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The Forgotten Spanish-Cuban Contribution to American Independence: Francisco de Saavedra and the Silver of Havana

When British forces surrendered at Yorktown in 1781, few would have imagined that the decisive blow had been financed not from Paris or Philadelphia, but from Havana. Behind this unexpected twist stood Francisco de Saavedra, a Spanish official whose name is absent from most American textbooks but whose actions helped change the course of the war.

Though he never set foot on the battlefield, Saavedra played a key role in securing the American victory. His contribution was strategic and financial, and it unfolded in the colonial capital of Cuba—a city that, by the late 18th century, had become the financial and military nerve center of Spain’s Caribbean empire.

Siege of Yorktown. 1781. Source: Wikimedia Commons

An Empire Without Liquidity

By the summer of 1781, the War of American Independence was reaching its climax. The American revolutionaries, aided by France and Spain through the Bourbon Family Compact, were preparing for a final strike. General Washington and his French counterpart, the Comte de Rochambeau, were planning a coordinated assault against British General Cornwallis at Yorktown, with naval support from Admiral de Grasse.

But there was a problem: France had no money. The French state, deeply indebted and fiscally strained, could not supply the fleet in the Caribbean in time. De Grasse needed funds to sail north, transport troops, and maintain the campaign. Without immediate financing, the entire operation—and perhaps the independence movement—would collapse.

Enter Saavedra in Havana

At this critical moment, Spain’s Caribbean presence proved decisive. In June 1781, following a desperate request from Admiral de Grasse, the Spanish authorities in Havana organized an extraordinary fundraising effort. In just a few days, half a million silver pesos were collected from merchants, landowners, and colonial officials—a sum that allowed the French fleet to sail north and support the allied siege of Yorktown.

Although Francisco de Saavedra was not yet in Havana during this crucial episode, his name would soon become central in the broader logistical and strategic coordination that followed. Saavedra had earlier been captured by the British while on a secret diplomatic mission in Jamaica. After his release and return to Spain, he gained prestige within the court of Charles III and held several important metropolitan posts. In 1782, he was appointed Royal Commissioner to the Caribbean, with broad powers to oversee Spain’s military and financial contributions to the war effort.

Francisco de Saavedra by Goya (1798). Source: Wikimedia Commons

A close ally of Bernardo de Gálvez, Saavedra established himself in Havana as a key figure in maintaining and expanding Spain’s support for the allied cause. He coordinated the flow of silver, troops, and supplies between New Spain, Cuba, Louisiana, and Venezuela—a complex imperial logistics network that kept the pressure on British positions in the Gulf and the Atlantic. Though not present for the initial fundraising that made Yorktown possible, he ensured that this type of transatlantic mobilization could continue throughout the final stages of the war.

Havana: A Hub of Empire

By the late 18th century, Havana had become one of the most important cities in the Spanish Empire. It was a strategic port, a fortified military bastion, and the financial capital of the Caribbean. Silver from New Spain (now Mexico), goods from across the Atlantic, and fleets bound for Spain passed through its harbor. Its local elite was wealthy, loyal, and deeply embedded in imperial networks. It was in this setting that Saavedra found both the material resources and the political support to act quickly and decisively.

Map of Havana 1798. Source: Wikimedia Commons

Why We Should Remember Saavedra

Saavedra’s name rarely appears in English-language accounts of the American Revolution. Yet his story reminds us that military victories often rely not only on generals and battles, but also on the invisible work of diplomacy, imperial logistics, and financial coordination. As Royal Commissioner in Havana and trusted envoy of the Spanish Crown, Saavedra helped sustain the momentum of allied operations during the final phase of the war—and exemplified a model of enlightened statecraft that deserves to be remembered.

More broadly, Saavedra’s intervention points to a neglected truth: the American struggle for independence was not only transatlantic but also transimperial. Cuba, as part of the Spanish Empire, played an indirect but essential role in this history. By recovering figures like Saavedra, we begin to see how interconnected the revolutionary era really was—not just through battles and declarations, but through the flow of silver, the logic of empires, and the resolve of men who could see beyond the moment.

It is worth noting that while other Spanish figures involved in the American Revolution have received significant recognition—such as Bernardo de Gálvez, who was granted honorary U.S. citizenship and has a portrait hanging in the U.S. Capitol — Francisco de Saavedra remains virtually unknown. This silence is striking given Saavedra’s extraordinary contributions to King Charles III and, later, to Charles IV and Ferdinand VII.

Bernardo de Gálvez. Source: Wikimedia Commons

Saavedra was a product of the Spanish Enlightenment. A native of Seville, he was not only a soldier and diplomat but also an intellectual deeply involved in reformist Bourbon politics. He served the Spanish Crown in various high-ranking positions, including Minister of Finance, Secretary of State, and a member of the Council of Regency. His long career reflected both competence and trust from the monarchy across successive reigns.

He was also appointed Royal Commissioner for the Americas, a role that attests to his influence and the responsibility he was given over the Spanish colonial world. His close involvement in the expulsion of the British from the Gulf of Mexico and his role in the financial support to the North American insurgents show his strategic vision and loyalty to Spain’s imperial interests.

Why has his name faded into obscurity? Part of the answer lies in the geopolitical caution of the Spanish crown at the time. Spain supported the American rebels with discretion, avoiding overt declarations that might incite revolutionary sentiments within its own American territories. The fear that Britain could exploit discontent in the Spanish colonies was not unfounded. Indeed, just a few decades later, British influence would play a substantial role in the fragmentation of the Spanish Empire in the Americas, encouraging the emergence of independent republics rather than a unified post-imperial federation. In many ways, Spain’s restrained involvement in the American Revolution was both a show of imperial strength and a prelude to the anxieties that would define its own age of revolutions.

The marginalization of Saavedra’s legacy also reflects the broader persistence of Anglo-American historical narratives that have long characterized Spain’s imperial role through the lens of “Spanish misrule.” In such accounts, Spanish governance is often portrayed as backward, despotic, or inefficient—especially when contrasted with the supposed rationality and liberty of the Anglo-American tradition. Yet Saavedra’s actions in Havana, his administrative competence, and his vision of imperial coordination reveal a more complex and capable form of statecraft than the caricature suggests.

José A. Adrián is a Professor of Psychology at the University of Málaga (Spain), specializing in language as a cognitive phenomenon and in its oral and written disorders. In addition to his academic work, he maintains a strong interest in history and the role of Spain in the Americas.

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.

Constructing a Canyon: Black CCC Workers and the Making of Palo Duro

In September 1935, Jimmie Lee Robinson and fourteen other Black Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) workers stationed at Palo Duro State Park in the Texas Panhandle wrote to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to protest their treatment in the CCC camp. “We work some time six days in a week,” they said, “and have to go to Canyon or on a long hike to keep from getting home sick.” Their letter ended with a petition asking to be relocated to a different CCC camp “near their own race.”^{^[1]} This complaint reflects Black workers’ deliberate assignment to Palo Duro Canyon, the “Grand Canyon of Texas,” because of its distance from nearby communities.

I encountered this letter while working on a larger project about how Palo Duro State Park became a symbol of Texas Panhandle history in the 1930s. What struck me was how easily this story—and the people behind it—had been forgotten. Palo Duro itself is a vast canyon in the Texas Panhandle visually defined by its colorful rocks and geological formations. But visitors to parks often don’t think about who built the trails, roads, and buildings that shape their experience of a landscape. Even less attention is paid to how that infrastructure tells a story—one that often excludes the full history of who lived in, used, and transformed these spaces.

Palo Duro Canyon Lighthouse. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

In the 1930s, CCC leadership charged young men with building the park’s foundational infrastructure. These structures told a version of the canyon’s history centered on white settlers while erasing the presence of both Black and Indigenous peoples, respectively. Even as they shaped the park’s landscape, Black people were subjected to segregation and geographic isolation at the hands of the federal government and the Texas State Parks Board.

To place the CCC’s work in a larger historical context, I turned to ClioVis—a mind-mapping tool developed by Dr. Erika Bsumek of UT-Austin’s History Department. ClioVis allowed me to visualize how a history of Palo Duro—told through the names of places and promotional materials—has long excluded the people who helped build it.

As I charted this history of Palo Duro, it became clear how the story of Palo Duro Canyon mirrored broader patterns of West Texas history—beginning with its earliest inhabitants. Indigenous people had lived in the canyon since as early as 10,000 B.C.E. In 1541, the canyon may have been a backdrop to Spaniard Francisco Vázquez de Coronado’s quest to find the fictional Quivira, one of the famed ‘seven cities of gold,’ a mythical indigenous paradise. In the mid-18^th century, the Comanche (Nemene) arrived at the Panhandle Plains and “held Palo Duro Canyon as a prominent camp and trading site,” building a formidable power capable of challenging Texas expansion.^[2]

In an assault on Comanche power, the United States’ army expelled them from the canyon in the 1874 Battle of Palo Duro, part of the Red River Wars.In the remainder of the decade, nuevomexicano pastores—Hispanic pastoralists who drove sheep onto the Southern Plains—continued their use of the plains. In 1876, rancher Charles Goodnight established an important cattle ranch in the depths of the canyon.The Panhandle’s ‘JA Ranch’ became a respected institution in the ranching industry.

In 1933, the CCC answered community calls to transform the canyon into a park. President Franklin Delano Roosevel created the CCC program to employ mostly young men during the Great Depression to build much of the country’s wilderness infrastructure. Young men enlisted in the program and the federal government assigned them to a CCC company, where they often lived in a future park and built roads, hiking trails, and other park facilities. Their work not only gave the public access to remote areas but also shaped how visitors experienced parks. They also influenced how people understood the history of the natural spaces through the naming of places, buildings, and landmarks.

CCC boys at work. 1935. Source: Library of Congress

Soon after CCC work began, Palo Duro became the site of the largest CCC camp in the country and found itself at the center of conflict over the racial segregation of CCC workers. At its inception, the CCC camp at Palo Duro was integrated with Black and white workers. This changed in the summer of 1935 when CCC national director Robert Fechner issued a policy calling for the segregation of CCC camps. Texas State Parks Board Chairman David E. Colp, forced to select a camp to host only Black workers, said that “The Palo Duro is called ideal for negro companies owing to its location 13 miles from town.”^[3] Colp hoped to avoid conflict between white communities and Black CCC workers by geographically isolating Black companies. Soon, Palo Duro State Park’s CCC camp hosted only Black workers. Consequently, they played a vital role in building the park’s infrastructure.

In my ClioVis project, I look specifically at how the park focused on non-indigenous men like Goodnight and Coronado to construct a frontier experience for Palo Duro tourists. Although Black workers built much of the park, CCC leadership tasked them with installing signs and creating landmarks that celebrated white pioneers. The ‘Goodnight Trail’ aimed to honor Charles Goodnight being the ‘first white pioneer to enter the canyon,’ supposedly tracing his historic entrance path. The trail also positioned Palo Duro as a place to experience history as it connected the Panhandle Plains Historical Museum (in Canyon, Texas) to the park’s entrance. Once in the park, visitors encountered ‘El Coronado Lodge,’ named to honor Conquistador Francisco de Coronado. Meanwhile, trails such as ‘Kiowa Trail’ and ‘Indian Trails’ acknowledged an Indigenous past but—in the context of promotional materials I analyzed—framed it as something distant, rather than as an integral part of the canyon’s ongoing history. Regardless, the park’s infrastructure told a story of the region that surrounded white pioneers and settlers, not indigenous people and the Black workers who built the park.

Photo of El Coronado Lodge. Untitled. Project Reports on Civilian Conservation Corps Projects in State and Local Parks, 1933-1937. National Archives and Records Administration. SP-13-16.

The power behind these names is best explained through the concept of place-making. Anthropologist Keith Basso coined the term place-making to refer to the act of assigning meaning to places. Basso argues that “…place-making is a way of constructing history itself, of inventing it, of fashioning novel versions of ‘what happened here.’”^[4] He argues that through place-making, humans develop entire frameworks for understanding existence and the history around them. Therefore, the naming of places in Palo Duro State Park to honor colonizers asserted a settler-based history of the canyon itself.

Palo Duro Canyon State Park – Base Map. 1937. Source: Wikimedia Commons

Even as Black workers built this infrastructure, they resisted the geographical isolation the state forced upon them. As noted earlier, fifteen Black workers sought President Roosevelt’s help in being relocated closer to Black communities. We “have to go to Canyon or on a long hike to keep from getting home sick,” they wrote.^[5] The Black workers’ letter to Roosevelt spoke to the geographical isolation of Palo Duro Canyon, reinforced by racist policies barring them from visiting nearby Canyon, Texas and transportation challenges in reaching Amarillo, the nearest non-sundown town. At the same time, the Black workers demonstrated the ways they experienced the canyon on their own terms. As their letter said, the workers went on hikes, likely exploring distant corners of the park. The Black workers’ letter to Roosevelt encapsulated the complex nature of the Palo Duro CCC Camp.

By the summer of 1936, CCC workers’ grievances culminated in a strike. Angered by their forced geographical isolation, the workers refused to continue their labor, and a standoff ensued. They stood against an unnamed CCC commander as well as blacksmith Sid Harrison. With both sides brandishing picks and other tools as weapons, it was initially unclear if violence would erupt. The youth workers demanded better working conditions and voiced their feeling of isolation. CCC Commander Walter Caserta apparently diffused the strike after a four-hour negotiation. By the end of the summer, likely because of this confrontation, the Black companies moved to a different CCC site, and Company 894, an all-white CCC group from Bonham State Park, soon took over park construction at Palo Duro.^[6]

Structure of Road from Bottom of Canyon. People seen in the distance. ca. 1930s

Structure of Road from Bottom of Canyon. Palo Duro Texas. 1933-1936. Project Reports on Civilian Conservation Corps Projects in State and Local Parks, 1933-1937, Record Group 79: Records of the National Park Service. National Archives and Records Administration. SP-13-16.

Despite their role in building the park, Black people were erased from its historical narrative. Promotional materials failed to acknowledge their contributions to the park’s infrastructure, just as the CCC leaders and Texas State Parks Board reinforced this erasure through the park’s design. Beyond the park’s construction, Black pioneers like the widely revered Matthew ‘Bones’ Hooks played a vital role in the region’s history, yet their stories were similarly overlooked. Instead, the park’s infrastructure promoted a history of the white settler pioneer. Together, this structural erasure of history constitutes what historian Erika Bsumek calls ‘infrastructures of dispossession’—the ways physical and social infrastructure further alienate Indigenous—and in this instance, Black—communities from land.^[7]

The consequences of this erasure are still felt today. Historian Carolyn Finney emphasizes that park infrastructure’s orientation to white audiences perpetuates disparities between white and Black people’s use of public lands. In this sense, I hope to counterweave Black workers’ history into Palo Duro’s landscape. After all, the letter from Black workers to President Roosevelt and their strike are significant events in the creation of the park. However, to make this effort truly meaningful, further work must be done to recover the voices, names, and lives of those who built the park.

In my ClioVis timeline, I expand on not only the work of Black CCC workers but also extend my argument to include the alienation of indigenous communities from the canyon’s history. ClioVis allowed me to create a network of events to visualize the connection between events in the canyon’s history and the ways the CCC brought (or didn’t bring) that history to park visitors through infrastructure.

This story of Palo Duro Canyon is not unique. People worked in segregated CCC camps in natural spaces across the United States. The park infrastructure they built often told revisionist histories about the parks. On top of this, many parks themselves were inaccessible to Black people. The State of Texas forbade Black people from entering Palo Duro until the federal government forcibly desegregated the Texas State Parks System in 1964.

Nevertheless, the infrastructure built at Palo Duro positioned the park as a particularly special symbol of Texas Panhandle history. In 1966, the community demonstrated the park’s importance to their historic mythos by inaugurating the musical TEXAS in the canyon’s basin. Producers called it “A Musical Celebration of Panhandle History.” In that sense, it becomes even more important that the history of Black CCC workers is brought to the forefront of the landscape’s narrative.

^[1] Jimmie Lee Robinson and Arlena Evans, et al, Letter to Roosevelt, September 21, 1935, quoted in Jackson, “The Imprint of the Civilian Conservation Corps on Palo Duro Canyon, 1933-1937,” 148.

^[2] Zapata, “Palo Duro Canyon, Its People, and Their Landscapes: Building Culture(s) and a Sense of Place Through the Environment since 1540,” 17.

^[3] “CCC Companies Will Be Changed During This Week,” The Canyon News, August 15, 1935, Newspapers.com.

^[4] Keith H. Basso, Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language among the Western Apache (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996), 6.

^[5] Robinson and Arlena Evans, Letter to Roosevelt, September 21, 1935, quoted in Jackson, 148.

^[6] My knowledge of the strike at Palo Duro relies on the work of Jackson and Petersen as I was unable to access the account from Walter Caserta. Jackson, “The Imprint of the Civilian Conservation Corps on Palo Duro Canyon, 1933-1937,” 152; Petersen, “The Building of Palo Duro Canyon State Park,” 12.

Aidan Dresang is an undergraduate history major at UT-Austin. He is writing his History thesis on anti-nuclear resistance to the Comanche Peak nuclear power plant. More broadly, his research interests include North American environmental history and social movements. He currently serves as a ClioVis intern and as the History Department’s social media intern.

Review of The Hard Work of Hope: A Memoir, by Michael Ansara (2025)

Banner for The Hard Work of Hope. A Memoir. By Michael Ansara. Reviewed by Sarah Porter

In his recent memoir, The Hard Work of Hope, activist Michael Ansara reflects on decades of organizing experience in the U.S. civil rights, student, and anti-war movements. Raised in Boston, Ansara was one of many Northern students who came of age following World War II and, drawing inspiration from the Southern civil rights struggle, organized opposition to the Vietnam War on college campuses. Ansara began his career as an activist in high school, working with a local civil rights organization, the Boston Action Group (BAG), to develop campaigns around issues like employment discrimination and tenants’ rights. Later, as a student at Harvard University, Ansara joined Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and became a leading voice in the anti-war movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Following the war, he helped to build Massachusetts Fair Share, an organization that addressed local and neighborhood-level concerns ranging from utility rate hikes to zoning laws.

Book cover of The Hard Work of Hope, a memoir.

Most of the book is devoted to Ansara’s anti-war activism while at Harvard and shortly after graduating. As U.S. involvement in Vietnam escalated over the course of the 1960s, many American students began to protest what they viewed as an unjust and immoral war. They organized massive rallies and demonstrations, circulated literature, and engaged in civil disobedience. Ansara was involved in planning and executing major campaigns at Harvard, including the occupation of University Hall and the subsequent student strike in 1969. As its title suggests, however, the book does not only document the flash points of the student movement —the massive rallies and confrontations with law enforcement. Rather, Ansara places emphasis on the day-to-day work of engaging with ordinary people and compelling them to act. As he notes, “It is easy to write about the demonstrations, the marches, the confrontations. They were dramatic and essential. However, they were only possible because of long hours of outreach, discussion, connecting. It was the mundane work of reaching out to students that occupied me, and the other SDS organizers, and that made it possible for people to join the march, get on the bus, join the movement” (p. 48). Far from being inevitable, the successes of the anti-war movement were the result of years of planning and organizing by activists who often encountered fierce opposition from law enforcement, their peers, and the public.

[Large crowd at a National Mobilization to End the War in Vietnam direct action demonstration, Washington, D.C.]
Source: Library of Congress

Throughout the book, Ansara also reflects on what he perceives as the failures of the anti-war movement. For instance, he acknowledges that many activists failed to offer concrete support to Vietnamese refugees and veterans after the war ended. He also addresses the creation of groups like the Weathermen, a radical offshoot of SDS that utilized political violence. Ansara was deeply critical of the group’s strategies, but he also recognized the role that state repression played in its development.

Ansara’s discussion of movement strategy and structure is particularly useful, and several ideas may resonate with contemporary readers. First, Ansara argues that the anti-war movement would have been more effective had it embraced electoral politics alongside direct action protest. Second, he distinguishes strategies from demands. Early on, anti-war activists focused on capturing public attention with bold and confrontational protests. Once the public was receptive to their message, however, many groups failed to deliver clear and actionable demands. Ansara suggests that a straightforward program of action is essential for organizing. Lastly, Ansara challenges the idea that a movement can be truly “leaderless.” Organizations like SDS rejected formal leadership structures as hierarchical and undemocratic. Yet, as Ansara notes, this often gave way to informal—and, thus, unaccountable—leaders making all of the decisions. He writes, “Every social movement and every organization has leaders, formal or informal. The question is not whether we have leaders, but whether we have good leaders, leaders who empower others, who build successors, who are accountable. In SDS, the confusion over leadership inhibited our effectiveness, allowing young, arrogant men like me to lead without being held accountable” (p. 258).

Group of young people standing, some are cheering.

Freedom Summer. Source: Wikimedia Commons

While the book does address the larger political context in which activists like Ansara operated, some of the events mentioned in passing deserve further explanation, particularly for younger audiences and for those without a background in history. For example, Ansara references the bombing of 16^th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, and the murder of three civil rights workers—James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner—during Mississippi Freedom Summer on several occasions without fully explaining what happened or how it shaped the larger social landscape. More thoughtful analysis of these events would provide important context for readers by highlighting the violent opposition that activists faced, especially in the Deep South. Moreover, as Ansara acknowledges, his memoir is a deeply personal reflection on his experience as an activist, and it should not be taken as a representation of the anti-war movement as a whole. Student organizing on college campuses was a crucial part of this broader movement, but there were many other manifestations of anti-war activism that cut across lines of gender, race, and socioeconomic status. Finally, while Ansara reflects critically on student organizing during the Vietnam War, he is less forthcoming about his later life, including the dissolution of Massachusetts Fair Share due to financial mismanagement under his leadership and his subsequent failed business ventures. Although some readers may appreciate Ansara’s focus on his anti-war activism, others may be left desiring a more complex portrait of his life that grapples with some of these contradictions.

Ultimately, The Hard Work of Hope represents a valuable resource for a number of audiences. For scholars researching anti-war and student activism during the 1960s and 1970s, Ansara’s narrative offers a firsthand account of key campaigns, such as student protests against Dow Chemical and the Harvard Strike. Educators might also incorporate excerpts of this book into undergraduate or high-school classrooms as an example of a primary source for analysis. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, Ansara’s memoir offers valuable insight for those currently organizing for a more just and equal society on college campuses and beyond.

Sarah Porter is a Ph.D. student in the Department of History at the University of Texas at Austin. She studies twentieth-century social movements, policing, and mass incarceration in the United States.

This is Democracy – Iran-Contra and its Legacies

In this episode, Jeremi and Zachary Suri are joined by Professor Alan McPherson, an expert on US foreign relations who introduces his new book ‘The Breach: Iran-Contra and the Assault on American Democracy.’ Together, they discuss how this Iran-Contra scandal altered public trust in the American government and set troubling precedents for future administrations.

Zachary sets the scene with his poem titled “Same Old Lies”.

Alan McPherson is a professor of history at Temple University in Philadelphia. He is the author of numerous books on the history of U.S. foreign relations, including: The Invaded: How Latin Americans and their Allies Fought and Ended U.S. Occupations; Ghosts of Sheridan Circle: How a Washington Assassination Brought Pinochet’s Terror State to Justice; and, most recently, The Breach: Iran-Contra and the Assault on American Democracy.

This is Democracy – Ending Wars

This week, Jeremi and Zachary talk with Michael Vorenberg about the difficulties of ending wars in democracies. Their discussion includes various perspectives on when the Civil War truly ended, the challenges of war termination, Lincoln’s approach toward reconciliation, and the lasting impacts of unresolved conflicts.

Zachary sets the scene with the poem “O Captain! My Captain!” by Walt Whitman.

Michael Vorenberg is an associate professor of history at Brown University. He is the author of Final Freedom: The Civil War, the Abolition of Slavery, and the Thirteenth Amendment. This book was used for Steven Spielberg’s blockbuster film, Lincoln. Vorenberg’s exciting new book is Lincoln’s Peace: The Struggle to End the American Civil War.

Review of No Place Like Nome: The Bering Strait Seen Through Its Most Storied City

Many history books share a lie, not their entirety but a still crucial aspect. They strut and pretend to speak from an authoritative state, authors who know that even a few hundred pages on a topic cannot encompass the multitudes of contexts and perspectives or even the fullness of their research. Pride is often integral to their presentation. Otherwise, what is the point of their existence? And yet, a rebuttal, adjustment, or an alternate take is always in the offing.

Michael Engelhard’s No Place Like Nome is a highbrow raconteur of a read meant for a layperson, though any scholar of Alaska will recognize the significant research underpinnings. Not quite a historical account or an anthropological study, it is instead a woven narrative that seeks to define the Alaska town through snapshots. And it is an honest book for it.

Book cover for Review of No Place Like Nome: The Bering Strait Seen Through Its Most Storied City

Each of us operates within our various spheres with imperfect knowledge. At best, we possess limited understandings of other people, other systems, and even ourselves. At our worst, there is the utter absence of knowledge, ignorance of context and cultures. Of course, there is no other choice, no other reality to this world. “I don’t know” is the truest sentence ever written, uttered, or thought.

More than most towns, Nome exists partly as myth, particularly as a place understood by the outsider. It is a million things at once to different people at different times. Tall tales from the Gold Rush mix with ancient indigenous culture and the mundanity of everyday modern life. There is no real divide between the present and the past, only shifting quantities of each in uneasy proportions, a weight shifting by moments and preferences. There was indeed gold in the beaches. Dogs of legend like Baldy and Balto and Togo ran here. John Wayne and Willem Dafoe pretended to live here. And there are also people struggling to find proper warm clothing, to scrape a living off the land without time to wonder about how the saloon dancehall ladies did what they did.

Engelhard explicitly acknowledges this uncertainty and does not pretend to a single Nome. Books of that ilk already exist, focused monographs in great numbers and more on their way. In his own words, “I am offering much material of less than earthshaking significance simply to fill in the colors of the personal, the idiosyncratic, or the purely eccentric that too rarely enliven anthropological and historical reconstructions.”

Picture of Eskimo high kick during the July 4th, 1915 celebrations — *Eskimo high kick during the July 4th, 1915 celebrations.*
*Library of Congress*

The book’s structure abandons the timeline, bouncing back and forth across the years, between seemingly unrelated topics that share only a geographic proximity. A chapter about the prevalence of jade abuts a yarn about an Italian airship’s demise. A Jesuit priest organizes a football game on King Island, introducing the sport to the middle of the Bering Sea. Locals hunt for precious qiviut (muskox wool).

To be sure, widely recognized characters make passing appearances, from lawman turned saloon proprietor Wyatt Earp to prospector turned author Rex Beach to musher turned Serum Run hero Leonhard Seppala. Bars and gold eventually appear in any sufficiently lengthy Nome narrative, no matter any authorial intent for originality. But there are also fossils, wars ranging from Indigenous to international, drumming, bicycles, and herbalism—both past and contemporary.

Picture of Placer mining on Glacier Creek. — *Placer mining on Glacier Creek, 1910.*
*Library of Congress*

Each section is revelatory in its own way, some admittedly more than others. Nome and its gold rush will be more familiar to the average reader than Nome and its reindeer velvet trade. But prospectors and quack male virility supplements exemplify legitimate aspects of this remote outpost. Engelhard willfully ambles through these legacies, histories, cultural detritus, and ongoing capitalistic affairs, revealing the place in much the same way as a literal stroll through the community might. Revelations come in pieces, glances, and curiosities. It is a humble, deeply human approach, denying the possibility of a singular take, offering entertainment and more than occasional enlightenment.

Honesty is neither perfection nor utility, and disparate sampling is not for everyone. Baggage-laden personages, such as missionary educator Sheldon Jackson, photographer Edward Curtis, and geologist-filmmaker Bernard Hubbard, pass uncritically through the narrative. Their relative failings, from cultural genocide to base exploitation, are left to other texts, which is perhaps the intent. The consumer has their choice, between more targeted interventions or the wandering trail laid down by No Place Like Nome.

All books on Alaska must plot their course in relation to the mythos of the territory, whether to accept, contradict, or, more rarely, acknowledge that perception and reality are intimately linked. This choice is particularly relevant in a place like Nome, a town surrounded by older cultures but more often regarded as a relic of a gold rush peak that ended over a century ago. In this way, Engelhard accomplishes what few others have achieved, bridging the lore of a romantically distant Alaska city with the grittier reality of trying to live in an actual place.

David Reamer is a public and academic historian in Anchorage, Alaska. He is the author of a weekly column for the Anchorage Daily News and co-author of the 2022 Black Lives in Alaska.

Converging Roads: Researching and Working at the Forty Acres

I learned a few months ago that the old Star Seeds Café near the UT campus had been demolished, a casualty of the I-35 expansion project. I was sad about this not because I miss the food—the old Star Seeds was always an acquired taste. My sense of loss, rather, has to do with the fact that the Star Seeds Café had been at the nexus of important professional and personal roads for me since my early 20s. And I have never attended the University of Texas as a student or lived in Austin. This requires some explanation…

I am a professional historian. I’ve taught at Portland State University in Oregon, down the highway at Texas A&M University, and, since last fall, have begun what I expect will be my final faculty position at the University of Texas at Austin. So this is an interesting time for me, one of reflection. At the age of 54 after more than three decades of a professional career studying U.S., Mexican American, and Texas history at these other institutions, these days I find myself spending a good deal of time learning how things work at my new university, where to go, and building relationships with a lot of new folks in and out of Garrison Hall.

Picture of Garrison Hall, the University of Texas at Austin — *Garrison Hall, the University of Texas at Austin. Source: Not Even Past*

As exciting as it is, this newness can also be humbling. For example, I participated in a faculty orientation process before fall classes began. This old dog was eager to learn new tricks. In those training sessions I distinctly remember a presenter chuckling about the first time they experienced the “passing period.” I had no idea why everyone thought this was funny, though context clues told me it involved students leaving class early. Oh well, I thought, each school has its own traditions. I resolved to be on the lookout for this so-called passing period on my teaching schedule, did not see it, and felt relieved—too bad for all those other suckers whose classes abutted this mysterious time! And then on my first day, I found out what it really was and how class times really worked. I had a chuckle…this time at myself. I’ve had additional little, surprising revelations in my new job, none of them quite so foolish. This is all a part of joining a new university, a universal experience for all faculty. And yet, I am in a slightly different position in that I’ve known this place in an entirely different context for decades. In fact, I’ve been coming to the University of Texas at Austin (and the Star Seeds Café) for over 30 years. The road to my historical research runs through this place.

As a historian of U.S., Mexican American, and Texas history, I have visited libraries and other archival repositories all over the country, though none so often and so deeply as the places of learning on this campus. The products of this research are my published books and essays. My first major research project, an extension of my Rice University dissertation, was a study of education policy and bilingualism in Texas schools. This resulted in some published essays in academic journals as well as a book, The Strange Career of Bilingual Education in Texas, 1836–1981 (Texas A&M Press, 2004). My next major project was a biography of the famed University of Texas educator and civil rights advocate, Dr. George I. Sánchez, whose name graces UT’s College of Education building. That project resulted in another book, George I. Sánchez and the Long Fight for Integration (Yale University Press, 2014). All told I’ve authored over 20 essays in books, journals, or magazines and edited one other book, but it is those two major projects that have cemented my longstanding connection to this university and the treasures in its libraries. In all this work I find hidden, obscured voices of the past and bring them to light; I study not just conflict and injustice, but also the passion and joy that infuse those who try to make their worlds better places; I connect the dots between past and present, always believing that our shared future can be positively shaped by studying our shared past. It’s hard not to feel romantic about that mission! For years now, I have experienced those feelings whenever I conduct research. And I’ve had many of those feelings here on the 40 acres.

Book cover for The Strange Career of Bilingual Education in Texas

I find research highly personal. I form a strong emotive connection to the places it takes me. Whether I am spending a week or two in Sleepy Hollow, New York to work in the General Education Board papers, in Nashville, Tennessee to work in the Julius Rosenwald Fund papers, in Pasadena, California at the beautiful Huntington Library, or College Park, Maryland’s mammoth National Archives II facility, each place I visit leaves an imprint. For example, the panoptical monitoring in the reading room at the Rockefeller Archives with constant reminders about breaking the rules of how many pages one can access on one’s desk or how folders are filed back in their containers are as vivid to me as are the New York-style pies from The Horsman, the neighborhood pizzeria, and its views of the spectacular Hudson River. And that was two decades ago.

As a historian with my particular interests in Texas and Mexican American history, most of the sources I need, however, are in Austin and, more specifically, in the libraries here at UT. I started doing work at the Perry-Castañeda Library (PCL) in 1993-94 working on my history MA at nearby Southwest Texas State University in San Marcos (now Texas State University) where I researched the history of higher education expansion in Texas during the 1960s. In the second half of the 1990s my PhD research at Rice University on bilingual education in Texas involved exploring the university’s archival holdings, including the Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library, the Barker Texas History Center (now the Briscoe Center for American History), and the Benson Latin American Center. Since then I have continued to visit these archival repositories (and others in town) for biographical research on the University of Texas faculty member Dr. George I. Sánchez and for other projects.

So UT Austin has been an integral part of my professional life for decades now. What was all this time on campus like? It had a monotonous rhythm that, I’m sure, must seem tedious to anyone without a passion for history. These trips for the past three decades have entailed staying at several hotels, but most often at the I-35 Rodeway Inn near campus for a week or two at a time. This was usually during the summer months. On these trips I would get up early, scarf down a heavy breakfast knowing that I would work through lunch, and hustle across Dean Keaton Street to the Benson, Brisco, or LBJ archives to begin the day’s work as soon as they opened. I worked non-stop until closing time near 5:00 PM.

What scholars actually do in archives might seem mysterious. It’s not really. My day typically involved sifting through hundreds of pages of old documents, including old carbon copies of letters on onionskin paper. Unfortunately this work creates for me a wave of allergy-related ailments ranging from cold-like symptoms to uncomfortable skin rashes. It is a small price to pay for learning about the past as I see it. I try my best to ameliorate the expected physical response by daily prophylactic antihistamine doping, an obsessive regime of handwashing every hour or more, using gloves and masks, and a habit (learned the hard way) of not touching my face with my hands or fingers while handling documents. It may sound like odd workplace behavior, but I’ve often thought of this as equivalent to a professional athlete’s pre-game stretching and taping rituals or a singer’s voice exercises. It is necessary to get the job done. It is a built-in cost rather than a burden.

After being kicked out of the archives at closing time, I would seek an early dinner (and an urgent one due to having skipped lunch) at nearby eateries, which frequently involved the now extinct Star Seeds Café. After dinner I would walk around campus to stretch my legs. Since most of my research happened in the summer, this meant sweltering walks in athletic gear with copious amounts of sunscreen in a mostly empty University of Texas campus. These post-workday walks were solitary. I wandered campus lost in thought about what I learned that day and how it could inform the larger project.

When I was working on the Sánchez biography, I would walk past the education building bearing his name, touch the plaque, and sometimes have a few silent moments in which I reflected about the remarkable human being I was studying who taught oversubscribed courses to decades of UT students all while running his department and quietly organizing groundbreaking civil rights efforts (and suffering consequences for it) from his office in Sutton Hall. My long day of allergy-related symptoms that ended with quiet reflection on hot concrete seemed like a small lift next to Sánchez’s herculean burdens. After these walks, I placed an evening call to my girlfriend who eventually became my spouse and in time these calls also involved our growing children. They punctuated a very long day and lead to a much-needed sleep to prepare for another similarly long day. I can still remember one evening during a two-week research trip in the late 1990s having an evening cheeseburger and a Shiner Bock (or a few…) at the Star Seeds while reading a monograph on early 20^th century anarcho-syndicalism along the U.S.-Mexico border by the dimmed, neon light of the bar. In that moment I was as happy as a lark, doing what I loved, though with enough self-awareness to realize I must have seemed a weird sight to the other bar patrons, who left me to my book.

*A plaque at the entrance to the George I Sánchez Building, the University of Texas at Austin. Source: Not Even Past*

However, these trips to Austin and the University of Texas contained much-needed moments in which the world outside of work joyfully broke up my owlish solitude. In the first half of the 1990s, for example, after my visits to the PCL, I would spend time with a dear cousin. We would have the kind of long chats about life that are such a part of being in one’s early 20s. In those days I also would visit a high school friend who happened to be a Longhorn football player. On one occasion this resulted in my tagging along with some very large guys to a country dance hall off of Ben White Boulevard, one of my few ventures into the famed Austin nightlife. That was fun! By the 2000s I was more personally settled. My Austin trips brought me to visit family who had moved to the area—tias, tios, and primos—at lovely dinners they provided for their vagabond relative temporarily living in a hotel near the interstate. We traded family stories and I would listen, especially to the older generations, to their lived experiences of the very things I was reading about in the archives that day.

Book cover for George I. Sánchez and the Long Fight for Integration

My sense of this campus and city is, in part, also an idealized connection. As the center for intellectual and cultural life in this state, Austin always had a special meaning for me even going back to when I was an aspiring, wannabe teen intellectual living a small South Texas town. And my academic research has always felt as if it were tapping into different parts of my personal history. Going through letters written by a young Lyndon Johnson in the 1920s about teaching Mexican American children at a segregated school brought to mind my mother and her family and the stories they told me. They would have gone to the same kinds of schools from their ranches, farms, and towns in the South Texas brush country of that era; they also would have been as unknowledgeable of the English language as young Lyndon’s students in Cotulla, Texas. For my biography of George I. Sánchez, I could not but help to compare his life and choices to my own as his work gradually revealed itself to me over many years of going through his manuscript collection at the Benson Latin American Center. I even caught myself using his own rhetorical flourishes in my daily emails!

All those experiences, the jumbling of my personal and professional selves that are so firmly rooted to this university, have now evolved. In my early 50s I find myself no longer on the outside looking into an idealized UT, but on the inside looking out in a very real and now lived-in space. Being here regularly means a different kind of connection. Now I can feel the bustle of the university when the students are going to and from class (in the passing period, of course). I now teach my classes and attend meetings in the very buildings that I once only knew as exteriors from my middle-of-summer, sweaty, evening hikes. And I now notice how many things have changed since the 1990s: the campus is more walkable, but less drivable than it once was; the massive Jester parking lot has been replaced by an art museum bearing my surname (no relation); and for the first time ever I got to actually go up “The Tower” for a reception. It was a revelation after so many years staring at it from the outside wondering what it was like on the inside. I am making all-new personal connections to this place, which remains the site of so much of the intellectual odyssey that led me here. My excitement at having new colleagues and students is only enhanced by my sense of how they are deepening and expanding upon those existing memories.

The 40 acres is a special place. For me, it’s a site both familiar and unknown—one that I’m constantly rediscovering as my roads of personal and professional discovery merge in ways I couldn’t have imagined. Sadly I’ll be having these new experiences without the Star Seeds Café, but I’m sure there is plenty more to discover on the converging road ahead.

Dr. Carlos Kevin Blanton is the Barbara White Stuart Professor of Texas History at the University of Texas at Austin in the Department of History. Blanton’s books and articles involve the intersection of Chicana/o history with education, civil rights, immigration, politics, and Texas history. His George I. Sánchez: The Long Fight for Mexican American Integration (Yale University Press, 2014) won the NACCS Best Book Award; The Strange Career of Bilingual Education in Texas, 1836–1981 (Texas A&M University Press, 2004) won the TSHA’s Tulls Award; and the article “The Citizenship Sacrifice: Mexican Americans, the Saunders-Leonard Report, and the Politics of Immigration, 1951–1952” in the Western Historical Quarterly (2009) won the WHA’s Bolton-Cutter Award. He has edited A Promising Problem: The New Chicana/o History (Texas 2016) and published additional articles in professional journals such as the Journal of Southern History, the Pacific Historical Review, the Teacher’s College Record, the Journal of American Ethnic History, and Texas Monthly. Carlos holds a 1999 PhD from Rice University, a 1995 MA from Southwest Texas State University (now Texas State University in San Marcos), and a 1993 BA from Texas A&I University (now Texas A&M University-Kingsville). He has held faculty positions at Portland State University (1999-2001) and at Texas A&M University, College Station (2001-2024) before joining the University of Texas at Austin community in the fall of 2024.

Review of Making Never-Never Land: Race and Law in the Creation of Puerto Rico by Monica A. Jiménez (2024)

Banner for book review of Making Never-Never Land

In Making Never-Never Land: Race and Law in the Creation of Puerto Rico, Caribbean historian, and Black studies scholar Mónica A. Jiménez offers a new interpretation of Puerto Rican legal and political history. In her first book-length project, Jiménez explores the intersections between law, and race in the creation of Puerto Rico. More specifically, Making Never-Never Land interrogates how these intersections have framed the relationship between the United States and Puerto Rico since the territory was ceded by Spain in 1898. The book is shaped by Jiménez’s personal experience as a diasporic scholar moving from Puerto Rico to Texas. Jiménez’s family joined the first wave of Puerto Ricans who left for Houston, Texas in the mid-1980s in search of better economic opportunities which is part of a broader colonial history of forced migration, economic hardship, and discrimination. Jiménez seeks to answer the question: What is Puerto Rico for the United States? This is a question that many Puerto Ricans living in and out of the United States ask themselves every day. This question shapes Puerto Rican colonial history as a territory, historically and currently, especially following the imposition of the Puerto Rico Oversight, Management, and Economic Stability Act (also known as PROMESA).

Throughout Making Never-Never Land, Jiménez examines the larger history of U.S. settler colonialism and racial exclusion, using an analysis of the United States Supreme Court’s decisions to better understand the unincorporated territory’s current debt crisis and disaster capitalism situation. She argues that PROMESA, which was meant to take care of Puerto Rico’s outstanding debt, reaffirmed the United States Congress’ plenary powers over the island and “effectively stripped the territory of its ability to self-govern” (p.119).

*Flags on the Coast of Puerto Rico. Source:* Pexels

To understand the limitations of a group of US Supreme Court decisions known collectively as the Insular Cases and interrogate the “state of exception” created by them, Jiménez draws back to place the Insular Cases within a more extended legal history of racial exclusion towards Native Americans, and African Americans. By closely examining early legal precedents and analyzing these cases together, in Making Never-Never Land Jiménez invites us to consider how race functions within them, shaping Puerto Rico’s present and future. Through this critical reading, she positions herself as an anti-colonial scholar with a deep understanding of Puerto Rican politics. She does not believe that simply overturning the Insular Cases will resolve the island’s challenges. Instead, she urges the reader to think about Puerto Rico’s colonial status and its history of exploitation and subjugation more broadly, which are deeply tied to the racism embedded in those decisions, as a deliberate legal reality. Rejecting that legal logic as valid is, a crucial first step, for her.

Making Never-Never Land is divided into two parts. The first part, “Toward a Legal Genealogy of Racial Exclusion” looks at the US Supreme Court’s resolution of the Insular Cases, particularly Downes v. Bidwell (1901), a foundational case that first established the legal framework of U.S.-Puerto Rico relations, placing that decision within a longer historical context of legal decisions before the United States’ acquisition of the territory. Chapter 1 puts the focus on Downes because it was in that case that the US Supreme Court pronounced Puerto Rico to be “foreign in a domestic sense,” and created a new legal category, “the unincorporated territory,” for the island effectively placing it in a legal limbo—neither fully part of the U.S. nor fully independent (pp. 19, 20). That decision created a series of limitations for the territory, continuing to undermine its sovereignty.

Chapter 2 examines the Marshall Trilogy (1823-1832), United States v. Rogers (1846), and Dread Scott v. Sanford (1856) concerning the rights of Native Americans and enslaved Africans, respectively, who were among the first nonwhite populations with whom the U.S. legal system had to contend, to connect their logics and legal reasoning to Downes. In these cases, according to Jiménez, the U.S. Supreme Court engaged in critical moments of racial formation and exclusion, were we see the birth and growth of plenary powers, creating what the authors refers to as the “American state of exception”.

In the second part of the book, “‘American’ State of Exception: Puerto Rico in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries”, Jiménez traces the legal, political, and social effects and logics of Downes into the present with implications for the future. She does this by identifying three key moments that established the limits of Puerto Rico’s relationship to the United States. For example, chapter 3 examines the immediate changes implemented after the United States acquired Puerto Rico as an overseas territory, and the Court’s ruling in Downes. Jiménez describes this process as “the creation of Puerto Rico as an experimental station,” where the island became a testing ground for colonial policies, and its inhabitants were subjected to a process of “Americanization” and were taught how to become proper U.S. colonial subjects (p. 63).

President Theodore Roosevelt in Ponce, Puerto Rico 1906. — President Theodore Roosevelt in Ponce, Puerto Rico, 1906.
Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Chapter 4 examines the events that led to “the midcentury miracle,” which lifted many Puerto Ricans out of poverty and culminated in the establishment of the Estado Libre Asociado (E.L.A.), or Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, in 1952. While acknowledging the benefits this period brought to some, including her own grandfather’s success story, Jiménez highlights the limits of Puerto Rico’s political authority and the overarching control of Congress’ plenary powers over the archipelago, much like Puerto Rican Nationalist Party leader Pedro Albizu Campos once did. In her effort to demystify archives of Puertorriqueñidad, the sense of Puerto Rican identity that became involved with the notion of E.L.A., she examines how Congress’ supremacy was reaffirmed in a series of U.S. Supreme Court decisions from 2016 to 2020 concerning Puerto Rico’s current debt crisis. In Chapter 5, Jiménez further develops how the Court once again upheld the precedent set in Downes, reinforcing the island’s colonial condition.

Jiménez’s Making Never-Never Land makes a significant contribution to Puerto Rican Studies, American Studies, Legal Studies, and Caribbean Studies, by interrogating the U.S. Supreme Court’s decisions through the lens of racial and colonial exclusion. Her work expands our understanding of unincorporated territories—Puerto Rico, Guam, the U.S. Virgin Islands, the Northern Mariana Islands, and American Samoa—and their relationship to the U.S. As a legal historian, Jiménez challenges the fiction that Puerto Rico holds real decision-making power, highlighting how Downes continues to justify the island’s exclusion and inequality. Her greatest scholarly intervention is tracing the genealogy of court decisions that have systematically stripped Puerto Rico of sovereignty, culminating in the imposition of PROMESA in 2016. By revisiting cases like Downes, she opens new avenues for understanding the present by rethinking Puerto Rico’s political and legal status.

Road Map of Puerto Rico, 1942.
Source: Wikimedia Commons

Jiménez’s Making Never-Never Land arrives at a crucial moment when Puerto Rican Studies scholars are examining critically how the United States treats its overseas territories. She not only expands these conversations but also moves beyond centering the debate on the Insular Cases, critically interrogating their lasting impact on Puerto Rico today. In doing so, she builds on the work of legal scholars like Efrén Rivera Ramos, David E. Wilkins, Maggie Blackhawk, Paul Finkelman, and Adam Arenson, among many others. Her research also engages with Ed Morales’ Fantasy Island: Colonialism, Exploitation, and the Betrayal of Puerto Rico (2019) and Rocío Zambrana’s Colonial Debts: The Case of Puerto Rico (2021), particularly in the context of Puerto Rico’s debt crisis and disaster capitalism, making it a timely and innovative contribution. Jiménez is also successful in expanding the conversation to other states of the U.S., as this book also helps us understand the colonial dynamics still present with Native Hawaiians.

Making Never-Never Land is well-suited for courses in Puerto Rican, and Caribbean Studies, American, African Diaspora, and Legal Studies, as it addresses race, discrimination, law, citizenship, U.S.-Puerto Rico relations, and colonialism while encouraging critical engagement with these legal precedents. Additionally, Jiménez’s intersectional approach to race and law makes her work relevant for students in Native American and Black Studies. Ultimately, this book challenges us to rethink legal narratives and their ongoing consequences, urging a more profound reconsideration of Puerto Rico’s political and legal status.

Nelson M. Pagán-Butler is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Texas at Austin. His research explores Afro-descendant intellectuals in the Hispanic Caribbean, Black Caribbean feminist and Marxist thought, and Hispanic Caribbean queer archives.

Review of Carceral Apartheid: How Lies and White Supremacists Run Our Prisons, by Brittany Friedman (2025).

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When Brittany Friedman began researching the formation of the Black Guerilla Family, a prison-based organization affiliated with the Black Power Movement, many people questioned the relevance of her project. Friedman recalled one interview with a former California Department of Corrections (CDC) official who, upon learning of her research topic, laughed and asked, “Why would you do that?”[1] From the perspective of state officials, this story had been written decades ago. The CDC and other government agencies, such as the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), had generated thousands of pages of documentation and reports on the Black Guerilla Family and other “Black Extremist” organizations. What more could a new study possibly add?

In fact, the resultant book, Carceral Apartheid, reveals a much more complex story. Friedman, an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Southern California, conducted over forty interviews with the founders of the Black Guerilla Family, CDC officials, and members of other race-based prison organizations such as the Aryan Brotherhood. Friedman describes her approach as historical ethnography. She uses these interviews to “invigorate and triangulate” traditional archival sources including prison administration documents, surveillance records, and personal correspondence.[2] Together, these sources paint a troubling portrait of the conditions that precipitated the creation of the Black Guerilla Family in California’s San Quentin Prison in 1970.

Popular narratives reduce the Black Guerilla Family (BGF) to a prison gang involved in criminal activity and the contraband economy. However, in tracing the group’s origins, Friedman argues that the founding of the BGF was a response to the system of carceral apartheid that structured—and continues to structure—life behind bars in the United States. California prison officials used racial classification systems to create divisions within the prison population and relied on white prisoners, especially those affiliated with white supremacist groups like the Aryan Brotherhood, to maintain the prison’s hierarchy. Officials fostered interracial conflict by spreading rumors, supplying weapons to white prisoners, and failing to intervene when violence broke out. In this way, the CDC was able to maintain a strict system of racial segregation that operated without any formal policy in place. Many of the people Friedman interviewed joined race-based groups such as the Mexican Mafia, Aryan Brotherhood, or the Black Guerilla Family out of fear. Traversing racial lines was often met with violent repercussions. This extralegal violence was not only sanctioned but encouraged by prison officials. As Friedman acknowledges, carceral apartheid relies on this relationship between state-sanctioned legal controls and extralegal violence and intimidation.

*Chester County (PA) Prison main cell block, 1960. Source: Wikimedia Commons.*

It was within this context that the BGF emerged. Drawing from her extensive interviews with founding members, Friedman argues that this group differed from existing prison gangs in two ways. First, the group was formed defensively to protect Black prisoners from the pervasive violence that they were subjected to by other prisoners and guards. Second, the BGF adopted a political stance that was influenced by organizations including the Black Panther Party (BPP) and the Black Liberation Army (BLA). Members were expected to engage in political education, develop skills in martial arts and hand-to-hand combat, and take an oath modeled after that of the Kenyan Mau Mau, who challenged British colonial rule through armed rebellion. Over time, the BGF would spread outside of California. In the process, it became less politically oriented and more closely connected to the prison’s illicit economy. As Friedman writes, this was largely due to the increase in membership and the CDC’s crackdown on political activity.

A poster of the Black Panther Party, 1971.
Source: Wikimedia Commons

Carceral Apartheid offers a nuanced study of the BGF and a compelling framework for understanding the U.S. prison system. It also points to some areas for further research. Friedman focuses entirely on men’s prisons, which seem particularly conducive to the kind of violent policing of racial segregation that she documents. But what might a study of “carceral apartheid” in women’s prisons reveal? Regional differences represent another route. While the book focuses on California, Friedman notes that this system of governance was not unique to the state. Prisons across the country adopted similar strategies for managing their populations. The Texas prison system is an excellent example. Historian Robert Chase has written at length about how the state’s building tender or “trustee” system granted certain prisoners enhanced power and privileges that gave way to rampant sexual violence.[3] It would be interesting to explore how these practices differ from place to place.

While the book does contain some disciplinary jargon that may be off-putting to those outside of the academy, Friedman’s interviews—which she quotes at length throughout the book—and her rich narratives anchor the text. In a study that is largely focused on organizational structures and dynamics, Friedman takes care to center the voices of people impacted by these systems. This commitment is also evident in her work as a Principal Investigator of the Captive Money Lab. Founded by Friedman and her collaborators, April Fernandes and Gabriela Kirk-Werner, the Captive Money Lab conducts research and engages in advocacy around the “pay-to-stay” fees that many city, county, and state governments impose on incarcerated people. These findings have informed public policy and signal an ongoing need for research on the criminal legal system.

Carceral Apartheid is an excellent contribution to this literature and offers important context for understanding prisons in the twenty-first century.

[1] Brittany Friedman, Carceral Apartheid, 153.

[2] Brittany Friedman, Carceral Apartheid, 166.

[3] Robert Chase, We Are Not Slaves: State Violence, Coerced Labor, and Prisoners’ Rights in Postwar America (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2020).

Why I turned the ‘Red Dead Redemption II’ video game into a history class on America’s violent past

Preface for Not Even Past: What place do video games have in the history classroom? Until recently, most educators dismissed this medium as frivolous and sensational. But given the staggering time that students spend in these digital landscapes, and the increasing thoughtfulness and diversity of major games, it may be time for a reassessment. My own experience in teaching a college class on late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century American history through the Red Dead Redemption franchise has convinced me that there’s tremendous future potential in the intersection of games and serious history. My experimental course at the University of Tennessee has seen unprecedented enrollments each semester, and student enthusiasm during class has similarly shot upward. I’ve adapted the course into a book, Red Dead’s History, which has also convinced me that digital games can provide a bridge for professional historians to reach wider audiences and share the academy’s wealth of knowledge. The book has granted me opportunities for public engagement that I could never have imagined previously – many made possible by my audiobook’s narrator, actor Roger Clark, who played Red Dead Redemption II’s protagonist. Roger and I spoke to a packed auditorium at San Diego Comic-Con, and were interviewed by one of YouTube’s most popular game streamers. When Roger and his fellow actor Rob Wiethoff made a surprise visit to my college class, game news site IGN broadcast the footage to millions of viewers. While this short-form public engagement often lacks the depth that academic scholars are accustomed to, it leads viewers toward a book that is very much a scholarly product, as Red Dead’s History is a synthesis of recent historiography in U.S. Western, Southern, and Appalachian history. And as early reader reviews indicate, new audiences are finding that scholarship is fresh and illuminating. As video games continue their astronomical growth in future decades, historical games will remain central to the medium. How will professional historians leverage this public passion toward serious study of the past? The future is wide open.

This article was originally published in “The Conversation” on 7.19.2024.

Title of course:
Red Dead’s History: Exploring America’s Violent Past Through the Hit Video Game

Q: What prompted the idea for the course?

This course was born during the COVID-19 pandemic. Confronting the lockdowns of 2020 and uncertain months spent at home, I rekindled a high school hobby that I had neglected for two decades – video gaming.

Picture of video game case — Used copy of Red Dead Redemption II. *Source: Not Even Past*

One of the first games I picked was “Red Dead Redemption II,” set in a fictionalized America of 1899. The game follows the Van der Linde gang, a diverse crew of idealistic outlaws, as they flee authority in an increasingly ordered and hierarchical world. Since its 2018 release, the game has sold more than 64 million copies, making it the seventh on the list of all-time bestselling video games – and the only historically themed one on the list.

While video games had been a mindless pastime in high school, this time around, I was playing as a professor who specialized in U.S. history since the Civil War. And though that made me a far more critical gamer, I was also genuinely surprised at how often RDRII – as it is often called – alluded to major topics that historians have spent generations debating.

These topics include corporate capitalism, settler colonialism, women’s suffrage, and the inequalities of race in an era that Mark Twain had called the “Gilded Age” – a period where the dazzling wealth of a small handful sharply contrasted with the misery of common people. These weighty topics were often on the game’s sidelines rather than at center stage – but they were present nevertheless.

Q: What does the course explore?

Given the centrality of violence to the video game, the course seeks to understand what really spurred bloodshed in the United States between 1865 and 1920.

In RDRII, gunfire is usually sparked by personal grudges, robberies, or the overconsumption of alcohol. But in Gilded Age America, it wasn’t so simple. Instead, broader social problems were the primary catalyst of violence. First, Americans fought over the emerging regime of corporate capitalism. Should new businesses like U.S. Steel and the Union Pacific Railroad, who wielded never-before-seen power and influence, dominate workers and consumers alike? Many resisted such an idea through protests, strikes, and sometimes bloodshed.

The Pullman Strike of 1894. Railroad workers who protested poor working conditions and low wages committed arson and destroyed property, which was followed by brutal state and federal law enforcement crackdown efforts.
*Image source: Wikimedia Commons.*

Secondly, Americans came to blows over the unfulfilled promises of racial equality that were written into the U.S. Constitution after the Civil War. Especially in the South, where the vast majority of African Americans lived, the formerly enslaved and their descendants demanded inclusion in politics and a chance to progress economically. But many white Southerners resisted such efforts, often using terrorism to push their Black neighbors into subservient positions.

Q: Why is this course relevant now?

American society in the late 19th century was ruptured by inequalities wrought by capitalism and race – and so is ours today. In the wake of Black Lives Matter and Occupy Wall Street, it’s wise that we look back at the long road that brought America to its contemporary dilemmas of racial violence and the gap between rich and poor. A handy way to open that conversation with young Americans is through video games – an industry that has now surged in value to eclipse both music and movies and which might be the key to reaching this generation’s students, as studies are beginning to show.

Q: What’s a critical lesson from the course?

One key lesson is about the city of New Orleans, fictionalized in RDRII as “Saint Denis.” In the game, the outlaw protagonists trade fire with the city’s blue-coated policemen following a botched bank robbery, leaving bodies in the streets. Few gamers could guess that a similarly bloody firefight with the police riveted the actual city in 1900, just a year after the game is set, leaving seven officers dead. Yet here the outlaw was a Black man, Robert Charles, who took a violent stand against police abuse and the emerging system of Jim Crow segregation.

In response to his attacks on the police, white mobs roamed the city and indiscriminately killed Black civilians. Therefore, the explosion of violence in New Orleans was produced not by simple banditry but by one of America’s towering social dilemmas.

Illustration in "The Mascot" newspaper, New Orleans, 1889. "Results of Police Outrage Investigations." — Illustration in “The Mascot” newspaper, New Orleans, 1889. “Results of Police Outrage Investigations.” The first panel of the cartoon entitled “As the Public See Him” shows a policeman with the head of a lion, waving a pistol and bloody billy-club over two prostrate bleeding bodies, as a citizen in the distance reacts in horror. The scond panel entitled “As the Committee Makes Him” shows policeman with the head of a lamb and angel wings, carrying a beribboned staff, exiting from a portal labled “Police Examining Committee” with a sign “Whitewashing Done Cheap”. A man with a top hat and cane looks on through binoculars.
Source: Wikimedia Commons

Q: What materials does the course feature?

I frequently begin course sessions with a brief video cutscene or gameplay footage from RDRII before we dive into the actual history that the games represent – or sometimes, misrepresent. For reading, students dive into scholarly monographs such as historian K. Stephen Prince’s “The Ballad of Robert Charles,” on the violent dilemmas of race in New Orleans. They also read various original sources, such as cowboy memoirs, train schedules, and a Texas newspaper from 1899.

Q: What will the course prepare students to do?

Anyone who has taken my class – or read my new book – will know that the big social problems we are wrestling with today have deep roots and took their modern shape during the same 1865-1920 period that is memorably captured in RDRII. They’ll also become much more discerning consumers of digital media and games in particular; they’ll be better able to assess and critique representations of history on the digital screen.

Tore Olsson, Associate Professor of History, University of Tennessee

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Tore Olsson is Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in History at the University of Tennessee.

Q: Why is this course relevant now?

Q: What’s a critical lesson from the course?

Q: What materials does the course feature?

Q: What will the course prepare students to do?

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