world history Archives - Not Even Past

IHS Talk: Debt: A Natural History

Debt is a human constant. The social implications of systems of credit and debt, however, are not; they can vary significantly over time and space. Traveling freely across the human past, this paper explores the paradoxical nature of the borrowing and lending and provides signposts for writing the natural history of debt.

Daniel Lord Smail is Frank B. Baird, Jr. Professor of History at Harvard University, where he works on the history and anthropology of Mediterranean societies between 1100 and 1600 and on deep human history. In medieval European history, his work has explored the social and cultural history of the cities of Mediterranean Europe, with a focus on Marseille in the later Middle Ages. He has covered subjects ranging from women and Jews to legal history and spatial imagination, which was the subject of his first book, Imaginary Cartographies: Possession and Identity in Late Medieval Marseille (Cornell University Press, 1999). His recently published book, Legal Plunder: Households and Debt Collection in Late Medieval Europe (Harvard University Press, 2016), approaches transformations in the material culture of the later Middle Ages using household inventories and inventories of debt recovery from Lucca and Marseille. Smail’s work in deep history and neurohistory has addressed some of the methodological and theoretical underpinnings of these approaches to the human past. His most recent article in this vein asks whether there is a history of the practice of compulsive hoarding. His books include The Consumption of Justice: Emotions, Publicity, and Legal Culture in Marseille, 1264-1423 (Cornell University Press, 2003); On Deep History and the Brain (University of California Press, 2008), and, with Andrew Shryock and others, Deep History: The Architecture of Past and Present (University of California Press, 2011).

Smail has received awards and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, and his publications have received several prizes. In 2007, he received the Joseph R. Levenson Memorial Teaching Prize from the undergraduates of Harvard University, and, in 2014, the Everett Mendelsohn Excellence in Mentoring Award from the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.

“Reclaiming the Pre-Modern Past” is an IHS lecture series that examines how new technologies and approaches are enriching our understanding of pre-modern eras and cultures

Other IHS Talks:

Climate and Soil: The Environmental History of the Maya
The Influenza Pandemic of 1918-1919

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.

IHS Panel: The Influenza Pandemic of 1918-1919: 100 Years Later

The influenza pandemic of 1918-1919 was one of the deadliest natural disasters in history, causing the death of 50 to 100 million people worldwide. This panel will be a wide-ranging discussion of the 1918-1919 outbreak and subsequent episodes from a historical, sociological, and medical perspective.

Featuring:

“Improved Approaches to Combat a Future Pandemic”
Robert Krug
Professor Emeritus, Molecular Biosciences
University of Texas at Austin

“The Flu in Texas”
Abena Osseo-Asare
Associate Professor of History
University of Texas at Austin

“One Hundred Years Later: Unknowns of the 1918 Flu Epidemic”
Sahotra Sarkar
Professor of Philosophy, and Integrative Biology
University of Texas at Austin

Miriam Bodian, moderator
Professor of History, and
Director, Institute for Historical Studies
University of Texas at Austin

Climate and Soil: The Environmental History of the Maya
Revolutionizing the Way We Fight Disease

Photography, Film Criticism, and Left Politics

By Jessica Werneke

Each year, a group of artists, art historians, and visual theorists meet at a conference to discuss the intersections of the visual, art, aesthetics, activism, and politics. Among many other important contributions, the conference is designed to involve individuals from a variety of institutions and backgrounds to unite scholars whose critical approach to photography, cinema and film is from “the Left.” As a historian of photography, I attended this conference for the first time this year. While there were many valuable and insightful presentations, several stood out not only for their original contributions, but also for the contemporary relevance of their ongoing artistic and research projects.

Dr. Nela Milic’s (University of the Arts, London) Materialising Site, was a description of her ongoing research cum artistic project visualizing the political awakening of Serbia in 1996 through visualizations of Belgrade. Melic’s personal experience of the uprisings against Milosevic, with nearly 200,000 protesters on a daily basis, was the initial impetus for her project. Yet, in her early research she found that Western European discourses not only misrepresent the scale of events of 1996, but have a tendency to outright ignore historical events. Similarly, those who participated in the uprising expressed a sense of shame that their efforts were unsuccessful, and no individual had ever attempted to archive the many visual and artistic materials associated with the protests. Her response is an innovative endeavor that seeks to activate Belgrade’s memory through participatory mapping of the city – conducting interviews, collecting images, posters, coupons, and photographs that function as public art artifacts in a collaboration between artist(s) and citizens. This project has existed in several forms and iterations before Milic decided on its current format.

In her presentation, Brigitte Thorsen Vislev (PhD-fellow affiliated with SMK, the National Gallery of Denmark, the Danish Film Institute and the University of Copenhagen) explored ABCinema, a socialist amateur film collective founded in Denmark in 1968. The group wanted to construct an alternative to the established film industry and desired to create a new alphabet, language and vocabulary for art film. They worked primarily with handheld Super 8 cameras, and their philosophy of film did not require theatricality or even a script, and incorporated long takes (essentially until the film reel ran out), real time situations, and editing “in the camera”; that is editing while shooting rather than afterwards. The collective included about 30 artists, experimental filmmakers, and intellectuals, including Per Kirkeby, Bjørn Nørgaard, and Ole John, whose philosophy and style later influenced the more renowned Danish Dogma Movement of the 1990s. According to Vislev, “The Danish film movement of the 1960s was ideologically founded on left-wing, Danish social-democratic Marxist ideas, and that cameras were pens and weapons used to revolutionize social hierarchies and to question who had the rights and access to the means of production.” Though the group dissolved in 1971, ABCinema was instrumental in changing legislation on film financing. New state funds were set aside for art film, which allowed individuals to apply for funding based on their ideas, rather than a completed script. In 1972, a new law was ratified which set aside funding to exclusively support experimental films. See this link for an example of ABCinema’s work.

In “Picturing the Predator: Subverting the Military Sublime,” Paul Lowe (Photographer and Reader in Documentary Photography at University of the Arts, London) explained how modern warfare, particularly the use of drones for surveillance and targeting “enemies of the state,” poses a challenge of representation for photographers. The sanitized and depersonalized nature of drone warfare has led photographers to find alternative means of expressing and depicting the consequences of invisible weapons systems. Contrary to the depictions of drones on government military websites and corporate purveyors of military technology that sanitize this technology (despite civilian casualties and the significant loss of life), photographers like James Bridle have tried to reclaim some measure of depicting the realities of war. In his works Drone Shadows and “Dronestagram,” Bridle attempts to render the invisibility of drone warfare visible. Importantly, Lowe, who built his career on photographing conflict, demonstrates the difficulty and complexities of how to represent the contemporary military state and modern warfare.

James Bridle, Drone Shadow 004, Washington D.C., 2013 (via Dezeen)

Dr. Sigrid Lien’s (University of Bergen, Norway) presentation “The Politics of Silence in Marja Helander’s Photography – and Video Production” investigates Marja Helander’s body of work and its connection to her Sámi heritage. The Sámi are an indigenous people inhabiting Sápmi, which includes parts of Norway, Sweden, Finland and the Murmansk region of the Russian Federation, whose language, culture and land have been, and in some ways, continue to be, threatened by adverse government policies in Scandinavia and Russia. As Lein demonstrates, Silence – Jaskes eatnamat, as well as Helander’s previous photographic series such as Modern Nomad and Darkness, need to be understood in terms of the Sámi people’s relationship to their ancestry, the present, and their spiritual connection to the Sápmi landscape. Silence depicts industrial landscapes and wastelands devoid of humans, but obviously bear traces of human activity, in order explore the aftermath of colonization in Sápmi. Lein also attempted to explain how various aspects of Helander’s work pay homage to Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1979 film Stalker, though I was not wholly convinced by this argument. In a way, Silence falls into the category of “aftermath” photography, recording the trace of an event or series of events. As a whole, however, Helander’s body of work expresses the artist’s and the Sámi people’s conflicted sense of belonging.

Marja Helander, from the Series Silence – Jaskes eatnamat, 2016 (via Sami Center for Contemporary Art)

Marja Helander, from the Series Darkness, 2010 (via Marja Helander)

Jessie Bond (Freelance writer, editor, and research student at University of the Arts London) explored Susan Meiselas’ 1981 photobook Nicaragua, which was intended to create a “multi-layered and multi-voiced narrative” about the Nicaraguan Revolution and the overthrow of the Somoza dictatorship in 1978-1979. As one of the only American documentary photographers present during the initial Sandinista uprising, her photographs were published frequently in the press and the photobook Nicaragua was Meisela’s attempt at creating a more comprehensive narrative of the revolution. At the time of its publication Nicaragua was criticized for a variety of reasons, ranging from Meiselas’ lack of subjectivity to the separation of text and images in the book itself. Crucially, however, this separation of text and image allows the reader or viewer some fluidity in interpreting Meiselas’ narrative, but the order of the images themselves provides a sort of contextual chronology from unrest and protests to open insurrection. Similarly, Bond showed that Nicaragua was not Meiselas’ first project that avoided overarching strict or set narratives. Meiselas herself recognized her work was subjective and, according to Bond, the fluid narrative and structure of the book perhaps provides a closer visual representation of the experience of revolution than other, similar publications. Isabel Stein’s (The Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil) presentation “Molotov-Click: The Domestication of Weapons” also discussed Susan Meiselas’ work in Nicaragua, primarily her iconic image “Molotov Man.”

Susan Meiselas, Molotov Man, 1979 (via Wikipedia)

These presentations provide us with a variety of new ways to think about and study the history of photography. The range of topics and the interdisciplinarity of their approaches to visual culture also offer us tools for thinking about the photographs that we see every day and the roles they play in society and our everyday lives.

Each year, this conference is hosted by the Faculty of Beles Artes of the University of Lisbon. (this year 9-10 November,). I would like to thank Alise Tifentale (PhD Candidate in Art History at the Graduate Center, City University of New York), for suggesting I attend.

Jessica Werneke (UT History PhD, 2015) is a Newton International Fellow of the British Academy and Lecturer in History at Loughborough University (UK) and former Postdoctoral Researcher at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow. Her research explores the aftermath of Stalinist cultural policies in photography and visual culture, and the impact of the unique political and cultural context of the “Thaw” on photojournalism and amateur photography. You can read more of her essays on photography on her blog, Sovetskoe Foto Blog.

Did the British Empire depend on separating Parents and Children?

Empires ancient and modern are large, hierarchical organizations, structurally founded on deep inequalities of risk and reward. The British Empire in Asia was no exception. At the front lines of imperial power were, all too often, common men (and some women) who were tricked, cozened, misled, coerced, and whipped into serving as the cannon-fodder of Empire. The temptation to desert was often present and the thought of mutiny cannot have been absent. These plebeian men were ‘kept in line’ men of status who served as commercial agents and military officers. But even among them, kickbacks and commissions were omnipresent and could grow into serious leakages of revenue or foment major acts of treason. Furthermore the wholesale desertion of a dynasty by its elite subjects was not unknown. In Britain in both 1660 and 1688, the political establishment and key army units deserted their established government to side with an invader sponsored by a foreign power. We could multiply such examples.

Transoceanic empires built by corporations like the British and Dutch East India Companies faced even greater problems because they lacked the sacred aura that surrounded kings and helped maintain nominal loyalties. It took nearly half a year for an inquiry or command to reach a functionary in Asia and it took many more months before a report or an excuse would come back. The military, commercial, or political situation could change dramatically in the interim. Many readers will be aware, for example, that the British and Americans continued to fight for six weeks in 1815 after the peace treaty was signed between the two powers. One of these peace-time battles cemented Andrew Jackson’s reputation and propelled him to the presidency. Asia was much further away and across more dangerous waters.

Corporations growing into empires, such as the Dutch East India Company and English East India Company were keenly aware of what modern organization theorists, such as Oliver Williamson, have termed the “agency problem.” This is simply the difficulty of monitoring subordinates and ensuring that they act mainly in the interest of those (“the principals”) whose “agents” they had been hired to be. In 1613, a vexed East India Company merchant, Nicholas Withington reported that the many Portuguese “renegades” were already being joined by a trickle of Englishmen, like one Robert Claxon. He converted to Islam for money but, dissatisfied with something, returned and appeared penitent. He was then trusted with Company funds and absconded for good. As the vexed Withington recounted it, Claxon:

had also turned Mahometan in the Decan, with a good allowance at [the Sultan’s] court; but, not being contented, he came to Surat, where he was pitied by us for his seeming penitence; but being entrusted with upwards of forty pounds [sterling: a considerable sum at the time] under pretense of making purchases, he gave us the slip and returned to the Decan. Thus there are at present four English renegadoes in the Decan, besides many Portuguese.

This was an example of the problems of large organizations: how can you ensure compliance and loyalty when agents are far removed and have sanctuaries beyond your control?

Even in 1787, the reforming Governor-General Cornwallis, came to India fresh from America. He often inveighed against the East India Company’s English employees for their incapacity or corruption. The editor of his letters wrote plainly of how the Company had been cheated by its senior employees in, for example, the purchase of silk.

The East India Company was an established ruling power in large parts of India after 1757. But the indiscipline and venality of even its senior-most civil and military officials once they realized how quickly they could grow wealthy brought the Company to the edge of ruin in less than 20 years. It was forced to seek a “bail-out” from the Royal Treasury. The illustration below depicts an East India Company official in regal guise, lording it over the “natives.”

An East India Company Grandee (via Getty Images)

This resulted (after some years of partisan grid-lock) in the dispatch of new governor-general with sweeping powers. This was Lord Cornwallis who came out to “reform” British India fresh from a bruising surrender at Yorktown in Virginia in 1781. He realized that neither a common language nor a common religious affiliation could guarantee either honesty or loyalty. From the time of his tenure as chief executive in India (1786-1795) therefore, the British regime carefully managed the social reproduction of European officers and soldiers. This was done to prevent the formation a dangerous Creole settler class. The Company had long sought to limit the numbers and control the conduct of private Europeans in India in order to maintain its commercial monopoly against “private trade.” Under Cornwallis, political prudence provided another rationale. The value of this strategy was made obvious when Governor General John Shore was faced with a mutiny among the East Company Army’s European officers in 1795-1796. Reflecting on the episode a year or so later, Shore’s successor in office, Richard Wellesley, wrote that:

If Europeans had been settled with their families in India; or if these men had, or could have had, their homes in that country, the Company would have lost it, [their Indian empire] and nothing could ever have regained it.

It was from awareness of this danger that, as Indrani Chatterjee was the first to show, the Company assiduously sought to limit the development a local power elite with any genealogical depth. This was intended to preempt any consequent claim to the “rights of Englishmen” that had just been forcefully raised in North America. The children of mixed European and Indian parentage were therefore turned into a socially inferior class of Eurasians, excluded from power. As early as 1786, the Company forbade the children of “native women” from traveling to England, after discovering that the Indian-born John Turing, “dark as his mother,” had done so and secured a cadet’s appointment in the Army. Two decades later, a “mulatto” candidate secured an appointment only by paying a young Englishman to impersonate him at the interview. Although disavowed progeny were increasingly excluded from the Army and higher civil service, some Eurasians were in found jobs in other state employment into the 1830s. But the official policies toward them derived from a well-established, generalized contempt for those of mixed descent. As early as 1786, Surgeon Richard Wilson, in proposing the creation of a charity school to raise such children as loyal Protestants, remarked that it “hath long been a severe and unanswerable Reproach from the Natives of this Country that Britons, above all other Nations, have neglected and despised their progeny.”

If efforts at social integration had succeeded despite such attitudes, British India might have developed into a casta-ranked society like the Spanish Americas. But the need to win the support of the indigenous clerical classes, as well as the fear of promoting a Creole elite like the treacherous Americans, led the East India Company onto a different track. In the last few decades of its rule, before the revolt of 1857, Eurasian clerks were gradually displaced in state service by Indians from the traditional clerical classes, both Hindu and Muslim and, around Bombay, also Parsi and Goan Catholic. A greater regard by the British for their own “blood” returned after 1857, when Anglo-Indians were extensively recruited into the developing railway system in order to ensure imperial control of this strategic asset. Eurasians, however, could not compete with the indigenous clerical classes in subordinate employment, that is to say, clerical work.

The government continued to follow the logic of Wellesley’s argument against allowing Europeans to set down familial roots within India, and sought to ensure that the affective ties and personal aspirations of key cadres such as Covenanted Service and Army officers should be directed toward England. The disciplinary value of this policy for the East India Company’s government is shown by Sleeman’s dedication of his Rambles and Recollections (1844), to his sister. He observed how nine out of ten Englishmen in India found their greatest pleasure in letters from their sisters at home, which filled the landscapes so dear to our recollections, with ever varying groups of the family circles, among whom our infancy and our boyhood have been passed; and among whom we still hope the spend the winter of our days.

He added that the approbation of the circles represented in these letters was an important restraint on Englishmen in India, and so the sisters should be considered “a valuable species of unpaid magistracy to the Government of India.” The psychic isolation of young men well indoctrinated in this system and left among Indians without their families was described to Emily Eden in 1837 as a “horrible solitude” that produced depression. One such officer told her of “the horror of being three months without seeing an European, or hearing an English word …” Indirectly, therefore, we may see patterns of marriage and family formation being managed by the British imperial regime to bolster the loyalty of key elements of its governing apparatus. The political and military efficacy of that apparatus thus depended on constant policing of the boundaries of ethnicity.

Legitimate reproduction was now focused on Europe-born women. Lord Cornwallis had raised official salaries both to ensure fidelity and to allow mature civil servants to make “suitable” marriages and sustain the establishment needed for them. Licit sex and open conjugality were now limited to English-born women. By the 1850s it was said of the junior-most Indian Civil Service officer that he was worth “three hundred [pounds sterling] a year, dead or alive.” Numbers of young women sailed out to India as part of what was archly termed “the Fishing Fleet.” Many did marry officials there. But it was soon discovered that their infants died in alarming numbers, doubtless aided by Victorian medicine and its therapeutic use of opium, alcohol, mercury and blood-letting for all ages and sexes. Furthermore, the still prevalent climatic theories of “racial qualities” suggested that children raised in hot climates deteriorated from the parental stock. From the mid-nineteenth century therefore, young children were usually sent back to Britain while in India fathers worked and mothers sought to monopolize all legitimate conjugality. The result was that generations of children were torn away from their parents and if boys, certainly introduced to that staple of Victorian education, the rattan cane. Two of these children were initially too young (six and three) for school, so Rudyard Kipling and his sister were left in Lorne Lodge, Southampton.

Rudyard Kipling Heritage Site at: 43 Villiers Street, Charing Cross, London (via Wikimedia)

Kipling later wrote of himself and his sister that, when he was told his parents had left him “for ever,” he “went out and wept bitterly with Judy, into whose fair head he had driven some ideas of the meaning of separation.” He also invoked the desolation he had felt in a later poem:

A Well-a-day for we are souls bereaved!

Of all the creatures under Heaven’s wide scope

We are most hopeless, who had once most hope

And most beliefless, who had once believed.

There are doubtless children in the USA today with good reason to echo that.

Age of Anger: A History of the Present, by Pankaj Mishra (2017)

By Ben Weiss

In Age of Anger: A History of the Present, acclaimed author and journalist Pankaj Mishra explores what he describes as the tremors of global change. For the past several decades, liberal cosmopolitanism provided a false sense of security after the fall of the Soviet Union. Now, Mishra claims, world schisms have begun to manifest in increasingly overt displays of violence by state and non-state actors alike, leaving dubious possibilities for the coming years. In this accessible work of public history, Mishra traces a long arc of the rise of the Age of Anger from the Enlightenment to what he perceives as the precarious present.

The book was written and published as we watched the explosion of chaos in Syria and Iraq, the collapse of established and relatively balanced political and economic relationships, increases in terrorist activity in places such as Turkey, Kenya, and Nigeria, and increasing violence stemming from racial prejudices in France, Great Britain, and the United States. The rise of rancorous populism cracking its way through the foundations of traditional model democracies in the West, evidenced by the success of Donald Trump, Marine Le Pen, and Brexit, leads Mishra to fear that the globe is on the precipice of world wide disaster.

“After a long, uneasy equipoise since 1945, the old west-dominated world order is giving way to an apparent global disorder.” This new disorderly Age of Anger ranges both from the destabilizing fury of history’s marginalized populations as well as the counterrevolutionary response that has mobilized hatred within mainstream political discourses. Unfortunately, Mishra offers little perspective on how the world may emerge from this predicament. For him, the tumultuous year that was 2016 is only the beginning.

The real value of this fairly pessimistic yet stimulating work is in Mishra’s analysis of how we arrived in the Age of Anger. Scholars in subaltern and imperial histories have argued for decades that the sheer arrogance of narratives of Western liberal progress have concealed the crumbling foundations of modernized globalization. Mishra offers an accessible and nuanced narrative of the emergence of popular rage from the European Enlightenment, through the advent of industrialization and imperialism, and the various alignments of the non-Western world within a Eurocentric global order during the twentieth century. From the upheavals of the Reign of Terror in revolutionary France to the rise of fascism in the twentieth century, he shows that the neatly packaged concept of liberal modernization mostly consists of a process of “carnage and bedlam.” Mishra argues that elites, unable to cope with the reality of modernization, take refuge in precipitating alienation: destruction of civil liberties, states of emergency, anti-Islamic movements, rhetoric purporting the global clash of civilizations, and the like. Though perhaps framed within too much of a polarized dichotomy, Mishra’s analysis reveals a massive schism between political and economic elites and the larger masses who have been directed into “cultural supremacism, populism and rancorous brutality” as a result of being denied the promised advantages of modernity. The consequential tension leaves us on the threshold of a “global civil war.”

A Tea Party protest in 2009 (via Wikimedia Commons).

Mishra predicts that continuing economic stagnation will exacerbate the bitterness of these existing divisions. Many will react to literal displacement from their societies or social and political displacement as we have seen with the recent and rapid expansion of activities in United States immigration. The subsequent fear and rage will divide those who may resort to radical violence because they have nothing left to lose from those who will empower more radical elites who promise to tear down the existing system. However, for Mishra, this chaos is fully representative of the process of liberal modernization. Once you strip the implications of liberal modernization of its positive rhetoric, what remains is a cacophony of violence. Slavery, imperialism, and warfare have always been the dark underbelly of the liberal project.

While modernization has generated the context for this violence to take on truly global proportions for the first time, Mishra’s detailed history describes the development of these themes through earlier centuries. For example, Voltaire routinely emphasized the exemplary capacity of humanity to exercise free will, however, he actively encouraged Catherine the Great to coerce Poles and Turks into Enlightenment education under threat of violence. All the while, Catherine’s actions allowed him to make a fortune in the commercial investments of new markets that arose as a result of this coerced ideological diffusion. Mishra also alerts readers to the various thinkers such as Rousseau and Nietzsche who prefigured the growth of dissident populations and their inevitable role as destabilizers during the emergence of modernization, drawing interesting parallels to the role of Islam in the twentieth century.

The Ottoman capitulation in 1877 ended the Russo-Turkish War (via Wikimedia Commons).

By demonstrating the connection of ideas in Europe with the rest of the world, Mishra is able to draw heavily from Nietzsche’s concept of ressentiment, which encapsulates the innate hatred and envy fostered by groups who are positioned as inferior. For example, ressentiment could describe the attitude of the colonized under imperial regimes. Mishra claims that Muhammad Iqbal, an Islamic poet and religious reformist, and Lu Xun, an activist in China all pulled from Nietzsche’s ideas, while “Hitler revered Atatürk” and “Lenin and Gramsci were keen on Taylorism.” This mix of Enlightenment thought with global adaptations speaks to the paradoxical fusion of self-contempt instilled by liberal otherization with the rage that facilitates resistance to the same system. Indeed, as Mishra contends, leaders from all over the global south and east met imperialism by synchronizing with Western ideology in order to secure their independence from the West. This aspiration failed locking much of Africa, Asia, Latin America, and various Marxist movements into liberal modernity. “The key to man’s behaviour lies not in any clash of opposed civilizations, but, on the contrary, in irresistible mimetic desire: the logic of fascination, emulation and righteous self-assertion that binds the rivals inseparably. It lies in ressentiment, the tormented mirror games in which the West as well as its ostensible enemies and indeed all inhabitants of the modern world are trapped.”

The Paris Commune stormed the Tuileries Palace in 1792 during the French Revolution (via Wikimedia Commons).

The ambitious project of Age of Anger is not without its faults, namely some oversights and generalizations. For one, Mishra does not consider social democracy or Marxism as the alternatives to neoliberal world systems that they perceive themselves to be. In other ways, his attempts to paint a larger history in broad strokes risks overgeneralizing some phenomena and exaggerating historical causality. Due to some of these flaws, proponents of liberalism may find his arguments unconvincing, but for those sympathetic to analysis of the darker sides of modernity, Mishra’s work should prove thought provoking while drawing attention to potential linkages in historical developments across multiple centuries in a way that brings arguments previously sequestered to academia into the public sphere.

Pankaj Mishra, Age of Anger: A History of the Present (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017).

Also by Ben Weiss on Not Even Past:

My Alternative PhD in History.
The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective, by Robert C. Allen (2009).
Violence: Six Sideways Perspectives, by Slavoj Žižek (2008).

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)

Reading Magnum: A Photo Archive Gets a New Life

By Steven Hoelscher and Andrea Gustavson

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Student Showcase – From the Ashes: MacArthur’s Responsibility for Rebuilding Japan

Jake Manlove
Rockport-Fulton Middle School
Junior Division
Individual Performance

Read Jake’s Process Paper

General Douglas MacArthur was a giant of the 20th-century world. After successfully leading Allied troops to victory in the Pacific, he oversaw the post-war occupation of Japan, a time of astonishing political, economic and social change across the country. But what kind of man was he? For Texas History Day, Jake Manlove researched the life and work of General MacArthur. But he also wanted to understand how this iconic American dressed and acted in daily life. Read about the work Jake did for his performance project:

Douglas MacArthur, 1945 (U.S. National Archives)

I wanted to do a performance because I have done performances for the past two years and liked working with props and costumes. l decided to portray General Douglas MacArthur, since he was Supreme Commander of Allied Powers (SCAP) and was the center of reforms undertaken in post-war Japan. I wanted my props to be historically accurate. My research on MacArthur’s uniform led to reenactment pieces purchased on EBay including an accurate hat and pipe. I was inspired to use a slide projector after l found unpublished photos taken in Japan by MacArthur’s personal driver at the Texas Tech University Library. I feel that the photos represent key points of the rebuilding and provide a unique perspective to my performance.

MacArthur signs the Japanese surrender document aboard the USS Missouri (National Archives and Records Administration)

MacArthur’s responsibility for rebuilding Japan fits the theme of Rights and Responsibilities in several aspects. President Truman accepted responsibility for dropping the atomic bombs on Japan. General MacArthur thought that violated the rights of Japanese women and children who were not soldiers, which addresses actions that are issues of morality. MacArthur also accepted responsibility for reconstructing Japan and created the new Japanese Constitution to guarantee the democratic rights of Japanese citizens after the occupation ended. MacArthur taking responsibility for Truman’s destruction of Japan helped them not only recover but prosper over the years.

Catch up on more remarkable THD projects:

A performance on the Orwellian reign of Joseph Stalin

A website on the global influence of one man’s non-violent philosophy

The story of “America’s Dirty Little Secret”

The End of the Lost Generation of World War I: Last Person Standing

by Andrew Villalon

In 2014, we enter the centennial of one of history’s most terrible conflicts. Originally (and quite appropriately) named The Great War, the four-year conflict claimed roughly eight and a half to nine and a half million lives on the battlefield, not to mention millions of civilian war deaths as well as many millions more who died in related events such as the Russian Revolution and Civil War and the Flu epidemic of 1919.

Not surprisingly, none of the veterans who fought and bled in the struggle has lived long enough to see the centennial. Even if someone found a way to get around army regulations and sign up at sixteen, he or she would have to be 112 today. Consequently, since the year 2000, almost all of the nations that participated in World War I have seen their last World War 1 veterans die off.

Since 2000, there have been an increasing number of news stories about such men as Claude Choules (British sailor), Harry Patch (British soldier), and Frank Buckles (American soldier), all of them male, two of them combat veterans. But as the countdown, and by extension, the die-off continued, the news media finally came to focus more closely on another, somewhat more unlikely candidate for the title “last living veteran of World War I.” In May 2011, with the death of Coules, that title went to his fellow Brit who had not yet received anywhere near as much attention—Florence Green of the Royal Air Force.

Florence Green

Although not the oldest in years at the time of her death on February 4, 2012 (she was “only” 110 while two of her fellow veterans had lived to be 111), Florence Green came closest to making the centennial of any surviving veteran of World War I. Born Florence Patterson in February 1901, she joined the women’s branch of the newly formed Royal Air Force (formerly, the Royal Flying Corps) in September, 1918, two months before the armistice. At the time of her enlistment, she was only seventeen. During her brief time in the military, Patterson worked in the officer’s mess at two air force bases, Marham and Narborough, not far from the England’s east coast. While she was not a combat veteran (few women were), she had, as the British put it, “done her bit” and done it underage and without the prompting of a draft. Her service is one more example of the role women played in WW1 as nurses, shell makers (the so-called girls “canaries” or “girls with yellow faces”), and the thousands who not only kept the home fires burning, but who poured into industry and agriculture, making possible the war effort. Asked what it felt like to be 110, Florence Green is reputed to have replied, “not much different to being 109!” Whether or not the female of the species is deadlier than the male, in this case at least she proved to be the most long-lived—the last person standing.

As the countdown to the centennial of World War I continued, a number of surviving veterans came into the spotlight. These are a few of their stories.

Claude Stanley Choules, last combat veteran (died May 5, 2011; age 110)

Claude Stanley Choules

Born in England in 1901, Claude Choules, came from a broken home. Several older siblings, who had been taken out to Australia, joined the Anzacs and participated in the landings at Gallipoli in 1915. Choules himself started his naval career at the age of 15 when he signed onto a British training ship, having been turned down a year earlier when he tried to enter the army as a bugler. In October 1917, his training completed, he transferred to a British battleship, stationed at the main naval base at Scapa Flow. Although he was too late to catch the one great sea battle of World War I, fought at Jutland in spring, 1916, late in the war his ship did tangle with a zeppelin, making him a bona fide combat veteran. Choules witnessed the surrender of the German High Seas Fleet in November 1918, and the scuttling of that fleet by the German sailors the following June. He continued to serve in the British navy until 1926, when he transferred to the Royal Australian Navy in which he served throughout World War II, finally retiring only in 1955. Having moved to Australia, he would remain there for the rest of his life.

Henry John Patch (better known as Harry), last to have fought in the trenches on the Western Front (died July 25, 2009; age 111)

Henry John Patch

Born in 1898, Harry Patch became known in his final years as “the Last Fighting Tommy” — a nickname given British soldiers as long ago as the nineteenth century, short for Tommy Atkins. He was the last man known to have experienced the horrific trench warfare of the Western Front. In October 1916, at the age of 18, Patch was drafted into the army, too late for the battle of the Somme in which the British suffered 60,000 casualties in a single day, but in time for what many regard as the most horrible battle of the war, Passchendaele or 3rd Ypres, where men and animals actually sank into the mud of Flanders. He was part of the crew operating a Lewis Gun, a rapid fire weapon used in World War I, when on September 22, 1917, he suffered a massive injury from an exploding shell, which instantly killed three of his “mates.” It would be Patch’s last battle; he was still recuperating in Britain fourteen months later when the armistice was signed.

Patch, who outlived his three wives and two sons, was not only the last surviving veteran to have fought in the trenches, he seems also to have been the most profoundly quotable—at least toward the end, when he was finally willing to speak of his war experiences.

Remembering that moment of terror experienced by so many men on both sides: “If any man tells you he went over the top and he wasn’t scared, he’s a damn liar.”

Characterizing war in general: The “calculated and condoned slaughter of human beings” [that] isn’t worth one life.”

When meeting the last survivor who had fought on the other side at Passchendaele:

Earlier this year [2004], I went back to Ypres to shake the hand of Charles Kuentz, Germany’s only surviving veteran from the war. It was emotional….We’ve had 87 years to think what war is. To me, it’s a license to go out and murder. Why should the British government call me up and take me out to a battlefield to shoot a man I never knew, whose language I couldn’t speak? All those lives lost for a war finished over a table. Now what is the sense in that?

Frank Buckles, last American who served in World War I (died February 27, 2011; age 110)

Frank Buckles

Born in February 1901, the same month as Florence Green, Frank Buckles tried to join up in 1917, the year America entered the war, despite being only sixteen. After being turned down by both the marines and the navy, he managed to convince an army recruiter to take him in. He was told that the fastest way to get to the front was to drive an ambulance, which he did and, as a result, he is not technically classified as a combat veteran. Rising to the rank of corporal, he served as a driver in both England and France. After hostilities ended, Buckles took part in civilian relief operations and escorted captive soldiers back to Germany. Discharged in 1919, he returned to the Unites States where he actually met his former commander, General Pershing, during a dedication ceremony in Missouri.

Following the war, Buckles became a chief purser on passenger liners and cargo ships. In the 1930s, when his ship stopped at German ports, he had a chance to watch the rise of Nazism. In 1940, business brought him to the Philippines and in January 1942, during the Japanese invasion, he was captured. Buckles spent the next three years interred in civilian prison camp from which was liberated only in 1945. He would spend the rest of his life, over six decades, living in West Virginia where he and his wife owned a farm. In February 2008, he became America’s last surviving veteran of the war. Even then, he remained active in the quest to establish a National World War I memorial on the National Mall in Washington DC.

Charles Kuentz, a veteran who fought for both Germany and France (died April 7, 2005, age 108)

Charles Kuentz

At the time of his death, Charles Kuentz was believed to be the oldest surviving veteran of the German army who had fought in World War I. Clearly, that is what Harry Patch thought when the two met and shared their reminiscences at Ypres the year before. Although this was later found to be untrue—in fact, the oldest German soldier was Erich Kastner who died three years after Kuentz at age 107—the case of Charles Kuentz merits attention for another reason.

During the First World War, he fought on the German side and during the Second, he fought (albeit briefly) for the French!

This remarkable about-face in national allegiances resulted from the latest chapter in one of Western Europe’s longest running feuds—the conflict over Alsace-Lorraine. Lying between France and Germany, this territory was considered German until well into the early modern period. However, in the 17th century, the “Sun King,” Louis XIV, seized Alsace for France, while some decades later his successor, Louis XV, added Lorraine. During the next century and a half, the provinces despite the fact that many Alsatians continued to speak of a German dialect, became increasingly French in their outlook. Then came the Franco-Prussian war of 1870-71. After the German victory, all of Alsace and a significant part of Lorraine were regained as the spoils of war by the new German Empire. In the succeeding decades, the Alsace-Lorraine question remained a bitter bone of contention in Franco-German relations leading up to the First World War.

Having been born in Alsace when it was German territory, Kuentz was drafted into the German army at the age of 19. Over the course of several years, he fought for Germany on both the Eastern and Western fronts. In November 1918, immediately following the armistice, he joined many other members of the fast disintegrating army when he simply walked away and returned home to Alsace. The following year, the Versailles Peace Treaty that officially ended the war with Germany, transferred the “lost province” back to France. Since Kuentz now opted to embrace French citizenship, he was once again called to the colors in 1939, this time by the French, though on this occasion his military service was short-lived. With the surrender of the Third French Republic following the disastrous campaign of 1940, Alsace once again became German and Kuentz again found himself a German citizen. His son, with the very French name of Francois, joined the German SS and died fighting in Normandy in 1944.

Following the second war, Kuentz once again became a Frenchman and remained one until the end. At his death in 2005, his coffin was draped with the French flag.

Don’t miss more recent NEP articles about World War I:

Read about the mysterious censorship of Wilfred Owen’s personal correspondence

And explore Harry Ransom Center’s incredible collection of WWI propaganda posters

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

By Henry Wiencek

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Earlier editions of the New Archive:

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

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

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