US History Archives - Page 14 of 24

Jim Crow: A Reading List

In the late nineteenth century, white Southerners imposed a system of constraints on African Americans, denying blacks their Constitutional rights, and, indeed, their human rights. This system—often violently enforced—was called “Jim Crow,” named after a minstrel song that stereotyped blacks. It included the disfranchisement of black men, the forcible segregation of blacks from whites in public spaces, and forms of state-sanctioned terrorism such as lynching, which included hanging, mutilating, and burning victims alive.

An African-American man drinking at a “colored” drinking fountain in a streetcar terminal in Oklahoma City, 1939. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

“Jim Crow” shaped the South’s judicial and public education systems, employment structure, and patterns of landownership. Black people were limited to the most menial kinds of jobs, and sharecroppers found it difficult if not impossible to escape chronic indebtedness to their landlord-employers. In effect, white Southerners were determined to replace the institution of slavery with a new set of constraints enforced by white judicial officials, politicians, religious leaders, and lynch mobs.

For their part, African American Southerners protested “Jim Crow” by forming advocacy organizations, educational and religious institutions; boycotting and protesting against segregated facilities; and moving north.

The “Jim Crow” project included the creation of a white identity based in part on the glorification of the “Lost Cause”— the myth that before the Civil War, the south was an idyllic place populated by gracious planters and contented slaves. The Lost Cause found tangible expression in the many statues and other memorials dedicated to the Confederacy and the soldiers who fought for it.

Ku Klux Klan members and a burning cross, Denver, Colorado, 1921.The KKK was founded by former Confederate soldiers after the Civil War. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

The erasure of slavery and “Jim Crow” from the historical record has distorted the teaching of U. S. history in both the South and the rest of the country. As communities finally begin to discuss and remove remnants of the Confederacy from public spaces, it is vital that all of us confront and fully understand this history.

Books:

James Allen, Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America. Sante Fe: Twin Palms Publishers, 2000

Douglas A.Blackmon, Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II. New York: Anchor Books, 2008

David Cunningham, Klansville, U.S.A.: The Rise and Fallof the Civil Rights-Era Ku Klux Klan. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.

Philip Dray, At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America. New York: Random House, 2002

Scott Ellsworth, Death in a Promised Land: The Tulsa Race Riot of 1921. Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1982

David F. Godshalk, Veiled Visions: The 1906 Atlanta Race Riot and the Reshaping of American Race Relations. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005

Gaines M. Foster, Ghosts of the Confederacy: Defeat, the Lost Cause, and the Emergence of the New South, 1865-1913. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988

Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Gender & Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896-1920. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996

Grace Elizabeth Hale, Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890-1940. New York: Pantheon Books, 1998

Louis R. Harlan, Booker T. Washington: the Making of a Black Leader, 1856–1901. New York: Oxford University Press, 1972

Louis R. Harlan, Booker T. Washington: the Wizard of Tuskegee, 1901–1915, Volume 2. New York: Oxford University Press, 1983

F. Michael Higginbotham, Ghosts of Jim Crow: Ending Racism in Post-Racial America. New York: NYU Press, 2013

Albert Kirwan, Revolt of the Rednecks: Mississippi Politics, 1876-1925. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1951

J. Morgan Kousser, The Shaping of Southern Politics: Suffrage Restriction and the Establishment of the One Party South: 1880-1910. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974

Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005

J. Anthony Lukas, Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families. New York: Alfred Knopf, 1985

Neil McMillen, Dark Journey: Black Mississippians in the Age of Jim Crow. Urbana, Ill: Illinois University Press, 1989

Michael Perman, Struggle for Mastery, Disfranchisement in the South. Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press, 2001

Remembering Jim Crow: African Americans Tell About Life in the Segregated South, edited by William H. Chafe, Raymond Gavins, Robert Korstad. New York: The New Press, 2014

Slavery and Public History: The Tough Stuff of American Memory. Edited by James Oliver Horton, Lois E. Horton. New York: The New Press, 2006

LeRae Sikes Umfleet , A Day of Blood: The 1898 Wilmington Race Riot. Raleigh: Historical Publications Section, Office of State Archives and History, 2009

Articles:

Carl R. Weinberg, “The Strange Career of Confederate History Month,” OAH Magazine of History, Vol. 25, No. 2, Civil War at 150: Origins (April 2011), pp. 63-64

Elsa Barkley Brown and Gregg D. Kimball, “Mapping the Terrain of Black Richmond,” Journal of Urban History, 21, 3 (March 1995), 295-346

Fred Arthur Bailey, “Free Speech and the Lost Cause in the Old Dominion,” The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, Vol. 103, No. 2, “Play the Bitter Loser’s Game”: Reconstruction and the Lost Cause in the Old Dominion (Apr., 1995), pp. 237-266

Grace Elizabeth Hale, “Granite Stopped Time: The Stone Mountain Memorial and the Representation of White Southern Identity,” The Georgia Historical Quarterly, Vol. 82, No. 1 (SPRING 1998), pp. 22-44

Michael Martinez, “The Georgia Confederate Flag Dispute,” The Georgia Historical Quarterly, Vol. 92, No. 2 (Summer 2008), pp. 200-228

Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, “The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past,” Journal of American History 91, no. 4 (March 2005): 1233–63.

Kenneth O’Reilly, “The Jim Crow Policies of Woodrow Wilson,” The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, No. 17 (Autumn, 1997), pp. 117-121

Reiko Hillyer, “Relics of Reconciliation: The Confederate Museum and Civil War Memory in the New South,” The Public Historian, Vol. 33, No. 4 (November 2011), pp. 35-62

Stephen A. Berrey, “Resistance Begins at Home:The Black Family and Lessons in Survival and Subversion in Jim Crow Mississippi,” Black Women, Gender + Families, Vol. 3, No. 1 (SPRING 2009), pp. 65-90

Documents:

The Library of Congress has a Teacher’s Guide to American segregation, including several documentary resources

Library of Congress collection of photographs and documents specifically relating to Brown v. Board of Education and its aftermath

Blackpast.org has compiled a large trove of primary documents that tell the story of segregation from colonial Louisiana to present day America

Oral histories, videos and documents that specifically recount the Civil Rights Movement in Virginia

Interviews with several individuals who participated in the Civil Rights Movement in Danville, Virginia

A new digital history project that uses GIS mapping software to visualize housing segregation in Washington, DC

An NEH piece documenting “Massive Resistance” to school integration in small towns in the South [also includes a lot of great photographs]

A two-volume Congressional report on Mississippi’s 1875 constitutional convention. Here is volume 1 and here is volume 2.

National Humanities Center, The Making of African American Identity

The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow, the website of this PBS special has stories, maps, documents, and activities for teachers.

You might also like these NEP articles on Slavery and its legacy in the US and further reading on Confederate flags, monuments, and historical myths.

Featured image: Attempting to block integration at the University of Alabama, Governor George Wallace stands defiantly at the door while being confronted by Deputy U.S. Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach. 11 June 1963. Via Wikipedia.

Reading Every Issue of The New Yorker

By David Ochsner

In Jack Finney’s novel Time and Again, the protagonist Simon Morley is taken to a top-secret government facility where time travel is made possible through self-hypnosis. Simon views what seem to be a series of historically accurate movie sets—complete with live actors performing everyday activities—and through extreme concentration he “travels” to the era depicted in those sets.

I read the novel when I was about ten years old, and subsequently attempted the trick myself, building shoebox dioramas and concentrating on the contents in hopes that it would be a portal to some great adventure.

It didn’t work.

I’ve since found another way to access the past through the The New Yorker magazine’s digital archive. By reading every issue—every article, every advertisement starting with Issue No. 1, Feb. 21, 1925— and blogging about it, I am hoping to gain a better sense of how one slice of America was living and thinking in the interwar years and beyond.

The New Yorker, Issue No. 1, Feb. 21, 1925. Many of magazine’s elements familiar to today’s readers were in place from the beginning, including the magazine’s distinctive typography and its famous cartoons. (The New Yorker Digital Archive)

This approach is similar to one taken by writer Laura Hillenbrand when she wrote a bestseller about the racehorse Seabiscuit. In an excellent essay in the July, 7, 2003 New Yorker, she described how a chronic illness forced her to conduct much of the book’s research from home, and in a recent interview with The New York Times Magazine (Dec. 18, 2014), she further related how the research included buying old newspapers on eBay and reading them in her living room as though she were browsing the daily paper. “I wanted to start to feel like I was living in the ’30s,” she told the magazine. “That elemental sense of daily life seeps into the book in ways too subtle and myriad to count.”

The New Yorker’s digital archive doesn’t provide the same tactile experience as newsprint, but each issue is nevertheless an exact scan of the original, some even bearing a past reader’s penciled notes, dog-eared corners, or the shadow of cellophane tape hastily applied over a tear.

My blog, A New Yorker State of Mind, is by no means a comprehensive survey of The New Yorker, but I hope my selections and observations give readers a sense of what was important to the magazine’s editors and writers. In addition to citing actual articles and illustrations from each magazine, I provide some context through research and images gleaned from various sources.

Famously droll cartoons were a New Yorker staple from the very beginning, including this illustration of President and Mrs. Coolidge by Miguel Covarrubias. The president was a frequent target of the magazine for his frugality and bland demeanor. March 14, 1925 (The New Yorker Digital Archive)

The magazine archive not only offers a glimpse into the lives of upper-middle class Gotham strivers, but it is also offers a point of reference to a particular time, and to all of the historic digressions to which it is connected.

For example, the May 2, 1925 issue’s “The Talk of the Town” notes the rapidly changing face of the city—Fifth Avenue mansions are giving way to commercial interests and architectural landmarks, such as architect Stanford White’s Madison Square Garden, are falling to the wrecking ball. In “The Sky-Line” section of the magazine, architecture critic R.W. Sexton noted, in reference to the Garden’s demise, how critics, including foreign visitors, often taunted New Yorkers about their “rabid commercialism.” The following week’s issue (May 9) told of the removal of Augustus Saint-Gaudens’ nude “Diana” sculpture from atop the Garden’s tower (which White fashioned after the Giralda of Seville), and an oblique reference was made to Stanford’s White’s scandalous demise, noting that although the manner of the architect’s death put him “in a poor light among his puritanical countrymen,” he was nevertheless courageously defended by the likes of Saint-Gaudens. That sent me back to 1906 (though various scans of tabloids from that time) to briefly revisit how the architect of Madison Square Garden was murdered by the husband of his lover, the actress Evelyn Nesbit, in the rooftop theatre he built in the shadow of his Giralda tower. I returned to 1925 with the understanding that the wrecking ball would be taking away far more than brick and stone.

Image of the destroyed Madison Square Gardens. Via Museum of the City of New York

Photo of the destroyed Madison Square Gardens. Via Museum of the City of New York

Photo of Evelyn Nesbit, whose affair with the architect Stanford White led to his death on the rooftop of Madison Square Garden in 1906. Via Wikipedia.

That is what makes this exercise so engaging: one can read the magazine as a contemporary while moving back and forth across the timeline. The blog is also informed by other contemporary readings—newspapers, other magazines, and books such as Patrick Leigh Fermor’s unfinished trilogy recounting his 1933 journey on foot across Europe. Following the Rhine and the Danube on his way to Constantinople, the 19-year-old Fermor occasionally noted in his journal the rumblings of fascism in Germany and Austria, but mostly describing the faded glories of collapsed empires and the many places that retained old ways of life.

However, Fermor did not start writing his trilogy until the 1960s, and didn’t publish the first book in the series, A Time of Gifts, until 1977. It is an account of what a young man hears and sees in 1933, but the omniscient hand of his future self guides his pen. Young Fermor gives us fresh-eyed descriptions of villages and the homely charms of the people, while the older Fermor knows (and occasional notes) that much will be obliterated by the war to come.

So before one gets too carried away, one must be mindful of this “older self” that can haunt a serial reading of The New Yorker. Although I attempt to read the articles and advertisements as though I am living in that time, this is not possible since I possess the foreknowledge of an omniscient reader. When I come across a cheeky account about two buffoons named Hitler and Mussolini, I know a horrible truth awaits my fellow readers.

Foresight and hindsight: A reader of this ad in the May 8, 1937 issue of The New Yorker would be well advised not to book passage on the Hindenburg, because it will not be making the return trip to Germany. (The New Yorker Digital Archive; Wikipedia)

Then there are the advertisements, such as the series that urges indiscriminate spraying of FLIT insecticide (with whimsical drawings by Theodore “Dr. Seuss” Geisel), or the quarter-page ad in the May 8, 1937 issue that invites readers to book a flight on the Hindenburg, which was destroyed on May 6, 1937, claiming 36 lives. The following year Germany would annex Austria, and soon after Czechoslovakia, and the rest is, um, history.

The indiscriminate spraying of FLIT insecticide was encouraged in a series of ads merrily rendered by Dr. Seuss. (The New Yorker Digital Archive)

Which begs the question I often ask myself during my readings: In the midst of the Roaring Twenties, did the New Yorker writers or readers have any idea of what was to come?

The answer so far: No more than we do today.

Conflict in the Confederacy: William Williston Heartsill’s diary

By Josh Urich

William Williston Heartsill volunteered to fight for the South before the Civil War even began. For the first two years of his service, he and his comrades from Harrison County, Texas served as a cavalryman on Texas’s western frontier. His unit, the W.P. Lane Rangers, finally saw combat at the Battle of Arkansas Post on January 11, 1863. They were captured on the second day of combat. Heartsill spent several months in Camp Douglas in Illinois and then was exchanged for Union prisoners.

Print of the bombardment and capture of Fort Hindman, Arkansas Post, January 11th 1863. Via Wikipedia. — Bombardment and capture of Fort Hindman, Arkansas Post, January 11th 1863. Via Wikipedia.

Upon their release, the Lane Rangers were separated and Heartsill was mustered into General Braxton Bragg’s infantry. Heartsill resented serving as a conscripted infantryman and longed to rejoin the rest of his volunteer unit on horseback. After the battle Chickamauga, and mere days before the battle of Chattanooga, Heartsill and one of his fellow Rangers abandoned Bragg’s army and headed back to Texas to rejoin the W.P. Lane Rangers. They succeeded after a month of dangerous travel.

Print of the Battle of Chickamauga. Via Wikipedia. — Battle of Chickamauga. Via Wikipedia.

The Lane Rangers saw little combat before they were dissolved in mid-1865. Five years after the war concluded, Heartsill printed one thousand copies of his wartime diary––although not before editing it to defend his desertion and his company’s honor. Shortly after his diary was published, he was elected mayor of Marshall, Texas, Harrison’s county seat. In the ensuing decades, Heartsill was active in the leadership of the Marshall camp of the United Confederate Veterans and was involved in both regional politics and business.

The section of the diary below is taken from the June 1, 1864 entry of Heartsill’s diary. At this point in the war, Heartsill had already abandoned Bragg’s army and rejoined the Rangers in the same place they started, Harrison County, Texas. After a number of weeks back in Harrison, Heartsill and the men began to hear “denouncements” against them. There were several reasons the townspeople turned against the Rangers. During their service, they had lost about ten percent of their company. By contrast, other units from Harrison County lost an average of fifty percent each. Many people in the county lost children or siblings from these other units. It was natural for townspeople who had lost loved ones to feel resentful towards the Rangers, considering their high survival rate. The Rangers were also an independent company and their limited combat experience, especially compared to the county’s other units, would have reflected poorly on their honor, an important southern value.

Entry from Heartsill's diary dated June 1, 1864. — Entry from Heartsill’s diary dated June 1, 1864.

Finally, the townspeople provided both emotional and material support to the Texan units. The townspeople must have wondered why the W.P. Lane Rangers accepted all of the town’s support but were not out on the frontlines. For the woman mentioned in this entry in particular, though, the root of her frustration was clearly the death of her relative. How must she have felt, seeing the Rangers still in Marshall––the Rangers who rarely saw combat, and who never, even at Arkansas Post, experienced casualty rates as high as most companies?

This document points to the internal conflicts that ate at the Confederacy from the local level up. Not only was Heartsill himself a deserter (at least briefly), but so also was this woman’s husband––if Heartsill is to be believed. Moreover, the financial burdens that companies placed upon towns put stress on loyalty to the southern cause.

Portrait of Heartsill included on the first page of diary. Via Library of Congress.

William Williston Heartsill’s papers are held at the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, University of Texas at Austin.

Honest Abe’s Archive: The New Archive (No. 21)

By Charley S. Binkow

Perhaps no figure in American history has been studied more than Abraham Lincoln. A man of profound importance, intellect, and ambiguity, Lincoln has been a source of fascination for scholars, students, and Americans for generations. There are innumerable documents centered on Lincoln and his legacy, which are now accessible to everyone via The Lincoln Archives Digital Project.

According to their website, the digitalization project, which started in 2002, is the first project to scan “the entire contents of a president’s administration.” That’s a lot of stuff—by project’s end, they will have approximately fourteen million images. But they do a wonderful job of organizing their growing collection. There is a search option to the archive for those who know what they’re looking for. For those who just want to browse, I would recommend starting with the website’s interactive timeline. This screen not only gives one a comprehensive history of Lincoln’s life, but it also supplements dates with a ticker-tape news display of global history. For example, you can learn that in 1811, two years after Lincoln’s birth, the Grimm brothers published their famous fairy tale collection.

Honest old Abe on the Stump, at the ratification Meeting of Presidential Nominations. Springfield 1860. Courtesy of the Library of Congress

From that page, one can head to the documents section to read Lincoln’s personal writings. I recommend reading the letters he sent to Mary Todd—one can really feel how much he misses her while he’s traveling.

The website also gives researchers the chance to explore Lincoln’s world. I would suggest looking at the maps section located on the left. One can explore city maps, battle maps, maps of foreign countries, and maps of territories.

Battle of Gettysburg, 3rd July 1863.

The newspaper section is a must. The website breaks the papers up by north and south and lets you peruse to one’s heart’s content. The editors of the site also give the reader a chance to explore the history of the newspapers/magazines and suggested future readings.

This is a fruitful and expansive archive. And it’s only getting bigger. I have already found useful information for my own research, and I’m sure any scholar can find something of use here for theirs. But to any American history enthusiast, this is a playground of documents, pictures, and downright interesting stuff.

Catch up on the latest from the New Archive series:

Joseph Parrott highlighted the digitalized political posters collected by archivist and artist Lincoln Cushing

Maria José Afanador-Llach discussed her experience at a Digitilization Workshop in Venice and Daniel J. Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig, Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving, and Presenting the Past on the Web
Charley Binkow discussed digitalized images from the Folger Shakespeare Library
Charley Binkow explored photographs of California’s Gold Rush
Henry Wiencek found a digital history project that not only preserves the past, but recreates it

This New Ocean: The Story of the First Space Age, by William Burrows (1998)

The Soviet Union appeared handily ahead in space. They launched the first successful satellite, put the first man and woman in space, performed the first space walk, and sent the first satellites out of earth’s gravitation and to the moon. And yet the United States still “won” the Space Race. How could that be? In This New Ocean, William E. Burrows grapples with this and other questions, illuminating widespread political manipulation in the process, and chronicling the first space age.

Cold War tension, exacerbated by the Soviet Union’s new nuclear capabilities, and the upcoming 1957-58 International Geophysical Year initiated the Space Race – the Cold War competition between the US and Soviet Union to achieve superiority in spaceflight. The US and Soviet governments were eager to fund military ventures for national security; both countries poured billions of dollars into space and rocket agencies. National security was the foundation of the world’s public space frontier, which Burrows dutifully records from the US acquisition of German personnel (notably former Nazi, Wernher von Braun) and V-2 rocket onwards.

Burrows contends it is a misconception to perceive Soviet dominance at the outset of the Space Race. The US never truly lagged behind the Soviet Union in space capabilities. Upon learning about the successful launch of Sputnik 1, President Eisenhower actually felt mild relief, contrary to the American public’s fear of inferiority at the time. As Sputnik 1 orbited over American soil, Eisenhower’s personal fear of infringing on restricted airspace by orbiting above another country dissipated. Despite employing Sergei Korolyov, lead rocket engineer and Wernher von Braun’s Soviet counterpart, funding and morale for the Soviet space program dwindled following notable accidents and poor planning. The leadership regularly used outdated technologies in an effort to save money. They also put Korolyov and his team in competition with another Soviet program planning a manned Moon landing. Many in the leadership questioned the goal itself – why spend increased capital putting humans in space who require life support systems when robots were cheaper and might obtain similar results?

The Chief Designer Sergei Korolev (left) and the Chief Theoretician Mstislav Keldysh (right). In the centre- Igor Kurchatov, 1956

Following the initial Soviet rocket achievements, notably Yuri Gagarin’s 1961 spaceflight, President Kennedy looked to quell the American public’s fear of inferiority by investing heavily in space. Noticing the monetary influx, politicking scientists secured government funding. Burrows scrutinizes projections justifying project funding given to the government, exposing their unrealistic claims. For example, although the space shuttle project was an enormous financial undertaking, scientists justified the seemingly high cost by emphasizing the shuttle’s reusability, overstating the number of executable missions, and downplaying turnaround time. The cost per mission looked good on paper, but the figures rested on misleading data. The shuttle program could never live up to such deceptive expectations.

Along with chronicling Soviet and American achievements ranging from Sputnik 1 to the Apollo 11 Moon landing, Burrows also covers both US and Soviet program failures. These include Project Vanguard (America’s little known unsuccessful first attempt to place a satellite in orbit), a fatal American ground test fire, fatal Russian spacecraft electrical malfunctions, and space shuttle Challenger’s O-ring catastrophe. Each failure dealt a blow to the two superpowers’ morale, inviting the public to question its nation’s technological prowess.

Saturn V carrying Apollo 11 rises past the launch tower camera

A new space age has now begun. Private companies like SpaceX and Orbital Sciences are slowly taking the helm in the universe’s largest frontier. New questions arise: should space exploration be financed by centralized governments? How does one justify financing space exploration? If we choose to return to the Moon, land on Mars, or explore any facet of space, our technology will be rooted in the work of von Braun, Korolyov, Robert Goddard, and the other early rocket pioneers. The story of humanity’s very first space age, exploring This New Ocean, is inspiring, gripping, and encouraging.

William E. Burrows, This New Ocean: The Story of the First Space Age (Random House: 1998)

You may also like:

Mark A. Lawrence discusses The Global United States, George Kennan’s long telegram on the Soviet Union, and Nikolai Novikov’s views on the US intentions

Matthew Tribe marks the forty-fifth anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing

Kacey Manlove essay on How a Handshake in Space Turned Cold War Agendas from Competition to Cooperation

All images via Wikimedia Commons

History Museums: Race, Eugenics, and Immigration in New York History Museums

By Madeline Y. Hsu

New York Historical Society (Wikipedia)

Ideas about race and eugenics have had a long influence on U.S. immigration and citizenship laws. A pair of historical exhibits ongoing in New York City vividly convey this troubling history. The regulations governing U.S. borders reveal the beliefs of legislators, but also many Americans, regarding what kinds of people are “fit to be citizens.” These two exhibits, “Chinese American: Exclusion/Inclusion” at the New York Historical Society and “Haunted Files: The Eugenics Records Office” at New York University, demonstrate how deeply entrenched such beliefs have been and the many forms of inequality that they produce and signify.

A political cartoon from 1882, showing a Chinese man being barred entry to the “Golden Gate of Liberty”. The caption reads, “We must draw the line somewhere, you know.” (Wikipedia)

For example, in 1882 the United States set a precedent in making Chinese the first and only group identified by race for severely restricted entry rights into the United States and bars against their naturalization. The so-called Chinese Exclusion Law lay the foundations for future U.S. immigration laws that targeted an expanding array of undesirable people by race, national origin, illiteracy, imbecility, and likelihood to become a public charge. By 1924, a majority of the world’s people, originating everywhere from Palestine to Southeast Asia, could not legally enter the United States and eastern and southern Europeans faced much higher bars against entry than their counterparts from western and northern Europe.

‘Chinese Must Go’ pistol from the 19th century. (Wikipedia)

The “science” of eugenics made such immigration controls seem to be a necessity for national preservation. As one slogan claimed: “Every 15 seconds $100 of your money goes for the care of persons with bad heredity,” thereby mandating the use of laws to protect U.S. population, civilization, and resources. Bolstered by protracted schemes to measure quantitatively, systematically categorize, and document racial and other inherited attributes, eugenics bore the force of natural selective processes, thereby tempting its practitioners to intervene in its principles in order to improve the caliber of American human beings. Such quests for a higher order of civilization and society irreparably marginalized and damaged humans identified as inferior by their ancestral traits.

In conjunction, “Chinese American: Exclusion/Inclusion” and “The Haunted Files” provoke insights regarding the very close relationships between U.S. immigration laws, our restrictions upon citizenship, and naturalized assumptions about what kinds of persons deserve to join America’s democracy.

Madeline Hsu’s book The Good Immigrants: How the Yellow Peril Became the Model Minority is now available for pre-order from Princeton University Press.

More from our series of history museums:

NEP editor Joan Neuberger visits the Museum of Liverpool

You may also like:

Madeline Hsu’s article on Chinese Texans

UT Professor of History Philippa Levine on the global history of eugenics

Reading Magnum: A Photo Archive Gets a New Life

By Steven Hoelscher and Andrea Gustavson

When photographer Bruce Davidson boarded a Greyhound bus on May 24, 1961 in Montgomery, Alabama, he joined a group of 27 students, ministers, and activists determined to challenge the South’s segregation laws. In response to two earlier busses carrying anti-segregationist Freedom Riders—the first one firebombed and the second attacked by a mob wielding iron pipes—the federal government stepped in and ordered armed National Guard soldiers to provide protection. It was a moment of high drama in the Civil Rights movement, one that both exposed the bitter racism along the way from Montgomery to Jackson, Mississippi, and one that sorely tested the activists’ belief in nonviolent action. Davidson’s photographs portray something of that drama as they show a secret meeting before the ride, young men and women waiting to board the bus at the segregated station, groups along the route including white men heckling the Freedom Riders and black residents standing among National Guardsmen.

One picture succinctly captures the complicated emotions and political tensions of the scene: taken from inside the bus looking out, it portrays both the young activists and the armed escort ordered to protect them (above). This photograph, and others like it, circulated widely from the November 12, 1961 issue of The New York Times, to Raymond Arsenault’s 2007 Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice, and to the cover of Davidson’s own 2002 book, Time of Change: Civil Rights Photographs, 1961-1965. An icon of the Freedom Riders’ struggle, it is featured on the 2010 American Experience documentary website.

Verso from press print by Bruce Davidson, taken “aboard the Freedom Riders’ bus, Montgromery [sic] Alabama, 1961.” Bruce Davidson/Magnum Photos

The photographic print that brought the image from Davidson’s photo agency, Magnum Photos, to newspapers, magazines, textbooks, and websites carries its history on its back. If we turn over the print, we find a message board of scribbled notes, agency stamps, archival references, photo credits, hastily written captions, and a stamp identifying the photo as part of the Magnum Photo New York Print Library. So many times has the photograph been sent to various publishers and then returned to Magnum that a staff member wrote in bold, black lettering, the word “RETIRED,” suggesting that this particular print’s utility has come to an end.

Like the print itself, the collection of photographs to which it belongs is now also retired—at least from its previous occupation of carrying the image it bears to publishing venues. Davidson’s print came out of retirement in the summer of 2010—or, more accurately, it took on a new life—when the Magnum Photo New York Print Library was opened for research at the Harry Ransom Center, a research library and museum at the University of Texas at Austin. The Magnum Photos collection, as it is now known, is comprised of some 1,300 boxes containing more than 200,000 press prints and exhibition photographs by some of the twentieth century’s most famous photographers. Once Magnum began using digital distribution methods for its photographs, the function of press prints as vehicles for conveying the image became obsolete and these photographs became significant solely as objects for both monetary and historic value.

Death of a Loyalist militiaman. Córdoba front, Spain, 1936, ©Robert Capa/Magnum Photos

Magnum’s visual archive is a vast, living chronicle of the people, places, and events of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Images of cultural icons, from James Dean and Marilyn Monroe,to Gandhi and Castro, coexist in the Magnum Photos collection with depictions of international conflicts, political unrest, and cultural life. Included are famous war photos from the Spanish Civil War and D-Day landings to wars in Central America, Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as unforgettable scenes of historic events: the rise of democracy in India, the Chinese military suppression of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, the U.S. Civil Rights movement, the Iranian revolution, and the September 11 terrorist attacks.

Marilyn Monroe reading James Joyce’s Ulysses. Long Island, New York, 1955, ©Eve Arnold/Magnum Photos

Finally, scenes of everyday life in a wide range of historical contexts—from immigrant communities in New York City to Romani communities in Czechoslovakia, and much more—comprise an extraordinarily valuable visual archive.

A newly arrived immigrant (Tang Z) eats noodles on a fire escape. New York City, 1998, ©Chien-Chi Chang/Magnum Photos

View from Brooklyn. New York City, September 11, 2001, ©Thomas Hoepker/Magnum Photos

Magnum Photos was formed in 1947, in the wake of the Second World War, by four photographers seeking to retain the rights to their images while working on projects that aligned with their own interests rather than solely responding to commissions from magazines and newspapers. Henri Cartier-Bresson, David “Chim” Seymour, George Rodger, and Robert Capa created a business model that fundamentally changed the practices of photojournalism, allowing the image-maker, rather than the magazine, to retain control over published work. This shift allowed Magnum photographers to emphasize their artistic integrity and fosters independence in terms of subject matter.

Soldiers search bus passengers along the Northern Highway in El Salvador, 1980 by Susan Meiselas/Magnum Photos.

The result was a new way of doing assignment photography so that members of the Magnum collective were free to pursue projects that spoke to their personal, political, and artistic concerns. While Magnum’s working model has evolved over time, Capa’s initial idea was that members would place images, often in the form of extended photo-essays, in various publications and across several geographic markets. The publication fees earned would be shared between the photographer and the agency with part of the earnings made available to finance further projects. Although Magnum Photos was formed during and sustained by the postwar heyday of picture magazines such as Life, Look, Picture Post, and Illustrated, the cooperative still exists and recently celebrated its 65th anniversary.

A column of T59 tanks makes its way from Tiananmen Square along the Avenue of Eternal Peace. A solitary protester stands determined in the center of the road, blocking the tanks. Beijing, China, June 4, 1989, ©Stuart Franklin/Magnum Photos

The organization of the Magnum Photos collection at the Harry Ransom Center directly reflects the working practices of the photography collective. A key component of Capa’s plan was the repackaging, recaptioning, and redistributing of images as photo-essays once the images were no longer immediately newsworthy. Practically speaking, this meant that images like Eve Arnold’s iconic photograph of Malcolm X might have been made into multiple prints and filed in several different file folders that eventually were placed into archival boxes including the box designated “Eve Arnold 1961-1964,” another designated “X, Malcolm 1925-1965,” and a third designated “Historical 1960s,” and a fourth designated “Social Protest.”

Malcolm X during his visit to enterprises owned by Black Muslims. Chicago, IL, 1962, ©Eve Arnold/Magnum Photos.

Eventually the physical photographs were returned to the Magnum office to be stored in file cabinets and boxes labeled by photographer and by a range of subjects and thematic groupings. This organizational structure has been preserved in the archival collection at the Ransom Center. The 169-page finding aid has sections for individual photographers, public personalities, and geographic regions. It also contains subject groupings such as “World War II” or “Motherhood” or “National parks” and also more idiosyncratic thematic categories such as “Time and Measurement” or “Historical Emotions, 1970s.”

Reconstruction of a homicide. In the foreground: a young gypsy suspected of being guilty. Jarabina, Czechoslovakia, 1963, ©Josef Koudelka/Magnum Photos

These subject categories evolved along with the press print library as different librarians, archivists, and interns sought to structure the collection in ways that would make the images accessible and reusable. In this way, the press print library with its organizational structures and its multiple copies of each photograph was an attempt to make the objects—the press prints—function in service of the image content.

Historians are encouraged to visit the Reading and Viewing Room at the Harry Ransom Center, where the Magnum Photos collection is open for scholarly research and teaching and fellowships are available to support that research. To be sure, many of Magnum’s images are available online through its website. But to understand these photographs in their historical context—both how they circulated throughout the world and how the photo agency kept them in the public’s eye—direct engagement with these remarkable primary sources is essential.

Reading Magnum: A Visual Archive of the Modern World by Steven Hoelscher

This essay is derived from a longer article to be published in Rundbrief Fotografie. We thank the editor for permission to reprint here.

Want to read more about Magnum Photos and photojournalism? Click here.

Head Photo: National Guard Soldiers escort Freedom Riders along their ride from Montgomery to Jackson, Mississippi. Montgomery, Alabama, 1961, ©Bruce Davidson/Magnum Photos

All photos: Courtesy of the Harry Ransom Center with permission from Magnum Photos for any promotional work associated with Reading Magnum.

Age of Fracture, by Daniel T. Rodgers (2011)

By Chris Babits

Have you recently found yourself wondering, “How did we get here?” Turning on the news — or jumping on social media — reveals a host of dramatic events and controversial issues: protests about the death of young black men at the hands of police; economic policies that benefit the wealthiest Americans at the expense of the middle- and lower-classes; and debates over the meaning of “feminism,” with Time Magazine even suggesting that we expunge that word from our vocabulary. Daniel T. Rodgers, a historian at Princeton, offers an interpretation that helps us understand the concerns currently dominating political, intellectual, and cultural life.

In Age of Fracture, the 2012 winner of the Bancroft Prize, Rodgers argues that, between 1970 and 2001, a key intellectual and cultural shift took place. The dominant tendency of the age, Rodgers contends, was toward disaggregation. In the realm of ideas, conservatives and liberals wrote and talked less about society as a whole and more about individuals, contingency, and choice. Structural macroeconomics gave way to notions of a flexible and instantly emerging market. After the Civil Rights Movement and second wave feminism, racialized and gendered identities became fluid, intersectional, and elective. And power itself thinned, receded, and sometimes appeared to be simultaneously everywhere and nowhere. Rodgers persuasively shows how these ideas weren’t restricted to academic and political circles. They shaped the mental frameworks and social experiences of everyday Americans.

Rodgers makes complex political, economic, intellectual, and cultural changes easy to understand. Beginning with presidential rhetoric and the rediscovery of classical economics, he demonstrates that Ronald Reagan and his speechwriters used the terms “freedom” and “market” as vague concepts that inspired hope and optimism. This shift in rhetoric led Americans to see freedom and individualism linked to tax cuts. However, Reagan was only one proponent of the new economic ideas that gained prominence after the financially tumultuous 1970s. These new theories, with Milton Friedman as their foremost champion, shifted concerns from macroeconomics to the microeconomics of individual actors. Reagan proposed supply-side economics, which included massive tax cuts for corporations and the wealthiest Americans, promising that wealth would “trickle down” to the middle- and lower-classes. These trends endured through George W. Bush’s presidency and were apparent in bestsellers like Freakanomics (2005) and The World is Flat (2005). Protest movements like Occupy Wall Street and the increased political role of Senator Elizabeth Warren highlight the ways some Americans are rejecting the effects of Friedman’s ideas and Reagan’s policies based on linking freedom with the marketplace.

The Occupy Movement began on September 17, 2011, in Zuccotti Park, New York.

Rodgers’ chapters on power, race, and gender provide additional insight into how American society got to where it is today. On the issue of power, Rodgers demonstrates how this term became an all-consuming concern of academics. Political scientists, sociologists, historians, and anthropologists engaged with power in ways that highlighted the significance of language, symbols, and consciousness. For historians, Rodgers argues, the search for power led to the virtual abandonment of class-based interpretations of the past in favor of cultural history. And Rodgers does something that many graduate students and general readers thought impossible — he makes Michel Foucault’s ideas accessible. Foucault, one of the most influential and controversial intellectuals of the past fifty years, emphasizes “capillaries of power” at work in the smallest of daily transactions. His notions of power were built from the ground up, showing how political hierarchies were reproduced and normalized – making them almost invisible – in everyday life. Foucault’s Discipline and Punish and A History of Sexuality, Volume I: An Introduction remain required reading for advanced undergraduates and graduate students in America’s colleges and universities.

Like Foucauldian power, ideas about gender and race became fractured between 1970 and 2001. During the Civil Rights Movement, there developed a popular belief in the need for unified black protest and action. A similar thing happened early in second wave feminism. But, Rodgers provides thought-provoking examples and analyses of the disaggregation of the unified black voice and of a unified female experience. By referencing scholars like sociologist William Julius Wilson, who wrote about the intersection of race and class, Rodgers traces the disappearance of racial and feminist solidarity. As a result, America has seen less collective black protest as economic and other differences divide African Americans and women in the United States. By the late-1980s, historian Joan Scott’s influential works about the construction of gender and philosopher Judith Butler’s concept of gender performativity, challenged the vision of a common and united womanhood. In the late-1960s, gender was determined by one’s biological sex. Over the past four decades, though, historians, cultural theorists, and others recognize that society helps construct what we view as masculine and feminine. As intellectuals complicated ideas about gender and class and other differences became more visible, Rodgers argues, movements based on gender equality, fractured, and multiplied.

Rodgers’ Age of Fracture is well-written, cogently argued, and timely. It includes additional discussions about school and university curricula, multiculturalism, and the impact of the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. Readers might not agree with all of the connections Rodgers makes, but Age of Fracture will help readers think not only about the recent past but also the world they currently live in.

Daniel T. Rodgers, Age of Fracture (Harvard University Press, 2011)

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All images via Wikimedia Commons.

The First Texans: An Exhibit in Jester Hall

By Nakia Parker

Tucked away in a corner on the second floor of Jester Residence Hall at UT Austin stands a thought provoking exhibit that pays tribute to Native Americans, the “First Texans.” Many times I have hurriedly passed by this area and only given it a casual look. In fact, the day I went to visit the exhibit,, students were standing directly across from it, laughing, doing dance routines, and hanging out with friends. No one even glanced in the corner. However, I strongly encourage taking the time to explore this well-constructed and respectful gallery honoring the first inhabitants of Texas.

Clovis point (replica) from Domebo mammoth kill site in Oklahoma.

Artist Rendition of Leander Indian Woman

The idea for the exhibit was hatched by Floyd Hoelting, Executive Director of the Division of Housing and Food Service. With the help of his staff members, student leaders, the Institute of Texan Cultures, and other experts in the field of archaeology, sociology, and anthropology, the commemoration became a reality. In six panels, the gallery traces the history of Native Americans in the region, commencing around 13,000 BCE, to the arrival of the Spanish in the early 16th century. But the displays do much more than simply chronicle the experiences of indigenous people who lived thousands of years ago. It also seeks to dispel common stereotypes surrounding these cultures and to demonstrate that Texas history does not begin and end with the Alamo. For example, the second plaque discusses the populating of the Texas region by the Clovis peoples. Archeologists and anthropologists had previously described the Clovis as a nomadic band of hunters, but they were actually were a sedentary people who participated in farming and created complex architectural structures to protect themselves from the elements. In addition, artifacts such as bowls, hunting instruments, and drinking utensils aid the visitor in reconstructing what life was like for indigenous people in centuries past. Visitors should also make sure to pay attention to what is under them as well as around them, because complementing the panels and artifacts nicely is the beautiful design found on the floor of the exhibit, which features a map of Native American archeological sites located in every section of the state.

Clovis Artifacts from Gault Site, Central TX.

The First Texans exhibit is a part of Jester Hall’s Gallery of Texas Cultures that showcases over thirty different ethnic groups of the state, highlighting the specific role each played in molding and influencing the politics, education, and culture of Texas. According to its website, “as a visual resource, the gallery is intended to increase the knowledge of the history and contributions of ethnic groups among students, faculty, staff and visitors while as a physical resource, the gallery is intended to provide the venue to inspire conversation, learning and a greater understanding of others.” Visitors who take the time to see The First Texans display will surely agree that it achieves its intended purpose.

Wall Paintings at Seminole Canyon State Park — Wall Paintings estimated to be 4,000 years old at Seminole Canyon State Park

You can see some of the exhibit at The Gallery of Texas Cultures website.

Boomtown, USA: An Historical Look at Fracking

By Henry Wiencek

Over the past five years or so, the United States has been experiencing an enormous oil boom. Hydraulic fracturing, known as “fracking,” has made it possible—and profitable—to drill through thick rock formations, opening up vast pockets of domestic oil and gas across the country. But nowhere has this process had more of an impact than in the Eagle Ford Shale and Permian Basin of Texas and in the Bakken formation of western North Dakota. New jobs, new workers, and new money have transformed remote prairies into humming boomtowns. Wood cabins in Midland, Texas typically rent for $1,500 a month; Karnes City in south Texas plans to build a $30 million high school; and Williston, North Dakota has absorbed 15,000 workers alone.

An oil derrick operated by Raven Drilling drills for oil in the Bakken shale formation on July 23, 2013 outside Watford City, North Dakota. (Photo by Andrew Burton/Getty Images)

But the party may soon be over. Largely due to high American production, the international price of Brent crude has fallen below $50/barrel, a six year low.

This is not the first time America has experienced the intoxicating highs and dispiriting lows of the oil patch. Between 1901 and 1930, Louisiana, one of the first major centers of domestic oil and gas production, encountered the same dilemma at various moments. Over the course of two decades, areas of the state went from isolated swamp to tent cities of 20,000 people…and then back to isolated swamp again. As demand fell or wells just dried up, boomtowns like Homer, Ida, Vivian, and Oil City—yes, Oil City—suddenly lost their raison d’être. Their stories may augur what comes next for present day boom communities like Karnes City or Williston—and perhaps impart some lessons on how to survive the bust.

Oil City, 1912

Although a great deal has changed in the oil industry over the past century, certain “boomtown” traits seem to be timeless. As production has increased in North Dakota and Texas, sprawling “man camps” of hastily built trailers quickly proliferated to house all the new workers. The migration has created a boon for local business, but also spikes in violent crime and drug addiction. When journalist Laura Gottesdiener visited Williston, ND, she found “an abundance of meth, crack, and liquor; freezing winters; rents higher than Manhattan; and far, far too many men.” The oil industry’s encroachment into rural parts of Texas and North Dakota has also dramatically changed their natural landscape. Meandering hills of prairie grass now compete with truck convoys, pipeline construction crews and perpetually dipping pumpjacks. In Williston, toxic gas flares illuminate the sky all night.

A trailer park occupied mostly by oil workers is seen in an aerial view in the early morning hours of July 30, 2013 near Watford City, North Dakota. Photo by Andrew Burton/Getty Images

The oil boomtowns of early twentieth-century Caddo Parish, Louisiana bore a striking resemblance to those of today. Located atop the highly productive Sabine Uplift, Caddo transformed from a desolate stretch of swamp to a boisterous collection of boomtowns after oil was found around 1905. Between 1907 and 1908, land prices spiked from $25-50/acre to $500-1,000. 25,000 people descended on Oil City alone. Much like in present day Williston, oil production dominated Caddo’s natural landscape. Driller Carl M. Jones remembered that so many oil wells were flaring off natural gas you could “read a newspaper at night several miles away.”

Drilling for oil on Caddo Lake

Given the enormous worker populations, housing was cheap and improvised. Driller Claude McFarland recalled that newcomers “had to live where they worked,” generally settling “all over the woods in tents.” “Main Streets” in Caddo were generally unpaved roads lined with ramshackle saloons, banks and general stores housed in shabby buildings ready to disassemble whenever the bust came. The tent cities of Caddo also became notoriously riotous. With virtually no law enforcement or civic institutions, gambling, drinking and violence prevailed. Oil City’s Reno Hill was infamous for its saloons and “hotels” of ill repute. Madams with aliases like Diamond, Oklahoma Mamie, Big Alice, and Old Mooch became experts at selling liquor and sex to the huge market of wage earning men who were either unmarried or far from their families.

Downtown Trees City c. 1915

Eventually, the drinking and violence became so extreme that Mike Benedum and Joe Trees, prominent oilmen with considerable interests in Caddo, decided to build Trees City, an enclave of comfortable, brick homes that would encourage more wholesome family-oriented lives among the workers. Drinking, gambling, and “loose women” were strictly forbidden. But Benedum and Trees’s efforts to control their workforce had only mixed results. When they hired a former Texas Ranger to shut down Caddo’s whiskey and prostitution rings, the bootleggers simply bribed him to look the other way.

Law enforcement tied drunks to tree in the center of Oil City until they were sober, September 15, 1912.

So how did these communities respond when the bust came? In many cases, the loss of oil revenue was devastating. When demand for commodities fell across America during the Great Depression, Caddo’s boomtowns had little to cushion the fall. Most of the new infrastructure built over the past two decades specifically related to oil and gas—pipelines, storage tanks, refineries—and had only limited applications in other fields. Most of the investors, lease hounds and oil workers left town, many in search of the next boom in Texas or Oklahoma. As Longtime Jennings, Louisiana resident J.M. Hoag recalled it, once “the oil started to slow down…the money mongers left with it.”

Fire at Mooringsport, Louisiana, 1913

Businesses reliant on those wages left as well. After revenues in Jennings—the site of Louisiana’s first oil well—declined, a country club and opera house catering to oilmen promptly shut. Hotels housing all the newcomers to the oil patch could no longer fill their rooms. Even the women of Reno Hill moved on once the market changed. Just as oilmen crisscrossed from boomtown to boomtown along the Sabine Uplift, female sex workers migrated along their own parallel network, an “interrelated community of vice” as one author called it.

This isn’t to say that there aren’t positive lessons to glean from Louisiana’s early boom days. The most obvious advice is for local governments to save while the oil is profitable—Norway is a great example of this virtue. Having a diverse local economy is another. In 1901, Jennings became the first zone of modern oil production in Louisiana, only to peak just five years later. But local jobs in rice production and transportation pre-existed the oil boom—and continued to keep many families afloat after the bust. Today, Jennings is a handsome, small town of 10,000. In contrast, Trees City, once a testament to the sturdy prosperity that oil created, gradually reverted back to a remote patch of bayou. Some privately owned pumpjacks still dot the landscape today, but only produce a fraction of the heady boom days. By remaining an oil-centered economy, Trees City had no way of coping when the bust came.

Trees City Bank, c. 1910

Many present day boomtowns have applied such lessons. Karnes City, Texas has actively prohibited bars and “man camps” from its city limits, instead channeling oil revenues into local schools, a new city hall, and a convention center that will hopefully pay long term dividends. Even the wild and rowdy Williston has begun investing in sewer improvements, a new recreation center and limiting permits for the construction of new “man camps.” Nonetheless, these boomtowns will still feel the pinch of fewer jobs, smaller government coffers and higher unemployment. That much is probably unavoidable.

Welcome sign to Karnes City, Texas. Via Wikimedia Commons.

And when the bust does come, perhaps Williston, Karnes City, and other oil patch communities will direct their energies towards reinvesting in their natural landscape. Years of breakneck growth in oil production have severely impacted local environments: farmland made fallow from contaminated wastewater; toxic oil spills; higher prevalence of earthquakes. And this is to say nothing of the global issues that accompany pumping yet more carbon into the atmosphere. I don’t want to be naïve—restoring grasslands and watersheds won’t sustain the 2.8% unemployment that North Dakota has been enjoying (the lowest in America). But it might provide a well-needed respite from the excesses—both social and environmental—that tend to follow in the wake of America’s oil boomtowns.