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Review of Undocumented Lives: The Untold Story of Mexican Migration (2018)

In Undocumented Lives, Ana Raquel Minian explores the inner world of undocumented Mexican migrants in the United States from 1965 to the present. While detailing the harsh realities that these migrants faced, Minian also demonstrates how the migrants’ perceptions of their lives differed significantly from those of the state and how the draconian migration policies of the United States and Mexico were not just detrimental to the interests of the migrants but also of the governments. Foregrounding the voices and the choices of the migrants, Minian argues that while the undocumented Mexicans in the United States maintained transnational connections between the United States and Mexico, they were unable to claim full belonging in either place. By displaying the subjectivity of the undocumented lives, Minian challenges the dominant rhetoric in the present day that often characterizes migrants as agentless people who are completely subjugated by the power of the nation-state without their own sets of priorities, sense of belonging, emotionality, and other elements that are fundamental of being human.

By foregrounding the perspectives of undocumented migrants, Minian contests common stereotypes. She shows that most Mexican migrants simply wanted to look for work in the United States and were not drug dealers. They did not gain social benefits from the U.S. government and instead created their own transnational welfare system that supported their communities in Mexico. Women preferred to stay in Mexico and raise children rather than giving birth in the United States to produce anchor babies. Gay men also preferred to stay in the more conservative Mexico rather than moving to the more liberal United States.

Perhaps the most significant myth that Minian debunked was that undocumented migrants had a fixed place where they could call home. Although many believe that Mexican migrants had full substantive citizenship in Mexico, making their migration to the United States unnecessary, such an assumption, as Minian shows, is far from the truth. In Mexico, the poor economy damaged these migrants, depriving them of reasonable livelihood and making emigration the only viable option for them to survive. Meanwhile, the Mexican government did not treat these migrants as full citizens and instead considered them to be superfluous to the country. Following such logic, Mexican officials believed that out migration could alleviate the pressure of domestic unemployment as these “extras” departed Mexico and competed in the U.S. job market. Therefore, while the undocumented migrants encountered discrimination in the United States as “illegal aliens,” they also faced marginalization in the country of their citizenship and were unable to establish roots in their communities in Mexico.

Minian further shows that without attending to the motivation and the reality of the Mexican migrants, the U.S. government devised and implemented faulty immigration policies that were detrimental to both the migrants as well as its own interests. Minian points out that Mexican migrants frequently engaged in circular migration to maintain their transnational belonging. Therefore, their movement between Mexico and the United States was frequent and few wanted to stay in the United States permanently. However, because policymakers failed to understand such migration pattern, not only did they formulate laws that created excessive hardships for the migrants and their families, but they also, ironically, harmed the interest of the U.S. government. Between 1965 and 1986, the U.S. government legislated multiple immigration laws that aimed to reduce the number of undocumented migrants within the United States. However, these laws, by the hardening of the U.S.-Mexico borders, actually increased the number of “illegal aliens” as the Mexicans ceased to circularly migrate because they were afraid of being detained and deported at the borders.

Demonstrators with signs, most in Spanish protesting the Simpson-Mazzoli immigration bill in Los Angeles, Calif., 1983 — *Demonstrators with signs, primarily in Spanish, protest the Simpson-Mazzoli immigration bill in Los Angeles, California, 1983.*
*Source: UCLA Charles E. Young Research Library Department of Special Collections*

Despite encountering severe discriminations in the United States, national unbelonging in Mexico, and the local pressure to exit, Mexican migrants challenged their marginal status in all three spaces. In the United States, these undocumented people fought for their rights and protested their “illegal alien status” with help from various organizations. Meanwhile, they demonstrated their importance to the Mexican economy by funding welfares in their hometowns. While physically distant from their families, they preserved their transnational households through letter writing, photo exchanging, and circular migration. By asserting their rights and presence, these migrants maintained partial belonging to the United States, Mexico, and their local communities.

Minian’s work points to the importance of using oral historical interviews to uncover the stories of those whose voices that are so often absent in the archives. To present the history of undocumented migrants from their own perspectives, Minian discovered and examined privately held documents including letters, photographs, and pamphlets. By using these personal/family documents, Minian successfully foregrounded the perspectives of the migrants. She also supplemented her research with an impressive 250 oral historical interviews with the migrants and their families. While oral history can be problematic as the interviewee might withhold, distort, or simply forget certain information, Minian mitigated such issue by distilling the broader patterns within these accounts rather than focusing on any single story. A collective experience narrated from the migrants’ perspectives therefore emerged. Undoubtedly, these methods are useful for future historians looking to incorporate the voices of the marginalized in their studies. Overall, insightful and groundbreaking, Undocumented Lives will appeal to scholars interested in migration studies, borderlands history, and Mexican American studies.

Jian Gao is a third-year PhD student at UT Austin. His primary research focuses on the transnational history of Chinese in Mexico during the first half of the twentieth century, and his secondary research focuses on the global dynamics of Latin America during the Cold War era. His works have appeared in The Latin Americanist, Asian Journal of Latin American Studies, The International Report on Drug Studies, and most recently History Compass. His papers have won multiple awards from Latin American Studies Association (LASA), Rocky Mountain Council on Latin American Studies (RMCLAS), Southeastern Council of Latin American Studies (SECOLAS), and the World History Association (WHA).

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.

Subjected to Science: Human Experimentation in America before the Second World War – a debate between suffering and medical knowledge for the greater good

banner image for Review of Subjected to Science: Human Experimentation in America before the Second World War

Subjected to Science: Human Experimentation in America before the Second World War by Susan Lederer explores the production of medical knowledge through human experimentation and animal vivisection. Lederer’s contextualization of the subject and her well-chosen examples enlighten readers and allow us to explore the intersection between politics, economy, medicine, and, of course, issues of ethical and moral character. One of the core topics in the book is the debate between the arguments of vivisectionists and antivivisectionists, vivisection being the practice of operating on live animals for the pursuit of scientific knowledge.[1] Through this discussion, one sees that the debate between the advancement of science, the greater good of society, and concerns about causing harm to the most vulnerable characterized the dialogue about human experimentation and animal vivisection in the early 20^th century.

Lederer considers three interlocking questions: why “did American physicians routinely perform non-therapeutic experiments on their patients?” and “who served as the subject of these experiments and what risks did they encounter?”.[2] These questions are essential to the historical significance of the book. Although the Nuremberg trials generated awareness of human experimentation and the consequences it could have while also establishing a set of rules and regulations, we cannot understand human experimentation without first understanding what happened before these trials. As Lederer put it, the Nuremberg trials are not the start of human experimentation but, instead, part of it.[3] That is why it is valuable to understand human experimentation before the Second World War. It allows us to understand the influence of technological developments and historical events like the X-ray and the Great Depression on what research is today. This is one of Lederer’s main arguments, which she addresses in the introduction and chapter one.

Scientists test yellow fever serum by injecting it into white mice. USPHS (United States Public Health Service) Rocky Mountain Laboratory, Hamilton, Montana circa 1942. Source: Library of Congress

The second chapter focuses on the claim that human experimentation must be looked at in the context of animal protection.[4] According to Lederer, antivivisectionists argued “it is not a question of animals or human beings, it is a question of animals and human beings”[5], showing how concerns for human experimentation started when the public became worried about animal welfare. The main argument was that “no progress in medicine… was worth the pain inflicted in laboratories by physicians and physiologists”.[6] Starting in 1866 with the establishment of the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA) by Henry Bergh and, later, the creation of various societies for the protection of children in New York and Pennsylvania in the 1870s, concerns over human experimentation were characterized by a preoccupation over those who were most vulnerable and did not have a voice.[7] These ideas circulated within the context of Darwinism, which fostered wider “acceptance of human and animal kinship”.[8]

In chapters three and four, Lederer poses a debate between the ideas of vivisectionists and antivivisectionists.[9] She refers to Hideyo Noguchi’s experiments, where healthy children and hospital patients were used to develop a luetin diagnostic test for syphilis.[10] She also talks about Arthur H. Wentworth’s “experimental tapping of the subarachnoid space,” which, according to Wentworth himself, caused “momentary pain” and “some children to shrink back and cry aloud”.[11] These types of experiments—which inflicted pain among vulnerable people like children—caused controversy among antivivisectionists. For example, Diana Belais, the president of the New York Antivivisection Society, claimed that medical knowledge was placed before the wellbeing of the most vulnerable. She along with lawmakers, like Republican senator Jacob H. Gallinger, tried to pass laws regulating vivisection.

Dr. Hideyo Noguchi (with back to camera) works in a research lab while William Alexander Young and Helen Russell watch. — *Dr. Hideyo Noguchi (with back to camera), William Alexander Young, and Helen Russell at the Medical Research Institute in Accra, Ghana circa 1928. Source: Wellcome Collection*

Meanwhile, in addressing vivisectionists’ arguments, Lederer talks about the American Medical Association (AMA) and Abraham Flexner’s survey of medical education, Charles W. Eliot’s reforms at Harvard Medical School, and the surge of research as the gold standard for creating medical knowledge. [12] Her sources rely on public statements from William H. Welch, the dean of the Johns Hopkins Medical School, and William W. Keen, the president of the AMA from 1899 to 1900. In contrast to antivivisectionists, vivisectionists’ main argument was that physicians had the obligation to generate medical knowledge, “to heal the sick, to check disease and to prevent death”, all of which could be achieved through vivisection and by having fewer restrictions in the law.[13]

The author also discusses issues that, despite being interesting because of their historical relevance, are incredibly heartbreaking. In chapter five, she delves deeper into the use of the most vulnerable—namely children, prisoners, soldiers, the poor, and those socially marginalized—as subjects for human experimentation. Experiments like those performed by J. Marion Sims on “black female slaves… to test his discovery of a repair for vesico-vaginal fistula”[14] are disturbing because of the intersection between social and political conditions with medicine. However, this discussion could have benefitted from a more in-depth discussion of race, social hierarchies, and inequality. Although Lederer used sources like articles from the Journal of Experimental Medicine, quotes from multiple figures, extracts from the magazine Life, and statements from the American Humane Association, she could have included a more human perspective from those who were experimented on, especially since the history of medicine deals with emotions and not just bodies and medical knowledge. Chapter five’s focus on the subjects of human experimentation introduces sub-arguments related to the issue of consent and whether we can justify experimentation on people whose consent cannot be obtained (like children) or is dependent on political or economic factors.

Despite debates on the ethics of human experimentation, chapter six demonstrates that research and “the discovery of insulin, sulfa drugs, and new treatments for pernicious anemia” eventually helped inspire confidence in medical researchers and doctors.[15] They began to be seen as heroes, as “those who survived their bouts with laboratory-acquired infections earned praise”.[16] There is a special mention of Walter Reed—who proved yellow fever is transmitted by mosquitoes—and Jesse Lazear—who was in Reed’s group and died from yellow fever as a result of self-experimentation.[17] This conclusion allows readers to see how research “became an integral part of [the] academic medicine”[18] and how it was influenced by everything that was discussed in previous chapters, further illuminating the historical relevance of the book.

*A scientist dispenses yellow fever vaccine into ampules. USPHS (United States Public Health Service) Rocky Mountain Laboratory. Hamilton, Montana circa 1942. Source: Library of Congress*

Lederer’s book brilliantly explores what human experimentation was like before the Second World War by making reference to important figures like William W. Keen, William H. Welch, Diana Belais, and Jacob Gallinger and using sources like extracts from scientific journals and quotes from those involved. It is enlightening to read as it gives readers an insight into the arguments of both vivisectionists and antivivisectionists. Also, the idea that human experimentation cannot be understood without knowing what happened before the Nuremberg trials is valuable because the history of human experimentation does not have a beginning or an end: it is embedded in an ebb and flow of political, economic, and social circumstances. This book should be read by anyone who seeks to understand the complexities behind human experimentation. It is through books like this that we become aware of the implications of the creation of scientific knowledge and better understand ourselves as humans.

Juliana Márquez is a sophomore at the Johns Hopkins University majoring in Molecular & Cellular Biology. She has always been interested in the connections between epistemology and history. Since taking a class on the History of Modern Medicine, Juliana immediately found a passion for understanding how scientific and medical knowledge is created. She hopes to use this understanding to have a more human-based approach to science.

References

Goodman, Jordan, Anthony McElligott, and Lara Marks. “Making Human Bodies Useful: Historicizing Medical Experiments in the Twentieth Century.” Essay. In Useful Bodies: Humans in the Service of Medical Science in the Twentieth Century. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003.

“vivisection.” In Concise Medical Dictionary, edited by Law, Jonathan, and Elizabeth Martin. : Oxford University Press, 2020. https://www-oxfordreference-com.proxy1.library.jhu.edu/view/10.1093/acref/9780198836612.001.0001/acref-9780198836612-e-10814.

Lederer, Susan. 1995. Subjected To Science: Human Experimentation In America Before The Second World War. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.

[1] Jonathan Law and Elizabeth Martin, “vivisection”, 2020

[2] Susan Lederer, Subjected to Science, XV

[3] Jordan Goodman, Anthony McElligott and Lara Marks, “Making Human Bodies Useful”, 3

[4] Lederer, XV

[5] Lederer, 101

[6] Lederer, 42

[7] In this chapter, Lederer alludes to the heartbreaking case of Mary Ellen Wilson, a 9-year-old girl who got beaten by her stepmother, as a catalyst for a growing concern for children and the creation of societies that cared about the wellbeing of the most vulnerable; Lederer, 28

[8] Lederer, 30

[9] Since there are various perspectives around human experimentation, Lederer does not only have one central argument. Instead, she addresses the perspective of both sides to contextualize human experimentation as a whole and go deep into what human experimentation was like before the Second World War.

[10] Lederer, 83

[11] Lederer, 62

[12] Lederer, 54-55

[13] Lederer, 100

[14] Lederer, 115

[15] Lederer, 126

[16] Lederer, 130

[17] Lederer, 18

[18] Lederer, 127

Review of The Three-Cornered War: The Union, the Confederacy, and Native Peoples in the Fight for the West by Megan Kate Nelson (2020)

Megan Kate Nelson has written a captivating history of the southwestern theater of the American Civil War. There more than one war took place as different groups of people envisioned futures dependent on control of the region. The balance of perspectives makes it clear the Civil War was not just a battle for the preservation of the Union, or for those states that had seceded, but rather a multicultural war for control of much of the North American continent. The Union, the Confederacy, Mexico, the Apache, and Navajo (Diné) all fought for control of land, water, resources, and trade. Skirmishes in the West were layered contests among several parties. While historians often acknowledge the importance of the West in determining the fate of slavery in an expanding nineteenth-century United States, few have tackled the southwestern theater as Nelson has in The Three-Cornered War.

Nelson’s writing is largely narrative and caters to a more popular audience. The layering of history compels the cultural, borderlands, and environmental historian while the details of battles captivate the military history enthusiast. Excerpts from letters and diaries as well as summaries of dialogue entertain those hunting for good stories. Nelson recounts an epic Western tale with a contemporary scholastic skillset that earned her a nod as a Pulitzer finalist in 2020.

book cover for The Three-Cornered War: The Union, the Confederacy, and Native Peoples in the Fight for the West

The book balances several viewpoints of the conflict, including the perspectives of men and women, Unionists and Confederates, Mexicans, and Indigenous people. She adjusts the perspective with each chapter, unfolding the narrative through a different person’s viewpoint every ten or fifteen pages. People, rather than larger-than-life forces, are at the center of this story about power and property in the Southwest.

The book uses the stories of nine individuals to detail the battles between nations, armies, and ideas in what would become the Southwestern United States. Those people are: Mangas Coloradas, Apache leader; Juanita, wife of Diné warrior Manuelito; Alonzo Ickis, miner turned Union soldier; John Clark, New Mexico Surveyor General; Louisa Canby, wife to Union Colonel Edward Richard Sprigg Canby and nurse to injured soldiers; James Carleton, Union Colonel; Kit Carson, Southwestern frontiersman and Union Brigadier General; John Robert Baylor, Confederate Brigadier General from Texas; and Bill Davidson, a Confederate soldier and Texas lawyer.

Mangas Coloradas Stands with a rifle by his side. — *Mangas Coloradas, circa 1884. Source: Library of Congress.*

If there are any characters missing from this story, they are African Americans, whose fate in the West was in the balance (as Nelson reminds us). She notes that enslaved Blacks in Confederate held Arizona Territory were few and mostly held by Confederate military officers (83). Slavery in The Three Cornered War focuses on Mexican enslavement of Indigenous Americans. However, the reader is left to assume the Confederate vision of empire would expand the system of race-based enslavement as far west as California. This vision could have also included enslaving Indigenous Americans had the Confederate States of America endured.

The Three Cornered War concentrates on the events between 1861 and 1868, with background details for Nelson’s main characters inserted as needed. The eastern theater of the war appears only as snippets of news. The Southwestern theater was a set of wars all its own. Not only were the Union and the Confederacy competing in their visions of manifest destiny, but Mexicans fought to regain claims recently lost to the United States in the Mexican American War of the 1840s, the Apache fought to maintain Apachería, and the Navajo fought to maintain Diné Bikéyah.

Nelson does not overtly discuss borderlands in the ways scholars of the field might desire, but she does evocatively illustrate the malleability of boundaries in the New Mexico Territory in the 1860s. Land changes hands, borders move, access to water, resources, and overland routes are contested, and recent wins and losses remain only barely settled in The Three Cornered War. This tension makes abundantly clear that the present-day borders of the United States were far from predestined. The Confederates had strategized a plan for their own transcontinental railroad to connect California to Georgia, and the rebels intended for slavery to flourish across the continent, perhaps even capturing more land from Mexico.

Johnson and Ward’s “New Military Map” shows the United States' forts and military posts, circa 1862. The New Mexico Territory included present-day Arizona and New Mexico as well as southern Nevada. — Johnson and Ward’s “New Military Map” shows the United States’ forts and military posts, circa 1862. The New Mexico Territory included present-day Arizona and New Mexico as well as southern Nevada. Source: Library of Congress.

Unlike the skirmishes further east, armies in the Southwest were small: casualties could quickly devastate any of the bands of soldiers and warriors in conflict. The Apaches and Navajos fought to keep Anglos and Hispanos alike out of their lands. Mexican officials heard diplomatic pleas from both the Union and the Confederacy but attempted to delay decision making until a victor prevailed. The book includes several maps to help the reader situate the movements of these groups and the quickly changing landscape of the southwest.

Nelson makes clear that these contingencies often depended on the actions of military leaders who acted without seeking approval, in large part because there simply was not adequate time to communicate with distant officials before circumstances changed. Dishonorable and treacherous war tactics were constant, and seemed necessary, but could face delay or prohibition from central authorities. The southwestern theater was a place where men gambled with their lives, but the winnings made it worthwhile.

Though the Union won the conflict and control of the land, Nelson reminds readers this came at a price and made the United States’ objectives contradictory. She writes, “These struggles for power in the West exposed a hard and complicated truth about the Union government’s war aims: that they simultaneously embraced slave emancipation and Native extermination in order to secure an American empire of liberty” (252). The price for the eradication of race-based slavery in the United States was the very sovereignty of its native peoples. In this three-cornered conflict, the United States sharpened its blades against all in the name of liberty granted only on the Americans’ terms.

Review of The Good Immigrants: How the Yellow Peril Became the Model Minority (2015)

In the current era of #StopAsianHate, there have been numerous conversations regarding the unique position occupied by Asian and Asian Americans in America’s wider ethnic and racial hierarchies. Importantly, these conversations have examined the origins of the so-called the ‘model minority’ myth. Esteemed Asian American historian Madeline Hsu incisively captures that history in The Good Immigrants: How the Yellow Peril Became the Model Minority (2015). In nine well-researched chapters, Hsu walks readers chronologically through the sociopolitical processes that propelled the incorporation of a privileged class of Asian migrants and how liberal immigration policy facilitated the transition from ‘yellow peril’ to ‘model minority.’ Hsu’s overall argument emphasizes that the contemporary favorable positioning of Asian immigrants in the United States is not strictly a product of cultural traits. Instead, she points to foreign and domestic policies that prioritized the entry of highly skilled, educated, Westernized Asian immigrants.

Cover of The Good Immigrants: How the Yellow Peril Became the Model Minority; a large group of Asian immigrants poses for a group photo as they debark a Pan Am flight

In the book’s early chapters, Hsu historically situates the entry of privileged Chinese migrants during the height of America’s racial exclusion. It is important to note that Chinese were the only group identified specifically by race for immigration exclusion. United States law prohibited Chinese laborers from immigrating to the United States and obtaining naturalized citizenship. Hsu examines the contrasting experiences of the exempted classes (students, diplomats, businesspersons) of Chinese migrants who were able to enter the United States for educational purposes in what Hsu classifies as the ‘side door policy’ (36). With a special focus on exchange students, Hsu shows readers that the earliest Chinese travelers in Western countries were brought by missionaries usually as students and converts.

Chinese students were not spared xenophobic encounters and racial antagonism, but according to Hsu, they nonetheless benefited from attending American universities to foster economic development in China. Additionally, U.S. educated Chinese immigrants like Meng Zhi played an instrumental role in enhancing Sino-American partnerships by establishing cultural exchange programs like the China Institute in America to advocate for Chinese educational interests abroad. Though not explicitly stated by Hsu, the advocacy of Chinese educational interests represents early examples of transnational and diasporic politics. The political activities conducted by this privileged class of migrants laid the foundation for the elimination of America’s restrictive immigration policies in subsequent decades.

Through Chapters 4 to 7, Hsu emphasizes how Cold War politics facilitated the piecemeal but eventual elimination of America’s racially exclusionary immigration policies. During the Chinese Civil War, many Chinese students studying in the United States became stateless persons with the emergence of a communist government. This reality compelled the United States government to allow Chinese students to adjust their legal status. State and private actors began privileging the voices and experiences of educated Chinese students, who were deemed to be of economic value and assimilable because of their exceptional educational attainment and shared political ideologies with the U.S. After decades of extensive advocacy from privileged Chinese immigrants, the United States government passed the Hart-Cellar Act of 1965, which abolished racial and national origin preferences in immigration. During this period the yellow peril designation began to shift to the model minority framework. While the Hart-Cellar Act was a major milestone in U.S. immigration policy, Hsu reminds readers that the act continued to selectively screen for highly educated, highly skilled immigrants in an effort to fulfill the United States economic interests. Thus, contemporary U.S. immigration policy maintained its inherently exclusive nature and reinforced U.S. racial hierarchies.

Miss April Lou, a teacher in Manhattan, poses with six Chinese children, recent arrivals from Hong Kong and Formosa, who are holding up placards giving his or her Chinese name (both in ideographs and in transliteration) and the name to be entered upon the official school records. Source: Library of Congress, photo by Fred Palumbo.

Hsu’s concluding chapters discuss the social and cultural consequences of this new racial positioning of Asian American communities in the United States after the Hart-Cellar Act of 1965. Asian Americans, specifically Chinese American communities, became celebrated for entering professional and white-collar employment. However, Hsu reminds readers that the class status of certain Asian immigrants in the United States was due to the fact that they came from privileged backgrounds thus facilitating their middle- and upper-middle class respectability in the United States. The increased visibility of Asian immigrants in the private and public spheres is due to contemporary immigration policies screening immigrants for their economic capital and employment potential for entry.

The Good Immigrants is not only a must read but serves as an invaluable contribution to the field of Critical Race Studies because it details how different groups have different relationships with America’s ethnic and racial hierarchies. The emphasis on the perceived assimilation of Asian Americans has prevented U.S. institutions from addressing the ongoing effects of racial marginalization, which the #StopAsianHate movement examines. More importantly, The Good Immigrants shows the role post-Civil Rights neoliberal public policy has played in maintaining structural racial inequality. This book illustrates how migrants with socioeconomic status and social capital have complicated perspectives regarding American racial politics and racial inequality. While many conservatives and to some degree liberals may argue that race is no longer a factor in determining someone’s success, The Good Immigrants successfully counters popular narratives about individual responsibility and ‘cultural values’ by highlighting the structural factors that produce inequitable racial outcomes for neoliberal purposes.

Review of Hazards of the Job: From Industrial Disease to Environmental Health Science (1997) by Christopher Sellers

In Silent Spring, Rachel Carson pioneered the public discussion of the dangers of toxic substances present in the environment as a result of industrial activity. Christopher C. Sellers investigates the type of scientific knowledge about toxic substances that Rachel Carson built upon and popularized in this famous study. The book follows the development of industrial work-related illnesses from the 1890s through the early 1950s. First understood as “bodily idiosyncrasies” (28) that were outside the main concern of employers, or that should be endured by masculine workers, knowledge about occupational disease underwent significant transformations over the course of the early 20^th century.

Cover of Hazards of the Job: From Industrial Disease to Environmental Health Science

Sellers’ work is tightly woven and tracks multiple factors that contributed to the development of environmental health science. First, his work follows a series of key studies across the American industrial landscape: phosphorus poisoning from match factories, lead poisoning from a number of industries, silicosis from mining, radium poisoning from watch-making, and others. These demonstrate the slow development of the objects of study for this field. His study also traces changes in who had the expertise and authority to comment on the underlying causes of the illnesses, who should bear the brunt of these diseases, and the impact that this kind of medical science had for both industry, the medical profession, the state, and the lives of workers. Among the many scientists that Sellers writes into the history of environmental health science, Alice Hamilton stands out as a key advocate for the social (and political) purpose of the field and its development. Her work is important even if other contemporary physicians (such as David Edsall at the Harvard Division of Industrial Hygiene) overlooked it because it did not meet their standards for depoliticized science.

Dr. Alice Hamilton (1869-1970), an expert in occupational health issues, was Assistant Professor of Industrial Medicine at Harvard Medical School. After graduating from the University of Michigan, Hamilton did additional research in Germany and then began a lifelong effort to apply bacteriology, pharmacology, and toxicology to public health. Source: Acc. 90-105 – Science Service, Records, 1920s-1970s, Smithsonian Institution Archives

The scope of the book is clearly-defined and the chapter sequence is well-structured. Sellers frames the presentation of his research with a question containing an easy touchstone for anyone interested in environmental humanities and environmentalism: where did Rachel Carson’s knowledge of toxins come from? Sellers starts his narrative with the 1893 Chicago exhibition, by drawing our attention to the lead that was present in much of its white paint. The book is presented with a great deal detail, which makes for a somewhat slower read, but the subject necessitates the slow, methodical weaving he sets out to do.

Sellers is writing about the nature of the production of knowledge, and the implications that it had for industry, American public policy, and medical education. Even if he doesn’t specifically highlight the voices of the workers, Sellers’ work illuminates what the stakes were them. Many industrial workers distrusted the physicians who examined them, for they could be deemed unfit to work, thus hampering their chances to earn a living. When he does return to Carson’s work towards the end of the book, it is easy to understand her work as inheriting this rich history.

Sellers’ work is unique in that it first brought together medical and environmental history. In the wake of Hazards of the Job, a number of other studies of the environmental and health impacts of economic activity have followed, including Michelle Murphy’s Sick Building Syndrome and the Problem of Uncertainty: Environmental Politics, Technoscience and Women Workers (2006); David Naguib Pellow’s Garbage Wars: The Struggle for Environmental Justice in Chicago (2004); and Geoffrey Tweedale’s Magic Mineral to Killer Dust: Turner & Newall and the Asbestos Hazard (2000).

Book cover of Sick Building Syndrome and the Problem of Uncertainty: Environmental Politics, Technoscience, and Women Workers by Michelle Murphy

Book cover of Garbage Wars: The Struggle for Environmental Justice in Chicago by David Naguib Pellow

Within the fields of Environmental history and the History of science, Sellers’ book makes another key historiographical intervention. Given that industrial diseases could not be studied only in the laboratory because a) their cause wasn’t always known and b) often it was a combination of environmental factors along with the pollutants themselves which produced the illness, the type of medical and environmental knowledge produced required study in industrial settings. In this regard, the early industrial work-place was neither a “field”, such as we might find in environmental histories of particular geographic regions, nor “the laboratory”, in the case of a specific type of invention or discovery.

Beyond these two fields, Sellers makes wider contributions. By looking at the specific hazards that workers were exposed to, his work contributes to histories of labor, as well as histories of public health as it outlines specific tensions between medical education and industrial activity.

When we eventually meet Rachel Carson’s book, as the book draws to an end, we are able to understand not only the specific historical processes that resulted in increasing knowledge of toxins like DDT, but also the peculiar relationships of research between industry and health professionals. These research activities served to confirm the “benignity” (232) of American commodities in the latter part of the 20^th century. This helps the reader understand, for example why even though knowledge of lead poisoning was common, leaded gasoline boomed in production until its eventual-phase out in the 1970s.

Ultimately, Sellers’ book is a valuable contribution to multiple fields and there is much within it that can be mined depending on one’s interest. It is a a challenging but rewarding read for anyone interested in the history of environmentalism.

15 Minute History – Slavery in the West

Guest: Kevin Waite, Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Durham University

Host: Alina Scott, PhD Student in the Department of History at the University of Texas at Austin

In the antebellum years, freedom and unfreedom often overlapped, even in states that were presumed “free states.” According to a new book by Kevin Waite, this was in part because the reach of the Slave South extended beyond the traditional South into newly admitted free and slave states. States like California found their legislatures filled with former Southerners who hoped to see California and others align with their politics. “They pursued that vision through diplomacy, migration, and armed conquest. By the late 1850s, slaveholders and their allies had transformed the southwestern quarter of the nation – California, New Mexico, Arizona, and parts of Utah – into a political client of the plantation states.” But it didn’t end there. The “continental South” as Waite calls it, had visions of extending into Central and South America as well as the Pacific. In West of Slavery, Waite “brings to light what contemporaries recognized but historians have described only in part: The struggle over slavery played out on a transcontinental stage.”

Episode 129: Slavery in the West

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This is Democracy – Participatory Democracy from the Sixties to Today

On this episode, Jeremi and Zachary, with guest Dr. Vaneesa Cook, discuss the Port Huron Statement, and the shifting ideals of democracy in America.

Zachary sets the scene with his poem, “Port Huron Revisited.”

Vaneesa Cook received her PhD in US history from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2015. She is the author of Spiritual Socialists: Religion and the American Left. Her articles on the history of social movements and religious thought have appeared in The Washington Post, Dissent magazine, and Religion & Politics, among others. She is currently the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency historian in residence for the UW-Madison Missing in Action Project.

About This is Democracy

The future of democracy is uncertain, but we are committed to its urgent renewal today. This podcast will draw on historical knowledge to inspire a contemporary democratic renaissance. The past offers hope for the present and the future, if only we can escape the negativity of our current moment — and each show will offer a serious way to do that! This podcast will bring together thoughtful voices from different generations to help make sense of current challenges and propose positive steps forward. Our goal is to advance democratic change, one show at a time. Dr. Jeremi Suri, a renowned scholar of democracy, will host the podcast and moderate discussions.

The Austin Women Activists Oral History Project

By Laurie Green

Since 2017, undergraduate students in my postwar women’s history seminars have had the unique opportunity to engage in intergenerational dialogues with women who were student activists at the University of Texas and the surrounding community during the 1960s and 1970s. As part of the Austin Women Activists Oral History Project, they have conducted professional-quality oral histories with roughly 30 white, Mexican American, and African American women who helped transform the UT campus into one of the largest and most significant hubs of student activism in the U.S., and helped invigorate a range of off-campus movements. These women activists agreed to donate their interviews to the Briscoe Center for American History, one of our many partners in the project. For Women’s History Month this year, the Briscoe is launching the Austin Women Activists Oral History Collection, a permanent digital collection that includes audio files, transcriptions, photographs, and additional documents that women have donated.

An extraordinary aspect of this project has been end-of-semester public gatherings at which students have presented their work to the women they interviewed, along with other students, faculty, and staff members from units on campus with which we have partnered. On December 14, 2017, for example, 18 students and most of the 21 women they interviewed came together for a dinner of enchiladas and history. The students’ presentations inspired a remarkable dialogue – not so much a walk down memory lane as an engaged discussion about how to interpret the activists’ own history. Based on footage from that event, Life & Letters media specialists Rachel White and Allen Quigley, at the College of Liberal Arts, produced Fight Like a Girl: How Women’s Activism Shapes History, a documentary film that Ms. Magazine also picked up for its online site.

As rewarding as this experience was, the public event held on May 17, 2019, “Pecha Kuchas and Pastries,” broke away from the format of conference-style research presentations. Students still had to develop their own interpretations of the history discussed by their interviewees, but instead of writing long research papers they created Pecha Kuchas. What’s a Pecha Kucha? It’s a PowerPoint-like presentation comprised of 20 slides (which advance automatically) and 20 seconds of narrative per slide [see links below]. The results might look simple, but they’re challenging for a historian. You have to distill your argument down to its essentials, keyed to images that enrich but don’t distract from your point on each slide. The “Pecha Kuchas and Pastries” public event drew about 40 people, some of whom were already veterans, either interviewees or interviewers from 2017.

This format, which combined visuals and commentary, also provoked remarkable responses, captured on film by History Department videographer Courtney Meador. A Pecha Kucha about struggles by African American women students prompted 2019 interviewee C.T. (Carolyn) Tyler to describe her first semester at Kinsolving, just after the dorm was “integrated,” when she was the sole Black female in the dorm and assigned to what she described as a kind of lean-to shelter in the lobby. For a Black female student to room with a white female, the latter’s parents had to give their permission. Her story prompted 2017 interviewee Linda Jann Lewis to share her own experience as a first-year student in 1965, when she lived in Kirby Hall, a women’s dormitory at 29th St. and Whitis owned by the Methodist Women of Texas. The brochure described Kirby Hall as integrated Lewis remembers, yet the 250 residents included only six Black women, two roommates per floor. Lewis lived in the basement.

Two Pecha Kuchas addressed the origins of “women’s gay rights” and the Austin lesbian community, based on interviews with women who, in turn, brought a few other friends from the 1970s to the event. These two presentations pieced together a history of activism and the creation of the Austin Lesbian Organization, Women’s Liberation, and women’s institutions such as Bookwoman bookstore (still in existence), the Safe Place shelter, women’s music venues, bands, and a recording studio. “I’m proud of my generation,” one woman declared. Emma Lou Linn, a 2017 interviewee, described getting some of the first gay and lesbian protective ordinances in the country passed when she served on the city council. This history was previously unfamiliar to any of the students.

Cynthia Perez, co-owner with her sister of La Peña, a downtown Latino cultural gallery and a 2017 interviewee, initiated another unexpected conversation after watching a Pecha Kucha that delved into Chicano/Black relations at UT. She recounted the inspiration she and other Chicana/os found in Black Power student activism at a time when she was a student at University of Houston before transferring to UT. “We rode the coattails of the Black students,” Perez declared. That perspective persisted when she arrived in Austin and, in 1975, participated in an occupation of the Tower to demand Chicano and African American student and faculty recruitment, as part of United Students Against Racism at Texas (USARAT). Another participant asserted that the antiwar movement at UT brought everyone together. Others vividly recalled a quite different shared experience: the Charles Whitman shooting from the Tower in 1966.

It did not take arm-twisting to convince these women to tell their stories; many emailed back the same day saying they wanted to participate in the project. Collectively, they believe that the history of this activism is crucial for the current generation of students to understand, and are disturbed that it has remained nearly invisible in national narratives of women’s liberation, civil rights, campus antiwar struggles, Black Power, Chicano liberation, gay and lesbian activism, and other movements. For the students, it’s fair to say that these interviews have challenged every preconception they brought to the table based on previous reading. None was aware that in 1956 UT became one of the very first public universities in the South to desegregate its undergraduate student body, but refused to allow Black women students to live in the regular dormitories until 1965, and only after years of protest. Likewise, they did not anticipate learning that the real beginning of the 1973 Roe v. Wade case was not in Chicago or New York, but among students on the UT campus, the flagship university of a conservative state.

The Austin Women Activists Oral History Project – set to become a history capstone course in Spring 2021 – reflects approaches to “experiential learning” encouraged by the UT Faculty Innovation Center (FIC). The FIC, along with proponents elsewhere, delineates several components of experiential learning, including preparation, autonomy, reflection, bridges, and a public face. As a history professor, I understand experiential learning as a form of pedagogy aimed at helping students value their own minds by working both independently and in collaboration with other students to rethink assumptions about history and to create lasting public products with the capacity to influence others. In developing the Pecha Kucha project students had the advantage of both working in pairs on their interviews and Pecha Kuchas, and working independently on papers that focused on the broader historical context of their interviews, and articulated research “problematics” – i.e., what one is arguing, how it destabilizes previous understandings, and why their project matters.

Besides the teamwork in the classroom, the creation of the Austin Women Activists’ Oral History Project represents collaboration with community activists and alumnae off campus, and many units on campus: the History Department, the Briscoe Center for American History, the Nettie L. Benson Latin America Collection, the Perry-Casteñada Library, the Division of Diversity and Community Engagement, the Faculty Innovation Center, University of Texas Captioning and Transcription Services, Life & Letters and the College of Liberal Arts.

A key component, suggested by Anne Braseby at the FIC and Margaret Schlankey at the Briscoe Center for American History, was reflection. In their papers, students wrote about both difficulties and breakthroughs they experienced. Several felt nervous going into their interviews, because they had never conducted an oral history before. One student said she felt frustrated at the lack of scholarship on “black women’s histories at Southern universities, which shows the project’s importance but made the context harder to find.” A graduating senior wrote that he “expected the interview and my research just to be littered with dates and facts, but the reality was that this assignment was full of life and felt important.” At the same time, it “made [him] feel as if [he] had done nothing in my time here as far as activism.” A Mexican American student wrote that her interviewee’s “point of view was very interesting, when she told me that she did not care that the only reason why she was accepted into the university was due to her race and the university’s quota for minority students.” This was “very different to the views that many students have today.” And one of the students who interviewed Erna Smith, who currently teaches in UT’s School of Communications, wrote that “learning about her time at the University of Texas, allowed me to see the campus I walk every day in a new light. Opening myself up to learning this was challenging, as I am often going into projects searching for the answer I want. However, my research and the interview created new questions that allowed me to dive deeper into topics I never realized I ignored in the past.” [Underlining in originals]

For more on this project, including tapes and transcripts of of the interviews, see the dedicated page for THE AUSTIN WOMEN ACTIVISTS ORAL HISTORY PROJECT on the website of the Briscoe Center for American History.

PECHA KUCHAS

Serena Bear and Zoë Marshall
“NAP, AABL, and Black Power at UT”

Shianne Forth and Amber Dey
“Setting the Record Straight: Gay Liberation was More Than Just Stonewall”

Sara Greenman-Spear and Wilson Petty
“The Glo Dean Baker Gardner Experience: How Black Women Transformed Social Organizations into Political Ones”

Michelle Lopez and Carson Wright
“Hello to All This: How Invisibility Uncovered the Austin Lesbian Feminist Movement”

Sasha Davy and Brittney Garza
Justice Warriors: How African-American Women Fought for Equality at UT.”

Taylor Walls and Elizabeth Zaragoza-Benitez
“Chicana Revolutionaries: A Rising Voice for Social Change at UT, 1960s-1970s”
(COMING VERY SOON!)

Photo Credits:
Pecha Kuchas reproduced with permission. Photos are frame captures from “Fight Like a Girl,” College of Liberal Arts, UT Austin. Historical images in that film come from The Texas Archive of the Moving Image and the Briscoe Center for American History.

Queering Postwar Marriage in the U.S.

By Lauren Gutterman

At first look, Barbara Kalish fit the stereotype of the 1950s wife and mother. In 1947, at age eighteen, Barbara met and married a sailor who had recently returned home from the war. The couple bought a house in suburban Norwalk, California and had two daughters. While her husband financially supported the family, Barbara joined the local Democratic club and the PTA. Yet beneath the surface, Barbara’s picture-perfect life was more complicated. Soon after marrying, Barbara realized she had made a mistake. She called her mother asking to return home, but was told, “You’ve made your bed. Lie in it.” Divorce was not an option, so Barbara persevered. Eventually, through the PTA she met Pearl, another wife and mother who lived only a few blocks away. Though Barbara had never before been conscious of same-sex desires, she thought Pearl “the most gorgeous woman in the world” and fell madly in love. In an oral history interview recorded years later, Barbara could not recall exactly how it happened, but somehow she was able to tell Pearl that she loved her and the women began an affair that continued for more than a decade.

Her Neighbor’s Wife: A History of Lesbian Desire Within Marriage centers on women like Barbara who struggled to balance marriage and same-sex desires in the second half of the twentieth century. Many—if not most—women who experienced lesbian desires during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s were married at some point, yet this population has been neglected in histories of gay and lesbian life, as well as histories of marriage and the family. Focusing on the period between 1945 and 1989, Her Neighbor’s Wife is the first historical study to focus on the personal experiences and public representation of wives who sexually desired women. Through interviews, diaries, memoirs and letters, the book documents the lives of more than three hundred wives of different races, classes, and geographic regions. These women serve as a unique lens through which to view changes in marriage, heterosexuality, and homosexuality in the post-World War II United States.

To a remarkable degree, the wives in this study were able to create space for their same-sex desires within marriage. Historians have typically categorized men or women who passed as straight while secretly carrying on gay or lesbian relationships as leading “double lives.” This concept may describe the experiences of married men who had anonymous homosexual encounters far from home, but it fails to capture the unique experiences of married women who tended to engage in affairs with other wives and mothers they met in the context of their daily lives: at church, at work, or in their local neighborhood. Barbara and Pearl, for instance, lived mere blocks away from each other. They socialized together with their husbands and children, went on trips together, and even ran a business together for many years. While LGBT history has focused on queer bars in urban spaces, many wives who desired other women found ample opportunity to engage in sexual relationships with other women in their own homes in their husbands’ absence. Some of these men remained unaware of their wives’ same-sex relationships, but others chose to turn a blind eye to their wives’ affairs and waited for them to pass.

Alma Routsong and her family in a press photo for her novel Round Shape, 1959. Routsong carried on a relationship with another woman for a year in Champaign, Illinois, in the early 1960s before divorcing her husband. Curt Beamer for the News-Gazette. (From the Isabel Miller Papers, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College Libraries.)

Lesbian history has highlighted the politically radical implications of love and sex between women, but married women’s same-sex affairs did not always function as a type of resistance to or protest against the institutions of heterosexuality and marriage. In some cases, engaging in same-sex relationships within marriage propelled women to identify as lesbians and to leave their marriages. This was a path, and a choice, that became increasingly available to (and expected of) women across this book’s time period as divorce became more common, and gay and lesbian activists challenged the stigmatization of homosexuality. However, many wives’ ambivalence about labeling themselves or their affairs as lesbian, and their refusal to divorce well into the 1980s and beyond, challenge a simplistic interpretation of such wives’ desires and identities. While the emergence of no-fault divorce, gay liberation, and lesbian feminism made it possible for many wives to leave unhappy marriages and build new lives with other women, others experienced the growing division between married and lesbian worlds as constraining, as forcing a choice they did not have to make before.

Della Sofronski dressed for a neighborhood Halloween party in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, which she and her lover attended in costume as husband and wife, ca. 1945. (From the private collection of Kenneth Sofronski.)

Barbara and Pearl’s story reveals how women responded differently to the social and cultural transformations of the 1970s. During their many years together, Barbara and Pearl had secretly planned to leave their marriages once their children were grown. Around 1970, when Barbara was forty and her daughters were in high school, she decided she was ready to leave her marriage and begin her life with Pearl. But Pearl did not want to divorce. She was ill at the time and worried about losing health insurance if she left her husband, a man Barbara described as “a sweet guy.” So Pearl remained married, and Barbara divorced. “I went to Chuck Kalish and said, ‘I’m going.’ And I went,” she recalled. By this time Barbara had discovered the Star Room, a lesbian bar in Los Angeles. In fact, Barbara invested some of her own money in the bar, making her a part owner, and when she left her marriage she moved into a house directly behind the bar where she easily embarked on a new lesbian life. “I was in hog heaven,” Barbara later said.

Like Barbara and Pearl, the wives described in Her Neighbor’s Wife made a range of choices over the course of their lives. Some ended their lesbian relationships and remained married for good. Some experimented with “open” or “bisexual” marriages in the era of the sexual revolution. Yet others divorced their husbands in order to pursue openly lesbian lives. Whatever paths they took, however, the wives in this study suggest that marriage in the postwar period was not nearly as straight as it seemed.

His Whaleship: The Stories of Real, Authentic, Dead Whales

By Lydia Pyne

In 1873, there weren’t very many options for the public in the United States to see what a real whale looked like.

The occasional whale could wash up on a beach somewhere, of course, but it would rapidly begin to shuffle off its mortal coil, leaving beachgoers with the decidedly unpleasant process of natural decomposition. On the other hand, seeing the animal’s skeleton neatly hung in a museum was a bit incomplete because it required imagination or an artist’s reconstruction to put muscle and skin on the whale. Unlike other large mammals, whales can’t be taxidermied; consequently, stuffed whales weren’t part of the dioramas of charismatic megafauna installed in natural history museums at the turn-of-the-twentieth century. And photographing whales underwater – to see real whales in their natural habitats – was almost a full century away.

The Columbus Evening Dispatch, Tuesday, March 8, 1881, front page.

So, in 1873, the best possibility for people to see real whales was thanks to Great International Menagerie, Aquarium, and Circus, that touted its exhibit of “A Leviathan Whale, a grand and magnificent specimen, the King of the Deep” as “the only show in the world that exhibits a WHALE,” per then-contemporary newspaper articles.

By WHALE, the Menagerie meant a real, actual dead whale. This WHALE was quasi-preserved through the constant injection of chemicals and carted around via rail from one American town to the next in a bit of Music Man-like showmanship. Their competitor, the Burr Robbins Circus, exhibited a giant paper-mâché whale a few years later, determined to not be outdone by the Menagerie. The two whales dueled their way across the United States for the better part of a decade, vying for publicity, audiences, and the money to be made from the venture. And the Menagerie’s WHALE was all about just that – turning the public’s awe and wonder at nature’s unknown into spectacle for profit.

The Columbus Evening Dispatch, Saturday August 27, 1881, front page.

Whether visitors knew anything about whales after they had visited the Menagerie was irrelevant. The showmanship, the bustle of activity, the anticipation of the WHALE was something so singularly extraordinary, that it never failed to draw huge crowds. And, yet, the decades-long success of the traveling WHALE largely depended on the experience being personal. Step right up, ladies and gentlemen, and see for yourself. You know what a real whale looks like now because you saw one here and paid for the privilege to do so. It’s as though the Menagerie was able to curry a sense of authenticity or even expertise about whales since that was, technically, what visitors saw.

But the WHALE lacked scientific or natural history context. For example, when the Menagerie’s King of the Deep arrived in Columbus, Ohio, on March 8, 1881, the headlines from the Columbus Evening Dispatch sensationalized the exhibit, “He is coming! He is coming! The Monster Whale! The Monarch Supreme of the Ocean! The Giant of the Gigantic Creation of the Universe! Don’t Fail To Bring The Children!”

The exhibit and its publicity were as big as its cetacean. “It requires a great deal of elbow room, because his whaleship is sixty feet long in the clear,” the Columbus Evening Dispatch reported. Visitors invariably wanted to know how the exhibit was possible – exactly how the whale’s entrails were removed and replaced with first ice and then chemicals, how the sawdust underneath the whale corpse kept the leviathan’s leaking in check. How yet more chemicals applied to the whale’s skin kept the outer parts of the animal from decomposing and how iron hoops within the body cavity kept His Whaleship from collapsing in on himself. (The Dispatch assured its readers that the exhibit was “free from unpleasant odor.”) In short, the WHALE wasn’t really so much about whales inspiring awe and wonder in nature, so much as it was about how the WHALE’s keepers and revenue collectors had so effectively cheated the animal’s mortal decay.

D. Finnan, Blue Whale, American Museum of Natural History

Meanwhile, in the museum world, curators, scientists, and exhibitors began to push to “properly” introduce audiences to the life, history, and biology of whales. The 1907 blue whale model at the American Museum of Natural History was built out of iron, wood, and canvas, and was eventually covered with a very believable paper-mâché exoskeleton of sorts. “They are building a whale at the Museum of Natural History,” the Wilkes-Barre Record of Pennsylvania reported on January 4, 1907, “from wooden strips, iron rods, piano wires, paper, and glue. They are carpenters, horsesmiths, and wallpaper hangers and when the work has been done in rough, the naturalists will give the finishing touches.”

Even though this wasn’t a “real” whale – it was a model – it represented the best knowledge about whales that the scientific community could offer at the beginning of the twentieth century. And as curators and showmen found, there’s only so much whale authenticity that audiences were willing to tolerate – no leaking, dripping, or smelling – even if those details are just as “real” as the other parts of an exhibit.

Rather than spectacle, credible institutions like the American Museum of Natural History argued, audiences ought to have accuracy. Scientific accuracy, to be precise. Unlike the free-wheeling world of sideshows, museums run by conservators, curators, and biologists could offer scientifically modeled and expertly credible specimens.

Understanding the Blue Whale (National Geographic)

Both sorts of whales – the menagerie act and the model in the American Museum of Natural History – have real and less-than-real parts to them: neither is in its natural habitat. So what makes one of these fake whales more real than the other? The intent? Its manufacture? The materials? What visitors take away? Some combination of everything? Both whales made audiences consider what was real, what was authentic, and how each aspect of the whales changed over time.

Each of the genuinely fake whales from the Great International Menagerie and the American Museum of Natural History balanced a series of tradeoffs in cost, audience, and realness. Whether or not history considers each authentic – or if that could change in the future – is an open question.

The stories of these whales are retold, here, as they appear in my book, Genuine Fakes: How Phony Things Teach Us About Real Stuff (Bloomsbury, Sigma, 2019.)

Noah Charney. The Art of Forgery: The Minds, Motives and Methods of the Master Forgers. London (2015).
Historian Noah Charney takes up the question of fakes, frauds, and forgeries; his book traces truly fantastic stories and offers a perspective from art history as to the cachet that fakes carry.

Byung-Chul Han. Shanzhai: Deconstruction in Chinese. Translated by Philippa Hurd. Bilingual edition. (2017).
“Shanzhai” is a contemporary Chinese neologism that means “fake” and in this longform essay Han discusses all of the ways that “fakes” can exists — from copies to replicas to counterfeits to facsimiles. Every object, every fake, take on a life of its own.

Michael Rossi. “Fabricating Authenticity: Modeling a Whale at the American Museum of Natural History, 1906–1974.” Isis 101, no. 2 (2010): 338–61. https://doi.org/10.1086/653096.

———. “Modeling the Unknown: How to Make a Perfect Whale.” Endeavour 32, no. 2 (June 2008): 58–63. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.endeavour.2008.04.003.
Michael Rossi’s work is key for anyone who want to dig into the specific details of the AMNH whale models.

Kati Stevens. Fake. Object Lessons. (2018).
In Fake, Kati Stevens offers a contemporary read on how “fake” has become a label, a judgement, and a moral judgement in the twenty-first century.

Erin L. Thompson. Possession: The Curious History of Private Collectors from Antiquity to the Present. (2016).
Possession traces the afterlives of antiquities and all of the many and bizarre ways that they’ve been collected and valued over millennia.

Header Image Credit: Richard Lydekker, Sperm Whale Skeleton 1894 (Wikipedia).

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