May Day–International Worker’s Day

Peter Staudenmaier reminds us of the varied meanings of May Day, and shares his experience in New York, working with Occupy Wall Street organizers, doing the work of a public intellectual.

Today is May Day, a traditional springtime holiday that is also celebrated in much of the world as International Workers’ Day. Its modern historical roots lie here in the Midwest, among immigrant labor activists in the Chicago of the 1880s, and are as much anarchist as socialist. May Day also occupies an important place in the history of the Catholic Worker movement of Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin. This year it will be marked by a series of demonstrations across the US coordinated through the Occupy Wall Street movement.

 During the semester break in January and once again during Marquette’s spring break in March, I had the privilege of participating in a series of week-long courses in New York City with Occupy Wall Street organizers from around the country. They asked me to come to New York to join a variety of other instructors, some academics and some independent scholars, in providing historical context and intellectual perspective on current struggles around fundamental economic and political issues. Many of those most intimately involved in last fall’s upsurge of attention to such issues, and many of those who have remained engaged in Occupy Wall Street activities since its fading from public awareness, came to these unorthodox courses and workshops eager to learn about the history of alternative movements like theirs and the challenges these movements have faced.

 From a pedagogical viewpoint, the classes were an ideal teaching situation; the students combined extensive practical experience and earnest enthusiasm with passionate commitment to expanding their

Time Traveling at the OAH

Jim Marten’s recent experience at the Organization of American History conference, held in Milwaukee, reminds us of just how small the academic world can be.

My past and present collided at the Organization of American Historians conference at the Frontier Airlines Center in Milwaukee earlier this month.  On the way back from lunch with South Dakota State University professor John Miller—from whom I’d taken my first college-level U. S. history class in 1975—we paused for a moment on the corner of 4^th and Wisconsin and John called a well-dressed young man over to take our picture.  That young man happened to be B. J. Marach, a first-year MA student in our graduate program.  We all got a kick out of the confluence of generations gathered on a Milwaukee street corner.

This is just the most extreme example of the kind of time traveling that is possible at a major history conference, which can be a kind of reunion of a clan of history geeks. Something like 2,000 people show up for typical OAH meeting—over 1000 were on panels, giving or commenting on papers, and several hundred other people attended.  The central gathering point of this and of all history conferences is the book exhibit. Over fifty academic publishers display the latest books in dozens of different fields in American history.  Between sessions, even during sessions, historians, students, a few spouses, and even a stroller-bound child or two, stroll and mingle, checking out the books, scanning name tags for familiar names, searching for old friends, meeting with potential publishers for future projects, killing time.  Like everyone else, the book exhibit inspires in me a certain level of anticipation—that book looks really interesting—and guilt—I have a pile of other books that I should really read before I add a new one to the list.

As I engaged in this ancient conference ritual of wandering the book exhibit, an odd but not unpleasant thought occurred to me: the book exhibit is an intellectual time machine.  On every aisle, in nearly every booth, I saw books written by mentors and professors, or new editions of classics I’d read for my PhD exams.  Other books had been written by contemporaries from grad school days at UT-Austin (yes, my classmate H. W. “Bill” Brands has published yet another big book!).  I saw books I have assigned to classes over the years (Confederates in the Attic still appears at exhibits, many years after its publication).  But the image of the book exhibit as a time machine really struck me when I noticed other books by current colleagues and students.  Coincidentally, Laura Matthew’s brand new book, Memories of Conquest, just out this month, rested next to my own most recent book, Sing Not War, at the University of North Carolina Press booth.  Harvard University Press prominently featured Andrew Kahrl’s brand new The Land Was Ours, while MU librarian and friend of the department John Jentz’s new book, Chicago in the Age of Capital, could be found at the University of Illinois Press. I’m always proud of the department I serve as chair, but I’m especially proud to see our work displayed among the books written by our peers from around the country and the world.

Perhaps the most powerful sense of the book exhibit as a portal into my intellectual past came when I spotted books written by former MU graduate students.  Ann Ostendorf’s Sounds American boasted a poster and a pile of paperback copies at the University of Georgia Press booth, while John McCarthy’s Making Milwaukee Mightier was featured at the front of Northern Illinois University Press’s display (no doubt because it’s about Milwaukee).  I’d been a reader for both of the much-revised dissertations on which those books were based (Kristen Foster and Tom Jablonsky were, respectively, directors of Ann’s and John’s dissertations).  Books by former MA students also drew my attention: since getting her BA and MA at Marquette, Heather Marie Stur has gone on to receive a PhD at Wisconsin and obtain a tenure-track job at Southern Miss and published her first book, Beyond Combat: Women and Gender in the Vietnam War Era with Cambridge University Press, while Pabst Mansion historian John Eastberg’s The Captain Frederick Pabst Mansion could be seen at the University of Wisconsin Press.

Each of these books, from each of these generations of scholars, brought back specific memories of seminar papers that grew into theses and theses into books, of the evolution of students into colleagues and even friends.  And from there it’s pretty easy to recapture my own memories of the joys and challenges of those intense periods of work and study, the frustrations and triumphs of the publishing process, the sense of accomplishment and bittersweet relief that comes with the completion of a project that you have lived with for years.

I’ve been to dozens of conferences large and small over the last quarter century, but this is the first time that I’ve experienced the sensation of a convention exhibit, held in a giant, sterile, fluorescent-lit hall, acting as a kind of personal archive of the recent and long-ago past.  It’s a little odd and humbling to start thinking of one’s own life as history rather than as just life.

James Marten is professor and chair of the history department.  His most recent book is Sing Not War: The Lives of Union and Confederate Veterans in Gilded Age America.  He frequently blogs on Civil War topics, such as slavery, veterans, and inspiring future Civil War historians.

Holocaust Remembrance Day at Marquette

Dr. Peter Staudenmaier recently participated in Marquette’s hosting of a Holocaust survivor.  Today, Holocaust Remembrance Day, he reminds us of the importance of remembering the Holocaust and the multiple roads that led to the Holocaust.

Today, April 19, is Holocaust Remembrance Day, commemorated in communities around the world. In preparation for observing this date, Marquette hosted a remarkable event at the beginning of the month with holocaust survivor Robert Behr. Born in Berlin in 1922, Mr. Behr and his family were interned at the Theresienstadt concentration camp in 1942 and managed to survive until the camp was liberated in May 1945. Now 90 years old and a resident of Washington DC, Mr. Behr agreed to come to Marquette to talk with students about his experiences. The chief event, an evening panel discussion on April 2 with Mr. Behr as the principal speaker, was organized at the initiative of a group of Marquette students and sponsored by the Division of Student Affairs. To the surprise of the organizers and panel members, more than 500 people attended the event and engaged in a searching discussion of this exceptionally challenging historical subject.

Along with Bonnie Shafrin of the Milwaukee Holocaust Education Resource Center, I was asked to participate on the panel with Mr. Behr. It was an honor to take part in the event, before the largest audience I have ever addressed, and I took the opportunity to examine some of the difficult questions which confront anybody who tries to come to terms with the seemingly incomprehensible Nazi campaign to exterminate European Jews. Mr. Behr himself provided much of the historical context, in the midst of a moving personal account, and encouraged Ms. Shafrin and myself to raise issues that would help illuminate this aspect of the past for the students. It was an occasion for both historical reflection and earnest consideration of the relevance of the past for present concerns.

“Warning: Black People at Leisure” – Harvard University Press Blog

Dr Andrew Kahrl’s recent post on issues of race and leisure (the subject of his new book) and the recent killing of Trayvon Martin.  This was originally posted on the Harvard University Press blog.  

“Warning: Black People at Leisure” – Harvard University Press Blog.

Upcoming talks by Marquette Historians

Dr. Kahrl will be giving a talk titled “Racial Justice and Environmental Sustainability” at Sweet Water Organics on Wednesday April 18th from 5-7pm.

Andrew and two colleagues will also participate in this week’s Organization of American Historians Meeting in Milwaukee.  The entire program can be read at http://annualmeeting.oah.org/program/.

On Thursday, April 19, at 1:30, Alison Efford will present the results of her new research on a panel called “Ethnicity on the Urban Frontier: Comparative Perspectives on Milwaukee Germans.”  Alison’s paper is called, Suicide in the City: Self-Destruction and the German Immigrant: Community in Late-Nineteenth-Century Milwaukee.

On Friday, April 20, at 8:30, Andrew will moderate a roundtable discussion on “Assessing the Spatial Turn in US History” featuring historians from across the country.

And on Sunday, April 22, at 8:30, Tom Jablonsky will chair a panel on “Mapping Milwaukee’s History.”  The commentator for that panel will be John McCarthy, a Marquette History PhD now teaching at Robert Morris University.

John Krugler and Jim Marten served on the local arrangements committee for this year’s OAH meeting.

On Seeing History–the Joplin tornado and Historical Memory

James Marten gives us his thoughts on the relationship between history and memory after his recent visit to Joplin Missouri, a place ravaged by a tornado, and a people whose trauma should not be soon forgotten.

Recently a few of my colleagues have reflected on scholarly journeys that have taken them to Egypt, Nigeria, China, and Samoa.  But I’m going to spend a few paragraphs reflecting on a much less exotic place—Joplin, an old zinc mining town of 50,000 in southwestern Missouri—and on something that many would not even consider history yet: the F5 tornado that cut through town on May 22, 2011, killing 160 and injuring nearly 1000 people and causing $3 billion in damages. (See this Youtube video of the tornado.)

I flew to Joplin in late March to deliver the annual Jeans Lecture at Missouri Southern State University.  It was actually a delightful trip. My hosts in the Department of Social Science, Steve Wagner and Virginia Laas, were gracious, the audience welcoming (including the ten or so fifth or sixth graders who followed their teacher down to the podium after the talk to shake my hand, as though I was a minister standing at the church door after a Sunday service), and my flights through Memphis and Springfield on time.  Joplin is a typical small city in the heartland.  The mining industry that nurtured it between the 1880s and the 1940s has completely vanished; it is now the commercial and medical center of a large rural area.  The motels, big box stores, and chain restaurants clustered near the exit ramps of I-44 have drawn business away from the circa 1940s downtown, which seemed to have nearly as many empty storefronts as flourishing businesses.

Encountering up close the physical evidence of a months-old catastrophe and talking to perhaps ten or a dozen people who had lived through it was a moving experience that started me thinking about a question that is too personal, too abstract, too subjective to have just one answer: how do people actually process an event that is so clearly historical?  When do events—both traumatic and triumphal—transcend the transient nature of personal experience and memory?

Lost and Found: Three hundred year-old Mexican document found in Milwaukee

Laura Matthew on the secret life of primary sources and the responsibility historians have to them, and to each other, when documenting the past. 

I have been thinking about how documents are lost, then found.

A week or so ago, my friend and colleague Aims McGuiness from the History department at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee (UWM) left me a voice mail message. “There’s this mysterious document at the American Geographical Society Library here at UWM,” he said. “It looks colonial-era, and maybe Mexican. The librarians don’t know what it is, or how they got it. Could you come look at it?”

“Ooh, fun!” I emailed him back (yes, that’s a direct quote). “I can always make time for a lost document.”

Little did I know. A few days later, Jovanka Ristic and Kay Guilden at the AGS Library unrolled in front of me a piece of bark paper on textile, about six feet long and two feet wide. The document had the characteristic look of an indigenous land title from Mexico’s mid-colonial period, a mix of traditional pictographic narration and alphabetic text.

Two sections in Spanish told me that the document dated from 1691-1709, and came from Santa Catharina de Tepexi. The rest of the text looked oddly like Zapotec – odd, because Tepexi is in the current state of Puebla, whereas Zapotec is spoken further southwest in Oaxaca. Since I am no expert in indigenous languages (nor, as it turns out, in Mexican geography), this was as far as my observations could take me.

But I knew who could take it further. The next day I wrote my friend and colleague Michel Oudijk at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. Michel and I co-edited a book together in the mid-2000s. He studies ancient Zapotec history through the pictographic writings of the colonial period. He also wrote a book on the leader of Tepexi, Puebla, during the conquest period. “Hey Michel,” I wrote, “there’s this document here in Milwaukee….” I described what I’d seen, and sent some pictures the librarians had provided.

“Wooooooooooooooowwwwwwww, Es el Códice de Santa Catarina Ixtepeji!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!” came the response in my email a day later. (Again, a direct quote).

As it turned out, Michel and his friend and colleague Sebastián van Doesburg had been searching for this document for over a decade, in archives throughout Mexico, Europe, and the United States. It is not from Tepexi in Puebla, but from the Zapotec town of Santa Catarina Ixtepeji in Oaxaca. Sebastián had even published an article on the document in 2000, based on a grainy black-and-white photograph of the document’s left-hand corner from the 1950s that he had found in the National Anthropology Museum in Mexico City.

Scholars writing in the 1960s reported that a document on leather from Santa Catarina Ixtepeji had been sold to a German consul in the early twentieth century. The scholars included this information in their catalogues of pictorial manuscripts from Mexico, with the hope that someday, somewhere, a document that was once seen would resurface.

(Sebastián’s research suggested that in fact there were two lost documents from Santa Catarina de Ixtepeji.

Alison Efford in Samoa–on serendipity and field research

Dr. Efford continues her account of recent sabbatical research trips to New Zealand and Samoa.  Here she reminds of us the importance of serendipity when doing history. 

My first research trip to Samoa had its frustrations. Internet access was unpredictable. I usually turned up to appointments damp with sweat despite being scantily clad by local standards. My contact at the main university had left for New Zealand a week before I arrived, and the archives of the Catholic archdiocese were unavailable after being hastily relocated twice since the 2009 tsunami.

While the challenges of working in a small and tropical developing nation (when “Samoa” is unqualified, it refers to the islands that are not American territory) were rather predictable, the rewards were quite unexpected. I had not counted on Samoans being so willing to help out a sweaty palagi (white) woman who turned up asking odd questions about events long ago. Fa’afetai lava (thank you very much) to Amela Silipa and Vaveao Toa at the Ministry of Education, Sports, and Culture, to Rev. Father Kolio Kelekolio, the Chancellor of the Archdiocese of Samoa-Apia, to Lalotoa Mulitalo, a legislative drafter and doctoral student at Australia’s University of Queensland, and to Leasiolagi Dr. Malama Meleisea, a distinguished historian who now serves as a judge.

The Apia clock tower with a billboard marking the fiftieth anniversary of Samoan independence.

Ordinary Samoans were also prepared to talk history. Taxi drivers, waiters, and school children were eager to discuss the fiftieth anniversary of Samoan independence from New Zealand. Apia, the capital, is preparing for celebrations in June with a rash of construction and beautification.

When I wondered aloud whether all this activity was mostly for the benefit of foreign dignitaries, everyone assured me how much the anniversary mattered to them—and not just because it will be marked by a week-long public holiday! Samoans are very proud to have shaken off colonial rule before their Pacific neighbors.

Andrew Kahrl on the history of segregated beaches in New Orleans

Here’s a recent article by Andrew Kahrl in Louisiana Cultural Vistas on the history of segregated beaches in New Orleans.  See pages 68-77 (starts on page 70 of the viewer at the bottom).  Those interested in this subject should check out his book, The Land Was Ours: African American Beaches from Jim Crow to the Sunbelt South, which comes out in April.  Congrats Andrew!

Andrew Kahrl is an assistant professor of US and African American History.  We look forward to the publication of his first book (listed above) by Harvard University Press.

Alison Efford in New Zealand–Constitutions and Histories

Dr. Efford on constitutions as a lens for looking at the past and present in New Zealand and the US.

I am an historian of the United States. I am also, among other things, a New Zealander. I have always imagined that my outsider’s perspective brings something distinctive to American history. But on my latest trip home (reconnaissance for a project on Samoa), I thought the tables might turn. Perhaps my American training could offer useful insights into developments in the country of my birth. New Zealanders are performing a constitutional review, and the American past has a lot to say about constitutions.

Americans penned state constitutions as they struggled for independence from Great Britain in the 1770s and then framed the capital-C Constitution to strengthen the central government. New Zealanders, on the other hand, never codified their fundamental law. The country slowly grew apart from Britain, and centralization is not much of an issue when your population only numbers 4.2 million!

Te Whare Runanga (the meeting house) at the Treaty Grounds at Waitangi, Aotearoa/New Zealand

New Zealand has no capital-C constitution. Its system has developed incrementally through the interpretation of English common law and the passage of parliamentary legislation regarding representation and individual rights. The closest thing New Zealand has to what Americans might recognize as a constitution is the Treaty of Waitangi. This document, signed in 1840, was an agreement between envoys from Britain and representatives of Maori, New Zealand’s original inhabitants. The Maori signees recognized the Crown’s authority in return for the recognition of their tino rangatiratanga (chieftainship) over their land, homes, and other taonga (treasures). (The definition of “tino rangatiratanga” and “taonga” is contested—and significant since Maori signed a Maori version of the Treaty.)

Although Pakeha (European) New Zealanders repeatedly disregarded the capital-T Treaty for well over a century, during the 1970s, Maori began to use it to reclaim some of the power wrested from them by force of arms, deception, and demographics. Parliament established a tribunal to redress grievances under the Treaty and thus elevated the document’s legal standing. This process provides the context for the current constitutional review. The Maori Party (just one of the many groups that represent Maori today) requested the formal public discussion in return for its support for the center-right National Party in parliament.