UT Austin Archives - Not Even Past

The Austin Women Activists Oral History Project

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.

Dean Page Keeton and Academic Freedom at UT Austin: Three Archival Letters

One bonus of archival research is discovering documents irrelevant to the topic but so evocative that they can’t be ignored. In the State Bar of Texas archives, I found three letters from June 1960 between Werdner Page Keeton (1909-1999), Dean of the School of Law of The University of Texas, and two lawyers. Those letters caused me to detour from my project for a while.

Black and white image of W. Page Keeton, Dean of the UT Law School, 1949-1974 — W. Page Keeton, Dean of the UT Law School, 1949-1974
Source: Law School Yearbook, 1959.

Homer L. Bruce, a tax-law partner of the Houston law firm Baker & Botts, sent the first letter to Keeton on June 15, 1960, with “carbon copies” to nine prominent members of the legal profession in Texas. Six days later, one of those nine recipients, a renowned oil and gas lawyer in a Fort Worth firm, Robert E. Hardwicke, also wrote Keeton. Both letters complained strongly about an article just published in the law school’s Texas Law Review by a UT tax-law professor, J. Henry Wilkinson, Jr. The article was titled “ABC—From A to Z,” and the letter writers were outraged that Wilkinson criticized a tax benefit for oil and gas companies known as the “percentage depletion allowance.” The third letter is Keeton’s June 28 response.

Image of letter from Homer L. Bruce to Dean Keeton dated June 15, 1960

The challenged article seems unremarkable today. Wilkinson’s topic was the “ABC” transaction, common in the oil-and-gas business. A producing property’s owner may sell a “production payment,” or a fixed quantity of the minerals to be produced, to a purchaser in a manner that takes advantage of the federal income-tax “allowance,” or deduction, of 27-1/2% of the property’s income, available to oil-producing taxpayers for the “depletion” resulting from the extraction of the minerals in the ground. Through patient examples, Wilkinson demonstrated that the ABC deal was not always as tax-advantageous as was believed. The article did refer to the allowance as “gratuitous.” And that observation drew the ire of Bruce and Hardwicke, who amplified their criticism by insisting that enemies of the depletion allowance—specifically, Hubert H. Humphrey—would use Wilkinson’s characterization of the percentage depletion allowance as “ammunition.”

Image of J. Henry Wilkinson, Jr's June 1960 article in Texas Law Review — *Wilkinson’s June 1960 article in the Texas Law Review*
*Source: www.heinonline.com*

In June 1960, when these letters were written, the Democratic Party’s national convention was a month away, and one still-active candidate for the presidential nomination was indeed Hubert Humphrey, then a two-term Senator from Minnesota who had consistently fought the depletion allowance in Congress. His fight against that and other “tax loopholes” had been unsuccessful but earned him respect as a reformer. In Texas, however, the depletion allowance was a sacred cow. The Texas Law Review had published an earlier article defending the depletion allowance, and the Chair of the Texas Railroad Commission, Ernest O. Thompson, wrote and spoke in favor of the allowance, and virtually all of the national legal literature and newspaper coverage in Texas about the allowance defended it. And Humphrey’s rival from Texas, Lyndon B. Johnson, was a protector of it. Humphrey later became LBJ’s vice-president but “never gave up” and, finally, in 1975, was gratified to see Congress abolish this tax “loophole.”

Black and white photograph of Hubert H. Humphrey — Hubert H. Humphrey
Source: WikimediaCommons

The addressee of the two letters, Keeton, was well acquainted with the oil and gas industry and its issues. He had earned the LL.B. in 1931 at UT, was hired to teach there, and quickly gained recognition in the field of torts, the law of civil injuries, and wrongful death. During World War II, he served in Washington as an executive of the Petroleum Administration for War. After a stint as dean of the Oklahoma University Law School, he accepted the deanship of UT’s law school in 1949, serving until 1974. He distinguished himself at both law schools by fostering racial integration and by continuing to teach torts as well as serving as dean. The law school grew during his deanship, and UT law alumni/ae revere Keeton. The city of Austin renamed the street alongside the law school for him, and he is buried in the State Cemetery by gubernatorial proclamation.

Moreover, Keeton was stalwart and adept, in protecting academic freedom at the law school. One innovative key to his success there was to liberate the school from overreliance on legislative appropriations by creating the UT Law School Foundation to receive alumni/ae contributions. Important supporters of this initiative were law graduates who attained positions of power within the oil and gas industry. For instance, Rex G. Baker of Humble Oil was a key supporter of the Foundation—and also a staunch defender of the depletion allowance.

Those relationships did not deter him. Keeton formulated a masterful response to the two letters that foreclosed any further discussion. “You realize, of course,” he began, “that I cannot act as any kind of a censor and do not even attempt to act as such with respect to what goes in the Review.” Having matter-of-factly vindicated academic freedom, the Dean added that he did not read Wilkinson to make any judgment about “merits or demerits of the percentage depletion allowance.” And by pointing out that the ABC structure does not always work as expected, “Wilkinson may have done a service to the oil industry.” Keeton also observed that the challenged word “gratuitous” was simply “a descriptive term,” indicating that the amount of the tax deduction was not tied to the cost of the property; the tax benefit was indeed essentially free to the oil and gas taxpayer.

Picture of a letter from Dean Page Keeton to Homer L. Bruce dated June 28, 1960 — *Dean Page Keeton to Homer L. Bruce, June 28, 1960*
*Source*: *State Bar of Texas, Archives Dept., via author*.

Academic freedom at UT has had a long history. In 1917, when Governor James E. Ferguson vetoed appropriations for UT because the President would not dismiss faculty to whom Ferguson objected, the Legislature, at the urging of UT alumni/ae, impeached and removed him. In his 1986 oral history interview, Keeton recounted less spectacular but nonetheless significant instances during his tenure of politicians and the Board of Regents seeking to meddle with the faculty and academic matters, efforts Keeton successfully repulsed. But Keeton’s defense of academic freedom was not always public, as in the example of these previously unknown letters in the archive. Keeton’s handling of that situation in June 1960 highlights the ongoing task of University leaders to protect academic freedom, and it burnishes both Keeton’s legacy and the reputation of UT as a place for the free exchange of knowledge and viewpoints.

The State Bar of Texas’s Archives Department, also known as the “Gov. Bill and Vara Daniel Center for Legal History,” contains the Bar’s permanent records. The Archives’ professional archivist also manages and provides access to the collections of the Texas Bar Historical Foundation there. The archives are located in the Texas Law Center in Austin, Texas. The three letters were contributed to this archive in 1992 by J. Chrys Dougherty, a historically minded lawyer; his father-in-law, Ireland Graves, was one of the nine cc recipients of the three letters.

Josiah Daniel (UT Law, J.D. 1978; UT History, M.A. 1986) is a Retired Partner in Residence of the international law firm Vinson & Elkins LLP in its Dallas, Texas office. After four decades of law practice, he now is focusing on the history of the legal profession in Texas and is writing a biography of Dallas congressman Hatton W. Sumners (1875-1962), based on his papers in the Dallas Historical Society’s archive. His C.V. is on his blog: http://blog-josiahmdaniel3.blogspot.com/2018/03/cv.html. He may be reached at jdaniel@velaw.com.

Sources for this article include:

Lewis L.Gould, Progressives and Prohibitionists: Texas Democrats in the Wilson Era (Austin: UT Press, 1973).

“W. Page Keeton, An Oral History Interview” (Austin: UT Austin School of Law, Tarlton Law Library, Legal Bibliography Series No. 36 (1992) 49-52, 69-74.

Theodore H. White, The Making of the President 1960 (N.Y., Harper, 1963)

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.

2019 History PhDs on Not Even Past

This month on Not Even Past we are celebrating the accomplishments of seventeen students who completed their doctoral dissertations and received their PhDs in History in 2018-2019. Above you see some of them pictured. Below you will find each of their names and the title of their dissertations.

Many of these students were also contributors to Not Even Past throughout their time here, developing their skills as public historians alongside their training as a academics. Here we offer a comprehensive index to all our new PhDs’ publications on Not Even Past. Congratulations to all!

Ahmad Tawfek Agbaria
Dissertation: The Return of the Turath: Arab Rationalist Association 1959-2000

Ordinary Egyptians: Creating the Modern Nation through Popular Culture by Ziad Fahmy (2011)

Israeli tanks advancing on the Golan Heights. June 1967 (via Wikipedia)

Christopher Babits
Dissertation: To Cure a Sinful Nation: Conversion Therapy in the United States

The Miseducation of Cameron Post (Dir: Desiree Akhavan, 2018)

Digital Teaching: A Mid-Semester Timeline

The Blemished Archive: How Documents Get Saved

Age of Fracture by Daniel T. Rodgers (2011)

Nature Boy, 30 for 30 (Dir: Rory Karpf, 2017)

Doing History in the Modern U.S. Survey: Teaching with and Analyzing Academic Articles

Finding Hitler (in All the Wrong Places?)

The Rise of Liberal Religion by Matthew Hedstrom (2013)

Encountering America: Humanistic Psychology, Sixties Culture, and the Shaping of the Modern Self by Jessica Grogan (2012)

Another Perspective on the Texas Textbook Controversy

Religious Book Week Poster from 1925 (via Library of Congress)

Bradley Joseph Dixon
Dissertation: Republic of Indians: Law, Politics, and Empire in the North American Southeast, 1539-1830

Facing North from Inca Country: Entanglement, Hybridity, and Rewriting Atlantic History

Map of Virginia, discovered and as described by Captain John Smith, 1606; engraved by William Hole (Via Wikimedia commons)

Luritta DuBois
Dissertation: United in Our Diversity: The Reproductive Healthcare Movement, 1960-2000

Historical Perspectives on Marshall (dir. Reginal Hudlin, 2017)

UT Gender Symposium: Women’s Bodies and Political Agendas

Thurgood Marshall in 1957 (Library of Congress)

Dennis Fisher
Dissertation: To Not Sell One Perch: Algonquin Politics and Culture at Kitigan Zibi During the Twentieth Century

The Many Histories of South Austin: The Old Sneed Mansion

A 1936 photograph of the Sneed House taken by the Historic American Buildings Survey (via Library of Congress)

Kristie Flannery
Dissertation: The Impossible Colony: Piracy, the Philippines, and Spain’s Asian Empire

A New History Journal Produced by Students

#changethedate: Australia’s Holiday Controversy

Acapulco-Manila: The Galleon, Asia and Latin America, 1565-1815

Notes from The Field: The Pope in Manila

Outlaws of the Atlantic by Marcus Rediker (2014)

Among the Powers of the Earth: the American Revolution and the Making of a New World Empire by Eliga Gould

Sixteen Months in a Leaky Boat

The Sapphires (2012)

2012 and the End of the World: The Western Roots of the Maya Apocalypse by Matthew Restall and Amara Solari (2011)

Imperial Subjects: Race and Identity in Colonial Latin America edited by Andrew B. Fisher and Matthew D. O’Hara (2009)

True History of the Kelly Gang by Peter Carey (2001)

Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War by Tony Horwitz (1999)

detail of an 18c map depicting a pirate ship sailing near the Philippines.

Pedro Murillo Velarde and Nicolas de la Cruz Bagay. Mapa de las yslas Philipinas (1744) (Detail: Benson Latin America Collection, UT Austin)

Travis Michael Gray
Dissertation: Amid the Ruins: The Reconstruction of Smolensk Oblast, 1943-1953

Every Day Stalinism, by Sheila Fitzpatrick (2000)

Stalin’s Genocides by Norman Naimark (2011)

Soviets fighting during World War II (via wiki commons)

William Kramer
Dissertation: Faith, Heresy and Rebellion: Resisting the Henrician Reformation in Ireland, 1530-1540

Henry VIII, Elizabeth I, and Edward VI (via Art Institute of Chicago)

John Lisle
Dissertation: Science and Espionage: How the State Department and the CIA Deployed American Scientists during the Cold War

What Killed Albert Einstein

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

Soviet postage stamp celebrating the 10th anniversary of the launch of the Sputnik satellite

James Martin
Dissertation: In Search of the Nixon Doctrine on Latin America: Levers of Influence and Resistance in Hemispheric Relations

Vice President Richard Nixon’s motorcade drives through Caracas, Venezuela and is attacked by demonstrators, May 1958 (National Archives via Wikipedia)

Kazushi Minami
Dissertation: Rebuilding the Special Relationship: People’s Diplomacy and U.S.-Chinese Relations in the Cold War

Peeping Through the Bamboo Curtain: Archives in the People’s Republic of China

Cold War Crucible: The Korean Conflict and the Postwar World by Hajimu Masuda (2015)

Past and Present in Modern China

Historical Perspectives on Hayao Miyazaki’s The Wind Rises (2013)

shot from animated film of a boy looking up at airplane in the sky

from Hayao Miyazaki’s film The Wind Rises

Elizabeth O’Brien
Dissertation: Intimate Interventions: The Cultural Politics of Reproductive Surgery in Mexico, 1790-1940

Partners in Conflict: The Politics of Gender, Sexuality, and Labor in The Chilean Agrarian Reform, 1950-1973 by Heidi Tinsman.

Gendered Compromises: Political Culture and the State in Chile, 1920-1950 by Karin Rosemblatt

The Deepest Wounds: A Labor and Environmental History of Sugar in Northeast Brazil by Thomas D. Rogers (2010)

“Women Advance with the Flag of the Motherland” La Unidad Popular poster (1970).

Nakia Parker
Dissertation: Trails of Tears and Freedom: Black Life in Indian Slave Country,1830-1866

Popular Culture in the Classroom

The First Texans: An Exhibit in Jester Hall

Confederados: The Texans of Brazil

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

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

Christopher Rose
Dissertation: On the Home Front: Food, Medicine, and Disease in WWI Egypt

You’re Teaching WHAT?

Wrong About Everything

Mapping & Microbes: The New Archive (No. 22)

Searching for Armenian Children in Turkey: Work Series on Migration, Exile, and Displacement

Industrial Sexuality: Gender in a Small Town in Egypt

Texas is Adopting New History Textbooks: Maybe They Should Be Historically Accurate

Exploring the Silk Road

The Ottoman Age of Exploration by Giancarlo Casale (2010)

What’s Missing from ‘Argo’ (2012)

Chris is also the co-founder and main force behind our podcast, 15 Minute History, where he has done many of our interviews.

Map showing typhus outbreaks in Egypt, September 1, 1914 – May 31, 1919 (created by Chris Rose)

Edward Flavian Shore
Dissertation: Avenger of Zumbi: The Nature of Fugitive Slave Communities and Their Descendants in Brazil

History and Advocacy: Brazil and Turmoil

Sanctuary Austin: 1980s and Today

Beyonce as Historian: Black Power at the DPLA

Remembering Willie “El Diablo” Wells and Baseball’s Negro League

The Public Historian: Giving it Back

The Quilombo Activist’s Archives and Post-Custodial Preservation, Part II

The Quilombo Activist’s Archives and Post-Custodial Preservation, Part I

An Anticipated Tragedy: Reflections on Brazil’s National Museum

The Public Historian: Quilombola Seeds

Getz/Gilverto Fifty Years Later: A Retrospective

Por Ahora: The Legacy of Hugo Chávez Frías

The Cuban Connection by Eduardo Saénz Rovner (2008)

Che: A Revolutionary Life by Jon Lee Anderson

Narco-Modernities

Photo from Edward Shore’s Collection

Eyal Weinberg
Dissertation: Tending to the Body Politic: Doctors, Military Repression, and Transitional Justice in Brazil (1961-1988)

Our History Mixtape: Embracing Music in the Classroom

Ex Cathedra: Stories by Machado de Assis: Bilingual edition (2014)

For Social Peace in Brazil: Industrialists and the Remaking of the Working Class in Sao Paulo, 1920-1964 by Barbara Weinstein (1996)

The Works Progress Administration’s music project employed musicians as instrumentalists, singers, concert performers, and music teachers during the Great Depression (via Library of Congress)

Zhaojin Zeng
Dissertation: Nourishing Shanxi: Indigenous Entrepreneurship, Regional Industry, and the Transformation of a Chinese Hinterland Economy, 1907-2004

Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics: Entrepreneurship and the State by Yansheng Huang (2008)

Cantonese bazaar during Chinese New Year at the Grant Avenue, San Francisco, circa 1914 (via Wikipedia)

Pictured in photo: Dr. John Lisle, Prof Daina Berry, Dr. William Kramer, Dr. Nakia Parker, Prof. Ann Twinam, Dr. Christopher Rose, Dr. Elizabeth O’Brien, Dr. Eyal Weinberg.

The Racial Geography Tour at UT Austin

By Edmund T. Gordon

For almost two decades, Ted Gordon has been leading tours of UT Austin that show how racism, patriarchy, and politics are baked into the landscape and architecture of the campus. This month, that tour goes live online. In honor of the launch of the new website, “The Racial Geography Tour,” we are featuring an interview Joan Neuberger conducted with Prof. Gordon last week.

JN: Let’s start with the origins of the tour: when and what made you want to start?

TG: Well that’s a good question, and there’s no real answer to it. I don’t know how long I’ve been doing it, and I’m not quite sure when it started, and the impetus for doing it is also foggy. It probably started somewhere around 2000, which means that I’ve been doing it for about almost 20 years now I guess, getting close to that, and I think it grew out of requests that were made to me as a young faculty member here to talk about the racial history of The University of Texas. I remember being invited to talk to the housing staff about racial history, and I think one of the things I wanted to do was talk about the history of the university being integrated in relation to its racial past, and being that it was a housing group I think I began to integrate some of the ideas about building and architecture into that discussion, so it actually started out as a slide show, and then at some point there was someone from out of town who was visiting. I was talking a little about the racial history and I was talking about, well actually we have Confederate statues on campus, and there’s a Confederate flag that flies and I said well hold on a second let me show you, nice day, we went out and started walking around and I think that’s the origin of it, some time ago

And you’ve been doing it on and off for a while. What kinds of responses have you had? Do people come up to while you’re talking and engage with you?

Sometimes they do, absolutely have people who join the tour as I’m doing it, and ask if they can follow along and certainly I have a lot of eavesdroppers and folks like that. Almost all the responses I get from both onlookers and people who are on the tour has been positive, well I know this to be the fact, that not that much readily available history of the campus and also not many tours of the campus itself that are available to folks outside the ones that are given to prospective students and all that, so I think there’s a fair amount of curiosity among students and others about the environment that they’re walking through on a day to day basis, so people seem to enjoy hearing about that and they want to know more about it.

There’s a lot in the ordinary (prospective) tours that the tours don’t go into — history of the tower, the kind of history that you’re talking about. What made you want to put it online?

The Littlefield Mansion

There’s a couple of things that made me want to put it online. Well, it wasn’t my idea first of all. The idea came from a young person who was working with us up in African and African Diaspora Studies, she was the electronic specialist or something like that and at any rate she was also the person who was helping me with my calendar, and helping to schedule the tours that I was doing, and she saw that the demand for the tour was becoming larger and larger and it was taking up more and more of my time, and then she also has this kind of digital and media background and thought it might be a good idea, and I think she was actually the one who got in touch with LAITS here and they jumped on it for whatever reasons, and that’s how it got going, so it wasn’t even really my idea. For me, really, it will help because I spend a lot of time giving tours. I gave 25 last semester, and it’s a large amount of time. I’ve got a lot of other things going on, and also people thought that it would be good to have it be available to a larger audience, and so that’s what’s behind it.

So the tour begins at the Littlefield mansion. Why did you start there?

Well, part of it is fortuitous. In recent years, my office was across the street from the Littlefield mansion, and so rather than having me hike some place else to begin, it seemed like a reasonable place to begin, but also it is the Littlefield Mansion. Littlefield personally had a lot to do with the origins of the University, but even more than that, the Littlefields positionality in Texas society is for me kind of indicative or emblematic of the folks who played the key role in the early years of the university, deciding that we need one and also serving the top positions in university, Littlefield’s biography in many ways really brings together a lot of forces that created the early university as it was. Plus there’s a building there that’s named after him, and it’s right across the street from the 40 Acres, so there’s just a number of reasons why it’s a reasonable place to start.

George Washington Littlefield

Let’s talk about his biography a little bit, because as you say it really brings together a lot of the different things that allowed white European people to come to Texas and make a lot of money, and be able to then found a university. So first of all he comes from a slave owning family–

Yes he does, from Mississippi–

A cotton producing family–

Absolutely–

And why did he stop farming cotton?

Well the big issue for Littlefield and all the rest of these folks was the Civil War, and so he went off the fight the Civil War in 1861, was injured, he had his man servant/ slave there with him who rescued him on the battlefield after he’s injured, and brought him back to Gonzalez, Texas where he recuperated, but that was the biggest issue. So after the end of the Civil War, there’s a problem with labor. In other words, where do you get enough labor now that the enslaved folks are free to be able to carry out, but there’s also problems with disease and various other kinds of things, financial disruption after the end of the Civil War, in the time of reconstruction, so he finds it difficult to be able to rebuild his cotton growing operation and then stumbles on to cattle, longhorn cattle.

And so he started raising cattle?

He had always been raising cattle as a side-line on his plantation, or in the area that he owned, but he discovered that by raising his own cattle and then buying cattle from neighboring farms and plantations and then driving them north to Kansas that he could make some money. I think his first drive was in the 1870s and he made a fair amount of money, and then from then on he didn’t actually drive the cattle himself, but he went into that business and became a cattle baron, owning property throughout central Texas, and up in the Panhandle, and in New Mexico, and west Texas, ended up controlling a huge amount of range land.

And where did all that land come from?

Well the land comes from, one of the things I talk about on the tour, is Littlefield was an ex-Confederate, and so in the period of time immediately after the Civil War, he was very much against what he would consider the invasion, the occupation of Texas by federal troops, but its those same federal troops and cavalry who were able to clear west Texas and New Mexico and particularly the Panhandle of the Comanche and other Native Americans who were there, which opened up that territory for people like Littlefield who would be able to exploit them, and then simultaneously, the massacre of the buffalo, over 20 million buffalo, created what Littlefield would see as virgin grass for his longhorns to feed on, and so it’s that kind of combined operation, plus the advent of the railroads pushing west from Kansas City, St Louis into Kansas that enabled them to make millions of dollars.

There are rumors that there are slave quarters in the basement of the Littlefield house.

There are rumors, but of course the Littlefield house was build in the early 1890s, or he occupied it in the 1890s. That’s 30 years more or less after the end of the Civil War, so of course there were no enslaved people who lived in the house, however, ex-enslaved people did and we know that Nathanial Stokes who was his man servant, ex-slave, till the day he died. He lived in the carriage house, above the carriage house and stables in the back of the Littlefield house there, and so I think the quarters that exist in the basement of the Littlefield mansion were probably quarters for domestic servants and many of them were undoubtedly ex-enslaved people, and maybe even his own.

So we’ve really just scratched the surface of Littlefield’s history, and let me just say at this point that there are additional resources on the website that go into more detail on everything that were going to be talking about.

You move from the Littlefield house to what used to be call the Women’s Campus, and this also is a fascinating piece of history that I didn’t know anything about, and I’ve been here for a long time, so can you describe the women’s campus and its architectural layout, and what was significant about that?

Alice Littlefield

The original housing for women on campus was over by where the Flawn Academic Center is now, but in the 1820s, Littlefield in his will left money and a piece of property to build the Littlefield dorm, named after his wife, as a dorm for freshman women, and then in 30s the University decided to create other living spaces for women in that vicinity, Andrews and Carothers were I think both opened in 1935, and so they created a women’s side of the campus. The main building there that kind of defines the whole space is Gearing Hall, the Home Economics building and if there’s any question about who that’s for, there’s a sculpture of a women and child on the façade there. They also put in Anna Hiss Gym, which is a gym for women, as well as playing fields for women behind the gym, and tennis courts just to the south of the gym for women. So it’s an area of campus for women built behind, on the north side, of the Tower, and in the tour I talk about the symbology of having women outside of the public sphere, outside of, or on the opposite side of, the entrance to the University, and what that means in terms of the gendered ideologies of the time.

You talk about how Gearing Hall was designed by the same architect, Paul Cret, who designed the Tower –the Tower’s our big administrative center, it’s the first building on campus, it is where the President’s office is housed now, the central library used to be there, it’s a big important tall building — and the same person who designed that designed Gearing Hall as a flat sort of circular building and the gendered nature of those two structures seems really clear, but you go further than that, and talk about the way they’re placed and the way the Tower even looks. Can you talk about that a little bit?

Gearing Hall

Sure. The point I’m trying to make on that whole section of the tour is to talk about how it is that space is gendered and space in terms of location of things, but also the design, the architecture, the naming, etc. And if you look at both the way in which the original women’s dorms, if you think about Littlefield, Carothers, and Andrews — Blanton wasn’t built until 1955, so the honors quad is only formed in the 1950s after they put Blanton there. So it’s a U shape, an open U shape that faces to the gym, and then you have Gearing Hall which is placed right on the axis, the north-south axis behind the Tower, to the north of the Tower, where’s there’s no mall leading up to it, and it opens up, it’s a also U shaped as well, and has a gateway, which opens up to the south with the Tower looming up above it. So it’s clear to me that there’s a kind of receptacle aspect to the architecture of Gearing Hall and a phallic kind of aspect to the Tower as a seat of power and kind of the public symbol of the University, and very masculine in that kind of way, and so there’s a femininity and a masculinity about the way the architecture is designed and Cret [Paul Cret], was the main consulting architect for all those buildings, and either implicitly or explicitly the gendered aspect of it is very clear.

And then you walk around to the west side of the Tower, which also has a really interesting history. The west mall is filled with these large planters and limestone walls, why was that?

The west campus, pretty shortly after the university was opened in 1883 became an area of residence for, originally faculty members and students, now it’s mostly students. And if you look carefully at the west mall, and you look at the planters and you look at the trees there, you’ll see that trees are much younger than the trees on the south mall and so they’re about 40, 50, 60 years old. So if you think we’re in 2019, you go back 50 years and now you’re talking about the 1960s, the late 1960s — so on the west mall which leads to Guadalupe and west campus where students are on the other side, think about what students were engaged in, in the late 1960s. There was a lot of political activity, civil rights, anti-war, free speech, and all those things were in fine form here at the University of Texas, students used that west mall area as an area of congregation. There was a relatively conservative President of the Board of Regents, Frank Erwin, we’ve got the Erwin Center named after him, who was particularly incensed by the students’ intransience or their rowdiness in terms of their politics, and one of his ways of dealing with it was to order that the University convert the mall into what we have today, putting walls up and down Guadalupe, and putting planters in the middle of the mall, and planting trees and in other ways making it difficult for students, large groups of students, to access, to really control the access to the campus, and to discourage the assembly of students in that particular area. So it’s a politicized landscape, very pretty, but political .

Lets talk about the statues on campus. Statues, everyone knows have been in the news, have been controversial politically. We have some new ones of civil rights heroes Martin Luther King Jr., Cesar Chavez, Barbara Jordan, and other statues are only marked by their former pedestals, so what’s that about? Could you talk about the statues?

I learned a new word with this, the removal of the statues, they’re actually plinths, who knew, and the plinths are still there and actually some of the statues are still there. I don’t know if you’ve been to see the Hogg statue, the return of James Hogg

I wanted to ask you about that…

Right, so the statues were placed actually ultimately in the early 1930s, but George Washington Littlefield began thinking about having statues be placed on campus probably in 1915 or 1916. 1915, if you think about, that’s 50 years after the end of the Civil War. There are some historians who claim that Littlefield was the wealthiest ex-Confederate, and he was very active in the state of Texas and elsewhere in terms of trying to memorialize the Civil War and the folks who fought in it. And he was a very big proponent, as you were mentioning earlier, of the Lost Cause. In fact, he and John H. Reagan were some of the biggest proponents of that.

The Lost Cause is an ideology which tries to say that the Civil War was fought to preserve the Constitution and the individual state’s rights to preserve what they considered to be one of the key aspects of the Constitution, which is the right to private property. So they want to make the claim that what the Civil War was about was a noble cause to enshrine and further the Constitutional rights that were originally granted; that the cause of the Civil War was not slavery itself but this issue over Constitutional and states’ rights within the context of the Constitution.

The Littlefield Fountain

One of the things that’s interesting, in the inscription that existed on the wall just to the west of the Littlefield Fountain, is an inscription that talks about Littlefield’s giving the money to construct this and one of the things it says is that the Civil War was fought for state’s rights and doesn’t mention slavery at all, so slavery gets disappeared. Littlefield is a very big proponent of that and so is J. H. Reagan. In fact, they played a major role in placing the Memorial to the Confederate Dead, which is at the entrance to the State Capitol grounds, which has Jefferson Davis as the largest figure there. Littlefield also, as a proponent of the Lost Cause, unlike other proponents of the Lost Cause who really looked to Robert E. Lee as the key figure in the Confederacy because he’s a less political figure and one who’s less identified with slavery than Jefferson Davis. Littlefield and Reagan were very big Jefferson Davis folks. So Littlefield gave the major part of the money for the Jefferson Davis memorial that’s up in Kentucky and he decided that he wanted to have Jefferson Davis as well as Robert E Lee, Albert Sidney Johnston, J. H. Reagan, and James Hogg statues built on campus as a memorial to the Lost Cause. And his original idea was to have a huge bronze arch that extended over the south entrance to the 40 Acres, with Jefferson Davis right in the center of it all.

That got changed because there was some backlash, actually even before Littlefield passed in 1920. Littlefield put this idea and the money for it into his will. But there were people on campus who didn’t want as much of an association with the Lost Cause as Littlefield and some others did so there was some back and forth about that. So that’s when it was decided to add the statue for Woodrow Wilson. And also when it became clear, particularly after Littlefield’s death, that there wasn’t enough money in the will to build the entire arch, that’s when they decided instead of the arch to build the Littlefield fountain, which was a memorial to WW1.

So the idea then becomes that there’s a Lost Cause aspect of it, which was what Littlefield’s original wish was, but there’s also a notion of national unification around WWI but also particularly around the presidency of Woodrow Wilson. Because Woodrow Wilson, of course, was a Democrat, a Southern Democrat. He also was a white supremacist. He resegregated the army, resegregated the federal offices in Washington, DC, wrote histories that were relatively sympathetic to the antebellum south and critical of Reconstruction. So this was the kind of figure that Littlefield but also the leadership of the University could get around.

Paul Philippe Cret (1876-1945) in 1910. (via Wikipedia)

That’s the history of how that got placed. Of course the final placement was the same person, Paul Cret, who was the architect (of the Tower and Gearing Hall), decided that instead of having those statues at the very entrance to the University, to put them along the walkaway thereby tying the tower to the statuary and to the Littlefield Fountain and making of it a, well I have a relatively lengthy analysis of the white nationalist aspects of that whole tableaux, which I lay out in the racial geography tour.

You also mentioned the MLK statue and those others. One of the things that is clear to me is that all these symbols speak to each other. And there almost certainly would not have been a Martin Luther King statue on campus if those Confederate statues hadn’t existed and without a Martin Luther King statue on campus, we wouldn’t have had Barbara Jordan and we also wouldn’t have Cesar Chavez. So they all are in one way of another, in conversation with one another in interesting ways.

And in conversation with the community, right?, because it was protest about Jefferson Davis that led to the erection of a statue of MLK.

Yes, there were students in particular who thought not only Jefferson Davis but the rest of the Confederate statues were problematic. The University back in 70s was not about to move them, or in the 80s or in the 90s or do anything else about them, so one of the alternatives was to produce alternative symbology and that’s where Martin Luther King comes up.

Now if you ask most people on campus if Confederate flags flew in prominent places at U.T. I think even people who really care about these things would be surprised to know that they did. So where were they and how did they fly under the radar for so long?

Well they fly under the radar because most people don’t recognize the national flag of the Confederacy. What they recognize is what has been publicized since the 1950s and 60s, which is the battle flag of the Confederacy, which is St. Andrew’s cross. That became the kind of symbol of the rebirth of Ku Klux Klan, the white citizens’ groups at the time of, as part of the anti-civil rights and anti-Brown vs. Board of Education movements in the 50s and 60s. So most people don’t know the Stars and Bars as the Confederate Flag. That flag flew at least at two places. One was over the stadium over the scoreboard, and it also flew at the Erwin Center as part of Six Flags. Six Flags over Texas. Six Flags over Texas became an important symbol of Texas basically around the time of the Texas centennial in 1936. The Six Flags over Texas of course are Spain, France, Mexico, the Lone Star flag, the Confederate flag, and the United States flag. These are all the countries that Texas was under, one way or another. One of the things that the state of Texas was trying to do in the 1930s was to distance itself somewhat from the Lost Cause ideology, and to project itself as an American state, and as a pioneer state associated with American pioneering move west etc., and as a western state. And so in the sense that the United States was engaged in a struggle for freedom from previous colonial eras, Texas was positioning itself in that same kind of, using that same kind of notion of move towards progress, progress towards freedom, and independence, and so it emphasized its various associations on the way towards this America destiny of westward movement, and increased freedom, and progress, and all that. So within that context, the Six Flags over Texas became one of the key symbols of Texas and the Confederate flag was right there in the middle of it.

There is still Confederate symbology here on this campus. If you go up to the Tower, which was erected at precisely that time, if you look on the outside of tower it says 1836-1936. The Tower was open in 1937, but it was still part of this Texas centennial celebration mode, and if you go up to the second floor and you go into what the main room used to be the university main library and now is the Life Sciences library, and if you look up you’ll see these big plaster cast seals for all the six flags, for all those six countries, and right there is the symbology of the Confederacy. And one of the things that people have no idea about and actually is represented by the fact there are two statues left on the south mall. Those two statues are the assemblage which is the Littlefield fountain and the other one is George Washington. So why is the George Washington statue still there? Well it’s not associated with the Confederacy, but if you go up to the second floor of the Tower and you go into the Life Sciences library and look at that symbol of the Confederate nation, who’s right there in the middle? It’s George Washington on horseback. So in some sense the Daughters of the Revolution who are paying for putting George Washington’s statue on the mall in actually 1930, it didn’t get up until 1955 or 1950-sometime. He’s put there as the father of two countries, he’s the father of the United States, but he’s also the father of the Confederacy and that comes out through this Confederate symbology of which the Confederate flags were part, from the 1930s up until when they were taken down, I guess a year and a half ago.

Names of buildings are especially significant on campus, and you talk about a lot of different names, and naming, and changing of names, so let’s talk about some of those. First of all, the main library on campus, which everyone knows as the PCL, what does that stand for?

Ervin Perry and Carlos Castañeda

That’s Perry-Castañeda. That library was open in the late 70s, in fact must have been 78 because they had their anniversary last year and I think both the Perry and the Castañeda families were present for that. That was quite an event. But yes that library was opened in the late 70s and named after Ervin Perry, who was the first African American who was hired in a tenure track position here at the University of Texas, in the School of Engineering. He actually went on to get tenure and then passed as an Associate Professor. And Carlos Castañeda had been an undergraduate, a Mexican American undergraduate here, and then I think he got his Masters, I believe he got his PhD here as well, came back as a lecturer and he taught for a while, and I believe he was associated with the Benson Library for many years. So that [main] library was appropriately named after a couple of the pioneers in terms of the integration of the University of Texas.

And then in the other direction, if we move down to the hill to the Darrell K. Royal stadium, Darrell K. Royal is a hero to many people in Texas. Who was he, why was he celebrated, and what’s left out of the story?

Aerial view of DKR Memorial Stadium on the Texas campus as seen on Sunday April 23, 2017.
RALPH BARRERA/AMERICAN-STATESMAN

Darrell K. Royal was a very successful football coach, in fact, probably more people know about him and his success than they know about anything else. If you can’t name anybody else associated with the University of Texas, you can usually name either Earl Campbell or Darrell K. Royal. He won three national football championships as coach here, but what people don’t usually know is that his second, the one in 1969, has the distinction of being the last all white national championship football team. Darrell in later years claimed that he didn’t recruit any black folks for the team because alumni wouldn’t like it, which is probably true, but nevertheless, he didn’t, and there’s a movie about when the University of Texas at Austin was to play Syracuse in the Cotton Bowl and the University of Texas football team refused to play or allow Ernie Davis, who was one of the early black stars for Syracuse, to play in the game. There’s a whole movie about that. So racial segregation in Texas football or Texas athletics in general was pretty extreme, although to University of Texas’ credit, we were one of the first schools in the Southwest Conference to integrate. We had our first black track athletes were recruited in 1964, and finally in 1970, actually Julius Whittier, who just passed last year, was the first black football player at the University of Texas to play on a national championship football team, when the University won. But even the basketball team, Royal went on to be the A.D. for a number of years, the athletic director, and his [basketball] coach who eventually integrated the team, I have a quote of him saying that they didn’t have any black basketball players on the team because there were no black boys in the state of Texas who were good enough or tall enough to play.

So in 1954 the Supreme Court decides the famous case of Brown vs. Board of Education and that prohibited racial segregation in public schools. U.T. responded in various ways, but one of the ways is architectural, and your tour takes us to sites of several dorms that were new in the 50s maybe we could talk about that for a bit.

One of the things that happens is first of all, there’s Swett vs. Board of Education which is finally won, the supreme court decision that’s won by Heman Swett along with Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP in the 1950s. So immediately after that we get our first black students at the University of Texas, but they’re all graduate students. And none of the graduate students were allowed to stay on campus until around 1954 or 55 where there was space made in one dorm, which is down by where the San Jacinto garages are for some of those folks. Almost immediately subsequent to that, University of Texas, and this is now after the Brown vs. Board of Education decision in 1954; in 1956 the University of Texas decides to allow the first black undergraduates to come to campus. At that point they had to decide what to do about housing for those students. The decision was made not to offer housing at all to black women, so most black women who came to the University of Texas in 56 lived in a cooperative down on 10^th St. on what used to be East Avenue — I-35 has now been placed over 10^th St. — in effect the dorm where they lived was destroyed in order to be able to put I-35 through. But anyway it was a co-op, and it was co-op which they shared with women from Huston Tillotson. There were a few black women who were allowed to stay in a co-op, which was across the street from where Carothers is now, where the Belo Communications building is — Whitis House was a co-op in which a small number of black women were allowed to stay, but that was off campus, the University didn’t own it at that point.

The University decided to allow some black men to stay on campus, and those folks were placed in basically two dorms that were dorms that had been purchased after World War II as temporary housing for students on campus. They were army barracks that were dismantled and brought to campus and built back up again. So one was placed more or less where the Alumni Center is now, and the other is placed over where the San Jacinto parking garage is. Ironically, in that period of time the Law School had decided to build a new, very luxurious dormitory for graduate students and law students. It was the first dormitory that was air conditioned on campus. It was opened in 1954 shortly after the Brown vs. Board of Education Supreme Court decision and the dean of the law school decided to name it after William Simkins, who was a law professor for 30 years, very well known, but he also was grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan. He and his brother, who was actually a UT regent, had started the Klan in Florida. So right after, within weeks to months after the Supreme Court decision, the head of the law school decides to name a dorm after a grand dragon the Ku Klux Klan, and right behind it is the wooden, tar paper shack, army surplus dorm that they designated for black students, two years later in 1956, so the juxtaposition was hard to miss, pretty complete.

Let’s finish up with something else that surprised me, the story of the Eyes of Texas, the song that students sing without probably knowing the history of it, so you take the tour to the Texas Cowboys Pavilion, which is also right down there by the dorms you were just talking about. Can you tell us about that site and about the activities there?

We cover this in two places. One is in front of the Robert E Lee statue. Robert E Lee, very few people know this, and it does seem strange, but Robert E. Lee became a University President right after the end of the Civil War, so he loses the Civil War and within a couple of years he is the President of Washington University in Virginia, which later became Washington and Lee. He’s the President and there is a young man by the name of Prather who is a law student under him, who subsequently became a President of the University of Texas. Now one of the things that Prather brought to the University of Texas when he came was a saying. Robert E. Lee at the end of every speech he made to his collective students and faculty members would say “The eyes of the south are upon you,” and so when Prather got to the University of Texas he decided to take freely from what Lee had been saying, and at the end of his speeches to his assembled students and faculty members he would say “The eyes of Texas are upon you,” taking it directly from Lee. Students of course found that to be interesting, and they decided to create a satirical song about it that put words to it, “the Eyes of Texas are upon you,” and the words are probably very familiar to many of you who are listening to this, and they put it to a familiar tune, which was “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad,” which actually comes from “I’ve Been Working on the Levee,” which is either a work song sung by black folks or a minstrel song that was developed making fun of black folks, but either one, they took that tune. And then its first performances were in minstrel shows, blackface minstrel shows, the Hancock Opera House down on Sixth Street was actually the first time it was performed, and it was performed in blackface. So it comes from the minstrel tradition, it’s a satiric tune, it plays off Robert E. Lee, and was originally sung in blackface.

And how is this connected with the Texas Cowboys?

Well the Texas Cowboys are an interesting group. It’s one of the primary “spirit groups” and has been around for many years. They certainly sing the song and all that but one of the things the Texas Cowboys were most known for was they would put on minstrel shows as part of, sometimes twice a year, but almost always at least once a year, during either the fall Homecoming or during the spring Roundup celebrations. And so they would put on minstrel shows, there were comedy shows and musical shows. As many as 60 of these young people would dress in blackface and cavort around. The racism was so extreme that they also played Mexican Americans in blackface. So you have stereotyping and denigration of Mexican Americans in sombreros and serapes and things like that in blackface, as well what they considered to be black people dressed in stripes and other kinds of disparaging kinds of ways, and that went on until 1964.

Til 1964?

1964-1965 it was outlawed, there was one final young cowboy who raced across the stage in black face, but there’s been kind of racially tinged play, you could call it, associated with the Roundup for years and years, well through the 1990s.

Prof. Gordon

Well thank you for making this history known to all of us in the community, and I think to a lot of people outside the community will be really interested in it. The website will definitely make it accessible for people on campus and off campus too, so thank you and thanks for talking to us today.

Well thank you for bringing me in, and thank you for asking me insightful questions, and giving me a chance to talk about what’s going here on campus, or what went on on campus.

You can listen to this interview on 15 Minute History.

You can see the online Racial Geography Tour at racialgeographytour.org

That website will include further reading on all the topics we discuss.

The Empire of the Dandelion: Environmental History in Al Crosby’s Footsteps

Photo of Alfred Crosby (via Washington Post)

By Megan Raby

This essay is adapted from Dr. Raby’s remarks at a symposium to honor Al Crosby that was sponsored by the Institute for Historical Studies at UT Austin on February 4, 2019.

Alfred Crosby’s work has been with me for a long time––actually longer than I can remember. I routinely assign Ecological Imperialism in my undergraduate course on Global Environmental History, but long before I had ever read that book, I had unknowingly encountered his work. That is, of course, through the concept of the “Columbian exchange”––also the title of his most influential book. By the time I went to elementary school, this once revolutionary way of framing the role of disease, crops, weeds, and domestic animals as central to world history was presented simply as common knowledge.

By putting environmental history at the center, Crosby replaced the older narrative of conquest with a narrative of biocultural encounter and exchange. Instead of a one-way process largely determined by European might, Crosby showed the importance of, on one hand, the great tragedy of virgin soil epidemics and indigenous demographic collapse and, on the other, the ongoing story of how the crops domesticated by the indigenous peoples of the Americas remade the landscapes and cultures of the rest of the world.

In many ways, I think we take this narrative shift for granted today. But to be taken for granted in this way is, I think, a major accomplishment for any historian…perhaps especially for an environmental historian. Even as the field continues to be one of the most rapidly growing subfields of history, many environmental historians still fear that their work remains on the fringes. Is environmental history still seen as a novelty or fad? Do our colleagues take the field seriously enough, say, to give pigs and dandelions a key place in a survey course on U.S. or world history?

Al Crosby’s feat is all the more impressive because he was essentially writing “environmental history” before there was such a thing. In interviews, he often pointed out that half a dozen presses rejected The Columbian Exchange before it finally got published in 1972––its biological perspective on European contact with the Americas was seen as just too arcane of a subject.

But only a few years later Crosby could be counted among the first generation of self-described environmental historians. Crosby was one of the founding members of the American Society for Environmental History, for example, when it was founded in 1977. There was now a new group of scholars who insisted on taking nature seriously as an actor in human history––focusing not on military conquests or presidential politics, but rather on how humans and nature have fundamentally shaped and reshaped each other.

Crosby was no longer alone, but he still stood out. And the ways in which he stood out reveal the lasting impact and relevance of his contributions.

For one thing, it is important to note that the other major founders of environmental history were, for the most part, focused on the United States and especially U.S. Western history. In contrast, Crosby’s work was truly global in scope. Rather than the one-way story of European expansion, The Columbian Exchange shows us New World crops remaking Europe, Africa, and Asia. And with Ecological Imperialism, he tested his thesis about the interplay of ecology and empire not just in the Americas, but with cases everywhere from the Canary Islands to Iceland and New Zealand. In fact, in all his books––on everything from the rise of quantification to the history of energy––Crosby explored truly global exchanges and transformations.

Some of the most groundbreaking work in transnational African and Latin American environmental history in the 1990s and 2000s––works that are themselves now classics––were in fact directly inspired by aspects of Crosby’s arguments. Elinore Melville explored the process of ecological imperialism beyond the temperate zone, by following Spanish sheep into sixteenth-century Mexico. James McCann showed how New World maize became an African staple, adapted to local cultures and climates. Judith Carney argued that rice culture in the Americas took more than just the movement of seeds; its success was dependent on the enslaved Africans who worked in the rice fields and their agricultural experiences and knowledge. These works took the interconnections between biology and cultural knowledge that Crosby himself emphasized, but pushed them into new contexts and new corners of the world.

With the sole exception of his book on the 1918 flu pandemic, Crosby’s temporal scale was as grand as his geographical scope. Recently, there has been a surge of self-described “Big Histories” or “Deep Histories” that view human history and the present through the lens of evolution, neuroscience, or even cosmology.

Crosby was doing “Big” and “Deep” history well before the arrival of these studies. The full title of Ecological Imperialism notes that it starts in 900, but in fact, its explanatory frame extends back beyond the Norse expansion into the North Atlantic. It begins 200 million years ago, with the breakup of the supercontinent of Pangaea, and, hence, the beginning of the evolution of quite distinct biogeographic realms in the Old and New Worlds.

This event was cataclysmic because it brought human and geological history into the same frame, in Crosby’s words:

“The seams of Pangaea were clos[ed], drawn together by the sailmaker’s needle. Chickens met kiwis, cattle met kangaroos, Irish met potatoes, Comanches met horses, Incas met smallpox––all for the first time.” (131)

This, Crosby explains––along with the penchant of Old World humans for living at close quarters with domesticated animals––was the ultimate cause of that immunological difference that made the Columbian exchange so unequal and allowed the empires of Europe their sweeping success in lands with similar climates.

Crosby brought in Pangea and the Paleolithic, but unlike some “Big Histories,” he was not trying to write a history of everything. Nor, I think, did he reduce history to geological and biological science. The scope, scale, and interdisciplinary nature of his work flowed necessarily from the kinds of questions he asked. These were indeed big questions, and also fundamentally historical questions––questions about human agency, about global inequalities in power, and about the roots of global imperialism.

At a time when others might attribute the spread of European empire to “their superiority in arms, organization and fanaticism,” Crosby had the audacity to ask, in the Prologue of Ecological Imperialism, “but what in heaven’s name is the reason that the sun never sets on the empire of the dandelion?” (7)

In the years since, authors like Charles Mann and Jared Diamond have sold many books repeating or updating aspects of Crosby’s argument. Other authors have dug deeper into the theoretical frameworks he offered, building on and extending them. One example is Stuart McCook’s new work on the “neo-Columbian exchange”––by which he means a second wave of globalization of crops and plant pests since 1700, mediated by imperial scientific institutions and global corporations. Likewise, UT History PhD, Gregory Cushman, has explored the role of fertilizer in enabling a process of “neo-ecological imperialism”––the importation of nutrients and energy from far away ecosystems to prop up a new crop of colonial powers. Not coincidentally, both authors place seemingly mundane historical objects at the center of modern history––a common approach today in global histories, after Crosby’s dandelions–for McCook it is the humble cup of coffee, for Cushman it is bird poop!

In many of these direct and more subtle ways, Crosby’s influence is indelible. Crosby helped to make mosquitos and sheep a respectable topic for historians––something that might even have something to tell us about “big questions,” like the rise and fall of empires.

I really regret that I never got a chance to meet him in person. At the same time, in some ways I feel almost like I have met him because, much more than most academic writers, Crosby’s personality, his great enthusiasm for his topics, and his often wry sense of humor shine through in his writing. Crosby’s voice and approach live on as much in the expanding new scholarship of environmental history as in his own body of work––as pervasive, permanent, and familiar in the historical landscape as the plentiful dandelions that sparked his imagination.

Teaching with Wikipedia

When Public History is done so well, we want to celebrate it! In Fall 2018, our colleague in Art History, Dr. Stephennie Mulder, had her students rewrite articles on Wikipedia to be more accurate and based on up-to-date scholarship. To be honest, I’ve thought about doing something like this in my classes, but I would never have done such a creative and thorough job. Now the instructors among us have a model and a roadmap we can all use. And the rest of us can sit back and watch some great teaching unfold because Dr. Mulder recently recounted the process on Twitter. Enjoy! ~ Joan Neuberger

by Dr. Stephennie Mulder

Read on Twitter

This semester in my Arts of Islam survey, I decided to scrap the research paper and have students collaborate to re-write @Wikipedia articles. It ended up better than I could have imagined & transformed how I think about teaching #StudentsOfIslamicArt #IslamicArt #MedievalTwitter

I was hesitant about shaking up a popular class that had worked well for years, but one statistic finally convinced me: 90% of Wikipedia articles are written by men – and largely by men from Euro-American contexts.

Female scholars are marginalised on Wikipedia because it’s written by men | Victoria Leonard

The oft-maligned #Wikipedia is the now the world’s most frequently-consulted source of information & fifth-most visited website. Because anyone can be an editor, it’s on us to make it the best resource it can be. If you think Wikipedia is bad, look in the mirror. Wikipedia is us.

So this assignment quickly took on a much deeper significance than a research paper. It required them to develop many of the same research and writing skills as a research paper, but it also came to have a strong #civics and #SocialJustice component, and the students responded.

To emphasize the collaborative, real-world applicability of the assignment, I set it up as a partnership with a museum and another Islamic art class via my brilliant

colleagues @lk_michelsen @hi_shangrila and @AlexDikaSegg @Rutgers_Newark shangrilahawaii.org

The assignment asks them to imagine they’re hired as consultants for a major museum to improve the public’s knowledge on Islamic Art, in advance of an exhibition. Their task? To assess an article for the quality of its sources and content and then research, write, and improve it.

I have almost 50 students enrolled in the class, so I made the assignment collaborative and divided the class into 15 groups of 3-4 students. I then preselected #IslamicArt articles I knew were important but underdeveloped on #Wikipedia. They had 3 weeks to research & 3 to write.

The assignment was set up on @WikiEducation‘s terrific website. Students had to complete a training module/week. Through this and discussion in class they learned how to determine quality of sources, the value of peer review, and improved research methods.

Wiki Education — Connecting Higher Ed and Wikipedia

In addition to the online training modules, @WikiEducation mailed me hard-copy pamphlets to give the students: one general one on Editing Wikipedia and another new one on editing Art History topics. These were super helpful.

New Resource Helps Art History Students Improve Wikipedia

I also drew on @artandfeminism‘s amazing quick guides which are brilliant for edit-a-thons.

But on top of these crucial online resources, I wanted to highlight continuing value of analog sources so students could gain experiential knowledge of benefits of both types of sources. I pulled in our brilliant #librarians Becca Pad and Gina Bastone from the UT Fine Arts Library @UTFAL and UT Libraries @utlibraries

Becca and I created a research guide for the assignment that pointed students to both digital and hard-copy sources within @UTFAL and @utlibraries.

I also spent a day in the library with students, walking them through basic research methods. I thought this might be too basic, but the day walking them through the physical library was inspired by a comment made by one of our brightest Honors Art History undergraduates in a meeting of the UT Provost’s Libraries Task force (on which I currently serve):

“Many faculty and librarians don’t realize that it’s not that undergraduates don’t *want* to use the libraries, it’s that we are SCARED of the libraries.” She explained that many students no longer receive the basic training needed to know how to use the libraries. So they don’t.

Here’s Eleanor Garstein’s and Dea Sula’s revamp of the Pyxis of Zamora

The UT Library system is one of the United States’ great research collections, but the vast majority of undergraduates test out of basic Intro to Rhetoric and Writing-type classes that used to train them in basic research methods. So the libraries just look intimidating and baffling.

Just getting them physically in the library was revelatory. They were astonished at the range and quality of sources that did not turn up on a Google search. It really lit a fire under them, sparked their curiosity and made them want to dive in. This was revelatory for me too!

We talked about what a privilege it is to have access to depth and reliable quality of knowledge in a top research library. We talked about how access to knowledge controls the way we see the world and our place in it. Again and again, students spoke about feeling empowered.

Zain Tejani and Tarik Islam improving the article on Islamic Gardens by replacing some of the more subjective aspects of the pages on the Islamic gardens with entries on the surviving gardens and sensorial experience. They later found their edits reverted by another editor – a valuable lesson about how to work within Wikipedia’s editor community (they’re still in negotiations on the Talk page!)

Yesterday [December 12, 2018] we met for an upload party. I wasn’t sure how it would go, but it turned out to be one of my favorite days as a teacher EVER. I am so proud of my students and of their hard work. I am amazed at how seriously they took the assignment and what a terrific job they did.

There were challenges: the sometimes-difficult collaborative aspect of a group assignment, the fact that some topics had few sources, the challenge of learning to write in a neutral, unbiased style. But they had something real on the line: an article out there in the world.

And in the end, these smart students have now contributed 15 better-sourced, better-written articles to the most frequently-consulted body of knowledge in the world. And they’ve learned key research and writing skills that will be applicable in a range of fields.

And of course, they’ve deepened their knowledge of #IslamicArt. Just listen to my student Gabrielle Walker speaking confidently about the complex history and historiography of Raqqa Ware, a type of medieval Islamic fineware pottery.

There is room for improving even important and significant topics on Wikipedia. Carla Bay, Sukaina Aziz (@SukainaAziz), and Yasmeen Amro (@TheYasmeenAmro), made major improvements to the article on Muqarnas, perhaps the most distinctive form of Islamic architectural ornament:

In short, this assignment did all a traditional research paper does: deepening knowledge, research, and writing skills – but it also left them feeling empowered to be active contributors: shaping global knowledge and redressing imbalances that shape the way we see the world.

So if you’ve ever wanted to have students do a Wikipedia article writing project, I would encourage you to jump in and follow Wikipedia’s motto: #BeBold. Your students will learn, and you will all feel like you made the world just a tiny bit better place to be.

And super grateful to the fabulous @LaurenMacknight, our hardworking and incredibly on-it communications director @UT_AAH, for enthusiastically promoting our project on multiple platforms! You’re incredible. 🙂

From There to Here: Tatjana Lichtenstein

(UT History faculty come from all over the world. Here are their stories.)

By Tatjana Lichtenstein

Map of Denmark (via Wikimedia)

Being an immigrant has always been part of my story. More than 50 years ago, my parents left their home country in search of a better life. They ended up in the small country of Denmark in northern Europe. And it’s small: if you take a map and draw a line connecting Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio – well, Denmark fits within that triangle – and its population is less than those three cities combined. Like many European countries, Denmark did not have a tradition for welcoming immigrants. It was not part of the country’s DNA. My strange name, my parents’ accent, and our different foods made me stand out. I was a foreigner despite having been born there. Even though we were citizens, my family didn’t quite belong; didn’t really feel at home.

Perhaps because I had this feeling of being different, I developed a fascination with history very early in my life. Much like you and I have personal histories – experiences that we can point to as having shaped us – communities and societies also have stories that define them. To me the past is the key to understanding who we are as individuals and as community members. By the time I graduated from high school, I had decided that I wanted to become a professional historian, a teacher and researcher. After finishing my undergraduate degree in Denmark, I spent two years at Brandeis University near Boston, before I went to the University of Toronto for my doctorate in History.

Over nine years ago, I started my job as a professor teaching history at the University of Texas at Austin. My specialization is war and violence in the twentieth century, specifically the Second World War. It is a great privilege to be a teacher and a mentor to my students. This past January, I became an American citizen and am proud to take on the responsibilities that follows with that privilege.

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

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

[jwplayer mediaid=”12847″]

Credits:

Interviews conducted by Teaching Assistant Shery Chanis.

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

History TAs on Learning to Teach

Even the most gifted teachers had to learn how to teach history and most of us needed a lot of help getting started. This month Not Even Past asked graduate students to reflect on their first teaching experiences as Teaching Assistants in History classes. They responded with insight, humor, and even a little hard won wisdom. Reflections here by Chloe Ireton, Cacee Hoyer, Jack Loveridge, Cameron McCoy, and Elizabeth O’Brien.

Chloe Ireton

As a graduate student in the History Department at the University of Texas at Austin, I have had valuable opportunities to learn how to teach history. Over the last three semesters I have worked as a Teaching Assistant in a lecture course on United States History since 1865. The 300+ students in the course listen to two hours of lecture a week and then participate in discussion sections of thirty-five students for one hour a week, taught by one of four TAs or Dr. Megan Seaholm who directs the course. The sections aim to create small learning environments for students to engage in sustained discussion and focus on important academic skills such as critical thinking, reading, writing, and discussion skills. Each seminar leader also creates a closed online social media group where students complete tasks, engage in graded online discussions about specific topics, and communicate with other students and the Teaching Assistant about the course.

This US History course is the first large lecture courses in the History Department to carry an “Ethics and Leadership Flag.” All UT undergraduates are required to take at least one Ethics Flag course, which is intended to “expose students to ethical issues and to the process of applying ethical reasoning in real-life situations.” The Ethics Flag component of the course taught students to explore the ethical reasoning of historical actors and to interrogate contrasting moral values in different historical time periods. We focused on four key ethical themes: poverty in the late nineteenth century, eugenics and state-sanctioned forced sterilizations in the early twentieth century, the Targeting of Civilians during the Second World War and specifically the use of atomic bombing, and lastly Civil Disobedience in the second half of the twentieth century. In the seminars, students reflected on the ethical reasoning of historical actors through primary source analysis. What did each person see as the key ethical issue at stake? Who did they see as the key moral actor(s) responsible for solving this issue? Did they see any alternatives? Did they see a certain action as ethically required or permissible and why?

At the end of the course, feedback from many students referred to these discussions as hugely important in the development of their critical thinking skills and their understanding of others and of history in general. The majority of the students found it enlightening to engage in discussions with peers who approached the topics differently from themselves. As the discussion leader, I found that the ethical framework of these seminars encouraged a high level of student engagement and provided a space for students to learn important skills in primary source reading, critical thinking, argumentation, and discussion, but most importantly in developing a sense of historical differences. I was fortunate to collaborate in the process of planning and integrating of the Ethics and Leadership Flag into the course. The TAs, Dr. Megan Seaholm (History), Dr. Eric Busch (Sanger Learning Center), and Dr. Jess Miner (Center for the Core Curriculum) met every fortnight during three academic semesters to plan seminars and debate the most appropriate forms of assessment. In our fortnightly meetings, we took turns presenting seminar lesson plans, each of which we critiqued until deciding on the most appropriate format. This experience provided a crucial venue for professional development in discussing best teaching practices with experienced teachers.

In organizing discussion seminars for this course, I adhered to a pedagogical philosophy called “task-based learning.” It is broadly defined as student centered and often student led learning through students’ active engagement in relevant tasks, commonly in collaboration with their peers. Adherents of this pedagogy believe that when learners are actively engaged in a task they become invested in the outcome of their own learning and the skills that they acquire along the way. In task-based learning approaches, the educator acts as a guiding toolbox to aide students’ learning rather than as a vessel that carries knowledge and imparts it in a teacher centered learning environment. For one weekly seminar, I planned a task-based lesson on National Security and free speech in the United States during World War I, which aimed to elaborate on the theme of the lecture that week, develop students’ primary source reading and critical thinking skills, and abilities to analyze historical sources and themes. Students read The Espionage Act of 1917 and President Woodrow Wilson’s 1917 speech about the need to enter WWI in order to make a world “safe for democracy.” I provided guiding questions and divided students into small discussion groups, which identified a wide array of perspectives on what these sources signified and whether they could and should be read together. In these discussions, students engaged actively in the type of historical thinking skills that we wanted them to acquire. For example, since the class represented a variety of opinions about the significance of the readings when read together, students became aware of the importance of historiographical debate and the role of historians’ perceptions in their own interpretations. In the second half of the class, students read two court cases where individuals who publically spoke out against the draft during WWI were found guilty of charges under the Espionage Act. For example, students read excerpts from Schenck v. United States, 249 U.S. 47 (1919), a United States Supreme Court decision, in which Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., concluded that those distributing leaflets that urged resistance to the draft could be convicted of an attempt to obstruct the draft (a criminal offense) because they posed a “clear and present danger.” This activity helped to contextualize the meaning and effect of the Espionage Act and prompted students to revisit the original question of whether we should read President Woodrow Wilson’s speech on the need to spread democracy across the world alongside the Espionage Act. For the post-seminar online discussion task, students reflected on the questions and documents that they found most interesting. They also read a news article about the Obama Administration’s use of the Espionage Act in order to engage in a discussion on the differences between the use and purpose of the Espionage Act in the early twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

This semester I am embarking on a new challenge as I am working as a Supplemental Instructor for a large US History Survey course. This means that I am offering two hourly discussion sections every week for students in this course. These seminars are designed to help students with course material and also to develop the skills that they need to become successful and autonomous learners. We will be covering diverse topics such as reading and note-taking skills, writing skills, preparation for specific assignments, discussion seminars, debating skills, historical thinking skills, and reading and analyzing primary sources, to name just a few. All of these sessions aim to support students’ progress in the class. The challenging aspect of these seminars is that they are voluntary. As the discussion leader, I have to be prepared for attendance to vary between a handful of students and hundreds. The Supplemental Instruction program (directed by the Sanger Learning Center) also provides continuing professional and pedagogical support through biweekly meetings with a supervisor and Supplemental Instructors from other departments within the College of Liberal Arts. These meetings aim to provide a forum to discuss teaching methods and our classroom experiences over the course of the semester.

Completing my PhD at the History Department at the University of Texas at Austin has provided an unrivalled venue for developing as a historian. Excellent support of my intellectual trajectory and research project (which I have not discussed in this post), combined with the opportunity to teach on exciting and innovative History courses make this a wonderful department in which to train as a historian.

***

Cameron D. McCoy

I would like to start this reflection with a quote from a friend. When asked to describe his undergraduate experience at the United States Naval Academy, he replied, “It was everything I thought it would be and a thousands things I never imagined.” As a UT History Teaching Assistant for the course in the Black Power Movement, my friend’s words found a suitable place to rest.

I am sure TAs do not even cross the mental radar of students until after the first exam. We morph into something a little more than a disembodied e-mail solicitor by the midterm, and then two weeks before the final the TA becomes the end-all-be-all. Prior to this—according to most students—the teaching assistant is the class scribe, sends pestering e-mails, listens and deals with complaints, and is supposed to know the syllabus verbatim at a moment’s notice. Of course this all falls under “… and a thousand things I never imagined.” Anything unfavorable is the Teaching Assistant’s fault and anything favorable is the professor’s doing. I can always count on the behavior of the students to hit the same currents throughout each semester, which brings the comfort of knowing it is “everything I thought it would be” and the familiar chaos of “a thousand things I never imagined.”

Surprisingly, I discovered that I never had to sell history to the students. Neither was I under fire in attempting to defend the discipline and virtues of history. The professor designed the course in such a way that the material was palatable and fairly easy to consume.

I did find when grading exams that the students’ interpretation of the material varied. Each student personalized the material, from ultra-conservative to highly polemic, from rigid to liberal, and from nonchalant to finely precise. I found this fascinating and the variety assisted me in better understanding how students communicated. I also enjoyed reading essays that expressed the student’s growth from learning the course material. Several students’ views drastically changed throughout the semester, specifically concerning how the black power movement connected directly to how universities function and how many social issues of 2014 are direct descendants of the 1960s.

***

Jack Loveridge

Teaching History at a major public university in the United States means stretching outside of your intellectual comfort zone on a regular basis. Teaching Assistants (TAs) are often assigned to courses somewhat beyond their principal fields of study. Many unwitting Latin Americanists, for instance, might find themselves cast before a crowd of inquisitive undergraduates, struggling to cough up the basics of the Missouri Compromise. A historian of Russia might be cornered in a hallway and asked where everyone was running during the Runaway Scrape or what was so abominable about the Tariff of Abominations. These are our occupational hazards.

As a student of British imperial rule in South Asia in the twentieth century, I felt a nervous pang when I found myself TA-ing for Dr. James Vaughn’s course, entitled History of Britain: The Restoration to 1783. Though a bit closer to home for me than the assignments drawn by many of my colleagues, the long, gouty march of Stuarts and Hanoverians, punctuated by a decade of Cromwellian fun, is hardly my strong suit. Not only did the scope of the course predate my period of expertise, part of it also predated Britain itself. (England and Scotland did not tie the knot until the Act of Union in 1707. Incidentally, whether their marriage will endure the test of time shall be seen with a Scottish independence referendum this September.) Beyond that bit of Jeopardy trivia, what on earth did I know about the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries?

My initial hesitation notwithstanding, I plunged forth into my first teaching assignment. I read the requisite materials and then some, devoured half a dozen BBC documentaries, and memorized the English monarchs since William the Conqueror for an added parlor trick. As it turned out, this period of English history helped to explain a great deal about the evolving British Empire and, more surprisingly, the contemporary global economy. Most of all, engaging with an unfamiliar period of history proved humbling, but it also gave me an opportunity to approach the readings and lectures as a student and not a teacher. This, in turn, ultimately helped me to address students’ questions with a bit more empathy.

On occasion, one of my many bright students would ask a question for which I simply had no good answer. At first, these instances embarrassed me. How could I, the respected TA, wearer of fishbone-patterned blazers, and sipper of tiny coffees, ever fail to answer a student’s question? Gradually, though, I realized that even when I didn’t have the knowledge my students sought, I typically knew how to find it. Moreover, I could teach students how to find and interpret that knowledge themselves.

The point for teachers of History of all stripes, I think, is to find comfort in the discomfort of branching out into the unknown. All of us are learning right along with our students and that’s how it should be. After all, the objective of any school or university is to build an open society that asks questions, fosters lifelong learning, and enables the sharing of knowledge. That’s what we do here and doing it well is as much about not knowing everything as it is about knowing anything at all. To be effective teachers, we must feel free to honestly say, “I don’t know,” and follow it up with a spirited, “But let’s find out.”

***

Elizabeth O’Brien

This semester I am TAing for a course designed to introduce students to the history of U.S. relations with Latin America. About half of the students are freshmen and most have very little knowledge of Latin American history. During discussion, some students requested information regarding the colonial “caste” system, which was mentioned in the readings but not explained. After class I decided to look online for some further reading for them.

It was very difficult to identify an accurate and academically rigorous article that was accessible for lower-division undergraduates. First, I looked at several websites, but I could not use them due to blatant historical inaccuracies. Then I skimmed a few full-length scholarly articles, but they were far too dense and lengthy for the students.

I realized that Not Even Past was a perfect source for the concise and accessible explanation that I needed. I found an article by Dr. Susan Deans-Smith, “Casta Paintings,” which clearly explained how seventeenth and eighteenth-century authorities sought to define, label, and categorize the offspring of Spaniards, Indigenous natives, and Africans. They developed an intricate “caste system,” which was represented in paintings that depicted mixed racial groups. Deans-Smith’s article was complete with images. For example, one painting showed a Spanish man, his Mestiza (Spanish and Indigenous) wife, and their “Castiza” daughter. Several students reported that they read the piece and emerged with a much better understanding of racial and social categories in the history of Latin America.

***

Cacee Hoyer

Top Five Experiences as a TA

#5: A student wanted to meet to discuss her exam. During the almost half-hour long discussion, the student contradicted every comment I had made on her paper. I coolly tried to explain why she had lost points for this or that and she consistently insisted I was wrong. Eventually, she gave up her debate tactics and just blurted out “well are you going to give me any points back or not!” I just stared at her and explained how I generally didn’t do that unless there was a blatant mistake. At which she responded, “then why are we even supposed to meet with you!” As she stomped away, I was saddened as I realized she was an honor student because she could play the game and work the system, however, she failed to learn how to love learning.

#4 A student emailed me to explain he was not able to turn in his assignment on time because he had spent the night in jail. After I explained this wasn’t a University sanctioned excuse, he eventually turned in the assignment. A few weeks later he approached me in class, introducing himself as the guy who had emailed about spending the night in jail. I thought I should point out to him that perhaps using that tagline earns him points with his friends, but that it doesn’t quite work that way with his TA.

#3 I was leading a discussion in class, which quickly ran out of control when one student who persistently claimed he liked to be “provocative,” made racially inappropriate references that set off another girl quite vocally. At one point I was afraid we were going to have an all out brawl! My head was spinning, and so was the class…right out of control. That was definitely a learning experience for me!

#2 On final exams, several students still refer to Africa as a country.

#1 A student practically tackles me when she gets her exam back. She had struggled on the first exam and had been working very hard, coming to office hours and emailing me constantly. She was so excited she almost knocked me down! But in a good way.

More to read on innovations in teaching history

Banner Credits:

Les Grande Chroniques de France (via Wikimedia Commons)

Gene Youngblood lecturing at Rochester Institute of Technology, 1982 (via Wikimedia Commons)

On Flags, Monuments, and Historical Myths

In response to student demand and in the wake of decisions made elsewhere in the southern U.S. to remove Confederate flags, UT-Austin President Greg Fenves appointed a Task Force to consider the removal of monuments to Jefferson Davis and other Confederate leaders that occupy a central site on the UT-Austin Campus.

A graffiti-covered Confederate statue on the quad on the campus at UT Austin

Understanding history and separating historical analysis from historical myth is essential for any society. One of the many disturbing aspects of Dylann Roof’s murder of nine African Americans on June 17, is his justification of White supremacy on historical grounds. And one of the signs that we could be doing a better job as historians is the CNN poll that shows the majority of White Americans see the Confederate flag as a “symbol of southern pride” rather than a “symbol of racism.”

Over the next few weeks, Not Even Past will offer readers historical sources, readings, and commentary on these events. Last week, Mark Sheaves collected past articles devoted to the history of slavery and its legacy in the US and provided us with an annotated list.

Today we offer the historical analysis and commentary from journalists and historians primarily writing online. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter for more reading and news from the Task Force. (We will add to the list as relevant articles appear.)

First, “Causes Lost But Not Forgotten: George Washington Littlefield, Jefferson Davis and Confederate Memories at the University of Texas at Austin,” an article by Alexander Mendoza about the controversies that have dogged the statues since their inception.

“Monuments to Confederacy have their own History at Texas Capitol,” by Lauren McGaughy

Memorial plaque of the Children of the Confederacy Creed erected by the Texas Division of the Children of the Confederacy

Many southerners claim that Confederate flags and monuments are reflections of southern “heritage,” not racism. On the Nursing Clio blog, Sarah Handley-Cousins discusses the uses of heritage as a concept and a badge, “Heritage is Not History: Historians, Charleston, and the Confederate Flag.”

A 2011 Pew Research Center survey that showed that more people believe the Civil War was fought over states’ rights rather than over slavery.

In “Why Do People Believe Myths about the Confederacy? Because Our Textbooks and Monuments Are Wrong,” James W. Loewin addresses some of the ways southerners rewrote Civil War history in Texas and elsewhere.

To document the centrality of slavery to the reasons southern states went to war, Ta Nehisi-Coates wrote “What This Cruel War was Over,” arguing that “the meaning of the Confederate flag is best discerned in the words of those who bore it.”

(And in case you haven’t read Nehisi-Coates’ searing history of relentless White efforts to prevent Blacks from obtaining economic security, here it is: The Case for Reparations.)

Finally, Bruce Chadwick on one of the most pernicious, and successful, purveyors of myths about “the southern way of life,” D.W Griffiths’ Birth of a Nation, 100 years old this year.

Added July 8-9, 2015:

On discussing the commemoration of the confederacy with students:
David C. Williard, “I don’t want my students to simply choose sides in a polemic between heritage and hate.”

It’s complicated. Not very, but a little.
Richard Fausset, “‘Complicated’ Support for Confederate Flag in White South.”

Added July 14, 2015
Many people argue that removing monuments is erasing history:
Alfred L. Brophy, “Why Northerners should Support Confederate Monuments“

Recent Posts