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Shadows at Dawn: A Borderlands Massacre and the Violence of History by Karl Jacoby (2008)

In Shadows at Dawn, Karl Jacoby examines the way that perspective influences historical memory and the role that political power plays in selecting which memories become codified in the historical narrative. Jacoby does this through a study of the Camp Grant Massacre—the death of approximately 140 Apache at the hands of a group of white and Hispanic settlers and Tohono O’odham natives in April 1871 in the Aravaipa Valley in Arizona.

Jacoby examines the settlement of the Arizona-Mexico border region from four perspectives, those of the Apache and O’odham natives, the settlers from Mexico, and settlers from the United States. He relates each group’s story individually, highlighting events forgotten, dismissed, or emphasized, and demonstrating the way each group created a unique narrative about a shared event. In doing so, he calls attention to the influence of numerous factors, that influence the creation of history and group memory, including a culture’s worldview and its political position within the larger social context.

Divided into two overall sections—before and after the Aravaipa massacre—Jacoby begins each group’s narrative with its arrival in the area northeast of the Gulf of California, in present-day southern Arizona (in the case of the O’odham, whose arrival in the area is uncertain, a discussion of its lifestyle before the other groups’ arrivals). Jacoby discusses each group’s interaction with the others from its own perspective, which he gleans by studying historical and biographical narratives, or artifacts with analogous function among the indigenous groups. By addressing the way each group interpreted common events common, for example the cause each group attributed to the Aravaipa attack, Jacoby theorizes about the way that each group envisioned its role in the conflict, and more broadly, the way that it interpreted life in the rugged Arizona territory.

Jacoby’s study presents a fairly straightforward analysis of the events leading up to the Araviapa Canyon attack and does not attempt to present a theoretical explanation for the violence of the frontier or colonialism. The major contribution of Shadows at Dawn, however, is Jacoby’s portrait of each group’s distinctive perspective on the same time period—and, in some cases, the same events. This is particularly useful in postcolonial or subaltern studies, for recovering the voices that are lost when, as is frequently the case, only the history of the dominant or victorious community has been preserved. Jacoby’s approach, however, also highlights the difficulty of subaltern histories—preserving the perspective of conquered peoples, which tends to be lost or destroyed. What fragments remain—in his account the calendar sticks of the Apache serve as an example of these historical remnants—generally paint an unclear or incomplete picture, at best, and the historian must engage in some degree of speculation to construct a narrative based upon them. This is particularly true when dealing with semi-literate groups like indigenous North Americans.

Despite this difficulty, Jacoby utilizes the extant material effectively and acknowledges the challenges that it presents. The result is unique both in its approach and analysis and makes for a readable and accessible study, which avoids the all-too-common trap of theoretical overreaching.

Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America by Rick Perlstein (2008)

by Dolph Briscoe IV

Rick Perlstein traces the antecedents of contemporary American politics to the period 1965-1972, presenting Richard Nixon as a central figure in creating a foundation for today’s bitter partisanship. Perlstein builds his story around the 1966, 1968, 1970, and 1972 elections, where Nixon, “the brilliant and tormented man struggling to forge a public language that promised mastery of the strange new angers, anxieties, and resentments wracking the nation in the 1960s,” acted as a critical participant. The author argues that during this time period, Americans intensely divided into two general groups, “each equally convinced of its own righteousness, each equally convinced the other group was defined by its evil.” Richard Nixon exploited the fears and rages of those Americans who resented elites and activists, further tearing apart the United States into warring political factions and establishing what Perlstein terms “Nixonland.” The nation of Nixonland persists today in America’s polarized electorate, which remains incapable of escaping the feuds initiated in the 1960s.

The author contemplates why Americans elected two presidents from different parties in landslides over a matter of eight years (Democrat Lyndon Johnson in 1964 and Republican Richard Nixon in 1972). He concludes that as Democratic liberalism collapsed under the weight of intense unrest at home and violence in Vietnam during the 1960s, Nixon sought to build a new political coalition among Americans who loathed the chaos permeating their society. Perlstein argues that Nixon particularly courted white southerners and northern working-class ethnics who resented the burgeoning counterculture, antiwar protestors, and Democratic embracement of civil rights. Yet as Nixon demonized his detractors and successfully captured the presidency in 1968, Democratic victories in the 1970 midterm elections and his increasing paranoia led him to conclude that his failure to be re-elected in 1972 would lead to the downfall of the United States, with its governance placed again in the hands of liberals now all the more influenced by civil rights activists, antiwar protestors, and rebellious youth. These obsessions caused him to resort to any means necessary to win a second term, leading to his own ruin in the Watergate scandal.

Nixonland is a magnificent work presenting a detailed political, social, cultural, and economic history of the United States during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Perlstein illustrates how the United States of today, especially in its acrimonious politics, owes much of its legacy to this tumultuous era. Perlstein concludes: “Both populations—to speak in ideal types—are equally, essentially, tragically American. And both have learned to consider the other not quite American at all. The argument over Richard Nixon, pro and con, gave us the language for this war.”

Further reading:

An interview with Rick Perlstein by History News Network.

Zeitoun by Dave Eggers (2009)

by Jessica Wolcott Luther

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

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

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

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

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

Great Books on Women in US History

By Megan Seaholm

As one of the students in my U.S. women’s history class put it, “Women are just like men; except that they are different.” For all that men and women have had in common these many millenia, women’s experience has often been different. Women’s History Month gives us the opportunity to talk about two new and one not so new “good reads” on the subject.

The University of Texas Press has just published the latest from the impressive authorial team, Judith McArthur and Harold Smith, faculty at the University of Houston-Victoria. Texas Through Women’s Eyes: The Twentieth Century Experience (2010) begins with “Social Reform and Suffrage in the Progressive Era, 1900-1920,” discussing the civic reforms pursued by white and black clubwomen, labor activism, settlement houses and prostitution districts, and the state woman suffrage campaign.

Black and white photograph by Richard Arthur Norton called Suffrage Hikers showing a line of women and men holding protest signs and flags

Texas suffragists were among the few southern suffrage associations to win partial voting rights for women before the federal amendment was passed. These Texas women pulled a “fast one,” and you will want to read about it.

McArthur and Smith continue through the Great Depression, World War II, the Civil Rights Movement, the Women’s Rights Movement, and the backlash to same in the last decades of the twentieth century. They make the history they reveal personal with selected documents like “Hallie Crawford Stillwell Gets a Sink and Builds a Bathroom,” “Jessie Daniel Ames Urges Women to Vote against the Ku Klux Klan,” “Army Nurse Lucy Wilson Serves in the Pacific Theater,” “Ceil Cleveland Becomes a Teenage Bride in the Fifties,” and “Ann Richards Moves from Campaign Volunteer to County Commissioner.”

McArthur and Smith are also the coauthors of Minnie Fisher Cunningham: A Suffragists’ Life in Politics (2005) which won the Liz Carpenter Award for Research in the History of Women from the Texas State Historical Association and the T.R. Fehrenbach Book Award from the Texas Historical Commission.

Christine Stansell, a well-regarded historian at the University of Chicago, provides a national perspective in her latest publication,The Feminist Promise: 1792 to the Present (2010). Don’t be daunted by the title. This is not a polemic, nor is it a weighty treatise on social theory. Rather, it is an exceptionally readable narrative of the efforts of American women to improve their social, political and legal situation. Stansell notes the efforts of women of color and of working class women alongside the more well-known white middle-class activists. She provides the general reader, as well as the scholar new to women’s history, with a splendid survey of women’s rights activism beginning with the days of the early republic. Her discussion of the woman suffrage movement is particularly strong because she explains the divisions in the movement and its culminating diversity, which led to the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. From the racism of the movement’s “southern strategy” to the dramatic protests of the National Woman’s Party in front of the White House even during World War I, Stansell’s unflinching history is good reading. Stansell barely pauses once women have won the vote. Her story continues through the interwar years to the “second wave” of feminism in the 1960s and 1970s.

Black and white photograph by Evert F. Baumgardner from 1958 entitled by Family Watching Television

Again, she explains that the “movement” was far from monolithic in goals or tactics, but she acknowledges the accomplishments as well as the internal politics.Stansell’s subject is organized women’s activism, which like activism of all sorts, was viewed with suspicion in the early years of the Cold War, aka “the McCarthy Era.” Fortunately, Elaine Tyler May moved into the breach with Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (1988). Who knew that Cold War foreign policy and its home front counterpart had such important implications for family life? May’s first chapter “Containment at Home: Cold War, Warm Hearth,” shows the ways that the Cold War foreign policy of “containing Communism” was reflected in family life.

The Fifties have been canonized as the nostalgia decade of domestic tranquility before the tumultuous Sixties. Professor May confounds, or, at least complicates, this happy myth. The frenzied public celebration of family life introduced new stresses into families and to couples, as social norms regarding dating, birth control, marital sexuality, consumerism, and divorce were in flux. A history of family life, a history of women’s experience, Elaine Tyler May’s Homeward Bound is a young classic.

Photo credits

Suffrage Hikers, By Richard Arthur Norton, via Wikimedia Commons
Bessie Colman, First African-American Pilot, National Air and Space Museum, via Wikimedia Commons
Family Watching Television, 1958, by Evert F. Baumgardner, via Wikimedia Commons

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

Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush’s War Cabinet by James Mann (2004)

by Aragorn Storm Miller

James Mann provides a lively and comprehensive study of the advisers who would guide George W. Bush as he sought to make the world safer for U.S. interests. Mann argues that Bush’s inexperience led him to rely on—as well as greatly empower—a cohort including some of the most experienced and respected members of the conservative foreign policy making community. This cohort—Cheney, Rumsfeld, Powell, Wolfowitz, Armitage, and Rice—came up in the ranks together, devoting much thought to altering the means and ends of U.S. foreign policy in order to avoid what they considered to be the errors of previous liberal and conservative administrations. The Bush administration’s abandonment of realpolitik and judicious use of force, to embrace of ambitious unilateralism and export of U.S. institutions, was thus not as sudden or unprecedented as many contemporary observers suggested. Such a new way forward had been brewing for decades.

As a journalist, Mr. Mann performs his role of “providing the first draft of history” admirably. Professional historians will appreciate his effort to position Bush’s “Vulcans”—the nickname his advisors used to convey their devotion to toughness and power—as the intellectual fulcrum between U.S. Cold War and post-Cold War conceptions of foreign relations. The more casual reader will also appreciate Mann’s ability to make these policymakers come alive as human beings who, like anyone, consist of a lifetime of personal dreams, disappointments, goals, and agendas. Indeed, as historians are becoming increasingly aware, men and women who toil on a specific problem or issue for decades often come to exercise far more influence on national policy than the given president who simply does not have the time to master every foreign policy question.

Righteous Propagation: African Americans and the Politics of Racial Destiny after Reconstruction by Michele Mitchell (2004)

by Ava Purkiss

Michele Mitchell’s Righteous Propagation is a fascinating study of the tactics African Americans used to bolster racial uplift after Reconstruction. Mitchell presents the book as a social history, revealing moments when African Americans shared ideas on ways to advance the race during the Progressive Era at the end of the 19^th and beginning of the 20^th centuries. In the prologue, Mitchell explains, “No longer divided into categories of ‘free’ or ‘slave,’ people of African descent acted upon assumptions that the race was unified, that institution building was possible, that progress was imminent.” This optimism shaped ideas about collective identity, destiny, and improvement of the race.

Early in the book, Mitchell outlines the ways African Americans idealized emigration to Liberia; the working poor embraced transplantation to Africa as a way to seek economic refuge. She also asserts that African Americans linked emigration, black colonization in Africa, and the reclamation of manhood. Here, Mitchell points out an interesting contradiction, explaining that the move to Africa had imperialist overtones, yet many African Americans were united in opposing white imperialism. Mitchell also discusses sexuality in the context of racial progress: the proper “choice of sexual partner, courtship, heterosexual intercourse, reproduction…,” were all imperative to the racial destiny of African Americans and pervasive in the discourse on racial progress. Surprisingly, she discovered that within the discussion of sexual politics, African Americans championed eugenic strategies such as birth control advocacy, sexual purity crusades, and “better babies” campaigns to counter racist ideas about biological inferiority.

Focusing on everyday life, Mitchell discusses the importance of cleanliness and living conditions in the black home, and the burdens black women carried at this time: “[African American women] were simultaneously caricatured by white Americans as diseased contaminants and characterized by Afro-Americans as primary agents in regenerating the race’s home life.” In serving as both agents and targets, African American women were an essential contradiction in the circulation of ideas about racial destiny and improvement. The final chapter examines miscegenation and the ways individual choices about romantic partners affected the race as a whole. The author highlights the ways black nationalism, namely the ideologies of Marcus Garvey, stipulated ideals of sexual conduct, masculinity, racial purity, and marriage, which factored into the intimate lives of African Americans and their effort to achieve progress and solidarity.

Righteous Propagation expertly describes the various ways African Americans perceived racial destiny and progress in the post-Reconstruction era. Mitchell recognizes that African Americans sought respect, freedom, and egalitarianism by disseminating ideas that would benefit the race, but sometimes reinforced the racist tactics that were perpetrated against them. In doing so, Mitchell does not romanticize the efforts of African Americans, but complicates some of their methods for uplift.

Cynical Realism: Miller’s Crossing by Joel and Ethan Coen (1990)

By Ben Breen

The HBO series Boardwalk Empire may currently be winning laurels for its workmanlike depiction of Prohibition-era gangsters and corrupt politicos, but viewers interested in a more fully-realized work about the Golden Age of American organized crime would be wise to turn to the Coen Brother’s 1990 masterpiece Miller’s Crossing.

This film centers on the attempts of an Irish-American mob underboss in 1920s Chicago, played by Gabriel Byrne, to collect on a gambling debt from an unsavory bookie named Bernie Bernbaum (John Turturro, in a riveting and unnerving performance), while he navigates a love triangle between himself, Bernbaum’s sister Verna (Marcia Gay Harden) and his mentor, an aging mob boss played with memorable vigor by Albert Finney. Yet the real appeal of Miller’s Crossing lies not in its convoluted plot, but in its evocative depiction of the distinctive visual style and underworld cant of 1920s Chicago. In a lesser film, the screenplay’s clutter of long-forgotten slang (“now take your flunky and dangle”) might come off as stilted or mannered, but here it seems natural: these are real characters, living real lives in a bygone urban America that is both foreign and familiar.

Miller’s Crossing was loosely based on Dashiell Hammet’s classic 1931 potboiler The Glass Key, but the Coens allow their spectacular ensemble cast to take what could have been a formulaic tale of double-crosses and gang warfare in a highly original direction

– despite nods to classic film noir like Carol Reed’s The Third Man (1949) and Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil (1958). Gabriel Byrne, as the brilliant but self-defeating mob lieutenant Tom Reagan, is the anchor of Miller’s Crossing, and the ethical dilemmas he faces in the film function as stand-ins for the larger moral ambiguities embedded in the ambitious and individualistic mindset of America in the twentieth (and twenty-first) centuries. Byrne’s Tom is a cynical realist who prides himself on his ability to “know the angles” and avoid allowing his conscience to get in the way of business opportunities. Yet at the same time, it is Tom’s aversion to violence — at least when he is forced to perform it himself, at close quarters — that sets in motion the film’s main events. Can criminals maintain a moral compass? And what separates a criminal from a businessman or politician, if all three place rational self-interest above personal ethics?

The Coens, who both wrote and directed the film, are wise to leave the answers to these questions up to the viewer. But Gabriel Byrne and the brilliant ensemble cast that support him are much more than gangster-movie cliches: like Tony Soprano, they are unsettling precisely because they are so familiar, such typical products of an American society that mingles cold-blooded acquisitiveness and violence with a sincere streak of idealism and a desire to do right. The French novelist Stendahl wrote that “a novel is a mirror carried along the highway.” Miller’s Crossing causes us to see criminals not as clichés or villains, but as reflections in that mirror.

The Age of Reagan: A History, by Sean Wilentz (2008)

by Dolph Briscoe IV

Historians often define political periods in the United States according to the dominant president of the era. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., most famously wrote of an Age of Jackson, and other scholars have proposed Ages of Jefferson, Lincoln, and Franklin D. Roosevelt. Sean Wilentz adds another chapter to this genre, labeling the last quarter of the twentieth century after Ronald Reagan, with his book The Age of Reagan: A History, 1974-2008. From the 1974 Watergate scandal until 2008 when Barack Obama was elected to the presidency, the U.S. witnessed the triumph of political conservatism. Ronald Reagan harnessed conservative angst to win the White House, pursued conservative polices as president both domestically and internationally, and left a legacy his conservative political successors attempted to continue, with mixed results.

The Age of Reagan provides a valuable overview of recent U.S. political history. During the 1970s both major political parties experienced internal divisions. Conservative Republicans criticized Nixon, Gerald Ford, and Henry Kissinger’s pursuit of détente with the Soviet Union as dangerously weak foreign policy. Liberal Democrats railed against Jimmy Carter’s ineffective leadership in solving the nation’s economic and social problems. Americans turned away from moderates in both parties and looked to conservatism when they elected Ronald Reagan president in 1980. Reagan succeeded in entrenching conservatism within the federal government, particularly with his judicial appointees and expansion of presidential power.

Yet the author correctly debunks much of the mythology surrounding Reagan, noting that his administration often pursued pragmatic policies, unable or unwilling to roll back much of the liberal reform of past years, and also encountered many setbacks, most notably with the Iran-Contra scandal.

The Age of Reagan goes on to describe the triumphs and travails of Reagan’s presidential successors. George H. W. Bush, less conservative than his predecessor, encountered difficulties in appealing to both the moderate and right-wing factions of his party. Bill Clinton, a self-described New Democrat, governed as a centrist following Republican capture of Congress in the 1994 elections, recognizing this as a requirement in a conservative age. Wilentz concludes with a brief overview of George W. Bush’s tumultuous presidency. During these years conservatism may already have been running on borrowed time, butevents of the Bush years, such as the controversial election of 2000, the disastrous Iraq War, the miserable response to Hurricane Katrina, and the dramatic collapse of the economy ultimately sounded the death knell for the Age of Reagan, as Americans rejected conservatism in favor of Barack Obama’s call for political change. Sean Wilentz’s The Age of Reagan is a fascinating narrative of recent U.S. history, and will prove engaging reading, especially in the aftermath of the 2010 elections.

Time will tell if the Age of Reagan truly is over. The emergence of right-wing groups such as the Tea Party and the continued popularity of demagogic figures like Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck suggest that the conservative movement will not exit quietly into the night. The current president and his supporters would have to convince Americans of the superiority of their policies, no small task. Their success or failure will determine whether the United States has entered a new period, perhaps an Age of Obama, or returns to the Age of Reagan.

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