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Not Even Past

2019 History PhDs on Not Even Past

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Digital Teaching: A Mid-Semester Timeline

The Blemished Archive: How Documents Get Saved

Age of Fracture by Daniel T. Rodgers (2011)

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

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

Finding Hitler (in All the Wrong Places?)

The Rise of Liberal Religion by Matthew Hedstrom (2013)

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

Another Perspective on the Texas Textbook Controversy

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

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

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

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

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

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

UT Gender Symposium: Women’s Bodies and Political Agendas

Thurgood Marshall in 1957 (Library of Congress)

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

The Many Histories of South Austin: The Old Sneed Mansion

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

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

A New History Journal Produced by Students

#changethedate: Australia’s Holiday Controversy

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

Notes from The Field: The Pope in Manila

Outlaws of the Atlantic by Marcus Rediker (2014)

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

Sixteen Months in a Leaky Boat

The Sapphires (2012)

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

Every Day Stalinism, by Sheila Fitzpatrick (2000)

Stalin’s Genocides by Norman Naimark (2011)

Soviets fighting during World War II (via wiki commons)

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

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

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

What Killed Albert Einstein

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Past and Present in Modern China

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

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

from Hayao Miyazaki’s film The Wind Rises

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

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

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

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

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

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

Popular Culture in the Classroom

The First Texans: An Exhibit in Jester Hall

Confederados: The Texans of Brazil

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

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

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

You’re Teaching WHAT?

Wrong About Everything

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

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

Industrial Sexuality: Gender in a Small Town in Egypt

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

Exploring the Silk Road

The Ottoman Age of Exploration by Giancarlo Casale (2010)

What’s Missing from ‘Argo’ (2012)

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

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


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

 

History and Advocacy: Brazil and Turmoil

Sanctuary Austin: 1980s and Today

Beyonce as Historian: Black Power at the DPLA

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

The Public Historian: Giving it Back

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

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

An Anticipated Tragedy: Reflections on Brazil’s National Museum

The Public Historian: Quilombola Seeds

Getz/Gilverto Fifty Years Later: A Retrospective

Por Ahora: The Legacy of Hugo Chávez Frías

The Cuban Connection by Eduardo Saénz Rovner (2008)

Che: A Revolutionary Life by Jon Lee Anderson

Narco-Modernities

Photo from Edward Shore’s Collection

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

Our History Mixtape: Embracing Music in the Classroom

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

A History of the World in Sixteen Shipwrecks, by Stewart Gordon (2015)

By Cynthia Talbot

The world’s attention was captured in 2012 by the disaster that befell the Costa Concordia, a cruise ship that ran aground off the coast of Italy leading to 32 deaths.

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This shipwreck is the most recent one covered in A History of the World in Sixteen Shipwrecks, whose expansive gaze covers much of the world from 6000 BCE to the present.  Like several other books containing the words “A History of the World in ..” in their title, Stewart Gordon’s work attempts to encapsulate world history through the close study of a set number of things.  Other examples of this approach include A History of the World in 100 Weapons, A History of the World in 12 Maps, A History of the World in 6 Glasses, and the very successful A History of the World in 100 Objects, a collaborative project between BBC Radio and the British Museum.  Focusing on a few cases as a way to illustrate global trends is both entertaining and effective – the reader can acquire interesting details about specific things and learn about the broader context at the same time.  

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Recovery operations on the Costa Concordia (via Wikimedia Commons).

Shipwrecks are dramatic occurrences that are often tragic for those involved, but they can also lead to the preservation of artifacts that can be studied and analyzed, sometimes centuries or millennia after the events themselves.  The Bremen cog from German, considered the best surviving specimen of this type of vessel, sank in 1380 but was not discovered until 1962.

Remains of the Bremen Cog (via Wikimedia Commons).

The cog was the dominant ship in northern Europe between about 1200 to 1450 CE. It was a bulk carrier of beer and wool and also served as a warship.  Another ancient type of ship is the Khufu barge, featured in the second chapter of A History of the World in Sixteen Shipwrecks.  This boat was buried in the Great Pyramid of Giza around 2600 BCE and was not discovered until 1954.  The Khufu barge, like several of the ships featured in the book, was not destroyed at sea but Gordon uses a broad definition of shipwreck because his chief goal is to examine the varieties of ships that have existed in human history and the maritime worlds they helped shape.

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Khufu barge after discovery (via Wikimedia Commons).

The shipwreck is therefore just an entry point for Gordon into the far larger topic of maritime history.  Each shipwreck allows the author to understand the various ways ships influenced the human societies that utilized them. He explains how each type of vessel was built, the purposes to which it was put, its strengths and weaknesses as a ship, and the maritime network it created.  He begins the book with the dugout canoe, a variety of boat found in several parts of the ancient world.  The chapters then follow a chronological sequence from the dugout to the modern cruise ship with a variety of stops along the way, including the famous seventh-century Sutton Hoo burial, the Intan shipwreck from Indonesian waters, a Spanish galleon, an American clipper ship, and the Exxon Valdez.  

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At times, Gordon uses literary evidence to launch his discussion, instead of an actual physical relic.  His chapter on the Arab dhow that plied the waters of the western Indian Ocean, for instance, relies on twelfth-century letters preserved at a synagogue in Cairo.  We learn about the Barbary war galley from the sixteenth-century memoir of an Englishman who described the ordeals of slavery that he faced after his ship was attacked and boarded in the Mediterranean.  Another chapter covers the attempted invasion of Japan by the Mongol leader Khubilai Khan in the thirteenth century, known to us from many sources of information, including Japanese picture scrolls painted soon afterward.  Above, we see Mongol warriors shooting arrows from a ship on the left hand side, while Japanese samurai board a Mongol ship on the right.  

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Japanese samurai boarding Yuan ships in 1281 (via Wikimedia Commons).

Although Gordon makes a concerted effort to examine ships from many areas of the world, the coverage shifts more and more to vessels from Europe and the United States as we get closer to the present.  The case of the HMS Victory, sunk in a storm after breaking a blockade in the Mediterranean in 1744, sheds light on the rise of British naval power.  The radical reduction of transport time resulting from use of the steam engine is illustrated by means of the Lucy Walker, a sidewheel steamboat that plied the waters of the Mississippi River.  Its engines overheated and blew the boat apart one day in 1844, with at least 43 casualties resulting.  

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Lucy Walker explosion, as depicted in an 1856 woodcut (via Wikimedia Commons).

The horrible scene of this explosion, a common problem for steamboats, was depicted by an artist in 1856. The transporting of large numbers of people, rather than cargo, became the rationale for large passenger ships such as the Lusitania.  Almost 1200 people died when it was struck by a torpedo from a German submarine in 1915, while en route from New York to Liverpool – a depiction of which adorns the cover of A History of the World in Sixteen Shipwrecks.  

Going well beyond the topic of shipwrecks, this enjoyable and educational book exposes the reader to diverse seascapes, social terrains, and political developments, as well as considerable information about trading patterns. In its geographic breadth and temporal length, it provides an admirable example of history writing on a world historical scale. Overall, A History of the World in Sixteen Shipwrecks is an engaging introduction to maritime history that explores the impact of specific types of ships in their regional economies and the gradual emergence of a globally connected maritime world by the twentieth century.  

Stewart Gordon, A History of the World in Sixteen Shipwrecks (Lebanon, NH: University Press of New England, 2015)

More by Cynthia Talbot on Not Even Past:
A History of the World in 100 Objects by Neil MacGregor (2011)
Great Books on Women’s History: Asia

You may also like:
Andres Lombana-Bermudez and Blake Scott discuss Colón 2000: Tour Guides, Cruiseships, and Tourists in Panama

Trauma and Recovery, by Judith Herman (1992)

By Augusta Dell’Omo

For Judith Herman, “to study psychological trauma means bearing witness to horrible events.” A professor of clinical psychiatry at Harvard University Medical School and a founding member of the Women’s Mental Health Collective, Herman is best known for her research on complex post-traumatic stress disorder, particularly with victims of sexual and domestic violence. In her own words, Trauma and Recovery is a book about “restoring connections” between individuals and communities and reconstructing history in the face of a public discourse that did not want to address the horrors of sexual and domestic violence. Herman begins her work by situating it in the feminist movement and the “forgotten history” of traumatic disorders, describing the cultural and political factors that have continually prevented psychological trauma from being recognized effectively by the public. From there, she enumerates not only the symptoms of traumatic disorders, but argues that only by renaming sexual, domestic, and violence traumas as “complex post-traumatic stress disorders,” and treating victims as suffering from this specific disorder, can victims truly “recover.”

herman-cover

Trauma and Recovery has been recognized as a groundbreaking psychological and historical work because it forces the reader to come to terms with the underlying traumas that permeate society and the ways in which a culture of oppression furthers the protection of the perpetrators. While Trauma and Recovery is over two decades old, its argument seems particularly fresh in the context of current national conversations on the status of victims of sexual assault, particularly in university settings, and their treatment in society. A close reading of Trauma and Recovery forces us to examine our own biases and the historical precedents that have colored our treatment of victims today.

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Judith Herman in a 2002 interview (via YouTube).

Herman argues that the study of psychological trauma is not governed by consistency, but rather “episodic amnesia,” in which the stories of the victims became public for brief periods of time before diminishing into the background. She points to three key moments: the treatment of “hysterical women” in late nineteenth-century France, the treatment of shell shocked soldiers in England and the United States after the First World War, and finally, the public awareness of sexual and domestic violence that took place during the feminist movement in Western Europe and North America. For Herman, one of the consistent elements in all three cases was a culture of societal neglect, in which the victim is rendered invisible and discredited, a horrifying tendency that seems to have continued into American society today.

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British soldiers after a German chemical weapon attack in 1917 (via Wikimedia Commons).

Herman follows with a description of trauma, stating that it overwhelms the victim, removing control, connection, and meaning. Individuals display hyperarousal, intrusion, and constriction, sometimes at levels so extreme they force an alternative state of consciousness to form, so that the victim can actually cope with their reality. This alternative state of consciousness, Herman argues can manifest in a variety of ways including multiple personality disorder, amnesia, and “sleep walking.” One of the most persistent elements Herman describes is “intrusion,” in which traumatized individuals cannot resume the normal condition of their lives due to the repeated interruption of the trauma. These symptoms occur because of a rupturing of the “inner schemata.” This is paramount for understanding both individual and societal trauma: for the individual, their trauma disrupts their inner schemata of safety, protection, and trust in the outside world.

Throughout Trauma and Recovery, Herman delineates the ways in which the societal context can affirm and protect the victims by giving voice to the disempowered, but can also deny the victims through silencing and rejection. Indeed, Herman states that denial is often the default state of society, in which the active process of “bearing witness” instead “gives way to the active process of forgetting.” These ideas of “bearing witness,” and forcing vocalization of events are similar to the work of religious, ethnic, and racial minorities in the face of traumatic genocide, oppression, and destruction. The active construction of a truthful narrative helps survivors to “re-create the flow” of memory, transform the recollection, and mourn that traumatic loss. In Herman’s final section, the emphasis on “truth” becomes paramount: only through a truthful understanding and representation of events can individuals and society come to an understanding of psychological trauma.

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A culture of victim-blaming still shapes the experience of trauma (via Richard Potts).

Herman’s Trauma and Recovery was a groundbreaking work that forced society to reckon with the nature of trauma and proved how understanding trauma can help us comprehend some of the most damaged groups in society. Herman’s research is critical in the historical understanding of how to bring truth to individuals and groups that societies have passively or actively chosen to repress. Furthermore, she raised interesting questions about constructing historical narrative when dealing with both perpetrators and victims and she showed how the collective memory of a society can hide atrocities that have been committed. Herman states in her afterword, that she sees the culture of victim blaming and repression of the heinous crimes of sexual violence as disappearing. However, lawsuits against universities about willful ignorance and discrediting of sexual assault survivors’ testimonies exposes Herman’s final claims as too optimistic. If nothing else, her work inspires historians to pursue a more active understanding of painful truths and charges us to side with the victims of violence to establish truth and justice, for which, she says, there “can be no greater honor.”

Judith Herman, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror (New York: Basic Books, 1992)

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You may also like:
Emily Whalen reviews John Mack’s psychological profile of T.E. Lawrence, A Prince of Our Disorder (1976).
Jack Loveridge recommends Robert Graves’ iconic war memoir, Goodbye to All That (1929).
Jimena Perry explores violence and historical memory in Colombia’s museums.

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Great Books on Women’s History: Europe

Not Even Past asked the UT Austin History faculty to recommend great books for Women’s History Month. The response was overwhelming so we will be posting their suggestions throughout the month. Since today is International Women’s Day, a celebration that began in Europe, we will begin with some terrific book recommendations on women and gender in Europe.

In no particular order:

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Philippa Levine recommends:

Alison Light, Mrs. Woolf and the Servants: An Intimate History of Domestic Life in Bloomsbury (2008)

In a brilliant reading of the great modernist novelist Virginia Woolf, Alison Light compares the absence of servants in Woolf’s published fiction with the constant references to them in her correspondence with friends and family.   Woolf was still employing servants at the moment when what had been a veritable army of available female domestic labour began to shrink as women rejected the constraints of such work and sought better paid and less intimate work elsewhere. In detailing Woolf’s fraught relationship with her long-time live-in servant, Nellie Boxall, with whom  she fought constantly, Light reveals the class and gender tensions that continued to shape British culture in the early twentieth century in elegant prose and with really sharp insights. A fantastic read!

Tracie Matysik and Yoav di Capua recommend:

Kate Evans, Red Rosa:  A Graphic Biography of Rosa Luxemburg (2015).

A compelling book, that introduces the reader to the passionate life and convictions of Rosa Luxemburg.  And the illustrations are beautiful, even moving.  Along the way, you’ll get a good glimpse of the aims and challenges of revolutionary thought in Europe in the early years of the twentieth century.  

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Tatjana Lichtenstein recommends:

Janina Bauman, Beyond these Walls: Escaping the Warsaw Ghetto – Young Girl’s Story (2006).

In this book — part diary, part memoir — Janina Bauman tells the fascinating story of how three Jewish women escaped the Warsaw ghetto and, assisted by a small network of courageous and devoted Polish helpers on the “Aryan” side, survived the war in hiding and by passing as non-Jews.

Mary Neuburger recommends:

Jelena Batinić, Women and Yugoslav Partisans: A History of World War II Resistance (2015)

This book traces both the fascinating phenomena of women’s role in the largest resistance movement in Europe during World War II, and women’s postwar memory of the changes in gender roles caused by the war and the communist period that followed.

Andy Villalon recommends: 

Vera Brittain, Testament of Youth.

The most moving memoir (male or female) to come out of the Great War.  Highly readable and easily obtainable, this is the story of love and unfathomable loss by a woman who saw all of her close male friends, including her fiancé and her brother, slaughtered in the holocaust of 1914-18.  The book also sheds considerable light on the trials women faced in pursuing an education during the decades just before the conflict.  It is the story of the making of a great crusader for pacifism.  I have read Testament of Youth several times and have never been able to avoid crying at various passages.

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Miriam Bodion recommends:

Elisheva Baumgarten, Mothers and Children: Jewish Family Life in Medieval Europe (2007)

This thoughtful, often surprising work makes use of a broad array of sources, from theoretical works on gender to ancient and medieval rabbinic texts, to explore how medieval Jews thought about birth, infant care, and the raising of children.

Julie Hardwick recommends: 

Judith Bennett, History Matters: Patriarchy and the Challenge of Feminism (2006)

A leading medievalist takes a brilliant, lively, provocative, and very accessible look at the persistence of gender inequality and insists we can only understand that pattern by looking back — well back.  Her topics range from work to sexuality, and she makes a very important and compelling argument.

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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

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

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

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

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

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.

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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

 

A Ferro e Fuoco: La Guerra Civile Europea, 1914-1945 by Enzo Traverso (2008)

by Alexander Lang

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The period from 1914-1945 has sometimes been called a “European Civil War,” but that concept has rarely been put to a systematic examination. Fortunately, Italian historian Enzo Traverso’s recent work A Ferro e Fuoco, which can be loosely translated as Put to the Sword, offers some intriguing proposals for understanding the period as a continental civil war. For Traverso, this larger perspective is important as Europe continues to struggle with the memory of the violence unleashed by two world wars. Only by entering the moral and psychological world of the actors of the time, he claims, can we comprehend the ever increasing systems of violence that culminated in the Holocaust.

One of the focal points of the book is how conceptions of legality changed during the period. Traverso employs the ideas of the German legal scholar (and Nazi supporter) Carl Schmitt to explain how the pre-1914 liberal order fell to the harsh legality of civil war. According to Schmitt, in a civil war, the two opposing sides each represent a different legal order, which requires that each place its enemy in a state of illegality. Before 1914 this ability of a sovereign to declare enemies illegitimate had been reserved to domestic civil wars and to the colonies. But when the Bolshevik Revolution challenged the legal structure of nation-states by representing an idea rather than a political entity, many Europeans sought to not only crack down on domestic supporters of communism, but to help overthrow, and then quarantine, the Bolshevik “virus.”

From the beginning of the Russian Civil War (1918) until the end of the Second World War, both fascists and communists, and sometimes liberal-democrats, denied the legal legitimacy of certain groups and individuals (such as political opponents, immigrants, ethnic minorities, and others) in order to either protect the sovereignty of the state or to provide the state with tools to construct a new legal order based not on the past, but on ideological imperatives. This culminated in Germany’s invasion of Russia in 1941, a war conceived by the Nazis as an existential struggle of annihilation. It is therefore not surprising that the Allies demanded that Germany surrender unconditionally, and later executed Wilhelm Keitel, who had represented the German armed forces at the surrender. Such actions would have been inconceivable in earlier wars between nations, but the European Civil War could only be resolved through the elimination of an opponent deemed illegitimate by the victors.

Traverso suggests that our modern liberal-democratic sensibilities are offended by the ease with which many leftists and rightists turned to the legal exclusion and violent targeting of groups seen as a threat. He fears that the consequent valorization of those who stayed neutral and “above” the fray will lead us to forget how discredited the liberal order was, and how the often violent means of revolutionaries and resistance fighters were the only realistic response to the threat of Nazism and Fascism. Furthermore, Traverso argues that while not all of these leftists were communists, only the strength and conviction of communists could have spearheaded the anti-fascist movement that would grant the opportunity for aimless socialists and liberals to regain their sense of strength.

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Russian POWs being marched to a German prison camp, 1941 (Image courtesy of The People’s Republic of Poland)

Traverso’s argument is not only legal, as he describes the evolution of violence during the period, as well as the psychological phenomena of fear and hysteria. Within each he shows how the catastrophe of World War I and its aftermath laid the foundations for the greater tragedy that would follow, though he does not go so far as to say that the Second World War was a necessary conclusion to the first. More work will have to be done to demonstrate the continuum of violence and instability linked to the fear and competing legitimacies unleashed in 1914. With that said, Traverso’s work pushes us to place local violence in the broader context of an international struggle, and to place the critical moments of that struggle (the Russian Civil War, the Spanish Civil War, World War II and all of its small civil wars) in a single period marked by constant structural and psychological crisis.

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A destroyed farmhouse in Belarus or Ukraine after the German invasion of 1941 (Image courtesy of The People’s Republic of Poland)

Images used under Fair Use Guidelines

Good-Bye to All That: An Autobiography by Robert Graves (1929)

by Jack Loveridge

imageReflecting on his motives for joining the Royal Welch Fusiliers at the outbreak of the First World War, Robert Graves wrote: “I thought that it might last just long enough to delay my going to Oxford in October, which I dreaded.” So began a five year pause in Graves’ life, in which the main action of his autobiography unfolds. In Good-Bye to All That, Graves powerfully explores the horrors of the First World War, while also providing a compelling look at the inner workings of British society.

On the front lines at Cuinchy and Laventie, divisions between the men who fought became clear. Graves highlights the bravery of Welsh soldiers who, as former miners, prove pessimistic but particularly well-adjusted to the trenches, but he adds a Welsh comrade’s sentiments regarding Scottish battalions, noting that they, “run like hell both ways.” While stationed in Ireland near war’s end, Graves comes down with Spanish influenza and flees for London to avoid suffering treatment in a “horrific” Irish hospital. In this way, Graves also relays the prevalence of regarding class and racial divisions in imperial Britain.

Throughout, Graves drives the social analysis implicit in his work with a dark sense of humor. For instance, as though schoolboys at Charterhouse, soldiers roll a defused bomb through the trenches to play a cruel joke on a shell-shocked comrade. Graves finds himself naked in a public bath in Béthune with the Prince of Wales, who was “graciously pleased to remark how emphatically cold the water was.” In a burned-out French village, the troops organize an impromptu cricket match using a birdcage as the wicket – with the dead parrot still inside. These vivid images reveal men far from home and in close proximity to death, struggling to maintain the regular routines of English life. With his humor and gently sardonic prose, Graves’s autobiography yields a depiction of the First World War and its domestic aftermath that says as much about British society as it does about the author’s own life.

imageEnglish soldiers in the trenches at Nieuport Bains, Belgium, 1917. The sergeant in the foreground is watching the German line through a periscope fixed on his bayonet. (Image courtesy of the United Kingdom Government)

Following the war, Graves picked up his life almost exactly where he left it. He matriculated at Oxford and launched a long career as a writer, poet, and scholar of antiquity. Yet, like so many of Graves’s generation, the war years left psychological scars that would linger for life. Good-Bye to All That investigates those scars and gives readers a crystalline sense of the trauma that left them.

You may also like:

Yana Skorobogatov’s review of The Pity of War, Niall Ferguson’s history of British involvement in the First World War.

Jermaine Thibodeaux’s piece on African-American soldiers in WWI. 

The Pity of War by Niall Ferguson (2000)

by Yana Skorobogatov

In The Pity of War, Niall Ferguson dedicates fourteen essays to addressing the major historical issues associated with the First World War.The essays fall into three broad categories: war origins, execution, and aftermath. Overt militarism, Germany’s ascent to power, alliance-based foreign policies, arms racing, and British intervention are issues covered in the first part of the book, while wartime enthusiasm, propaganda, economy, and military strategy are discussed in the second. The final chapter, on the Versailles Treaty, advances the controversial argument (one that rests on a long-winded condemnation of John Maynard Keynes) that the peace terms were not unprecedented in their harshness and that German hyperinflation was due to irresponsible fiscal policies adopted by the Germans themselves. The question that informs Ferguson’s analysis is: who is to blame for the war? Ferguson is unambiguous in his belief that British statesmen overestimated their alliance obligations and the extent of the German threat, which led them to mistakenly intervene in and transform a regional conflict into a global war. This assessment colors each of the book’s chapters and leads the author to put forth many bold, unorthodox, yet startlingly fresh arguments about a topic that many of today’s historians have written off as overdone.

51di57Zae0LAfter finishing the book, the reader will realize that its subtitle, “Explaining World War I,” is far more clever than it appears at first glance. The Pity of War offers not quite a history of the First World War, but rather a history of Great Britain and the First World War; for Ferguson, the two are inseparable. In his eyes, a proper explanation of World War I must dedicate a significant portion of its narrative to Great Britain. This would have been construed as an outdated approach – most recent scholars of empire have stopped writing books centered in the City of London – if not for the innovative mix of social and cultural history added to Ferguson’s standard economic and military analyses. Fascinating chapters on the media purveyors of wartime propaganda, enthusiasm on the home front, and soldier motivation humanize other chapters that depict army recruits as little more than another item on the British government’s grocery list for war material.

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TTFerguson deserves praise for a book that is unique in scholarly insight, rigorous in its treatment of the secondary literature, and accessible to a non-academic reader. His excellent use of popular literature – the wartime poems, books, and songs he read and heard while growing up in England – testify to his personal connection to his subject. The book’s most convincing arguments are those that rely on evidence of Cabinet, Parliamentary, and popular political attitudes that contradict previous scholars’ explanations for British intervention in the conflict. For example, Ferguson argues that a militant culture, embodied by Army Leagues and immensely popular spy books, cannot even partially explain British politicians’ decision to declare war against Germany because such a culture lacked an electoral following. To the contrary, many of the most influential politicians at the time worked to uphold a liberal tradition defined by an aversion to excessive military spending and a historic dislike of a large army. Theorists like J.A. Hobson, whose widely-read books outlined the malign relationship between a nation’s financial interests, imperialism, and war, helped anti-militarist socialist parties gain a strong electoral following on the eve of war. Ferguson makes an interesting distinction between pacifism and anti-militarism, of which social and cultural historians should take note. Other anecdotes are less worthy of emulation. His strong belief that Germany would have guaranteed France and Belgium’s territorial integrity in exchange for British neutrality comes across as extremely optimistic, if not baseless. Ferguson seems naive to assume that a “Middle European Empire of the German Nation” could be maintained without German infringement on a rival nations’ sovereignty. Nazi Germany’s continental ambitions, though qualitatively different from Mitteleuropa, offer a hint to what France and Belgium’s fates would have been like had plans for a German-dominated and exploited Central European union been realized.

Photo credits:

Realistic Travels, “Three British soldiers in trench under fire during World War I,” 15 August 1916 (Image courtesy of The Library of Congress)

McLagan & Cumming, “The tank tour. Buy national war bonds (£5 to £5000) and war savings certificates,” 1918, Scottish War Savings Committee (Image courtesy of The Library of Congress)

You may also like:

Lior Sternfeld’s review of Erez Manela’s The Wilsonian Moment.

Joseph Parrott’s review of Churchill: A Biography.

Life and Nothing But (1989)

by Judy Coffin

French historians love this film.  It’s hard to convey the horrors of what was long called The Great War: the almost unimaginable losses at battles like Verdun and the Somme; the mobilization of whole economies, states, and societies to supply those battles and to replenish the men and material afterwards; the stench of rotting corpses (human and animal) in the trenches; and the grinding boredom of trench life – interrupted by terrifying bombardment or the dreaded command to go “over the top,” through the mud, barbed wire, and, further on, the machine gunners on the enemy side. Life and nothing butStanley Kubrick’s Paths of Glory (with Kurt Douglas, 1957) captures some of the view from the trenches. So does PBS’s multi-disc documentary: The Great War and the Shaping of the Twentieth Century.  Not surprisingly, though, the most popular films about World War I – like the brilliant Lawrence of Arabia  — are set far from the un-cinematic slog of the western front. Life and Nothing But is set on the front, but after the war, where the French are trying both to tally their losses and commemorate their victory. Both projects are heartbreaking and, in some important sense, impossible. That’s the point, and the film captures one of the tragedies of war and a more specific tragedy of twentieth-century French history.

Philippe Noiret plays French Major Delaplane, charged with trying to discover the fates of the over 300,000 French soldiers missing at the end of the war. Most of them were dead, it would turn out. 1.4 million French soldiers were killed, out of 8.4 mobilized. Delaplane presides over a ramshackle, improvised office filled with clerks compiling lists of the dead and descriptions of the missing. In the psychiatric hospital next door, teams of doctors work with soldiers whose minds have been destroyed: trying to get them to walk, to speak, or to recover bits of memory that might help to identify them. In the surrounding countryside, crews dig in a tunnel that had been mined by the Germans, destroying a Red Cross train and the wounded it was carrying. On designated days families of the missing are permitted on site, and they comb through long tables of rings, watches, and occasionally photographs searching for bits and pieces of their loved ones’ lives.

Into this melancholy scene come two women. Irène de Courtil, (Sabina Azena) wealthy and beautiful, is looking for her missing husband and the much younger, middle-class Alice (Pascale Vignal) searching for her fiancé, whom she met while he was a soldier. Alice had taught school during the war, but then had to give up her post to a veteran returning from the front. (This is a nicely understated rendering of the government’s policy after World War I.) She now is working in a café in the area near Delaplane’s project, hoping for news.

No spoilers here, and the plot matters! But you will find love, of course, and deception, class resentments, and cynicism (softened by love). It’s not grim, but haunting. It’s hardly an action film –- I don’t want you to be disappointed — but then World War I was not usually an action war. It’s about a country whose past is mined, literally and figuratively, but which is compelled to return to that past. It’s about memory, a subject that has fascinated historians for decades now. It’s smart about commemoration: Tavernier makes us ask what the French state wants to commemorate and how, what the families want to remember, and what Delaplane, Irène, and Alice, respectively, are looking for. It’s acerbic about the politics of commemoration too. Delaplane has to produce a body for the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. “Ah non,” the government’s representative says refusing one of the bodies that the major offers him: “certainly not a black!” Why not? Roughly half a million troops from France’s colonies fought in the war.

France’s victory cost more than the country could pay. Reparations would prove a dangerous illusion. We know this, and we know what happened in a few decades later. But this film doesn’t preach or offer general lessons: it looks closely at a grieving culture, trying to gather up the pieces and move on – to what we now know will be another war.

More great French war films:
François Truffaut, The Last Metro

Marcel Ophuls, The Sorrow and the Pity

Marcel Ophuls, Hotel Terminus: the Life and Times of Klaus Barbie

Jean-Pierre Melville, Army of Shadows

Joseph Losey, Mr. Klein

Louis Malle, Au Revoir les Enfants

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