US History Archives - Page 18 of 24

You Say You Want a Revolution? Reenacting History in the Classroom

Two students stand back-to-back in the center of the room. At my signal, they step in opposite directions, turn, and shoot. Afterward, one crumples to the floor dead while the rest of the class erupts in cheers of glee or howls of outrage. This scene took place in my classroom last fall. My students were all “in character,” acting the part of historical figures. The duelists were Abraham Brasher, a New York City silversmith and member of the “Sons of Liberty,” and Christopher Billop, a Staten Island farmer loyal to the king. Although Brasher and Billop were both genuine historic figures and real political foes, their fatal meeting never actually took place. The student playing Billop had provoked the duel, gambling that if the dice fell his way (the projectiles they each “shot” were not bullets but dice), Brasher’s death might prevent the New York Provincial Congress from voting for independence.

Such fictitious events and “unhistoric” outcomes are an integral part of a class that I have taught for the past few years called “Debating the American Revolution.” The class was first inspired by the book Patriots, Loyalists, and Revolution in New York City, 1775-1776 written by William Offutt (a history professor at Pace University in New York City). This book is part of a series called “Reacting to the Past” launched in the late 1990s by Professor Mark Carnes of Barnard College. Each of books in the series focuses on a particular historical event or debate. Carnes believed that students would be more engaged with history if they encountered it as a participant rather than as a spectator. In the case of Offutt’s book, the chosen setting was New York City in the period between the start of the revolutionary war in April 1775 and the passage of the Declaration of Independence fifteen months later, and the historical debate was whether or not New York should join the American Revolution.

As soon as I read Offutt’s book I knew that I wanted to try it. However, as I became more excited about the idea, I also became convinced that I would need an entire semester, and not merely the five weeks he allotted, to do the job properly. I believed the students’ role-playing would be more historically accurate if they were given a deeper background in the ideas and material life of late colonial New York before the “game” began.

In my course we devote the first half of the semester to background research. We begin by discussing things colonial New Yorkers would have, or at least could have, read. These include extracts from “classics” of early modern political theory (Locke, Hobbes, and Montesquieu) as well as from less well remembered writers such as Lord Bolingbroke, and John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon’s “Cato’s Letters.” From there we progress to reading the pamphlets published on both sides of the Atlantic during the imperial crisis of the decade prior to 1775. We finish with political tracts written by colonial New Yorkers themselves. Students read an essay by the loyalist parson, Samuel Seabury, writing under the pseudonym the “Westchester Farmer,” and the robust rebuttal penned by Alexander Hamilton, then a twenty-year-old student at Kings College (now Columbia University).

From the world of political ideas, we move on to the nitty-gritty of daily life. To give students a sense of the physical landscape of colonial New York City, we pore over a wonderful map of the southern end of Manhattan Island made by an officer in the Royal Engineers on the eve of the revolution. On the map, the city sits on the southernmost tip of the island, occupying an area about the same size as UT’s campus. Colonial New Yorkers still lived in close proximity to the countryside. On the engineer’s map, Greenwich village was still literally that, a rural hamlet separated from the city proper by a mile and a half of fields and forest.

Yet, despite its small size, colonial New York City was a surprisingly urban place. With approximately 25,000 inhabitants, the city was the second largest in the colonies (after Philadelphia). Crowded together into such a confined space, in buildings only three or four stories tall, all colonial New Yorkers, rich and poor, black and white, lived in close proximity to each other. They walked the same broad streets or narrow alleys and often slept beneath the same roofs (although the poor – or enslaved – were likely to be relegated to cramped and unheated attics, or dank basements).

Lastly, each of my students is tasked with reading one month’s worth of a newspaper printed in New York City between July 1773 and March 1775. Digital versions of these and many other Early American newspapers are available online through the UT library web-site. Then as now, newspapers are written for the moment; yesterday’s newspaper is used to wrap the fish. Everything you read in the paper speaks to immediate concerns. We will never know if the runaway slave advertised for by his master escaped or was caught and returned for the reward. In the woodcut that accompanies the advertisement, he is caught in mid-stride, perpetually on the run. My students are naturally appalled by such notices, but they also are intrigued by the minutiae of a distant time and place whose fervent desires (for wealth, good health, fashionable attire), and fears (illness, debt, death) seem surprisingly familiar.

Besides writing papers on their newspaper reading, the students present their findings to the rest of the class. Because each student reports on a different month between July 1773 and March 1775, listening to their presentations in chronological order encapsulates the last stages of the imperial breakdown as it was happening. This sense of the impending crisis ends in April 1775, the first meeting of the New York Provincial Congress, and the start of the “game.”

At last, midway through the semester, comes the moment everyone has been waiting for. From a tri-cornered hat, each student draws the name of his or her character. I leave the room for five minutes and anyone unhappy with their “lot” can try to persuade someone to trade with them. I then give every student a sealed envelope containing secret information about their character which they are not to reveal to anyone and which they should use to guide their conduct in the game.

Each character belongs to one of four larger groups or in 18th-century language “factions.” Five students are patriots, charged with promoting the revolution and declaring independence. Four students are loyalists, tasked with preventing the same. Another four classmates are “moderates,” members of the Provincial Congress who have yet to decide between the first two options. This moderate bloc forms the “swing vote” whose support the patriots will need to win if they are to prevail. The tri-partite division of our in-class Congress echoes John Adams’s post-war calculation that at the start of the revolution Americans were evenly divided between patriots, loyalists, and neutrals.

The patriots’ challenge of winning over the moderates is made harder by the last and largest segment of the class representing the great majority of colonial New York’s inhabitants: those people who were not permitted to vote or sit in the Provincial Congress. In our class, this group consists of two poor men, two women, two slaves, and a clandestine Catholic. In class, we call the politically disenfranchised the “People-Out-of-Doors” (or PODs). This was a polite 18th-century term for people more often called “the lower sort,” the “mob,” “crowd,” or, in Edmund Burke’s memorable phrase: “the swinish multitude.” In modern political parlance, we might call them “the street.”

Pulling Down the Statue of King George III by William Walcutt (Wikimedia Commons)

In the early modern era, however, people excluded from the formal political process could still make their opinions known by means of popular protest. Once each class session, I ask the back of the classroom where the PODs gather if a mob is forming in the city’s streets, and if so, who is the crowd’s target and what is their demand? Those confronted by a mob have three choices: capitulate to the mob’s demand, flee (in which case they cannot vote in that game session), or resist. The latter choice could end in tar-and-feathers or even death.

Although their power lay in numbers, each of the PODs also has an individual agenda. Slaves want to gain their freedom. One of the women seeks the right to divorce her absent ne’er-do-well husband. All of the PODs would like political rights, and a chance to vote in the class’s ultimate vote on independence. To this end, they must persuade the Congress to remove the disqualifications, whether of property, gender, or religion that barred them from having political rights in the colonial period. Both the patriot and loyalist factions fear the mob’s wrath, but they also see it as a weapon that can be used to threaten their opponents and whose actions might be swayed by promising to support some of the “liberal” reforms.

With the possibility of adding members to the Congress (as individual PODs gain the vote), as well as the likelihood of subtracting them (either permanently by death, or temporarily by flight), you can see how complicated the political calculus and game strategy can become and why the weekly game sessions of the class as well as the weeks between classes were filled with intense negotiations and intrigue.

At the start of each week’s game session students meet briefly with the members of their group to plan and plot. Afterwards comes the most formal item on the agenda: speeches. In the course of the game, each student has to write and present two ten-minute-long speeches. Although everyone speaks from the same podium at the front of the classroom, members of the Congress are presumed to be speaking before that assembly, while the PODs pretend to address the tavern-table-democracy at the “Bunch O’ Grapes” tavern, located across the street from the statehouse I am always pleased (and, to be honest, surprised) by the earnestness and skill students display in portraying their characters and presenting their opinions to the rest of the class. Nor does the rest of the class sit idle while the speeches were being made. I encourage the audience to interject freely with cheers, and table-pounding when they approve of what the speaker says or with hisses or cries of “rubbish!” when they disagree with the sentiments being expressed.

Besides speaking and voting, students’ are also required to submit two anonymous (or pseudonymous) letters to our in-class newspaper. The letters allow for a great deal of mischief (the Billop-Brasher duel began when the former planted a letter falsely accusing the latter of beating his wife), but the assignment also reflects a historical reality, for the print culture of the 18th-century was filled with pseudonym and imposture. Famous examples in early American history include young Benjamin Franklin’s “Silence Dogood” letters, or the contributions made to the New York newspapers by “Publius,” (a composite of James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay) which urged ratification of the Constitution and which are now collectively known as the “Federalist Papers.”

Students first send their letters to me (so I know who wrote what and can assign grades), and I remove their actual names before publishing the letters in the our newspaper, “The New York Gazette and Weekly Mercury” that I distribute before each week’s meeting.

(View a full issue of “The New York Gazette and Weekly Mercury” below)

Our in-class newspaper also provides students with a short reminder of the previous week’s class and what was scheduled to happen this week. Most importantly, the paper advances the hands of time. Each weekly session of the game is set three months after the previous one from April 1775, until our sixth and final session: July 1776. Each issue of the newspaper informs the students what had happened in England and in the other colonies since the last game turn. These “outside” events, decisions, and declarations, drawn verbatim from the actual historic record, force students to react to the changing political and military situation as events in America and Britain spiral toward revolution.

It is this ongoing “course of human events” (to quote from Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence) that drives the game. For example, if the main item on the patriots’ agenda in the April 1775 session was to get New York to join the economic boycott of Britain, by the next week’s session (July 1775), the war has begun and the patriots are charged with answering the call of the Continental Congress to raise troops for General Washington’s new Continental Army. By the winter of 1775, New Yorkers read of the royal governor of Virginia’s call to arm slaves who agree to fight for the King against their patriot masters. In the spring of 1776, the newspaper includes extracts from Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense,” then hot-off-the-press.

My loyalist students find the rising revolutionary tide vexing. Often, when they read the latest issue of the newspaper they learn that their carefully negotiated agreement with the moderate faction has been undermined not by the radicals in Philadelphia, but by the hard-liners in London, and by a British policy that becomes increasingly militaristic and intransigent as the year wears on.

Eventually, the middle ground erodes, and everyone must choose sides. Most of the moderates reluctantly join the patriots. Those PODs who have gained the vote, also tend to lean patriotic, reasoning that their new found liberties depend on the success of the American cause. All my classes thus far have voted to declare independence and join the revolution when the push finally comes in July 1776.

But what I find fascinating is that no two classes have arrived at that destination by the same route. John Adams once famously remarked that getting the Congress to declare independence was like trying to “make thirteen Clocks, Strike precisely alike, at the Same Second.” As Adams’s remark suggests, until July 1776, the American Revolution consisted of thirteen closely related but distinct crises. Each colony followed its own peculiar political path to independence, shaped in part by the colonies’ own particular histories and circumstances, but also by the choices made by individual actors. No two of these thirteen revolutions were exactly alike.

In trying to make the revolution happen in our class, my patriot students often unknowingly follow the actual historical paths that lead one colony or another to join the revolution. For example, when one class voted to print paper money in order to pay for the troops required by Congress (risking inflation and the wrath of the poor), they inadvertently adopted the same course their historic predecessors chose in the New York Provincial Congress. In another case, the class-appointed commander of New York’s Continental Brigade ordered his troops to purge the Congress and declared New York to be independent by something like a military coup-d’etat, (which parallels what actually happened in Pennsylvania).

Playing historical characters based on real historical sources immerses my students in ideas, events, and drama of the American Revolution. Better than any class I have ever taught, this format teaches students how history is woven from the interaction between structure and contingency, between the warp of the larger forces of economics, politics, and culture and the weft of immediate consequence of events and of individual choice. In “Debating the Revolution,” my students learn about history by helping to make it.

As to what my students feel they get out of the class, perhaps the best way to illustrate this is to let one of them speak for herself. Sara Gordon shared this description of her experience in the course, written for another purpose, with me:

“Every week, I temporarily become Bathsheba Spooner, an impoverished laundress who supports women’s civil rights and the Patriot cause. As Bathsheba, I yell my opinions and pleas through the windows of the Colonial Assembly, I argue with my fellow people-out-of-doors regarding what the best course of action for our colony of New York would be, and I march through the streets with the Daughters of Liberty.

I am able to become Bathsheba through my History 350R seminar class entitled “Debating the American Revolution.” Though this class began with a . . . study of British and early American political theory and a detailed summary of the years leading up to the American Revolution, it was not long before my professor, Dr. Robert Olwell, assigned us each a character from the colonial time period, and as a class, we began historical role-playing.

I must admit, I was at first skeptical and hesitant about this aspect of the class. I have such a deep interest in the study of the American Revolution that I was inclined to prefer a more traditional lecture and discussion based class. This class, however, has made me incredibly glad and grateful to be a history major. When my peers and I enter the classroom, we take on our assigned character’s identities. We have set aside time for faction meetings, for congressional discussion and voting, for court, and even for mobs. Each class period is intense, and we must each be able to truly represent our character and argue, debate, and vote as if we are he or she.”

In “Debating the American Revolution,” history comes alive for my students, and, in the end, that is what I hope to achieve in all of my classes.

The New York Gazette and Weekly Mercury (A full issue of the course newspaper.)

More books in the series, Reacting to the Past

Omens of Adversity: Tragedy, Time, Memory, Justice, by David Scott (2014)

by Lauren Hammond

On October 19, 1983, members of Grenada’s People’s Revolutionary Army assassinated Prime Minister Maurice Bishop of Grenada and seven of his associates, triggering the sequence of events that led to the sudden end of the Grenada Revolution. With the prime minister dead, the hastily established ruling military council unsuccessfully attempted to restore order to stave off the military invasion being planned in Washington, D.C. But just days after Bishop’s death, President Ronald Reagan launched Operation Urgent Fury to save American lives and ostensibly restore democracy to the island of Grenada. Having established their authority, U.S. military officials rounded up the leadership of Grenada’s socialist party, the New Jewel Movement, and the army high command, whom the Grenadian people and the U.S. blamed for the murders. Later known as the Grenada 17, these men and women would be tried, convicted, and sentenced to hang for the deaths of Bishop and his compatriots, despite a lack of credible evidence linking them directly to the assassinations.

In Omens of Adversity, Caribbean anthropologist David Scott wrestles with the connection between time and tragedy, engendered by what the Grenadian people experienced as the catastrophic collapse of the popular movement as they lived on in the post-socialist moment. In the wake of the assassinations and the U.S. intervention, Grenadians who came of age during the revolution and watched its ruin found themselves “stranded” in the present, bereft of hope for the future, and grieved they had to be rescued by the United States, whose power the New Jewel Movement had set out to challenge. Adding insult to injury, the U.S. played a role in the disappearance of the bodies of Bishop and the others, robbing the families of the deceased and the entire revolutionary generation of a chance to mourn the prime minister and the future free of Western hegemony he had embodied. In assessing the socialist experiment in Grenada and its end, Scott argues that although the Grenada Revolution is often forgotten, it is nevertheless a key event in the world history of revolutions because it signaled an end to the possibility of post-colonial socialist revolution and the ascendancy of Western neo-liberalism.

Prime Minister Maurice Bishop of Grenada (Encyclopedia of Puerto Rico)

Traditionally, scholars of liberal political change see trials such as that of the Grenada 17 as markers that signify the transition from the illegitimate old regime to the new transparent liberal order. However, despite the apparent triumph of the Western tradition, the transition to liberal democracy has had its flaws. Using the trial of the Grenada 17 and its aftermath, Scott raises questions about truth, justice, and democratic transitions. The investigation and trial were full of irregularities, including the torture of the defendants. Scott emphasizes that instead of an earnest attempt to secure information and justice, the goal of the 1986 prosecution of the Grenada 17 was to criminalize the NJM leadership and their political ideology. He describes the proceedings as a late Cold War “show trial” crafted to demonstrate what happened to those in America’s “backyard” who sought revolutionary socialist or communist self-determination. Instead of indicting the 17, Scott reframes them as “leftovers from a former future stranded in the present.”

Members of the Eastern Caribbean Defense Force participate in Operation Urgent Fury (Wikimedia Commons)

Although the jury found the Grenada 17 guilty, the anomalies in the investigation and trial meant that the Grenadian people still had questions about what happened and why. Public interest was aroused when a group of high school boys began investigating the disappearance of the victims’ bodies. A truth and reconciliation commission was constituted and began to research the events of October 19 in late 2001. However, these efforts were tainted, too. The report recapitulated the standard narrative of the events, complete with anti-communist biases that demonized the NJM – unsurprising in light of the commissioners’ refusal to meet with the Grenada 17. However, Scott’s reading of the report’s appendices containing statements from NJM leadership shows that a different story could have been told. Unfortunately, it seems unlikely that the people of Grenada will ever know the full truth about what happened to Maurice Bishop and the others. After all, in the neoliberal era, the socialist past can only be a criminal one.

Crimes against Nature: Squatters, Poachers, Thieves, and the Hidden History of American Conservation, by Karl Jacoby (2003)

by Henry Wiencek

Who actually lived in The Adirondacks, Yosemite, and The Grand Canyon before they became national parks? This is the simple, but compelling, question Karl Jacoby asks in Crimes against Nature: Squatters, Poachers, Thieves, and the Hidden History of American Conservation. When we think about preserving nature, Jacoby argues, Americans tend to assume an easy dichotomy between The Evil Poacher vs. The Righteous Park Ranger. But Crimes against Nature tells a deeper history of the rural communities who relied on these lands before their “preservation” and introduces some moral complexity into the story of America’s national parks.

Jacoby’s narrative starts with the legal, cultural and environmental changes taking place during the Progressive Era. As America became increasingly urbanized, many social reformers and politicians feared a dystopian future in which crowded, industrial cities replaced nature entirely. Teddy Roosevelt often spoke about the dangers of “over-civilization” as fewer and fewer Americans encountered the great outdoors. Starting in the late 19th-century, The federal government responded to these anxieties with the establishment of national parks that would protect “wilderness” from human development. These preserved park lands, officials reasoned, would encourage people to “get back to nature” and escape the pollution, disease, and social disorder of urban slums.

Teddy Roosevelt and naturalist John Muir pose at Yosemite National Park, 1906 (Library of Congress)

But the conservationist impulse to protect “wilderness” from the encroachment of human society, Jacoby points out, wholly disregarded the rural communities that had been living there for generations. Overnight, settlers and residents became outlaws and “squatters” residing on government owned land. The hunting and fishing which had sustained those communities was suddenly “poaching,” a crime that could result in fines or banishment. At the time of the Adirondacks’ preservation, 16,000 settlers lived within what became “preserved” and “uninhabited” land. Even the Grand Canyon at one time provided trails and access to natural resources for local Native American populations.

Map of Grand Canyon National Monument prepared by the National Forest Service, 1907 (Library of Congress)

In order to enforce these new sets of rules, federal and state governments mobilized a bureaucracy of Forest Police to prevent squatting and poaching. Officials set new legal boundaries around “conserved” areas and organized forestland into grids of property ownership. Jacoby argues these efforts to define and protect “preserved” zones oversimplified complex ecological systems and produced unintended consequences. When officials at Yellowstone began hunting predators such as coyotes and mountain lions to maintain animal populations, the number of elk soared, throwing off the park’s delicate ecological balance. Despite the conservationist impulse to preserve nature as it is, park managers were really creating “nature” as it ought to be.

Horace M. Albright, Superintendent of Yellowstone National Park, with bears from the park, 1922 (National Park Service)

Crimes against Nature also details a variety of confrontations that ensued between park officials and the local communities who refused to leave. Setting fires, hunting or even making violent threats all represented forms of resistance against the incursions of the state on rural lands. Although many conservationists regarded these rural populations as fascinating vestiges of a pre-modern world, that nostalgia co-existed with a fierce contempt for their “primitive” modes of subsistence. Conservationists and Forest Police railed against the “irrationality” and wastefulness of rural hunting habits and worried that such behavior would undermine the rule of law.

“View of Tutocanula Pass, Yosemite, California,” by photographer Carleton E. Watkins, 1878-1881 (Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University)

Jacoby concludes that both sides actually embodied distinct, but complementary, American ideals. While conservationists sought to prevent illicit behavior and maintain the rule of law, settlers regarded themselves as rugged individualists pursuing self-sufficiency. In contrast to the simplified narrative of conservation vs. poaching, Jacoby sees a morally complex story unfolding in the wilderness.

Read more on the history of national parks and preservation:

Neel Baumgartner on Big Bend’s “scenic beauty”

Erika Bsumek on Lady Bird Johnson’s beautification project

And watch Blake Scott and Andres Lombana-Bermudez’s short documentary on the history of tourism in the Panamanian jungle

Hearing the Roaring Twenties: The New Archive (No. 12)

by Henry Wiencek

Ultimately, the task of any historian is to piece together the experience of another time—to understand what it was like being on the streets of Paris in 1789. Photographs, primary documents and personal recollections offer important glimpses, but one digital history site specifically wants to understand how it sounded. “The Roaring Twenties”—a collaboration between Emily Thompson of Princeton University and Scott Mahoy of the University of Southern California—compiles audio files and written noise complaints from 1920s New York City to capture the utter cacophony its residents experienced. Arranged by sound type, geography and timeline, this database is a new type of documentary and experiential history—recreating what the Roaring Twenties sounded like.

A screenshot of the “Sounds” section (The Roaring Twenties)

The variety of noises that 1920s New Yorkers endured is astonishing. Click on any of the listings in the “Sound” section and you’ll get the brief history of a particular sound: its source, its location, its formal noise complaint (if such documentation existed) and, in many entries, a contemporary piece of footage capturing the actual noise. It is remarkable to visit the utterly different sonic world these videos capture. While many of the auditory sensations caught on film would be familiar to present day residents—sirens, construction and honking cars—actually hearing (and seeing) them feels like entering a parallel universe. For the individuals seen on camera, all that rattling, whistling and yelling would have been the ordinary context for daily life; yet to us, it is exotic and bizarre.

A formal complaint Louise P. Jenkins of Manhattan filed with the New York Commissioner of Health in 1933 regarding the sounds of fire engines (The Roaring Twenties/NYC Dept. of Records/Municipal Archives)

Screenshot of the formal complaint Louise P. Jenkins filed with the New York Commissioner of Health in 1933 regarding the sounds of trucks in her Manhattan neighborhood (The Roaring Twenties/NYC Dept. of Records, Municipal Archives)

In order to provide a spatial context for this historical soundscape, the “Space” section arranges each sound entry onto a map of the city. Manhattan has the highest concentration, but you can find yelling newspaper vendors, saxophone playing neighbors and noisy radios in every borough. Many of these sounds reflect the unique cultural and ethnic character of New York’s neighborhoods: there is a Kung Fu demonstration on Chinatown’s Mott Street; an “Ol’ Clo'” Jewish peddler looking for clothing to buy on the Lower East Side; and ferry boat whistles along the Battery promenade. They also reveal an industrial city at work. Gotham echoed with dynamite blasting, steel factory operations, riveting, and boring machines.

Screenshot of the “Space” section, which arranges different sounds onto a map of New York City (The Roaring Twenties)

But look closer and you’ll discover many sounds that will complicate our assumptions about what a “modern” industrial city sounded like. In 1930, Mr. W.C. Mansfield filed a noise complaint about an Upper West Side horse stable. That same year saw multiple complaints for rooster crowing in upper Manhattan as well as several sites in the Bronx. And in 1932, Mr. Arthur Campe of Brooklyn informed the city about one Mr. Johnson’s “noisy chickens.” New York did not just contain a diversity of sounds, but also a diversity of economies and lifestyles—both industrial and pre-industrial. Even as the jackhammering of factories and construction projects rang through the air, the neighing of horses and crowing of roosters were present as well.

Screenshot from the video "Fire Engines, and Children at Play" (The Roaring Twenties/NYC Dept. of Records, Municipal Archives)

Screenshot from the video “Fire Engines, and Children at Play,” circa 1928-30 (The Roaring Twenties/NYC Dept. of Records, Municipal Archives)

Books can elegantly describe trends like industrial growth and urbanization, but “The Roaring Twenties” goes deeper by uncovering the sonic minutiae that accompanied them: a noisy bakery on Ogden Avenue in the Bronx; dairy wagons bothering J. J. Cohen each day in upper Manhattan; or the early morning racket created by live poultry aboard the NY Central Railroad cars along Riverside Drive. And these sounds are not just pieces of trivia. They exhibit people, machines and animals projecting their unique way of life into the sonic atmosphere. This compelling and very addictive site captures New York City at its noisiest, most contested and loudest.

Catch up with the latest New Archives:

The Civil War, as seen by the artists of Harper’s Weekly

And an economic, demographic and oceanic history of the trans-Atlantic slave trade

Harper’s Weekly’s Portrayal of the Civil War: The New Archive (No. 11)

By Charley S. Binkow

Images of war surround us today. We see high-definition photographs and videos of violence on our televisions, smartphones, and laptops almost constantly. But what was living through war like when people didn’t have instant videos or photographs? George Mason University’s Virginia Civil War Archive gives us a glimpse into the American media’s portrayal of the war at a time when ink-prints dominated the newspapers.

During the Civil War, Harper’s Weekly was one of the authoritative voices in news, both in the North and the South. What set them apart from their competition? Their prints brought the war to the people and illuminated a world far removed from our own. You can see Fredricksburg, Virginia before it saw battle, a map of the Battle of Bull’s Run, and a portrayal of rebels firing into a train near Tunstall’s Station.

A Band of Rebels Firing Into the Cars Near Tunstall’s Station, Virginia, June 13, 1862 (George Mason University Libraries)

The collection is quite well organized. You can browse by titles, subjects, people, and more. A Civil War historian trying to find primary visual documents concerning Richmond during wartime can do so with a click of a button. An art historian can explore the different landscapes and figures expertly drawn by Harper’s staff—some of America’s best illustrators of the time worked for Harper’s. Almost anyone can find something interesting in this collection.

Harpers Weekly’s map of the Battle of Bull’s Run (George Mason University Libraries)

My personal favorite pieces are those that depict war scenes and their aftermath, like this dynamic, busy drawing of Colonel Hunter’s attack at the Battle of Bull Run or this poignant one of soldiers carrying away the wounded after battle. A lot of people relied on Harper’s Weekly and other newspapers to give them information about the Civil War. Seeing what these artists chose to portray, what they chose to omit, and how they created their scenes is fascinating.

Carrying the wounded at the Battle of Bull Run (George Mason University Libraries)

This collection is one of many quality archives in the George Mason database. Eager history enthusiasts should take advantage of these primary documents. They’re informative, detailed, and just downright interesting.

More discoveries in the New Archive:

A website that charts the demographic, geographic and environmental history of the slave trade

And newly declassified government documents that tell the story of Radio Free Europe

Reagan on War: A Reappraisal of the Weinberger Doctrine, 1980-1984, by Gail E. S. Yoshitani (2012)

by Simon Miles

Few presidents have left as complicated and politically charged a legacy as Ronald Reagan. Hailed as a pioneer of conservatism by some and reviled as an enemy of the middle class and a supporter of dictators by others, Reagan’s legacy has largely been shaped by debate between partisan pundits. Gradually, however, a limited body of more moderate of “Reagan revisionism” has begun to emerge. Historians and political scientists, writing with the benefit of temporal distance from events and increased access to sources have begun to produce more nuanced accounts of the Reagan administration – especially in the realm of foreign policy – that acknowledge the administration’s shortcomings and its successes.

Gail Yoshitani’s Reagan on War is one such book. Yoshitani, a professor of history at the US Military Academy at West Point, offers an in-depth look at the Reagan administration’s development of a strategic doctrine for the use of force based on extensive archival research. She demonstrates how a doctrine for the use of force emerged, but also how the Reagan administration, and the president in particular, chose to either adhere to or eschew these doctrines depending on Reagan’s goals Throughout Reagan on War, Yoshitani asks two important questions. First, what role did Reagan personally play in shaping his administration’s foreign policy? Second, to what extent did Reagan’s advisors, neoconservative and otherwise, influence the administration’s foreign policy?

Yoshitani’s account of US foreign policy during the early 1980s places Reagan at the center of events. As president, Yoshitani argues, Reagan set the course for US Cold War strategy. His perception of American resources as infinite and his determination to rebuild not only US military and economic strength, but also the country’s morale, guided policy during the 1980s. Reagan firmly believed that the solution to America’s “Vietnam syndrome” was strong presidential leadership (which he felt had been particularly lacking during the preceding Carter administration) and “peace through strength.” Yoshitani is clear, however, that Reagan’s advisors were responsible for developing policies to achieve these goals.

President Ronald Reagan and First Lady Nancy Reagan view the caskets of the 17 US victims of the 1983 attack against the US Embassy in Beirut (The Reagan Library)

The key question faced by the Reagan administration in Yoshitani’s analysis was not only how to deal with the Soviet Union, but also when the United States should use military force overseas in the aftermath of Vietnam. Reagan’s advisors had differing policy prescriptions for this dilemma and Yoshitani examines the various doctrines proposed by Director of Central Intelligence William Casey, the Pentagon (in particular Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General John Vessey), Secretary of State George Shultz, and finally Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger. Casey’s approach to the use of force centered on proxy forces, usually the militaries of right-wing governments in Latin America, to repel communism. Proxy forces would bear the brunt of combat and create a permissive context for any future American military involvement, if desired, by cultivating a local perceived ally that the United States could support. Vessey and his Pentagon colleagues favored direct and decisive US engagement with limited, realistic goals, such as the removal of Palestinian Liberation Organization fighters from Lebanon. Shultz saw the military as a tool to be deployed in support of diplomacy. Deploying troops was a clear sign of resolve, he argued, but should be done sparingly to ensure that the Soviet Union would not feel compelled to become involved to counterbalance American involvement around the world. Weinberger, synthesizing these approaches, outlined six litmus tests for US policy-makers to govern the use of force: necessity to US or allied national interest; wholehearted commitment; defined political and military objectives; correlation between objectives and forces committed; public support; and the absence of a non-military alternative. Though Reagan did not always adhere to the Weinberger Doctrine, Yoshitani argues, it formed the heuristic framework in which the administration considered the use of force.

President Ronald Reagan at his desk in the Oval Office (Library of Congress)

Yoshitani makes a valuable contribution to the historiography of Reagan’s foreign policy by exploring Reagan as an individual, his advisors, and their approach to policy-making and the Cold War. The 1980s are already fertile ground for historians, with ample material accessible at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, the National Archives and Records Administration, and in smaller repositories such as the Hoover Institution Archives. This valuable and insightful book will be of considerable interest to students of the Cold War.

More on the presidency of Ronald Reagan:

Joseph Parrott’s review of The Rebellion of Ronald Reagan: A History of the End of the Cold War

Dolph Briscoe’s review of The Age of Reagan: A History

Jonathan Hunt looks back on the 1986 Reykjavík Summit between Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev

Mapping The Slave Trade: The New Archive (No. 10)

By Henry Wiencek

Roughly 12 million Africans were forcibly transported to Europe, Asia, the Caribbean, and the Americas. It’s hard to conceptualize so many men and women being uprooted from their homes. But Emory University’s Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database helps users understand the vast proportions of this perverse exodus. The site pieces together historical data from 35,000 slave voyages between 1500 and 1900 and arranges them onto graphs and maps, offering readers a geographic, demographic, and even environmental context for the slave trade.

Screenshot of “Overview of the slave trade out of Africa, 1500-1900” (Emory University)

While people may assume that one singular “slave trade” took place, the database maps demonstrate that many existed. And not just across the Atlantic, but around the globe. Overview of the slave trade out of Africa, 1500-1900 charts the routes slave traders followed from Africa to various international ports. But you might be surprised at some of their destinations—traders ventured from East Africa to Arabia, Yemen, the Persian Gulf, and even various ports in India. Although the largest number of slaving ships do land in Brazil or the Caribbean, this map demonstrates that Africa’s slave trade was very much feeding a world market. The variety of international ports participating in the trade is also striking. This was not a black market undertaken by a depraved few, but rather a thriving worldwide industry that brought ships, employment and wealth to numerous communities on both sides of the Atlantic. The maps make this point visually with striking impact.

Screenshot of “Wind and ocean currents of the Atlantic basins” (Emory University)

The site also reminds readers that the process of moving enslaved Africans across the ocean was as much an environmental process as an economic one. The map, Wind and ocean currents of the Atlantic basins reveals how oceanic forces played a role in determining the travel routes for slave ships. Red and blue lines respectively denote winds and currents swirling between Africa and the Americas, facilitating particular geographic courses better suited for crossing the ocean. These natural forces effectively created two separate “slave-trading systems,” as the site identifies them: one originating in Europe and North America and the other originating in Brazil. Historians have certainly detailed the racism and greed motivating the slave trade, but comparatively little time examining the environmental processes that made it possible. Particular centers of trade emerged along the coasts of Brazil, the Caribbean and West Africa to meet an economic need, but also to harness the currents and winds essential to moving so many men and women such vast distances. And here too, the visual character of the map makes it easy to see how natural forces worked to shape the historical events.

Numerical timeline graphing the number of African captives in the trans-Atlantic slave trade between 1500 to 1866 (Emory University)

In addition to these visual aids, the site also includes a more quantitative rendering of this nefarious business. A timeline graphs the number of captives who embarked and disembarked between 1500 and 1867. Users can make the information even more precise by expanding or contracting the time frame or manipulating different variables, including sites of disembarkation, embarkation, and nationality of the slave ship. This visual tool reveals a steadily growing trade, with the number of embarked Africans peaking at around 115,000 in 1792. You will also find a chilling disparity between the number of “Embarked” and “Disembarked” Africans in the statistics—a powerful indication of the deadly voyages these individuals were forced to endure.

A white slave trader inspecting an African male up for sale, ca. 1854 (Wikimedia Commons)

The sheer numbers documented in the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database are astonishing. With much of the globe participating, an elaborate network of ports, ships and trade routes uprooted millions of African souls with ruthless efficiency. Some users might find the site’s emphasis on graphs and maps to be sanitizing or dehumanizing to the enslaved individuals—too many numbers and figures, not enough people. But the story this site wants to tell is a big and highly important one. The African slave trade had a global reach; it was an environmental force as well as an economic one; and it displaced millions upon millions of men and women from their homes. Visualizing the statistics makes the global reach of their human toll palpable in new ways.

Earlier editions of the New Archive:

Charley Binkow reads through declassified CIA documents relating to the creation of Radio Free Europe

And Henry Wiencek explores a new, more visual, way of understanding emancipation in America

Black Slaves, Indian Masters: Slavery, Emancipation, and Citizenship in the Native American South, by Barbara Krauthamer (2013)

by Nakia Parker

For decades, scholars peered at the painful and complex topic of American slavery through a purely “black-white” lens—in other words, black slaves who had white masters. The sad reality that some Native Americans, (in particular, the Creek, Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Seminole, or “the Five Tribes”) also participated in chattel and race-based slavery, was rarely acknowledged in the historical annals. Only in the latter part of the 20th century did historians begin to address this oversight. Several groundbreaking studies recognized the momentous repercussions of this practice for Native and African American populations alike during the antebellum era and down to the present day. Barbara Krauthamer, a professor of Native American and African American history at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, adds an exhaustive and compelling contribution to the research in this area. The first full-length monograph chronicling chattel slavery in the Choctaw and Chickasaw Nations, Krauthamer amply demonstrates how both before and after the era of Indian Removal in the mid-nineteenth century slavery also intersected with issues of race and gender in complicated ways.

Krauthamer tracks white commodification and enslavement of Choctaw and Chickasaw bodies starting in the late seventeenth century and its transition to the commodification and enslavement of black bodies by Choctaw and Chickasaw slaveholders in the eighteenth century. In addition, Krauthamer adroitly debunks the myth that the main cause for American Indian participation in chattel slavery stemmed from their desire for European, and later American goods, unable to resist the inescapable forces of the market economy and capitalism. Krauthamer acknowledges the catastrophic economic consequences of the American seizure of Indian lands, of the racist rhetoric that Native Americans needed to be properly “civilized,” and of the exigencies caused by depletion of the deer population, which severely curtailed trade opportunities. But she persuasively argues that the decision to engage in chattel slaveholding resulted from a conscious and deliberate choice on the part of Indian slaveholders to embrace racial ideology that “degraded blackness and associated it exclusively with enslavement.” For some influential and wealthy members of the Choctaw and Chickasaw Nations, adopting race-based slavery provided the most efficient way to maintain an increasingly tenuous hold on political and cultural autonomy in the face of aggressive American expansion, while pursuing self-interested economic and diplomatic goals.

Holmes_Colbert — *Holmes Colbert, a prominent leader in the Chickasaw Nation and the owner of several enslaved African-Americans (Wikimedia Commons)*

Krauthamer also addresses the “leniency thesis” that many early scholars of Native American history advocated — that life under the yoke of an Indian master was somehow more “benevolent” than enslaved life under whites — but that has been successfully challenged, by Tiya Miles and Claudio Saunt among others. By the mid-nineteenth century, laws existed in both nations that banned intermarriage between blacks and Indians: for example, Choctaw lawmakers allowed white men to achieve citizenship through marriage to a Choctaw woman, but forbade “a negro or descendent of a negro” from enjoying the same privilege; likewise, in the Chickasaw nation, the punishment for “publicly taking up with a negro slave” was a steep fine, whipping, or the ultimate punishment, banishment from the nation and the dissolving of all kinship ties. Krauthamer also cites accounts from WPA slave narratives detailing instances of physical and sexual abuse at the hands of Native American owners.

*Chickasaw Freedmen filing for allotment in Oklahoma (Oklahoma Historical Society)*

Krauthamer also shows that despite horrific conditions, enslaved people living in “Indian country” engaged in covert and overt forms of resistance. One particularly compelling experience of slave resistance concerns the story of Prince, who, angered that his Choctaw owner Richard Harkins failed to give his slaves a Christmas celebration, brutally murdered him and then unceremoniously dumped the body into the river in 1858. Prince finally confessed, but implicated his Aunt Lucy in the crime. Although Lucy denied her involvement and no evidence existed to prove that she participated in the murder, Lavinia Harkins, the widow of the murdered man and thus also Lucy’s owner, demanded that Lucy be burned alive along with Prince. This harrowing tale highlights the intersections of race, gender, and power relations that informed the interactions between “black slaves and Indian masters” in Indian Territory.

PI013 — *Peter Pitchlynn, or “Hat-choo-tuck-nee,” a Choctaw chief and later tribal delegate to Washington (LC-USZ62-58502, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, D.C.)*

Even Emancipation and the end of the Civil War did not bring immediate relief to the enslaved living in the Choctaw and Chickasaw Nations. Although the Choctaw and Chickasaw sided with the Confederacy during the conflict, the United States considered them to be separate political polities; therefore, the abolition of slavery as stated in the Thirteenth Amendment did not apply in Indian Territory. Instead, the Choctaw/Chickasaw treaty of 1866 outlined the details of emancipation, citizenship, and land claims for the Freedmen, but inextricably (and problematically) linked these issues with Indian sovereignty, land rights, and annuities—one could not be obtained without the other. This knotty situation became further complicated with the passage of laws enacted by Choctaw and Chickasaw political leaders that seem eerily similar to the “Black Codes” of the Reconstruction era South. Former slaves in Choctaw country who did not have a work contract could be arrested for “vagrancy” by the lighthorsemen (police force) and then be auctioned off to the highest bidder—slavery by another name. Once again, the now emancipated slaves in Indian Territory, in particular African-American men, engaged in resisting these harsh measures and formed groups that lobbied for political and economic justice before the Freedmen’s Bureau and Indian leaders.

Riverside, the home of Benjamin Franklin Colbert at Colbert's Ferry — *Riverside, the home of Benjamin Colbert in Colbert’s Ferry, OK (Oklahoma Historical Society)*

Black Slaves, Indian Masters proves a much needed addition to African American and Native American histories of slavery. Krauthamer uses an exhaustive number of sources to bolster her argument–slave narratives, government records, personal correspondence of Indian leaders such as diaries and letters, and official papers of the Choctaw and Chickasaw Nations. Her work not only expands the lens of the study of slavery beyond the “black and white,” but also can provide insight into the current tensions and issues of citizenship and identity existing between descendants of the enslaved and nations such as the Cherokee and Seminole today.

In 2011, Dr. Krauthamer was a fellow at The Institute for Historical Studies at UT-Austin. During this time, she delivered a workshop “Enslaved women and the Politics of Self-Liberation.”

You can fin d Black Slaves, Indian Masters here. And be sure to explore Envisioning Emancipation, a powerful collection of photographs portraying the lives of enslaved and freed African-Americans that Dr. Krauthamer compiled with renowned photographic historian Deborah Willis.

What Not to Wear to a Texas Barbecue, 1957

By Lynn Mally

When Coco Chanel received the Neiman Marcus Award for Distinguished Service in the Field of Fashion in 1957, she asked to visit a ranch during her trip to Dallas. Her host, Stanley Marcus, obliged her by throwing a barbecue at his brother’s spread in her honor. It included, among other things, a cow fashion show. And this is what she wore—a trim suit, a fur scarf, a Chanel handbag, and white gloves. I wonder what she thought when she saw how her hosts, Billie and Stanley Marcus, were dressed.

Black and white photograph of Coco Chanel attending a Western Party with Stanley Marcus and his wife in Dallas, Texas in 1957

But apparently she was not the only one who didn’t have the right clothes for a barbecue. According to Marcus’s memoir, Minding the Store , “It turned out that she didn’t like the taste of the barbecued meat and the highly seasoned beans, so she dumped her plate surreptitiously under the table. Unfortunately, the contents hit the satin slippers of Elizabeth Arden, who was seated next to her.”

Black and white photograph of Chanel, Stanley Marcus, Mary "Biliie" Marcus, Elizabeth Arden watching the "Bovine Fashion Show" at Stanley Marcus' Western Party — Chanel, Stanley Marcus, Mary “Biliie” Marcus, Elizabeth Arden watching the “Bovine Fashion Show” at Stanley Marcus’ Western Party. (DeGolyer Library: Photographs, Manuscripts, and Imprints)

Lynn Mally taught modern Russian history at the University of California at Irvine until she retired to become a seamstress and an historian of American fashion. She writes the blog, American Age Fashion, where this article was originally posted on January 31, 2014.

The Fish that Ate the Whale: The Life and Times of America’s Banana King, by Rich Cohen (2012)

by Kody Jackson

The best stories teach us without our knowing. The best way to illustrate this, of course, is with a story. When I was in elementary school, I had to memorize the prefixes of the metric system: kilo-, hecto-, deca-, base, deci-, centi-, milli-. And I could never get it right! It always went something like this: Kilo…Hecto…something else…pass…deci…I forget…umm. All I ever wanted was to go back to feet and inches. And so it went, until our fifth grade teacher introduced us to the magical phrase, King Henry died by drinking chocolate milk. My teacher’s little jingle changed everything: King Henry made that infernal metric system memorable. It was a wonderful lesson on the power of a story, one that has stuck with me to this day.

I would like to think Rich Cohen had a similar experience in his fifth grade classroom, one where he too learned how to defeat the evil metric system, but I cannot be sure. All I know is that he holds story in the same esteem in his The Fish that Ate the Whale: The Life and Times of America’s Banana King. In the first couple pages, Cohen introduces his readers to his compelling protagonist, Samuel Zemurray, a poor Jewish immigrant to the United States who later came to embody the American Dream.

The book’s first glimpse of Zemurray shows him working hard in his uncle’s Alabama grocery store, sweeping and cleaning, stacking and shelving, and always looking for an opportunity to succeed. His real break comes when a banana peddler arrives in town. Fascinated by the sight, Zemurray sets out to involve himself in the trade. He begins selling freckled bananas, the ones thought too ripe for long-distance transport. He finds a partner; they invest in a company. They purchase banana ships. Zemurray takes sole control, buys banana land in Honduras, and profits enormously. The story reaches its climax when Zemurray ascends to the presidency of the United Fruit Company, one of the United States’ most dominant and successful monopolies of the late nineteenth century. Even from this perch, Zemurray still embodies the underdog, fighting to maintain his banana empire, championing the noble cause of Zionism, and struggling to be accepted by mainstream America. The story ends as a triumph that, while acknowledging certain mistakes, largely celebrating the life of Zemurray. He was a self-made man, a shrewd banana tycoon, and, most importantly to Cohen, a Jew who succeeded in a hostile and prejudiced world.

Cohen’s story, on the whole, proves successful. As a reader, one becomes so engrossed by Zemurray and his work ethic that one almost does not notice the technical descriptions of banana planting, the history lesson on U.S. trust-busting, or the explanations of Central American politics. These chapters pass like clouds on a windy day, quickly and without much notice. Thus, in terms of story, Cohen presents his readers with a tour de force.

Samuel Zemurray, a Russian who rose to become a fruit magnate (Image courtesy of Peter Ubel)

Samuel Zemurray, the Russian immigrant who rose to become a giant in the American fruit industry (Image courtesy of Peter Ubel)

Stories, however, are never without their faults. To accommodate his narrative structure, Cohen simplifies and whitewashes the actions of Zemurray and his fellow banana titans. Rarely do abuse and corruption come up; even when they do, they are largely minimized. In sum, Cohen tells a story of business decisions and individual effort, not exploitation and collective sacrifice. Cohen falls most grievously into this trap when writing about Zemurray’s involvement in a Honduran coup. With colorful mercenaries and crafty strategy, it starts to look more like a Wild West adventure than a violation of sovereignty. Cohen gets so caught up in the romance that he forgets the other side of the story. To neglect the Central American experience is like telling the Illiad without mentioning Priam’s grief or recounting the Crusades without mentioning the experiences of Muslims (or Byzantines, for that matter). A more circumspect tale might have noted that triumphs for U.S. business, at least in this age, often played out as tragedies for a foreign people.

While The Fish that Ate the Whale oversimplifies the complex and glorifies the morally questionable, readers should evaluate it for what it truly is, a wonderful story. Its quick pace and well-crafted characters make it exciting to read. More than that, Cohen makes the history memorable, which is no small feat. As such, it provides a great introduction to Central American history and a jumping off point for future research into the area.

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