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Roundtable Review of Jeremi Suri’s Civil War by Other Means

Roundtable Review of Jeremi Suri’s Civil War by Other Means

From the editors:

Historical scholarship is underpinned by rigorous investigation of sources and archives. But historians can also leverage their knowledge of the past to think critically about the present. Jeremi Suri, the Mack Brown Distinguished Chair for Leadership in Global Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin, exemplifies this practice. In October, Dr. Suri published his fifth book, entitled Civil War by Other Means: America’s Long and Unfinished Fight for Democracy. As its title suggests, the book reinterprets the history of the American Civil War in order to shed new light on the ongoing struggle for racial justice in the United States.

To mark the publication of Civil War by Other Means, Not Even Past invited three scholars of American history, each with unique expertise, to review the book. Their reviews are published below.

book cover

banner image for Brandon Render's review

As a teaching assistant for a United States history course at the University of Texas at Austin, I would ask my students a simple question: who won the Civil War? The students, after sharing confused glances with each other, would often respond with “The North?” or “The Union?” I assured them that it wasn’t a trick question before describing the history of our campus. In 2015, the university moved a statue of Confederate President Jefferson Davis from the South Mall to the Briscoe Center for American History, a museum and archive also located on campus. The Davis statue was commissioned by university benefactor George Littlefield and dedicated in 1933 – almost seventy-years after the Civil War ended. In 2017, during my first week of graduate school, the university removed four more statues commemorating Confederate figures and took down the Confederate flags throughout the campus. The students were of course correct that the Union defeated the Confederates on the battlefield, but as the physical landscape of campus suggests, many of the Southern symbols and ideals lived on. Students walked past these Confederate monuments each day, yet they did not fully grasp how the campus connected past and present.

After reading Jeremi Suri’s Civil War by Other Means, I’m considering another question: when did the Civil War end? According to Suri, the Civil War has continued into the twenty-first century. Through political posturing, racial terror, and disenfranchisement, Suri argues that the late 1860s and ‘70s did not represent “a culmination but a continuation” of the Civil War. In the January 6th Riot and the Insurrection at the Capitol Building in Washington, D. C., the same ideas that motivated Confederate leaders to secede from the Union also pushed white nationalists to storm the halls of Congress and physically intimidate elected officials. Rioters invoked the memory of the Confederacy through symbols, including the Confederate flag and a noose – two images with deep connections to white supremacy. In Civil War By Other Means, Suri’s adept interpretation of the explicit and subtle forms of division after the military struggle between the Union and Confederacy offers valuable perspectives in how we view the conflict today.

Beneath cloudy skies, a noose hangs from a makeshift gallows erected by rioters during the Insurrection at the U. S. Capitol on January 6th, 2021. The Capitol dome is visible in the background, farmed by the gallows.
A gallows in front of the Capitol during the Insurrection on January 6th, 2022. Source: Flickr/Tyler Merbler. License: Creative Commons 2.0.

Suri’s book blends popular narratives with often overlooked events to illustrate the depths of the political and ideological battle that took place before, during, and after the Civil War. While standard understandings of the conflict establish a clear ending with Robert E. Lee’s surrender to Ulysses Grant in April 1865, Suri takes an alternative approach by examining the continued efforts to maintain a “Southern way of life.” For example, it is well-known that Andrew Johnson’s preferential treatment of secessionists played a role in his impeachment in 1868. Yet, many people are unaware of the Confederates that traveled further south into Mexico and formed an alliance with Mexican Emperor Maximilian I in an attempt to develop a Confederate colony near the U.S.-Mexico border. Former Confederate supporters and politicians held fast to notions of forced servitude, developed memorials and symbols to honor soldiers, produced conditions that led to the formation of the Ku Klux Klan, and reinforced white supremacy in the two decades following the military conflict. There is ample evidence not of the end, but the extension of the Civil War.

Suri’s Civil War by Other Means deftly captures the evolution of historical interpretation. As our collective memory of the Civil War changes, the views of the people dedicated to remembering the conflict – for better or worse – evolve as well. This is particularly important in the current political climate. In addition to the Insurrection at the Capitol, racial justice protests demanded the removal of Confederate memorials. In many cases, protestors refused to wait for public officials to take action and, instead, engaged in the destruction or removal of monuments themselves. As Suri argues, this is integral to the contemporary culture wars that can be traced back to the decades following the Civil War and how policies, practices, and ideas shaped the “Lost Cause” of the Confederacy. Since then, an ideological struggle has taken shape in classrooms, courtrooms, and the general public based on interpretations of the Civil War.

Americans’ collective memory of the Civil War, as evidenced through the January 6th Riot, continues to influence contemporary society, politics, and culture. Suri’s important study of the two decades following the military conflict is necessary for how we teach and remember the Civil War – not only in the South, but beyond the former Confederacy. Now that I’m teaching outside of the South for the first time, I’m aware that historical memory of the Civil War is not only dependent on what we learn in the classroom, but what we also see in our daily lives. Although I haven’t encountered Confederate symbols where I currently live and work in Utah, there are remnants of the white supremacist ideologies that motivated secession in 1861 and resonates with groups of people in the American West – an area of the U.S. with a problematic racial history itself.

Suri’s engaging and accessible writing style makes Civil War by Other Means a critical addition to the growing body of scholarship on historical events and collective memory. This book stands out for its simple but thought-provoking questions, which forces readers to wrestle with the meaning of history and how it shapes our day-to-day lives. Whether in the classroom or around the kitchen table, Suri’s Civil War by Other Means will spark hard conversations about history, memory, and citizenship.

Brandon James Render is an assistant professor of history at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. His current book project, Colorblind University: A History of Racial Inequity in Higher Education, explores the intellectual genealogy of racial colorblindness throughout the twentieth century

banner image for Jon Buchleiter's review

Two sequential survey courses covering the full arc of US history undergird historical education at nearly every university in the country. Programs disagree, however, about which year should divide the two courses. Many schools draw the line at 1865, highlighting the surrender of Confederate forces and the end of open hostilities in the Civil War. Others split their courses in 1877, using the ostensible end of Reconstruction as a bookend. Jeremi Suri’s Civil War by Other Means shows why delineating between the two “halves” of American history is so difficult no matter where the cut is made. Suri dispels the notion that the Civil War ended with Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox. He instead explains how the war moved from “muddy battlefields to the marble halls of Congress, various statehouses, a theater, and a train station.”[1] The war’s transmutation underscores the challenge of periodizing this juncture in American history.

In this nineteenth century portrait by Karl Wilhelm Wach, a smiling Carl von Clausewitz sports a row of medals and a blue military uniform with a high red collar and large epaulettes. Trees and church spires are visible in the background.
A nineteenth-century portrait of Carl von Clausewitz by Karl Wilhelm Wach. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

The book’s title is a subtle nod to the German military theorist Carl von Clausewitz, who famously asserted that “war is the continuation of politics by other means.” Suri’s argument inverts this observation to elucidate how political struggles, from 1865 onward, constituted a continuation of war by other means. In depicting these various means, Suri traces the lionization of John Wilkes Booth, follows former Confederates to the failed colony of Carlota, illustrates the intrigues of Andrew Johnson’s impeachment, and recounts the withdrawal of federal troops from their postbellum occupation of the American South – effectively ending Radical Republicans‘ efforts to establish a multiracial democracy. As with so many good histories, the strength of this narrative comes from the striking characters whom Suri profiles. Figures ranging from Matthew Fontaine Maury, a celebrity scientist and ardent defender of white supremacy, to Henry Adams, an indefatigable Black community organizer, to Charles Guiteau, the poster child of fragile masculinity, populate an absorbing account of the battle between exclusive and inclusive visions of democracy.

Suri centers his first five chapters on key groups who emerged from Civil War battlefields with unfinished business. The first two chapters contrast the martyrdom of President Abraham Lincoln and Booth, his assassin. The commemoration of both serviced a renewed “mobilization” of men and women on the opposing sides of the unresolved conflict.[2] The next chapter follows Confederate exiles, who refused to accept defeat and migrated to Mexico with ambitions to regroup and relaunch the “Lost Cause.” Meanwhile, newly emancipated African Americans sought to secure the rights and opportunities promised them by the reconstruction amendments. In this postwar period, fissures within the Republican Party emerged as Southern resistance tested the resolve of Lincoln’s party to realize his vision of a multiracial democracy.

The final five chapters detail several of the new battles of the enduring Civil War. The first presidential impeachment pitted Republicans against the defiant accidental president Andrew Johnson. Former Confederate states witnessed recurring outbursts of vigilantism that occupying Union forces struggled to curb. The next battle took the form of the contested election of 1876, finally “resolved” through the withdrawal of federal troops from the South and the election of a “caretaker” executive in Rutherford B. Hayes. Finally, the assassination of James Garfield marked a defeat for Republicans that left African Americans more “repressed than at any time since Appomattox.”[3]

Civil War by Other Means demonstrates how contemporary experiences can generate fruitful new examinations of moments already richly chronicled by earlier generations of historians. While this account does not tread much new scholarly ground or unearth unexamined sources, it eloquently provides a succinct framework for thinking about the long-standing struggle for democracy and inclusivity. Events of the past several years have laid bare how incomplete this struggle remains today. It’s a dismaying state of affairs, but it also underscores the value of reexamining our past to help inform efforts toward improving our democratic society. To this end, Suri’s closing chapter addresses “our troubles today,” identifying historical lessons and proposing ways to pull up the “intricate roots” of racism and white supremacy.[4] These ideas define Suri’s scholarly activism, which he cites as an inspiration for his book. They also strike a much-needed optimistic note to close an often dispiriting description of the United States’ democratic deficiencies.

Suri has crafted a book with appeal for a broad audience. It can simultaneously speak to young adults seeking to understand the historical origins of the United States’ ongoing dialogue on race as well as scholars looking for a concise account that explains how debates about race infused U. S. politics during the era of Reconstruction and beyond. Regardless of the perspective from which readers approach Civil War by Other Means, we can only hope they heed its call to take up the task of building a better democracy. As Suri closes this excellent book, there’s “lots of good work to do.”

Jon Buchleiter is a graduate student in the Department of History at the University of Texas at Austin. He studies the institutionalization of nuclear arms control and disarmament efforts as an important element of US foreign policy during the Cold War. At UT, Jon is a graduate fellow with the Clements Center for National Security.

banner image for Sarah Porter's review

During the 1950s and 1960s, following the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board, white Southerners opposing school integration used Confederate symbols, alongside violence and intimidation directed toward Black students, to express their defiance. In 1957, for instance, the local school board in Tyler, Texas, decided to rename the city’s new, all-white high school after Robert E. Lee. Students adopted “the Rebels” as their mascot, and they proudly displayed the Confederate flag at school events. In Tyler and elsewhere, young people born generations after the Civil War resurrected these images as a way to articulate their own politics. According to Jeremi Suri, these incidents were not merely efforts to cling to the past but actually represented a continuation of the war in the American political imagination.

Three football players run onto a playing field applauded by a large group of spectators; a cheerleader leads the charge. Two very large Confederate flags fly overhead.
Cheerleaders and football players at Arlington State College–now the University of Texas at Arlington–run onto the field beneath Confederate flags in this undated photo. Source: University of Texas at Arlington Photograph Collection, University of Texas at Arlington Libraries. “Arlington State College (A. S. C.) football players running under Rebel flags.” UTA Libraries Digital Gallery. n.d. Accessed October 25, 2022.

In Civil War by Other Means, Suri examines the tumultuous decades immediately following the Civil War. Unsettled debates over democracy and citizenship resurfaced with renewed strength during this period, and they “created a pattern for exclusion, violence, and coup plotting that repeated in the twenty-first century.”[5] The political compromises that Republicans and Democrats brokered between 1865 and 1885 left many of the war’s underlying issues unresolved. Most notably, Republicans’ desires for moderation and national reconciliation encouraged politicians, from Andrew Johnson to Rutherford Hayes, to exercise leniency toward the white South at the expense of freedpeople. Drawing from a large body of secondary literature, along with presidential papers, congressional records, and periodicals, Suri demonstrates how these “lingering embers” have erupted at key moments in U.S. history.

Perhaps one of the most powerful examples that Suri uses is the literal continuation of the war by Confederate generals who refused to admit defeat. Following the official surrender at Appomattox, groups of Confederate soldiers traveled south into Mexico in hopes of recreating a Southern planter aristocracy. Upon returning to the United States, these “exiles” did not abandon their visions for society. Instead, they worked to reinscribe racial hierarchies as architects of the New South. They served as state legislators, funded Confederate monuments, joined historical associations, and accumulated wealth through various business ventures. Alexander Watkins Terrell offers one example. After returning to Texas, Terrell became a state legislator and authored a slate of restrictive voting bills passed during the early twentieth century. Designed to disenfranchise Black voters, these bills established the state’s direct primary system, extended poll tax requirements to primary elections, and permitted political parties to prescribe qualifications for voters. Terrell’s biography supports Suri’s conclusion: “The men who fled the American South after Appomattox were also the men who made the American nation in the next decades. They converted the treachery of their exile into a narrative of courage, loyalty, and commitment.”[6]

While Terrell and his colleagues worked to undermine federal civil rights legislation and restrict voting rights, Black Americans consistently pushed for more expansive visions of citizenship as voters, soldiers, and elected officials. Debates about American democracy did not only take place in the national capital and state legislatures, however. They also materialized at the local level, in the churches, schoolhouses, and other community institutions that formerly enslaved people built following emancipation. While Suri explores how Black men redefined citizenship through military service and political participation, his emphasis on formal politics sometimes obscures Black women’s contributions. In addition to serving as nurses, educators, and caretakers, Black women who lacked access to traditional political channels sought other ways to assert their visions for society. They played active roles in advocating for individual and collective restitution. For instance, in 1870, Henrietta Wood filed a suit against her former enslaver in a federal court and, after a decade of litigation, won her case. Later, during the 1890s, Callie House mobilized people across the South through the National Ex-Slave Mutual Relief, Bounty, and Pension Association. House and her colleagues lobbied for pensions for ex-slaves and eventually filed suit against the federal government, inspiring many subsequent efforts for reparation. Including these often-overlooked struggles in the narrative would strengthen Suri’s argument and expand our understanding of how these conflicts played out on multiple levels.

A black-and-white photograph of Callie House, who wears a ruffled dress with a lace collar.
A photograph of Callie House, a leader of the national movement to provide pensions to formerly enslaved people. Source: Wikimedia Commons. Original image in the collections of the Department of Veterans Affairs, National Archives Record Group 15.

Suri does many things well in this book. His conceptualization of ongoing debates about American democracy as a continuation of the Civil War “by other means” is compelling, and it offers a useful framework for people interested in exploring contemporary U.S. politics through an historical lens. Suri’s engaging writing style also makes the book appealing to a wide audience. He manages to make complex political history not only accessible but actually enjoyable to read. Finally, this book provides a timely and important critique of several key features of the U.S. political system. In Suri’s words, Southern resistance “thrived [because] it had many advantages in the American democratic system.”[7] By identifying some of these features—including the structure of the electoral college, election certification procedures, and longstanding efforts to restrict voting rights—Suri challenges his reader to think critically about the future of American democracy.

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

[1] Jeremi Suri, Civil War by Other Means: America’s Long and Unfinished Fight for Democracy (New York: Public Affairs, 2022), 261.

[2] ibid., 27.

[3] ibid., 256.

[4] ibid., 270.

[5] ibid., 9.

[6] ibid., 65.

[7] ibid., 259.

The views and opinions expressed in this article or video are those of the individual author(s) or presenter(s) and do not necessarily reflect the policy or views of the editors at Not Even Past, the UT Department of History, the University of Texas at Austin, or the UT System Board of Regents. Not Even Past is an online public history magazine rather than a peer-reviewed academic journal. While we make efforts to ensure that factual information in articles was obtained from reliable sources, Not Even Past is not responsible for any errors or omissions.

Review of Our America: A Hispanic History of the United States, by Felipe Fernández-Armesto (2014)

banner image for Review of Our America: A Hispanic History of the United States, by Felipe Fernández-Armesto (2014)

From the editors: One of the joys of working on Not Even Past is our huge library of amazing content. Below we’ve updated and republished Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra’s brilliant and moving review of Felipe Fernández-Armesto’s magisterial Our America: A Hispanic History of the United States.

I first came across Felipe Fernández-Armesto many more years ago than I care to admit: I met his words first, before I met him. I was dazzled by Felipe’s Columbus: the flow, the style of his writing, the power of his argument. And then I came across Millennium. I had just finished graduate school and I was earning my bread and butter teaching large survey classes of Latin American History, and even larger ones of World History. I was to offer kids sweeping panoramas: from the age of the dinosaurs to current events, namely, the Cold War. Global history was yet to produce a multimillion dollar textbook industry. So Millennium came to me as a breadth of fresh air: irreverent, fast paced, learned, entertaining, full of strange and fascinating vignettes, from Ming China to Peronist Argentina. I was then writing my How to Write the History of the New World. I had a fellowship to the John Carter Brown Library.

book cover for Millennium

One of the first things I learned at the JCB was that Felipe occupied the office right next to ours. We had 8 cubicles. His was for him, alone. He kept sherry in his office. His accent and demeanor made him seem unapproachable. I don’t remember the official title he was given, some kind of JCB lordship: The Lord of the Rings, I think. During the fellows’ luncheons he would tear into the other fellows’ arguments with probing, disarming questions, prefaced always by a learned and most insightful comment on any and every field of expertise. When asked about his own research, he would reply “civilizations.” It turns out, that year, he was writing that book. The whole thing was frightening to me at the time.

The John Carter Brown Library's MacMillian Reading Room: a large, richly decorated hall with a high ceiling. Low bookshelves and large pieces of art line the walls.; desks with work stations stand in the middle of the room. A few researchers are visible at the desks.
The John Carter Brown Library’s MacMillan Reading Room, Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

And then one day, I noticed Felipe spoke Spanish. I approached him for the first time in Spanish and a friendship emerged. He came for dinner and met my kids, Sebastian and Andrea, both then toddlers. Later Felipe would read my manuscript and help me improve it before it became a book; he wrote a blurb when it was published; promoted it in England and beyond; got it noticed in The Economist; passed judgment on my tenure; followed me around with letters of support in my peripatetic existence. Felipe and his awesome power changed my career and buoyed up my self-esteem. I owe him big.

Felipe and I share something beyond friendship and a common language: our view of the past. The book before us, Our America, epitomizes that shared view. It is about turning perspectives upside down. It is about reading self-satisfying narratives of the past irreverently, mockingly, unsparingly. It is about elucidating the political work that History, with capital H, does. History creates myths that move and inspire, but it also creates myths that silence. Our America is a book about myths: the fountain of youth, the cities of Cibola, the pursuit of King Arthur, the realm of Queen Calafia, the curse of Zorro, the revenge of Moroni, the republic of Hesperus. Our America narrates the history of the United States from a perspective I have often tried to use myself: from the South, rather than the East.

book cover for our America

The book is divided into three periods: 1) when Hispanics loomed large over the colonial territories that are now the United States; 2) when Hispanics lost power in the 19th century as the Anglo-imperial frontier expanded into the West, Mexico, the Caribbean, Central America, and the Pacific, and when Hispanics came to be seen as racially inferior, misbehaving children to spank and educate; and 3) when Hispanics in the 20th century slowly crawled their way back from marginalization to claim forcefully a central role in the polity, demographically, politically, and culturally.

The first period uses the myths of the fountain of youth, the cities of Cibola, the knights of King Arthur, and the realm of Queen Calafia to demonstrate how the Hispanic dimensions of US colonial history shaped its every detail, from Roanoke to Jamestown, to Plymouth, to Massachusetts Bay, to Charleston, to the Ohio River Valley, to the siege of Yorktown. From the Puritan plantations to the American Revolution. Hispanics shaped every colonial event described in college textbooks.

The second period makes for tearful, tragic reading:  losses, lynching, brutality, and racial slurs aimed at Hispanics, Indians, and Blacks, all lumped together. Felipe follows El Zorro and the Mormon prophet Moroni to describe the losses of California, Texas, the Rockies, the Marianas, Guam, the Philippines, and Puerto Rico, where Hispanics, Blacks, Comanche, Sioux, Apache, and Pacific Islanders had created shared worlds together for generations. Those shared worlds were found in the prairies, on the Mississippi (from the Ohio all the way to Louisiana), and on the Pacific coast (from Monterrey and Baja to Manila). These worlds surrendered to industrialization, machine guns, railroads, steamboats, industrial tractors, and millions of land hungry illegal immigrants from England, Germany, Italy, Ireland, Norway, and Central Europe, who came to the land to act as, say, Texas Rangers and carry out genocide.

The third period is not less tragic; it narrates the age of braceros and forced deportation, from the Great Depression to the Great Recession. Felipe reminds us that liberal Obama, who won his first and second presidency on the back of the Hispanic vote, has deported 1.4 million undocumented immigrants, four times as many as George W Bush, who only managed to deport 400,000. But this age of violence and racism, and merciless labor exploitation, has also experienced the Return of Aztlan: a huge demographic explosion, the Chicano movement, Cesar Chavez, and Civil Rights. And it also seems to be on its way to turning the Anglo republic into a republic of Hesperus, the king of the Hesperides, whose islands the chronicler Fernandez Oviedo claimed where in fact Hispanic colonies.

Seven men in work clothes pose for a photograph in a beet field near Stockton, California in this black-and-white photograph.
Marjory Collins, photographer. Stockton (vicinity), California. Mexican agricultural laborer topping sugar beets. 1943. Source: Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

There is little with which to take issue in this book. I share Felipe’s perspective and passion. I wish I could claim I also share his panache, wit, and style. The book is filled with insight, one-liners, and striking reversals of traditional narratives. Let me share with you a few:

  1. Describing how millions of acres were stolen from rancheros in Texas, Nuevo Mexico and California in the 19th century to create large Anglo latifundias, Felipe points out: “The notion that US rule always broke latifundias and introduced morally superior smallholders is risible.”
  2. His account of guerrilla fighters and rebels like Joaquin Murrieta who acted as social bandits in Texas and California explores also the emergence of the literary character of El Zorro as the first superhero to emerge in the US. Felipe then adds: “It is to me a delicious irony that a great line of American superheroes, with their lone trajectories, their alienating experiences, the disguises that place them outside society, and the astonishing dexterity with which they stun evildoers, goes back to a prototype who was a legend of anti-US resistance.”
  3. His description of what the arrival of Anglo capital and law into New Mexico meant, is guided by the reading of the autobiography of Agnes Morely Cleaveland. After a description of her romantic narrative of frontier violence and odd Anglo characters, Felipe bitingly concludes: “Agnes Cleaveland was the chronicler of the Americanization of New Mexico, and her evidence, because it is neutral, is decisive in demonstrating that the United States was not a “civilizing influence.” On the contrary it brought more lowlifes, scapegraces, and refugees from civilization to the colony than ever before.”

I could multiply the examples, but you get the point.

I would not do my job if I were not to deliver some critical comments on Felipe’s book. So to conclude, let me offer a few.

I enjoyed the first section more than I did the second and the second more than I did the third. The third section on the revitalization of Aztlan and the return of Hispanics into the mainstream of America follows the Chicano narrative too closely to offer fresh insights. How to present Hispanics as something more than undocumented or exploited laborers? How to populate the more recent history of the Hispanic diaspora with Nobel Prize winners, scientists, philosophers, economists, opera singers, and captains of industry to offset the dominant image of popular culture, one of curvaceous Shakira and awesome yet corrupt baseball players? And there is the history of the reverse: the “USification” of Latin America, namely, the transformation of a region by capital, values, and returnees from the United States. In the South there lies the Anglo just as deeply within as lies the Hispanic within the North. We can no longer sever the Hispanic from the Anglo, neither here nor there.

The second section on tragic outcomes, therefore, could have been balanced by a more continental approach of mutual influences, cutting both ways. It could have yielded a narrative of Hispanic influence and continental creativity beyond the bandit and the pistolero. I have in mind the printing presses of Philadelphia that in the first half of the nineteenth century became an endless source of books and ideas, shaping Latin America’s public sphere, just as much as did the books printed in London or in Paris in Spanish in the nineteenth century. There is also the case of the origins of American international law and the law of nations that Greg Grandin has so insightfully described in a recent article in the American Historical Review. Grandin shows that jurisprudence and identities, both in the North and South, were the product of codependences and mutual influences. In short, the Hispanic 19th century in the US is much more than dispossession and violence (for other examples of what is possible, see also Gregory Downs’ provocative essay on the Mexicanization of 19th-century American Politics).

The first section is for me the most satisfying and the one about which I know most. It manages to do what was a call to arms for me in 2006, namely, to Iberianize the early modern Atlantic. There are a few Puritan Conquistadors walking through Felipe’s pages. I therefore felt confirmed, justified, in short, delighted. But even here more could be done. I have encountered, for example, English Calvinist debates on colonization, in the 1610s in 1629 that were thoroughly shaped by Iberian categories of dominium and sovereignty. The odd figure of Roger Williams with his radical ideas about religion and state can better be interpreted if we put him in dialogue with Las Casas. Williams knew well the ideas about the radical separation of spiritual and temporal sovereignty so forcefully presented by Bartolomé de Las Casas and Francisco de Vitoria to undermine any Spanish claims of rightful possession of property and authority in the Americas. Williams got to his ideas about state and religion by first offering a critique of Calvinist and Stuart notions of dominium and sovereignty in America. This facet of Williams completely escaped Edmund Morgan’s pioneering study published 50 years ago. In 2012 it continues to escape John Barry, whose Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul remains as parochial as Morgan’s. Both Barry and Morgan should have known better had they not be so provincially Anglo: to study Williams is to study Las Casas and Vitoria. To paraphrase Berry and to capture Felipe’s spirit, to study the creation of the American soul is in fact to study the creation of the Hispano-American soul.

The views and opinions expressed in this article or video are those of the individual author(s) or presenter(s) and do not necessarily reflect the policy or views of the editors at Not Even Past, the UT Department of History, the University of Texas at Austin, or the UT System Board of Regents. Not Even Past is an online public history magazine rather than a peer-reviewed academic journal. While we make efforts to ensure that factual information in articles was obtained from reliable sources, Not Even Past is not responsible for any errors or omissions.

Review of Master of the Game: Henry Kissinger and the Art of Middle East Diplomacy (2021)

banner of Review of Master of the Game: Henry Kissinger and the Art of Middle East Diplomacy (2021)

This is no ordinary work of history. That’s a good thing. As opposed to many scholarly studies, this book has an author with real-world experience in his field. Martin Indyk, who served as U.S. Ambassador to Israel and Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs under Clinton and Special Envoy for Middle East Peace under Obama, knows the Middle East like the back of his hand.

The same could not be said of his biographical subject before the Yom Kippur War. While orchestrating détente with the Soviet Union and an end to America’s presence in Vietnam, Henry Kissinger had his mind elsewhere and spared few thoughts for the Middle East. But that changed abruptly when Israel and its Arab foes took up arms once again in October 1973.  

Thereafter Kissinger went above and beyond in his regional outreach. Master of the Game documents how over the next two years, the secretary of state held many meetings with Arab and Israeli interlocutors in seeking a lasting peace. From his shuttle diplomacy came a string of disengagement agreements: two between Israel and Egypt and one between Israel and Syria. In Kissinger, Indyk sees a brilliant practitioner of statecraft whose pragmatic, incremental approach succeeded where others had failed.

Driving Kissinger’s relentless diplomacy was a particular vision for the Middle East. This vision, argues Indyk, modeled itself on the order Metternich, Castlereagh, and Talleyrand forged for post-Napoleonic Europe (the subject of Kissinger’s dissertation-cum-monograph A World Restored). The question of whether a bespectacled academic well-versed in European statecraft could apply his wisdom to the Middle East was soon answered.  

Although Indyk is mainly interested in American decision-making, Arab and Israeli officials are not mere bystanders in his story. He writes at length about how the likes of Ismail Fahmy, Yitzhak Rabin, and Hafez al-Assad sized Kissinger up, not just the other way around. No number of American carrots and sticks could make both sides come to terms with one another. Those were decisions they alone could make. Present and prospective policymakers should bear in mind that however strong the United States may be, Middle Eastern countries can always push back.       

Henry Kissinger meeting King Faisal in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia to review the Middle East peace process and bilateral relations on March 19, 1975.
Henry Kissinger meeting King Faisal in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia to review the Middle East peace process and bilateral relations on March 19, 1975. Source: Saudi Press Agency

Indyk shares lessons he has drawn from Kissinger’s accomplishments. One of these is the role of domestic politics. In the United States, Kissinger faced pressure from pro-Israel voices to be as generous as possible toward the Jewish state. Israel witnessed a premiership change during the period in question (due to Golda Meir’s perceived weakness) and had many constituencies to placate. The Egyptian and Syrian governments were not democratic but nonetheless were mindful of public opinion.          

Some of the strongest lessons are those unique to Israeli-Palestinian peacemakers. As Indyk observes, Washington cannot make things happen on its own. All the more so when it eagerly pushes Arab and Israeli officials to the negotiating table where “a sense of urgency is often absent” (304). The fact that Americans are keen to strike deals does not mean Arabs and Israelis are.   

Although he does not deify Kissinger, Indyk risks overstating his importance. Kissinger clearly played an important role in bringing Arabs and Israelis together and negotiating  the details of their agreements, but is it fair to anoint him “Master of the Game?” Calling him as much masks Kissinger’s considerable shortcomings in his shuttle diplomacy.

These are shortcomings that Indyk acknowledges. For instance, Kissinger’s ignorance of Middle Eastern politics made him “underestimate the importance of the Palestinian issue in the legitimation of his American-led order” and sideline King Hussein and the Jordanians when they could have been invaluable peace brokers (554). Kissinger’s amoral realism left little room for matters beyond power politics, but he would learn the hard way that Arab leaders were willing to go to the mat for the Palestinians.

That realism was the only reason why Kissinger was in the Middle East in the first place. In facilitating these Arab-Israeli negotiations, he sought to wrest Egypt, and to a lesser extent Syria, from the Soviet sphere. In so doing, he also hoped to create a stable balance of power that would avert wars like the one in 1973.

Ultimately, Israel grew strong enough to resist pressure to give concessions to Arab adversaries, and it has neither concluded a peace treaty with the Syrians nor a final-status agreement with the Palestinians. Yet Indyk shows convincingly that Kissinger did not intend for Israel to turn into the regional superpower it became. Such an outcome was discordant with his Metternechian worldview and did not redound to his goal of making Egypt and Syria centerpieces in a new U.S.-aligned Middle East. Then as it does now, self-interest mainly explained America’s presence in that far afield place.    

This photograph depicts President Gerald R. Ford and ambassadors from countries in the Middle East seated around a table in the Roosevelt Room at the White House on the day he was sworn into office. Meeting participants include Abdelkader Maadini of the Algerian Interests Section, Ashraf A. Ghorbal of Egypt, Riad Sabri of Jordan, Jamil Al-Hassini of Kuwait, Joseph Akl of Lebanon , Ali El-Gayed of Libya, Saad Taib of Morocco, Ahmed Macki of Oman, Adullah Saleh Al-Mana of Qatar, Ibrahim Al-Sowayel of Saudi Arabia, Mamoun Abdel Gadir Yousif of Sudan, Sabah Kabbani of Syria, Amor Ardhaoui of Tunisia, Hamad Abdul Al Madfa of the United Arab Emirates, and Yahya H. Geghman of Yemen. Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger and State Department officials Alfred L. Atherton and David A. Korn also attended.
President Gerald Ford and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger meet with ambassadors from the Middle East in the Roosevelt Room, circa 1974. Source: Gerald R. Ford Library

For all of Indyk’s criticisms of Kissinger, his admiration of the man is palpable. Indyk’s service in two administrations that failed to achieve a final Israeli-Palestinian peace deal has helped him appreciate how extraordinary Kissinger’s diplomatic accomplishments in this part of the world were. As Indyk shows in Master of the Game, negotiation, and diplomacy require considerable skill.

Those at odds with Indyk’s methodological approach might say he gives too much importance to  Kissinger the individual. Why not give credit to the legions of government staff and civil-society actors who worked so hard to make these agreements happen? Does Kissinger truly deserve the star billing he gets? These are genuine questions, but, in my view, the choice to make Kissinger the central figure in this story stands up to scrutiny. Arab and Israeli leaders negotiated through him. No one else spent more time in conversation with them or diplomatic capital in bringing both sides together. Kissinger undoubtedly was the sine qua non.    

On a separate note, this book puts the lie to charges that the United States has given Israel whatever it wants. To the contrary, there is ample evidence of U.S.-Israel friction. The Israeli side often frustrated Kissinger. The barbs traded with Prime Minister Golda Meir could be ferocious. She could not believe a fellow Jew could be so dismissive of Israel’s security interests, while he resented Israeli intransigence. Under Rabin’s government, too, the Americans and Israelis gave each other an earful over seemingly minute details. Thanks to plentiful American and Israeli sources, Indyk makes exchanges like these lively and engaging. In this way, Master of the Game is the latest installment in a literature that has cast the U.S.-Israel relationship as one of tension and compromise rather than harmony. See Dennis Ross’ Doomed to Succeed: The U.S.-Israel Relationship from Truman to Obama (2015) for another example.

Master of the Game: Henry Kissinger and the Art of Middle East Diplomacy: Indyk, Martin: 9781101947548

Evidence in the book should also dispel the view that Kissinger was heartless. On his way out of Israel without a peace treaty in March 1975, Kissinger started crying after declaring “we have no other goal except to enable the young people in this area to grow up without the fear of war” (478). While he has been criticized for his alleged callousness, this book shows that Kissinger, albeit unwaveringly devoted to his craft, was not immune to emotion.                 

Those who’ve had enough of America’s misbegotten adventures in the Middle East might be tempted to skip this book. That would be their loss. Master of the Game tells the story of an overall successful policy of negotiation. A superpower got many of its sought-after objectives by engaging a handful of middle powers. As great-power rivalry returns to Asia, Europe, and elsewhere, American policymakers would do well to learn from Kissinger’s example.  

In telling a remarkable story, Master of the Game proves it is possible to write well without sacrificing scholarly standards. The book includes its fair share of colloquial gems—Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Dayan “sounded like an excited bro planning a fraternity party” while talking to Kissinger, we’re told (256). Forgoing the heavy prose that can mar academic writing, Indyk makes this book accessible to the lay reader. That might be a function of his time in the government, where it pays to shun the abstract for the concrete.        

At the same time, Indyk’s book is firmly grounded in historical evidence. Among the archives Indyk consults are the Nixon and Ford Presidential Libraries, the Department of State’s Office of the Historian, and the Israel State Archives. He gives the sources their due. Policymakers in search of historical background and practical advice would do well to read this book. Inside they will find a road map for remedying seemingly intractable disputes, not only in the Middle East but perhaps in the world beyond.  

Daniel J. Samet is a Ph.D. student in History at the University of Texas at Austin, where he is a Graduate Fellow at the Clements Center for National Security.  

The views and opinions expressed in this article or video are those of the individual author(s) or presenter(s) and do not necessarily reflect the policy or views of the editors at Not Even Past, the UT Department of History, the University of Texas at Austin, or the UT System Board of Regents. Not Even Past is an online public history magazine rather than a peer-reviewed academic journal. While we make efforts to ensure that factual information in articles was obtained from reliable sources, Not Even Past is not responsible for any errors or omissions.

    

Review of Sex Among the Rabble: An Intimate History of Gender and Power in the Age of Revolution, Philadelphia, 1730-1830 (2006)

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The question “how revolutionary was the American Revolution?” has long animated academic inquiry into the American experience of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Historians have often sought to answer this question by examining political and economic effects of the War of Independence. Clare Lyons’ Sex Among the Rabble suggests scholars should spend less time studying revolutionaries in statehouses and more time looking under the sheets. Her study shatters popular preconceptions that colonial sexuality emulated Georgian notions of propriety and politeness. Lyons traces both radical changes and reactionary reforms in sexual mores of Philadelphia during the decades before and after the Revolution.   

book cover for Sex among the Rabble: An Intimate History of Gender and Power in the Age of Revolution, Philadelphia, 1730-1830 (Published by the Omohundro Institute of Early American Histo): 9780807856758: Lyons, Clare A.: Books

Lyons’ study is not truly limited to the “rabble,” although one can understand the appeal of such a titillating title for this rousing monograph. Lyons looks at an array of sources ranging from popular print materials to court records to sordid sexual diaries compiled by voyeuristic men. Through these documents she “illuminates the interplay between sexual behavior and the cultural construction of early American understandings of sexuality” (p. 8). Furthermore, the broad temporal scope of her study shows how supple sexual behavior during the Revolution was eventually regulated along class and racial lines in the early antebellum period.

The book’s initial chapters examining discourses and sexual practices reveal a colonial society where the distribution of power between men and women was sharply contested both inside and outside of the confines of marriage. Far from depicting marital bliss, ditties in print suggested that the trope of marriage and misery has deep roots in American history. Lyons also shows how a pleasure culture that promoted promiscuity and prostitution emerged in the late 1760s and blossomed in the closing decades of the eighteenth century. This culture of casual sex suffused the entire social hierarchy of Philadelphia — although there was considerable variance in the types of liaisons sought by members of different classes.  

Additionally, Lyons exposes how racialized attitudes about differentiated sexual appetites and cross-racial relationships profoundly impacted this sexual culture. African Americans were characterized as a “libidinal race” by none other than Thomas Jefferson, whose own family tree was shaped by his interracial desires (p. 230). Over time, concerns about cross-racial and cross-class sexual relations drove upper classes to seek to regulate sexuality and encourage restraint instead of lustful trysts. This elite-driven sexual culture was intricately linked to notions of republican motherhood that sought to portray women as key sources of morality and virtue. If sexuality experienced a radical transformation as the colonies broke away from Great Britain this later period represented a Thermidorian reaction to these rapid changes. 

Title page and frontispiece of The Mother at Home or the Principles of Maternal Duty Familiarly Illustrated by John Stevens Cabot Abbott, published by the American Tract Society (New York, ca. 1834). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts.
Title page and frontispiece of The Mother at Home or the Principles of Maternal Duty Familiarly Illustrated by John Stevens Cabot Abbott, published by the American Tract Society (New York, ca. 1834). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts.

Lyons’ rich source material and scintillating subject matter make this book a riveting read. This study will appeal to both historians of early America and scholars of sexuality and gender. While Lyons’ own recent experiences in political activism inspired this work, she avoids presentist judgments or imposing present-day sexual attitudes on her subjects. Instead, she carefully considers the social ramifications of a series of practices, ranging from wife-sales to enforced child support in cases of bastardy. Given the centrality of race in her account it may have helped to structure her book to more clearly delineate the racial dimensions of her findings as distinct from the class-based differences she uncovers. This small revision and perhaps culling the copious excerpts from printed poems that she includes throughout would have strengthened her study. Nonetheless, Lyons has pulled back the covers on a fascinating facet of early American society that reveals social transformations on par with the political and economic revolutions debated by other scholars of this time period. 

Jon Buchleiter is a third-year Ph.D. student in the Department of History at the University of Texas at Austin. He studies United States history with particular interest in US foreign policy of the Cold War. His current research examines the institutionalization of arms control and disarmament efforts and successive administrations approached and prioritized arms control initiatives. At UT, Jon is a Graduate Fellow with the Clements Center for National Security and Brumley Fellow with the Strauss Center for International Security and Law. Jon received his BA in Peace, War, and Defense and Political Science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

The views and opinions expressed in this article or video are those of the individual author(s) or presenter(s) and do not necessarily reflect the policy or views of the editors at Not Even Past, the UT Department of History, the University of Texas at Austin, or the UT System Board of Regents. Not Even Past is an online public history magazine rather than a peer-reviewed academic journal. While we make efforts to ensure that factual information in articles was obtained from reliable sources, Not Even Past is not responsible for any errors or omissions.

Review of The Men Who Lost America: British Command during the Revolutionary War and the Preservation of the Empire (2013)

Review of The Men Who Lost America: British Command during the Revolutionary War and the Preservation of the Empire (2013)

Several years ago, while visiting Jamestown, Virginia, I had an epiphany; this isn’t American history, it’s English history—these people were English, and the America they strived within was a space more than an entity. Of course, this all changed with the American Revolution. So for obvious reasons, Yorktown, not far from Jamestown, didn’t give this Englishman the same sense of kinship.  It may well have done so if I had read Andrew O’Shaughnessy’s excellent The Men Who Lost America before visiting.

book cover for The Men Who Lost America eBook by Andrew O'Shaughnessy | Official Publisher Page | Simon & Schuster UK

The cleverness in O’Shaughnessy’s work is found in the simplicity of its lens—reassessing the American Revolution through the lives of those who lost it rather than those who won. Two striking insights arise from this approach. First, the British did not lose America because of elite and illiberal buffoonery. Adopting a multi-biographical approach, O’Shaughnessy demonstrates that Lord North, John Burgoyne, Sir Henry Clinton—even Cornwallis and George III—were educated and capable men, cognizant of the latest and most sophisticated military strategies of their era.  To suggest otherwise, as much historiography has done on both sides of the Atlantic for over 200 years, undercuts the spectacular achievements of the Revolutionary army.

Second, British logistics worked as effectively and efficiently as they could under the circumstances. However, “under the circumstances” is the operative phrase here – as much as O’Shaughnessy attempts to shy away from any form of determinism, he shows again and again that this was a war that Britain simply could not win. This is despite the fact that they prevailed in most of the major battles and occupied every American city of note, including New York, Boston, Savannah and Charleston.

The storming of Redoubt during the Siege of Yorktown, No. 10,
The storming of Redoubt during the Siege of Yorktown, No. 10, by Eugène Lami

Why was this so? Because, O’Shaughnessy argues, Britain chose to prosecute the war with “an army of conquest not of occupation,” meaning that the colonial rebels (remember, they weren’t Americans yet) could always flee, replenish their ranks, and regather their strength. Often, British success simply reinvigorated rebel recruitment drives. Meanwhile, the British use of billeting and foraging, as well as their recruitment of runaway slaves and indigenous warriors, did much to galvanize rebel resistance.

The appeal of O’Shaughnessy’s tome (nearly 500 pages in 9-point print) is its fresh perspective on a well picked over subject.  Quite delightfully, he turns the American Revolution into English history, which it is – just like Jamestown. And for Americans, there is the new perspective of encountering George Washington as a factor rather than an agent. He shows up again and again in The Men Who Lost America — a problem needing to be solved, an elusive frustration, a precocious upstart, and (finally) the grave digger for British power on the continent. As such, Washington is cast in an altogether different light—he is someone being thought about rather than thinking, a mind to be reacted to rather than a mind reacting, a thorn rather than a rose.

Washington at the Battle of Trenton
Washington at the Battle of Trenton, by E.L. Henry.

Despite the book’s originality and narrative luster, it ends on a strange, anti-climactic note, with allusions to the rather catch-all explanation of all British colonial mishaps—that London always cared more about other possessions than the one it was losing. In the last few paragraphs, O’Shaughnessy pivots to late 18th century British successes on the Indian subcontinent, though this would have been scant consolation to George III. Ireland was surely as important a factor as India for the British ruling class, as was keeping Canadian and Caribbean possessions. In this sense, many British war aims were in fact achieved. Furthermore, it is obviously inappropriate to think of Indian subjugation as some kind of imperial silver lining of the American Revolution.  But Britain clearly did learn a great many lessons about soft power and modern war, while at the same time not exhausting itself before Napoleon and his eventual empire entered the picture.  

This is ultimately what O’Shaughnessy misses, or at least does not emphasize strongly enough: the American Revolution was in some ways the beginning of British ascendancy on the world stage—and it was built on the thinking and action of men like North, Clinton and Rodney, most of whom saw their careers and reputations recover during the French Revolutionary Wars. What really gets going in 1776, or at least after 1787, is British ascendancy to the world stage. Furthermore, this ascendancy was built upon the rejection of military authoritarianism, which was so prevalent on the European continent during the second half of the eighteenth century. As O’Shaughnessy demonstrates again and again, British elites who prosecuted the war thought it was unwinnable—but they thought so precisely because they had no interest in constructing a continental style military regime of occupation and repression. There is much discussion of the sacrifices made by Americans on the altar of their emerging national identity during the Revolutionary War. Perhaps not enough is said about how many Englishmen did the same.

The views and opinions expressed in this article or video are those of the individual author(s) or presenter(s) and do not necessarily reflect the policy or views of the editors at Not Even Past, the UT Department of History, the University of Texas at Austin, or the UT System Board of Regents. Not Even Past is an online public history magazine rather than a peer-reviewed academic journal. While we make efforts to ensure that factual information in articles was obtained from reliable sources, Not Even Past is not responsible for any errors or omissions.

Digital Archive Review: The University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology

Digital Archive Review: The University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology

The University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology—often called the Penn Museum—contains an extensive collection of objects originating from “ancient Egypt, Greece and Italy, Mesopotamia, Asia, Africa, and the Americas and more.” Many of those pieces are available for viewing online. The Penn Museum website offers in-depth descriptions of each item, along with high-resolution images, short entries on historical context, and related videos.

The Granite Sphinx of Ramses II
The Granite Sphinx of Ramses II

The homepage offers users several options for exploring the museum’s contents. As a starting point, it displays featured items, such as The Granite Sphinx of Ramses II. The site also utilizes a a keyword search and allows visitors to narrow their results by a range of categories, including: record type, if it has an associated image or video, whether it is currently on display, geographic section, whether it has a 3D model, historical period, inscription language, material, and technique.

A keyword search for “Jewelry” yields over 37,000 results
A keyword search for “Jewelry” yields over 37,000 results

One standout piece helps illustrate the quality of the pieces housed at the Penn Museum. The Dowager Princess Crystal Sphere, a glass ball that sits atop a metal stand in the shape of a roaring wave. Dating from Qing Dynasty China (nineteenth century), the mysteries of its origins have enchanted museum goers for decades. The website provides images of this item from many angles, along with a description and a short historical context.

A 1954 image captures the smiling reaction of some children examining the Crystal Sphere
A 1954 image captures the reaction of some children examining the Crystal Sphere

An interesting feature that the site offers is an interactive map illustrating the origins of the museum’s collections. It includes approximately 92% of the items that the Penn Museum contains, which come from more than 1000 locations around the world. 

The Object Location Map appears on the homepage
The Object Location Map appears on the homepage

Through all of these options, the website allows visitors to build their own virtual, self-guided tour based on their particular interests. For those seeking a more in-depth discussion, the museum posts videos of its monthly lecture series. In 2012, the lecture theme was “Great Riddles in Archaeology.” More introductory activities are also available on the site, including the “Write like a Bablyonian” text translator. 

This text translator helps users write their name in Cuneiform
This text translator helps users write their name in Cuneiform

The digital collections of the Penn Museum are extensive and easily accessible through their online portal. Its written, visual, and audio sources invite many groups to explore world history by browsing its pieces.

Review of Pulp Empire: The Secret History of Comic Book Imperialism (2021)

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Over the last decade, the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) has grown into the most profitable media franchise in history. As of January 2022, the MCU accounted for four of the top ten-grossing films of all time. The expansive collection of films ranging from Iron Man (2008) to Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021) has captured the imagination of new generations of viewers and taken the genre to new heights of commercial and critical success. In Pulp Empire: The Secret History of Comic Book Imperialism, Paul Hirsch explores the origins of these superheroes who have experienced such a profound renaissance in recent years. Hirsch examines comic books as instruments of American empire and unpacks the complicated relationship between government and publishers that have shaped these comic books’ imagery and messages over their eighty-year history.

book cover for Pulp Empire: The Secret History of Comic Book Imperialism

Hirsh’s book marks an impressive effort to elucidate the political, cultural, and diplomatic legacies of an artifact that has been regarded by many as “trash.” Such attitudes have meant that cartoons’ history has “been obscured through shame, malice, and benign indifference.” Yet, Hirsch has turned up treasures through his tenacious research and the full-page, full-color reprints splendidly illustrate his analysis throughout.

Pulp Empire traces the dynamic relationship between the industry and state and federal governments, a connection that influenced comic books’ development throughout the twentieth century. Hirsch characterizes the emergence of comic books in the 1930s as products that exploited the creative energies of marginalized men and women. Writers and artists were stingily compensated for their work, while publishers began profiting handsomely as the pamphlet’s popularity rose. American entry into World War II led the industry in a new direction as the US government sought to use comic books as propaganda to generate support for the war effort and promote racial stereotypes about the nation’s adversaries. The government largely stopped regulating the medium following the war and, during subsequent decades, the industry began to depict darker stories as American society lived under the pall of nuclear warfare. Pages were soon filled with gruesome images of crime, violence, and the destructive effects of atomic explosions.

cover for "The Fighting Yank," on the cover of Startling Comics
“The Fighting Yank,” on the cover of Startling Comics #10, Sept. 1941. Art by Elmer Wexler. Source: Digital Comic Museum

Such seedy scenes and pervasive racist attitudes in comic books invited criticism on several fronts. Hirsch profiles anti-comic campaigners who decried these pamphlets as corrupting influences on American youth that contributed to rises in crime and juvenile delinquency. Others took a different tack and warned that stories effused with racial enmity eroded American credibility as a beacon of hope and democracy abroad during the intensifying ideological conflict of the Cold War. Hirsch shows how these efforts ultimately resulted in self-imposed censorship.  New covert collaboration between the government and publishers crafted fresh characters and narratives to serve as propaganda designed to condemn communism and improve attitudes toward the United States. Several superheroes who have gained acclaim in recent films, such as Iron Man, Thor, and Spider-Man, were born from this public-private partnership and acted as implicit (or in some cases explicit) agents of US foreign policy.

Pulp Empire is filled with fascinating anecdotes and incisive analysis of the ephemera of the US empire. This book offers something for an array of audiences, from fervent comic book fans to historians of American foreign policy. Hirsch deftly deals with several dimensions of comics’ hidden history, from their perpetuation of racist and sexist tropes to their use as a unique tool of soft power popular abroad across class lines. Finally, Hirsch’s analysis of the debates over the atomic age played out in comic book pages proves both entertaining and enlightening. Pulp Empire effectively interrogates the intersection between politics and popular culture and profiles how superheroes have been deployed to serve American expansionist goals. 

Jon Buchleiter is a third-year Ph.D. student in the Department of History at the University of Texas at Austin. He studies United States history with particular interest in US foreign policy of the Cold War. His current research examines the institutionalization of arms control and disarmament efforts and successive administrations approached and prioritized arms control initiatives. At UT, Jon is a Graduate Fellow with the Clements Center for National Security and Brumley Fellow with the Strauss Center for International Security and Law. Jon received his BA in Peace, War, and Defense and Political Science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

The views and opinions expressed in this article or video are those of the individual author(s) or presenter(s) and do not necessarily reflect the policy or views of the editors at Not Even Past, the UT Department of History, the University of Texas at Austin, or the UT System Board of Regents. Not Even Past is an online public history magazine rather than a peer-reviewed academic journal. While we make efforts to ensure that factual information in articles was obtained from reliable sources, Not Even Past is not responsible for any errors or omissions.

Review of The End of Ambition: The United States and the Third World in the Vietnam Era (2022)

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While most Americans are likely to think of President Lyndon Baines Johnson (LBJ) in connection with the Vietnam War, Johnson himself wanted to be remembered in terms of his domestic achievements in the form of the Great Society. Lacking in many accounts of LBJ are his policies toward the rest of the world. In The End of Ambition, Mark Atwood Lawrence brings into focus U.S. foreign policy during the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon administrations, by focusing on the Third World, with the notable exclusion of Vietnam, during LBJ’s tenure. Few scholars are better positioned to undertake this study. Lawrence is currently the Director of the LBJ Presidential Library and Museum and an accomplished scholar specializing in the Vietnam War and more broadly in the history of U.S. foreign policy in the 1960s and 1970s. As an historian steeped in the politics of the era, Lawrence addresses an important shortfall in scholarship on the Johnson Administration and U.S. foreign policy in general.

book cover for The End of Ambition : The United States and the Third World in the Vietnam Era

Lawrence begins by considering the legacy bequeathed to LBJ by John Fitzgerald Kennedy (JFK). Johnson began his presidency by committing to JFK’s agenda and maintained much of his team. This proved problematic as JFK had often failed to establish clear objectives or priorities and seemed to lack a fixed set of guiding principles. In Lawrence’s words the Kennedy administration was a “conglomeration of tendencies, rather than [an] executor of a core set of ideas.” Lawrence reviews the Kennedy Administration’s approach to four countries—Brazil, India, Iran, Indonesia—and one region—Southern Africa—to provide context for his investigation of the Johnson administration’s approach. Supporters of Kennedy might object to Lawrence’s critical portrayal of the JFK administration as lacking context and depth. However, considering Lawrence’s focus on LBJ’s foreign policy pertaining to the Third World, he does an admirable job in providing the right amount of context critical to a nuanced exploration of LBJ’s approach to the third world, without overwhelming the reader.

LBJ’s ambitions in the domestic context were clear, as was his desire to focus on domestic affairs over foreign policy. In line with this basic intent, the Johnson administration adopted a distinct approach to the Third World that, for better or worse, resolved the ambiguities of JFK’s administration. LBJ sought to lower U.S. ambitions in the Third World and reduce risk while shoring up U.S. control over global affairs by establishing or bolstering cooperative regimes. Despite the judgment of many, including LBJ himself, that he lacked foreign policy expertise, LBJ’s approach to international affairs was rooted in intellectual tendencies distinct from those of JFK, not ignorance. Where JFK sought to transform, LBJ sought to manage. Still, Lawrence points out that LBJ was more visionary than JFK in areas that today we refer to as transnational issues. Further, while LBJ’s ambitions in foreign policy may have been tempered by his desire to focus on domestic affairs, he nonetheless displayed the state-building impulse of the 1930s in both the domestic and foreign arenas. This might be expected based on LBJ’s admiration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and LBJ’s desire to bring to full fruition the wider new deal program.

Five case studies form the heart of Lawrence’s book, covering U.S. policy toward Brazil, India, Iran, Indonesia, and Southern Africa. Central to LBJ’s foreign policy in each of these case studies was a desire to minimize U.S. burdens so as to not further distract from efforts in Vietnam as well as Johnson’s broader goal of advancing the Great Society program. This was the key driver in the LBJ administration’s bringing to power, or enhancing relations with, often authoritarian regimes that could effectively govern and reduce the potential for conflict or communist advances while acting in concert with U.S. interests more broadly. In Brazil, LBJ presided over transformative events and constructed a new relationship with a military regime that effectively dismantled Brazilian democracy. The administration’s patterns and policies in Brazil informed his approach to the Third World for the duration of his tenure. These tendencies included favoring the development of constructive change and democracy over the long-term by countering the danger’s posed by communist movements.

A general labeled "anti democratic rulers" says to President Johnson: "Where I'm in charge, there's absolutely no danger of democratic government being subverted."
This cartoon by Herb Block was published in the Washington Post on May 3, 1965, a few days after U.S. Marines landed in the Dominican Republic to bolster a friendly regime. The cartoon hints at the Johnson administration’s attraction to reliable authoritarian leaders across the Third World. Source: The Herb Block Foundation

With India, LBJ shared Kennedy’s hope that resistance to Chinese expansion would serve as a basis for cooperation, but by early 1966 he was losing hope for reasons including India’s lack of support for U.S. actions in Vietnam. In LBJ’s approach toward India, we see another principle emerge: the emphasis on economic development more so than military assistance. This certainly held true in the case of U.S. policy toward Iran. There was also a China angle in enhancing relations with Tehran as a hedge against Islamabad’s improving relations with China.

In Indonesia, the rise to power of the military led to the “evisceration of the world’s third-largest communist party.” Still, among the countries explored, Indonesia was the most resistant to U.S. influence. The Johnson administration wisely opted for a low-key approach, playing the long game by building influence in select elements of the Indonesian military and society. LBJ and his team viewed Indonesia as a success story that gave American leaders renewed confidence that the Vietnam War was achieving important results even absent a clear military victory. Johnson felt that if the United States had not taken a stand in Vietnam the countercoup in Indonesia in 1965 and the defeat of communism would not have come to pass.

A meeting of the National Security Council on January 7, 1964, reached consensus on the need to keep providing aid to Indonesia despite Sukarno’s provocations. CIA Director John McCone sits at the far end of the table, with Budget Director David Bell to his right and Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy to his left. Around the table in a clockwise direction are Undersecretary of State W. Averell Harriman, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, President Johnson, Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara, Assistant Secretary of Defense William Bundy, Air Force General Curtis LeMay, an unidentified official, and National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy.
A meeting of the National Security Council on January 7, 1964, reached consensus on the need to keep providing aid to Indonesia despite Sukarno’s provocations. CIA Director John McCone sits at the far end of the table, with Budget Director David Bell to his right and Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy to his left. Around the table in a clockwise direction are Undersecretary of State W. Averell Harriman, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, President Johnson, Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara, Assistant Secretary of Defense William Bundy, Air Force General Curtis LeMay, an unidentified official, and National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy. Source: LBJ Library photo by Yoichi Okamoto

Even though Southern Africa held less strategic importance to the United States, it provoked more political controversy. This was based on intersections with the U.S. domestic context, specifically civil rights. Here Lawrence’s case study differs in that it involves a region, not just a nation, though Rhodesia is the primary focus. Despite the differences, the same patterns and policies were clearly in evidence including a desire to minimize U.S. direct involvement, particularly any type of military involvement. Vietnam was certainly a consideration, but one can also appreciate a sense of realistic assessments and expectations regarding the importance of the region and what U.S. power could accomplish. Although one could argue that an appreciation of U.S. constraints emerged only due to Vietnam, such a judgment seems to underestimate LBJ’s priorities. It is likely that LBJ would have opted for such an approach even absent Vietnam as his priority was the Great Society. In fact, Lawrence’s work supports the contention that LBJ had across a broad basis a preference for restraint overseas and action on the home front.

Lawrence not only covers this history of foreign policy during a critical period in American history, but he also considers patterns and precedents. The title of the book may be mildly misleading in this regard. Lawrence asserts that the United States is shaped by the competing impulses of worldmaking and self-interest. In this context Lawrence asserts that the United States has faced multiple inflection points in which it curbed its worldmaking ambitions in favor of a narrower pursuit of its self-interest. It might be more accurate to say that the United States tempered its ambition, but that the pattern that Lawrence alludes to in the ebbing and flowing of American ambition remains intact and returned with a vengeance in the 1990s.

Lawrence’s volume raises many important issues including the relationship between domestic and foreign policy that in total represent the national interest. There are few case studies as potentially rich in this regard as LBJ’s basic dilemma – Vietnam vs the Great Society. Such a study would provide additional context and understanding of the priorities and rationale guiding how the Johnson administration faced the rest of the world, aside from Vietnam. For scholars of the Cold War, the Kennedy and Johnson presidencies, and U.S. foreign policy toward the third world more generally, Lawrence’s The End of Ambition makes an invaluable and much needed contribution.

Bryan Port is a doctoral student at the University of Texas at Austin and a civil servant with the Department of the Army assigned to U.S. Army Futures Command as a strategist. He is a historian of the United States focusing on U.S. intellectual history. His research interests include the construction and application of the idea of national interest as well as grand strategy. Bryan holds a M.A. in National Security Studies from Georgetown University and a M.S. in National Security Strategy from the National War College. His ongoing research centers on American progressive leaders and thinkers of the first half of the 20th century. 

The views and opinions expressed in this article or video are those of the individual author(s) or presenter(s) and do not necessarily reflect the policy or views of the editors at Not Even Past, the UT Department of History, the University of Texas at Austin, or the UT System Board of Regents. Not Even Past is an online public history magazine rather than a peer-reviewed academic journal. While we make efforts to ensure that factual information in articles was obtained from reliable sources, Not Even Past is not responsible for any errors or omissions.

Review of The Approaching Storm: Roosevelt, Wilson, Addams, and their Clash over America’s Future (2021)

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In 1914, the United States was an emerging world power. Many of its citizens looked forward to a future defined by more extensive American involvement in global affairs. However, their growing optimism also masked profound disagreements about the kind of role Americans should play on the world stage. Some wanted their country to challenge the political, economic, and military dominance of its European and Japanese rivals. Others hoped that American leaders would ensure perpetual peace by extending the scope of international law, liberal democracy, or corporate capitalism. Rival policy agendas vied for attention in the halls of power and the popular press, sparking heated public debates that touched on virtually every aspect of American foreign relations. The debates themselves, which highlight the broad spectrum of possibilities open to American foreign policymakers at the dawn of the “American Century,” are endlessly fascinating. But because of their variety and complexity, they are also quite difficult to study.

book cover for The Approaching Storm: Roosevelt, Wilson, Addams, and their Clash over America’s Future

The Approaching Storm, a forthcoming book by popular historian Neil Lanctot, attempts to solve this problem by focusing exclusively on the contentious debate over the possibility of American intervention in the First World War. The outbreak of war in Europe at the end of July 1914 dramatically intensified the rivalry between hawks and pacifists in the United States, bringing their worldviews—and the differences between them—into much sharper focus. The ensuing “clash over America’s future” pitted some of the country’s most influential politicians and thought leaders against one another. Three of them occupy center stage in Lanctot’s book: President Woodrow Wilson; his archrival Theodore Roosevelt, who became the leading advocate of military preparedness and war with Germany; and Jane Addams, a world-renowned social reformer and pacifist. The Approaching Storm colorfully describes their involvement in the intervention debate. More ambitiously, it also tries to locate the source of their profound disagreements about the future of American foreign policy. Lanctot contends that his protagonists’ “starkly different” responses to the First World War reflected their “unique visions of what America could and should be” (21).

Although The Approaching Storm is based on extensive archival research, it is primarily intended for popular consumption and eschews extensive engagement with relevant historical scholarship. Nevertheless, professional historians and policy experts will find plenty to admire in Lanctot’s accessible and engaging book. The author is at his best when he writes about Addams, whose pacifism seems a logical extension of her commitment to social justice and her faith in the meliorative power of expertise. His portraits of Roosevelt and Wilson are less analytically rich, but they’re still incisive. The Approaching Storm hints at a relationship between Roosevelt’s obsession with manliness, his assertive approach to domestic politics, and his eagerness for war. It also calls attention to Wilson’s “Machiavellian” political savvy, subtly challenging outdated realist caricatures, which cast the President as a hapless idealist.

Lillian Wald (left) and Jane Addams (right) speak with press correspondents
Lillian Wald (left) and Jane Addams (right) speak with press correspondents, circa 1916.
Source: Library of Congress

Lanctot’s boldest and most provocative intervention may be his decision to reframe the wartime intervention debate as a three-cornered contest. Much has been written about the rivalry between Roosevelt and the more cautious Wilson, who initially supported American neutrality. Yet in The Approaching Storm, it is not Wilson but Addams who draws the sharpest contrast with the hawkish “TR.” Long before Wilson began touting his plans for a League of Nations, Addams envisioned and tried to execute an ambitious, dynamic peacekeeping strategy. Her ultimate goal was to place the United States at the head of a conference of neutral powers capable of ending the war in Europe by diplomatic rather than military means. Lanctot takes this plan very seriously, praising Addams’ pragmatism and pointing out how close she came to winning allies in high places.

Addams, of course, did not emerge victorious from the intervention debate. Instead, in April 1917, Congress—to Roosevelt’s delight and at Wilson’s request—declared a “war to end all wars” against Germany. It was a fateful decision, signaling that the United States was now willing to use armed force against perceived threats to world order. But as The Approaching Storm makes clear, the choice for war was far from preordained. By presenting Addams’ pacifism as a viable policy agenda, Lanctot’s book reminds us that the seemingly inevitable transformation of the United States into a great military power was not, in fact, inevitable at all. Between 1914 and 1917, American leaders could have steered their country down a very different path, committing themselves to forging world peace without fighting Wilson’s “war to end all wars.” Today, as shifts in the global balance of power make American military supremacy increasingly difficult to maintain, that’s something worth thinking about.

John Gleb is an America in the World Consortium Pre-Doctoral Fellow at the Henry A. Kissinger Center for Global Affairs in Washington, D. C. He is also a doctoral candidate in the Department of History at the University of Texas at Austin, where he earned his MA in May 2020. John received his BA at the University of California, Berkeley, from which he graduated with High Honors and Highest Distinction in 2017. At UT, he is a Graduate Student Fellow at the Clements Center for National Security and has appeared as a guest on The Slavic Connexion, a podcast affiliated with the Department of Slavic and Eurasian Studies. He is also fluent in French. John’s research focuses on the rise of the American national security state and on the relationship between foreign and domestic politics in the United States. He is especially interested in the concept of political consensus, a yearning for which has decisively shaped the worldview and activities of American foreign policymakers since the turn of the twentieth century. John’s dissertation will examine attempts to forge a foreign policy consensus both inside and outside the halls of government between 1900 and 1950. Thanks to those early consensus-building campaigns, the national security state that emerged during the Cold War would consist of more than just a cluster of institutions: as John will show, it also encompassed (and continues to encompass) a system of shared values and ideas from which those institutions had to draw power in order to compensate for their formal weakness.

The views and opinions expressed in this article or video are those of the individual author(s) or presenter(s) and do not necessarily reflect the policy or views of the editors at Not Even Past, the UT Department of History, the University of Texas at Austin, or the UT System Board of Regents. Not Even Past is an online public history magazine rather than a peer-reviewed academic journal. While we make efforts to ensure that factual information in articles was obtained from reliable sources, Not Even Past is not responsible for any errors or omissions.

Film Review: The Harder They Fall, Directed by Jeymes Samuel

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In one of the final scenes of Jeymes Samuel’s gripping 2021 Black Western The Harder They Fall, androgynous outlaw Cuffee (played by Danielle Deadwyler) says a teary goodbye to her comrade “Stagecoach” Mary Fields (Zazie Beetz). The two share a long, not-quite-chaste kiss goodbye as Nat Love, Mary’s main romantic interest in the film, shifts uncomfortably in his saddle. Mary responds with a coy “What you looking at?” before mounting her horse a final time and literally riding off into the sunset with Love, leaving Cuffee behind.

The film, which follows Nat Love and his gang of outlaws on an epic revenge quest across the American southwest, encompasses a litany of historical elisions and inaccuracies, culminating in this moment between Mary and Cuffee. It cements the movie’s final and most glaring lapse: while The Harder They Fall’s vision of the Old West is brazen, bold, and Black, its queer notes amount to little more than whispers. Not only was the real “Stagecoach” Mary Fields (as several writers have noted) much taller, darker, and heavier than she is depicted in the film, she was probably much queerer as well.[i]

Stagecoach Mary poses for a photo holding a shotgun
Stagecoach Mary Fields. Source: Unknown author

Born in captivity around 1832, Mary Fields spent the early part of her life enslaved by Judge Edmund Dunne of Tennessee. During this time, she reportedly grew very close to Dunne’s sister Sarah, who later became a nun and went by the name Mother Amadeus. After being freed at the end of the Civil War, Fields worked a series of odd jobs before eventually relocating to Toledo to rejoin Mother Amadeus at the Convent of the Sacred Heart, where she worked as a groundskeeper. When Mother Amadeus moved to the Montana Territory in the early 1880s to establish a mission and a small “Indian School,” Fields followed soon after, braving a harsh Montana winter in order to nurse Amadeus through a life-threatening case of pneumonia.

This decision, which one biographer describes as “an act of love,” indicated that the two women’s relationship likely represented something deeper and more complicated than a childhood friendship.[ii]  Mary remained at the mission long after Mother Amadeus had recovered from her illness, transporting supplies to the nuns and even personally building Amadeus a hennery, all the while refusing to accept pay for her work. After getting into a shoot-out with a fellow employee who objected to taking orders from a Black woman, Mary was expelled from the mission in 1894, nearly a decade after her arrival. The incident prompted the mission’s male leadership, who already disapproved of Fields’ hard-drinking, “gun-toting”[iii] ways, to directly order Mother Amadeus to send Mary away. Instead, Amadeus helped Fields set up a business – a short-lived restaurant that is mentioned briefly in The Harder They Fall – in the nearby town of Cascade. Later, Amadeus helped Fields secure a star route contract, a position that propelled Mary to fame as the first Black woman mail carrier in the United States.[iv]

Drawing of Cathay Williams
Cathay Williams. Source: U.S. Army

For all their closeness, however, the two women’s relationship existed in a social and racial context no amount of loyalty or affection could negate. In tying Mary’s potential queerness to another Black woman (Cuffee) rather than the sister of the man who enslaved her, The Harder They Fall offers a glimpse of Black queerness uncomplicated by these same questions of power. Unfortunately, though, it is only a glimpse. The charged moment between Mary and Cuffee, a character based on Cathay Williams, who famously disguised herself as a man to enlist in the U.S. Army, passes as quickly as it begins, a loose end to be tied up before Mary can have her happy ending with Nat.[v]  

Though The Harder They Fall’s director Jeymes Samuel has stressed that the film is not an attempt at historical accuracy so much as a way to honor the often-forgotten story of the Black West,[vi] it is telling that this is the version of that story that ultimately made it to the screen. To depict a woman who in life was never once romantically linked with a man as the ingenue to Nat Love’s swaggering anti-hero was a choice. How much richer could this reimagining have been if different choices had been made—if queerness existed as more than a hint, a shared look, or a fleeting scene of unrealized potential? Samuel’s deeply compelling, cinematically stunning take on the classic Western works in large part because it treats Blackness as something complex and unambiguous. What if it treated queerness the same way?

Candice Lyons is a Ph.D. candidate in The University of Texas at Austin’s Department of African and African Diaspora Studies and a 2021-2022 Black Studies Dissertation Scholar at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her recent pieces “A (Queer) Rebel Wife in Texas” (2020) and “Rage and Resistance at Ashbel Smith’s Evergreen Plantation” (2020) can be found on Not Even Past. Lyons’ writing can also be found in the 2021 E3W Review of Books, for which she served as special section editor. Her 2021 Feminist Studies article “Behind the Scenes: Elizabeth Keckley, Slave Narratives, and the Queer Complexities of Space” is the winner of the 2020 FS Graduate Student Award.

[i] Ineye Komonibo, “Colorism Clouds The Rich Imagination Of The Harder They Fall,” Refinery 29, November 5, 2021, https://www.refinery29.com/en-us/2021/11/10701439/netflix-the-harder-they-fall-stagecoach-mary-casting-controversy.

[ii] Miantae Metcalf McConnell, “Mary Fields’ Road to Freedom,” Black Cowboys in the American West: On the Range, on the Stage, Behind the Badge, edited by Bruce A. Glasrud, Michael N. Searles, and Albert S. Broussard (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2016).

[iii] Gary Cooper, “Stagecoach Mary: A Gun-Toting Black Woman Delivered the U.S. Mail in Montana,” Ebony (1977).

[iv] McConnell, “Mary Fields’ Road to Freedom.”

[v] DeAnne Blanton, “Cathay Williams: Black Woman Soldier 1866-1868,” Buffalo Soldier, Originally Published 1992, https://www.buffalosoldier.net/CathayWilliamsFemaleBuffaloSoldierWithDocuments.htm.

[vi] Andrew R. Chow, “The Real Black Cowboys That Inspired Netflix’s The Harder They Fall,” Time, November 3, 2021, https://time.com/6111612/the-harder-they-fall-true-story/.

The views and opinions expressed in this article or video are those of the individual author(s) or presenter(s) and do not necessarily reflect the policy or views of the editors at Not Even Past, the UT Department of History, the University of Texas at Austin, or the UT System Board of Regents. Not Even Past is an online public history magazine rather than a peer-reviewed academic journal. While we make efforts to ensure that factual information in articles was obtained from reliable sources, Not Even Past is not responsible for any errors or omissions.

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