US History Archives - Page 12 of 25

US Survey Course: Slavery

During the summer of 2016, we will be bringing together our previously published articles, book reviews, and podcasts on key themes and periods in the history of the USA. Each grouping is designed to correspond to the core areas of the US History Survey Courses taken by undergraduate students at the University of Texas at Austin.

Experiencing Slavery:

Slavery is often discussed in terms of numbers and dates, human rights abuses, and its lasting impact on society. To be sure, these are all important aspects to understand, but one thing that is often given relatively short shrift is what it was like to actually be a slave. What were the sensory experiences of slaves on a daily basis? How can we dig deeper into understanding the lives of slaves and understand the institution as a whole?

Who speaks for the experiences of the enslaved? Let the Enslaved Testify: Daina Ramey Berry discusses the use of former slave narratives as a “valid” historical source.

Rosa and Jack Maddox (Briscoe Center for American History, UT Austin)

15 Minute History Episode on Experiencing Slavery:

The Senses of Slavery

Slavery marks an important era in the history of the United States, one that is often discussed in terms of numbers and dates, human rights abuses, and its lasting impact on society. To be sure, these are all important aspects to understand, but one thing that is often given relatively short shrift is what it was like to actually be a slave. What were the sensory experiences of slaves on a daily basis? How can we dig deeper into understanding the lives of slaves and understand the institution as a whole?

Guest Daina Ramey Berry has given this question serious thought. In this episode, she discusses teaching the “senses of slavery,” a teaching tool that taps into the senses in order to connect to one of the most important eras in US history and bring it to the present.

Urban Slavery:

In their article Slavery and Freedom in Savannah, Leslie M. Harris and Daina Ramey Berry show that “urban slavery was part of, not exceptional to, the slave-based economies of North America and the Atlantic world.”

Going to Market- A Scene Near Savannah, Georgia. Harper’s Weekly, 1875 Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Miscellaneous Items in Hight Demand collection, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-USZ62-102153.

Interested to learn more about urban slavery? You may also like:

Jacqueline Jones discusses her book Saving Savannah: The City and the Civil War, a study of the unanticipated consequences of the Civil War for Confederate slaveholders and the dramatic efforts of the city’s black people to live life on their own terms in Savannah.

Tania Sammons’ essay on Andrew Cox Marshall, a former slave who went on to become a successful businessman and religious leader in pre-Civil War period Savannah.

Daina Ramey Berry and Leslie Harris offer further reading recommendations on Urban Slavery.

15 Minute History Episode on Urban Slavery:

Urban Slavery in the Antebellum U.S.

When most people think about slavery in the United States, they think of large agricultural plantations and picture slaves working in the fields harvesting crops. But for a significant number of slaves, their experience involved working in houses, factories, and on the docks of the South’s booming cities. Urban slavery, as it has come to be known, is often overlooked in the annals of slave experience.

This week’s guests Daina Ramey Berry, from UT’s Department of History, and Leslie Harris, from Emory University, have spent the past year collaborating on a new study aimed at re-discovering this forgotten aspect of slave experience in the United States.

Labor and Gender:

Daina Ramey Berry discusses her book Swing the Sickle, an incisive look into the plantation lives of enslaved women and men in antebellum Georgia.

For further reading, consult this list of classic studies, new works and a few novels on labor and gender and the institutions of slavery in the United States.

Further Recommended Books on Slavery in the US:

Jorge Cañizares Esguerra reviews Slaves and Englishmen, by Michael Guasco (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014)

Nakia Parker recommends Black Slaves, Indian Masters: Slavery, Emancipation, and Citizenship in the Native American South, by Barbara Krauthamer (University of North Carolina Press, 2013)

Henry Wiencek discusses The Fiery Trial, by Eric Foner (W.W. Norton and Company, 2011)

For an in-depth study of one of the most famous slave owners we recommended Henry Wiencek Sr.’s study Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves.

And here are some more Books on Slavery, Abolition, and Reconstruction recommended by Jacqueline Jones.

Slavery in Popular Culture:

Historical films and books always distort the historical record for dramatic purposes. Sometimes that doesn’t matter and sometimes it does. How has the history of slavery been presented in historical films?

Jermaine Thibodeaux reviews 12 Years a Slave (2013) and talks about the difficulty of dramatizing the ‘Peculiar Institution’.

Daina Ramey Berry, Tiffany Gill, and The Associate of Black Women Historians comment on The Help (2011).

Nicholas Roland offers historical perspectives on Spielberg’s Lincoln (2012).

Daina Ramey Berry and Jermaine Thibodeaux discuss Nat Turner: A Troublesome Property (2002) and Haile Gerima’s film Sankofa (1993)

And finally, Daina Ramey Berry reviews Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained (2012)

Texas History:

Maria Esther Hammack delves into the Briscoe Center archives at UT Austin and finds sources detailing the illegal slave trade in Texas, 1808-1865.

Mapping Slavery:

Henry Wiencek recommends two significant digitalization projects that help capture broad trends related to slavery and emancipation in the US:

Mapping the Slave Trade using Emory University’s Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database.

Visualising Emancipation(s)‘, a new digital project from the University of Richmond that maps the messy, regionally dispersed and violent process of ending slavery in America.

Race and slavery’s lasting legacy:

Jacqueline Jones discusses her book A Dreadful Deceit: The Myth of Race from the Colonial Era to Obama’s America, an exploration of the way that the idea of race has been used and abused in American history. This discussion is expanded further on 15 Minute History: The Myth of Race in America.

Daina Ramey Berry and Jennifer L. Morgan offer historical perspectives on the casual killing of Eric Garner, highlighting slavery’s lasting legacy and the historical value of black life.

Concerned by misconceptions about slavery in public debate, Daina Ramey Berry dispels four common myths about slavery in America.

Shippensburg University student Cory Layton, a junior from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, paints his face with the slogan “Black Lives Matter” at the ‘Fight for Human Rights and Social Equity’ rally at Shippensburg University in Shippensburg, Pennsylvania, on Thursday, December 4, 2014. (AP Photo/Public Opinion, Ryan Blackwell)

Teaching US History with Not Even Past

Over the past five years, NEP has posted hundreds of articles, book recommendations, film reviews, and blogs on every period of US History. These articles make great teaching material. Some introduce a topic to students entirely unfamiliar with it. Others present one or both sides of a controversy that can be used to launch a classroom discussion. Some can teach students how to read primary documents and some are just fun to read for students or instructors looking for a little extra or a new angle.

This Summer 2016, we will be presenting a chronological index of NEP articles on US History, designed to correspond to the topics covered in the US History Survey for instructors and students participating in US History survey courses to use as they wish.

US Survey Course: Colonial US and the American Revolution

15 Minute History Episode on Colonial America:

The Pueblo Revolt of 1680

In the late 17th century, Native American groups living under Spanish rule in what is now New Mexico rebelled against colonial authorities and pushed them out of their territory. In many ways, however, the events that led up to the revolt reveal a more complex relationship between Spanish and Native American than traditional histories tell. Stories of cruelty and domination are interspersed with adaptation and mutual respect, until a prolonged famine changed the balance of power.

Guest Michelle Daneri helps us understand contemporary thinking about the ways that Spanish and Native Americans exchanged ideas, knowledge, and adapted to each others’ presence in the Southwest.

15 Minute History Episodes on the American Revolution:

The American Revolution in Global Context, Part I

Every year, Americans celebrate the Fourth of July, which commemorates our successful revolution against British colonial rule. It’s an important national moment—but it’s also an important international moment when viewed against the context of the greater British empire. At the time, the Empire was considered the most tolerant and liberal entity in the world—why and how did the American settlers come to the conclusion that they would be best served by breaking free and setting off to their own?

Guest James M. Vaughn helps us understand the little known international context of a well-known national moment, pondering questions of politics, economics, and ideas that transcend national boundaries.

The American Revolution in Global Context, Part II

Every veteran of high school American history knows that the rallying cry of the American revolution was “No taxation without representation!” But what did that rallying cry actually mean? What were the greater principles behind it? And, in an empire upon which the sun never set, were the 13 North American colonies the only place that Britain’s colonial subjects were agitating for a larger role back in London?

In this second of a two-part episode, guest James M. Vaughn walks us through the long and often painful process that took our founding fathers away from their original goal of from wanting representation and equal standing with the British motherland to the decision to split off from the world’s most powerful empire and go their own way.

The Royal Proclamation of 1763

Between 1754 and 1763, Great Britain, France, and a collection of French-allied Native American tribes fought a brutal war over trading rights in colonial North America. This war, generally called the “French and Indian War,” or “The Seven Years’ War,” resulted in a British victory and a large acquisition of French territory across the eastern half of North America. So, faced with the task of how colonists would settle all of this land, King George III issued a Royal Proclamation in 1763 which attempted to reorganize the boundaries of colonial America, as well as the lives of its inhabitants.

Guest Robert Olwell describes the proclamation, its effects on the history of colonial North America, and ponders whether the Royal Proclamation is really the smoking gun that caused the American Revolution as some have claimed.

Texas and the American Revolution

What role did Texas play in the American revolution? (What–Texas? It wasn’t even a state yet!) And yet, Spain and its empire–including what is now the Lone Star State, did play a role in defeating the British Empire in North America. New archival work is lending light on the ways that Spain, smarting from its loss of the Floridas to Britain in the Seven Years War, backed the American colonists’ push for independence.

Ben Wright of UT’s Briscoe Center for American History has been working with the Bexar archives and documents how Spain’s–and Texas’s–efforts to divert sources of food and funding to the American troops helped to tip the balance of power in North American forever.

15 Minute History Episodes on the Founding Fathers and the Declaration of Independence:

Perspectives of the Founding Fathers

American political discourse refers a lot to the ideals of the Founding Fathers, but the Founding Fathers often found themselves at odds with one another with very different religious, political, and economic ideas. In this episode, we’ll examine some of the lesser known Founding Fathers, and examine the ranges of opinions they held about issues from slavery to states’ rights and their opinions on the form of the new American Republic.

Guest Henry A. Wiencek from UT’s Department of History walks us through an era of American history that, it turns out, isn’t so easy to summarize as it might appear.

Early Drafts of the Declaration of Independence

The Declaration of Independence is arguably one of the most recognizable documents in American history, quoted and recited often. But the first draft that Thomas Jefferson wrote contained passages that were edited and deleted by the Continental Congress before its approval. What did they say? What might have been different about the early Republic if they were left in? And is there really a treasure map hidden on the back of the original document?

Guest Robert Olwell from UT’s Department of History takes a deeper look to get insight into Jefferson, the workings of the Congress, and the psyche of the American colonists on the eve of revolution—plus, we’ll put that whole treasure map thing to rest once and for all.

Thomas Jefferson’s Qur’an

In 2006, Keith Ellison, a newly elected congressman from the state of Minnesota, and the first Muslim elected to Congress, took his oath of office on a Qur’an from Thomas Jefferson’s personal library. Why did one of the founding fathers own a Qur’an? What was his opinion of it? And how did it influence his ideas about concepts of religious liberty that would eventually be enshrined in the Constitution?

Guest Denise A. Spellberg, author of a new book called Thomas Jefferson’s Qur’an: Islam and the Founders, sheds light on a little known facet of American history: our earliest imaginings of and engagements with the Islamic world, and comes to some surprising conclusions about the extend of religious freedoms envisioned by one of the key founding fathers.

Reconstruction in Austin: The Unknown Soldiers

By Nicholas Roland

Seven marble head stones lie along a chain link fence in the Old Grounds of Austin’s historic Oakwood Cemetery. Their inscriptions read simply “U.S. Soldier.” These graves are Austin’s own unknown soldiers, men whose identities were lost over time and whose existence is mostly forgotten in the bustling twenty-first century Texas capital. They are also some of the last tangible remnants of the United States Army’s occupation of Austin during the Reconstruction years, a period that is often overshadowed by the deadly four year struggle between North and South that preceded it.

The Seven 'Unknown Soldier' Gravestones. — The Seven ‘Unknown Soldier’ Gravestones. Courtesy of the author.

The recent sesquicentennial of the American Civil War occasioned an outpouring of scholarly commentary, public programming, and commemoration. No such effort will be made to recall the drama of Reconstruction, an effort that began while the Confederacy still clung to life and ended in the aftermath of the 1876 presidential election. Historians today see the Civil War and Reconstruction not as discrete events, but as a critical period in a wider nineteenth-century struggle over issues of race, citizenship, individual rights, and the relationship between the state and federal governments and individual Americans.

Scholars debate exactly how much Reconstruction accomplished and whether more radical policies were either desirable or possible, but the long-term impact of Reconstruction legislation, especially the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the United States Constitution, is undeniable. On the ground level, the United States Army played a key role in supporting the operations of the Freedmen’s Bureau and in protecting white unionists and the formerly enslaved from the wrath of defeated Confederates. The seven men who lie in Oakwood Cemetery today took part in the struggle of Reconstruction in Texas, a struggle that in many ways was simply a continuation of the American Civil War.

Gravestone of an 'Unknown Soldier'. Courtesy of the author. — Gravestone of an ‘Unknown Soldier’. Courtesy of the author.

Emancipation and Reconstruction arrived in Texas on June 19, 1865 in the form of the Union Army. Within weeks, Union forces entered the state from several directions and proceeded to station troops in the most heavily populated areas. Austin was occupied on July 26, making it the last Confederate state capitol to fall to Union forces. Volunteer units, who made up the vast majority of the Union Army during the war, were the first to garrison Austin. The Second Wisconsin, First Iowa, and Seventh Indiana Cavalry regiments, under the command of General George A. Custer, camped on the northern outskirts of town in the fall of 1865.[1] As early as November 1865 the volunteer forces were being mustered out of the service and in 1866 they were replaced by Regular Army units. Although troops began to be sent to Texas’ western frontier in the fall of 1866, others remained in Austin and other portions of the eastern half of the state to maintain order and combat rampant violence aimed at suppressing the interracial political coalition represented by the fledgling Texas Republican party. The United States Army maintained at least a small garrison in Austin until 1875.[2]

A recently published work on Oakwood Cemetery says that the men who are buried there today were victims of a cholera outbreak that took place among Custer’s troops, who were encamped along Shoal Creek. If they were members of Custer’s cavalry, they were veterans of the Civil War as well as participants in the Reconstruction occupation of Texas. Although newspaper reports from the time do not mention a cholera outbreak, the unit histories of the regiments stationed in Austin reveal that nearly 86 percent of the casualties they sustained during their service were from disease. Along with other casualties, the men are believed to have been buried on the grounds of the historic Neill-Cochran house, which was used as a hospital by the Army from the fall of 1865 until March 1867.[3] In the 1890s most of the bodies along Shoal Creek were supposedly exhumed and reinterred elsewhere, but the seven men were forgotten until a flood exposed their graves some time prior to 1911, at which point they were transferred to Oakwood Cemetery.[4]

The Neill Cochran House located near the University of Texas in Austin, Texas, United States. Photo taken October 2007 by Larry D. Moore. Via Wikipedia.

As Drew Gilpin Faust illustrates in This Republic of Suffering, the federal government faced a monumental task in attempting to locate and identify the Union dead in the years following the Civil War. Between 1865 and 1871 303,536 Union dead were relocated to national cemeteries, at a cost of over $4 million. Only 54 percent of the bodies were identified. One of the major obstacles confronting efforts to identify and move the Union dead to national cemeteries was the intransigence of former Confederates, who did not hesitate to remove headboards and otherwise desecrate Union graves. In contrast, African Americans in the South proved to be the best allies of federal investigators who labored to document and care for Union graves.[5] In fact, David W. Blight argues that the first Memorial Day commemoration took place in Charleston, South Carolina in 1865, when formerly enslaved Charlestonians held a memorial service for Union prisoners of war who had died while in captivity at a local race track.[6] The culture of commemoration established by Americans during the Reconstruction years continues in the modern Memorial Day holiday.

Were Austin’s unknown soldiers forgotten due to malice toward occupying US troops? On the one hand, Travis County had voted against secession in the 1861 referendum and many prominent unionists resided in Austin. Custer’s troops camped on land owned by Elisha M. Pease, a pre-war governor and moderate unionist who would serve again as governor under the military government established by the Reconstruction Acts in 1867. The owners of the Neill-Cochran home, S.M. Swenson and John Milton Swisher, were both unionists as well, although Swisher worked for the state of Texas during the war.[7] According to the records of the Texas State Cemetery, part of the cemetery was set aside during Reconstruction for burials of Army personnel, a move that hardly seems to indicate hostility toward the occupying soldiers. Sixty-two Reconstruction-era soldiers were eventually transferred from Austin to the San Antonio National Cemetery in the late nineteenth century.[8] The men buried in Oakwood may have simply been the victims of negligence or error.

On the other hand, although relations between Austinites and the occupying federal soldiers appear to have been generally peaceful, Amelia Barr recorded that the town was “practically in mourning” in the aftermath of Confederate defeat.[9] Libby Custer, who accompanied her husband to Austin, recalled that “it was hard for the citizens who had remained at home to realize that the war was over, and some were unwilling to believe there had ever been an emancipation proclamation. In the northern part of the State they were still buying and selling slaves.”[10] Most white Texans steadfastly opposed the Reconstruction program of advancing racial equality, often violently. In later years “Lost Cause” propaganda and the Dunning school of Reconstruction history would paint the Reconstruction period as a time of corruption, misrule, and tyranny. Ironically, a town that was known for its large unionist population during the secession crisis became dotted with Confederate memorials during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The Old Oakwood Cemetery Austin, Texas, United States. Via Wikipedia. — The Old Oakwood Cemetery Austin, Texas, United States. Photo taken January 2007 by Larry D. Moore. Via Wikipedia.

The physical space of Oakwood Cemetery illustrates the workings of Texas historical memory over time. Approximately twenty yards directly north of the unknown soldiers is a large obelisk dedicated by the United Daughters of the Confederacy in 1909 to General Tom Green, an officer in the Republic of Texas army and a Confederate general who was killed in action in 1864. Monuments to other individuals are scattered throughout the cemetery, some with Texas Historical Commission markers that tell their stories. In their midst, these seven marble headstones lie adjacent to Navasota Street, unknown and largely forgotten, with nothing to explain their significance to visitors. Although controversies over Confederate statuary and school names draw the most media attention in twenty-first century Austin, the long shadow of the Civil War and Reconstruction lingers in the city’s oldest cemetery, at once hidden and in plain sight.

Picture of an obelisk dedicated by the United Daughters of the Confederacy in 1909 to General Tom Green, an officer in the Republic of Texas army and a Confederate general who was killed in action in 1864. — Obelisk dedicated by the United Daughters of the Confederacy in 1909 to General Tom Green, an officer in the Republic of Texas army and a Confederate general who was killed in action in 1864. Courtesy of the author.

Notes:

[1] Austin Southern Intelligencer, October 26, 1865 and November 9, 1865.

[2] Thomas T. Smith, The Old Army in Texas: A Research Guide to the U.S. Army in Nineteenth-Century Texas (Austin: Texas State Historical Association, 2000), 54, 104-114.

[3] Kenneth Hafertepe, Abner Cook: Master Builder on the Texas Frontier (Austin: Texas State Historical Association, 1992), 148.

[4] Save Austin Cemeteries, Austin’s Historic Oakwood Cemetery: Under the Shadow of the Texas Capitol (Austin: Save Austin Cemeteries, 2014), 73; email correspondence with Dale Flatt and Kay Boyd, May 23, 2016; Lorraine Barnes, “Only Stones Remain of US Soldiers,” The Austin Statesman, September 28, 1955; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1st_Regiment_Iowa_Volunteer_Cavalry; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2nd_Regiment_Wisconsin_Volunteer_Cavalry; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/7th_Regiment_Indiana_Cavalry.

[5] Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008), 211-238.

[6] David W. Blight, “Forgetting Why We Remember,” May 29, 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/30/opinion/30blight.html?version=meter+at+1&module=meter-Links&pgtype=article&contentId=&mediaId=&referrer=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.davidwblight.com%2Fpublic-history%2F2015%2F5%2F26%2Frestoring-memoriam-to-memorial-day&priority=true&action=click&contentCollection=meter-links-click

[7] http://www.nchmuseum.org/about/; https://tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/fsw20; https://tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/fsw14; https://tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/fpe08.

[8] Email from Jason Walker, May 25, 2016.

[9] Quote in David C. Humphrey, “A ‘Very Muddy and Conflicting’ View: The Civil War as Seen from Austin, Texas,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly (Jan. 1991): 412.

[10] Elizabeth B. Custer, Tenting on the Plains, Or, General Custer in Kansas and Texas (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1994), 138.

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.

Watching Soccer for the Very First Time in the American West

By Mark Sheaves

In the summer of 2014, when the World Cup was played in Brazil, around 3.2 billion (not million!) people watched at least one game of football, or as we like to call it here in the US, soccer. That’s nearly half the world’s population. The final between Germany and Argentina played at the Maracana, the so-called “Cathedral of Football,” drew an audience of about one billion people, probably representing the largest simultaneous experience in the history of humanity. That’s nearly ten times the viewers of this year’s Superbowl. And viewing numbers are just one way of judging the global reach of a sport played in parks, streets, and beaches almost everywhere in the world. Today, it is hard to imagine meeting someone anywhere in the world who has not watched or played the global game. With the European Championships kicking off in France this June, I was wondering: What would the sport look like to someone who had never seen it played?

I found an answer while conducting research on an entirely different topic. Trawling the digitalized local newspapers from early twentieth-century Kansas, I stumbled on an article titled “A Sunday with the Scotch at Maple Hill” published in The Topeka Daily State Journal on November 16, 1912. Reading the headline I hoped that the article might be about a rowdy party involving kilts, whisky, and bagpipes. But instead it was an account by an unnamed Topeka-based journalist describing his first ever soccer game.

In the Kansas countryside, a short drive west of Topeka, two teams lined up on a patchy field of grass in late-fall sunshine. Wheat swayed in the background, cattle wondered freely, and “the fruit trees and cabbage plants and fat pasture land mocked the poor, lean newspaper men from the city.” On one side stood the Topeka team composed of descendants of “the English shires and the Scotch Glens.” Their opponents were a Maple Hill team of “eleven husky Highlanders” who worked on the farms in rural Kansas. Bigger and stronger than their urban counterparts, the Maple Hill players are described as built like bears, with jaws made of cement, and faces weather-worn by the Scotch glens and the Kansas sun. This was a game between slender, quick urbanites and a team of strong, rugged farm workers. Skill and speed took on physical power that day, which is still a recognizable dynamic in the soccer world.

And then the game kicked off and the newspapermen watched on, trying to make sense of a game with “no hidden details or smothered intricacies.” Without a sporting lexicon to draw from, the journalist relied on animal metaphors and contemporary references to describe what he saw. Some of these create wonderful images of a game played between a zoo of hybrid animals. A Maple Hill player has “a face like a hawk, hair grey as a badger and standing up like a shock. He was a bearcat to follow the ball.” At another moment, the author explains that the Topeka goalkeeper “had more troubles in the game than a bear in a bee yard.” But he reserves his best descriptions for the Maple Hill defense:

“The three Maple Hill Scots guarded the goal like a bulldog watching a baby buggy. Jackson stood like a tree. Reid had the displacement of a battleship. Warren covered the ground like a crop of wheat.”

Living now in an era where sports commentators usually draw on a set of clichés, it is refreshing to read this journalist describe the game in such original language.

At some points the game is almost entirely unrecognizable to a current soccer fan. A section titled “Kicking a ‘Human’ Goal” describes the brutal events that led to Maple Hill’s fourth goal. Moments after the Topeka goalkeeper successfully caught the ball, five of the Maple Hill “clan” bundle him to the floor and then kick the ball and man through the posts. Amazingly, the goal stood while the fans on the sidelines “swore joyously in the Gaelic tongue”. The Topeka goalkeeper “got up with the worst grouch this side of the Balkan war zone.” A picture depicts this moment, which was one of the highlights for the journalist. Such play now would probably result in a lengthy ban for the offending players, but the game played that day at Maple Hill appears to have been largely lawless.

Back in 1912, the violent nature of this game should not come as a massive surprise. During the nineteenth century, Americans played a diverse range of sports involving kicking, running, and outright fighting. These games derived from ill-defined versions of rugby, football, and the medieval game of mob football, the latter being a ferocious chaotic event pitting neighboring European communities against each other as they fought to drag an inflated pigs bladder to a designated point. And of course, it was from this mosaic of sporting activities that some kind of standardized rules for American football came into being in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While the game at Maple Hill was primarily about kicking a leather ball, and no animal innards were involved, the violence of Highlanders certainly echoes elements drawn from other sports including the recently developed American football.

This one-off game also sheds light on a largely forgotten history of soccer in the US. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, businesses, churches, schools, and ethnic community organizations established teams, leagues and associations in the hope that soccer would become the nation’s favored sport. While mid-nineteenth-century New Orleans is thought to be the first home of soccer in America, the game really took off in the northeast under the stewardship of the American Football Association, founded in 1884. By the second decade of the twentieth-century when the Maple Hill game took place, soccer matches drew large crowds in New Jersey, Massachusetts, and increasingly in cities further west such as St. Louis. The game at Maple Hill is part of this westward expansion of soccer. It was just one example of a series of matches organized by Tom Powell, a Topeka businessman, who devoted his energy to bringing the game to the Kansas area in the 1910s. However, as with most other parts of the country, these soccer initiatives declined with the increasing popularity and professionalization of American football and baseball. Yet, these early twentieth century games point to a richer history of soccer in the US than is usually recognized.

A mob football match played at London’s Crowe Street in 1721. Via Wikipedia.

Oh, and the score between Maple Hill and Topeka? The reporter does not give it. Maple Hill certainly won, and scored at least four goals. No mention is made of a Topeka goal. This was a friendly match, in the sense that the score mattered only for pride, and for the journalist the final result mattered less than the enjoyment he derived from watching his first ever game. Perhaps this emphasis on play and community rather than results is one we might hope to return in the face of the ever-increasing monetization and business oriented approach of the sport.

All Images and quotes are from: The Topeka state journal. (Topeka, Kan.), 16 Nov. 1912. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Lib. of Congress.

Digital Teaching: Behind the Scenes in the Liberal Arts ITS Development Studio

The Liberal Arts Development Studio has served as the production force behind the development of live-streaming and other online courses at The University of Texas at Austin since 2012. The Development Studio is an integrated team of professional and student staff assembled to work with faculty to create rich and effective online courses. Software development professionals create tools to support student/professor interaction online. Audio, video and graphic design experts recruit top-notch UT student staff to create high-quality multi-media experiences for students. Project management professionals work with faculty and technical staff to coordinate the production and delivery of multiple courses each semester, including the summer terms.

[jwplayer mediaid=”12847″]

Credits:

Interviews conducted by Teaching Assistant Shery Chanis.

Musical intro prepared and performed by Natalie Suri and Zachary Suri.

American Zionism and Soviet Jews

By Michael Dorman

During the early 1960s American Jews began realizing the severity of the anti-Semitic policies under which the 3 million Jews in the Soviet Union were living. This sparked an organized effort across American Jewish communities to raise awareness about the human rights violations being faced by Soviet Jews. Throughout the decade the White House frequently received letters from Jewish organizations and leaders requesting that the President use his influence to persuade the Soviets to rethink their anti-Semitic policies. Jewish organizations also wrote directly to the Soviet government pleading for it to ease its discriminatory policies targeted at Jewish culture and religious practices. Letters sent to the Kremlin were often asking the Soviet government to merely follow its own laws, citing cultural freedom as a right that was granted to all Soviet citizens in the 1917 Declaration of Rights. Another common request sent to the Soviet government was that Soviet Jews, who had been separated from family members as a result of the Holocaust, be allowed to reunite. Many organizations, especially those with an underlying Zionist agenda, used such arguments with the Soviets (and the White House) in hopes that it would provide a convincing pretense for a mass emigration of Soviet Jews to Israel.

In response to Zionist efforts to use the discrimination of Jews in the Soviet Union as an opportunity to increase the population of Israel, Jewish anti-Zionists leaders began writing to the White House expressing their concerns. During his time in office, President Johnson, a strong and vocal supporter of Jewish causes, received numerous letters from anti-Zionist rabbis and Jewish organizations asking him to take their views and solutions into consideration. These letters were primarily aimed at explaining to the Johnson administration that Zionism is not synonymous with Judaism, thus supporting a Zionist approach in the Soviet Union should not be thought of as supporting a Jewish approach. These letters often point out that the vast majority of the American Jewish community at that time was either not supportive of the Zionist movement or outright anti-Zionist.

Lyndon B. Johnson signs the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Via Wikipedia.

One letter in particular, sent to President Johnson by The American Council For Judaism, an organization of Anti-Zionist, reform rabbis, was quite explicit in expressing opposition to Zionism. In this letter the Council attempts to draw the White House’s attention to the fact that Zionism is not the humanitarian rescuing of the Jews, nor should it be viewed as a movement that is particularly inline with the tenets of Judaism as a religion. The letter explains to the president that, from the Council’s perspective, the aim of Zionism is not to create a Jewish state, but a Zionist state, emphasizing ethnicity over religion.

The letter goes on to point out that Zionists have worked hard to make it so that criticism of Israel (especially by non-Jews) has become synonymous with criticism of Jews as a whole, and sometimes unjustly labeled anti-Semitism. According to the Council this is an intentional way to not only deflect criticisms of Zionist ideologies, but also to make criticism of the State of Israel and its legitimacy completely off limits. As a result of this, many American Jews and non-Jews shied away from speaking out against the Johnson administrations’ whole hearted support of Zionism and the solutions it offered in efforts to ease the plight of Soviet Jews.

As the decade progressed, Jewish special interest groups would continue to work with the White House in the battle to end the state imposed hardships on Soviet Jewry. Ultimately the Israeli voice would prevail, and during the 1970’s a noticeable trickle of Soviets emigrants to Israel would begin. This is perhaps to be expected, as every Prime Minister Israel has ever had was either born in the Russian Empire or born to parents born in the Russian Empire, thus the connection to the region’s Jewish population runs deep among Israel’s elites. Over the next several decades more than a million Jews would leave the USSR (and the post-Soviet territories) to settle in Israel.

The documents cited in the essay are held in the LBJ Library and Museum, “White House Central File; RM (Religious Matters) Box #7. They include a letter from the American Council For Judaism to Jack Valentini on December 18,1963, a letter from the American Council For Judaism to President Johnson on January 25, 1967, a letter from the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America to Bill Moyers on December 8, 1966, a letter from Richard Korn (president of the American Council For Judaism) to President Johnson on June 16,1966, and a letter from the Satmar Rebbe Joel Teitelbaum and Rabbi S. A. Berkowits to President Johnson on September 23,1966.

On the Performance Front: Internationalism and US Theatre

By Charlotte Canning

Grinnell College professor Hallie Flanagan wanted to challenge and transform herself as a theatre artist. “I can’t tell you how much I feel that I need this European training if I am to do anything distinctive . . . . I want first hand knowledge of the theaters of the world . . . . In short, the year of foreign study is indispensable if I am to do work which is of power and value,” she wrote in her December 1925 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation application. Flanagan was one of many artists, not just in theater, who were heading to Europe in the 1920s to learn about innovative and sophisticated artistic practices.

Her preparation to study abroad was impeccable. She was part of the first generation of theatre artists in the US to receive specific university education in theatre practice. At Harvard University she studied with George Pierce Baker, who established theater as a serious course of study in higher education. A positive recommendation from him was the ultimate seal of approval. She was fortunate in her timing as well. Less than a generation earlier she would have had nowhere to turn to find an organization interested in funding her work.

The rise of the philanthropic foundation in the US is largely a twentieth-century phenomenon and one that has great bearing on the history of US theatre. The number of foundations in the US had risen from only three in 1902 to 40,000 by the end of the twentieth century. Until President Lyndon Baines Johnson approved two national endowments in 1965—for the humanities and for the arts—the American government had few resources officially dedicated to the arts or humanities. Long before President Dwight Eisenhower implemented a formal program of cultural diplomacy, private foundations had been funding US artists and scholars to study and work abroad.

There is another element of Hallie Flanagan’s story that is just as crucial as the narratives about the development of public policy and the arts, the growth of US theatre, the relationship between theatre and higher education, or twentieth century geopolitics. That element is Flanagan’s racial identity as a white woman. US theatre struggled with questions of race just as painfully as did education, government, and private enterprise. The histories of all these institutions for many years erased the contributions that people of color made to their development. White theatre leaders, who occupied most of the positions of power in US theatre, commercial and otherwise, were constantly forced to confront race as it was configured as a public issue in the moment, as well as their own prejudices, in their daily work. How they did so, as well as how their colleagues of color deployed theatre for their own means, shaped US theatre in the twentieth century. Evidence of the struggle around race, and the results of the struggle, can be seen in the ways US theatre leadership both artistic and administrative, was predominately white, except in the very few theaters run by and for people of color. Those people of color in mainstream theaters were most likely to have experiences like Rose McClendon‘s. She was a highly respected actress in the interwar years who headed the Negro Theatre Unit of the Federal Theatre Project in New York. McClendon had to have a white co-director because the FTP worried that an African American woman could not be an effective leader within the deeply segregated and discriminatory federal government.

Hallie Flanagan’s story is just one of many in the history of the remaking US theatre in the twentieth century. She was part of a large community of people, some of whom were not theatre practitioners but critics, administrators, editors, professors, or writers who assumed leadership roles in US theatre. They were neither isolationists nor exceptionalists, they believed that the US theatre should be part of the larger world, as an equal player that learns as much as it teaches. Through the interwar years and during the Cold War, this community did not lose sight of its internationalist goals or investments. Instead they worked with their counterparts around the world to ensure that theatre people of all kinds could share their work globally and that audiences could see work from other parts of the world. Their internationalism was utopian in the best sense: they saw theatre as a productive way to make the world a better place for all.

Those in the arts who pioneered internationalism did so out of frustration over the limitations of nationalism, specifically the ways it prevented people with mutual interests from working together across borders to realize common goals. Internationalists in the arts imagined a community where the bonds were as profound, defining, and affective as those of citizenship. It relied, however, on forces that sometimes resisted, sometimes affirmed, but always negotiated geopolitical identities and histories, even those that undermined their cause. Theatre people fervently believed that theatre, more than any other art form, connected people to one another and should be central to the development and expression of internationalism and the better world it envisioned.

Three crucial institutions were integral to theatre’s reinvention in the US and elsewhere during the twentieth century. They are largely without precedent; in the nineteenth century such institutions would have been unthinkable as theatre was not considered a serious endeavor deserving of serious study or geopolitical attention. The journal Theatre Arts, the American National Theatre and Academy (ANTA), and the International Theatre Institute (ITI), a NGO of UNESCO, constituted an effort to transform US theatre into a legitimate, national cultural form. They appealed to those in theatre because they supported theatre’s development and connections among theatre artists. They demonstrated to those outside theatre that the art form was a legitimate art—not mere entertainment—one with national and global reach and impact.

The Marriage Proposal, 1927 (Realistic) Hallie Flanagan Production © Vassar College / Archives & Special Collections, Vassar College Libraries

The Marriage Proposal, (1927),Hallie Flanagan Production
© Vassar College / Archives & Special Collections, Vassar College Libraries

The argument for theatre’s importance was not achieved solely through offstage efforts. Productions in performance too made the argument that theatre was central to education, cultural diplomacy, and the United States’ global reputation. Three particular productions exemplify how theatre was used to these ends. In 1927 Hallie Flanagan directed Anton Chekhov’s “A Marriage Proposal” performed by Vassar College undergraduates. Flanagan employed what she had learned during her Guggenheim year, particularly in Soviet Russia, to create theatre that helped her students understand themselves as part of a global artistic reinvention. The students were immersed in the ideas and methods of Russian Soviet directors Vsevelod Meyerhold, Nikolai Evreinov, and Konstantin Stanislavsky and in the process were able to envision a different way of looking at the world.

A 1949 US production of Hamlet was a fledgling effort at cultural diplomacy. It was the first show to tour abroad with official support from the US government. In addition, the production itself was the work of the first state-supported theatre in the US, the Barter Theatre. Hamlet performed at the Elsinore festival in Denmark and then traveled to military bases in occupied Germany. Its true audience, however, was not the European spectators who mostly flocked to the show out of curiosity, but US citizens at home who need to be convinced about the powerful potential of international artistic exchange.

The team behind Hamlet went on to produce the 1952-56 world tour of George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess. The revival performed in Western and Eastern Europe, Latin America, Africa, and even Russia, the first US production to do so. Everywhere the company went it was hailed as a triumph. The artists involved were invested in demonstrating that the arts’ were worthy of ongoing public support, and that they had something essential and unique to add to public discourse. The US government leveraged the production for their own purposes. The government investment in cultural diplomacy was two-fold. First it was an attempt to communicate (as with Hamlet) that the US had vibrant and sophisticated culture that could be positively compared with any in the world. If the Soviets were going to use ballet and symphonic orchestras to prove their complexity and worldliness, the US would counter with jazz, dance, and theatre.

The second was race. During the Cold War the US argued that the nation stood for freedom, and that democracy guaranteed equal rights and opportunities for all. But that presented the US with an extraordinary challenge. White supremacy and democracy had historically been coeval, and US national identity had been produced by this relationship. Now the US wanted to argue for democracy as a resistance to intolerance, particularly racism and colonialism. To do so would require evidence that racism was not an integral part of the nation, and that the experiences of people of color were far better than they were usually depicted. Cultural diplomacy provided a way to make that argument without seeming to—every musician, performer, and speaker was positioned as a refutation of the charge that the US was a racist apartheid state. None of these three productions documents the new and influential plays being written in the US, or, with a few exceptions, the theatre artists whose names would become ubiquitous in US theatre history. Instead these productions moved theatre’s cause along, and supported the argument that theatre was necessary and essential.

Theatre internationalists around the world believed that live performance could inspire and ensure a better, a more peaceful, world. They took each other’s work seriously and created new work for their own audiences based on what they had learned from each other even when they were not in agreement about what constituted an improved world. They built a series of interdependent institutions to further theatre’s influence, to give it greater visibility and prominence, and, most importantly, to ensure its survival. Theatre could be imported and exported and exchanged so it could provide a point of contact among nations. Internationalism, as it was embraced by utopian theatre practitioners in the twentieth century, ceaselessly negotiated the demands of the state with those of the people whose stories needed to be told to each other.

For more great books on modern theater, look here.

My Life on the Road, by Gloria Steinem (2015)

By Megan Seaholm

Gloria Steinem’s eighth book is part feminist memoir, part autobiography of personal growth and change, part invocation to the adventure of living in the present, and part story book. Her style is relaxed and conversational but never random or sloppy. She presents four purposes of the book in the Introduction, but I found two recurring themes: the joy of serendipitous discovery while traveling to new places and the value of listening, the power of groups talking and listening, that she learned from the talking circles while in India.

The life on-the-road theme begins as she recalls that until she was ten years old her family spent most of each year travelling around the country as her father bought and sold antiques. Though she longed for a “real home” when she was a child, she is grateful for her father’s “faith in a friendly universe” and credits him with her tolerance for a life of relative insecurity. She writes with sadness about her lonely mother who worked as a journalist before she married. This migrant life ended when her parents divorced and she lived in Toledo with her clinically depressed mother. She went to Smith College on a scholarship—Government major, Phi Beta Kappa—and, then, spent two years in India on a fellowship. She studied at the University of Delhi and spent several months with a Gandhi-inspired group who walked from village to village after terrifying caste riots in east India. The walking group invited villagers to meet with them, and with each other, to share their grievances and to provide reassurance after the riots. She credits this experience with teaching her the value of listening and the amazing things that happen when people share with each other in groups.

Gloria Steinem and Dorothy Pitman Hughes, circa 1970. Photograph by Dan Wynn. — Gloria Steinem and Dorothy Pitman Hughes, circa 1972. Photograph by Dan Wynn.

She returned to the U.S. to work as a free-lance journalist and an avid participant in political campaigns, the first being the 1952 Adlai Stevenson campaign for president. She became aware of the women’s rights-women’s liberation movement in the 1960s. In 1971, after New York Magazine published her article “After Black Power, Women’s Liberation,” she began to receive invitations to speak about feminism. Terrified of public speaking, she enlisted the help of her friend Dorothy Pitman. As a bi-racial team, they spoke at community centers, in union halls, and school gyms. As Steinem gained skill and confidence, this duo was soon traveling to college campuses, to meetings of the National Welfare Rights Organization, to speak with United Farm Workers chapters, lesbian groups, and antiwar activists. Steinem saw her job as helping the audiences become “one big talking circle” — there was always discussion after she and Pitman made their presentations. Later, she would work and travel with the inimitable Florynce (Flo) Kennedy.

Most of the stories that Steinem shares are stories from the road as she became “a public speaker and a gatherer of groups” and one of the best-known feminists in the U.S. She refers to these campus speaking engagements as the “largest slice of my traveling pie.” One of her best stories is about the often-tense 1977 National Women’s Conference in Houston. This account features Bella Abzug, co-founder of Women Strike for Peace in 1961, three-term Congresswoman from New York, and tireless activist. Abzug, Congresswomen Shirley Chisholm and Patsy Mink asked Steinem to help them organize the National Women’s Political Caucus, which they did in 1971 with a diverse group of notable women. There are other stories from the feminist trenches, but this book is only part feminist memoir. There is a curious and very fun chapter titled “Surrealism in Everyday Life,” and there is a chapter about her time in “Indian Country” by which she means her relationships with Native Americans, including Wilma Mankiller, deputy chief of the Cherokee Nation. Speaking of “Indian Country,” I was troubled when she confidently asserted the popular, but erroneous, notion that that the U.S. Constitution was modeled on the Iroquois Confederacy.

Steinem shares these stories in the most-unassuming way as if you were a long-time friends visiting over a cup of coffee after having not seen each other for a while. She talks (writes) about covering Eugene McCarthy after Robert Kennedy’s assassination in 1968 and about the Clinton-Obama contest in 2008. My favorite chapter, “Why I Don’t Drive,” is an account of conversations she has had with taxi drivers. Oh, the stories!

Gloria Steinem and Dorothy Pitman Hughes in 2014.

But, of the lessons that she has learned and that she shares, my favorite is this: “One of the simplest paths to deep change is for the less powerful to speak as much as they listen, and for the more powerful to listen as much as they speak.”

Digital Teaching: From the Other Side of the Screen: A Student’s View

By Abigail Griffin

When most college students think of online courses, they often imagine basic, boring classes that are convenient and easy A’s. Online classes often require little effort and minimal time commitment, while still satisfying a graduation requirement. So, students drudge aimlessly through the mandatory course, get their completion grades, and move on with their lives, without actually gaining anything from the experience. Dr. Suri’s online course, however, is so much more than a mark off of an undergraduate’s to-do list. Professor Suri revolutionizes this old, bland style of online coursework and provides a unique and active learning experience to students anywhere—from the comfort of their own beds to a quaint coffee shop down the street to the studio classroom in Mezes.

Going into the course, I was skeptical. Not because I didn’t have full faith in Professor Suri’s ability to make the course the best it could be, but because I was worried that even the best online class could not beat traditional, classroom-style learning. I had been unimpressed by the reputation of online classes in the past, and I never previously had the desire to take one. I always preferred a classroom setting because it just seemed more “right.” But boy, was I wrong.

Not only is Professor Suri an incredibly energetic and knowledgeable professor, but he makes his lectures engaging, informative, and entertaining. The online setting does not take away from the education at all, in fact, I think it enhances the learning environment. Students are more willing to participate in class through applications like “Class Chat” and “Ask the Professor,” and the TA’s and Prof. Suri actively respond to their comments, which would be nearly impossible in a huge lecture hall. When students take an active role in their learning like this, they benefit significantly more from the lecture. I know from experience that there is practically no class participation in a 300-500 person lecture hall, but having the same class size online encourages significantly more student involvement.

For example, Dr. Suri uses images in his lecture every class period, and the pictures pop up on our video screens so we can easily see them. When he asks us to comment on the images, students begin contributing to the discussion in a matter of seconds. In a normal classroom setting with the same number of students, almost no one responds to the professor’s questions, and never that quickly and eagerly. So the online forum actually makes the lecture easier for the students, the professor, and his assistants. It is also wonderful because the slides and images that come up on our screen are clear and easy to understand and interpret, whereas, it would be more difficult for some of the students to evaluate the images in a lecture hall.

Overall, I am incredibly impressed by what Dr. Suri has done with his online course. Obviously, it isn’t perfect. Sometimes the technology doesn’t work correctly or people get off track in the class chat. But as a whole, the class is a lot of fun. I think that the online and in-person office hour options are great, the class pings ensure that students are paying attention (and are super easy participation points), and the lectures are always interesting.

Plus, I have never been a morning person, so it’s great to be able to wake up 5 minutes before class and still make it on time.

Abigail Griffin is a second-year Plan II Honors and Government double-major with a minor in Arabic. She graduated high school in St. Louis and her family currently resides in Elizabethtown, KY. She is an Arabic Flagship and Forty Acres scholar at UT , an Agency Co-Director within Student Government, and a Camp Texas counselor to incoming freshman. Abigail also volunteers as a KIPP tutor and as an AISD tutor to Arabic-speaking students. Additionally, she is passionate about sports and has played on the Women’s Club Soccer team In the future, she intends to pursue a career in foreign service and counterterrorism.

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