Transnational Archives - Page 5 of 7

A History of Islam in America: From the New World to the New World Order by Kambiz GhaneaBassiri (2010)

In the last decade, the history of Muslims in America has come into its own and A History of Islam in America provides one of the most comprehensive and even-handed treatments of the subject. Many previous studies breezily pit “Islam” against the “West.” Sidestepping the assumption that the two categories are essentially different, GhaneaBassiri studies the actual lived tradition of Muslims in America instead of second-guessing their compatibility.

America has been home to Muslims for a long time. Compelling stories come to the fore. Some Muslims arrived in the New World before slavery, like the adventurous sixteenth-century Moroccan cowboy and healer, Estevanico. Enslaved African Muslims sometimes resorted to private worship and remained active in their local communities. The story of Selim, an Algerian captive who petitioned for his freedom, is fascinating. Understanding his constraints, Selim converted to Christianity and, as a result, received economic and political benefits. He finally earned enough money to return to Algeria as a free man. Once there, he reverted to Islam.

Much past research about Islam in the West has focused on perceptions. For instance, Timothy Marr’s The Cultural Roots of American Islamicism and Susan Nance’s How the Arabian Nights Inspired the American Dream: 1790-1935 study only non-Muslim Americans’ representation of Islam. But images of Muslims in literature and political propaganda are not the only sources at our disposal. The historical records of Muslim individuals and institutions show that in the past four hundred years, Islam and America have interacted and the relationship between the two has defined each. Islamic America, like the rest of American society, is not one uniform set of communities, practices or symbols, but it has nonetheless existed in different forms continuously on this side of the Atlantic.

American political, legal, and civic institutions have provided many ethnic and religious groups, not only Muslims, with opportunities for participation mixed with doses of exclusion. GhaneaBassiri tells us of Muslims who collaborated and challenged these norms through organizations of their own. In the period between the two world wars, Islamic community building took root in mosques and benevolent societies like the Moorish Science Temple and the Nation of Islam. Islam allowed black Muslims new tools for rethinking race, religion, and progress in the aftermath of World War II when optimism about human accomplishment waned. Civil Rights legislation offered opportunities for immigrant Muslims by declaring loudly that discrimination based on race would not be tolerated. A positive, if accidental, symptom of immigration reform was the realization that the Muslim community also struggled for self-reliance.

In the wake of the 1979 Iranian Revolution and the popular American use of the term “Islamic terrorism” in place of “Arab terrorism,” Muslims in the United States continued to participate in activism. Optimistic that their adopted land gave them substantial socio-economic and political advantages, Muslims also realized that prejudice, like anything else, fades through interaction. Today, the juggernaut terms “Islamic terrorism and fundamentalism” are the focus of U.S. foreign policy rather than Cold War enemies. But at the same time, GhaneaBassiri believes that American Muslim objectives continue to show increased diversity. With a multiplicity of institutions, Muslim groups and organizations have ties to non-Muslim institutions and individuals. These relationships, bonds and experiences testify to a larger and more varied experience than merely cultural conflict. This book drives home the point that America’s historical encounter with Islam has not been a clash. But, as the author explains, we can only get our arms around it when we look at how Muslims actually lived on American soil.

Photo credits:

Marion S. Trikosko, “President Jimmy Carter greets Mohammad Ali at a White House dinner celebrating the signing of the Panama Canal Treaty, Washington, D.C., 7 September, 1977”

Library of Congress

Kamal al-Din, People Marching before the Iranian Revolution

Author’s own via Wikimedia Commons

Borderlands Business: Conflict and Cooperation on the US-Mexico Border

by Anne M. Martínez

The economic ties between the United States and Mexico are well over a century old, but the coverage of the border rarely contextualizes it in these terms. In order to understand the violence we see today, we must consider the violence that erupted there in the early 1990s. The film Señorita Etraviada/Missing Young Woman (2001) chronicles the mysterious deaths of hundreds of women in Ciudad Juárez starting two decades ago. Filmmaker Lourdes Portillo challenges us to look beyond our assumptions about Mexican culture and biases about working-class women to recognize an epidemic of violence costing Mexico a generation. Portillo finds the maquiladoras, the factories on the border that manufacture products largely for American consumption and largely profiting American corporations, at the middle of the chaos that allowed the murders of these women.

Alejandro Lugo’s book, Fragmented Lives, Assembled Parts: Culture, Capitalism and Conquest at the U.S. Mexico Border, considers the historical legacy of the twin cities of Ciudad Juárez and El Paso, Texas. Lugo suggests that the placement of Juárez, at the intersection of the Iberian Century and the American Century, brings together global capitalism and imperial conquest in a way that reduces the human element – the maquiladora workers – to a cog in a global machine. To explore the historical legacy of the borderlands even futher, consider Intepreting Spanish Colonialism: Empires, Nations and Legends, edited by Christopher Schmidt-Nowara and John M. Nieto-Phillips. This collection of essays examines nation-building and historiographies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, centering on the narratives of Spain and its colonies as backward in comparison to the narratives of progress associated with Great Britain and its colonies. These historical legacies have stuck, in great measure, and they intersect in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands.

Vicky Funari and Sergio de la Torre present a different view of the maquiladoras in their documentary, Maquilapolis (2007). In a colonia on the edge of Tijuana, women maquiladora workers organize to fight for severance pay, safe working conditions, and to clean up of the toxic waste polluting their community. American business interests and Mexican government officials insist their workers have good lives, but we see otherwise in the tours the women give us of their communities. (Watch the trailer here.)

There are examples of productive cross-border alliances as well. The photographer David Bacon documents many of the efforts to build solidarity across the border, including the deep roots of many non-governmental organizations. There are also corporate projects that change the relationship between U.S. and Mexican partners. For example, PepsiCo has undertaken a new initiative that saves the corporation money, but also benefits small corn and sunflower farmers in Mexico. The elimination of middlemen and strategic use of regional production facilities, helps both the corporation and the farmers. Such projects, while still profit-oriented, can enhance communities in Mexico and reduce migration to the United States.

For more reading and viewing, take a look at Anne Martínez’s “Rethinking Borders” in DISCOVER.

Photo Credit:
Guldhammer, A Maquiladora factory in Mexico, via Wikimedia Commons

Undergraduate Essay Contest Honorable Mention: The Global Cold War by Odd Arne Westad (2007)

by Carson Stones

The Global Cold War by Odd Arne Westad is a fascinating account of superpower interventions in the Third World during the latter half of the twentieth century.Covering a wide sweep of history, Westad argues that the United States and the Soviet Union were driven to intervene in the Third World by the ideologies inherent in their politics.

Westad opens his book with an examination of the ideologies of the United States, the Soviet Union, and the post-colonial leaders before the Second World War. Emerging victorious from the war, Westad argues that the two countries believed it was their destiny to combat the competing ideas of modernity in the post-war era of decolonization. With the world divided between NATO and the Warsaw Pact, any country declaring independence outside the blocs was a potential battleground for the competing ideologies. In a conflict that lasted over forty years and affected billions of people worldwide, Westad highlights the events chronologically from the Korean Peninsula to Latin America, Southeast Asia, Africa, and finally the Middle East and Afghanistan.

Seamlessly tying together seemingly unrelated incidents, The Global Cold War manages to take a bird’s eye view of history while still providing incredible details of the specific events, which turned the tide of the Cold War. Westad explains that each pivotal turn represented a new ideological shift for Moscow and Washington in the continuing struggle to win the hearts and minds of newly emerging countries. A few notable incidents from the book include the CIA operations in Guatemala, containment in Vietnam, and détente in Ethiopia. As this book proves, these superpower interventions only exacerbated the conflicts of diverse nationalities who were struggling to emerge from under the heels of Imperialism. The unfortunate result of these interventions was incredible bloodshed, environmental devastation, and millions displaced as refugees. The turning point of the book is the 1979 Iranian Revolution, preaching a new ideology, Islamism, which rejected both liberal capitalism and Marxist-Leninist socialism. The best chapters in the book follow the emergence of Islamism and the repercussions of its rapid spread in a two-bloc world.

This book provided a refreshing perspective on the Cold War as it related to the political and social developments in the Third World. Echoing Clausewitz, Westad calls the Cold War “a continuation of colonialism through slightly different means.” Anyone who reads this book will appreciate Westad’s tragically ironic statement that while both Moscow and Washington were formally opposed to colonialism, the “methods they used in imposing their vision of modernity on Third World countries were very similar to those of the European Empires who had gone before them.” This book will force readers to question the motives of American foreign policies which authorized assassinations, toppled democratically elected regimes, and supported dictatorships all in the name of protecting freedom and democracy from the evils of socialism around the globe.The conclusion of The Global Cold War is especially poignant when considering the ongoing conflict in the Middle East and the return of American troops this Christmas. Twenty years have passed since the collapse of the Soviet Union but the specter of the Cold War still haunts American foreign policy today. With the breakdown of the bipolar world, this book should encourage citizens around the world to question the motives of any country, which imposes an ideology upon their neighbors as humankind progresses into the twenty-first century.

Photo credits

Unknown photographer, Soldiers ride aboard a Soviet BMD airborne combat vehicle, Kabul, 25 March, 1986

DOD Media via Wikipedia

Check out the other winning and honorable mentions submissions for our First Annual Undergraduate Writing Contest:

William Wilson’s review of George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia

Lynn Romero’s review of Open Veins of Latin America

Katherine Maddox’s review of Beirut City Center Recovery

Rethinking Borders: Salman Rushdie & Sebastião Salgado on the US-Mexico Border

by Anne M. Martinez

The U.S.-Mexico border, with all its power, danger, intrigue and excitement is even more complex than most acknowledge. As Gloria Anzaldúa suggested in her seminal work, Borderlands/La Frontera:

The U.S.-Mexican border es un herida abierta [an open wound] where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds. And before a scab forms it hemorrhages again, the lifeblood of two worlds merging to form a third country – a border culture… A border is a dividing line, a narrow strip along a steep edge. A border is a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary.

Anzaldúa focuses on the U.S.-Mexico border, while Salman Rushdie emphasizes figurative, more than literal, borders in Step Across This Line, “there are frontiers which, being invisible, are more dangerous to cross than the physical kind.” Rushdie, an international figure who spent nearly a decade in his own “borderlands” existence, provides a unique perspective on the role of frontiers, as he calls them. Step Across This Line, his 2002 Yale University Tanner Lecture on Human Values, travels the globe and the centuries to try to make sense of lines, frontiers, and borders and the peoples who traverse them in the early twenty-first century. Consider Rushdie’s analysis of this photograph:

There is a photograph by Sebastião Salgado that shows the wall between the United States and Mexico snaking over the crests of hills, running away into the distance, as far as the eye can see, part Great Wall of China, part gulag. There is a kind of brutal beauty here, the beauty of starkness.

Give the photo a second or third or fourth glance before continuing. Which side is the United States? How do you know? What kind of activity do you see? What kind of lives do you imagine are lived on either side of the wall? Rushdie continues,

At intervals along the wall there are watchtowers, and these so-called sky-towers are manned by armed men. In the photograph we can see the tiny, silhouetted figure of a running man, an illegal immigrant, being chased by other men in cars. The strange thing about the picture is that, although the running man is clearly on the American side, he is running toward the wall, not away from it. He has been spotted, and is more afraid of the men bearing down on him in cars than of the impoverished life he thought he had left behind. He is trying to get back, to unmake his bid for freedom.

Rushdie’s turn of phrase is striking. The idea of “unmaking” one’s “bid for freedom” counters our traditional casting of the United States as the land of the free.

So freedom is now to be defined against those too poor to deserve its benefits by the edifices and procedures of totalitarianism. What kind of freedom is it, then, that we enjoy in the countries of the West – those exclusive, increasingly well-guarded enclaves of ours? That is the question the photograph asks, and before September 11, 2001, many of us – many more, I suspect, than today – would have been on the running man’s side.

This prescient vision, a decade ago, came to be: the border in the post-9/11 world has been directly tied to terrorism, despite our knowledge that none of those who struck on 9/11 entered through Mexico. In fact, the alliance between the United States and Mexico that was being strengthened by Presidents George W. Bush and Vicente Fox in the days immediately prior to 9/11, disintegrated. The spirit of opportunity and cooperation between these neighbors evaporated in the aftermath of the attacks on the United States.

You may also enjoy this author’s blog post: Borderlands Business

In the meantime, you may enjoy these resources:

The Borderlands Encyclopedia
Educational resource on contemporary US-Mexico border issues.

Borderlands Information Center (BIC)
Central clearinghouse and referral center for information about the Texas-Mexico border region.

Migrations.
A photo essay on world migration by Sebastião Salgado (1997)

Corruption at the Gates
Two-part series from NPR’s All Things Considered, which examines the culture of drug money and corruption along the US-Mexico border.

The Forgotten Americans
PBS documentary about the people who live in Las Colonias, shanty towns and rural communities within 150 miles of the US – Mexico Border.

Latin American Network Information Center
“LANIC’s mission is to facilitate access to Internet-based information to, from, or on Latin America. While many of our resources are designed to facilitate research and academic endeavors, our site has also become an important gateway to Latin America for primary and secondary school teachers and students, private and public sector professionals, and just about anyone looking for important information about this public region.”

Photo credit:
Sebastião Salgado (Brazilian, born 1944)
U.S. – Mexico Border, desert of San Ysidro, California
negative 1997; print 2009. Gelatin silver print
34.4 x 51.4 cm (13 9/16 x 20 1/4 in.)
© Sebastião Salgado
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

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

by Kristie Flannery

The title of Carey’s best-seller is misleading. The True History of the Kelly Gang is not a “true history” at all, but rather an imagined autobiography of Australia’s greatest folk-hero, the bushranger Ned Kelly and his band of Irish-Australian outlaws. The novel is written as though it were an authentic autobiography, written by the bushranger on paper printed with the “National Bank of Australia” letterhead, dated 1878. It has an intentionally old feel as though it had been discovered by a historian in the archive. To write this novel Carey climbed into the bushranger’s worn-out boots, mounted his stolen horse, and bounded gallantly into the land of historical fiction bravely going where many have gone before.

Certainly Carey’s not-so-True History is based on historical evidence. The Kelly Gang’s criminal exploits left a sizable paper trail for historians to read and interpret, including criminal records, newspaper reports and wanted posters offering prizes for Gang members dead or alive. The real Ned Kelly also left the long “Jerilderie letter,” a sort of manifesto that he dictated during a bank robbery to justify his life of crime. Based on such documents, Carey makes Ned’s own voice clearly heard. Historians can also ponder the Kelly Gang’s famous suits of iron armour, and Ned’s eerie death mask, both of which are on display in public museums in Victoria.

The primary sources can tell us a lot about Ned Kelly and his Gang. Ned was born in 1854 in the colony of Victoria to impoverished Irish convicts. He became a petty thief while still a lad, appearing before a judge more than once for stealing livestock before his sixteenth birthday, and serving three years in prison before turning twenty. Upon his release from gaol, Kelly and his Gang gained notoriety for murdering three policemen and then robbing a series of coaches and banks. For a long time the elusive Kelly Gang avoided the police in a drawn-out game of catch me if you can. Kelly was finally shot by police after an epic shoot-out in the town of Glenrowan, where his Gang had kept the entire town population hostage in a pub. Soon afterwards, in 1880, Ned Kelly was hanged until dead in the Melbourne Gaol.

The documentary life history of Ned Kelly is a great one and it is complete in the sense that it has a beginning, a middle and an end. But there are still plenty of gaps that story-tellers like Carey want to fill and this is the beauty of historical fiction. It’s an art form that allows us to speculate on aspects of history that are otherwise are unknowable. What kind of man was Kelly? Who did he love? Who did he hate? Why did he pursue a life of crime? As Carey did not have primary sources that could answer these questions, he invented them.

In many ways Carey’s historical fiction sticks to the script of the Ned Kelly legend. Carey’s Ned is kind and brave, coerced into violence by the violence of the cruel colonial system he had the misfortune of being born into. It’s this version of Ned that has made it to the big screen many times, including in The Story of the Kelly Gang produced in 1906 and thought to be the world’s first feature-length narrative movie. Later films had clear political agendas. The heartthrob rocker Mick Jagger started as a radical Ned Kelly in Tony Richardson’s 1970 film (really!) who called for the establishment of an Irish Republic downunder, and in 2003 the late Heath Ledger played the bushranger in Gregor Jordan’s Hollywood production. This most recent Hollywood interpretation of Ned Kelly controversially suggested that Ned’s brother Dad Kelly and Joe Byrne were in love. Born from Carey’s fertile mind is a wife and baby for Ned. These wholly fictional characters allow us to also get to know the bushranger-hero as a husband and father.

Like any other good reads, historical fiction serves to entertain us. The True History of the Kelly Gang is a beautifully written story, and it won Carey the Man Booker Prize in 2001. But Carey’s novel also had a political program. The Ned Kelly that Carey imagines seeks to redeem a nation founded as a penal colony. For a long time Australians with convict heritage were ashamed of the fact. It was the myth of the honest bushranger that allowed Irish-Australians to embrace their ancestors who were transported to Australia against their will. Carey’s True History breathes new life into this legend. One can also read Carey’s portrayal of police stupidity and brutality sponsored by the Crown in the colonial period as an attempt to renew Australia’s Republican movement. In 1999, shortly before Carey wrote this novel, Australians voted no in a referendum to break political ties with Great Britain.

Today the Queen of England remains Australia’s Head of State and retains the authority to dissolve a democratically elected Government. Only a writer opposed to Australia’s membership in the Commonwealth would write the novel that Carey did.

It suggests that historical fiction also provides us with an opportunity to come to know a version of history that is more intriguing or more convenient than the actual past.

*Note from the editors of Not Even Past: we are aware that Australia is its own continent. However, because we do not currently have a section dedicated exclusively to books written on Australia, we decided, however inadequately, to categorize The True History of the Kelly Gang as “transnational.”

Photo credits:

The National Museum of Australia, “Armour worn by Ned Kelly, 1879, State Library of Victoria; armour worn by Joseph Byrne 1879, private collection; armour worn by Dan Kelly 1879, Victoria Police Museum; armor worn by Steve Hard 1879, Victoria Police Museum”

http://www.nma.gov.au/exhibitions/irish_in_australia/exhibition_overview/

You may also like:

Information on the exhibit at the National Museum of Australia entitled “Not Just Ned,” which covers the history of the Irish presence in Australia.

Casta Paintings

by Susan Deans-Smith

In 1746 Dr. Andrés Arce y Miranda, a creole attorney from Puebla, Mexico, criticized a series of paintings known as the cuadros de castas or casta paintings. Offended by their depictions of racial mixtures of the inhabitants of Spain’s American colonies, Arce y Miranda feared the paintings would send back to Spain the damaging message that creoles, the Mexican-born children of Spanish parents, were of mixed blood. For Arce y Miranda, the paintings would only confirm European assumptions of creole inferiority.

Casta paintings first appeared during the reign of the first Bourbon monarch of Spain, Phillip V (1700-46), and grew in popularity throughout the eighteenth century. They remained in demand until the majority of Spain’s American colonies became independent in 1821. To date over one hundred full or partial series of casta paintings have been documented and more continue to surface at art auctions. Their popularity in the eighteenth century suggests that many of Arce y Miranda’s contemporaries did not share his negative opinions of the paintings.

The casta series represent different racial mixtures that derived from the offspring of unions between Spaniards and Indians–mestizos, Spaniards and Blacks–mulattos, and Blacks and Indians–zambos. Subsequent intermixtures produced a mesmerizing racial taxonomy that included labels such as “no te entiendo,” (“I don’t understand who you are”), an offspring of so many racial mixtures that made ancestry difficult to determine, or “salta atrás” (“a jump backward”) which could denote African ancestry. The overwhelming majority of extant casta series were produced and painted in Mexico. While most of the artists remain anonymous, those who have been identified include some of the most prominent painters in eighteenth-century Mexico including Miguel Cabrera, Juan Rodríguez Juárez, José de Ibarra, José Joaquín Magón, and Francisco Vallejo.

Casta paintings were presented most commonly in a series of sixteen individual canvases or a single canvas divided into sixteen compartments. The series usually depict a man, woman, and child, arranged according to a hierarchies of race and status, the latter increasingly represented by occupation as well as dress by the mid-eighteenth century. The paintings are usually numbered and the racial mixtures identified in inscriptions. Spanish men are often portrayed as men of leisure or professionals, blacks and mulattos as coachmen, Indians as food vendors, and mestizos as tailors, shoemakers, and tobacconists. Mulattas and mestizas are often represented as cooks, spinners, and seamstresses. Despite clear duplications, significant variations occur in casta sets produced throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Whereas some series restrict themselves to representation and specification of racial mixtures, dress styles, and material culture, others are more detailed in their representation of flora and fauna peculiar to the New World (avocadoes, prickly pear, parrots, armadillos, and different types of indigenous peoples). While the majority appear to be in urban settings, several series depict rural landscapes.

What do these exquisitely beguiling images tell us about colonial society and Spanish imperial rule? As with textual evidence, we cannot take them as unmediated and transparent sources. Spanish elites’ anxiety about the breakdown of a clear socio-racial hierarchy in colonial society–the sistema de castas or caste system–that privileged a white, Spanish elite partially accounts for the development of this genre. Countering those anxieties, casta paintings depict colonial social life and mixed-race people in idealized terms. Instead of the beggars, vagrants, and drunks that populated travelers’ accounts and Spanish bureaucratic reports about its colonial populations, viewers gaze upon scenes of prosperity and domesticity, of subjects engaged in productive labor, consumption, and commerce. Familiar tropes of the idle and drunken castas are only occasionally depicted in scenes of domestic conflict. In addition, European desires for exotica and the growing popularity of natural history contributed to the demand for casta paintings. The only extant casta series from Peru was commissioned as a gift specifically for the natural history collection of the Prince of Asturias (the future Charles IV of Spain). And despite Dr. Arce y Miranda’s fears, many contemporaries believed the casta series offered positive images of Mexico and America as well as of Spanish imperial rule. In this regard, the casta paintings tell us as much about Mexico’s and Spain’s aspirations and resources as they do about racial mixing. Many owners of casta paintings were high-ranking colonial bureaucrats, military officials, and clergy, who took their casta paintings back to Spain with them when they completed their service in America. But there is also evidence of patrons from the middling ranks of the colonial bureaucracy. Very fragmentary data on the price of casta paintings suggests that their purchase would not have been restricted to only the very wealthy.

The casta paintings were displayed in official public spaces, such as museums, universities, high ranking officials’ residences and palaces, as well as in unofficial spaces when some private collections would be opened up to limited public viewing. The main public space where casta paintings could have been viewed by a wide audience was the Natural History Museum in Madrid.

Regardless of what patrons and artists may have intended casta paintings to convey, viewers responded to them according to their own points of reference and contexts. While much remains to be learned about who saw sets of casta paintings and where they saw them, fragmentary evidence suggests varied audience responses. The English traveler Richard Phillips, visiting the Natural History Museum in Madrid in 1803, enthusiastically encouraged his readers to go and see the casta paintings as exemplary exotica along with Japanese drums and Canopus pots from Egypt. Another English traveler, Richard Twiss, expressed skepticism about the inscriptions that described the racial mixtures depicted in a casta series he viewed in a private house in Malaga. And, to return to Arce y Miranda in Mexico, the casta paintings for him signified a slur on the reputation of creoles in Mexico.

Although we have a good general understanding of the development of this provocative genre much remains to be understood about the circulation, patronage, and reception of the casta paintings. We know, for example, that some casta series found their way to England. One tantalizing piece of evidence comes from the British landscape painter Thomas Jones (1742-1803) who made a diary entry in 1774 about a set of casta paintings he viewed at a friend’s house in Chesham. How these paintings were acquired by their English owners, as purchases, gifts, or through more nefarious means, remains an open question. We also need to know much more about patrons of the casta paintings and the painters in order to deepen our understanding about innovations and new interpretations that appear in this genre.

This is an electronic version of an article published in the Colonial Latin American Review © 2005 Copyright Taylor & Francis; Colonial Latin American Review is available online at www.tandfonline.com http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10609160500314980

For more on casta paintings:

Magali M. Carrera, Imagining identity in New Spain: Race, Lineage, and the Colonial Body in Portraiture and Casta Paintings (2003)

María Concepción García Saiz, Las castas mexicanas: un género pictórico americano (1989)

Ilona Katzew, Casta Painting: Images of Race in Eighteenth-Century Mexico (2004)

You may also like: Naming and Picturing New World Nature, by Maria Jose Afanador LLach (here on NEP)

Credits:
1. De Español y Mestizo, Castizo de Miguel Cabrera. Nº. Inv. 00006
2. De Chino Cambujo y India, Loba de Miguel Cabrera. Nº. Inv. 00011
3. Castas de Luis de Mena. Nª.Inv. 00026
Posted by permission of El Museo de América, Madrid

The Strangest Dream – Reykjavik 1986

by Jonathan Hunt

College freshmen have no personal knowledge of the Cold War. Born after the Berlin Wall’s fall and the Soviet Union’s collapse, the threat of nuclear Armageddon seems far removed from their experiences, a relic of a bygone age. Yet, today, more countries than ever hold weapons whose scale of destruction can dwarf that of every bomb used in World War II. As the Cold War nuclear arms race recedes from collective memory, it is important to remember why the world remains beneath the shadow of the mushroom cloud.

This October 11th and 12th, the world observed the 25th anniversary of the summit between U.S. President Ronald Reagan and Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev at Reykjavik, Iceland in 1986, where the leaders of the world’s superpowers contemplated the abolition of nuclear weapons. The talks remain the closest humanity has come to stopping the accumulation and proliferation of nuclear arms. Twenty-five years later, historians still debate the summit’s legacy. Even if the nuclear colossi had adopted Gorbachev’s plan to disarm in three stages by 2000, only their fine example would have persuaded Great Britain, France, China, India, and Israel to join them. Reading the minutes of the four meetings at Reykjavik, it is also unclear if gravity bombs like the ones that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki would have been eliminated. Nevertheless, during those two autumn days, Reagan and Gorbachev neared the brink of a nuclear-free world, only to turn back in defeat.

It seems, ironically, that Reagan’s abhorrence of nuclear weapons scuttled the talks. As president, Reagan made research and development of the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), an anti-missile shield derisively known as “Star Wars,” a centerpiece of his strategic policy. Nuclear abolitionists condemned the project as a multi-billion dollar boondoggle and a slippery slope toward normalizing the military use of nuclear weapons. Strategists weaned on the Cold War doctrine of mutual assured destruction warned that its construction could prompt the Soviet Union to launch a preemptive first strike. For Reagan, SDI represented a means by which to make nuclear weapons obsolete and an insurance policy if a “madman” ever got his hands on them. Gorbachev disagreed, and saw limits on SDI as indispensible if the USSR was to trust its rival to disarm.

At Reykjavik, Soviet and American negotiators smoothed over rough spot after rough spot, agreeing to limits and sub-limits on an array of nuclear delivery systems—bombs, cruise missiles, sub-launched, medium-range, and intercontinental ballistic missiles. More progress was made in 36 hours than the previous 15 years combined. Paul Nitze, the president’s special adviser on arms control and a fixture in U.S. foreign policymaking throughout the Cold War, remarked Soviet concessions were “the best we have received in 25 years.” When Reagan and Gorbachev began their fourth and final meeting, they knew the stakes: an historic agreement for deep arms cuts and eventual disarmament. They also knew the final and toughest challenge; how to finesse Reagan’s steely support for SDI and Gorbachev’s stand that the U.S. confine R&D to the labs.

Initial expectations for Reykjavik had been modest. Recurrent crises had beset U.S.-Soviet relations since Reagan took office. The White House’s more confrontational tone, the shooting down of a wayward Korean airliner over Soviet territory, the deployment of quick-strike missiles in Europe, and an alarming NATO nuclear exercise codenamed Able Archer, compounded an already fraught relationship. However, conditions eventually improved. Reagan assumed a more conciliatory line so as to facilitate arms control initiatives and lessen the chances of an accidental nuclear exchange. It was Gorbachev’s rise to power in 1985, however, that transformed the tenor of the Cold War by infusing new life into a listless Soviet system. Following a series of three elderly statesmen whose best days were behind them, he was confronted by an economic system with chronic shortages and, in April 1986, a catastrophic meltdown of the nuclear reactor at Chernobyl, Ukraine. Gorbachev insisted that “new thinking” be applied to the USSR’s manifold problems, and espoused the policies of perestroika, restructuring the Soviet economy, and glasnost, making the government more open and responsive. A major element of perestroika was redirecting the river of resources flowing into the state’s military-industrial complex, especially the secret agencies managing the USSR’s nuclear, biological and chemical weapons programs, to more productive ends. Unable and unwilling to keep pace with U.S. military spending, Gorbachev instead offered a three-step plan to liquidate the superpowers’ nuclear weapons.

It was a bold initiative, but Gorbachev’s labors were close to bearing fruit when he and Reagan sat down for their last tête-à-tête. Reagan promised to share advances in missile defense with the Soviets. Gorbachev fired back that the U.S. had thus far been unwilling to share even industrial and agricultural technology with his country. Just when the statesmen seemed to have exhausted their cases, Gorbachev’s foreign minister, Eduard Shevardnadze, urged them to cross the finish line, declaring they had “come very close to accomplishing this historic task … [a]nd when future generations read the record … they will not forgive us if we let this opportunity slip by.” Despite Shevardnadze’s appeal, however, Reagan and Gorbachev failed to agree on the wording of the final text. The two negotiating parties left Reykjavik without an agreement.

Sadly, subsequent generations have more often forgotten than condemned the talks. The calamity of climate change is more familiar to our undergraduates than the firestorm of nuclear war and the long night of the ensuing nuclear winter. In the 1980s, scientists theorized that only 200 thermonuclear explosions would kick up a planetary shroud of radioactive dust, lowering temperatures enough to recreate the climactic conditions in which the dinosaurs died off. Five countries—the U.S., Russia, Great Britain, France, and China—have more than 200 warheads. The U.S. and Russia are currently reducing their arsenals to 1,550 deliverable warheads. A conflict between India and Pakistan, who fought four wars since 1947, where nuclear weapons were used would jeopardize the continuation of life, as we know it.

Current global affairs hardly resemble the global situation in 1986 when two nuclear-armed superpowers testily eyed one another. Yet some themes have reoccurred. Just as the Soviet Union fiscal emergency forced Gorbachev to offer a plan to nuclear disarmament, today’s financial crisis could pave the way for deep multilateral arms cuts. The nuclear disaster at Fukushima, Japan augurs lessons similar to those of Chernobyl regarding the uncontrollable nature of nuclear power. It remains for the leaders of today to take advantage of their window of opportunity.

For two days on a remote archipelago in the North Atlantic, Reagan and Gorbachev discussed the entwined destinies of the Cold War and nuclear arms. As educators, we must remind our students of such moments, when history conspires to grant individuals the occasion to re-route its course. Reykjavik’s great tragedy is not its failure; after all, the negotiations paved the way for two momentous treaties—the 1987 Intermediate-Range Ballistic Missile Treaty and the 1991 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty. Its tragedy resides in its potential disappearance from our collective memory. For our students’ generation will have to address this dangerous legacy of the Cold War—even if they don’t remember it.

You may also like:

Reuters, Mikhail Gorbachev, “A Farewell to Nuclear Arms,” October 11, 2011

“The Reykjavik File: Previously Secret Documents from U.S. and Soviet Archives on the 1986 Reagan-Gorbachev Summit, from the collections of The National Security Archive, George Washington University, Washington DC.

Jonathan Hunt and Paul Walker, “The Legacy of Reykjavik and the Future of Nuclear Disarmament,” Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, Nov/Dec 2011.

Photo Credits:
Federal Government via Wikimedia Commons

The Forgotten Armies: The Fall of British Asia, 1941-1945 by Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper (2006)

by Isabel Huacuja

In The Forgotten Armies: The Fall of British Asia, 1941-1945, Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper chronicle the war years of the British Empire in its Asian Crescent, which curved from Calcutta to Singapore into Malaysia and Burma. Soldiers from the British 14th army stationed in India and Burma felt that few in the West took notice of them and sardonically called themselves the “forgotten army.” This label remains pertinent even today as the battles in Europe loom larger in the histories of the WWII than the war against Japan in Southeast Asia.

The “forgotten armies,” however, include much more than Britain’s 14th army. The forgotten armies encompass Subhas Bose’s Indian National Army, which fought for India’s liberation on the Japanese side, the Burma Independence Army of Aung San, and Chin Peng’s communist guerilla army in Malaya. Furthermore, Bayly and Harper’s forgotten armies also include the some 600,000 refugees who fled Burma in 1942 and perished in the mud and “green hell’ passes of Assam, as well as the thousands of laborers who toiled building the Burma – Thailand railway. Finally, this book’s forgotten armies include the Indian coolies, tea states workers, tribal people, ‘comfort women,’ and the nurses and doctors who provided Japanese and British soldiers with much needed labor and assistance. In this book, Bayly and Harper “reassemble and reunite the different, often unfamiliar narratives,” of the Far Eastern War, but the book amounts to much more than a military history of the Japanese invasion of the British Asia. The authors draw a “panoramic picture” of a region ravaged by “warfare, nationalist insurgency, disease and famine,” during the five daunting years from 1941 to 1945. Furthermore in the concluding pages, the authors argue that Japanese occupation hastened nationalist struggles for independence in the region.

Workers with hand tools build the Burma Road in southwest China, 1944

In The Forgotten Armies, Bayly and Harper present an exemplary scholarly work that draws from a large number of memoirs and diaries. But the authors deserve most praise because, in addition to scholarly accuracy and scope, they offer the nuance, enticement, and that feeling, which we can only call human touch, of great fiction. Take, for instance, Bayly and Harper’s description of the plight of refugees who fled from Burma into India: “Women and children collapsed and drowned in the mud […] Porters refused to touch the corpses so they lay decomposing until medical staff arrived with kerosene to burn them. The butterflies in Assam that year were the most beautiful on the record. They added to the sense of macabre as they flitted amongst the corpses.” Passages like this one stir a multitude of emotions: from shock, to terror, to anger, to sorrow and, finally, compassion. The authors paint a vivid and memorable picture of Malaysia and Burma under Japanese occupation and of India mobilized for war, and they tell a heart-wrenching and gripping tale of suffering and despair, a tale that the reader will feel both glad and sad to know. Bayly and Harper bring to life the many ‘forgotten armies’ that fought in Southeast Asia during WWII so that we never forget them again.

Photo Credit, US Army Signal Corps, via Wikimedia Commons

Lend-Lease

by Charters Wynn

During World War II the United States shipped an enormous amount of aid to the Soviet Union through the Lend-Lease program. The significance of this aid to the Soviet war effort has long been debated. During the Cold War, the Russians minimized its impact and the West exaggerated it. While it is obviously impossible to know what would have happened without the aid, it is clear that Lend-Lease came too late to be the decisive factor in the Soviet victory. But it is equally clear that when aid began to arrive on a massive scale, it significantly increased the speed with which the German Army was pushed out of the Soviet Union. Without Lend-Lease, the Soviet people would have had to make even greater sacrifices and would have suffered even more deaths.

The American Lend-Lease aid program was passed by the United States Congress in March of 1941 originally to support the war effort in Great Britain. American public and congressional opinion at first resisted the idea of extending the aid to the Soviet Union. Many Americans shared the views of Senator Harry S. Truman of Missouri, who argued, “If we see that Germany is winning, we ought to help Russia. If Russia is winning, we ought to help Germany.” But aid was offered to the Soviet Union in October 1941 and when Hitler incautiously declared war on the United States four days after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the de facto American-Soviet alliance became a reality.

Most of the early aid arrived on the dangerous “Murmansk run.” In raging seas and Arctic temperatures, convoys carrying American war materials and basic goods ran a gauntlet of German air and U-boat attacks, from Great Britain to the Soviet Arctic ports of Arkhangelsk and Murmansk. One convoy lost 70 out of 80 ships. Later in the war, the Pacific route, a short voyage across the Bering Straits from Alaska to the Siberian port of Vladivostok, made up nearly half the shipments, and one-third came over the mountains into Soviet Central Asia via the Persian Gulf.

The main American motive was self-interest, not generosity. While remaining suspicious of Stalin and the Soviet leadership, President Roosevelt believed the United States could lose only if Germany emerged victorious on the Eastern Front. With Germany controlling the continent of Europe from the English Channel to Central Russia, it was in the western Allies’ interests to help the Red Army fight the German forces.

Nor did the Russians see Lend-Lease as charity. They saw themselves as carrying the war on their shoulders in its most critical phase. As late as the end of 1942, the Red Army faced 193 German divisions, while Anglo-American forces in Africa faced only four. To Stalin and people in the Soviet Union, the western Allies’ failure to open a second front in Europe until June 6, 1944 was deliberately intended to let the Soviet Union bear the brunt of the fighting and casualties.

Lend-Lease aid was slow to arrive. During the most crucial period of the war on the Eastern Front it remained little more than a trickle. Only following the Battle of Stalingrad (August 19, 1942-February 2, 1943), when the Soviet Union’s eventual victory seemed assured, did American aid began to arrive on a significant scale – 85% of the supplies arrived after the beginning of 1943. Although the vast majority of the Red Army’s best aircraft, tanks, guns and ammunition continued to be manufactured in the Soviet Union, its mobility and communications, in particular, came to rely on Lend-Lease.

The Soviet ability to mount massive and overwhelmingly successful offensives against the still formidable German forces depended on the more than 360,000 trucks, 43,000 jeeps, 32,000 motorcycles, 380,000 field telephones, 2.5 million belts and 14 million boots produced in the United States, as well as large amounts of other equipment. Soldiers also depended on American food supplies, including hundreds of thousands of tons of Spam and other canned meat. Red Army troops advanced into Berlin driving American trucks and wearing American boots. As Stalin told Roosevelt, without Lend-Lease “victory would have been delayed.”

Ironically, although the Soviet Union would have won the war on the Eastern Front without Lend-Lease, American aid facilitated the Red Army’s arrival in Eastern Europe before Anglo-American forces, which set the stage for the beginning of the Cold War.

You may also like:

Russian newsreel video about Lend-Lease on our blog

Transcript of the Lend-Lease Act (1941)

“One for All, All for One: The Story of Lend-Lease,” (U.S. Government Printing Office, 1943)

To read more about the war on the Eastern Front:

Richard Overy, Russia’s War: A History of the Soviet War Effort, 1941-1945 (1997)
Roger Munting, “Lend-Lease and the Soviet War Effort,” Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 19 (1984), 495-510
Albert L. Weeks, Russia’s Life Saver: Lend-Lease Aid to the U.S.S.R. (2004)

Photo Credits:
American Douglas A-20 bomber, provided through Lend-Lease, is loaded on to a ship bound for Allied ports, ca. 1943. Photo by Gruber for U.S. Office of War Information, via Wikimedia commons
Graphs from “One for All, All for One: The Story of Lend-Lease”

The “Einstein Letter” — A Tipping Point in History

by Michael B. Stoff

On a mid-July day in 1939, Albert Einstein, still in his slippers, opened the door of his summer cottage in Peconic on the fishtail end of Long Island. There stood his former student and onetime partner in an electromagnetic refrigerator pump, the Hungarian physicist Leo Szilard, and next to him a fellow Hungarian (and fellow physicist), Eugene Wigner. The two had not come to Long Island for a day at the beach with the most famous scientist in the world but on an urgent mission. Germany had stopped the sale of uranium from mines in Czechoslovakia it now controlled. To Szilard, this could mean only one thing: Germany was developing an atomic bomb.

Szilard wanted Einstein to write a letter to his friend, Queen Mother Elisabeth of Belgium. The Belgian Congo was rich in uranium, and Szilard worried that if the Germans got their hands on the ore, they might have all the material they needed to make a weapon of unprecedented power. First, however, he had to explain to Einstein the theory upon which the weapon rested, a chain reaction. “I never thought of that,” an astonished Einstein said. Nor was he willing to write the Queen Mother. Instead, Wigner convinced him to write a note to one of the Belgian cabinet ministers.

Pen in hand, Wigner recorded what Einstein dictated in German while Szilard listened. The Hungarians returned to New York with the draft, but within days, Szilard received a striking proposal from Alexander Sachs, an advisor to President Franklin Roosevelt. Might Szilard transmit such a letter to Roosevelt? A series of drafts followed, one composed by Szilard as he sat soaking in his bathtub, another after a second visit to Einstein, and two more following discussions with Sachs. Einstein approved the longer version of the last two, dated “August 2, 1939,” and signed it as “A. Einstein” in his tiny scrawl.

The result was the “Einstein Letter,” which historians know as the product not of a single hand but of many hands. Regardless of how it was concocted, the letter remains among the most famous documents in the history of atomic weaponry. It is a model of compression, barely two typewritten, double-spaced pages in length. Its language is so simple even a president could understand it. Its tone is deferential, its assertions authoritative but tentative in the manner of scientists who have yet to prove their hypotheses. Its effect was persuasive enough to initiate the steps that led finally to the Manhattan Project and the development of atomic bombs.

Stripped of all jargon, the letter cited the work of an international array of scientists (“Fermi,” “Joliot,” “Szilard” himself), pointed to a novel generator of power (“the element uranium may be turned into a new and important source of energy”), urged vigilance and more (“aspects of the situation call for watchfulness and, if necessary, quick action”), sounded a warning (“extremely powerful bombs of a new type may thus be constructed”), made a prediction (“a single bomb of this type, carried by boat and exploded in a port, might very well destroy the whole port together with the surrounding territory”), and mapped out a plan (“permanent contact between the Administration and the group of physicists working on chain reactions in America . . . and perhaps obtaining the co-operation of industrial laboratories”). A simple conclusion, no less ominous for its understatement, noted what worried the Hungarians in the first place: “Germany has actually stopped the sale of uranium from the Czechoslovakian mines which she has taken over.”

Looking back at the letter, aware of how things actually turned out, we can appreciate its richness. For one thing, it shows us a world about to pass from existence. Where once scientific information flowed freely across national borders through professional journals, personal letters, and the “manuscripts” to which the letter refers in its first sentence, national governments would now impose a clamp of secrecy on any research that might advance weapons technology. The letter also tells us how little even the most renowned scientists knew at the time. No “chain reaction” had yet been achieved and no reaction-sustaining isotope of uranium had been identified. Thus the assumption was that “a large mass of uranium” would be required to set one in motion. No aircraft had been built that could carry what these scientists expected to be a ponderous nuclear core necessary to make up a bomb, so the letter predicts that a “boat” would be needed to transport it.

More than the past, the letter points to the shape of things to come. Most immediately, it shows us that the race for atomic arms would be conducted in competition with Germany, soon to become a hostile foreign power. And in the longer term, of course, the postwar arms race would duplicate that deadly competition as hostility between the United States and the Soviet Union led them to amass more and more nuclear weapons. The letter also presents us with nothing less than a master plan for what became the Manhattan Project, the first “crash program” in the history of science. After the war, other crash programs in science—to develop the hydrogen bomb; to conquer polio; to reach the moon; to cure cancer—would follow. Finally, by stressing the entwining of government, science, and industry in service of the state, the letter foreshadows what Dwight Eisenhower later called “the military-industrial complex.”

In the end, the “Einstein Letter” is a document deservedly famous, but not merely for launching the new atomic age. If we read it closely enough, it gives us a fascinating, Janus-faced look at a tipping point in history, a window on a world just passing and one yet to come, all in two pages.

You can read the letter in its entirety here.

Photo Credits:
Albert Einstein, 1947, by Oren Jack Turner, The Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons
Dr. Norman Hilberry and Dr. Leo Szilard (right) stand beside the site where the world’s first nuclear reactor was built during World War II. Both worked with the late Dr. Enrico Fermi in achieving the first self-sustaining chain reaction in nuclear energy on December 2, 1942, at Stagg Field, University of Chicago. U.S. Department of Energy via Wikimedia Commons

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