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The Latest from Longhorn PhDs

In November we wrote to everyone who received a PhD in History at UT Austin since 2000 to find out what they were doing. We are curious about our former students’ careers and adventures and we want to celebrate their achievements in whatever line of work they pursued.

And we still do! We hope everyone who didn’t write back immediately will send us news of their work, travels, lives.

Photograph of the front facade of Garrison Hall on the campus of the University of Texas at Austin

Greg Cushman (2003 PhD) is an Associate Professor at the University of Kansas and he has just published a new book called Guano and the Opening of the Pacific World: A Global Ecological History (2013). One of his UT professors, Bruce Hunt, said that the book got an absolute rave review in “Science” and added that “It’s the best book on bird crap you’ll ever read.”

Stuart Rockoff has become Executive Director of the Mississippi Humanities Council.

Matt Childs is an Associate Professor and Director of the History Center at the University of South Carolina where he started teaching in the fall of 2009. Matt is the author of The 1812 Aponte Rebellion in Cuba and the Struggle against Atlantic Slavery (2006), which was a finalist for the 2007 Frederick Douglass Book Prize, and he has co-edited with Toyin Falola The Yoruba Diaspora in the Atlantic World (2005) and The Changing Worlds of Atlantic Africa: Essays in Honor or Robin Law (2009). Most recently he co-edited with his former UT profs, James Sidbury and Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, The Urban Black Atlantic during the Era of the Slave Trade (2013), which was featured in the New Books series this spring at the UT Institute for Historical Studies.

David Imhoof wrote to say that he is an Associate Professor and Chair of the History Department at Susquehanna University and he has just published his first book: Becoming a Nazi Town: Culture and Politics in Göttingen between the World Wars.

Roger Martinez, is Assistant Professor of history and Director of the Sephardic and Crypto-Jewish Studies Program at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs.

Ken Aslakson let us know that he teaches at Union College in Schenectady, NY where he just got tenure. His book Making Race in the Courtroom: The Legal Construction of Three Races in Early New Orleans is just about to be published by NYU. He wrote to us from France where he was completing a month-long invited professorship at the University of Toulouse.

Lauren Apter Bairnsfather (PhD 2008) works in the Office of the Dean of the UT Austin College of Liberal Arts where she supervises Grants Services, conducts institutional research for the Dean, and serves as contact for Humanities Research Awards. She has written articles for the AHA newsletter Perspectives and for Not Even Past about careers for history PhDs outside the professorate.

Anju Reejhsinghani has been Assistant Professor of Latin American and Caribbean history at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point since Fall 2010. She recently saw fellow UT Latin American history PhDs Bonar Hernández (East Stroudsburg University) and Ben Narvaez (University of Minnesota-Morris) at the North Central Council of Latin Americanists conference she helped to organize on her campus in September 2013. In January 2013, she developed and led one of the University of Wisconsin System’s first for-credit, short-term study abroad programs to Cuba; she is repeating the program in January 2014.

Kristen Oertel was a professor at Millsaps College in Jackson, Mississippi, for ten years, where she won the Outstanding Young Faculty award in 2003. She left Millsaps in 2010 to accept the Mary F. Barnard Chair in 19^th-Century American History at the University of Tulsa. She published her first book, Bleeding Borders: Race, Gender, and Violence in Pre-Civil War Kansas with LSU Press in 2009. Her second book, Frontier Feminist: Clarina Howard Nichols and the Politics of Motherhood (Kansas, 2011) won the Armitage-Jameson Prize for the best book in women’s and gender history from the Council of Western Women’s Historians. She says that “It’s sometimes tough to wear my Texas Longhorns t-shirt while living in Oklahoma, but I never waste an opportunity to wax poetic about my time at UT.”

Matt Heaton (PhD 2008) has been an Assistant Professor in the History Department at Virginia Tech. He has published Black Skin, White Coats: Nigerian Psychiatrists, Decolonization, and the Globalization of Psychiatry. (2013) and edited with Toyin Falola, A History of Nigeria in 2008.

Miguel A. Levario is an Associate Professor at Texas Tech University. He published Militarizing the Border: When Mexicans Became the Enemy (2012). He has also recorded an episode for 15 Minute History on Mexican-American immigration.

Anna Taylor writes: “I am happy to share my news, since I had such an excellent experience in the PhD program. My advisors were Martha Newman and Alison Frazier, and they did a wonderful job of preparing me for the academic job market, as well as supervising the dissertation.” She recently published Epic Lives and Monasticism in the Middle Ages, 800-1100 (2013), and also received tenure in the Department of History at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where she teaches a variety of courses on western civilization, medieval history, religion, monsters, and animals.

Faik Gur teaches at Ozyegin University in Istanbul and has just published an article in Historical Research, the journal of the Institute for Historical Research in London: “Sculpting the nation in early republican Turkey” (vol. 86, no. 232 [May 2013]).

David M. Lauderback has taught history at Austin Community College since 1996. Dr. Lauderback has served as a Fellow for the ACC Center for Public Policy and Political Studies for many years and partnered on numerous events, such as Texas Independence Day Celebration, Constitution Debate Night, the Mock Hearing on Health Care, the Earth Fair, and numerous teach-ins and lectures for ACC students and the community. He earned the Rising Star and Guiding Star awards from ACCs Student Life for his work with the Center for Student Political Studies and the Silver Star Children’s Literacy project. And, just this spring, Dr. Lauderback received recognition as recipient of a John and Suanne Rouche Excellence Award from the League for Innovation in Community College instruction.

Frances (Franni) Ramos wrote to tell us that In June 2013, she was promoted to Associate Professor with tenure at the University of South Florida. In 2012, she published Identity, Ritual, and Power in Colonial Puebla, which was awarded the Rocky Mountain Council for Latin American Studies Michael C. Meyer Award for Best Book in Mexican History published over the past five years (2008-2012). In the spring of 2013, she spent five months researching at the John Carter Brown Library with the support of an NEH, and she just received an Outstanding Research Achievement Award from USF. In August 2012, she also had a baby girl named Ellie! And she says, “I miss UT.”

Andrew Falk sent us a long newsy note that says in part: “it’s great to hear from Austin again, and I’m glad to give you an update. I keep up with the UT History Department regularly, including the impressive Not Even Past site.”

[We just had to include that!] “The short answer to your question is this: things are great and UT prepared me very well, indeed!” [We couldn’t resist that either.]

“After earning my PhD from UT Austin in 2003, I got a postdoc at the University of Georgia. Then I received an academic appointment at Christopher Newport University. It’s a mid-sized liberal arts college focused on undergraduate education. Located in Newport News, Virginia, CNU is situated in the beautiful Hampton Roads area between Colonial Williamsburg and Norfolk….At UT I worked most closely with Michael Stoff and Mark Lawrence and, therefore, teach classes in the same areas: modern US politics, culture, and foreign relations. Like Mike Stoff, I’ve led my students on several study abroad trips, including to China and throughout Europe. My first book, Upstaging the Cold War: American Dissent and Cultural Diplomacy, 1940-1960 was published as part of the “Culture, Politics, and the Cold War” series of the University of Massachusetts Press in 2010…. In Virginia I’ve managed to find Stubbs sauce, Shiner beer, and Bluebell ice cream, but the homesickness endures….Hook ’em.”

Julie Hughes writes: “I’ve been at Vassar College as an Assistant Professor of History since Spring 2010. My book Animal Kingdoms: Hunting, the Environment, and Power in the Indian Princely States first came out in 2012 in South Asia, where it was published by Permanent Black. In 2013, Harvard University Press published their edition of Animal Kingdoms. I just had an article on the idea of wilderness in the Indian princely states accepted for publication in the journal Modern Asian Studies, and will have a chapter on wild boar hunting in a forthcoming volume, Shifting Ground:People, Animals, and Mobility in India’s Environmental History,edited by K. Sivaramakrishnan and M. Rangarajan, from Oxford University Press. In November 2013, I was an invited speaker in the Yale Agrarian Studies Program’s Colloquium Series and, in March 2014, I will be giving a talk at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi, as part of their public lecture series ‘Science, Society and Nature.’ I hope all is well down there in Austin – I must say I miss it, especially when the weather starts getting cold up here!”

Paul Rubinson wrote to say “Not sure how much detail you want about my career, but I got my PhD in 2008 (an ominous year to start the job search) and managed to luck out with a TT job.” He is an Assistant Professor of History at Bridgewater State University (Bridgewater, MA). He’s published 4 articles on international science:

“The Global Effects of Nuclear Winter: Science and Antinuclear Protest in the United States and the Soviet Union during the 1980s,” forthcoming in Cold War History (published online February 15, 2013.); “Internationalism in a National Security State: U.S. Scientists and the Cold War,” in Artemy Kalinovsky and Craig Daigle, eds., Routledge Handbook of the Cold War. Forthcoming from Routledge in Summer 2014; “‘For Our Soviet Colleagues’: Scientific Internationalism, Human Rights, and the Cold War,” in Petra Goedde, William Hitchcock, and Akira Iriye, eds., The Human Rights Revolution: An International History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 245–64; and “‘Crucified on a Cross of Atoms’: Scientists, Politics, and the Test Ban,” in Diplomatic History, Vol. 35, No. 2 (April 2011), 313–49.

Saheed Aderinto, (PhD 2010) is an Assistant Professor at Western Carolina University. His book, When Sex Threatened the State: Illicit Sexuality, Nationalism, and Politics in Colonial Nigeria, will come out in Fall 2014. He has edited another book and published over a dozen articles, and is working on a book about guns and arms control in Nigeria.

Stefanie Wichhart is an Associate Professor at Niagara University, near Niagara Falls NY, where she teaches both Middle Eastern and European history. She has recently published two articles, one on the Iraqi Kurds in World War II in the Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History and the other on democracy debates in Iraq during World War II in the Journal of Contemporary History.

Eric Meeks (PhD 2001) writes to say that he is currently the department Chair and Associate Professor at Northern Arizona University. His book Border Citizens: The Making of Indians, Mexicans and Anglos in Arizona was published in 2007. It won several book awards and one of his articles, entitled “The Tohono O’odham, Wage Labor, and Resistant Adaptation, 1900-1930,” earned the 2004 Bolton-Kinnaird Award as the best article in borderlands history that year from the Western History Association, and the Oscar O. Winther Award for the best article appearing in the Western Historical Quarterly in 2003. He added: “I must say, UT Austin gave me a superb education, which I am very thankful for!”

Photo: Garrison Hall, UT Austin (Wikimedia Commons/User Larry D. Moore)

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.

The Ottoman Age of Exploration by Giancarlo Casale (2010)

by Christopher Rose

In The Ottoman Age of Exploration, Giancarlo Casale contests the prevailing narrative that characterizes the Ottoman Empire as a passive bystander in the sixteenth-century struggle for dominance of global trade. Using documents from archives in Istanbul and Portugal, Casale shifts our attention east and demonstrates that the Ottomans were actively engaged as rivals to the Portuguese for control of the lucrative spice trade and sea lanes of the Indian Ocean.

Casale’s study is a reaction against two historiographical trends: the first is a Eurocentric version of history in which the so-called Age of Exploration is posited as a purely European phenomenon, conditioned by the intellectual tradition of the European Renaissance and focused on New World colonization. This perspective focuses on the opening of direct trade between Europe and Asia as the catapult that launched Europe forward and started the Ottoman Empire’s slow road toward decline and eventual demise as the “sick man of Europe.” The second is the new trend toward a non-Eurocentric view of world history, that seeks to write the history of the global community that is independent of Europe. The Ottoman Empire tends to get short shrift in the early modern period in both of these narratives because it did not focus on Atlantic exploration or colonization. Indeed, a cursory review of nearly every map published in world history textbooks that depicts trade routes in the 16th and 17th centuries will show a swirl of arrows around, but never through, Ottoman and Safavid lands in the eastern Mediterranean.

Casale proposes instead that Ottoman participation in the Age of Exploration focused on maintaining, expanding, and defending Indian Ocean trade against the Portuguese expansion there. For the Ottomans, the Indian Ocean seemed likely to be far more lucrative than the colonization of a new continent whose economic viability was anything but assured. The income was substantial and the Ottoman and Portuguese navies were well-matched, challenging the Eurocentric narrative that suggests that European exploration was boosted by superior technology and weaponry.

While the phenomenon of Indian Ocean trade in the pre-colonial era has been well documented by Janet Abu-Lughod, Andre Frank and others, Casale provides the Ottoman perspective for the first time through new discoveries in the Ottoman archives. We are introduced to previously unknown heroes and villains, giving familiar events new interpretations. The Ottomans were introduced to this new milieu in 1517 following their conquest of Egypt, a province that had grown rich from its geographic position at the head of the Nile, the head of the Red Sea, and from the their monopoly on trade between the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean world. The Portuguese sought to challenge Egyptian dominance of Indian Ocean trade by circumnavigating Africa and establishing their own trading ports in South Asia. The Ottomans, Casale proposes, were motivated in part by Egypt’s riches, which they needed to support, among other things, their never-ending military rivalry with Safavid Iran. Once in Egypt, however, the Ottomans discovered that the Portuguese had established a blockade of the Red Sea to disrupt Egyptian trade with India and a military outpost at Hormuz to control access to the Persian Gulf. In order to restore trade and income, the Ottomans had to deal with the Portuguese menace and increase the flow of goods and their resulting tax revenue. Over the course of the sixteenth century, this led to the annexation of Yemen and Eritrea in order to enforce a Muslims-only shipping policy in the Red Sea and to prevent the Portuguese from striking at the symbolic heart of the empire, Mecca and Medina, or the imperial shipyards at Suez. Similarly, Basra at the head of the Persian Gulf was incorporated into the empire outright, and Casale documents several negotiated attempts at alliances or outright annexation of territories across the Indian Ocean basin as the Ottoman sphere of influenced waxed and waned over the course of the century.

The Ottomans employed a combination of military might, intelligence and espionage, diplomacy, propaganda, science, technology, and cartography in order to counter the Portuguese as they made a serious bid to expand what Casale refers to as a “soft” empire, where trade, rather than political and military power, connected disparate territories across the Indian Ocean, stretching from Yemen and Hormuz to Gujarat, Calicut, and as far as the sultanate of Aceh on the northern tip of Sumatra. Casale suggests that by 1580, the name of the Ottoman Sultan was read out during Friday khutbas from Central Africa to China, their reward for a propaganda campaign against the Portuguese. In telling this story, Casale’s brings us not only the voices of players in Istanbul, Cairo, and Lisbon but also the voices of the Indian and African rulers for the first time as they played these two powers—Ottoman and Portuguese—off of one another in an attempt to secure their dominions.

Casale might exaggerate the originality of his findings and the vision of some of his historical figures but he makes an interesting, readable, and meticulously detailed case for the Ottoman Empire as an active participant in the first century of the Age of Exploration, along with a well-justified explanation for its decision not to pursue expansion at the century’s end. European and World historians alike will find compelling evidence for a new narrative outlining a perilous balance of power in the Indian Ocean during this era in which Europe’s eventual ascendency was not a foregone conclusion. His readers will gain a new appreciation for all of the players involved—not just European and Ottoman, but also the Indian and African rulers who are finally given voice through Casale’s archival work.

Photo Credits:

Fragment of a 1513 Ottoman map depicting the coasts of Western Europe, Northern Africa and Brazil (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

A 1606 map of the Ottoman Empire (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

A History of the World in 100 Objects by Neil MacGregor (2011)

by Cynthia Talbot

Objects not only inform us about the time and place when they were made, but often have subsequent biographies of use that shed light on later historical developments. Take this wooden drum acquired in Virginia around 1730 and sent to a wealthy collector in England.

Identified as an American Indian artifact, it was one of 71,000 items in the founding collection of the British Museum, the world’s first national public museum. Since its founding in 1753 the British Museum’s collection has grown to more than 8 million objects, yet this drum still holds a special significance. A recent examination of the instrument’s wooden body revealed that it was made in West Africa, even though it had been obtained in North America and was long assumed to be of American Indian origin. Scholars now believe that the drum traveled across the Atlantic in a slave ship and spent some time on a Virginia plantation before winding up in London. It is a remnant, in other words, of the Atlantic slave trade, as well as of the Enlightenment impulse to collect and classify material from around the world.

The fascinating past lives of this drum are among the many glimpses into complex historical processes offered by A History of the World in 100 Objects by Neil MacGregor, the Director of the British Museum.

Based on a set of radio programs aired in 2010 by the British Broadcasting Company (BBC) in collaboration with the British Museum, the book is a later print adaptation that closely follows the contents of the radio broadcasts. The twenty parts into which the book is divided, each covering 5 objects, are organized both chronologically and by theme. Collectively, the objects cover a breath-taking expanse of time, beginning with a stone chopping tool from the famous Olduvai Gorge dating back about two million years and ending with a Chinese solar-powered lamp made in 2010. They come from all over the globe: Papua New Guinea, Peru, Pakistan, Paris, and St. Petersburg, among other places.

Along with representing numerous societies from around the world, the 100 items also illustrate the wide variety of material objects that humans have created over time. A ceramic roof tile from Korea, a bark shield from Australia, and a North American stone pipe are included in the selection, along with stone sculptures, paintings, and luxury goods that are more typical of museum exhibits. One of the most interesting objects from the perspective of everyday life is a British penny minted in 1903 that someone illegally stamped with the slogan “Votes for Women.” Defacing coinage was among the milder tactics adopted by British suffragettes in their long campaign to obtain voting rights for women, but it was an effective way to spread their message. They finally achieved success in 1918.

The diversity of objects contributes to the success of this project, but so too does Neil MacGregor’s engaging style of communication and constant attention to the significance of the artifacts, not only for the societies where they originated but also in terms of the larger world. In the section on the Lewis Chessmen, for example, MacGregor shows how things like chess pieces can teach us about the societies that produced them.

Made out of walrus ivory in the late twelfth century, probably in Norway, the Lewis Chessmen were discovered buried in a sand bank on Lewis Island in 1831. The Norse influence on this part of Scotland is revealed in the “berseker” chess pieces derived from the fierce warriors of Old Norse literature, the equivalent of the modern rook. Another piece in this and other European chess sets, the bishop, replaced the war elephant of the original Indian game, in a reflection on the powerful role played by churchmen in medieval Europe.

MacGregor is also skilled at highlighting how objects convey human experiences that transcend the barriers of time and place. We learn not only about the techniques of warfare from relief sculpture that depict the conquest of the Biblical town Lachish ca. 700 BCE, but also about the suffering of the local people after they surrendered to the Assyrians. MacGregor compares the Assyrian practice of forcibly resettling conquered populations to Stalin’s mass deportations in the Soviet Union during the 1930s-50s, and to the displacement of many refugees in the recent Balkan conflicts.

All in all, A History of the World in 100 Objects is an impressive achievement: a captivating introduction to the main themes of world history by means of a focus on tangible artifacts. The British Museum and the BBC have done a commendable job of making it accessible to the public, as well, through their companion websites. The original radio programs can still be heard online or downloaded as podcasts, while one or more images of each object can also be viewed along with a map of its original location. There is even a section for teachers containing lesson plans and a game, making this an even more useful resource for the classroom.

Companion websites:

100 Objects at The British Museum
100 Objects at the BBC

You may also like:

Enlightenment: Discovering the World in the Eighteenth Century (2003),
Kim Sloan, editor

“A History of New York in 50 Objects”

Photos courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Using History to See the World

by Gustavo Fernandez

(Photo courtesy of Gustavo Fernandez)

To some, the term “international history” may come across as vague and unfamiliar. Gustavo Fernandez, a student at UT Austin’s Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs, has dedicated an entire website, “Using History to See the World,” to demystifying this academic field. Fernandez defines international history as a sub-field of history that describes how nations, non-state actors, and non-governmental organization interact in the international arena. On his website, Fernandez talks about the different ways that historians, policymakers, and students use history to address, understand, and solve present-day policy issues. What historical examples, for instance, do today’s historians turn to before offering advice on how the United States should react to Iran’s decision to develop its nuclear program? What do Fox News pundits mean when they criticize Barack Obama for being an “appeaser”?

“Using History to See the World” contains book reviews, videos, links to relevant online news publications and course syllabi, and a blog to help readers answer these and other policy-related questions.

Photo credits:

Mario Tama,“Ahmadinejad,” 22 September 2008

Getty Image via tonygido/Flickr Creative Commons

University of Texas at Austin – Department of History

(Professor: Jeremi Suri)

Debating Bolshevism

by Andrew Straw

Communism acquired many different faces during the twentieth century. In the Soviet Union, it became known as Bolshevism. Named after the political party, led by Vladimir I. Lenin, that defeated the rival Menshevik Party in the October Revolution in 1917, Bolshevism would become the official political dogma of the Soviet Union for decades to come. The domestic response to Lenin’s revolutionary doctrine has inspired nearly a century’s worth of historical literature. Yet one question remains: how did other countries worldwide understand and react to what seemed like a particularly Soviet brand of communism?

Poster shows a Bolshevik leaning on a map of Europe and setting fire to Bavaria. The text below says: “The Bolshevik is coming! Throw him out on Election Day! Bavarian People’s Party.” (Courtesy of The Library of Congress)

Andrew Straw, a doctoral student at the University of Texas at Austin, created “Debating Bolshevism” to answer this very question. While even Stalin questioned the relevance of the term in as late as 1952, one glance at primary and secondary literature from across the globe during the twentieth century demonstrate that while the term may seem obsolete now, understanding what Bolshevism meant, how it was used, and why people had such strong reactions to it is crucial to understanding twentieth century history. The fact that the Soviet Union was the only official Bolshevik state in no way confined the idea of Bolshevism to the USSR. After all, Bolshevism’s own origins came from a transnational dissident group in European exile, one in which Lenin himself claimed membership. After the Bolshevik Revolution, Bolshevism entered into an ideological debate taking place on a world stage. Supporters presented it as an alternative to Western goals and principles of the West. Debating Bolshevism demonstrates that the international community from all points of the political spectrum took it seriously: its detractors maligned its violent excesses, and its supporters exalted its unhinging of imperial powers and rapid change.

Lenin leads the October Revolution wearing a proletarian workers’ cap on the front page of a 22 January 2009 issue of Pravda. The front-page article is etitled “On the Crisis,” referring to the recent spread of “Occupy Wall Street” protests in cities around the world. The accompanying text states that unemployed workers in Putin’s Russian (unemployment had reach nearly 20% in some areas) are ripe for communist revolution and calls on all concerned to attend a communist rally that was held on January 31 in Moscow.

Further down the page, a picture of pre-revolutionary Russian workers stands side by side with an image of currently unemployed Muscovites to underline the point. In addition, the newspaper includes a flyer for the demonstration that prominently displays the clenched fists of workers.

Mao Zedong was one of the prominent leaders of the 20^thcentury, and the road leading to his successful consolidation of power in the People’s Republic of China was heavily informed by the Bolshevik idea of a radically revolutionary break and guerilla warfare tactics. Mao was a firm believer that a potential revolutionary situation exists in any country where the government consistently fails in its obligation to ensure at least a minimally decent standard of living. While guerilla warfare certainly existed before Bolshevism, Mao was inspired by Bolshevik anti-imperialism, revolutionary self-determination of colonized populations, and civilian participation. Mao’s literature on military strategy drew heavily from Lenin’s On Guerilla Warfare, citing both Lenin’s political ideas and military tactics and sharing the belief that a “people’s” revolution was inevitable. Furthermore, even Western military men viewed Lenin as key to the Marxist revolutionary trends because they thought, “only when Lenin came on the scene did guerilla warfare receive the potent political injection that was to alter its character radically.

But despite the influence, Mao did not adhere to Moscow demands calling for a proletarian revolution, but instead he believed China’s revolutionary potential was housed entirely in the peasantry. Mao “knew and trusted the peasants, and had correctly gauged their revolutionary potential.” At least at this seemed to by the case to Samuel B. Griffith wrote the 1961 introduction to his translation of Mao’s on Guerilla warfare. While Mao’s Cultural Revolution and collectivization would later bring cause take a huge toll on the countryside, his initial use of peasants contrasted with the distrust and disdain Lenin and especially Stalin had for the Russian peasantry. Mao’s view was a such source of dissension between him and the Kremlin that Moscow even sanctioned the attempt by Zhou Enlai and a group known as the “28 Bolsheviks” who tried to replace Mao in 1934. These tensions would remain and only grow into the Sino-Soviet split during the Cold War.

Visit Andrew Straw’s graduate student homepage.

University of Texas at Austin – History Department

(Professor: Jeremi Suri)

Photo credits:

Zhou Zhenbiao, “Marx’s – The Glory of Mao’s Ideologies Brightens Up the New China,” Peking, 1952

People Fine Arts via The Library of Congress

The Civil World: A Global “War Between States”

by Henry A. Wiencek

Can historians reinterpret the American Civil War as a global event? This question inspired Henry Wiencek, a first year doctoral student in history at the University of Texas at Austin, to create the website “The Civil World: A Global ‘War Between States.’”

A rendering of the naval battle between in the infamous CSS raider, Alabama, and the Union Keasarge.

Weincek designed the site to provide an “intellectual portal” for historians, students, and general interest readers alike to consult in order to learn about the economic, diplomatic, and social changes ushered in by the Civil War on the international stage. That the Civil War can be interpreted as an international event may come as a surprise to many readers. The conflict, after all, is often taught and thought of as a regional phenomenon: its origins, key players, events, and consequences are traditionally thought to be constrained within U.S. borders. Wiencek’s website tells a different story. Through its diverse collection of maps, newspaper clippings, and recent historical literature, “A Civil World” argues convincingly that the war’s international stage played a significant role in the war’s origins, trajectory, and eventual outcome.

(A Harper’s Weekly cartoon satirized the widespread fear that a post-bellum, pre-Reconstruction America will descend into a “Mexican” state of constant civil war.)

Abraham Lincoln as the “Federal Phoenix” in the British magazine Punch.

University of Texas at Austin – Department of History

(Professor: Jeremi Suri)

Undergraduate Essay Contest Honorable Mention: The Global Cold War by Odd Arne Westad (2007)

by Carson Stones

The Global Cold War by Odd Arne Westad is a fascinating account of superpower interventions in the Third World during the latter half of the twentieth century.Covering a wide sweep of history, Westad argues that the United States and the Soviet Union were driven to intervene in the Third World by the ideologies inherent in their politics.

Westad opens his book with an examination of the ideologies of the United States, the Soviet Union, and the post-colonial leaders before the Second World War. Emerging victorious from the war, Westad argues that the two countries believed it was their destiny to combat the competing ideas of modernity in the post-war era of decolonization. With the world divided between NATO and the Warsaw Pact, any country declaring independence outside the blocs was a potential battleground for the competing ideologies. In a conflict that lasted over forty years and affected billions of people worldwide, Westad highlights the events chronologically from the Korean Peninsula to Latin America, Southeast Asia, Africa, and finally the Middle East and Afghanistan.

Seamlessly tying together seemingly unrelated incidents, The Global Cold War manages to take a bird’s eye view of history while still providing incredible details of the specific events, which turned the tide of the Cold War. Westad explains that each pivotal turn represented a new ideological shift for Moscow and Washington in the continuing struggle to win the hearts and minds of newly emerging countries. A few notable incidents from the book include the CIA operations in Guatemala, containment in Vietnam, and détente in Ethiopia. As this book proves, these superpower interventions only exacerbated the conflicts of diverse nationalities who were struggling to emerge from under the heels of Imperialism. The unfortunate result of these interventions was incredible bloodshed, environmental devastation, and millions displaced as refugees. The turning point of the book is the 1979 Iranian Revolution, preaching a new ideology, Islamism, which rejected both liberal capitalism and Marxist-Leninist socialism. The best chapters in the book follow the emergence of Islamism and the repercussions of its rapid spread in a two-bloc world.

This book provided a refreshing perspective on the Cold War as it related to the political and social developments in the Third World. Echoing Clausewitz, Westad calls the Cold War “a continuation of colonialism through slightly different means.” Anyone who reads this book will appreciate Westad’s tragically ironic statement that while both Moscow and Washington were formally opposed to colonialism, the “methods they used in imposing their vision of modernity on Third World countries were very similar to those of the European Empires who had gone before them.” This book will force readers to question the motives of American foreign policies which authorized assassinations, toppled democratically elected regimes, and supported dictatorships all in the name of protecting freedom and democracy from the evils of socialism around the globe.The conclusion of The Global Cold War is especially poignant when considering the ongoing conflict in the Middle East and the return of American troops this Christmas. Twenty years have passed since the collapse of the Soviet Union but the specter of the Cold War still haunts American foreign policy today. With the breakdown of the bipolar world, this book should encourage citizens around the world to question the motives of any country, which imposes an ideology upon their neighbors as humankind progresses into the twenty-first century.

Photo credits

Unknown photographer, Soldiers ride aboard a Soviet BMD airborne combat vehicle, Kabul, 25 March, 1986

DOD Media via Wikipedia

Check out the other winning and honorable mentions submissions for our First Annual Undergraduate Writing Contest:

William Wilson’s review of George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia

Lynn Romero’s review of Open Veins of Latin America

Katherine Maddox’s review of Beirut City Center Recovery

The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches from the Fault Line between Christianity and Islam by Eliza Griswold (2010)

by Joseph Parrott

There exists a fault line near the tenth parallel north of the equator where the two great proselytizing religions of the last two millennia meet. In centuries past, desert traders and merchant seamen carried Islam along with their goods, halting only where they confronted unsurpassable natural barriers or the expansion of European Christianity in the colonized regions of Asia and Africa. The diverse peoples of these lands found ways to live alongside each other, yet the past decades have seen this relative peace come unglued. New Yorker reporter and poet Eliza Griswold traveled along this increasingly chaotic border, documenting the day-to-day realities of the growing conflicts between the world’s largest monotheistic faiths. She finds that more than mere ideology motivates these men and women; instead, “growing numbers of people and an increasingly vulnerable environment are sharpening the tensions between Christians and Muslims over land, food, oil, and water.”

In Nigeria, Sudan, Malaysia, the Philippines, and elsewhere, Griswold reveals that religious identity serves as a refuge from the constant challenges of the modern way of life. Climate change, the expansion of the nation state in search of natural resources, political conflict, and the globalization of the market economy all undermine traditional beliefs that rely heavily on local community and close association with the environment. Colonial legacies and ethnic differences have inspired deep political divides.

In these developing countries, state institutions and social organization often lag behind economic growth and fail to fill the place of ailing traditions. Here, religious community provides stability and scripture proves “a more practical rule of law than the government does.” Faith offers a support network, a form of advocacy, and a unifying identity where life is difficult and the control of valuable resources contentious. The transnational nature of both Christianity and Islam means that these parochial negotiations of power often invite foreign assistance from evangelical missionaries and radical Islamists with their own agendas, meaning that battles are “fought locally and exploited globally.” The ease of communication and common beliefs connect disparate peoples, but such interactions also work to inspire divisions among coreligionists who reject the perceived superficiality and wickedness of the more secularized spiritual practices of developed states. Griswold finds that both Christianity and Islam prove complicated beliefs, neither inherently contradictory nor monolithic, powerful stabilizing forces abused by self-interested leaders. Faith in this context becomes a coping mechanism for unfamiliar world; it “could mean whatever one wanted it to; it could hold a link to the past or forge a vision for the future.”

Displaced Persons camp in Sudan resulting from the conflict in Darfur.

Griswold offers a fascinating, poignant, and insightful account of global religious conflict. Part history, part travelogue, and part theological mediation, the work successfully dissects the “compound of multiple identities” that drives the mass conversion of whole populations and motivates pious believers to take up arms against their neighbors. The daughter of Episcopal bishop Frank Griswold, the author situates this discussion of devotional violence within the context of her own spirituality, offering a personal and accessible view of a highly charged subject. Her pithy, graceful writing clothes this complicated story in an understated elegance. The Tenth Parallel demands attention as an insightful piece of historically informed news reporting and a truly engrossing account of one woman’s theological journey across the globe.

Further reading:

Eliza Griswold discusses Christian-Muslim relations on NPR Books.

Darfur photograph via Wikimedia Commons.

For the Soul of Mankind: The United States, the Soviet Union, and the Cold War by Melvyn P. Leffler (2008)

by Michelle Reeves

In this accessible and remarkably balanced synthesis, Melvyn Leffler, one of the most distinguished and prominent historians of American foreign relations, offers a refreshing interpretation of Cold War policymaking from the vantage points of both Washington and Moscow. Rejecting the oft-repeated assertion that U.S. foreign policymakers were ignorant or inattentive to the realities of power in the Soviet Union and the complexities of Third World nationalism, Leffler argues that cold warriors on both sides of the iron curtain were in fact keenly aware of the liabilities inherent in the zero-sum approach to international politics. Benefiting from access to multiple archives and a clear command of the secondary historical literature, Leffler has crafted a persuasive and thoroughly documented analysis that recasts the Cold War as not simply a political, economic, or military confrontation, but a battle “for the soul of mankind.” In doing so, he has transcended the scholarly debate over whether economic, structural, or ideological factors were more influential in determining the course of Cold War history.

Rather than adopting a standard narrative approach, Leffler focuses on both American and Soviet political leadership during five distinct intervals of potential détente—Truman and Stalin and the origins of the Cold War; Eisenhower and Malenkov during the power struggle within the Kremlin in the wake of Stalin’s death; Khrushchev, Kennedy, and LBJ in the aftermath of the Cuban missile crisis; Carter and Brezhnev and the erosion of détente; and finally, Gorbachev, Reagan, and Bush, and the end of the Cold War. Leffler argues that, while the decisions of policymakers were clearly shaped by perceptions of both threat and opportunity, the constraints of the international system within which they operated also severely circumscribed their freedom of action.

U.S. President Harry Truman and Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin alongside their advisors at the Potsdam Conference, July 18, 1945. Image via Wikimedia Commons.

This raises a conceptual problem with Leffler’s analysis, however. Although emphasizing contingency as a major factor in the arc of history, Leffler argues that Cold War leaders were trapped within ideological prisons of their own making, suggesting perhaps that the trajectory of the Cold War was more predetermined than he allows for. And viewing the time periods he has chosen for analysis here as moments of missed opportunity, he proceeds to prove that American and Soviet policymakers were so limited in their options that they had little choice other than to behave as they did. If that is in fact the case, the reader is left wondering whether there truly were opportunities for peace during these critical junctures.

These criticisms should not, however, obscure the fact that Leffler has written one of the most eloquent, balanced, and extensively researched books on the Cold War. “For the Soul of Mankind” certainly raises the bar for scholars of the Cold War, and in its nuanced complexity, elevates the scholarly debate over which factors were more salient in the development of Cold War policymaking. Although not definitive (and what monograph on such a huge topic possibly could be?), “For the Soul of Mankind” will likely grace both undergraduate and graduate level required reading lists for years to come.

The Wilsonian Moment by Erez Manela (2007)

by Lior Sternfeld

President Woodrow Wilson’s address in January 1918, later known as the “Fourteen Points,” outlined the principles for the post-war new world order. According to this speech, the U.S. would support the right of every people to “self-determination” and “consent of the governed.” Wilson also proclaimed that every nation, regardless of the size of its territory or population, should hold equal rights among the family of nations. Did Wilson honestly intend to grant every nation those rights? Can this message be considered universal? These vague questions are the basis for Erez Manela’s The Wilsonian Moment.

Manela closely examines the events that followed Wilson’s address to Congress in a few distinct contexts. He identifies four nascent national movements that exemplify the profound impact Wilson had over the colonial world. These case studies — Egypt, India, China, and Korea – illustrate Wilson’s emergence, development, and downfall as the great liberator of the colonial world. Manela begins with the contradiction that was embedded in America’s new vision: as a small, but nevertheless active colonial power, how could America champion an anti-colonial order? That contradiction was expressed in the concept of “Benevolent Supremacy.” Americans viewed their project in the Philippines as a civilizing mission that would eventually enable the native people to take control over their fate. The success of previous endeavors, such as Cuba, gave them good reason to believe in this policy. The U.S. propaganda service (Committee on Public Information-CPI) supported this view by creating an inspiring, universalist message that became well known all over the world by the end of the First World War. The “dawn of a new era” that Wilson promised was well anticipated everywhere on the colonial world.

Manela’s book is enjoyable and readable. With his rare breadth of expertise, Manela writes effective and illuminating introductions to each section. His ability to examine the exact same moment in five different countries (including the US) shows the genre of International History at its finest. His use of such sources as diplomatic correspondence, newspapers, journals, memoirs, and biographies in four different languages make the story more comprehensive than anything that has been told so far about this period.

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