monument. The soldier is easily recognizable as a Civil War soldier with his rifle ready, sword at his side, his distinctive hat, and the gaze of a vigilant soldier, saddened to be fighting his brother and countrymen. Ari Kelman dedicates portions of his book, A Misplaced Massacre: Struggling Over the Memory of Sand Creek, to a discussion about the history of this Civil War monument. The monument was erected and dedicated in 1909. This date places the monument in a period of United States history that saw the rapid erection of monuments across the landscape. Americans had emerged from the smoke and haze of the Civil War into a brave new world of freed slaves, Indian wars, and reform movements. Memorialization allowed for the reinterpretation of the racially motivated fratricide and cleansing of the west. Instead memorializers could reforge the familial bonds of the Union in stone. Denver memorialized this glory with their Union Soldier statue and a plaque that proudly displays a list of all the battles and engagements of the Civil War that Coloradans participated in. Notably listed in the battles is Sand Creek.

On November 29, 1864, Colonel John Chivington, with 700 men, attacked the Cheyenne and Arapahos camped peacefully along Sand Creek. Within the encampment was Black Kettle, a well known peace negotiator between the white settlers and the Indians. Black Kettle had recently returned to the Sand Creek camp, after concluding peace settlement negotiations at Fort Weld, where Chivington happened to be stationed. Upon realization of Chivington’s betrayal, Black Kettle immediately raised the American Flag and a white flag of surrender above his tipi, desperate to prove how those in the camp were friends of Americans and therefore peaceful. Chivington and his men took no heed of the raised flag, and continued the attack, killing not only men, but women and children who begged for mercy on their knees. Many ran to the sand beds along the creek where they burrowed into the sand, seeking cover from the sea of bullets. As the dust settled, 150 Cheyenne and Arapahos were dead. Chivington suffered the loss of ten men. His remaining 690 men proceeded to mutilate and desecrate the bodies of the deceased, with many keeping various body parts as grisly mementos.

As Kelman shows, immediately following the events of Sand Creek the public memory becomes cloudy and convoluted. For Chivington, the Union soldiers, and the American Nation, Sand Creek was a glorious battle in the story of westward expansion and the expulsion of the rebellious and violent Indians from the landscape. For the Cheyenne and Arapahos, Sand Creek was a brutal slaughter and massacre. One of Chivington’s men saw it the same way. Silas Soule was uneasy as he marched out on the day of the attack. When they arrived at Sand Creek, Soule refused to order his men to fire and he watched from the sidelines as the rain of bullets poured down on Black Kettle’s camp. Soule recorded the event in his letters, agonizing over his memories of that day.

A battle is often defined as an extended struggle between two organized armies. A massacre on the other hand is understood as the brutal and violent killing of multiple victims. The terms battle and massacre both carry heavy and violent meanings, but the picture they evoke are not the same. This difference in how to view the history and memory of Sand Creek coalesced around the Civil War monument in Denver in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The inclusion of Sand Creek in the list of battles and engagements on the monument at the Denver State Capitol projects an authority over the definition of the event and downplays its injustice by suggesting that there was a more even playing field between two opponents equally engaged. This leads the general public to believe that the band of Cheyenne and Arapahos provoked Chivington’s attack.

The Sand Creek Massacre as imagined by Harper’s Weekly in 1868 (via wikimedia)

The debate over the monument was strikingly similar to the many debates we have seen in the past year over the many Confederate monuments across the American landscape. The central question is what do we do with these monuments that valorize highly politicized motivations but also provide a glimpse into the people, culture, and history of those who erected these very monuments? For historical preservationists, this question creates a crucial internal battle. Preservationists recognize the white veil that hides the ugly truth of the monument’s history and purpose. However, their desire to preserve leads them to a fiery inferno. Ultimately, preservationists cannot come to a consensus on what should be done, however. many advocate for at least reinterpretation of the monuments.

Reinterpretation was the path Colorado ultimately decided upon. A small plaque was attached, not to the monument itself, but to the brick knee-high wall around the monument. The plaque provides a small nugget of insight into the controversy over the memory of Sand Creek; and yet it still leaves open just enough ambiguity to allow a visitor to interpret Sand Creek as a battle.

Monuments have authority. They are literally etched in stone. They influence the way the public perceives and remembers history. After all, how do you argue with a giant bronze plaque attached to a monumental piece of stone, holding up a heroic citizen soldier who fought to preserve our Union?

Further Reading:

Ari Kelman, A Misplaced Massacre: Struggling Over the Memory of Sand Creek (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013).

Thomas J. Brown, The Public Art of Civil War Commemoration: A Brief History with Documents (Boston: Bedford/St Martins, 2004).

Stephanie Meeks, “Statement on Confederate Memorials: Confronting Difficult History.”

Civil War and Daily Life: Snapshots of the Early War in Guatemala

Two young Guatemalan soldiers abruptly pose for the camera. They rush to stand upright with rifles at their sides. On a dirt road overlooking an ominous Guatemala City, they stand on guard duty. This snapshot formed the title page of an exhibit at the University of Texas at Austin’s Benson Latin American Collection in 2018. A collection of these and other documents by Rupert Chambers will become part of a permanent archive at the library. The photographs depict the year 1966, a time of martial law and increasing state repression of leftist movements and supporters of reform. A storm was brewing in Guatemala.

Historians can situate this collection of photographs in the context of Guatemala’s civil war. The Guatemalan military was mobilizing to eliminate leftist guerrilla armies, which had recently arrived on the scene. Leaders of these rebel armies framed their struggle in the hope of democratic reform. The Guatemalan state would not budge. The state military agenda rested on two pillars: fierce Cold War anti-communism and protection of the Guatemalan oligarchs’ monopoly on land and labor. Nearly two decades later Guatemalans would learn of the brutality of a military regime that would go to any lengths, including genocide against innocent indigenous-Mayan civilians, to suppress the insurgency.

Was this snapshot of two young foot soldiers a sign of what was to come? It is convenient to position these two soldiers as symbols of the violence that ensued in coming decades. But in 1966, terror had not yet reached its apex. The conflict was still, in part, a “gentlemen’s war,” fought between members of the upper and middle classes. At the time, foot soldiers, many of whom came from poor Mayan communities, were unaware of the military operations that would define the ensuing decades. They experienced the same ominous environment of uncertainty that most Guatemalans did.

This past February, the author of these photographs, Rupert Chambers, reflected on his work for a public audience at the Benson Latin American Collection and took time to answer my questions. He visited Guatemala in 1966 as a UT graduate student doing historical research. There, Chambers documented the streets and people of Guatemala City and rural towns. He photographed Mayan women at local markets, children selling goods, and funeral processions through the streets. The camera lens captures citizens who continued to make a living, coping through poverty, violence, and discrimination. How do these photographs help us understand the context of the civil war?

As an American in a highly fragile moment in Guatemala, Chambers reflects on the lack of awareness among Americans in Guatemala about the military and political conflict at the time. “They [Guatemalans] knew we [the U.S. Government] had overthrown their revolution in 1954; we had not yet admitted it to ourselves.” He was referring to the CIA administered revolt that replaced Guatemala’s 10-year old democratic government with a right-wing regime.

In 1966, roughly a decade into the Vietnam war, U.S. military advisers were exporting their anti-communist military infrastructure into their neighbor in Central America. Guatemalan generals obligingly received aid in the form of training, as well as technical and material support. The American military also authorized thousands of Guatemalan military commissioners to help combat the perceived communist threat. In the 1980s, the military collaboration was more obvious to American observers. In 1966, however, Americans in Guatemala were still in the dark. Chambers remembered how “few of us were aware of the full extent of U.S. support and intervention.”

An air of uncertainty occupied the minds of ordinary Guatemalans as well. Chambers spoke about this overall atmosphere, pointing out that most Guatemalans were aware of the conflict but not the extent, and no one would have used the term “civil war” at that juncture. “While not exactly the calm before the storm, the mid-1960s gave only clues and portents.”

Behind the scenes, networks of right-wing terror groups flowed in the capital city. Signs of terror reared their ugly heads. Chambers described witnessing street signs of the mano blanco (white hand). The “white hand” was a symbol for a clandestine terror organization that used death lists to assassinate democratic leaders and decorated the corpses of their victims with threatening notes. In the 1960s, Guatemala would become one of Latin America’s first settings of “forced disappearances.”

Despite this violent background, Rupert Chambers’ photographs provide an important perspective on the “day-to-day.” As Chambers states, “Guatemalans had lived in a context of violence for so long that in the mid-sixties this all appeared to them as more of the same, a constantly fluctuating level of violence, a cause for concern but not yet something very much out of the ordinary as it was soon to become.”

Chambers prompts historians to consider whether we can we document a tragedy before it happens. Photographer Sally Mann once stated that “photographs open doors into the past, but they also allow a look into the future.” Historians may examine such photographs for clues of terror, silence, and ambiguity. There is something deceptive, however, about looking at these photographs solely through the prism of what was to come; something deterministic. The precariousness of Guatemala’s situation was as much a product of history as it was an unfortunate feature of daily life. And while Guatemalans feared the past and future, their dignity remained in the present.

Photo documentary evidence of state violence also has a history. About a decade after Chambers’ 1966 photographs, a new wave of visual records would help document the violence in Guatemala, spearheaded by the likes of Jean-Marie Simon, in her book Guatemala: Eternal Spring, Eternal Tyranny, and Pamela Yates, in her documentary, When the Mountains Tremble. Such visual documentation propelled human rights efforts to combat the impunity of the Guatemalan state apparatus, which was responsible for around of 90% of civilian deaths during the war.

Chambers’ photographs embodied one of the earlier stages of the documentation of the civil war. His photographs document an underexamined area of history in the ambiguities and fears of daily life under violent regimes. While photography was Chambers’ hobby, he intentionally set out to document human dignity, something he claimed to learn much about from the people of Guatemala. Chambers continues this work in his new project in Mexico.

(All photos here are published with the permission of the photographer.)

An Anticipated Tragedy: Reflections on Brazil’s National Museum by Edward Shore

Black Amateur Photography by Joan Neuberger

Media and Politics from the Prague Spring Archive by Ian Goodale

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The Public Archive: The Road to Sesame Street

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.

The Road to Sesame Street by Peter Kunze features government documents tracing the development of the Public Broadcast Act of 1967, the landmark legislation that established the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, PBS, and NPR. Using materials from the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library in Austin, this project provides a behind-the-scenes view of the power players, interest groups, and decisions that laid the groundwork for American public media through digitized documents, blog posts, and lesson plans.

More on Kunze’s project and The Public Archive here.

The Public Archive: Qahvehkhaneh, Reading Iranian Newspapers

The coffeehouse, qahvehkhaneh, was an important political and cultural institution in Iran in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As men drank coffee, played backgammon, and discussed business, they also listened to impassioned pleas for democracy and reform from newspapers published in the Ottoman Empire, Russian Caucasus, and British India, smuggled into Iran and read aloud. Hoping to replicate the qahvehkhane’s spirit of sharing knowledge and camaraderie for anyone interested in Iran, Andrew Akhlaghi’s project comprises of digitized issues of Etella’at, an Iranian newspaper founded in Tehran in 1926. In addition to the newspaper collection, this site is also allows students of Persian to collaboratively translate articles.

More on Akhlaghi’s project and The Public Archive here.

The Public Archive: Frederic Allen Williams

Frederic Allen Williams (1898-1955) was a prominent sculptor, lecturer, intellectual, and rodeo rider. Based in New York City, he became known for his talks on Native American art delivered in his midtown studio using magic lantern slides, an early type of image projector. By digitizing a sizable collection of Williams’ prints, negatives, lantern slides, and other ephemera held at the Harry Ransom Center, Jesse Ritner‘s digital project not only makes these materials accessible to wider audiences, but also reflects on using photography as historians and teachers.

More on Ritner’s project and the Public Archive here.

Also by Jesse Ritner on Not Even Past:

Death, Danger, and Identity at 12,000 Feet
The Curious History of Lincoln’s Birth Cabin
Paying for Peace: Reflections on “Lasting Peace” Monument
What Makes a Good History Blog?

The Public Archive

Doing History Online and In Public

by Joan Neuberger

Links to their projects can all be found below on this page.

We built these digital, public projects in four main steps.

First, with the help of UT librarians, the students identified collections related to their research that were not yet available to the public. These collections of documents come from the many wonderful archives on our campus: the Harry Ransom Center, the Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library, the Perry-Castañeda Library, the Briscoe Center for American History, and the Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection. Then we digitized them.

Second, we each wrote a series of blog-essays to share our archival finds with the public. Each blog is meant to show something historically significant about our documents and to open them up in ways that any curious reader, without any background in the subject, can understand and appreciate.

Third, we wrote lesson plans based on our documents to allow educators at the K-12 and college levels to bring our archives into their classrooms.

Finally, we each built a website to introduce our topics, to share our digitized documents, and to make our blogs and lesson plans openly available.

Here are the results:

Qahvehkhaneh: Reading Iranian Newspapers: by Andrew Akhlaghi

The coffeehouse, qahvehkhaneh, was an important political and cultural institution in Iran. As men drank coffee, played backgammon, and discussed business, they also listened to impassioned pleas for democracy and reform from newspapers published in the Ottoman Empire, Russian Caucasus, and British India, smuggled into Iran and read aloud. This qahvehkhaneh is meant to spread the issues of one newspaper, Etella’at, to those curious about Iran.

Bureaucracy on the Ground: the Gálvez Visita of 1765: by Brittany Erwin.

This project examines the localized consequences and on-the-ground implications of the royal inspection, or visita general, administered by José de Gálvez in New Spain from 1765-1771.

After the Silence: María Luisa Puga and the 1985 Mexico City Earthquake by Ashley Garcia

María Luisa Puga (1944-2004) was a talented Mexican novelist from the Post-Boom movement whose personal notebooks, manuscripts, correspondence, and related documents are held in the Benson Latin American Collection. On this site you will find digitized selections from Cuaderno 118, which contains both Puga’s coverage of the earthquake that struck Mexico DF (now Mexico City) in 1985 and her reflections on those original pages, written in 2002.

Building a Jewish School in Iran: The Barmaïmon-Hamadan Manuscript by Isabelle Headrick

Where do you go when you want to change the world? For Isaac and Rebecca Bassan in 1900, the destination was Hamadan, Iran, to establish a French-language, Jewish school for the small Jewish community in that city. About fifty years another teacher at the school, Isaac Barmaïmon, wrote an 81-page manuscript that describes the first twenty years of the school’s existence.

Food Migrations: Texas Czech Culinary Traditions by Tracy Heim

Texans with Czech heritage have been able to preserve their culture in America through organizations, cultural events, church groups, and especially through food. Two books of recipes and other documents contextualize the process of migration into life in Texas and create a framework for understanding the Texas Czech culture.

Indian Revolt of 1857 by Anuj Kaushal.

South Asia witnessed an event during 1857 which altered the history of India, Britain, and the British East India Company. The event, known as a mere “mutiny” by the British and as an anti-colonial revolt by Indians, was reported in the English language press around the world.

The Road to Sesame Street by Peter Kunze

The Road to Sesame Street features government documents tracing the development of the Public Broadcast Act of 1967, the landmark legislation that established the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, PBS, and NPR. Using materials from the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library in Austin, this project provides a behind-the-scenes view of the power players, interest groups, and decisions that laid the groundwork for American public media.

Animating Italian Immigration: Sicilian-American Puppetry by Megan McQuaid.

Attending a puppet theatre performance with familiar characters acting out well-known stories gave some Italians living in New York City a regular taste of the homeland they had left behind.

Frederic Allen Williams: Citizen-Artist with a Magic Lantern by Jesse Ritner

Frederic Allen Williams (1898-1955) was a prominent sculptor, lecturer, intellectual, and rodeo rider based in New York City, where he became known for his talks on Native American art, illustrated with magic lantern slides, which he gave in his midtown studio near the then recently built Museum of Modern Art.

Woven Into History: Living Cultural Fabrics by Alina Scott

The nineteenth and twentieth-century Navajo rugs in this collection aims to provide a platform for respectful collaboration and discourse to recenter the discussion of Navajo culture and commodity production around them and to diversify traditional conversations about Navajo textiles and their communities.

Mercenary Monks by Jonathan Seefeldt

These texts are windows into a thriving monastic world whose varied activities included: raising mercenary armies, caring for widows and child brides, providing credit and other banking services, collecting tax revenue from farmers, providing merit and prestige to an emerging merchant class, and asserting a (short-lived) form of political independence.

Guards and Pickets: The Paperwork of Slavery by Gaila Sims.

The documents in this collection provide a glimpse into the paperwork created to control the movement and relationships of the enslaved, as well as the financial documentation used to make money off the institution of slavery.

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the following people for sharing their expertise in digital and public history with us: Dale Correa, Liza Talbot, Ian Goodale, Stephanie Malmros, Christina Bleyer, Albert Palacios, Andrea Gustavson, Elizabeth Gushee, Astrid Ruggaldier, Penne Restad, and Stacy Vlasits.

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