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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The UT Tower. Source: Not Even Past
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 20th 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.
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.
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.
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).
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. 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
[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).
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.
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.
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.
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.” 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.
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.
This week, Jeremi and Zachary have a conversation with Professor Mary Bridges, author of ‘Dollars and Dominion: U.S. Bankers and the Making of a Superpower.’ They explore the significant, yet often overlooked, role of banking institutions, particularly the Federal Reserve, in shaping American democracy and foreign policy.
Zachary sets the scene with his poem, “Reserves”.
The conversation delves into the historical impact of Banker’s Acceptance credit instruments on global trade, the establishment of the U.S. dollar as a reserve currency, and the dynamics of financial power during and after World War I. They also address the importance of transparency and accountability in maintaining a participatory democracy.
Mary Bridges is an Ernest May Fellow in History and Policy at Harvard’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. She is a historian of the twentieth-century United States. Her book, Dollars and Dominion: US Bankers and the Making of a Superpower, has just been published. Her next research project focuses on infrastructure building as a means of projecting U.S. influence overseas. Mary has also worked as a business reporter and editor.
Over sixty years ago, in November 1963, President John F. Kennedy took a fateful trip to Texas. It would be the last of his life. The trip had four planned stops: San Antonio, Houston, Dallas, with a final planned fundraiser dinner in Austin. In the days after his shocking assassination, JFK was buried at Arlington National Cemetery. Four years later in 1967, he was reinterred in his final resting place, marked by the Eternal Flame at the official presidential gravesite. The evolving design of the gravesite at Arlington had been publicized after his initial burial. However, behind the scenes, plans developed for an encircling memorial artwork. This missing wreath has remained undisclosed for decades.
With the Oak Spring Garden Foundation, I revealed the story of “The Missing Wreath: On JFK’s Grave & Mrs. Mellon’s Maquette” in an article published this fall in Ploughshares (the full text can be read here). Told as a detective narrative, it is woven like the structure of a wreath, exploring the planning, creation, and eventual disappearance of the artwork over time.
A short version of the story goes like this:
After JFK’s assassination and his initial interment in Arlington National Cemetery in November 1963, an architectural firm owned by John (Jack) Warnecke was commissioned to design the formal gravesite. Detailed research reports were created in conjunction with consultations by prominent family, scholars, architects, art critics, and clergy, along with a public exhibit of design plans at the National Gallery of Art and coverage in major news outlets. First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy wanted the gravesite to be publicly accessible yet personal and intimate as befitted a family grave. In 1964, she designated her close confidant, Rachel “Bunny” Lambert Mellon—who had designed JFK’s beloved White House Rose Garden—to represent Jackie’s wishes in the grave design.
President John F. Kennedy Gravesite, Arlington National Cemetery, Arlington, VA. Photo by author, November 2021.
With her sophisticated landscaping eye, Bunny softened Warnecke’s design around the Eternal Flame. As the final reinterment approached in 1967, she also worked behind the scenes on a secret memorial sculpture with another close confidant: the French-born Tiffany jewelry designer, Jean Schlumberger.
Bunny Mellon and Jean Schlumberger took as inspiration a wreath of military hats around the Eternal Flame that had been laid by JFK’s funerary Honor Guard in an impromptu gesture at his initial interment. Robert “Bobby” Kennedy, JFK’s brother, had been so moved by the gesture that he said the hats should remain around the grave until they “crumble to dust.” By 1969, the memorial wreath had been secretly made by French-born sculptor Louis Féron. Yet due to series of events and issues that delayed installation, the sculpture went missing by the early 1970s and was essentially lost to time—until it was rediscovered earlier this year.
Through the diligent sleuthing of Elinor Crane and Nancy Collins at the Oak Spring Garden Foundation (the Mellon’s former estate outside Upperville, VA), and with thanks to the memory of a stonemason named Tommy Reed, who had worked for essentially a half-century at Oak Spring, the lost artwork was finally found after a multi-year search. It was found disassembled in packing crates in an offsite storage facility at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum.
Originally written when the artwork was still missing, the story of “The Missing Wreath” aimed to inspire a search for the lost sculpture. In the process of writing, the search to me became a meditation on who and what gets lost and found in retellings of history. As I wrote in the longer article:
Cast and assembled memorial wreath for JFK’s gravesite, unknown location and date, photographer unknown. Photo acquired in 2021 by OSGF from an eBay sale of unidentified photos of “War Art Work” by Louis Féron (from the 2018 estate sale of Louis Féron and Leslie Snow). Courtesy of Oak Spring Garden Foundation.
“Historical artifacts never exist in a vacuum, and inanimate objects have lives and even afterlives. Public and private events color retellings; an artwork can be curated dozens of ways, even to the point of disappearing behind variations of accounts. The aura around the memorial wreath’s absence makes it almost more powerful than if it were present. When public celebrity is involved, when privacy is fiercely guarded, when privilege can determine what is noticed or neglected or even erased, stories can constellate between private records and the public imagination … Histories can get lost between lines and behind headlines—just as a crumbling stone maquette in a rural cemetery can lie for decades without notice.”
In the two years since “The Missing Wreath” was finished and accepted for publication by Ploughshares, additional puzzle pieces have emerged from different corners of the country, aiding in the search for the artwork’s final resting place. A brief coda notes the memorial’s rediscovery, highlighting its journey from lost to found, while leaving room for future historians.
As I reflect back on this remarkable story, what remains of interest to me are different ways to see the memorial wreath. Any history is always incomplete, as acts of remembering grow spaces for future storytellers to fill more gaps. With a nod to Wallace Stevens’ poem “13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” I offer here some frameworks for interpreting and re-interpreting the wreath:
1. Histories of Art and Design: JFK’s memorial wreath was co-created by the American gardener and philanthropist Rachel “Bunny” Lambert Mellon, French-born jewelry designer Jean Schlumberger, and French-born sculptor Louis Féron. When lines between artist, craftsman, and commissioner blur, who is credited as the creator of an artwork? How do historical traditions and cultural systems influence this valuation and reevaluation where art and design meet?
Nancy Collins hanging holiday wreath on headstone of Rachel “Bunny” Lambert Mellon, in Trinity Episcopal Church Cemetery, Upperville, VA. Photo by author, December 2021.
2. Histories of Labor: In addition to the co-creators in name, JFK’s memorial wreath owes much to contributions by highly skilled tradesmen including stonemasons, gardeners, servicemen, foundry workers, and more. The story of the missing wreath surfaced at the Oak Spring Garden Foundation (the former estate of Paul and Bunny Mellon in Virginia), thanks largely to a stonemason, who originally worked on a stone maquette in the early 1970s in the Oak Spring cemetery, where the sculpture briefly weathered. Since many people played a role in this memorial, how are such layers of labor credited?
3. Histories of Memorials: Plans for JFK’s Gravesite included commissioned reports in the 1960s by interdisciplinary critics and experts who considered distinctions among graves, memorials, and monuments in shaping the design. This was complemented by public-facing exhibits and family engagements with the process. Whether a national or personal memorial, how do incorporated elements do more than reflect a singular era to stand the test of time? Since the memorial wreath was not installed on JFK’s grave, how does its rediscovery offer a different reading of the same object in a different historical context?
4. Histories of Cemeteries: Multiple cemeteries in Virginia help to illuminate the story of the missing wreath: Arlington National Cemetery (where JFK is buried), Oak Spring’s Fletcher Cemetery (where the stone maquette was constructed based on JFK’s grave), Trinity Episcopal Church Cemetery (where the Mellons are buried), not to neglect other marked graves, along with unmarked cemeteries in neighboring mountains (largely interring free Black communities). Cemeteries balance preservation of memories with residual presence of physical bodies, cycles of life and death, shaped by beliefs about afterlives rooted in culture and ecology. JFK’s Gravesite sits in a national cemetery; he is one of only two presidents buried at Arlington. How do considerations of burial and commemoration reflect not only the person who died but also the values of the living?
5. Histories of Gardens: Bunny Mellon designed JFK’s White House Rose Garden during the president’s life, his Gravesite at Arlington after his death, and later the bayside grounds in Boston for his Presidential Library and Museum. After her death, the Mellon estate at Oak Spring transitioned from a private estate into a “garden foundation” to cross-pollinate the humanities, arts and sciences. One of its responsibilities includes stewarding the property’s cemetery, which caught the attention of Elinor Crane. Crane began asking questions about the crumbling stone maquette and enlisted Nancy Collins, the Foundation’s archivist, to help her search. Histories of gardens and cemeteries overlap. As landscapes change over time, how do attentions to plants help to support living histories and reparative futures, including attending to climate change?
6. Histories of Materials: JFK’s grave is composed of engraved slate headstones around a large round stone sourced from New England, in a sea of wavy pink granite, surrounded by specimen trees and other signature plantings. The design of the memorial wreath symbolically interweaves materials from bamboo to rope, driftwood to military hats, which inspired the wreath after JFK’s Honor Guard laid their hats in that shape at his initial interment. His memorial artwork was cast at a metal foundry and brought outside for a brief time to weather on an oyster shell stone maquette at Oak Spring. Considering both natural and manmade resources, how does materiality contribute to this story of the memorial wreath?
7. Histories of Ecology: After her multi-year search for the missing memorial wreath, Elinor Crane finally witnessed the artwork in early 2024 disassembled and crated at the JFK Presidential Library and Museum in Boston. On one of the disassembled pieces, she spied an unexpected detail: some bird droppings which she surmised came from Oak Spring when the memorial had been laid to rest for a short time on the outdoor stone maquette in the cemetery in the early 1970s. Since Oak Spring has transitioned from a private estate to a garden foundation to focus on cross-pollinating research, would it be possible to test and trace those droppings to identify the avian species? What foods might that bird have eaten, and does its kin still migrate through this ecosystem? This detail may seem insignificant but reveals the living world that surrounds such memorials.
Stone maquette related to JFK gravesite in Fletcher Cemetery at Oak Spring Garden Foundation, Upperville, VA. Photo by author, November 2021.
8. Histories of Lands (Ancestral, Colonized, Enslaved, Emancipated, Legislated): Established in 1864, Arlington National Cemetery is relatively young. It occupies land once owned by Robert E. Lee, which was requisitioned during the Civil War as a national burial ground. On the heels of the Emancipation Proclamation, part of the land was designated Freedman’s Village to support free Black women and men escaping enslavement. In centuries before colonization, the intersecting waterways of the Potomac and Chesapeake region served as homeland for hundreds of Indigenous communities. How are these ancestral lands recognized and represented in national and regional cemeteries, and who else may be buried in marked and unmarked graves in and beyond this region?
9.Histories of Witnesses: Most of JFK’s contemporaries have died, but after the memorial wreath was found in 2024, Elinor Crane and Nancy Collins learned that an important member of JFK’s funeral Honor Guard still lives. James L. Felder was only the tenth Black American to serve with the Honor Guard (with the other nine preceding him by only months), and he wrote an account of his experience, I Buried John F. Kennedy (1994). When the Oak Spring Garden Foundation gathered experts for a private meeting in September 2024 to share news of the lost-and-found memorial, Felder spoke about his experience and also shared his personal album of JFK’s funeral, made for him personally by First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy. Attendees also received a copy of Felder’s book with an advanced copy of “The Missing Wreath.” His album was reproduced for an exhibition on the memorial wreath that will run at the Oak Spring Garden Foundation from October 2024 into 2025. “The Untold Story of a Lost Memorial” exhibition invites attendees to share their own intersecting memories.
10. Histories of Libraries & Museums: Many museums and libraries figure in this story, including the Oak Spring Garden Library, Museums of Fine Arts in Virginia and Boston, the JFK Presidential Library and Museum, and others. Collections are never complete by themselves. Primary research often requires years for researchers to piece together a story. Large collections may take years to process, catalogue, and create finding aids to make items accessible. Versions of cataloguing can leave items relatively invisible. Conservation and preservation of a single item may take months or longer. Events like a global pandemic can separate curators from collections. Scholarly trends may neglect aspects of objects that hide in plain sight. Historical events influence why items were collected in the first place, leaving gaps in historical records. Collaborations help to reconnect parts that have been disassembled over time. How do related histories influence the lost-and-found memorial wreath and other aspects that may be missing from this story?
11. Histories of Speculative Futures: If the memorial wreath been installed after JFK’s reinterment, what would its reception have been in the era of the late 1960s or early 1970s? Would it have distracted from the timeless simplicity of the Eternal Flame, and what other unrealized memorial plans for the president’s grave lie buried in other archives? Now that the memorial wreath has been found, what are its possible futures, from its current resting place disassembled in Boston to an anticipated exhibition reassembled in Virginia, or otherwise? Why does the specter of JFK’s unrealized presidency continue to haunt our current moment, including vulnerabilities around civil rights and other social concerns that remain pressing issues? Beyond surmising what the world might have been if JFK had survived, would it be more helpful to consider: What descendants have we become, and what kind of ancestors do we wish to be?
12.Symbolic Histories: Many symbols are woven into JFK’s memorial wreath—military hats, ropes, driftwood, a leaf, and more—not to neglect the symbol of the wreath itself. Why have the symbol of wreaths played such an important role over time? What does the choice of a memorial in the shape of a wreath resembling a crown of thorns offer to this larger encircling story? Now that over a half-century has passed since the memorial wreath was created, what symbols still carry resonance or not, depending on the eye (and age and background) of the beholder? Beyond the memorial wreath, how might the living symbol of the Eternal Flame illuminate a path forward, among other eternal flames that have existed across centuries and cultures?
13.Public Histories and Public Memories: For many, the memory of that day remains remarkably vivid. If you were alive in 1963, consider what do you remember? If you weren’t alive then, ask someone who was to share generational knowledge—not only about JFK but also about their daily lives. How do generations connect to learn about the arc of evolving and intersecting histories? What other questions arise? What knowledges emerge by sharing these stories? As I wrote:
“Even as this story tells the arc of an artwork that went missing, it is as much if not more a story of those who co-created a memorial and who cared to go searching for an artifact that got lost, about the ephemeral or privileged materiality of human lives, how cultural collections are acquired and stewarded in ways that evolve, laying groundwork for future researchers and historical understandings.” ~ GEH, “The Missing Wreath”
These are 13 ways of looking at JFK’s lost-and-found memorial wreath, offering more questions than answers. There are surely more. But these questions provide a starting point to look again at this traumatic and critical moment in modern American history, as we work to imagine and co-create possible futures.
Gretchen Ernster Henderson is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Texas at Austin and writes across environmental arts, cultural histories, and integrative sciences. Her publications, exhibitions, and performances include five books, arts media, and opera libretti. She previously served as Associate Director for Research at the Harry Ransom Center at UT-Austin and Co-Director of a National Endowment for the Humanities Institute on Museums: Humanities in the Public Sphere at Georgetown University with UC-Santa Cruz.
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.
Banner picture: Oak Spring Garden Library, Oak Spring Garden Foundation, Upperville, VA. Photo by author, April 2021.
On Saturday, September 21, 2024, I had the privilege of joining a diverse group from Austin’s activist community for a workshop, Archiving Activism Freedom School, organized by Dr. Ashanté Reese and Dr. Ashley Farmer–both of them Associate Professors of African and African Diaspora Studies (AADS) at the University of Texas at Austin. Funded by the National Archives’ National Historical Publications and Records Commission, Campus Contexutation Intiative, and GRIDS, the workshop aimed to make community archiving practices and techniques accessible with the wider goal of documenting activism. The purpose of the Archiving Activism: Freedom School was to “teach student activist, organizers, and community organizations how to archive their community work and maintain digital documentation of their legacies”.
Oriented towards minority student activism and focused on the diverse racial geographies of Austin, the Archiving Activism Freedom School was “organized in the spirit and tradition of historical freedom schools”. As the organizers explain, Freedom schools “are temporary, alterative, and free schools aimed to help organize communities for social, political, and economic equality”. They have their origins in 18th and 19th century secret schools, “where enslaved people learned to read, write, and become politically engaged”. Such institutions became key tools for labor movement and civil rights struggles through the 20th century.
Historically, the purpose of freedom schools has been to empower communities by teaching their history, critically examining their current circumstances, and fostering education for social and political transformation. These goals were thoughtfully integrated into the Archiving Activism Freedom School.
Photo Credit: Michael T. Davis Photography
The first session of the agenda began with two talks by Texas-community members that focused on the question of ‘Why archives matter for your activism’. Jonathan Cortez, (Assistant Professor at the History Department of UT Austin) gave a talk on their experience with the Vicente Carranza Archive which was collected by a Chicano radio host from Corpus Christi. Cortez’s experience as a researcher brought them together with Vicente Carranza, resulting in the development of the Vicente Carranza Papers, a Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi (TAMU-CC) Special Collections now available for consultation at TARO (Texas Archival Resources Online). Cortez’s talk highlighted the importance of community history and creative thinking for archival practice as a means to highlight the activism of Hispanic communities in South Texas.
In the second presentation, Stephanie Lang, writer, organizer, community curator, and founder of RECLAIM, an organization that discovers, recovers, and showcases narratives and histories of Black people through the diaspora, shared her experience with the changing racial landscape of Austin. A seventh-generation African American woman from Austin, she talked about the importance of oral history for documenting the Black history of Austin. Lang emphasized that preservation is a way to maintain the memory and presence of the people of East Austin, one of the city’s most rapidly gentrifying neighborhoods in the city. Archiving, Lang stressed, offers proof that black and brown communities of Austin have pushed back.
In a subsequent session focused on the question of “Who deserves to hold your archives?”, participants heard from Carol Mead (Head of Archives and Manuscripts at The Dolph Briscoe Center for American History), Jacqueline Smith-Francis (Archivist and Curator of Black and African American stories at the Austin History Center), and Rachel Winston (Austin-Based activist, curator, and archivist, currently holding the inaugural Black Diaspora Archivist position at LLILAS Benson, Latin American Studies and Collections).
Photo Credit: Michael T. Davis Photography
A long-time archivist at the largest archive within the University of Texas system Mead’s presentation highlighted the ethics of archiving. In doing so, she stressed questions of access and use to keep in mind while creating and engaging with archives. Smith-Francis emphasized that archival work is deeply connected to land, sovereignty, and the silences contained within archives. Drawing on her 25 years as an archivist at the Austin Public Library, she talked about how community archive programs in Austin have contributed to the decolonization of archives. This shift means that archival initiatives now prioritize diverse subjects, stories, and collections—largely thanks to efforts like her own. Finally, Rachel Winston’s presentation offered valuable insights into the decision-making process behind where to place collections and why. She emphasized the importance of carefully selecting who you engage with when creating archives and shared key strategies for building meaningful relationships with archival institutions.
The second half of the workshop was focused on creating an archival plan. First, archivist Genevia Chamblee-Smith, Hidden Collections Curator at the Texas State University Libraries, walked participants through the step-by-step process needed to create an archive. She outlined six key steps: 1) identify, 2) evaluate, 3) describe, 4) arrange, 5) preserve, and 6) name. In the spirit of sharing knowledge, I will briefly outline the main points of these key steps.
Identify: Take inventory of the materials. What is available? What is important to keep, and what can be discarded? Where are the materials located?
Evaluate: Assess the types of materials you have. Which items are the most sensitive or vulnerable? Do you need professional assistance to process or preserve them?
Describe: Each item intended for preservation must be described in detail, answering key questions: What is it? Why is it significant? Who created it? Where did it come from?
Arrange: Organize materials by subject or type. Create an inventory for easy reference, and store documents in acid-free boxes or folders. Ensure the arrangement allows others to access the materials easily.
Preservation: The workshop emphasized digital preservation techniques. Staying current with technology is essential to prevent materials from becoming obsolete. Key strategies include scanning, converting to digital files, storing data across multiple external drives, and regularly backing up materials.
Name: The final step is consistent file naming. Use the File Naming Convention (FNC) framework to ensure files are easy to identify and relate to others. File names should include relevant metadata, avoid spaces and special characters, follow naming conventions, and be descriptive.
Each participant received an acid-free archive box containing cotton gloves, a pencil, a flash drive, and an acid-free folder. Image taken by the author.
With all this information at hand, the Freedom School ended with a digitization workshop where participants were able to scan and organize their materials for digitization, aiming at social movements preservation.
The workshop included concrete items designed to help with archiving work. Participants received an acid-free archive box containing cotton gloves, a pencil, a flash drive, and an acid-free folder. We also received a booklet that not only outlined the day’s agenda but also provided space to brainstorm and map out the six key steps for organizing our archiving projects.
The Archiving Activism Freedom School was an inspiring initiative, designed to introduce non-trained archivists and community participants to the process of creating archives. I spoke with several attendees focused on activism. They were genuinely excited to be there and grateful for the opportunity to learn more about how to archive community’s materials in a professional, intentional way.
More importantly, this workshop serves as a much-needed example of how to bridge the gap between archivists, academics, and activists. While the concept of community archives is gaining momentum, the scholarship in this field is still emerging. This workshop offered invaluable insights into the priorities, challenges, and opportunities that community archives present, making it an incredible learning experience for all involved.
Camila Ordorica is a doctoral candidate in Latin American History at the University of Texas at Austin, where she studies the history of the General Archive of Mexico during the long nineteenth century (1790-1910). Her research dialogues with archival, cultural, social, and material history, and explores how archives are written into history and their role within it. Camila’s passion for archival studies is rooted in her training as an archivist. She has worked at the Acervos Históricos de la Universidad Iberoamericana and the archives of Sine-Comunarr. She has also collaborated with UNAM’s ENES-Morelia, the ’17, Institute of Critical Studies’ and the International Federation of Public History in archival studies, practice, and digital humanities.
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.
On September 30, 2024, Dr. Tara López, Assistant Professor of Ethnic Studies at Winona State University, presented her new book, Chuco Punk: Sonic Insurgency in El Paso, at the Institute for Historical Studies. Part of The University of Texas Press’ American Music Series, the book traces El Paso’s influential Chicanx punk rock scene from its evolution in the 1970s through the early 2000s. López uses ‘Chuco punk’ as a lens to explore broader political, social, and cultural forces in the borderlands.[1] In doing so, she reveals how this music scene reflected a longer history of cultural and musical resistance among El Paso’s predominantly Chicanx community.
Chuco Punk is deeply embedded in the cultural and geographical specificity of El Paso, a city marked by the realities of militarization and segregation along the U.S.-Mexico border. “Dr. López’s work is impressively propulsive—weaving her expertise as a sociologist, a musicologist, and a transnational historian,” praises Dr. Annette Rodriguez, Assistant Professor of History at UT-Austin. “She elevates late-20th century El Paso, Texas, and Ciudad Juárez to their proper historical significance by documenting this long insurgent sonic landscape.” As Dr. Rodriguez notes, López explores how El Paso’s punk music scene created an outlet for marginalized voices while also responding to the wider social and political environment.
Punks in El Paso found ways to create their own space, sound, and community outside mainstream venues by staging shows in backyards and mechanic shops. The DIY and underground spirit of the scene often garnered dismissive attitudes. Bobby Welch, a concert promoter interviewed by López, recalled feeling that many people dismissed punk musicians as “stupid people who [couldn’t] play two chords.” However, Chuco Punk upends that narrative, showing that these El Paso artists forged a platform to vent frustrations and express solidarity while also pushing back against broader social expectations. By taking these musicians seriously, López emphasized that punk music in El Paso was more than just a rebellious subculture. The genre was also a form of political memory and protest.
López’s research draws on over seventy interviews with punks as well as unarchived materials, such as flyers, zines, photographs, and other ephemera. For the punks of El Paso, personal collections became informal archives. They carefully preserved their own history, which challenges the conventional narrative that punk music is predominately white and male. López’s work resists this framing. Instead, she illustrates how Chicanx women, in particular, carved out their own space within the punk scene.
Alongside these unarchived materials, oral histories serve as the backbone of López’s historical research. However, she initially faced some hesitation within the punk community, whose members were wary of academics seeking to document their story. This skepticism—rooted in the sense that punk itself was never taken seriously by mainstream culture—eventually gave way to rich collaboration. In gaining the punk community’s trust, López is able to elevate marginalized voices and materials by drawing on their rich, informal archives.
Ultimately, López offers more than a history of punk music in El Paso. She also challenges scholars to rethink their assumptions about what sources, archives, and communities are worthy of academic study. In her presentation, she recounted stories of fellow scholars who framed her research as “fun” or “a hobby.” Pushing back, she argued that these attitudes marginalize important narratives and constrain academic scholarship. The power of centering communities at the periphery became apparent during the talk’s question and answer session. Multiple attendees, themselves from El Paso, became emotional as they thanked López for telling the story of their community. Their reactions demonstrate the project’s ability to awaken and animate historical memory. Chuco Punk thus opens new possibilities for how we think about archives, memory, and the role of subcultures in shaping broader historical narratives.
SBITCH – Onion Street, Austin, TX 2000. Video of local punk band discussed in book.
Sicteens, August 27, 1996 at The Attic. Video of local punk band discussed in book.
Gabrielle Esparza is a Ph.D. candidate in Latin American history, with a focus on twentieth-century Argentina. Her dissertation examines the evolution of President Raúl Alfonsín’s human rights policies from his candidacy to his presidency in post-dictatorship Argentina. At the University of Texas at Austin, Gabrielle has served as a graduate research assistant at the Texas State Historical Association and as co-coordinator of the Symposium on Gender, History, and Sexuality in 2020-2021. Gabrielle was also Associate Editor and Communications Director of Not Even Past from 2021-2022. Currently, Gabrielle works as a graduate research assistant in the Institute for Historical Studies and as an Editorial Assistant for The Americas: A Quarterly Review of Latin American History.
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.
[1] El Chuco is a common nickname for El Paso. Scholars attribute the term’s origins to the pachuco subculture that originated in El Paso in the 1920s. Pachucos were particularly well-known for their jargon and style, which included ‘zoot suits.’ See Dictionary of Chicano Folklore (2000)by Rafaela G. Castro for more on this term.
I was on a train listening to the podcast The Road to Now and I couldn’t stop laughing. The hosts joked about drunken slogans from the 19th century on American daredevil diver, Sam Patch, a feud fought by jumping off Passaic Falls, and a ship with an effigy of Andrew Jackson being sent over a waterfall. [1] As I stifled my laughter, it became clear that there was much more to the story. The podcasters explained Patch’s bizarre journey to becoming one of the United States’ first ‘common man’ celebrities during the onset of the Industrial Age, a narrative also explored in Leaps of Fame: The Rise of Sam Patch and a Changing Industrial Landscape.
To better understand Sam Patch’s life in the context of 19th century working-class culture, I set out to make a ClioVis timeline. ClioVis is an interactive timeline software that allows you to chart, and emphasize connections between, historical concepts, events, and themes. My project incorporates The Road to Now’s podcast episode on Patch, allowing users to hear audio clippings of the podcast. Additionally, I relied heavily on Paul E. Johnson’s research in his excellent book Sam Patch: The Famous Jumper. Not many records exist on Sam Patch, especially preceding his fame, and Johnson’s book is the product of extensive research.
Patch life’s offers a fascinating window into a crucial moment in US history as industrial change transformed literal and cultural landscapes. Born around the turn of the 19th century, Patch spent his youth navigating a shifting landscape of worker identity in New England. He worked as a skilled laborer in various textile mills and, in Paterson, New Jersey, even joined the Paterson Association of Spinners.[2] Outside of work, he quickly began mastering the art of jumping from high places.[3] Thousands of people gathered to watch Patch’s leaps, but his story goes beyond showmanship. Studying his life as a performer reveals how class-status determined access to natural spaces and illuminates the rise of the American daredevil celebrity.
A lithograph of Paterson, New Jersey nearly 88 years after its founding (Packard & Butler Lith. Philadelphia 1880). Source: Library of Congress
The United States’ emerging Industrial Revolution provided the backdrop to Sam Patch’s life. At the time of Patch’s birth, the United States’ first water-powered mills were not even a decade old. In Pawtucket, Rhode Island, Samuel Slater opened the country’s first water-powered textile mill in 1793.[4] This style of mill would eventually transform New England’s waterways as entrepreneurs sought to harness the power of water for industrial production. In Paterson, New Jersey, the Society for Establishing Useful Manufactures (S.U.M.) built an industrial city that Alexander Hamilton hoped would define the United States’ industrial landscape. Paterson Mill—eventually water-powered—opened in 1794.[5]
Patch worked in both of these industrial centers before becoming a daredevil. In Pawtucket, Patch found joy and escape by jumping in the Blackstone River with other children, where he began learning the art of high dives. In 1824, Pawtucket was the site of the nation’s first factory strike. Limited evidence makes it difficult to know if Patch took part in the strike. Regardless, he witnessed the formidable power of Pawtucket’s mill owners who colluded in setting working conditions to limit competition and maximize profits.[6] His time in Rhode Island helped form his sympathies for New England’s working-class.
In 1826, Patch moved to Paterson, New Jersey where he would perform a jump designed to antagonize local businessman Timothy Crane over his use of public land. Patch and his fellow spinners frequently enjoyed the Passaic River recreational area. In contrast, Crane built a park called “Forest Garden” which featured a curated selection of plants for the enjoyment of the city’s elite. For a fee, people could enter Crane’s new park which used to be the site of a public playground.[7] In September 1829, Crane promoted the installation of a bridge across Passaic Falls to his new park. Patch intentionally chose to organize a leap to coincide with the unveiling of this bridge. Crane, hearing of these plans, worked with the police to lock Patch in a basement with Patch’s other favorite pastime: the copious consumption of alcohol. Despite this effort, Patch found a way to freedom and jumped from Passaic Falls right as Crane placed the bridge.[8] As planned, Patch stole the large crowd’s attention. Perhaps unintentionally, Patch also started his path toward becoming the United States’ first famous stuntman.
By jumping at the same time as Crane’s bridge unveiling, Patch staged a public show of resistance to Crane’s attempt to privatize land and regulate the recreational use of natural spaces. We may understand Patch’s jump as highlighting two important concerns that came to define his career as a showman: the public use of natural spaces and his sympathy with New England’s working-class. Patch brought entertainment to public audiences and championed the use of natural spaces for common enjoyment. Crane, on the other hand, created his “Forest Garden” in an attempt to make recreational areas more exclusive.
“Sam Patch on platform. (Typed and glued on the back: “In the 1829 Sam Patch built a 97-foot ladder-like platform at the base of Goat Island and jumped into the river”) Source: Wikimedia Commons
By fall 1829, Patch had become famous and regularly attracted audiences of thousands. Invited to an event celebrating ‘the Niagara Frontier,’ Patch headed to the falls in early October. He planned to jump his highest jump yet off of a platform on Goat Island—a site in between the United States and Canadian Falls. Patch arrived late which led the organizers to delay his jump by a day. When the date came, he had a drink and prepared to throw himself from the prepared platform. As per his routine, Patch wore his Paterson Association of Spinners uniform during his jump.[9] He leapt from the platform and gracefully landed in the pool below. His audience cheered as he emerged from the water. Patch went on to do another jump at the falls just 10 days later. These events further strengthened Patch’s fame.
As Historian Paul E. Johnson argues, Patch was one of the first ‘common men’ to reach celebrity status without significant wealth or ties to positions of great authority. In his words, Patch “wanted to be famous and he succeeded”, a fear that was far from common at the time.[10] In this way, he represented many aspects of the Jacksonian Era. His rise to fame mirrored the ideals that President Andrew Jackson and the Democrats promoted—an image of opportunity and success available to supposedly “ordinary” white male Americans.
My ClioVis timeline expands on Sam Patch’s story while better situating it within the context of the early 19th century. Using the ‘categories’ feature, I organized my timeline into cultural history, labor history, and the events of Patch’s life. The software also allows me to incorporate images, audio clippings, and ‘connections’ to strengthen my argument. These features enabled me to create a complex chronology of Patch’s life.
Sam Patch ended his career with a fatal jump into the Genesee River in 1829—yet, his legacy lives on. Following his death, Patch’s name entered into the colloquial lexicon. “What the Sam Patch,” “Where the Sam Patch,” and “Some things can be done as well as others” all became common sayings.[11] President Jackson named one of his horses Sam Patch, and the actual Patch became a character in countless theatrical productions and literary works across the world.[12] Today, Patch’s life offers us a platform to jump off for a deeper understanding how the Industrial Revolution changed natural and cultural landscapes in New England. His story provides insight into how capitalists and workers varied in their approaches toward using public land. Finally, examining Patch’s rise to fame tells us something about how Patch and the Jacksonian Era ushered in new ideas of the ‘American celebrity.’ Patch claimed physical space—through his jumps and their audiences—for the working-class on public land and in peoples’ minds as a ‘common man’ celebrity.
Aidan Dresang is an undergraduate history major studying to become a public high school history teacher. He is interested in environmental history and resistance movements. As a future history teacher, Aidan hopes to teach history critically and bridge the community-classroom divide. He is currently a ClioVis intern.
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.
[1] Rivers Langley, Narado Moore, and Ben Sawyer, “Sam Patch: America’s First Daredevil,” The Road to Now, accessed July 15, 2024, https://open.spotify.com/episode/3qHTRGbVgsrML2z5nYmtAL?si=c6bbc181cf284adb.
[2] ‘Spinners’ refers to workers who made thread, often using the ‘spinning jenny.’ The adoption of power looms in textile production mills often led to the displacement of skilled textile workers (spinners).
[3] Paul E. Johnson, Sam Patch, the Famous Jumper, 1st ed (New York, NY: Hill and Wang, 2003).
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