Historians Without Borders: New Studies in Multidisciplinary History 2018055878, 2018056112, 9781351244749, 9781351244725, 9781351244732, 9780815372882, 9781351244756

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Historians Without Borders

This text explores a variety of themes developed from successive years of the University of California, Davis, multidisciplinary graduate conference. It draws out connections on a wide array of topics among the arts, humanities, and sciences in history for multidisciplinary study. This text presents a rare forum for multidisciplinary connections researched and presented by junior specialists in their respective fields. It enables both creativity and flexibility in drawing out connections that are frequently overlooked by more specialized senior scholars. This book is a unique exercise in the promotion of junior scholarly achievement and multidisciplinary research. Lawrence Abrams is a PhD Candidate at the University of California, Davis, specializing in Modern British History, and focusing on Scottish ethnic, national, and imperial history. His dissertation explores ideas of union and changing modes for the expression of Scottish identity in political, military, and cultural arenas. He is also working on a project investigating the relationship between comics and national identity in an international and post-colonial context in the activist comic years since 1970. Kaleb Knoblauch is a PhD Candidate in Modern European History at the University of California, Davis, specializing in France in the nineteenth century, with a focus on Breton and Celtic history, mass culture, gender, and identity formation. His dissertation examines the region of Brittany in the long nineteenth century to argue that increased mobility and mass culture in the Third Republic changed how French people imagined the relationship between regional and national identities.

Routledge Approaches to History

The Work of History Constructivism and a Politics of the Past Kalle Pihlainen History and Sociology in France From Scientific History to the Durkheimian School Robert Leroux Universal History and the Making of the Global Edited by Hall Bjørnstad, Helge Jordheim and Anne Régent-Susini Cowrie Shells and Cowrie Money A Global History Bin Yang A Personalist Philosophy of History Bennett Gilbert Historical Parallels, Commemoration and Icons Edited by Andreas Leutzsch Historians Without Borders New Studies in Multidisciplinary History Edited by Lawrence Abrams and Kaleb Knoblauch Leopold von Ranke A Biography Andreas D. Boldt For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/ Routledge-Approaches-to-History/book-series/RSHISTHRY

Historians Without Borders

New Studies in Multidisciplinary History Edited by Lawrence Abrams and Kaleb Knoblauch

First published 2019 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2019 selection and editorial matter, Lawrence Abrams and Kaleb Knoblauch; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Lawrence Abrams and Kaleb Knoblauch to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Abrams, Lawrence, 1971– editor. | Knoblauch, Kaleb, editor. Title: Historians without borders : new studies in multidisciplinary history / edited by Lawrence Abrams and Kaleb Knoblauch. Description: London ; New York : Routledge, 2019. | Series: Routledge approaches to history | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018055878 (print) | LCCN 2018056112 (ebook) | ISBN 9781351244749 (adobe) | ISBN 9781351244725 (mobi) | ISBN 9781351244732 (epub) | ISBN 9780815372882 (hardback) | ISBN 9781351244756 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: History. | Interdisciplinary approach to knowledge. Classification: LCC D16 (ebook) | LCC D16 .H5288 2019 (print) | DDC 900—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018055878 ISBN: 978-0-8153-7288-2 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-351-24475-6 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by Apex CoVantage, LLC

For Steve and Ginny, for everything you’ve done. –Lawrence For Jenneth and Nadia, you make your brother proud. –Kaleb

Contents

Acknowledgmentsix Introduction

1

LAWRENCE ABRAMS AND KALEB KNOBLAUCH

SECTION 1

History and the other muses7   1 The rubble of the other: Beethoven’s Ruins of Athens

9

TEKLA BABYAK

  2 “Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition”: propaganda music as a governmental marketing tool during the WWII era

24

ZOË JENSIENE GODFREY

  3 Can the subaltern laugh? A study of humor, power, and resistance

46

MIGUEL ALBERTO NOVOA CIPRIANI

SECTION 2

Culture and cognition57   4 Extended evolutionary synthesis: linking history and cognitive science

59

ALINA SHRON

  5 Common quest: the search for the everyday person in the Merovingian age MATTHEW GARDNER

95

viii  Contents SECTION 3

Altered and hostile environments111   6 Geophysical agency in the Anthropocene: engineering a road and river to Rocky Mountain National Park

113

WILL WRIGHT

  7 The politics of solitude: listening to environmental change in Rocky Mountain National Park, 1945–present

139

MARK BOXELL

  8 Hidden in plain sight: rethinking Saharan studies as a discipline

154

SARAH GILKERSON

SECTION 4

Contested places and spaces

165

  9 Indigenous land ownership in the praying towns of the Southern New England borderlands

167

TAYLOR KIRSCH

10 Forgotten: the Spanish influenza pandemic of 1918

185

SRIJITA PAL

11 Historical realities: voices from the war of Algerian decolonization

201

ARIANNA BARZMAN-GRENNAN

SECTION 5

Movement and travel217 12 Negotiating the sixteenth-century road: diplomacy and travel in early modern Europe

219

KRZYSZTOF ODYNIEC

13 Going it alone: practical travel manuals and independent women travelers in the nineteenth century

237

JILL POULSEN

Index248

Acknowledgments

Oliver Wendell Holmes said that “many ideas grow up better when transplanted into another mind than the one where they sprang up.” This book is no exception; it is better because of the many minds that dedicated themselves to its improvement throughout the publication process. As such, we would first like to thank everyone who participated in the Historians Without Borders, History Without Limits Graduate Student Conference, without which this book would not have been possible. The University of California, Davis, History Department provided incalculable assistance for both the conference and this book, and in letting us make this humble effort to build intellectual community. To Sally McKee and Edward Dickinson, thank you for helping us with the countless hours of planning it took to get this project off the ground. We would like to thank Ellen Hartigan-O’Connor for constantly pushing us to make this project a beneficial part of our campus community. And a special thank you to Michael Saler for encouraging us that, yes, editing a book is a stupendous amount of work and we should do it anyway. Many (many) thanks to Ian Campbell for keeping our heads on straight and for his many words of sage advice. We owe a debt of gratitude to Lori Odenweller, Monica Fischer, Grace Woods, and Nicole Dyer, who moved logistical mountains every year to keep the conference organized. And thank you to our friends in the Northeastern University History Department; we benefitted immensely from your experience in managing our own conference. And a special thank you to Maryanne MeckelRhett, mentor, scholar, and friend. Thank you to the departments and organizations that sponsored our conference: UC Davis Institute for Social Sciences, the Davis Humanities Institute, the UC Davis History Department, UC Davis History Graduate Student Association, UC Davis Campus Graduate Student Association, UC Davis Native-American Studies Department, UC Davis Middle East and South Asian Studies Program, and the Community Development Graduate Group. Your financial support, needless to say, was essential to making our vision a reality. Thank you, of course, to Rob Langham from Routledge for reaching out to us to propose the idea of an edited volume. And thank you to the team at Routledge for this opportunity. Finally, we would be remiss if we did not thank our parents and families for the ongoing emotional support and enthusiasm as we went about the process of editing a book-length project that was not our dissertations. So, to Marc Abrams and Gretchen and Frank Knoblauch, all our love and thanks!

Introduction Lawrence Abrams and Kaleb Knoblauch

In October 2015, we sat down with the leaders of the history department at UC Davis with a simple idea: develop a history conference that would bring together young scholars across a variety of disciplines and fields. While the conference would be rooted in historical study, it was meant from the outset to be inclusive of work in the social sciences, humanities, and STEM fields. It was our hope that the multidisciplinary approach would encourage collaboration among practitioners of different fields, and that this kind of conference would fill what we saw as a significant gap for young scholars to meet and exchange ideas with people well outside their specializations. At the time, such opportunities at the graduate level were sparse in our region. As it turned out, however, we vastly underestimated the demand for these kinds of multidisciplinary exchanges. The Historians Without Borders conference has run for three years and served as a venue for researchers across many fields, including cognitive science, evolutionary psychology, microbiology, musicology, refugee and migrations studies, and international economic policy. The conference reliably also hosted presentations by historians from a variety of fields and methodologies. And to our delight, scholars from twelve countries across four continents submitted proposals, creating possibilities for international exchange. Conference attendees also included scholars outside of traditional academic institutions, and as a means of opening our work to the public, community attendance was also highly encouraged. Our mission to provide professional development and mentorship opportunities to the attendees guided us in adding additional elements to the conference. One such addition was a day of presentations by our undergraduate history majors, speaking about their senior capstone projects. The panels were chaired by graduate students, and the day offered these seniors an opportunity to discuss their research in a semi-professional setting. This book grew organically out of the outreach mission of this conference. In our early developmental meetings, we set as an ongoing goal of the conference that presenters would use the feedback and connections to further develop their research and eventually publish their work in journals or other media. The inclusion of the undergraduate component stemmed in part from this goal. The work presented here in this volume is the result of a great deal of ongoing tinkering, development, and editing from those initial conference presentations.

2  Lawrence Abrams and Kaleb Knoblauch We are thrilled to get the chance in this volume to present a selection of the work developed from the first two meetings of the Historians Without Borders conference. The process of selecting which papers to include in any edited volume is never easy. This is especially true when the editors have had a chance to see their development from starting conference presentation to finished research chapter the way we have. Ultimately, the chapters selected for inclusion here were chosen based on four principal criteria. The first criterion was that the papers address major developments or topics of interest in current historiographies. We wanted to ensure that submissions could address ongoing topics of interest for researchers and educators. For example, Section 3 addresses the role of human involvement in climate change and the effects of human societies on the natural world. While not every section will deal with topics that are so firmly entrenched in current political or social spheres, we wanted to ensure that each section could be read holistically to address a concrete theme. Some of these section themes were drawn from complete panels of presentations. However, most of the themes were chosen based on our reading of otherwise disparate paper submissions. The harmony between sometimes divergent topics to create new and interesting connections was a principal goal of our project from the outset and was central to the selection process for inclusion in this volume. Our second criterion asked that chapters exemplify the multidisciplinary approach of the conference. We sought papers that demonstrated an ability to communicate clearly between disparate disciplines. Especially important were ones that reached beyond traditional historical methodologies because they provoke historians to leave their comfort zones and reimagine the ways in which we communicate about the past. By expanding the ways in which we communicate about the past, we also hope this book will contribute to the expansion of the audience for historical narratives and encourage historians to pursue methodologies from other disciplines. The routine incorporation of outside methodologies can only be to the benefit of historical practice. It is not necessary to always invent a new methodology, but the innovative use of techniques from outside the traditional bounds of historical study can provide new avenues for creative scholarship. The third criterion was that the contributors to this volume match the diversity of participants in the conference. This criterion was of great personal importance to us as editors. Contributors to this volume represent the changing face of historical research, encompassing diverse racial, gender, sexual orientation, socioeconomic, religious, and institutional backgrounds. The ability to engage with scholars from disparate backgrounds, across disciplinary and institutional boundaries, was an invaluable part of the conference. As such, we would be remiss in not maintaining that degree of diversity in our contributors to this volume. Finally, we looked for chapters that, though they may not present the material together – or even in the same year – provide provocative connections when read together. This was the most enjoyable part of the selection process, as we were able to go back through all of the paper submissions to discover new linkages between topics. We also went back through notes of the audience questions and

Introduction 3 discussion, which provided insight that neither of us would have had alone. For those contributions, we are deeply grateful. This volume grew out of the kind of constructive collaboration that exemplified the spirit of the Historians Without Borders project. We organized this volume into five sections based on the major themes covered in the chapters. Section 1, “History and the other muses,” addresses the arts  – music, humor, and theater, specifically  – and their political and cultural contributions in history. Section 2, “Culture and cognition,” focuses on the distinct impacts of temporality, culture, and perception, both in a specific period and as they change over time. “Altered and hostile environments,” the third section, examines the interaction of humans and their environments, placing a particular emphasis on both history and environmental science. Our fourth section, “Contested places and spaces,” expands the definition of contestation by exploring disputed and contested memory and memorialization of topics ranging from religion in the borderlands to disease and war. The final section, “Movement and travel,” focuses on the movement of peoples and groups, both within countries and across borders. The authors argue that this movement can be physical but also entails social, cultural, and class mobility. Each of these sections has something to offer to scholars interested in a wide range of historically informed topics. In the first section, “History and the other muses,” we seek to explore the relationships of the other traditional muses in both historical context and for their potential use by historians. The first chapter in this section, “The rubble of the other: Beethoven’s Ruins of Athens” (Chapter 1), by Tekla Babyak explores the political and allegorical uses of theater and music during the 1809 War of the Fifth Coalition against Napoleonic France. Babyak’s chapter investigates the effect the tumultuous political climate had on the music of Beethoven and Kotzebue’s play Ruins of Athens both in technical terms and in terms of the cultural and political messages the play was meant to convey. The second chapter in this first section (Chapter 2) is “ ‘Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition’: Propaganda music as a governmental marketing tool during the WWII era” by Zoë Jensiene Godfrey. In this chapter, Godfrey develops further the idea of specific political impacts on music and the messages music is meant to convey. By highlighting the deliberate governmental efforts to control music, and by extension cultural norms, during World War II, Godfrey reveals some startling and lasting effects on society since the end of the war. Rounding out our first section is Miguel Alberto Novoa Cipriani’s “Can the subaltern laugh? A study of humor, power, and resistance.” This chapter (Chapter 3) serves as both a counterpoint to and further expansion on the ideas of the preceding chapters in this section. Cipriani’s chapter analyzes the power relationships of humor and its ability to reinforce or, more dangerously, undermine a pervasive political system. Taken together, these chapters provide a variety of useful lenses to examine the use and effects of the arts on political and cultural arenas. Section 2 of this volume, “Culture and cognition,” may be unfamiliar or challenging to most historians. Beginning with Alina Shron’s “Extended evolutionary synthesis: Linking history and cognitive science” (Chapter  4), this section

4  Lawrence Abrams and Kaleb Knoblauch explores the difficulties and rewards of understanding the historical mind. Shron’s chapter bridges the gap between what we think of as traditional history and the field of neurocognitive science. The understanding of an historical mindset from a scientific view, informed by the culture of its own time, is an exceedingly difficult task. However, Shron’s analysis and synthesis of several competing schools of scientific and historical thought on the topic provide an invaluable contribution. The development of an understanding of the historical mind and how it was shaped by its surrounding culture is also the subject of the other chapter in this section, though from a radically different approach. In his “Common quest: The search for the everyday person in the Merovingian age” (Chapter 5), Matthew Gardner utilizes close text analysis and techniques drawn from the fields of sociology and psychology, and especially the Stanislavski method – a theory of acting based on inhabiting the ‘reality’ of the character – from theatrical practice, to develop a new view of the historical character of common society frequently otherwise neglected by source material. These chapters take diverse approaches, but both contribute a new set of tools for tackling a difficult problem in the practice of historical work. In Section 3, “Altered and hostile environments,” we return to more concrete – sometimes in a literal sense – historical issues. The development of environmental history as a field has been of great benefit for a variety of historical studies. However, as the chapters in this section demonstrate, there remain a great many opportunities for further examination and development of the field. In the first chapter of this section (Chapter 6), “Geophysical agency in the Anthropocene: Engineering a road and river to Rocky Mountain National Park,” Will Wright addresses some of the terminological and methodological issues resulting from the proliferation of studies of the Anthropocene. His case study of the construction of Rocky Mountain National Park lays the groundwork for further work on the idea of ‘geophysical agency’ at a more local scale than the broader Anthropocene concept. In Chapter 7, “The politics of solitude: Listening to environmental change in Rocky Mountain National Park, 1945–present,” Mark Boxell is likewise utilizing a case study centered on Rocky Mountain National Park. However, in this chapter, we see a distinct shift from the local to the regional – and even transnational. His analysis of the effects of sound, an infrequently considered environmental factor for many historians, is rooted in the growth of national and international travel routes and tourism. The idea of larger societal networks interacting with their environment is also central to Chapter 8, “Hidden in plain sight: Rethinking Saharan studies as a discipline,” by Sarah Gilkerson. Gilkerson envisions the Sahara as a site of economic and cultural interchange, porous borderland, and environmental knowledge for its inhabitants. By adapting Fernand Braudel’s Mediterranean model for the Sahara, Gilkerson provides new insight for a region that is traditionally seen as a barrier, rather than a route of passage and exchange. The chapters of this section examine different environmental histories, from the local to the transnational, revealing the multifaceted nature of seemingly simple concepts like deserts, noise, and the Anthropocene. The fourth section, “Contested places and spaces,” explores the role of both physical and mental spaces in historical practice. In Chapter 9, “Indigenous land

Introduction 5 ownership in the praying towns of the southern New England borderlands,” Taylor Kirsch examines the legal and cultural effects of land ownership on a contested borderland. The nature of the claiming process and its outcomes are deeply rooted in not only the physical space being claimed but also the physical documentation and legal recording of the claim. By contrast, Chapter 10, Srijita Pal’s “Forgotten: The Spanish influenza pandemic of 1918,” is notable for her investigation of a space that lies almost completely unclaimed. Her chapter highlights the complex reasons behind the erasure of historical memory of the Spanish Flu pandemic. The forgetting of victims as a deliberate and unconscious act is its own form of contested and frequently counterfactual claiming on the part of past actors. In Chapter 11, “Historical realities: Voices from the war of Algerian decolonization,” the results of counterfactual claiming and even outright lying are investigated by Arianna Barzman-Grennan. Barzman-Grennan’s investigation of an historical narrative and memorialized space obscured by doublespeak and misinformation demonstrates the extreme complexities of historicizing a field of study dominated by so many contested claims. These chapters explore themes of loss, trauma, and memory using a variety of methodological techniques. However, their shared focus on the act of remembering and memorializing historical trauma provides insight into the impact of competing narratives and contesting claims on the physical and cultural landscape. The final section, titled “Movement and travel,” historicizes different kinds of movement, specifically early modern state-sanctioned travel for political purposes and leisure travel in the modern period, to see how they reveal artifacts of everyday life and contribute to the cultures in which they operated. The ability to move about the world reveals changing degrees of political power and individual agency, often in contravention of existing social and cultural norms. In Chapter 12, “Negotiating the sixteenth-century road: Diplomacy and travel in early modern Europe,” Krzysztof Odyniec examines contemporary diplomatic correspondence and artistic evidence to reveal conditions of everyday life in the sixteenth century and to understand what exactly is ‘modern’ about early modern Europe. Odyniec follows the Polish-Lithuanian ambassador to the Holy Roman Empire, Johannes Dantiscus, on his path from Poland to Spain in 1522 to show how political changes in the sixteenth century opened up the continent to the individual traveler, but also revealing the limits of royal authority on the oftendangerous open road. Concluding this volume, in Chapter 13, “Going it alone: Practical travel manuals and independent women travelers in the nineteenth century,” Jill Poulsen analyzes practical travel manuals written by and for women to understand changes in how American women traveled abroad in the nineteenth century. The number of women traveling abroad increased markedly during the nineteenth century, but to this point, historians have been unable to propose sufficient explanation for the cause of this change. Poulsen argues that the networks of information and practical advice found in these manuals provide the clearest explanation for why women would feel comfortable setting out on long, costly journeys without the assistance or supervision of male escorts. Using these underexamined sources, Poulsen recreates the network of advice and potential pitfalls

6  Lawrence Abrams and Kaleb Knoblauch that women could educate themselves on before setting out on a holiday. So when a woman set out on her own for the purposes of leisure travel, she was never really alone, carrying with her the experiences and information collected by numerous other women, looking out for their fellow travelers. This volume is just one example of the potential benefit to the practice of historical study provided by a multidisciplinary approach to the field. The chapters we have included in this volume are salient examples of innovative and useful approaches by junior scholars in their respective specialties. The ideas and conclusions we have drawn out of our contributors’ chapters in this volume are but a small sampling of those available. We invite readers to expand on and draw new connections across the topics of this volume. There are obviously many more connections to be made. We hope you enjoy reading Historians Without Borders as much as we enjoyed working on this project. November 15, 2018 Davis, California

Section 1

History and the other muses As might be obvious from the title, this section of the book deals principally with the historical use of culture. In the following chapters, the focus is on music and humor. Both music and humor can serve as enlightening cultural artifacts for historical analysis, and their usage in their own historical contexts and at the scholarly remove of the present can reveal a great deal about the culture that produced them and their legacy. Since the cultural turn of the 1970s, historians have produced countless works detailing the development of cultural trends, the evolution of the zeitgeist, the effects of culture on the nation, and any number of other useful applications of cultural analysis in history. By their very nature, though, cultural studies in history tend to be sharply limited to the examination of reasonably concrete and defined temporal spans; limited geographic regions, nationalities, and ethnicities; or even micro-specific subcultures. This has led to a wonderfully diverse array of detailed and insightful works of history, but it can also lead to a kind of professional tunnel vision. However, as we laid out in our introduction, this book is dedicated to exploring the value and occasionally surprising findings that become apparent when works from different scholarly fields are brought together in conversation with one another. To be clear, we do not suggest any kind of totalizing or universal narrative of culture either in music or humor in these chapters. Indeed, despite their topical breadth, they are largely analyses of modern European and American culture. However, these chapters do reveal certain common themes that might not be apparent in a cultural history collection dedicated solely to the topics examined in each individual chapter. Tekla Babyak’s chapter is grounded in studies of musical theory and the history of music itself but reveals a deeply complex narrative of racialization, politicization of the arts, and propaganda in Napoleonic era music. Notably, the historical and mythological influences on Beethoven’s Ruins of Athens reveal how music and the theater communicate and also misremember the past for present political ends. Zoë Godfrey’s chapter develops many of these themes further in a different setting. She highlights the continuing evolution of governmental uses of music in World War II propaganda and the eventual apotheosis of musical propaganda in political and commercial advertising. Despite concerted (and occasionally comical) efforts by the state-at-war to deploy music for patriotic purposes, it becomes clear that no artistic or state endeavor survives contact with

8  History and the other muses the audience. Reinterpretation of songs and the memory of classic wartime music through the veil of nostalgia altered the histories of these musical compositions and their role in popular culture during World War II. Finally, Miguel Cipriani’s chapter subverts and inverts the narrative of elite or top-down politicized culture. His chapter examines the uses of humor as a political tool of subaltern resistance, broadens the scope of theoretical inquiry, and begins to push beyond the European or American context. Significantly, these chapters reveal the complexities of artistic production and the reception of art in changing political and cultural contexts.

1 The rubble of the other Beethoven’s Ruins of Athens Tekla Babyak

The 1812 inauguration of a new theater in the Hungarian city of Pest was celebrated with a premiere of August von Kotzebue’s play Ruins of Athens. The music for the play was composed by Ludwig van Beethoven. In this chapter, I explore how the historical ruins of Athens became, in the hands of Kotzebue and Beethoven, a vehicle for allegorical commentary on Austro-Hungarian ruins.1 The play and music, both of which were written for the inaugural event,2 revolve around a traumatic discovery: the Greek goddess of wisdom, Minerva,3 awakens after having been asleep for 20 centuries and discovers that Athens is in shambles. Its artifacts, buildings, and artistic traditions have been destroyed by Turkish invaders, who continue to occupy the city and rule over the Athenian citizens. The barbarism of the invaders is represented in several songs, including a choir of dervishes and a noisy Turkish march. In the second part of the play, Minerva flees from Athens and takes refuge in Hungary. To her delight, she discovers that the artistic spirit of Greek culture is alive and well in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, in which Greek aesthetic traditions continue to thrive. To celebrate the rebirth of Greek culture in the AustroHungarian Empire, Minerva performs a ceremony in front of an altar, in which Greek and German artistic characters come together for a celebration of artistic traditions. The high point of the ceremony occurs when the Greek muse of tragedy, Melpomene, calls forth a series of German literary characters, such as Egmont, Coriolan, and William Tell. This symbolizes the unification of classical Greek traditions with nineteenth-century Austro-German culture. However, the ceremony has political as well as aesthetic overtones: the altar features a statue of Emperor Franz Joseph. Even as the play celebrates the Greek arts, it also glorifies the political system of monarchy. Ruins of Athens thus functions as a piece of propaganda. The play celebrates the imperial glory represented by the new Hungarian theater. Moreover, it sets up the Austro-Hungarian empire as the heir to Greek civilization. Indeed, this play draws on the Grecophilia that swept through Austro-German culture during the early nineteenth century.4 Along these lines, Lawrence Kramer has argued that Ruins of Athens “draws together three powerful strands of the era’s cultural practice: the patriotic celebration of state power . . . the rise of Romantic classicism . . . and there is the looming ascendancy of the Austro-Hungarian Empire over its

10  Tekla Babyak traditional emblematic foe, the Ottoman Turks.”5 To grasp these strands, we must examine how Kotzebue’s depiction of ruins conveys a political message.6 In this chapter, I offer an allegorical interpretation of these ruins. Ralph Locke has described Ruins of Athens as an “ethno-religious culturescape.”7 Building on this idea, I examine how the play engages with Napoleon’s threat to the AustroHungarian Empire. In the following section, I will discuss the political context for this war. I will then offer a close reading of the music and text in Ruins of Athens. The crux of my argument is that Ruins of Athens represents the Other in the form of the Turkish invaders; in so doing, this theatrical production indirectly represents the Self: Austria in the throes of its wartime struggles.8 I am using these terms in the sense associated with post-colonial theory. In this field of study, “Self” generally means the members of a perceived in-group, and “Other” refers to a group that is viewed as inferior and potentially dangerous.9 By applying these terms to Ruins of Athens, I hope to show that the citizens of the Austro-Hungarian empire considered themselves a privileged group.

The Ruins of Vienna: Napoleonic devastation and wartime rubble When Kotzebue and Beethoven wrote Ruins of Athens, both of them were living in Austria and experiencing the effects of Napoleonic invasions. During this time, the Austro-Hungarian Empire was embroiled in a military conflict: the Napoleonic Wars, including the 1809 War of the Fifth Coalition, in which Napoleon and his armies invaded Austrian territories.10 This war lasted only a few months, taking place from April through July 1809. However, it was an intense period characterized by much violence and destruction. Ruins of Athens should be viewed in this context. In fact, even before the premiere of this work, the playwright Kotzebue was already notorious for his antiNapoleonic sentiments. In 1811, a year before the premiere of Ruins of Athens, he wrote a play called The Quakers, which celebrated pacifism. Gary B. Nash points out that the play offers a critique of Napoleonic militarism: “With mounting opposition to what many viewed as Napoleon’s endless wars, Kotzebue put a pacifist Quaker on the stage as his contribution to the cause of peacemaking.”11 In light of Kotzebue’s interest in political allegory, it is likely that Ruins of Athens can be read along similar lines.12 Kotzebue continued to write anti-Napoleonic works throughout much of his career. In 1813, he participated in a project in which “the Russian army leadership accompanied the military campaign against Napoleon with war propaganda. It hired . . . German writers to produce propaganda texts.”13 Kotzebue’s contribution was The River-God Niemen and ‘Still Somebody’: A Farce on Napoleon’s Flight from Russia. It was published “in January 1813 and quickly gained great popularity as a puppet show in taverns and at fairs.”14 Karen Hagemann observes that this play “was typical of Kotzebue’s ironic style. He ignored all attempts at censorship and firmly [maintained] his own tone, as the Prussian censor complained.”15

The rubble of the other 11 Beethoven, like Kotzebue, was also an outspoken critic of Napoleonic militarism. Indeed, Beethoven had long viewed Napoleon as a tyrant, even before the Napoleonic Wars. His turn against Napoleon dates back to 1804, when Napoleon crowned himself Emperor. At that point, Beethoven retracted the dedication of his Symphony No. 3 to Napoleon. Explaining his decision to his student Ferdinand Ries, Beethoven exclaimed, “Now, too, Napoleon will tread under foot all the rights of Man, indulge only his ambition; now he will think himself superior to all men, become a tyrant!”16 Beethoven’s fury at Napoleon continued throughout the War of the Fifth Coalition. The war had a devastating effect on Austrian musical culture and, specifically, on Beethoven’s career. Michael Steinberg describes how “on the worst night of all, that of 11 May [1809], Beethoven made his way through the broken glass, the collapsed masonry, the fires, the din, to find refuge in the cellar of the house of his brother.”17 In 1809, many of Beethoven’s letters refer to his wartime misery: “Heaven knows what is going to happen – normally I should now be having a change of scene and air. . . . What a destructive, disorderly life I see and hear around me, nothing but drums, cannons and human misery in every form.”18 The ongoing series of French invasions was hindering his artistic projects: “I had begun to have a little singing party at my rooms every week – but that accursed war put a stop to everything.”19

Greek trauma and Turkish barbarism: orientalized images of ruin In light of Kotzebue and Beethoven’s negative attitude toward Napoleonic warfare, it is likely that Ruins of Athens alludes to the destruction associated with this 1809 war. In Ruins of Athens, the war waged by the Turks against the Greeks has destroyed classical Greek civilization, a theme that resonates with Beethoven’s letters about the ruins in Austria. In fact, echoing the sorrowful tone of Beethoven’s wartime letters, the second musical number in Ruins of Athens is a lament sung by two enslaved Greeks.20 Throughout this lament, the sorrowful pair describe their oppression at the hands of the Turkish invaders. They point out that Greece is no longer populated by philosophers and playwrights: all Greeks have now become slaves. The parallels between Beethoven’s 1809 letters and this song are striking. In both cases, the enemy is suppressing art and wisdom. This enemy is represented by the Turkish invaders in the play, but I would argue that these “Turks” constitute a thinly veiled depiction of Napoleon and his armies. Indeed, Beethoven’s critique of Napoleonic barbarism, as I will argue, informs his depiction of Athenian ruins and Turkish invaders. However, Beethoven does not depict Minerva’s initial reaction to these ruins. Minerva first notices the ruins during a lengthy section of spoken dialogue without musical accompaniment. The next two musical numbers do not represent her response to the ruins. Instead, the music launches into a Chorus of Dervishes. The style of this chorus is crude and primitive, repeating the same triplet motive

12  Tekla Babyak again and again. Moreover, the dervishes sing in unison, creating a monotonous texture. The text is “You have carried the moon in the folds of your sleeves, and you have shattered it. Ka’abah, Ka’abah.” Disgusted by this musical utterance, Minerva exclaims, “Ah, what nonsense has just assaulted my ear! What a barbarous shriek!”21 The next number, the Turkish March, is also a form of musical “nonsense,” with its full battery of Turkish effects. These include unison textures, grace notes, and a heavy use of percussion.22 The percussive effects evoke the sounds associated with Turkish military bands, known as Janissary bands, which generally included an assortment of kettledrums and cymbals. As scholars have observed, “Western military music that used these instruments was sometimes called Janissary music; and the instruments were even absorbed into opera orchestras, particularly in the fashionable, exotically colored ‘Turkish operas’ of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.”23 In Ruins of Athens, which borrows heavily from these types of exotic operas, the outpouring of Janissary music coincides with Minerva’s realization that Athens has been ruined. Moments of recognition and realization, indebted to the classical Greek theories of Aristotle, were an important plot device for many eighteenthand early nineteenth-century works.24 Why would this pivotal moment in the plot, the moment of Minerva’s traumatic discovery, be associated with exotic music? I would argue that these two exotic numbers represent the rubble: they are musical ruins. They contain none of the complex harmonies or motivic developments that Beethoven uses for the Greek characters. In other words, Beethoven portrays the ruins indirectly using Orientalist features that undermine the style of Western music. Indeed, these features take on a destructive character in Ruins of Athens since the plot line sets up an opposition between East (Turkey) and West (Greece) in which exoticism is associated with the demolition of Athenian greatness. The idea of exoticism as a potentially destructive force was firmly established in European culture by the time of Ruins of Athens. For instance, in a letter written in 1781, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart described the danger of writing exotic music for the Turkish character Osmin in his opera Die Entführung aus dem Serail. The danger was that the music would become too barbaric, which would destroy its beauty: “[P]assions, whether violent or not, must never be expressed in such a way as to excite disgust.  .  .  [M]usic, even in the most terrible situations, must never offend the ear, but must please the hearer, or in other words must never cease to be music.”25 Beethoven’s exotic music for Ruins of Athens pushes the boundaries further than Mozart’s. His Orientalist numbers represent Turkish barbarism that is intended to elicit disgust; in fact, Minerva actually describes the music as an assault on her ears, as quoted above. Yet, for all its disturbing qualities, the exotic music also serves as a form of escape from real-life problems. The architectural and cultural ruins in the Austrian Empire are projected onto a distant culture. Here, Orientalism is used as a way of distancing the audience from the trauma of the Austrian ruins. Kotzebue and Beethoven project the Austro-Hungarian ruins onto ancient Greece. The visual trauma of the ruins has been displaced and sublimated into music.26

The rubble of the other 13 As Ralph Locke has observed, musical exoticism sometimes functions as a commentary on domestic political issues.27 This tendency is taken to extremes in Ruins of Athens, in which wartime devastation is depicted indirectly through exotic music. Indeed, the music avoids any direct encounter with the rubble: the physical ruins are not represented in the music. A direct representation would have been undesirable. It would have been a painful reminder of the Austro-Hungarian ruins. For Kotzebue and Beethoven, exoticism becomes a distancing manoeuvre: it shields the audience from the trauma of the domestic ruins.

The flight from Turkish rubble: Minerva the refugee When the exotic music – the Chorus of Dervishes and the Turkish March – has run its course, Minerva and her guide Mercury leave Athens, seeking refuge in westward territories. It is as though she has become a political refugee, seeking asylum in a foreign land. Now that the site of the ruins has been left behind, all overt markers of exoticism disappear from the music. Thus, when examining the structure of this play, it turns out that the musical exoticism occurs only in the middle of the work, not at the beginning or the end. This serves to contain the Oriental threat, placing it safely between Western bookends that serve as a framing device. Yet the threat cannot be fully contained. When Minerva and Mercury leave Athens and arrive in Hungary, the next musical number is a passage of primitivesounding background music that accompanies a narrated text (Figure 1.2). Background music generally tends to be simpler than the primary musical numbers. Even so, this section is unusually simplistic, with many parallel intervals and a lack of melodic complexity. It is as though the musical style has not fully “shaken off” the corrupting effect of exoticism. To some extent, then, the exotic music has contaminated the musical style in spite of Minerva’s flight from the Turks.

Figures 1.1 and 1.2 Beethoven, Ruins of Athens, “Musik hinter der Scene” (“Music Behind the Scene”), measures 1–9. The text for this example is “the people are already wandering in their festival clothing and they fill the wide streets and rejoice!”

14  Tekla Babyak

Figures 1.1 and 1.2 Continued

All of this is followed by a stretch of unaccompanied dialogue, during which an old man tells Minerva that she is now in Hungary, the land where art thrives. Why did Kotzebue put these words in the mouth of an old man? Perhaps this is intended to show the antiquity of the culture that thrives in Hungary. He demonstrates its ancient Greek origins by associating this culture with a wise old man. Significantly, at the end of his monologue, the old man says, “I feel young again.”28 His age serves as a dramatic opportunity, allowing Kotzebue to set up this transformation of old age into fresh youth. This transformation underscores both the classical antiquity and the youthful hopes of the Austro-Hungarian empire. This entire scene soon triggers a move toward a more sophisticated European style of music, as heard in the following musical number, “Mit reger Freude” (“With exuberant joy”), shown in Figures 1.3 and 1.4. Here, the “European” style returns in almost its full glory, with contrapuntal and rhythmic complexity. It is as though the music had not been able to recover until the muses were invoked, suggesting that only art can heal the ruins. But even here, at what should be a triumphant moment, the music cannot fully recover from its previous encounter with the Turks. In several sections throughout the song in Figures 1.3 and 1.4, the chromatic triplet figures seem to echo the triplet figures from the Chorus of Dervishes. This “return of the repressed” demonstrates that the exoticism is infiltrating the celebratory music.29 In creating these motivic links, Beethoven might have been aiming for unity and coherence. Yet these motivic reminders of the Dervish motive cast a shadow over Minerva’s celebration. These lingering traces of exoticism perhaps allude to the trauma that lurks at the heart of Ruins of Athens: the persistence of Austria’s real-life ruins in the wake of Napoleonic devastation. However, these ruins are disavowed in the text even as they are subtly evoked in the music. The remainder of the play consists of a long ceremony

Figures 1.3 and 1.4 Beethoven, Ruins of Athens, “Mit reger Freude” measures 1–8. The text for this section is “The holy sisters [muses] welcome us with exuberant joy, which will never grow cold, for wherever the muses ethically prevail with highest seriousness, there the wise people will gladly set forth their altar.”

16  Tekla Babyak that celebrates the Austro-Hungarian continuation of Greek traditions. The ceremony begins with an announcement from Mercury: “Look at these children of the happy throng. They flutter here and there like butterflies; they come from Thalia’s lively play.”30 Thalia, as the Greek muse of comedy, functions here as a symbol of joyful renewal. A group of solemn characters suddenly appears on the stage, prompting Minerva to ask, “What about these serious, lofty faces?”31 Mercury explains that the muse of Greek tragedy, Melpomene, has called them forth. She then lists the names of the characters: “Thekla and Wallenstein, Otto der Wittelsbacher, Emilia Galotti, Tell, die Jungfrau, Egmont and Maria Stuart, Coriolan, and Iphigenia, Regulus and Octavia.”32 Most of these characters come from literary works by Austro-German authors: Schiller, Goethe, and Heinrich Joseph von Collin. Significantly, two of the German characters  – Egmont and Coriolan  – were associated with Beethoven: he had composed music for von Collin’s Coriolan in 1807 and Goethe’s Egmont in 1810. Thus, the reference to these characters functions not only as a celebration of Austro-German literature but also as an allusion to the greatness of Austro-German music. This display of Austro-German culture is combined with a celebration of classical rebirth: the last three characters in the list – Iphigenia, Regulus, and Octavia – are Greco-Roman in origin. This merging of classical civilization with Austro-German literature conveys an imperialistic message: the Austrian Empire is portrayed as the “new Greece,” the site in which classical culture has been reborn. However, even as the play celebrates the Greek arts, it glorifies the political structure of the Austrian Empire as superior to classical democracy. The final scene of the play includes a statue of Emperor Franz I, prominently displayed on the altar. The play concludes with a chorus in honor of the Emperor: “Hail to our king, hail!”33 The implication is that Greek art needs to be combined with an aristocratic political structure for cultural greatness to be achieved.

The fantasy of cultural wholeness: wish fulfillment in the aesthetic sphere This celebration of the Austro-Hungarian Empire reflects Kotzebue and Beethoven’s patriotic devotion to their culture in the face of Napoleonic invasions. It might even be a type of wish fulfillment, in which Kotzebue and Beethoven imagine that the ruins of Austria could be healed through the power of art. Ruins of Athens thus sets forth a utopian vision of the future, spinning out a fantasy in which Napoleon and his armies have been thoroughly defeated. This dream of victory might have seemed far-fetched at the time when Ruins of Athens was premiered in 1812. However, this dream did come true a year later, when Napoleon was defeated by Duke Wellington in the Battle of Vitoria (June 21, 1813). At that point, Beethoven composed another political work to celebrate the triumph: Wellington’s Victory, Op. 91, a musical representation of Napoleon’s defeat at the hands of Wellington. The work incorporates several British tunes, including Rule Brittania

The rubble of the other 17 and God Save the King. The French forces are represented by the song Marlborough s’en va-t-en guerre. The battle between the French and British empires is portrayed through snippets from these songs punctuated by cannon shots, marked in the score with “dark circles for the British and open circles for the French artillery.”34 During the course of the work, the gradual defeat of the French army is marked by the increasing use of the British cannon shots and the waning of the French tune and cannon shots. In fact, the French tune gradually dwindles into a tiny snippet as the British tunes gain ascendancy, creating a musical representation of British victory over French forces. As Kinderman puts it, “While the British cannons pound relentlessly, Beethoven even dismembers what is left of the French motif. . . . The ‘Marlborough’ figure is reduced to a single note.”35 In Wellington’s Victory, Beethoven celebrates the British Empire for its victory over French forces, suggesting that his political agenda was more about vanquishing the enemy and less about celebrating the Austrian Empire. However, despite Beethoven’s willingness to exalt the British Empire as a military power, this was a time in which nationalistic sentiments were beginning to emerge in the Austrian Empire. Evidence of this burgeoning nationalism can be found a few years later, in 1814–1815, during the Congress of Vienna. This event was a meeting of ambassadors, chaired by Klemens von Metternich, who gathered in Vienna to discuss foreign policy and territory ownership in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars. Nationalist sentiments, already prefigured in Ruins of Athens, emerged even more directly throughout this gathering. Despite the linguistic and cultural diversity of the Austrian Empire, there was a strong focus on Austria (and especially Vienna) as the seat of nationalistic pride. Brian Vick has observed that “many of the period’s most significant figures in the development of nationalist ideas and movements populated the Vienna scene during the congress.”36 As in Ruins of Athens, music served to prop up these nationalistic ideas. Beethoven composed a choral work for the Congress, Die glorreiche Augenblick (The Glorious Moment), whose text celebrates the past and present greatness of Vienna. The song uses the old Latin name for Vienna: “Vindobona, may you prosper! World, your great moment is at hand!”37 The Latin name serves to associate Vienna with antiquity, echoing the emphasis on classical civilization in Ruins of Athens. The rebirth of classical greatness in Austro-German regions became an influential idea throughout the nineteenth century. In this sense, Ruins of Athens was prescient in its depiction of a Greek spirit that migrates toward the West. This concept would become more widespread in 1823 with the publication of G.W.F. Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of History. Hegel viewed historical progress as a migration from East to West: “The history of the world travels from East to West, for Europe is absolutely the end of history. . . . Although the earth forms a sphere, history performs no circle around it, but has on the contrary a determinate East. Here rises the outward physical sun, and in the West it sinks down: here rises the sun of self-consciousness, which diffuses a nobler brilliance.”38 Here, the sun follows the westward path taken by Minerva. This nationalistic trope of Westward migration, performed on stage in Ruins of Athens and expressed philosophically by Hegel, should be viewed in the cultural

18  Tekla Babyak context I have outlined in this chapter. This nationalistic trope, as I have argued, was initially motivated by the Napoleonic Wars, specifically the 1809 War of the Fifth Coalition. The nationalistic view of Austria as the inheritor of Greek culture has its origins in a specific political situation. The transcendent view of Austria as the “new Greece” was rooted in the painful experience of war, with its “drums, cannons, and human misery of every sort,” as Beethoven described it. The Austro-German response to this misery took place not only on the battlefield but also in works of art. Faced with Napoleon’s armies, Austrian intellectuals responded with their literary, musical, and philosophical attempts to give their empire an Athenian stamp.

The reception of Ruins of Athens Ruins of Athens was reworked and rearranged by several composers throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The first of these reworked versions was produced by Beethoven himself in 1822. He published the new work under the title Consecration of the House to celebrate the opening of another theater – a Viennese theater this time. The Hungarian composer and pianist Franz Liszt played a significant role in the afterlife of Ruins of Athens. In 1852, he transcribed the work for piano and orchestra under the title Fantasie über Motive aus Beethovens Ruinen von Athen (Fantasia on Motives From Beethoven’s Ruins of Athens). His medley-like Fantasia divests the work of its vocal parts: gone are the songs and spoken dialogue. In Liszt’s hands, the work becomes an untexted piece of instrumental music. In doing so, he made the ruins even more aestheticized and abstract, completely removing the music from any textual description of ruins. Although Liszt was an avid proponent of descriptive music, his love of transcription was sometimes at odds with his narrative impulses: the pianistic transcription of vocal music necessarily entails the suppression of the original story line.39 Liszt’s transcription of Ruins of Athens became extremely popular, as indicated by the frequent performances of this work documented in many nineteenthcentury sources. For instance, the Liszt scholar Alan Walker observes that “[o]n June 1, 1853, Bülow walked onto the stage of the Hungarian National Theater and played Liszt’s Fantasia on themes from Beethoven’s Ruins of Athens for piano and orchestra, with Ferenc Erkel conducting, and received a standing ovation.”40 It is significant that this successful performance took place in Hungary, the original site of the premiere and the destination of Minerva’s journey. The Hungarian element of Ruins of Athens might help explain Liszt’s attraction to this work: he was a Hungarian nationalist who composed many works about his homeland, including a series of Hungarian Rhapsodies. Thus, it is likely that Liszt was drawn to the Hungarian patriotism of the play, even as he suppressed the text to render the music more transcendent and less overtly political. The Hungarian element, sublimated into absolute music in Lizst’s transcription, became more explicit when Liszt performed the work in overly nationalistic Hungarian contexts. For instance, in 1856, the work was programmed as part of

The rubble of the other 19 a benefit concert for Hungary, which took place in a theater in Pest, echoing the original performance venue at which Ruins of Athens had been premiered. This concert had an overtly nationalistic agenda, featuring Liszt’s Hungaria, a symphonic ode to his homeland, alongside his transcription of Ruins of Athens. These pro-Hungarian works met with great success; gripped by nationalistic fervor, the audience responded with “thunderous and prolonged applause, cheers, flower wreaths, verses and greetings.”41 A similar situation occurred in 1874, when Liszt once again performed his transcription in Pest. The performance took place as part of a charity concert “in the large hall of the Vigadó to raise money for the orphans of a recent cholera epidemic.”42 Liszt and his duet partner Ödön Mihalovich “delivered a riveting performance of Liszt’s Fantasia on Motifs from Beethoven’s Ruins of Athens, which created a pandemonium.”43 Much of the program focused explicitly on Hungarianthemed music (Liszt’s Mélodies Hongroises, Fantasy on Hungarian Folk Themes), which served to (re)situate Ruins of Athens in a patriotic Hungarian context. The interest in Ruins of Athens continued into the twentieth century. In 1924, the composer Richard Strauss and his librettist Hugo von Hofmannsthal created a ballet based on Ruins of Athens, combined with musical numbers adapted from another Greek-themed work by Beethoven, Creatures of Prometheus.44 Strauss and Hofmannsthal added a new character named the Wanderer, who “muses on the ruins of the past in a deserted Athenian market at sundown.”45 The nostalgic melancholy of this adaptation is rooted in a post-war context, as was the original production of Ruins of Athens. In this case, it is World War I that served as the political context for Strauss and Hofmannsthal’s obsession with ruins and reconstruction. As Gilliam observes, Strauss “envisioned a unique ‘Austrian idea,’ a ‘United States of Europe,’ whose center would be Austria  – more specifically Vienna,” an idea that involved a “unique, utopian embrace of ancient Greece.”46 The Hellenistic renewal promised by Ruins of Athens had a broad appeal that reached beyond its initial Habsburg context. The nationalistic message in Ruins of Athens turned out to be surprisingly flexible, serving as a vehicle for British patriotism in the mid-nineteenth century. In a British adaptation, written by W. Bartholomew in 1846,47 Minerva travels not to Hungary, but rather to London. Instead of the statue of Franz Joseph, which had served as an altarpiece in the original, this adaptation features a statue of the Duke of Wellington – a reference back to the original Napoleonic context of the play, but with an emphasis on British rather than Austrian victory. Mercury points to the Wellington statue and exclaims, “There stands the trophy of a hundred victories: the hero yet exists.”48 Minerva replies by affirming the immortality of British greatness: “The hero never dies: he lives in the remembrance of the past.”49 The next scene features a host of Shakespearean characters celebrating the Bard’s native culture. Gone are the German literary figures who starred in the triumphant conclusion of the original work. They have all been replaced by characters from Shakespeare’s plays. The Shakespearean parade begins with a group of fairies from Midsummer Night’s Dream. This fairy dance is soon followed by Prospero’s delivery of a speech that brings the Greek god Neptune into

20  Tekla Babyak the Shakespearean world, uniting Greek and British culture: “Ye elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes, and groves; and ye, that on the sands with printless foot do chase the ebbing Neptune, and do fly him, when he comes back.”50 After the conclusion of Prospero’s speech, the witches from Macbeth appear on stage, celebrating the unification of Greek and British traditions: “Hail, Minerva, in ancient Greece, Athena of th’ Athenians: – And here, and now Britannia of the Britons! Hail!”51 The Priest of Apollo then summons forth a statue of Shakespeare: “Deign, great Apollo, now to hear our supplication; And let his form whose memory we revere, – his, whose wise precepts exist still in shapes of his creation, Enthron’d within thy temple now appear. Our Bard whose art embellished Nature, Shall ever be admir’d – renown’d.”52 Minerva echoes these sentiments: “Let him appear in form and feature!”53 In response to these pleas, “the statue of Shakespeare rises, and Minerva crowns it with an olive wreath.”54 The play concludes with the chorus singing Shakespeare’s praises: “Hail, mighty Master, hail! Great heir of fame! Sacred wisdom in thy pages, shines for all succeeding ages, – Halos thy name!”55 In an 1852 review in the London Musical World, reprinted in Dwight’s Journal of Music, this production is described as “an adaptation rather than a translation, designed to meet a ready appreciation in England by the substitution of some entirely local matter for other, that being out of our knowledge, was supposed to be beyond our sympathy.”56 This adaptation underscores the flexibility of nationalistic tropes, which can often be reworked to suit a variety of cultural contexts.

Notes 1 I would like to thank Ralph P. Locke for his insightful comments on an earlier draft of this chapter. I’m also grateful to Abby Anderton, Ariana Phillips-Hutton, Emily Richmond Pollock, Jessica A. Schwartz, Martha Sprigge, and Amy Lynn Wlodarski. They offered me useful feedback on a version of this project that I presented for the seminar “The Rubble Arts: Music after Urban Catastrophe” at the 2017 meeting of the American Musicological Society. 2 Beethoven’s musical score conveys this information with a heading that reads “Componirt zur Eröffnung des Theaters in Pesth im Jahre 1812” (Composed for the opening of a theater in Pest in 1812). Ludwig van Beethoven and August von Kotzebue, Die Ruinen von Athen, Op. 113 (Leipzig: Breitkopf and Härtel, 1812). 3 Kotzebue’s use of Roman names such as Minerva was the standard practice in early nineteenth-century Austro-German writings about ancient Greece. These names were, as far as I can tell, not intended as an ideological statement about the relationship between Greece and Rome. Even the most scholarly classicists, who valued ancient Greece highly, tended to use Roman rather than Greek names for the gods and other characters. This can be found, for example, in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich Schiller, Johann Joachim Winckelmann, and many others. The use of “Minerva” instead of “Athena” was so widespread that there was even a political journal founded in 1792 with the name Minerva: Ein Journal historischen und politischen Inhalts. The reasons why Germans preferred the Roman names are beyond the scope of this chapter, but it most likely has something to do with the academic prestige of the Latin language. 4 For more information about the German obsession with ancient Greece, see Damian Valdez, German Philhellenism: The Pathos of the Historical Imagination from Winckelmann to Goethe (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).

The rubble of the other 21 5 Lawrence Kramer, Interpreting Music (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2011), 99. 6 Ruins are a central theme in many Romantic works of art. Andrew Davis writes, “Ruins became a standard symbol in Romantic landscape prose, poetry, painting, and literature . . . the fragments Schlegel valued so highly can be understood as fractured remnants of Classical genres – specimens of architectural ruins, as it were, wrecked not literally by the forces of nature but by the forces of the Romantic architectural spirit.” Andrew Davis, Sonata Fragments: Romantic Narratives in Chopin, Schumann, and Brahms (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2017), 28. See also Charles Rosen, The Romantic Generation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 41–115. 7 Ralph P. Locke, Music and the Exotic from the Renaissance to Mozart (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 323. 8 Ruins of Athens has not generally been viewed as an allegorical work, but scholars have pursued this line of inquiry with respect to other nineteenth-century operas and plays. See, for example, Ralph Locke, “Aida and Nine Readings of Empire,” Nineteenth-Century Music Review 3, no. 1 (June 2006), 45–72. 9 For more information about these concepts in post-colonial theory, see Jane Hiddleston, Understanding Postcolonialism (Oxford and New York: Routledge, 2014), 17–28. 10 David Gates, The Napoleonic Wars, 1803–1815 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). 11 Gary B. Nash, Warner Mifflin: Unflinching Quaker Abolitionist (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017), 243. The relationship between European artworks and American politics is a rich and complicated field of study; for more information on this topic, see Pierpaolo Polzonetti, Italian Opera in the Age of the American Revolution (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011). 12 Later in his career, Kotzebue became even more directly involved in politics, eventually becoming involved in Russian espionage. In a shocking twist of events, he was assassinated in 1819 because of his political allegiances and activities. See George S. Williamson, “What Killed August von Kotzebue? The Temptations of Virtue and the Political Theology of German Nationalism, 1789–1819,” The Journal of Modern History, 72:4 (December 2000), 890–943. 13 Karen Hagemann, Revisiting Prussia’s Wars Against Napoleon: History, Culture, and Memory (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 91. 14 Hagemann, Revisiting Prussia’s Wars Against Napoleon, 91. 15 Ibid. 16 Quoted in Barry Cooper, Beethoven (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 151. 17 Michael Steinberg, The Concerto: A Listener’s Guide (New York and Oxford, 1998), 73. 18 Quoted in Nancy November, Beethoven’s Theatrical Quartets: Opp. 59, 74 and 95 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 173. 19 Ibid., 176. 20 Ruinen von Athen, No. 2, “Duett,” 32–7. 21 “Ha! Welche Unsinn hat mein Ohr vernommen! Welch ein barbarisches Geschrei!” All translations are my own unless otherwise noted. Beethoven and Kotzebue, Ruinen von Athen, 49. 22 For a discussion of the political and cultural context surrounding the vogue for Turkish exoticism in Austrian music during the long eighteenth century, and the musical markers associated with the “alla turca” style, see Mary Hunter, “The Alla Turca Style in the Late Eighteenth Century: Race and Gender in the Symphony and the Seraglio,” The Exotic in Western Music, ed. Jonathan Bellman (Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press, 1998), 43–73. For a study that focuses more specifically on the Turkish-inspired work of a single composer, see Matthew Head, Orientalism, Masquerade and Mozart’s Turkish Music (London: Royal Musical Association, 2000).

22  Tekla Babyak 23 Ursula Reinhard, Irene Markoff, Yildiray Erdener, and Karl Signell, “Turkey: An Overview,” in The Concise Garland Encyclopedia of World Music, Volume 2 (New York and London: Routledge, 2008), 869. 24 For the Greek underpinnings of the numerous recognition scenes in eighteenth-century opera, see Jessica Waldoff, Recognition in Mozart’s Operas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); Richard Kramer, “Anagnorsis: Gluck and the Theater of Recognition,” Cherubino’s Leap: In Search of the Enlightenment Moment (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 135–61. 25 Quoted in Peter Kivy, Osmin’s Rage: Philosophical Reflections on Opera, Drama, and Text (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988), 59–60. 26 My argument is indebted to psychoanalytical theory. Sigmund Freud proposed the notion of displacement to account for the phenomenon in which a traumatic occurrence is psychically replaced by a less painful substitute: “Among displacements are to be counted not merely diversions from a train of thought but every sort of indirect representation as well, and in particular the replacement of an important but objectionable element by one that is indifferent and that appears innocent to the censorship, something that seems like a very remote allusion to the other one.” Quoted in Agnes Petocz, Freud, Psychoanalysis and Symbolism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 70. 27 Ralph Locke, “Exoticism and Orientalism in Music: Problems for the Worldly Critic,” in Edward Said and the Work of the Critic: Speaking Truth to Power, ed. Paul A. Boré (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), 272–3. For an example of how this allegorical approach could be applied to specific musical works, see Locke, “Constructing the Oriental ‘Other’: Saint-Saëns’ Samson et Dalila,” Cambridge Opera Journal 3, no. 3 (1991), 261–302. 28 “Ich bin wieder jung.” Beethoven and Kotzebue, Ruinen von Athen, 61. 29 In referring to the “return of the repressed,” I am again drawing on a psychoanalytical framework, informed by Freud’s theories about the uncanny feeling that occurs when a repressed feeling is unexpectedly brought to conscious awareness. See Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny, trans. David Mclintock (New York and London: Penguin Books, 2003). 30 “Schau dieser Kinder fröhliches Gewühl, sie flattern hin und her mit Schmetterlingsgefieder; sie deuten auf Thaliens munteres Spiel.” Ruinen von Athen, 63. 31 “Doch diese ernsten hohen Gestalten?” Ruinen von Athen, 64. 32 Ruinen von Athen, 64–5. 33 “Heil unserm König! Heil!” Ruinen von Athen, 106–8. 34 William Kinderman, Beethoven (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 193. 35 Ibid., 196. 36 Brian E. Vick, The Congress of Vienna: Power and Politics After Napoleon (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 268. 37 Richard Taruskin, Music in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 722–3. 38 Quoted in Kramer, Interpreting Music, 104. 39 For more information about Liszt’s complex attitudes toward programmatic music, see Jonathan Kregor, Program Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 99–135. 40 Alan Walker, Reflections on Liszt (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 2005), 83. 41 Keith T. Johns, The Symphonic Poems of Franz Liszt (Stuyvesant: Pendragon Press, 1997), 96. 42 Alan Walker, Franz Liszt: The Final Years, 1861–1886 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), 274. 43 Ibid.

The rubble of the other 23 44 Bryan Gilliam, Rounding Wagner’s Mountain: Richard Strauss and Modern German Opera (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 275. 45 Bryan Gilliam, “The Great War and Its Aftermath: Strauss and Hofmannsthal’s ‘ThirdWay Modernism,’ ” in Modernism and Opera, ed. Richard Begam and Matthew Wilson Smith (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016), 136. 46 Ibid., 136–7. 47 W. Bartholomew, The Ruins of Athens: A Cantata (London: Novella and Company Co., Limited., 1846). 48 Ibid., 12. 49 Ibid. 50 Ibid., 14. 51 Ibid., 15. 52 Ibid. 53 Ibid.,16. 54 Ibid. 55 Ibid. 56 “From the London Musical World: Beethoven’s ‘Ruinen von Athen,’ ” Dwight’s Journal of Music 1–2, ed. John Sullivan Dwight, 74.

2 “Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition” Propaganda music as a governmental marketing tool during the WWII era Zoë Jensiene Godfrey Introduction As World War II rages, countless refugees, Vichy French, Nazis, and profiteers make their way to unoccupied Casablanca, Morocco. To pass the interminable nights of waiting, everybody goes to Rick’s nightclub. One evening, a raucous table of Nazis begins singing a patriotic German song, Die Wacht am Rhein. Their march-like tune is met with thinly veiled scowls from the rest of the club-goers. The din of the room dies down as the drunken chorus picks up momentum. In an impulsive act of defiance, Victor Laszlo, a fugitive from the Germans’ concentration camps and fierce resistance fighter, cues the band to play La Marseillaise. The band starts the triumphal tune, with Laszlo leading the song. For an uncomfortable moment, the German and French anthems merge together in an aggressive duet. One by one, the members of the nightclub join in to sing La Marseillaise until the Nazi chorus must back down. The swell of French lyrics crescendos, erupting into “Vive la France!” Many of Casablanca’s nomads shed tears of joy for this small act of victory over their oppressors. This is a scene from one of Hollywood’s most iconic movies, Casablanca. It sheds light on music’s power, especially in times of conflict. The incremental rise of the “Marseillaise” – an anthem that bespeaks a patriotic love of France and of freedom, more generally, echoed in the seemingly spontaneous rise of “Vive la France” and “Vive la démocratie” by [members of the crowd] – exemplifies the common will to unite and overthrow tyranny.1 This scene was the touchstone for this chapter, which examines the ways in which governments and social movements, often in opposition, each used music to their advantage during WWII. Casablanca premiered in 1942, a mere two weeks after the real-life city of Casablanca surrendered to American troops.2 The “film critic J. Hoberman recounts that during the war, when his mother was a student at Brooklyn College, she attended a screening of Casablanca [in New York]  .  .  . During the “Marseillaise” scene, many people in the theater – politically minded students, perhaps, possibly fellow travelers – stood up and sang along.”3

“Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition” 25 La Marseillaise remains an international symbol of “Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity” to this day. After recent terrorist events in France, such as the Charlie Hebdo shooting in 2015, global rallies were held in solidarity with French victims. Many of these rallies, French or otherwise, were accompanied by the singing of La Marseillaise. On first glance, it is just a song. Yet to have such a widespread societal impact, it is obviously more. Isenberg writes, “Thanks to Casablanca, the ‘Marseillaise’ may be one of the few national anthems sung by noncitizens, who may not know all of its words but know its emotional weight.”4 This chapter seeks to analyze the WWII era use of songs with such “emotional weight” and the impact of such music.

The US government’s use of music during WWII Nationalism and religion The title of this chapter was taken from an American song written as a response to the attack on Pearl Harbor. The Smithsonian also offered a brief history of the piece and the legend that has been tied to it since the beginning. On a Sunday morning in December 1941, a chaplain had his most difficult assignment – to say a prayer to sailors aboard a US navy ship actively under low-flying attack by the enemy firing from all directions. He quickly realized the best he could do was walk the ammunition line saying, “Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition!” Stories of the overheard phrase quickly turned into legend and passed between soldiers, eventually reaching the press and one Broadway composer and lyricist, Frank Loesser.5 He served in the Radio Productions Unit charged with mounting shows of popular guest stars for boosting morale of the troops. With the phrase as the song title, he combined the stories into one set of lyrics – fact mattered not as much as the need to inspire spirit. By 1943, the song, performed by Kay Kaiser and His Orchestra, had reached no. 1 on the Billboard chart, surpassing its peak of no. 8 the previous year when performed by the Merry Macs. The lyrics from “Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition” especially align the war efforts with listeners’ sense of religious identity and moral duty. The lyrics “Praise the Lord, we’re on a mighty mission” imply that the mission of the United States is a holy directive. The lyrics “All aboard, we ain’t a-goin’ fishin’ ” include imagery of a locomotive, as if the war effort is gaining steam and none should be left behind. The fishing imagery would also be familiar to many Americans as a pastime, and here the lyrics are a gentle scoff at those who would rather fish than contribute to the war effort. The lines “Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition/ And we’ll all stay free” are key throughout all verses of the song. This is a causal statement that implies that ammunition, or arming oneself, is the necessity for freedom, and that the ability to arm oneself is a God-given right, with the blessing of ammunition coming from above. In this way, the song reinforces the idea

26  Zoë Jensiene Godfrey that America’s role in the war is morally unobjectionable, and that staying on the sidelines would be an unforgiveable sin. Music is often used to build auras of nationalism and religion around a cause. Faith traditions and music are so intertwined that whether or not overtly expressed, propaganda music carries with it a sense of religion. Frank Wright6 says, “Nationalisms are not merely ‘like’ religions  – they are religions.” While this is most apparent during times of conflict or potential threat to a country, there is always a sense of religious fervor involved in nationalism.7 Governments capitalize upon the zeal of fervent nationalists when they seek to justify the extraordinary consequences of necessary (as far as the state is concerned) actions. In President Roosevelt’s address to Congress on December  8, 1941, the day after the attack on Pearl Harbor, he asks Congress to declare war on Japan, rallies the American people in support, and calls on God to support the cause as well. His words from the radio address: “Hostilities exist. There is no blinking at the fact that our people, our territory, and our interests are in grave danger. With confidence in our armed forces – with the unbounding determination of our people – we will gain the inevitable triumph – so help us God.” Seeing the potential for mass media to communicate directly and intimately with the public, “[President] Roosevelt would give around 30 total radio addresses [colloquially known as “Fireside Chats”] from March 1933 to June 1944.”8 These broadcasts provided updates on national and international events for American listeners. “ ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ was played after each chat ended, underlining that patriotic message. [The] president appealed to God or Providence at the end of almost every speech, urging the American people to face the difficult tasks ahead with patience, understanding and faith.” Religious and familiar tunes have provided a backdrop to history’s most tumultuous chapters.9 The MUZAK project and the Psychological Warfare Division During WWII, governments began experimenting with emotional manipulation through musical propaganda. The US government’s MUZAK project is one example. Muzak was a company founded by Army Major General George Owen Squier in the 1930s that would go on to develop background music to elicit a specific “Stimulus Progression” from listeners. The theory behind “Stimulus Progression” was that one could manipulate the mood of a listener by playing certain sets or styles of music.10 Squier created the industry of background music, claiming his methods increased customer satisfaction in stores, drove productivity in offices, and lessened tension in long lines. While his theory has been scrutinized, it would nevertheless be built upon in the years during and after the war.11 The US government was eager to use every weapon in its arsenal to shift the tides of war. On the basis of Squier’s musical innovations, the US government’s Office of Strategic Services’s12 Morale Operations (MO) Branch began its MUZAK project in 1943, producing “black” radio programming and music to pit the Axis powers against one another.

“Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition” 27 “Lili Marlene” was one such piece of music.13 The song is about a girl waiting under a lamppost at night for her soldier to come home. Lyrics such as “Underneath the lantern by the barrack gate/Darling I remember the way you used to wait” highlight the song’s design for a specific target audience: soldiers to whom the barracks imagery would be a touchpoint of familiarity. In addition, the lyrics “I remember the way you used to wait” could bring to mind a love that would not stand the test of war (“used to wait” instead of “will always wait”) or a loved one that was far away. The song goes on, “Twas there that you whispered tenderly/ That you loved me/You’d always be/My Lili of the lamplight/My own Lili Marlene.” Again, note the past tense “you loved me,” which leaves the listener to question whether that love still holds true (“Lili Marlene Lyrics”). The imagery, tone, and style in which the song was sung brought forth a melancholy result. Noting the popularity of the song and its “homesick” imagery, the US government incorporated it into the MUZAK project for propagandistic purposes.14 Many songs from the WWII era can be classified as “sad,” yet they remain “classics” to this day because of their nostalgic qualities. But why should seemingly depressing songs earn such popularity? Even sad lyrics can evoke feelings of happiness in the listener. As the authors of a recent study put it, the listener has “pleasant feelings generated by the perception of sadness.”15 Nostalgia is another word for it.16 Another 2014 study concludes that sadness can be a not unpleasant emotional experience when accomplished through art. In art, we experience emotion vicariously and are therefore not threatened by these emotions.17,18 Nostalgia is a “slippery” quality of music that elicits often unexpected responses, such as a mixture of emotions. By the time the United States saw its potential as a propaganda tool, “Lili Marlene,” a song that openly played into listeners’ nostalgia, was already successful in Germany. Radio Belgrade, a German-run radio station, played the song frequently, and it became a favorite among the troops. Because of the song’s popularity among Axis audiences, “Lili Marlene” was re-recorded by Marlene Dietrich, a recent German immigrant to America, and was widely distributed by the US government’s MUZAK project. The familiarity of the song was meant to cause homesickness and desertion among German troops. Similar productions were made by many countries, like the “Tokyo Rose” propaganda broadcasts that Japan produced to lower the morale of Allied listeners.19 At one point, the song was ordered to be taken off the air by Joseph Goebbels, the Reich Minister of Propaganda. The radio station received so many complaint letters from Axis servicemen that Goebbels relented, and once again the song’s popularity flourished. In his 2014 article, “The ‘D-Day Dodgers’ in Italy,” BBC contributor Trooper Tom Canning writes about British soldiers who were fighting in Italy at the time of the D-Day invasion, yet were accused of being “D-Day Dodgers.” These soldiers were disgusted that their trials in the war were being belittled.20 But they turned the slur into a joke. They re-worded the tune of “Lili Marlene,” transforming the ballad into a satire. The new version of the song became incredibly popular,

28  Zoë Jensiene Godfrey and it poked fun at the idea that the troops had been “relaxing” in Tuscany during D-Day. So, a German song that was re-recorded with the intent to demoralize German citizens through the MUZAK project was satirically re-worded by branches of the Allied military forces. While propaganda music always began with an intended mission, once out in the open, it was often reinterpreted by the public.21 In addition to the MUZAK project, the US government developed the Psychological Warfare Division, from which sprang the Naval Special Warfare Branch Op-16-W. Its purpose was to undermine the enemy psychologically. Instead of guns, one of its primary weapons was music. Radio broadcasts were developed specifically for German soldiers, especially those on U-boats. Each broadcast began with Wagner’s overture from The Flying Dutchman (Der fliegende Holländer). The German soldiers were familiar with this German classic, and were even conditioned to respond to it emotionally because of its frequent use by the Nazi Party. After the musical primer, the broadcast would continue with a message from the fictional character Commander Robert Lee Norden (American Lieutenant Commander R.G. Albrecht speaking in German). The first broadcast took place on January 8, 1943. The typical programming would include information about the war, offering a supposedly objective outside perspective that was otherwise unattainable for the German troops. It should be noted that these broadcasts contained an entire spectrum of truthfulness. This propaganda was so effective that some soldiers began to trust the fictional “Commander Norden” character more than their own commanders.22 After Kapitänleutnant Heinrich Eberhard Müller, commanding officer of a German U-boat, was captured and held as a prisoner of war (P/W), they began questioning him. Soon, the P/W made it clear he wanted to talk to Commander Norden, the character played by real-life Lieutenant Commander Albrecht. During a two-hour interview, Lieutenant Commander Albrecht was able to gain valuable information about the effects of the broadcasts on listeners. A secret memo from Commander John L. Riheldaffer documents what Lieutenant Commander Albrecht wrote about the interview: P/W’s listening to the “Voice of America” took place on the short wave band. He estimated the time as early evening E.S.T. He was usually on the bridge of his boat at that time. His officers who were off watch, would be listening on his radio below. As soon as it was announced that Comdr. Norden was about to speak, they would call up to him that “Bob” was about to go on the air. They never missed the Norden talk if they could avoid it. [. . .] In commenting generally about British broadcasts, he expressed the opinion that it was a mistake to attempt to jazz German music. An effort to jazz “Liebestraum” particularly offended him. This interview proved vital to the Allied forces as they continued to refine their methods of propaganda. Their efforts were having the desired effect: the character of Commander Norden would live on.

“Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition” 29 Goodwill through music However, the United States’ Psychological Warfare Division was only part of the picture. Not only was the government concerned with combatting the enemy, they were also concerned with building up their own troops. In 1941, at the request of President Roosevelt, six private organizations23 collaborated to form the United Service Organizations (USO). USO clubs were established around the world as places where GIs could go to relax and feel more at home, and many famous entertainers toured the USO clubs to give back to the GIs (USO.gov). One of the pioneers of this effort, a name that has become synonymous with the “USO shows” he so famously headlined, was Bob Hope.24 Beginning in 1942, only nine months after the United States declared war on Japan, Bob Hope went overseas to entertain the newly deployed troops. In the summer of 1944, he traveled around the South Pacific, performing over 150 times and covering over 30,000 miles in all. His efforts during WWII would be the beginning of a 50-year commitment to the USO and performing for troops fighting in wars and conflicts across the globe (“Bob Hope and American Variety, On the Road: USO Shows”). In the years after the end of WWII, wartime propaganda techniques were refined for use in United States foreign affairs. In 1954, the United States initiated its Cultural Presentations Program, touring thousands of musicians around the world to “enhance the reputation of American culture, create a positive impression of the United States and its foreign policy, and compete with the many Soviet and Chinese performers who traveled for similar propaganda purposes.”25

Music in Nazi Germany during WWII In the Nazi government, we can notice two distinct efforts regarding music – first, to sponsor the creation of music that advanced a Nazi ideology, and second, to prohibit the so-called “degenerate” music that went against it. Joseph Goebbels, the Reich Minister of Propaganda, once remarked, “Music affects the heart and emotions more than the intellect. Where then could the heart of a nation beat stronger than in the huge masses, in which the heart of a nation has found its true home.” From the top level down, Nazi officials recognized the importance of music as an integral part of their propaganda machine (“Music in the Third Reich”). Regulation of music Instead of simply covering up “undesirable” music or keeping it from its citizens, in 1938, the Nazis staged the “Entartete Musik (Degenerate music)” exhibition (McKee). It took place in Düsseldorf as a circus-like showcase mocking the modern and avant-garde styles of music that had come into prominence in the interwar years. The label of “degenerate” music was not well-defined by the Nazis, which made it that much easier to lump together all the styles perceived as antagonistic to the Nazi regime.

30  Zoë Jensiene Godfrey Many of the pieces played at the exhibition as examples of degeneracy were [. . .] popular among listeners, and some feared that the display was attended by fans eager to hear them. In addition, while the firing of Jews had evoked little protest, this exhibit was more disturbing to German musicians, probably because ‘degeneracy’ was not simply linked to blacks and Jews, but also to experimental and ‘foreign’ music of diverse kinds.26 At the beginning of the war in Germany, the Nazis placed a ban on swing and jazz music. Born out of American culture, swing and jazz music was performed by and especially popular among black audiences in the United States. These audiences were not only American, and therefore enemies of Germany, but Germany was also bent on convincing its citizens that non-Aryans were lesser humans, degenerate in form. To have such a distinctly American and specifically black style of music rise to popularity would undo all the propaganda Germany had fine-tuned over the years.27 Hard as they tried, the Nazis could not contain swing music. Swing clubs were known to post guards at the door, ready to signal the band to switch to a docile polka at the first sign of an unwelcome intruder.28 Despite (or perhaps because of) the war, there was an increased demand for “danceable” music. An underground jazz scene emerged in Berlin, which was only allowed to continue because of the pro-German lyrics added to the popular music. Seeing an opportunity, Goebbels’ Propagandaministerium (Ministry of Propaganda) formed a band around lead singer Karl “Charlie” Schwedler and several other regulars of Berlin’s underground jazz scene. The Ministry of Propaganda produced recordings and radio broadcasts of Charlie and his Orchestra that were distributed internationally.29 One particularly heinous song was “Sheik of Araby,” with the lyrics “I’m the Sheik of Araby/Your love belongs to me/At night when you’re asleep/Into your tent I’ll creep.” Another stanza goes “You’ll rule this land with me.” The lyrics seem to be crafted to instill a fear of “Sheiks” as characters that are ready to steal both women and homeland (“The Sheik of Araby”). Another overtly racist tune by Charlie and his Orchestra was titled “Makin Whoopie” (Leventman 2008, 23). This song’s lyrics were an attack on Jews and used lines such as “Another war, another profit, another Jewish business trick,” implying that Jews were responsible for the war. Another set of lyrics goes “Washington is our ghetto, Roosevelt our king,/Democracy is our motto, think what a war can bring!/We throw our German names away, we are the kikes of USA.” These songs served as one more angle from which to fan the flames of xenophobia under the Nazi regime. The Nazi Party also regulated funeral music to stifle mourning and promote nationalism. The “unremarkable” composer Hans Ferdinand Shaub was commissioned to write two cantatas that were to be used in place of dirges or traditional funeral music (Kater, 1997). These were Den Gefallenen (“The Fallen”), 1940, and Ein Deutsches Te Deum,30 1942.31 The pieces feature the minor to major tonality that is common in nationalistic music, as if to say that life is gloomy and full of despair (minor mode), but thanks to our government, we are overcoming all obstacles and will end in victory (major mode). The Nazi regime did not allow open mourning for the loss of loved ones during WWII. Instead, these songs

“Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition” 31 provided (and required) by the government were intended to elicit somber remembrance and inspire more sacrifice for the Fatherland. Even music distributors saw the danger of openly advertising music of remembrance. While the music still existed, it was no longer sold under the heading of “Requiem” or “commemorative music” in Germany.32,33 Composers and musicians in Nazi Germany The Nazis curated and promoted music that fit with their anti-Semitic propaganda and filtered out works from undesirable composers, such as Jewish composers Giacomo Meyerbeer and Felix Mendelssohn from the nineteenth century. The inventive music of contemporary twentieth century composers Paul Hindemith and Arnold Schoenberg was banned, and along with many other composers, they fled the Nazi regime. Paul Hindemith was one of the most innovative composers of the twentieth century. Hindemith developed his own interpretation of the tonal system and wrote sonatas based on this new idea of tonality for virtually every instrument in the orchestra. As a Jewish German composer of contemporary music, he was not treated favorably by the Nazis. As the Nazi Party “was rising to power in Germany, Wagner’s music became a powerful nationalistic symbol. Hindemith [. . .] produced a series of sometimes raunchy parodies of Wagner operas which sought to deflate these nationalistic musical associations.” Hindemith’s 1925 piece titled Overture to the ‘Flying Dutchman’ as Played on Sight by a Bad Spa Orchestra by the Village Well at 7 in the Morning is a spoof on Wagner’s Overture from the Flying Dutchman. In stark contrast to the full-bodied orchestra sound and triumphal tone of Wagner’s original piece, Hindemith’s parody for string quartet is full of clashing dissonances and poorly timed entrances and ends without a resolution. Still, it follows the basic structure of the original piece and would be immediately recognizable to anyone familiar with the original. Hindemith’s spoof on one of the Nazi’s favorite composers was a clear political statement. This, along with his Jewish heritage and his taste for composing modern, or, as the Nazis saw it, “degenerate,” music made it unsafe for him to remain in Germany. He fled to Switzerland and then America in 1940.34 Through a series of laws, the Nazi Party systematically removed music and musicians that were not aligned with Nazi ideals: “In March 1933, Goebbels took control of all German radio stations and the press, summarily firing the art and music critics who did not support his aesthetic agenda. One month later, on April 7, 1933, the Law for the Re-establishment of the Civil Service was passed, which led to the widespread dismissal of Jewish conductors, singers, music teachers, and administrators.” This led to many open seats in orchestras and ensembles throughout Germany and therefore was not opposed by the majority of nonJewish musicians. In “July [of 1933], the two most important composers at the illustrious Prussian Academy of Art, Arnold Schoenberg and Franz Schreker, were dismissed” (Hirsch). Though the Jüdischer Kulturbund (Jewish Cultural League) was established in 1933, it did little to defend Jews’ dwindling rights. In 1935, the Nuremburg

32  Zoë Jensiene Godfrey Laws went to the point of blocking “ ‘half-Jews’ and those married to Jews” from performing and composing.35 The “music publishing world was also targeted, and hundreds of leading publishers and staff were persecuted, fired, and imprisoned” (Hirsch). Many musicians and composers found themselves walking the tightrope between allegiances during the war. Richard Strauss was one such composer. His political convictions were often founded on the government’s support for the arts and music, and he was a passionate supporter of musicians’ rights. This led to his early loyalty to the Third Reich. Despite this alignment, he refused to participate in the “Aryanizing” of the music industry as a whole, especially the blacklisting of Jewish-German musicians and composers. Still, he remained in good favor with the Nazi Party.36,37 It was ultimately the fact that Strauss considered himself next in the great line of German composers, such as Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, and Wagner, that would irritate the Nazi regime. He once remarked, “I am the last mountain of a large mountain range. After me come the flatlands” (“Richard Strauss”). In 1934, his collaboration on the opera Die Schweigsame Frau (The Silent Woman) with Jewish writer Stephan Zweig began his era of political turmoil. When the Nazis intercepted a letter from Strauss to Zweig discounting his involvement with the Nazi Party, even calling it “play-acting,” Strauss was forced to resign, and further productions of the opera were banned. During some of the worst episodes of the war, such as the Kristallnacht, Strauss was able to use his political connections to protect his family, including his daughter-in-law and grandchildren, who were Jewish. However, his connections only held out for so long, and all of his family members who were interned died in the camps. As far as his musical contributions, Strauss was and still is widely considered one of the greats: “Conductor Arturo Toscanini, a fervent anti-fascist during the war (he refused to conduct anywhere near Mussolini) famously said, ‘To [Richard] Strauss the composer I take off my hat; to Strauss the man I put it back on again.’ ”38 Nazi use of Wagner and its enduring implications For nationalistic music to rally the masses, the Nazis turned to Richard Wagner. Wagner was a nineteenth-century German composer of epic and elaborate works, including groundbreaking operas. The Nazis took a particular interest in his “Ring Cycle” of four operas, which are based on stories from Germanic mythology. Hitler was a devoted fan of Wagner’s works and once remarked, “When I listen to Wagner, I hear the rhythms of a bygone world.” Wagner was an innovative composer but also a raging anti-Semite. He wrote many papers expressing his beliefs, which were compiled in book titled “Das Judenthum in der Musik,” or “Judaism in Music.” Select works by Wagner were used by Nazis to tie the new government to ancient Germanic mythology and ideology. In many ways, Hitler viewed himself as the personification of Wagner’s opera heroes. In his memoirs, he wrote that he fully realized his calling to lead the German people after watching Wagner’s Rienzi.39

“Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition” 33 Controversy remains with Wagner’s music because of its strong ties with Nazism. In 1938, “in the wake of Kristallnacht, the nationwide pogrom in Nazi Germany, the Palestine Symphony led by Arturo Toscanini removed Wagner’s ‘Meistersinger’ Prelude from its program.”40 Since that time, there has been an informal ban on the performance of Wagner both among Jewish orchestras and subsequently in Israel after its formation in 1948. As writer Lili Eylon puts it, “The truth is that some Germans, like many Israelis, still cannot ‘digest’ Wagner, and that the anti-Semitic composer continues to be an issue – lukewarm in Germany, hot in Israel.” In 1981, Zubin Mehta, after giving audience members an opportunity to leave the hall, conducted the “Liebestod” from [Wagner’s] “Tristan und Isolde” as an encore; in response, Ben-Zion Leitner, a Holocaust survivor and a hero of the First Arab-Israeli War, walked in front of the podium, bared his scarred stomach, and shouted, “Play Wagner over my body.” Similarly charged scenes unfolded when Daniel Barenboim led the “Tristan” Prelude in Jerusalem in 2001. [A 2011] effort by the Israel Wagner Society to present a concert at Tel Aviv University [did not materialize]. The Israeli conductor Asher Fisch, who was to have led the concert, has personal reasons for campaigning against the unwritten ban: his mother, who was forced to leave Vienna in 1939, felt that if her son could conduct Wagner in Israel it would amount to a final victory over Hitler, and he still hopes to realize her dream.41 In 2014, the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra commemorated the anniversary of Wagner’s birth with a formal discussion of his music, his impact, and an analysis of the ban on his music: “ ‘All the difficult questions’ the Symphony’s website advertised, ‘but none of the notes.’ ”42 With so many painful memories tied to Wagner’s music for so many individuals, the debate over playing his music in Israel will likely continue long after the passing of the generation that lived through WWII. Before any music was selected for widespread use in propaganda, the Nazis systematically ran a background check on the composer, then worked to convince the general public of the composer’s significance and ties to the Nazi ideology, largely through rallies and newspapers. Wagner was by and far the most talked about German composer43 in the state-run newspaper, the Völkischer Beobachter: “Virtually no major area of Nazi policy – cultural, social, economic, military, or racist – was addressed in the Völkischer Beobachter without some accompanying reference to Wagner’s views on the matter.”44

Reflections on personal experiences with music during WWII In talking with my grandparents recently, I was surprised at their ability to recall the song (also the title of this paper) “Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition.” They had more than vague memories of the tune but were able to hum the chorus and remember many of the words. In 1942, the year the song was written and rose

34  Zoë Jensiene Godfrey to number eight on the Billboard charts, my grandmother would have been eight years old, and my grandfather would have been fourteen years old. Musical messages are so powerful they can be retained for 76 years, and counting. Henry Neimann immigrated to the United States from Germany after WWII. When Henry was ten years old, the Hitler Youth came to his town, and he signed up without telling his family. From the beginning, there was a musical element to the Hitler Youth, he says. They sang strictly Nazi anthems and nationalistic tunes while they marched, and especially during parades. Henry compares his early years in the Hitler Youth to the Boy Scouts: a fun experience. He and his friends learned outdoor skills, marched, sang, practiced battle maneuvers, and trained with weapons. He recalls over 50 harmonica players he enjoyed playing with in the Hitler Youth (H. Neimann, personal communication, 2011). As the Germans ran out of older men to draft into the army, they turned to the Hitler Youth (World ORT). These young boys were already trained and combatready before many of them had hit puberty. Henry recalls lying on his army bunk the night before they were to be taken into battle. He had his harmonica with him, and he played a few songs in the darkness of the bunkhouse. He remembers the sound of his friends sniffling and sobbing while he played the music. He was just shy of 16 years old at the time. Many propaganda songs were aimed at the youth, and under the leadership of Baldur von Schirach, the Hitlerjugend (Hitler Youth) developed an elaborate music program. Even soldiers on the front were encouraged to attend cultural events, and to sing amongst themselves. Between 1933 and 1945, scores of soldiers’ songbooks were published, the majority during the war years. A 1943 volume in the series Yearbook of German Music reminded its readers that ‘at times of combat, music is a source of joy.’45Henry’s life shows proof of the joy music can bring even in the direst of circumstances. I asked Henry if he knew of the song “Lili Marlene.” He had more than heard of it – he sang the tune and lyrics for me! Even in Germany, he was aware of its popularity with the English and American soldiers. He described the great comfort music was to him and the rest of his unit. They endured heavy combat, and wherever Henry went, his harmonica went too. Music provided a momentary escape from his horrific experience and a salve in the years after the war. Technical Sgt. Anthony “Tony” Paul Narducci shared his story in an interview for this research project.46 After joining the Army Air Corps in 1939, Narducci used his extensive background as a musician and bandleader to start the base band, becoming the chief steward in command of musical decisions. His responsibilities included programming an hour-long music block for a weekly KFBK radio broadcast to recruit for the Women’s Army Corps. In 1944, a visiting general from Hawaii was so impressed by Narducci’s band that he transferred the entire ensemble to Hickam Field (Pearl Harbor). Narducci and his band remained there until the end of the war. The general looked out for them, making sure the band members could eat at the Officer’s Club and paying them $10 per man per performance above the typical salary. Music’s value was often recognized (and even, in this case, compensated) by the armed services. Narducci’s story makes an

“Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition” 35 interesting point: while the larger government recognized the importance of music to its grand plan, so did individuals with localized control.

Echoes of WWII music practices in a post-war society and the current era After WWII, American soldiers returned home to claim the American Dream for which they had sacrificed. For many, this came in the form of consumerism. A generation of consumers that had been stifled for a decade and a half during the Great Depression and wartime shortages was now supported by the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944 (G.I. Bill). The medium of television took off during this era, and as more households acquired televisions, radio broadcasts became the second choice for entertainment and news in the home. The initial television advertisements were experimental, but as the medium grew, so did the sophistication of the advertising techniques in use. In his book Brought to You By: Postwar Television Advertising and the American Dream, Lawrence R. Samuel notes, The most effective [. . .] commercials [. . .] were those which did not appear to be commercials at all, a tenet that stemmed from radio. Most advertisers rightfully believed that any form of overt selling caused a certain level of skepticism among consumers, the underlying premise being to disguise advertising as entertainment.47 These methods of combining specific messages with entertainment were direct descendants of the propaganda methods that had been fine-tuned by various governments during wartime. One company that uses music well is Walgreens. It uses the song “Down on the Corner” by Creedence Clearwater Revival as the musical backdrop to its TV commercial created by GSD&M titled “1901.” The commercials feature videos of Walgreens locations, which just happen to always be located on the corner of a street. The song also reinforces Walgreens’ slogan, “At the Corner of Happy and Healthy.” Plus, the target demographic of Walgreens, a certain generation coming to the stage of life in which they need more prescription medication, would have listened to “Down on the Corner” when they were teenagers. This song is a perfect connection between brand and consumer and provides an effortless brush with nostalgia in the process.48

Conclusion With the increased development of advertising in the decades after WWII, patterns of music usage that began in the governmental sphere are seen emerging in commercial settings, such as the Walgreens example. When we consider that governments are organizations, it seems a natural transition. Governments built “brand followings” by associating religiously tinged music with their causes.

36  Zoë Jensiene Godfrey Specific songs also acted as calling cards for social movements, and governmental officials curated specific music to match their “brand message.” The ever-expanding scope of marketing is much broader than sales alone: it is a formulated attempt to identify and respond to consumer needs, put forth communications that will help consumers personally identify with the proposed ideas, and hopefully establish a bond of trust with the brand itself. The various governments of WWII did not know that their efforts in music were part of an elaborate marketing campaign, but by today’s standards, there is no other way to describe them. What historians call propaganda, businesses call marketing. And what better way to establish trust with an entire population than to tap into an ideology they already identify with, such as religious imagery or a repurposed familiar tune? Governments have long recognized the potential threat of music to rally revolutionaries or social movements. A passage in Plato’s The Republic quips, “Any musical innovation is full of danger to the whole State, and ought to be prohibited; when modes of music change, the fundamental laws of the State always change with them.”49 Music can create a sense of community and has the power to unite people in both hope and fear. In an introduction to a lecture titled “Why Music Matters,” Former United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan said, “Music both shapes and reflects society. Dancers follow its beat; protesters use it to find their voice. It can promote ideals – like peace and solidarity – but it can also prepare armies for battle. It is part of almost every important personal and collective moment.”50 “Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition” was a propaganda tune almost hilariously obvious in retrospective analysis. However, the public bought into it. Music that is overtly political, nostalgic, familiar, or religious is still used to build momentum around causes. But the same constraints of music usage still exist. The public must buy in. Music carries much “emotional weight.” It can bring back memories, intensify a cause, or help us identify ourselves in a larger social context. Yet music is not “one-size-fits-all.” A single song can carry multiple or layered meanings that depend on audience, context, or pairings with other media. Therefore, music remains part of a larger communication plan by governments. Music is humanity’s expression, and states should never expect to be able to enact complete control over citizens who possess the tools to fight back with equal measure. Thus remains the challenge for the future: for states to recognize the “emotional power” of the music that is at their fingertips, to curate music for specific circumstances to achieve optimal buy-in from audiences, and to recognize that their adversaries also possess a musical arsenal.

Appendix

Figure 2.1 “Hope Broadcasts Here Tonight” Newspaper Clipping from Tech. Sgt. Anthony Narducci’s personal collection. Recounts the visit of Bob Hope to Mather Air Force Base in Sacramento as part of his traveling USO show.

Figure 2.2 Lyrics for Fight Songs from Tech. Sgt. Anthony Narducci’s personal collection.

Figure 2.3 “We see some stars – on the ground!” page from an Air Force yearbook from Tech. Sgt. Anthony Narducci’s personal collection. Shows pictures of Bob Hope’s visit to Mather Air Force Base (top right photo and bottom middle photo).

40  Zoë Jensiene Godfrey

Notes 1 Isenberg (2017, 112). 2 Ibid. 3 Ibid., 112. 4 Ibid., 121–2. 5 “Loesser donated his royalties for sale of the song to the Navy Relief Society. The chaplain originally quoted wished to remain anonymous, and the episode to remain legend. Many variations on the tale, the name of the chaplain, whether or not he himself manned a gun turret to participate in the battle, and the battle’s whereabouts have existed over the years” (“Sheet Music: Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition!”). 6 As quoted in (Stevens 1997). 7 For further reading on this topic, I recommend David Stevens’ article “Nationalism as Religion.”   David Stevens, “Nationalism as Religion,” Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review 86, no. 343 (1997): 248–58. Web. 8 An article published on History.com estimates that “during the 1930s, approximately 90 percent of American households owned a radio.” 9 “God Bless the USA” rose to popularity in the United States during the Persian Gulf War (1990–1991). Spirituals that trace their roots back to the times of slavery and Jim Crow in the southern United States were resurrected for use in the Civil Rights Movement. For example, “We Shall Overcome” became a rallying anthem. 10 Today, we would call these sets “playlists” or “mood stations.” They were 15-minute time blocks of music originally designed to be played quietly in the workplace in order to subconsciously make employees work faster and more efficiently. 11 Trex (2011). 12 The OSS was a forerunner to the CIA. 13 Many spellings of the title were used, as different performers recorded the song and it became very popular with servicemen on both sides of the conflict. For my purposes, I will use the spelling “Lili Marlene.” 14 An article published on the CIA’s website in 2008 titled “A Look Back . . . Marlene Dietrich: Singing for a Cause” provides detailed information about Marlene Dietrich and the U.S. government’s MUZAK project. 15 Mori and Iwanaga (2014). 16 The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines nostalgia as “pleasure and sadness that is [sic] caused by remembering something from the past and wishing that you could experience it again.” It is precisely this mixture of emotions that wistful songs, which rose to extreme popularity during WWII, seem to capture. 17 Kawakami et al. (2014). 18 Listeners of sad music are not gluttons for punishment. The evocation of vicarious emotions, still popular with artists today (Adele, Sam Smith, John Legend, and John Mayer, for example), is what keeps sad songs at the top of the charts. 19 According to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, “Tokyo Rose was not an actual person, but the fabricated name given by soldiers to a series of American-speaking women who made propaganda broadcasts under different aliases” (Iva Toguri D’Aquino and “Tokyo Rose”). As an aside, I think it is important to note that the FBI did specifically say American-speaking women. Perhaps it was in an effort to differentiate between American, English, and Australian accents, or to note that these broadcasts targeted American servicemen. 20 Holmes (2011). 21 Well-known tunes tied to a specific country’s politics or culture have often been reworded by nationalists from other countries. For example, the tune of “My Country ‘Tis of Thee” is taken from the British national anthem, “God Save the King.” America

“Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition” 41 was neither the first nor the only other country to use the familiar tune: “By the 1790s the melody had become that of the Danish national anthem [. . .] Eventually it also became the national anthem of at least six other places, including Prussia, [Britain, and Liechtenstein]” (“My Country ‘Tis of Thee”). 22 Stein (2015). 23 These organizations were the YMCA, the YWCA, the National Catholic Community Service, the National Jewish Welfare Board, the Traveler’s Aid Association, and the Salvation Army (“United Service Organizations”). 24 See Figure 2.3. 25 Fosler-Lussier (2012). 26 “Music in the Third Reich”. 27 Fackler (a). 28 Hollywood even depicted this in a scene from the movie Swing Kids. Gordon, M., Manulis, J. B. (Producer) & Carter, T. (Director). (1993). Swing Kids [Motion Picture]. United States: Hollywood Pictures. 29 Fackler (a,b). 30 A Te Deum is typically a song of praise or victory, so the fact that the Nazis commissioned Shaub to write a victorious song for use at a funeral further emphasizes the way they wanted to brush all mourning under the rug and keep moving forward. 31 Painter (2015). 32 Ibid. 33 More than just the funeral music was dictated – families were not even allowed to display pictures of their loved ones at funeral services. In many cases, a soldier’s body would be unrecoverable and therefore not present at the funeral service. 34 Judd (2016). 35 The Nazi era pushed many Jewish composers out, paving the way for composers whose works would not have otherwise seen the light of day. Many opportunistic musicians clamored for their moments in the spotlight, producing over twenty thousand politically based compositions in the twelve years Hitler was in power. Frequently, these compositions were the result of “state commissions” by venal Nazi leaders, such as Göring, Goebbels, and Alfred Rosenberg. Even Hitler, who did not consider himself an expert on music, could see through the abundance of blatantly opportunistic and unremarkable compositions: “By 1935 he had forbidden the inflationary practice of personal dedications to the Führer” (Kater). 36 On his 70th birthday in 1934, he received framed autographed portraits from Hitler and Goebbels. His birthday was even celebrated in Japan, and Strauss made a special connection with the Japanese over the radio. He composed “Japanese Festival Music” for the arrival of the Japanese Ambassador to Germany. Research suggests that it was not money that drove Strauss to write for the Japanese, as he did so for free (Jackson 2015). 37 (Jackson (2015). 38 Levine (2013). 39 Nicholson (2007, 21). 40 Levine (2013). 41 Ross (2012). 42 Shields (2015). 43 Here is a breakdown of German composers and the number of articles written about them: “Wagner (243), Beethoven (116), Mozart (107), Bruckner (47), Bach (43), Schubert (35), Brahms (23), Handel (22), Weber (20), Liszt (16), and Haydn (15)” (Dennis 2002). 44 Dennis (2002). 45 “Music in the Third Reich.” 46 See the Appendix (Figures 2.1–2.3) for newspaper clippings and other mementos from his personal collection.

42  Zoë Jensiene Godfrey 47 48 49 50

Samuel (2001, pp. 27). Olenski (2013). As quoted in Schumann 2008. UNNC (2004).

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“Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition” 43 Hirsch, Lily E. “The Berlin Jüdischer Kulturbund.” Music and the Holocaust. World ORT. Web, accessed January 29, 2019. History.com Staff. The Fireside Chats. History.com. A&E Television Networks, 2010. Web, accessed January 29, 2019. Holmes, P. (2011, February 17). The ‘D-Day Dodgers’, accessed June 7, 2018, www.bbc. co.uk/history/worldwars/wwtwo/d_day_dodgers_01.shtml Huron, David. “Music in Advertising: An Analytic Paradigm.” Musical Quarterly 73, no. 4 (1989): 557–74. Web, accessed January 29, 2019. Isenberg, N. We’ll Always Have Casablanca: The Life, Legend, and Afterlife of Hollywood’s Most Beloved Movie. New York: W. W. Norton & Co, 2017. Iva Toguri D’Aquino and “Tokyo Rose.” FBI. Web, accessed January 29, 2019. Jackson, Timothy. Richard Strauss and Japanese Fascism. American Musicological Society, 81st Annual Meeting, November 2015. Web, accessed January 29, 2019. Judd, Timothy. Hindemith’s “Flying Dutchman” Parody. The Listeners Club., April 15, 2016. Web, accessed January 29, 2019. Kater, Michael H. The Twisted Muse: Musicians and Their Music in the Third Reich. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Web, accessed January 29, 2019. Larson, Erik. In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin. New York: Crown, 2011. Print. Lepsius, M. R. “The Nation and Nationalism in Germany.” Social Research 71, no. 3 (2004): 481–500. ProQuest. Web, accessed January 29, 2019. Leventman, Seymour. American Popular Culture: Historical and Pedagogical Perspectives. Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars, 2008. Web, accessed January 29, 2019. Levine, Robert. “Israel’s Problems with Richard Wagner.” Jewish Currents, August 15, 2013. Web, accessed January 29, 2019. “Lili Marlene Lyrics.” MetroLyrics. Web , accessed January 29, 2019. “Long Long Ago.” The Traditional Tune Archive. Web, accessed January 29, 2019. McKee, Abaigh. “Art and Music Under the Third Reich.” Music and the Holocaust. World ORT. Web, accessed January 29, 2019. Mori, Kazuma and Makoto Iwanaga. “Resting Physiological Arousal Is Associated with The Experience of Music-Induced Chills.” International Journal of Psychophysiology 93, no. 2 (2014): 220–26. Academic Search Premier. Web, accessed May 4, 2016. “Music in the Third Reich.” Music and the Holocaust. World ORT. Web, accessed January 29, 2019. “Music Unites People of Different Backgrounds, Secretary-General Says in Remarks Introducing ‘Why Music Matters’ Lecture.” UNNC (UN News Center). United Nations, accessed November 8, 2004. Web “My Country ‘Tis of Thee.” Performing Arts Encyclopedia. Library of Congress. Web, accessed January 29, 2019. Nicholson, Christopher. Richard and Adolf: Did Richard Wagner Incite Adolf Hitler to Commit the Holocaust? Jerusalem: Gefen, 2007. Print.

44  Zoë Jensiene Godfrey “Nostalgia.” Merriam-Webster.com. Web, accessed January 29, 2019. Olenski, Steve. “Music to a Brand’s Ears.” Branding Magazine, January 9, 2013. Web, accessed January 29, 2019. ———. “Why Music Plays a Big Role When It Comes to Branding.” Forbes Magazine, February 6, 2014. Web, accessed January 29, 2019. Painter, Karen. Unsung Requiems: Music and Mourning in Germany at War (1939–45). American Musicological Society, 81st Annual Meeting, November 2015, Web, accessed January 29, 2019. “Praise the Lord And Pass The Ammunition.” Google Play Music. Web, accessed January 29, 2019. “Richard Strauss.” Music and the Holocaust. Web, accessed January 29, 2019. Riheldaffer, Commander John L. and Lieutenant Commander Ralph G. Albrecht. Op16-W Broadcasts to German U-boats. Letter to Director of Op-16-Z. 24 Sept. 1943. U Boat Archive. Web, accessed January 29, 2019. Ross, Alex. “The Case for Wagner in Israel.” The New Yorker, 2012. Web, accessed January 29, 2019. Samuel, Lawrence R. Brought to You by: Postwar Television Advertising and the American Dream. University of Texas Press, 2001. Schumann, Anne. “The Beat That Beat Apartheid: The Role of Music in the Resistance Against Apartheid in South Africa.” Stichproben. Wiener Zeitschrift Für Kritische Afrikastudien 14 (2008): 17–49. Print. “Sheet Music: Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition!” The National Museum of American History. Smithsonian. Web, accessed January 29, 2019. “ ‘The Sheik of Araby’ Lyrics.” LetsSingIt.com. Web, accessed January 29, 2019. Shields, Nathan. “Wagner and the Jews.” Mosaic Magazine RSS, January 5, 2015. Web, accessed March  09, 2016. Song, Y.S. Dixon, M.T. Pearce, and A.R. Halpern. “Perceived and Induced Emotion Responses to Popular Music: Categorical and Dimensional Models.” Music Perception 33, no. 4 (2016): 472–92. doi:10.1525/MP.2016.33.4.472. Stein, Danielle. The Norden Broadcasts: Wagner’s Flying Dutchman Overture and the Demoralization of the German U-Boat Fleet. American Musicological Society, 81st Annual Meeting, November 2015. Web, accessed January 29, 2019. Stevens, David. “Nationalism as Religion.” Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review 86, no. 343 (1997): 248–58. Web, accessed January 29, 2019. “Transcript of Joint Address to Congress Leading to a Declaration of War Against Japan (1941).” OurDocuments.gov. Web, accessed January 29, 2019.

“Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition” 45 Trex, Ethan. “Muzak History: The Background Story on Background Music.” Mental Floss, July 19, 2011. Web, accessed January 29, 2019. Vuoskoski, Jonna K. and Tuomas Eerola. “Extramusical Information Contributes to Emotions Induced by Music.” Psychology of Music 43, no. 2 (2015): 262–74. PsycINFO. Web, accessed January 29, 2019. “We Shall Overcome, Historical Period: Postwar United States, 1945–1968.” Library of Congress. Web, accessed January 29, 2019. World ORT. “Music Amongst the Hitler Youth.” Music and the Holocaust. World ORT. Web, accessed January 29, 2019.

3 Can the subaltern laugh? A study of humor, power, and resistance Miguel Alberto Novoa Cipriani

Introduction One iconic scene from the 1990 American mobster film Goodfellas occurs when actor Joe Pesci’s character asks, in a sarcastic, threatening manner, “You think I’m funny? Funny how? [. . .] Am I a clown? Do I amuse you?” – and, at its most intense moment, laughter is a catalyst for the scene’s mood change.1 Comedy ameliorates, if not resists, the somber overtone that naturally pervades this biopic about a gangster’s rise and fall. Pesci’s supporting character, albeit maniacal and short-tempered, is possibly the most aware of humor’s power, using it to his convenience while also punishing those that use it to subvert his authority. Unfortunately, this relationship between humor and power is largely ignored in history studies, as evidenced by the absence of works on the subject. Nonetheless, comedy, including jokes, double entendres, and irony, can and should be studied as an historical tool used by the non-elite masses, the subaltern, to critique their status. Can the subaltern laugh? The question seeks to understand whether humor can serve as a form of resistance, meaning an expression that provides a voice for the voiceless. The simple answer, evidently a resounding “yes,” is not sufficient. At a more fundamental level, the question – and the purpose of this essay – aims to understand how humor can be studied within an historical framework and what information this can reveal about the subaltern’s perspective and mind. To aid in the pursuit of these objectives, this chapter examines works from multiple fields, including a language study by Aparajita Sagar as well as film and cultural studies by Steven Marsh, Christopher Beach, and Alan Bilton. Ultimately, this analysis demonstrates that comedy is an outlet through which subalterns communicate most naturally, even if intricately. By comprehending comedy’s humor and cynicism, comedy can shed greater light on the hidden motives of subaltern historical actors, thus reinforcing the perspective of history from below.

Searching for the subalterns’ voice At its foundation, this chapter’s argument takes inspiration from the highly influential and controversial essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” by Indian scholar Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Presented in 1983, Spivak’s work brought forth a

Can the subaltern laugh? 47 complicated question to the attendees of the conference on “Marxist Interpretations of Culture” and the intellectual world at large.2 She posits that subalterns cannot be understood because they lack a voice within the established power structures that silence and anonymize them. Spivak uses as an example the colonial descriptions of sati, an ancient Indian custom in which a widow immolated herself on her husband’s funeral pyre, arguing that British hegemony and Indian patriarchy doubly silenced the women’s voice.3 Consequently, this silence inherently prevents the comprehension of the subaltern subject. Spivak’s statement proved controversial because she basically told Marxists and other intellectuals that their studies could neither substitute for nor represent the voice of the subaltern. She added insult to injury by stating that these scholars’ subaltern studies inadvertently further silenced the voiceless masses by placing their voice over the subjects of their studies.4 Spivak argued that to overcome this situation, the power structures must first be deconstructed to reach a level of awareness about the elements silencing the so-called “others.” Language, in particular, serves as the central, overarching element of the power structure due to its control over how we establish meaning for reality – even when, as French philosopher Jacques Derrida points out, words cannot totally encompass meaning itself.5 Under this lens, a word’s power in both framing and suppressing human affairs becomes all the more evident.

The power of language The idea behind the power of words is nothing new and, in fact, directly relates to the notion of humor as a cryptic form of resistance. Why, then, is language so difficult to analyze? An answer to this query comes from historian Greg Dening, who argues in the book Mr. Bligh’s Bad Language that “[l]anguage is notoriously difficult to recapture in history” because there is much more required to understand it other than the words themselves. Simply put, language has never existed in a vacuum, and it is affected just as much by context (i.e., timing and delivery) as by pronunciation.6 Recapturing all of these factors is no simple task, and it might even be wise to consider it impossible to fully comprehend everything that went on at a moment in time. Dening’s monograph narrates the 1789 mutiny aboard the HMS Bounty, a British Royal Navy merchant vessel, attributing the revolt’s cause to language’s misuse and misunderstanding. Lt. William Bligh, who captained the ship’s expedition in the Pacific Ocean, used crude language and was ill-tempered toward his subordinates, but the ambiguity of his actions and words stood as his worst quality. For example, on the day of the mutiny, Bligh reportedly stated, “Never fear, my lads, I will do you justice if ever I reach England,” which the crew was unable to grasp as either a threat of punishment or a promise of rescue.7 According to Dening, even Bligh was apparently unaware of the tension resulting from his incongruous language and, most certainly, did not comprehend the intensity of the sarcasm and mockery made of him by his subordinates.8 Thus, if even the central actor of a particular situation could not fully grasp the complexities of language as applied

48  Miguel Alberto Novoa Cipriani at that moment in time, what better luck can a historian or other intellectual have of gaining an even deeper understanding of the matter? Understandably, then, this example raises the possibility that subalterns are cursed with eternal silence.

Humor and social order Within this seemingly difficult atmosphere is where humor appears to develop a life of its own because its critique of society and situations fits in nicely with historians’ use of retrospection to reconstruct the past. In the case of the HMS Bounty, the mockery of Bligh by his crew offered the opportunity for Dening to acquire a sense that “bad language” did not mean a crude use of language, but rather how the captain applied it (creating confusion and disunity at a time when leadership was needed) – this the sailors made clear to their captain by challenges, which were indirectly applied through mockery in funny songs and teasing responses.9 The use of humor and laughter as a source for examining a society is also prominently argued in the introduction to Laughter in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Times by Albrecht Classen. He writes that the “study of laughter can shed significant light on the culture, or civilization, of a certain age and people and their psychology.”10 According to Classen, laughter opens the door to the contradictions of reality, criticizing the imaginary rules that attempt to delimit existence, thus demonstrating that the seemingly incongruent parts of society – the absurd, the foolish, the vain – are just as true and relevant as the main facade. Put simply, laughter blurs the line between the world the societal structure wants to present and the world hidden beneath the imaginary.11 Nonetheless, this raises one final question: how did this distinction come about? As it turns out, this imaginary distinction in human history was not quite as separated from the elements of society now presented so negatively. Russian historian Mikhail Bakhtin comments on this in the book Rabelais and His World, where he explains the appreciation for the so-called grotesque in the humor of a past where structures did not create stark contrasts between the oppressed and the privileged. This was especially true during carnival season in Europe’s Middle Ages, when people “celebrated the return of happier times, abundance, and justice for all the people.”12 Written records, such as the works of Cervantes and Rabelais, also reflect the playful slippage of social norms and provide further insight into the nature of the blurred lines between propriety and indecorum. Miguel de Cervantes’ novel Don Quixote, for example, is replete with commentary on liberty and equality, challenging the institutional order of his time. Cervantes’ novel is about the misadventures of a mad noble, Don Quixote de La Mancha, who seeks to embody the revival of an idealized chivalric code of honor. In the novel’s first part, Quixote attacks royal guards to free criminals sentenced to the king’s galleys, proclaiming that to him “it seems a hard case to make slaves of those God and nature had made free.”13 Through Quixote’s actions, Cervantes questions the Spanish monarch’s legal and spiritual authority. Moreover, Quixote’s declarations, such as when he tells his sidekick that “no man is more than another, if he does no more than another,”14 reflect a radical notion of equality that,

Can the subaltern laugh? 49 at the time of its publication in 1605, seems to have escaped censors primarily due to the contemporary widespread festive mood surrounding Spain’s ascendancy as a global power.15 In effect, the Spanish monarchy’s passivity toward Cervantes’ challenges of social norms reflects the established order’s acceptance of criticism to the established system so long as it appeared through comedic overtones. Similar to Cervantes, François Rabelais used his novels about two obscene giants, Gargantua and Pantagruel, to satirize the social order in sixteenth-century France. For instance, in the novel Gargantua, Rabelais, as the narrator, wrote that “many today are emperors, kings, dukes, princes and popes on this earth who are descended from pardon-mongers or hodmen in vineyards,” adding a few lines later that he considers himself of noble descent because he desires wealth and power “so as to live in great style, never working, [never ever worrying].”16 These criticisms of the upper classes reflect not only deep dissatisfaction with the nobility but also an idea of equality, as Rabelais proposes that even nobles can descend from commoners. Yet, as Bakhtin indicates in his analysis of Rabelais, contemporary readers understood and accepted it as carnivalesque, with a festive exterior and a serious inner meaning.17 To them, the novel reflected a sociopolitical critique tolerated by the authorities because of its humor. All this changed by the seventeenth century, according to Bakhtin, with the consolidation of the absolute monarchs and the creation of systems seeking to establish a new official order. This order no longer tolerated the ambiguity of humor and the playful slippage of social norms, presenting instead an “eternal truth” of the imposed power structure.18 Thereupon, the established social order formed a new social performance that placed humor and laughter at the margins.

Lost in translation In the first chapter of his aforementioned book, Bakhtin quotes the Russian thinker Alexander Herzen, who wrote that “it would be extremely interesting to write the history of laughter.”19 Nevertheless, writing about humor is complicated because, as has just been proven, its meaning and understanding have changed over the course of time. To address this problem, the essay turns to Christi Merrill’s Riddles of Belonging, which presents a thoughtful discussion on the difficulty of translation due to the challenges presented by different language systems that define their own set of standards and delimitations of reality. Merrill both eases and complicates this study of humor as resistance by revealing that meaning changes with each interpretation or translation, thus indicating that humor is inherently meant to be understood in multiple manners. The laughter of the subaltern is not tied to a particular time or format. This matter of format and structure, or, better yet, the clash between different languages, is central to the narrative presented by Merrill. Translation is presented as a key problem, mostly because it traditionally has “fixed conceptual frames that threaten to render static an otherwise dynamic conversation.”20 In other words, translating from one language structure to another has imbedded difficulties because languages have unique concepts that may not be particularly

50  Miguel Alberto Novoa Cipriani well represented in other linguistic formats. The clarity of translated material becomes all the more muddled when elements of irony are involved because a textual emphasis is required to try and imitate the original material – otherwise, the humor is lost in translation. For example, Merrill compares two authors translating a text that parodies official government speech about mental health asylum inmates, but one author only makes the inmates seem sympathetic and the other completely misses the mark.21 However, even when considering through a thought experiment that the author effectively does manage to capture the original intention of the text, is this not only a mimicry of the original that will never truly be what it seeks to represent? Assuming that to be the case, no reason exists to disregard the new text as such, for, as Merrill also argues, the author and the translator are providing their own uniqueness to the material; thus, the riddles of belonging are born. To elaborate, the key to comprehending this is to view the entire situation as a long process or, to quote Merrill as she paraphrases the French intellectual Michel Foucault, “a fragmented, ongoing storytelling community.”22 Merrill goes as far as to contend that the reader is also a translator in this story because the reader has to reinterpret the point of view presented by the writer.23All of this combined creates a complicated web where the strength of the commentary, particularly when it is one of humor or irony, seeps through multiple readers over the course of time. On this, Merrill writes that “[t]he joking triangle, then, is also a translation triangle, one that does not fix another unidirectionally but interrogates multidirectionally – as a form of agency that invites another to take part in its play of translation, generation after generation.”24 The interpretation here does not give a voice as such to the humor of the subaltern, but it does give it life by connecting the laughter with those who decipher it. Comprehending this perspective can help us understand why, for example, the political stance of William Shakespeare remains a contested subject among scholars. According to the American literary scholar David Bevington, depending on the analyst, Shakespeare was either a hard-line conservative or a progressive who would have sympathized with modern liberalism.25 Although at first glance this might seem problematic, possibly even demonstrating the futility of writing a history of such an ambiguous topic, these multiple interpretations actually rescue the resistance in the subaltern’s laughter by freeing it from the eternal truth. In the early twentieth century, scholars scrutinizing Shakespeare’s plays believed that their analysis did more than simply consider his works for their literary value, which they viewed as a disservice that preferred “bland universal truths” over “historical contingencies.”26 Hence, regardless of political spin, uncovering the profound meaning of the humor in satirical works, within the context of their time or in application to modern politics, indeed rescues the subaltern’s voice.

Humor and resistance in early films Modernity also brought filmmaking as a method for subaltern resistance, particularly as films became the new popular spectacle for mass audiences. Silent films

Can the subaltern laugh? 51 from the 1920s and 1930s, for example, critiqued how socioeconomic changes hurt the common worker. As Alan Bilton indicates, Charlie Chaplin’s movies from this era provided commentary on the ills of modern industry and the unfairness of the capitalist economy.27 In the well-known 1936 film Modern Times, Chaplin’s character, a poor assembly-line worker abused by his bosses, is maddened by his repetitive tasks and is later swallowed by the factory’s machine, a reference perhaps to how the labor system devours the worker’s mind and body.28 In another scene, Chaplin’s character inadvertently becomes the leader of a Communist parade after stumbling into them on turning a street corner.29 Thus, the film uses humor as a mask for the reasons an oppressed worker would join the Communist movement. Although works of comedy, silent films like Chaplin’s carried in them the tradition of subalternity found in the works aforementioned in this chapter. Moreover, by having no sound, silent films are an even clearer indication that subalterns do not need to speak for their voice to be heard. Such meaning escaped neither audiences nor authorities, with the latter’s increasing concern over the subversive content of comedy films eventually resulting in censorship. So strong could be the subversive meaning of these humor films that, according to Italian filmmaker Sergio Leone, Chaplin’s comedies seemed to him to do more favor to socialist politics than any political leader ever did during his lifetime.30 Conservative authorities in the United States, worried by the social commentary of these and other more serious films, aimed not only to censor films but also to target actors. Scholars Michael Arntfield and Vivien Miller argue that one of censorships’ early victims was comedian Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle, whose publicized trials in the 1920s tarnished his reputation by using dubious evidence to depict him as a sex-crazed, adulterous drug addict and drunkard.31 Arbuckle’s acting criticized the fat opulence of the wealthy, but Arntfield and Miller posit that he seems to have been pursued by Will Hays, Hollywood’s director of censorship, because of his role in films with the “Keystone Cops,” which depicted policemen as humorously incompetent.32 Chaplin also fell victim to censorship in 1952 after traveling to England for promotion. The authorities used Chaplin’s leave to launch an official investigation into his alleged “anti-American” values, thereby prohibiting him from returning to the United States for twenty years.33 Hence, in early twentieth-century America, audiences and authorities understood comedy films to be more than just a matter of amusement and the people involved more than just comedians. Despite these restrictions, film comedies in the United States generally maintained their subaltern message. In Christopher Beach’s Class, Language, and American Film Comedy, the author argues that speech in Hollywood films from the 1930s to 1950s is used as a way to poke fun at the social norms imposed on the lower classes and women. In comedies such as that of the Marx Brothers, the comedic case was principally set to emphasize the differences in culture and status while also using that exaggeration in a grotesque form.34 The acts of unruly women in film, demonstrating defiance against men and the capacity of effective manipulation through the use of irony, mockery, and other wordplay also challenged the norms of the time that portrayed females as being the weaker sex.35

52  Miguel Alberto Novoa Cipriani In short, comedies continued stepping past moral limits and legal restrictions to carry a message of resistance – the voice of the subaltern. Elsewhere in the world, such as in Spain, filmmakers also carried the carnivalesque tradition of social resistance in their works. In mid-twentieth-century Spanish film, mimicry returns as a voice of the subaltern during Francisco Franco’s dictatorship, with filmmakers mocking the dominant classes’ attitudes, including their speech, clothing, and eating. Scholar Steven Marsh posits that the contradictory message displayed by these films, ridiculing the pompous elite, between 1942 and 1964 helped weaken the totalitarian regime’s apparatus, which was reliant on order through fear and strictness.36 A  case in point is the film ¡Bienvenido, Mister Marshall! which depicts the activities of a small town elite preparing for the arrival of American diplomats. Even though many of the local notables go to great lengths to fascinate the Americans, including wearing quirky traditional costumes and redecorating the entire town to fit the foreigners’ expectations, the diplomats’ motorcade goes right through the town without stopping.37 For all their troubles, the elite end up with only a large debt, which is an additional ironic twist, as the locals hoped to receive financial assistance through the Marshall Plan of post–World War II European economic reconstruction.38 Hence, through the act of imitating and mocking the elite’s behavior, what emerges is the silliness innate to the dominant order’s imagined strictness.

Subaltern resistance in dark humor As mentioned earlier in the chapter, subversive comedy often skirts the boundaries of the grotesque and taboo as a challenge to social norms. Dark humor encompasses those topics that border on the serious or tragic, treating the subjects with humor despite the difficult circumstances of the narrative.39 Within the context of subaltern resistance, dark humor offers another important insight into the voice of the oppressed by challenging the unquestioned tone of a particular subject, striking deep into the viewer’s conscience. Irony plays a central role within this process, forcing viewers to reanalyze what they experience, and consider an alternative understanding.40 Within this art form, the subalterns’ voice is again subject to the viewers’ interpretation, assuming they realize the irony’s existence, thereby pinning the challenge to social norms on the viewers’ own context and experiences. The Mexican film ¡A volar joven! (1947), starring the comedian Cantinflas, brings up the case of dark humor within a light humor film. The film’s plot centers around an illiterate peasant who is also an army recruit. Constantly abused by his superiors both at the military camp and at home, Cantinflas’s only solace is his cherished girlfriend, a peasant woman viewers learn is unfaithful to the protagonist with at least two other recruits. At the peak of his misfortunes, Cantinflas is forced to marry his boss’s daughter, a seemingly ugly, shy, and sickly individual. Making matters worse, the inexperienced recruit finds himself in a dangerous flight with another recruit he initially thought was the flight instructor. However, the protagonist finds happiness with his wife, discovering her true beauty, and

Can the subaltern laugh? 53 becomes an unexpected hero at the military base after breaking the record for longest-lasting flight.41 The film’s dark humor focuses on the misfortunes of the peasant protagonist, whom the audience laughs at rather than with, and the seemingly silly demands imposed on him. Nonetheless, the discreet subaltern message of the film is that the poor, ignorant, and abused peasant will turn the table on his superiors. For example, in a conversation with his former boss and new father-in-law, Cantinflas indicates that he is expecting him to die soon so that he can become sole owner of the entire hacienda. The statement is dismissed by the father-in-law, who dismisses all of his comments and pleas earlier in the film, but not before he shows a worrisome expression.42 The scene serves to indicate that the seemingly ignorant peasant is well aware of the power he wields and will no longer be manipulated by his boss. It also indicates the danger of ignoring the subaltern’s voice. In another scene, the military officers at the air base not only are pressured by the news media to change their plans to punish and court-martial Cantinflas, but their own prestige is also placed secondary to that of a first-time flight recruit, leaving them effectively powerless.43 Again, in this scene, the power of the subaltern comes to light, demonstrating that the people’s support is stronger than even military officers. Thus, a film that at face value mocked a peasant’s mishaps in reality is critiquing the elite’s abuse of power and cheering for the rise of the abused peasant. A similar criticism of power structures is present in the American film Dr. Strangelove (1964), although, in this case, the satire is mainly aimed at the politics of the Cold War. The plot revolves around three characters played by Peter Sellers. The first, Captain Mandrake, spends most of the movie negotiating with the insane General Ripper, who is the only one to know the three-letter code needed to stop a nuclear strike on the Soviet Union. Ripper ordered the strike based on a conspiracy theory about the water system being poisoned, not knowing that the Soviets had developed a doomsday machine operated by computers. The president of the United States, Sellers’ second character, negotiates with the Soviet premier, but both come to the realization that humanity’s fate is doomed, as the Soviet computers will respond to any attack with the total destruction of life on Earth. Dr. Strangelove, the film’s title character and Sellers’ third role, proposes a breeding program to repopulate the human race, secretly fulfilling the eugenics ambitions of his suppressed Nazi idealism.44 The film’s dark humor concerns the inevitability of humanity’s annihilation, much to the happy surprise of the irrational characters and despite all attempts at stopping it by the rational characters. Dr. Strangelove works as a dark satire due to factors such as its tone and political critique. Critics praise the film for combining the characters’ serious tone with a wacky set of circumstances as well as director Stanley Kubrick’s wide-shot camera angles that allow viewers to decide when to laugh, rather than being told when to do so.45 Critics also positively regard the film’s comment on the deterrence theory of mutual assured destruction (MAD), which supposedly de-incentivizes the use of nuclear weapons between two powers aware that they can annihilate each other. According to the notable movie critic Roger Ebert, Dr. Strangelove demonstrates that “if a ‘nuclear deterrent’ destroys all life on Earth, it is hard to

54  Miguel Alberto Novoa Cipriani say exactly what it has deterred.”46 Considering that at the film’s particular time the possibility of nuclear annihilation hung over society like the sword of Damocles, its humorous take on the planet’s situation is certainly very revolutionary. Nevertheless, placed within a subaltern resistance framework, the film mocks the schemes of world powers by making their plans backfire and awarding victory to the more insane, carnivalesque characters of the narrative. For instance, in one of the film’s scenes, Dr. Strangelove comments that the doomsday machine’s purpose is to reduce human meddling with deterrence, and yet the machine itself is the ultimate flaw in the attempt at stopping the destruction of life on Earth.47 In their blind trust in a machine that supposedly only they can control, the world powers have doomed themselves and their geopolitical order. The latter point is made all the more clear when the disabled Dr. Strangelove suddenly regains the ability to walk after thrillingly describing his plan for the repopulation of humanity.48 What this indicates is the ultimate success of the Nazi plans for reshaping the human species, so the defeated foe of the US and the USSR. ends up with the last laugh (perhaps not at all coincidentally, Dr. Strangelove’s miraculous recovery is the last scene before the bombs explode). Furthermore, in addition to Strangelove, wacky characters such as the conspiracy nut General Ripper and the insanely committed Major Kong end up achieving their goals of dropping a bomb on the Soviet Union, an ironic twist that is made all the more ironic by the constantly displayed signboard of the air base that reads “Peace is Our Profession.”49 In addition to critiquing the military and its claim to serve as a force of peace, the subaltern message is again presented by giving the upper hand to those individuals from the social fringes. In a nutshell, the subaltern message from Dr. Strangelove is that the world powers’ imposed social order is doomed to fail through its own mechanisms.

Conclusion In conclusion, the enduring problem of the subaltern’s silence in the study of the oppressed is no excuse to refuse other signs left by subalterns of their critiques on society. The power of laughter is the strongest indicator of the continuing resistance of the subaltern as part of the natural society that has been left in the shadows by the dominant social structure imposed on the world since the seventeenth century. The works analyzed provide an updated commentary on the power of humor to highlight social ills and the absurdity of a world system that refuses to see its problems as natural parts of itself. Like Joe Pesci’s character in Goodfellas, this is basically an oppressive system that finds it offensive to be considered funny.

Notes 1 Ian Phillips, “One of the Most Famous Scenes in ‘Goodfellas’ Is Based on Something That Actually Happened to Joe Pesci,” May 4, 2015, accessed February 2, 2018, www. businessinsider.com/goodfellas-joe-pesci-funny-how-scene-2015-5 2 Spivak delivered the essay under the title of “Power and Desire,” which never had a publication. See Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “In Response: Looking Back, Looking

Can the subaltern laugh? 55 Forward,” in Can the Subaltern Speak? Reflections on the History of an Idea, ed. Rosalind Morris (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 227. 3 Benita Parry, Postcolonial Studies: A Materialist Critique (London: Routledge, 2004), 19. 4 Stephen Morton, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (New York: Routledge, 2009), 32–3. 5 According to Derrida's study on deconstruction, words are merely symbols that have meaning only when placed in context with one another. In other terms, words lack meaning in and of themselves. Ibid., 33–5. 6 Greg Dening, Mr. Bligh’s Bad Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 61. 7 Bligh’s orders proved contradictory and ambivalent, often worsening already tense situations. Ibid., 87. 8 "Bligh’s crew teased their captain through songs and sarcastic responses. Ibid., 61, 73. 9 Ibid., 73. 10 Albrecht Classen, “Introduction,” Laughter in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Times, ed. Albrecht Classen (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2010), 31. 11 Ibid., 26–30. 12 Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. H. Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 99. 13 Miguel de Cervantes, El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha (Madrid: n.a., 1700), vol. 1, 147. 14 Ibid., 114. 15 Anthony Close, A Companion to Don Quixote (Suffolk: Tamesis, 2008), 23. 16 François Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel, trans. M.A. Screech (London: Penguin Classics, 2006), “Chapter 1: On the Lineage and Ancient Origins of Gargantua.” 17 Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. H. Iswolsky, 61–2. 18 Ibid., 60–6, 101. 19 Ibid., 59. 20 Christi Merrill, Riddles of Belonging: India in Translation and Other Tales of Possession (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009), 13. 21 Ibid., 192. 22 Ibid., 53. 23 Ibid., 55. 24 Ibid., 295. 25 David Bevington, William Shakespeare: Oxford Bibliographies Online Research Guide (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 11–12. 26 Robin Wells, Shakespeare’s Politics: A Contextual Introduction (London: Continuum, 2009), 185–6. 27 Alan Bilton, Silent Film Comedy and American Culture (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 78–136. 28 Charlie Chaplin, Modern Times, dir. by Charlie Chaplin (Beverly Hills: United Artists, 1936). 29 Ibid. 30 John Fawell, The Art of Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West: A Critical Appreciation (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 2005), 92. 31 Michael Arntfield and Vivien Miller, “1921 to 1940: An Introduction,” in The Social History of Crime and Punishment in America, ed. Wilbur Miller (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2012), 2219. 32 See Ibid., 2219. See also Bilton, Silent Film Comedy and American Culture, 78–136. 33 Lauren Niland, “1952: Charlie Chaplin Banned From the US,” The Guardian (London), February 17, 2012, accessed July 30, 2018, www.theguardian.com/theguardian/ from-the-archive-blog/2012/feb/17/charlie-chaplin-1952-communist 34 Christopher Beach, Class, Language, and American Film Comedy (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 14.

56  Miguel Alberto Novoa Cipriani 35 Ibid., 15. 36 Steven Marsh, Popular Spanish Film Under Franco: Comedy and the Weakening of the State (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 191. 37 Juan Antonio Bardem and Luis Garcia Berlanga, !Bienvenido, Mister Marshall!, dir. by Luis Garcia Berlanga (Madrid: UNINCI, 1953). 38 Ibid. 39 Erin Lehman, “Introduction,” in Dark Humor, ed. J. Susan Isaacs (MD: Towson University, 2017), 6. 40 Irony can be direct or indirect, the latter being less clear about its critique. Viveca Greene, “Critique, Counternarratives, and Ironic Intervention in South Park and Stephen Colbert,” in A Decade of Dark Humor, ed. Ted Gournelos and Viveca Greene (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2011), 120–2. 41 Miguel Delgado, !A Volar Joven!, dir. by Miguel Delgado (Mexico City: Posa Films S.A., 1947). 42 Ibid. 43 Ibid. 44 Stanley Kubrick, et al., Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, dir. by Stanley Kubrick (Los Angeles: Columbia Pictures, 1964). 45 Beverly Merrill Kelley, Reelpolitik II: Political Ideologies in ‘50s and ‘60s Films (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2004), 251. 46 Ibid. 47 Kubrick, et al., Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, dir. by Kubrick. 48 Ibid. 49 Ibid.

Section 2

Culture and cognition

One of the great scientific endeavors of the modern era has been the effort to open up the black box of the human brain. But what does that black box represent for a historian trying to understand past events? Historians must rely on the archive rather than brain scans as their diagnostic tool in attempting to reconstruct the thought processes of historical actors. This search for the mindset of historical actors has greatly benefited from developments in the field of microhistory and history of mentality, but it remains constrained by certain difficulties. The chapters in this section address some of these problems and offer up potential avenues for ameliorating them. In the first chapter, Alina Shron highlights the potential benefits of integrating science and historical study in the understanding of the historical mind. Her chapter develops a theory of extended evolutionary synthesis as a means of investigating the historical culture of the mind. This distinctly scientific approach is complemented by the second chapter in this section by Matthew Gardner. In his chapter, Gardner also addresses the difficulty of uncovering the historical mind. By utilizing the Stanislavski acting model to propose a character of the common person during the Merovingian era, Gardner is adapting a variety of non-historical techniques to address the common historical difficulty of scarce source materials. The lack of source materials is an old problem, but these chapters present possible new solutions to address this age-old historian’s dilemma. Despite the seemingly divergent methodologies of these chapters, they share a central set of common threads. Both chapters offer creative solutions to the troublesome issue of understanding the historical mind. Their creativity does not lie in inventing new methodologies from whole cloth. This would be wholly unnecessary, as these methods already exist. The strengths of these chapters lie in their adaptation of non-historical techniques for use as additional tools in the professional historian’s repertoire.

4 Extended evolutionary synthesis Linking history and cognitive science Alina Shron Introduction Historians are not passive observers of a past ‘as it really was.’ They extract facts of ‘history’ from those of the ‘past,’ balance causes, and make hypotheses. They fill gaps in the record, read between the lines, extract meaning against the grain of documentation, pick out unthinking reflexes and deliberate distortions, and assess the credibility of sources. Historians must enter the mental world of the past to reconstruct the thought behind the record. From innocuous ascriptions of minimal rationality (without which the actions of historical agents would remain unintelligible) to inferences about the interdependence of phenomenological, psychological, social, and material transformations, whether explicitly recognized or tacitly entailed, historical analysis necessarily relies on assumptions about the human mind, how it is constructed, how it works, how it changes. By the same token, the sciences of mind, in seeking the universal attributes of human thought and behavior, inevitably make unarticulated assumptions of their own: that their object of study, properly discerned, is not subject to historical change. In theory, therefore, history and the sciences of mind, irrespective of methodological and epistemological differences, are mutually accountable.

Biologizing history or historicizing cognition? In practice, accountability is construed as a one-way affair by those with a strong constructivist or nativist bent. Constructivists – ‘culture and psyche make each other up’ – defend the functional autonomy of human behavior from the species’ phylogeny on grounds of personal agency, historical contingency, and cultural variation and transmission. Save for the occasional cherry-picking (e.g., brain plasticity), its characteristic skepticism about the scientific study of human psychology on epistemological, ontological, and ethical grounds mutes attention to its results in favor of a critique of its culturally situated premises.1 Nativists – ‘innate biology enables, constrains, and specifies psychological properties’ – see culture as a by-product of an evolved, genetically transmitted architecture to whose study its many manifestations act as noisy data: variation can be accounted for by non-cultural mechanisms (e.g., ecology and ‘evoked’ culture, causal reasoning,

60  Alina Shron trial-and-error learning). Inquiry that disregards the material underpinnings of human thought and behavior is disqualified from the shared space of scientific reason. Though worn out, the debate has not wound down.2 Research linking history to the sciences of mind, from psychology to neuroscience, has proliferated in the past three decades but is characterized by great diversity with respect to the historical subject matter and scope (micro, macro, meso) as well as the scientific concepts, theories, frameworks, and methodologies drawn on for support.3 This promiscuity and the resulting tensions are nicely reflected in the debates around the proper relationship between history and cognitive science in a ‘cognitive history.’4 To the extent that the loosely knit research program makes up a single category at all, it is by virtue of a motif prominent in all advocates: the perils of disciplinary division of labor and the palliative of mutual accountability. The aim of this chapter is neither to describe all nor prescribe any one approach. Instead, I begin by showing how the dichotomous logic – culture/nature, history/science, external/internal – has, despite best intentions, carried over into the debate over the possibility and purpose of cognitive history. I go on to discuss some developments in the evolutionary life sciences (extended evolutionary synthesis, as shorthand) that add welcome justification and resources for exploiting this variety to mutual benefit. Throughout, I am concerned with the roles history can and ought to play in an increasingly intimate relationship with the mind and life sciences – a central and versatile one, I conclude, provided it is willing to let the latter challenge the borders of historical imagination. a. ‘Environmental’ cognitive history The history and philosophy of science was an early site of self-styled cognitive histories, attempting, roughly, to infer cognitive processes and activities from historical records and use cognitive concepts and theories (e.g., schemata, analogical thinking, heuristics, procedural knowledge) to frame their interpretations. Drawing attention away from the results to the processes of knowledge production allows cognitive histories of science to pick apart the nitty gritty of the investigative pathways through which scientists create and communicate knowledge (e.g., proximate cognitive mechanisms, thinking practices, representational systems, epistemic artifacts). This allows for addressing with some nuance the relationship between scientific thought and the social and material contexts of its production, asking questions about the conditions and causes of conceptual change, and anchoring rational reconstructions of scientific discovery.5 Pioneer of the field Nancy Nersessian sees such cognitive history as continuous with the history of mentalities, in that it tries to occupy “a place between a traditional history of scientific ideas and a new sociological history of science that tends to marginalize the cognitive dimension of scientific practices.”6 As she repeatedly emphasizes, however, the relationship with cognitive science is not a one-way street of mere expedient borrowing from, or accountability to, its findings. The cognitive-historical method is fundamentally reflexive: the privileged status accorded to cognitive science-derived assumptions in order to anchor

Extended evolutionary synthesis  61 historical analysis is provisional and subject to critical scrutiny, which the historical record is in a position to provide. Cognitive science derives conclusions based on tasks designed to be testable in laboratories. Studying cognition ‘in the wild’ is the only way to test not only the ecological validity of individual findings but also the way they hang together and are manifested in non-experimental, socially situated contexts. Historical case studies are thus a vital source of additional empirical data, validity tests, and new hypotheses – cognitive history as a virtuous circle.7 In his review of Reviel Netz’s seminal study The Shaping of Deduction in Greek Mathematics, Bruno Latour, spokesman for the new sociological history of science, lavishes praise on Netz’s self-styled cognitive history. Is this a change of heart in the co-author of the infamous ‘ten-year moratorium on cognitive explanations,’ with death overdue and not in sight?8 Hardly. Latour endorses Netz’s branch of cognitive history because he takes it to be indistinguishable from science studies: “namely an obsessive attention to the material, historical, and practical conditions necessary for the discovery of new cognitive skills.”9 The ‘cognitive history’ that Latour endorses is not so much a cognitive history of science as a history of cognition seen as a set of intellectual technologies that are invented and transmitted rather than innate. Latour’s persuasion that these ought to be “taken as the topics of the historical inquiry instead of as the resources with which to write this history”10 bears obvious affinity to the ‘new history’ of psychology, which defines itself against the perceived presentist tendencies of previous historiography and the ahistorical character of mainstream, psychological science: “psychology is the object to be historicized, not a resource to better understand historical change over time.”11 In both cases, embracing an historical perspective on the social construction of psychological processes is taken to necessitate and ratify transcendence from the sciences of mind.12 The challenge for those who beg to differ is to make a case for integration that accommodates both the conceptual critique of methodological individualism and the historical demonstration that much of the specificity of (scientific) thinking cannot be attributed to the inner workings of the mind and thus can neither exist nor be made sense of in isolation of specific social and material contexts. One major line of response is to point out that the cognitive sciences have, as a result of both external critique and internal reform, turned away from the strong internalism characterizing the field in its early days.13 Since the 1980s, there has been a growing appreciation of the ‘embodied, embedded, extended, and enactive’ nature of cognition, the ways in which online cognition depends and off-loads on its materially, symbolically, and socially structured environment.14 Latour’s premise, i.e., that the locus of the production and transformation of elements constitutive of cognition is to be sought in the environment rather than the individual mind, stands. But the conclusion that therefore nothing worth studying is left in the mind relies on a false dichotomy between an insulated mind and a mind-independent environment that new models of cognition challenge: Environmental perspectives argue that the traditional symbol processing view has mistaken the properties of a complex, cognitive system, comprising both

62  Alina Shron the individual and the environment, for the properties of an individual mind. They aim to develop an analytical framework in which cognitive processes are not separated from the contexts and activities in which cognition occurs.15 Powerful testaments to the limitations of standard computational cognitive science were the spectacularly inadequate ‘minds’ its models generated. As philosopher Andy Clark quips, “We model chess playing by programs as Deep Thought when we still can’t get a real robot to successfully navigate a crowded room and we still can’t fully model the adaptive success of a cockroach.”16 The reason for this failure is at least in part prosaic: if the spatiotemporally extended and opportunistic nature of real-world problem-solving is a ‘potential methodological nightmare,’ as Clark has it, the traditional computational view is a methodological wet dream. From this perspective, initial success was courtesy of a highly selective, one-sided choice of problem domains. In line with traditional narrow rationalist views of intelligence, the task domains chosen to model human intelligence were more often than not abstract, the input and output coded in highly artificial ways. It was presumed that the integration of other, more practical, areas – like perception, motion, and action – could be stalled until the basic mechanism of mind was more fully elaborated. A devil’s choice, in the eyes of critics. If the purpose is to illuminate actual human intelligence and biological cognition as they face and solve ecologically realistic problems, cognitive science simply cannot afford to abstract away from perception and action, from our social and physical environment. Cognitive history launched on the basis of this critique thus sees the ‘history of cognition’ not as simply compatible with a ‘cognitive science of history,’ but as an indispensable methodological complement to an overly disembodied cognitive science. Assuming, contra Latour, that such environmental cognitive history does more than merely rehash the insights achieved by practice-oriented (anti-cognitivist) science studies in the technical vocabulary of cognitive science,17 one reservation remains, and it exceeds the concerns of the history of science proper: can cognitive history have its reciprocal cake and eat it too? In other words, on what grounds can it be coherent to analyze historical phenomena “with reference to the cognitive structures of the human mind” while, in the same breath, operating on the “premise that cognitive frames, while deeply influencing the direction of a society, are not permanently fixed. When drastic change occurs to a given society, its cognitive structures – and, ultimately, its entire worldview – can change equally drastically within a generation or two”?18 For Sutton and Keene, the distributed cognitive ecologies theoretical framework can do the trick: Of course changing technologies, practices, and norms can restructure mind and consciousness. But this is happening all the time, for cognitive artifacts are the medium or process of mental activity. It is not that a private, inner, subjective realm [. . .] is suddenly transformed, freed, or constrained by novel external material resources. Rather, the history of the mind just is the array and trajectory of distributed, hybrid cognitive systems.19

Extended evolutionary synthesis  63 We do not have to leave the ranks of cognitive history to find pushback.20 b. ‘Nativist’ cognitive history Taking stock of the first volume of the Journal of Cognitive Historiography,21 Dimitris Xygalatas laments what he takes to be the pervasive view “that the contribution of the cognitive sciences to Cognitive Historiography is limited to theorizing about past minds.”22 While equally adamant that “interdisciplinarity and collaboration are a sine qua non for cognitive historiography,” Xygalatas fears that invoking cognitive theoretical models serves more to support existing positions than to tap into the real virtue of cognitive science: empiricism. The motivation behind cognitive historiography is precisely to correct for the biases and limitations associated with traditional, i.e., interpretative and theoretical, treatments of textual material by harnessing the explanatory and methodological tools of empirical cognitive science.23 This can mean treating history as a ‘natural experiment.’ While it may not allow for random assignment, history charms the experimentalist with access to large and low-cost data sets, unfettered by ethical pitfalls that complicate, or render impossible, studies with human subjects.24 For the majority of historical scholarship (which does not lend itself to mathematical formalization), collaboration means accountability: historians ought to test their ubiquitous but unarticulated assumptions about past minds, e.g., by designing experiments to test hypotheses derived from historical material, or, at the very least, by subjecting their assumptions to the scrutiny of state-of-the-art cognitive science consensus. Historians and cognitive scientists must exchange expertise to prevent misconceptions: if the former lack the skills to confidently locate, interpret, and extrapolate from cognitive science, those coming from experimental traditions conversely want the sort of contextual knowledge and philological expertise that enable sophisticated readings of historical material.25 The theoretical pillar of this endeavor is the continuity of past and contemporary minds, and supporters claim it towers on solid empirical ground.26 Thus, Xygalatas invokes the “uncontroversial assumption among cognitive scientists that the mental and behavioural architecture of anatomically modern humans has not undergone any significant changes in historical times (the last few millennia).”27 Anders Lisdorf concurs that it is “almost unanimously agreed that no significant mutations have occurred in the human brain since around 100.000 years ago.”28 Luther Martin cites Lisdorf’s paper to support the view that “[c]ognitive scientists, like evolutionary psychologists, now agree that the morphology of the human brain and the functions of that morphology have changed little, if at all, over the past 100,000 years.”29 If the uncontroversial status of the assumption accounts for the sparsity of evidence adduced in its support, it is less clear what to make of the apparent lack of agreement on what exactly it is that has not changed. To equate ‘mental and behavioural architecture,’ ‘mutations in the brain (anatomy?),’ and ‘brain morphology and its functions’ would be cavalier at best. To gain any real purchase on

64  Alina Shron the argument that human mental and behavioral architecture is universal (across at least the last few millennia) requires agreement on (a) what exactly constitutes this architecture (perception? preferences?), (b) what is meant by universality, and (c) what sort of evidence counts in its support. These are actively contested questions.30 In consistency with their overall argument, the authors align roughly with a popular package deal for settling them: nativist evolutionary psychology. Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, doyens of the genre-defining Santa Barbara school, defend the ‘psychic unity’ of humankind on the grounds of an innate (i.e., evolved and genetically specified) human nature that consists of a collection of complex psychological adaptations (‘modules’), ranging from language acquisition to the preference for sweet foods, which emerge early and reliably in the ontogenetic sequence.31 Individual developmental plasticity, intercultural variation, and intraspecies genetic diversity, while not denied, are taken to be strongly constrained by developmental programs and innate psychological mechanisms: “the underlying computational design of the human mind is genetically transmitted while cultural variation results from differential experiential inputs being processed through this common architecture.”32 Equating the mind with genetically specified, shielded neural systems and conceiving of evolution as ‘adaptation by natural selection’ furnish evidence for universality. Phylogenetic and archaeological data suggest that neuroanatomically modern humans emerged during the Pleistocene, when natural selection built a suite of cognitive adaptations on the basis of then available genetic variation. This architecture characterizes our species to this day given that natural selection is too slow a process for significant genetic change (and thus change in our cognitive adaptations) to have occurred since this ‘Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness.’ The heuristic cash-out of such mental unity is a realistic research program – separating the wheat (adaptations) from the chaff (manifest variation) – and a license for inferential leaps across ancestral and contemporary minds. c. Two visions Underneath a shared and vocal commitment to the overcoming of disciplinary and ontological divides, we appear confronted with two distinct visions of the raison d’être of cognitive history that reflect that very divide. The former emphasizes mutual correction and complementarity. It sees in cognitive science a valuable resource for both the subject matter and methods of historical study. Conversely, however, it construes history as an indispensable participant in cognitive science proper, arguing that its objects and methods, in turn, can and ought to be historicized. A cognitive history planted in the soil of such environmentally conscious cognitive science could conceivably grow not to replace but to qualify, systematize, and extend apparently contrasting frameworks that populate theory, from historical phenomenology to science studies. In the latter, history appears more as a beneficiary of a science that progresses irrespectively.33 Collaboration is mainly between the subject matter of history and

Extended evolutionary synthesis  65 the methods of science.34 History is not quite reduced to a passive data bank, but its autonomy and authority with respect to cognitive science are circumscribed by the denial of the historicity of the subject matter and muddled by a somewhat whiggish and dichotomous conception of their relationship and respective epistemologies.35 For if the humanities are to survive in the modern academia, they need to keep up with theoretical and methodological developments in other disciplines, and certainly with scientific approaches to the study of human nature. Postmodernism has had its run, but in its obsessive focus on deconstruction it forgot to be constructive, failing to make any incremental contribution to our empirical knowledge of the world.36 The boo word is not entirely without referent. In her overview of recent historiographical currents, Carolyne Bynum agrees with the reading of the ‘turn to science’ as a mode of retreat from – even a rejection of – the cultural turn.37 But the cultural historian ends on a culturalist twist: [I]n the hands of most professional historians, even cognitive science [.  .  .] tend[s] to be used analogously rather than reductively. [. . .] Cognitive structures lie deep below and hence are accessed only through behaviors that differ culturally; analogies are exactly that: analogies not equations. Even ‘deep history’ at its best involves understanding that the physiological structures are always mediated through our ways of knowing them, and hence through culture.38 Luther Martin laments this as evidence of historians continuing to ignore panhuman cognitive capacities and constraints, thus missing out on the boons of evolutionary-cognitive approaches to historiography: “In this way, Bynum is able wistfully to reaffirm cultural studies as usual rather than capturing recent scientific advances in historiographical method.”39 True, glossing the use of cognitive science by historians as ‘analogizing’ undermines the project – analogies are heuristic tools, useful but dispensable. And, true, a good deal of post-structurally inspired work is problematic. In writing off Bynum’s remark as a ‘nostalgic pronouncement,’ however, Martin reaffirms the dichotomy as usual. Transcending it would require offering a convincing alternative beyond the two unattractive ones – reductionism and analogizing – from which Bynum feels compelled to choose. It is one thing to take interpretative practices to task for their implicit or explicit dualism in treating the mind as un- or trivially constrained by the brain. It is quite another to tout scientific consensus on the ahistorical nature of mind as a viable and desirable alternative.

Socializing biology This style of advocacy for ‘biologizing the social’ might be doing the larger project a disservice, not simply by advertising it badly, but by selling the wrong

66  Alina Shron product. Champions of bringing the study of humanity within the ambit of science emphasize the cohesion and firm empirical basis of modern science as a palliative to the various afflictions – stagnation, fragmentation, ‘postmodernism’ – bogging down the ‘soft’ disciplines. If the social sciences are ill, biology looks like the therapy; if sociological investigations are thin and fragmented, biological knowledge is solid and cohesive; finally, if the social is an erratic, ephemeral entity, lacking firmer ground, what is required is to anchor it onto the firmer basis of evolutionary thinking and neurobiological facts.40 But the monistic rhetoric rests on a vision of biology that is out of touch with the increasingly social direction taken by the life sciences over the past three decades. Empirical discoveries of new phenomena (e.g., epigenetics), methodological innovations (e.g., game theory), and the elaboration of new concepts (e.g., evolvability) are animating a substantial renegotiation of the biosocial terrain and chipping away at the artificial boundary between them. This process might dampen antagonism toward the social sciences as well as ease prejudice about biological interpretation of human behavior. “In future,” Jablonka and Laor envisage, “a biologist will need to be more of a social scientist, and a social scientist will need to be more of a biologist.”41 Geneticist and philosopher Eva Jablonka is a prominent voice for the extension of evolutionary synthesis (EES). In this flagship case of biology ‘turning social,’ researchers from a variety of fields (including developmental biology, genomics, epigenetics, ecology and social science) advocate for a reconceptualization of evolutionary theory, such that extragenetic factors are acknowledged as causal, co-constructive agents in the evolutionary process, on par with genes.42 The EES movement defines itself in counterpoint to modern evolutionary synthesis (MS), i.e., the reconciliation in the 1930s of Darwinian selection and Mendelian heredity, initially perceived as rivals.43 MS catalyzed modern evolutionary biology by furnishing a mathematical treatment of evolution (change of frequencies of genetic variants in a population over time) and a set of mechanisms (natural selection, drift, mutation, recombination, and gene flow) that proved to be “powerfully predictive, broadly applicable and empirically validated.”44 The achievement of MS was specifying the microevolutionary details of the general processes that had been laid out by Darwin, but this neo-Darwinian specification also constituted a narrowing of his more pluralist theory.45 For one, whereas Darwin did not exclude the possibility of Lamarckian evolution, the ‘central dogma’ of MS seemed to pose an impermeable theoretical barrier to the very possibility of the inheritance of acquired traits.46 The promise of MS was in explaining evolution at all levels by causation at the genetic. To its architects, the question of what drives gene frequency changes was an open one.47 Yet by the end of the 1940s, according to Gould and Lewontin, the synthesis had ‘hardened’ around an adaptationist view whereby natural selection is the only cause of evolutionary change.48 The identification of heredity with

Extended evolutionary synthesis  67 genetics promoted relative neglect of other evolutionary forces. Because they are the only thing organisms inherit, genes are privileged as the causally primary store of all relevant information, an idea reflected in tenacious metaphors of genetic ‘programs’ or ‘blueprints.’49 Since culture per se is in no straightforward way genetically stored, it is precluded from playing any direct causal role in evolution and, by extension, deeper structures of cognition. The claim ‘it’s not nature or nurture, it’s both’ isn’t new. In fact, the entire nature/nurture debate has been characterized by a paradoxical tenacity of claims that it is resolved and further debate – scarcely surprising given the complexity of the subject matter, its pregnant political stakes, the burden of historical baggage, and deep semantic quagmires.50 Excavating the marginal, forgotten, heterodox antecedents of purported novelties and breakthroughs is the bread and butter of historical scholarship, and it does not take much digging to reveal that the plurality of explanatory levels and concepts existed before, during, and after the ‘hardening’ of MS.51 There are sound historical reasons, in other words, to avoid relying too heavily on ‘revolutionary’ rhetoric. There are pragmatic reasons too. Historical complexity is an effective retort to those who invoke purported unification in biology to argue that making any real progress in the social sciences requires them to be subsumed under a common (evolutionary) framework.52 It is in recognition of this fact that I invoke EES in spite of the disputed status of the project. Crucially, critics of EES (primarily population geneticists) disagree not with the relevant findings as such, but with the research value of what they perceive to be a purely semantic distinction: all the novelties are continuous with MS and do not warrant redescription.53 Most proponents of EES are happy to admit that its ideas are not new and, in fact, are more consistent with Darwinian than neo-Darwinian evolution. But semantics matter. Many issues in biology pivot on an ‘empirical–theoretical–conceptual triumvirate.’54 There is good reason why the philosophy of biology has been one of the most successful branches in philosophy of science – if success is measured by the influence exercised on empirical research.55 The upshot: because nature/nurture debates are not the sort of thing that can be resolved by empirical and conceptual advances alone, the future imagined by Jablonka and Laor – should it become reality – will mark as much a sociological as a conceptual or empirical shift. The strongest evidence for such a shift taking shape, therefore, lies not so much in radical discontinuity of empirical findings, or novel plurality of approaches, as in the simultaneous convergence on an emphasis of the irreducibly social nature of phenomena studied by a variety of relatively autonomous research fields.56 Adding interaction The basic principle that phenotypes result from the interaction between genes and intrinsic and environmental conditions was never in doubt but, as developmental biologists are prone to point out, often insufficiently appreciated. The black-boxing of interaction contributed to the neoclassical status of the gene as an ‘unmoved mover’ – autonomous master of development and evolution – a status

68  Alina Shron from which it is increasingly dethroned in favor of a far more open and complex view of the gene and its function.57 The completion in 2003 of the three-billiondollar human genome project has, among other things, underlined the naivety of the more hyperbolic expectations it inspired: the mere map of the genome is a paltry guide for navigating the human condition.58 Humans turn out to have far fewer genes than most scientists had predicted.59 Only around 1.2 percent of the human genome corresponds to the neoclassical definition of a gene as a proteincoding sequence. Conversely, more of this non-coding DNA plays a role in gene regulation than originally predicted. The relative importance of gene regulation is particularly salient in the case of Homo sapiens. Consider that we share 98.8 percent of our DNA with chimpanzees.60 The 1.2 percent genetic difference corresponds to extensive differences in cognition, behavior, and morphology. Small genetic differences do not typically correspond to substantial phenotypic differences in other species.61 Understanding the basis of this discrepancy – between the near-identity of human and chimpanzee DNA sequences and their phenotypic differences – is one of the great new challenges of biology, and the accomplishments so far have been both exciting and sobering. Many phenotypic peculiarities appear to be due to patterns and timings of gene regulation, rather than changes to the sequences themselves.62 The fact that human and chimpanzee DNA sequences are nearly identical cannot be made sense of unless seen in the context of the ontogeny of the organism as well as the phylogeny of the species.63 Introduced by British developmental biologist Conrad Waddington in 1956, it is in recent decades that epigenetics – the study of molecular events that govern the ways in which the environment regulates the expression of genomes – has exploded into “one of the most promising and expanding fields in the current biomedical research landscape,”64 characterized by hype and hope in equal measure.65 Partly responsible for its high public profile is the fact that the epigenome dynamically regulates gene transcription throughout life and does so in response to social experience, nutrition, toxicological exposures, hormones, and neuronal activation, among others. Its truly heretical appeal, however, lies in the fact that some epigenetic markers also appear to be transmitted through generations. By opening a channel of communication between biological heredity and social experience, potentially heritably acquired epigenetic markers raise a Lamarckian specter and challenge our understanding of ‘inheritance.’ The extent of intergenerational stability of such epimutations is a matter of controversy and warrants caution about more radical claims.66 EES, however, does not rely on esoteric claims and spurious empiric evidence and should not be mistaken for a nurturist in sheep’s clothing. The public sex appeal of epigenetics, the irresistibility of revolutionary rhetoric even to serious science writers, and its co-option by constructivist narratives of biological transcendence are not so much a response to as a mirror image of the trendy ‘gene for’ determinism of the ’80s and ’90s.67 Both are biologically nonsensical: genetic factors cannot be studied independently of the environment, nor do environmental factors function independently of the genome. Epigenetics, while an important

Extended evolutionary synthesis  69 and novel phenomenon in genetics and development, cannot be ‘the long-sought link through which the environment influences the hereditary material’ because the principle has been found true all along. The failure to cross the chasm between nature and nurture is not due to, and thus not eliminable through, (lacking) technical prowess or empirical insight into the mechanisms of interaction so much as the reliance on additive models to capture an interactive system: The technology of 2001 is employed in the service of questions that have been conceptually unchanged since the 19th century. Our technical brilliance is constructed on a conceptual scaffolding that, in many areas of biology, is little changed from the 1920s. [. . .] [T]he most troubling example remains that of the question of genetic versus environmental determinism [. . .] and the theoretical divide that exists between researchers which fuels such fruitless controversy.68 Developing a conceptual framework that does more than pay lip service to ‘interaction’ is the central aim of EES.69 This should make clear the way in which invoking epigenetics, developmental plasticity, niche construction, etc., as ways in which biology is ‘becoming social’ does not serve a ‘nurturist’ argument. Stressing the causal contribution of, say, niche construction to the evolutionary process does not and cannot imply that ‘genes aren’t everything’ or that a cumulative niche construction can somehow progressively liberate us from genetic constraints. That culture does not transcend nature – nor nature precede culture – is no less provocative for ‘neo-Darwinians’ than it is for ‘constructivists.’ Instead, it is a way of embracing, and addressing, what behavior geneticists Plomin and Daniels have called the ‘gloomy prospect’ – that the intricate, interactive, nonlinear developmental entanglement between ‘genetic’ and ‘environmental’ factors is a bottomless pit: their individual effects cannot be picked apart.70 The stagnation of the nature/nurture debate reflects and affects real-world theoretical divides between researchers. The trouble with interactive systems is that one-sided inquiry is prone not simply to incompleteness but to misunderstanding, as when it mistakes properties of the entire system for properties of one of its parts. Just as critics argue that the traditional symbol-processor view of cognition mistakenly locates the properties of a complex cognitive system co-constituted by the environment in individual minds, presuming cognitive universality, from an EES perspective, runs the risk of mistaking results of complex cultural histories for properties of stable, content-rich, genetically specified modules.71

Variety without plurality Universality, while it may provide prima facie support, is not sufficient to establish innateness. A psychological trait might be universal without being innate – for instance, because it is a culturally generated by-product of naturally selected tendencies (e.g., religion) or thanks to the independent invention or widespread diffusion of useful learned responses to commonly faced problems (e.g., writing

70  Alina Shron or counting systems).72 A strong argument for innateness, therefore, cannot rely on a plausible story about its adaptive value in the Pleistocene, lack of substantial genetic change, and inferences from cross-cultural ubiquity.73 It must also show that neither repeated, independent inventions nor their widespread cultural propagation is likely to have universalized any given psychological feature. This is not a straightforward task. An alien anthropologist studying a fully literate future human society could conclude that reading and writing are genetically specified. One might object that literacy is acquired quite late and not without extensive instruction, but Cecilia Heyes extends the argument to features that robustly emerge early in the ontogenetic sequence, such as imitation or theory of mind.74 Arguing from empirical evidence, Heyes conjectures that both capacities rely on socialization to such a degree that human cognitive adaptations can be assumed to have changed markedly with the cultural circumstances in which they matured. Whatever the fate of this particular argument, a growing number of evolutionary psychology research programs have moved from the idea that our modern skulls house Stone Age minds to actively debating and testing hypotheses about universality and its boundary conditions.75 The current state of evidence does not give grounds to doubt substantive cognitive similarity across different historical and cultural contexts and with it the intelligibility of other minds. But it does offer good reasons to see historical analysis not merely as a beneficiary to the theoretical deliveries of the cognitive sciences, but indispensable to their efforts of delineating the contours and conditions of such similarity. Lisdorf cites Pinker’s admonition that the mind is not a blank slate but attempts to strike a conciliatory chord: [This] is not to say that culture is not important, just that the human mind of modern and historical people are sufficiently similar in general cognitive function to warrant a meaningful comparison. To put it differently: historical minds are not more different from modern minds than those of other cultures in our contemporary world.76 Maybe so, but how well do we know the minds of these other cultures? Psychology, cognitive, and neuroscience studies habitually draw general inferences about ‘humans’ based on a notoriously narrow subject pool.77 This sampling bias has multiple reasons, but a key factor of this deficit in epistemic vigilance is an implicit assumption of generalizability, a problem that has recently started to attract widespread attention from within.78 Sustained and systematic attempts to rectify disproportionate reliance on WEIRD populations, still in their infancy, are documenting an uncomfortable amount of variation, even at ‘basic’ levels such as perception.79 Cultural relativism is not the only strategy for coming to grips with it, but squaring variation with a commitment to a shared human psychology requires elaborating a much more sophisticated conceptual, interpretative, and methodological apparatus than currently available. The seminal work of Heine et al. (discussed later) goes some way toward illustrating the sorts of challenges involved in trying to infer rather than project universals. The set of universal

Extended evolutionary synthesis 71 processes that manifests in more or less uniform ways across contexts (e.g., the preference for sweet and fatty foods) is limited. Mostly, we encounter universals not in their abstract, but in their culturally instantiated forms. Disentangling one from the other requires triangulating conceptual, comparative, and developmental methods. A starting point is to address the current theoretical confusion that results from differing but unarticulated assumptions about the levels on which universals are thought to exist. A conceptual framework is needed that allows us to distinguish levels, anchor findings, and sharpen discussion. Norenzayan and Heine propose a taxonomy of four (continuous, interpenetrating) levels, each with a different degree of claim for universality, comprised of three universals and one nonuniversal: “An accessibility universal (a) is, in principle, cognitively available to most people in most cultures (it is an existential universal); (b) has the same use across cultures (it is also a functional universal); and (c) is accessible to the same degree across cultures.”80 Accessibility universals are characterized by little or no cultural variation in availability or function and early and reliable ontogeny and are likely to be shared by non-linguistic primates. They are found in primitive domains of cognition and are impervious to conscious reasoning; examples are the mere exposure effect (increased positive affect toward familiar objects relative to unfamiliar ones) and our analog number sense.81 Contra the implicit assumption that most psychological processes qualify as accessibility universals, the authors argue they constitute but a small subset. ‘Existential’ and ‘functional’ universals have lower thresholds for universality and are therefore more numerous but also more difficult to pin down. While developmental studies can provide important evidence for accessibility universals, when it comes to the more common, lower-threshold universals, it is only by considering cultural diversity that we can identify where we might be conflating the particular with the universal. Here, different samples will yield different effect sizes, and interpretation is complicated by the fact that similar traits need not have similar explanations, nor similar causes give rise to similar traits – the former because different conditions can produce similar responses and the latter because many naturally selected adaptations are best conceptualized as contingent rules. They will manifest in different form in different populations as a function of how they are enabled, modified, and suppressed by a multitude of environmental factors, including ecological, economic, demographic, and social ones.82 Inferences of existential and functional universal from observed variation, moreover, must be sensitive to other possible causal origins of variation. These can include differential distribution of genes, epigenetics, behavioral plasticity, domain-general learning mechanisms, and divergent trajectories of cultural transmission. While anthropology and archeology have a secure place in cognitive science, the past, too, is a foreign country, and history has some unique contributions to make. Diachronic comparative study is required to distinguish between existential and non-universals. Some cognitive strategies have become so ubiquitous that we readily forget they started out as culturally bound inventions (i.e., nonuniversals). Distinguishing between universals and non-universals is not an end

72  Alina Shron but a means. The more complex the behavior under study, the more likely it recruits several cognitive strategies, issuing from different levels of universality. Even such seemingly basic processes as numerical thinking are composites.83 More complex products of biocultural bootstrapping have genealogies. They cannot be understood in terms of phylogenetic or proximal psychological factors alone, nor in isolation from them.84 Conversely, it is only by tracing genealogies of what transcends nature in the narrow sense (e.g., non-universals) that we can approximate an understanding of the diversity of contingent properties that characterize evolved biological phenomena.85 The urgency of diachronic studies in this domain is only accentuated by the homogenizing forces of globalization. Their methodological limitations, when compared to the research possibilities of anthropologists and experimental psychologists, are compensated for by their unique ability to track change over time, assess the impact of different environmental and social conditions on salience and distribution, and recover some of the diversity lost or neglected.86 Consider two examples of how ‘traditional’ narrative historical scholarship can benefit from and contribute to this endeavor. Linking history and cognitive science Comparison is as crucial a building block of historical method as of any other, and, as elsewhere, parallels are found as a function of where similarity is sought. Because similarity is a matter of perspective, and given that similar causes can give rise to different traits, the appeal to universals can counteract, rather than perpetuate, presentist readings of historical material. An argument of this sort is presented by philosopher and classicist Peter T. Struck in his monograph Divination and Human Nature: A Cognitive History of Intuition in Classical Antiquity. Struck provides a novel reading of the most influential philosophical analyses of divination from the ancient world. Interpretations so far have fallen into two categories: The question of the logic that might lie behind [divination] is either not asked at all, since it is assumed not to have one, or it is deflected onto other, functionalist grounds. In place of a rational logic, the social historian explores the more comprehensible realm of social capital, while the historian of magic will tend toward the psychological, presenting an ancient mind-set, groping to find effective means of dealing with a sometimes brutal world.87 Both readings, argues Struck, betray our rationalist bias, and neither is able to convincingly account for why philosophers like Plato – who had no patience for magic – were compelled to elaborately speculate about divinatory insight. Struck’s argument, by contrast, rests on an appeal to a universal cognitive phenomenon he calls ‘surplus knowledge.’88 The virtue of the contemporary category of cognition for Struck is precisely that it allows for a broader attention to activities of the mind beyond volitional, self-conscious, discursive, inferential intellectual activity. That divinatory knowledge does not derive from such narrowly

Extended evolutionary synthesis 73 conceived ‘rationality’ does not mean it is unreasonable, illogical, or absurd. “Our ability to know exceeds our capacity to understand that ability,” (p. 15) and over the course of history, different cultures came up with different strategies of getting a grip on this prominent property of human phenomenology, in the sense of acculturating it and positioning it coherently in their larger worldview. For Struck, divination in the ancient world, rather than driven by exotic theological commitments, superstitious primitive minds, or political ambitions, is best understood as one such attempt.89 Of course, the institutionalization of divination could then serve to regulate it and make it socially useful. But in shifting the causal emphasis to underlying characteristics of human cognition, the sociopolitical and theological dimensions appear as epiphenomenon and local language formalizing a durable human experience, respectively. The details of the argument are for his fellow classicists to judge. The example is simply meant to highlight how the appeal to universals, when understood at the right level, can be the opposite of reductive or flattening. Rather, it can serve to reveal surprising parallels, counteract presentist readings, help us “work through the powerful observation that rationality has a history, and [realize] a deeper understanding of cultures whose notions of it are not always isomorphic to our own.”90 ** Once a reliable consensus is reached on the existence of a universal, it ought to constrain any historical analysis in which it is implicated. Considerable scientific consensus surrounds two features of race: one, race is not a biologically significant category,91 and two, we have an innate cognitive predisposition to essentialize, i.e., attribute species-like properties to, human subgroups.92 Consider both, for the sake of argument, established. An upshot for historians most likely to be emphasized by critics of ‘postmodernism’ is that interpretations that hold ‘race’ to be a modern invention (prominent, e.g., in post-colonial theory) are untenable and ought to be dropped or revised. Failure to do so warrants a disqualification from the shared space of reason: “[t]hose who jettison the epistemological standards of science are no longer in a position to use their intellectual product to make any claims about what is true of the world or to dispute the others’ claims about what is true.”93 Must one choose between being unhistorical or unreasonable? Only when universality is targeted on the wrong level of analysis. Both extremes – ‘we have all, always, already been racist’ and ‘racism is a modern Western invention’ – are unhelpful because unlikely. Psychologists studying categorization have tended to discount or ignore social or cultural factors in favor of two more straightforward causes: the nature of human cognition and the nature of the world. Machery and Faucher, like many advocates of cognitive-evolutionary approaches to the study of culture, do not espouse such a simplistic opposition and instead promote aligning their approach with literature on social construction.94 The motivation is not empty diplomacy but empirical necessity. Only two things are clear: one,

74  Alina Shron classification of humans on the basis of phenotypic properties is widespread all over the world to an extent that suggests the existence of a universal cognitive system, and two, intracultural and intercultural variability suggests it is not, in the above terminology, an accessibility universal. The relevant questions are not ‘does a racial module exist?’ but ‘what are its building blocks, what mechanisms underlie it, what are the associated patterns of reasoning, which variables affect its development?’ On all of these there is controversy in the cognitive science community. To contribute to the debate, historians must be willing to draw explicit distinctions between concepts of race, on the one hand, and content and origin of a racial ‘module,’ on the other.95 Historical, like other comparative, studies can serve as legitimate tests of universality hypotheses only to the extent that variation in (or even the absence of) explicit racial concepts is not interpreted as counterevidence to racial cognition. A crucial insight of evolutionary-cognitive science is that bad folk science may in fact be good epistemology.96 Even if something does not exist as a feature of the real world (i.e., biological race), there might still be evolutionary reasons why it exists as a feature of our cognition in such a way as to underlie the manifest variety of conceptualizations and persist despite our deliberate interventions. Justin Smith’s two-dimensional historical analysis of Blumenbach’s racial theory corroborates this evolutionary-cognitive hypothesis: At the height of the modern taxonomic project, he continues the taxonomic project at the subspecies level in the case of human beings, thereby implying that there are real or natural boundaries between subspecies kinds, even as he denies that the sort of features that make inter-species boundaries real arise at the subspecies level. Blumenbach picks out, and names, the races of men, even as he deprives them of the features that he explicitly cites as making species real.97 Such a reading contradicts the social-constructionist supposition that what exists as a feature of only the human, not the physical, world must have been (deliberately) ‘invented.’ The fear of reductionism and historical flattening can be mitigated by taking to heart the above distinction: conceptualizations are multidimensional formations and are not exhausted by a single cognitive system. As Struck’s take on divination goes some way toward illustrating, anchoring historical analysis to an evolutionary-cognitive argument serves to rule out rival hypotheses and reveal the continuity underlying manifest variation, not replace all meaningful questions about the contingent aspects of historic change. So far, this dovetails quite neatly with the nativist vision of cognitive history. But to think it sufficiently addresses the constructivist argument is to squarely miss its concern. To be a social constructionist about X is to hold that “X need not have existed, or need not be at all as it is. X, or X as it is at present, is not determined by the nature of things; it is not inevitable.”98 Such an evolutionary-cognitive argument still reeks of determinism. Advocates of nativist cognitive history reach for two conciliatory strategies. While, yes, more of history is amenable to science than meets the traditional

Extended evolutionary synthesis 75 historian’s eye, much will remain safely outside its scope, e.g., by virtue of sheer complexity or the role of accident.99 Moreover, [i]n addition to employing cognitive insights and models in their historiographical work, historians of religion can productively participate in the cognitive project generally, by assessing the ‘real-life’ validity of cognitive models. After all, if behavioral and cognitive defaults identified by evolutionary psychologists and cognitive scientists are, in fact, panhuman proclivities, then their effects should be readily documented from what is known from the entire deep history of Homo sapiens.100 These strategies rely on at least three assumptions that I have sought to problematize.101 1. The demarcation of science (universal laws) from history (contingent circumstances). Evolution introduces an historical element into biology such that contingencies are part of evolutionary explanans.102 The unparalleled complexity of human developmental processes does not free us from genetic constraint but does give rise to the ‘gloomy prospect’ – a methodological nightmare ripe for cognitive-historical exploration. 2. The independence of theory and observation. Finding historical evidence consistent with a theory does not allow assessing its validity unless it simultaneously tests the fit with competing models. As a result, cognitive history faces a trade-off: it can opt for the high heuristic cash-out of anchoring historical analysis in nativist models but resolve to a largely derivative role with respect to cognitive science. Conversely, contributing a truly historical perspective to the cognitive scientific project comes at the cost of hermeneutic ambivalence. Where the distributed cognitive ecologies framework is of limited appeal outside work on online cognition, EES picks up the thread. 3. A one-dimensional understanding of psychological universals. A layered taxonomy of universals holds promise as a productive platform on which to integrate and counterbalance the empirical and theoretical claims of conflicting research traditions. The assumption of an evolved cognitive disposition may often be the more plausible and parsimonious, but the presumption of universality, innateness, phylogenetic constraint comes with characteristic limitations: postulated modules are underspecified, theories underdetermined by empirical evidence, and minority answers neglected as noise. Individual, i.e., intracultural, differences can cast crucial light on which inputs affect development, intercultural differences on variables affecting salience and distribution.

Conclusion Historical judgment and practice are caught squarely between the competing implications of constructivist and nativist views of the constitution of mind.

76  Alina Shron The appeal to a transhistorical and uniform human mind, such as at the heart of eighteenth-century conjectural history and nativist schools in twentieth-century sciences of mind, pays clear interpretative dividends.103 It provides principles with which to interpret, explain, compare, and judge the variety and changes in individual behaviors, social structures, and cultural products. It licenses conjecture, i.e., rational reconstruction of the likely state of human institutions or activities in the absence of documentation, and potentially even the derivation of general laws of political and social life from an observation of the variety of human experience. The psychic chasm opened by a radical historicization of the human mind, conversely, destabilizes the very intelligibility of the historical past. Past minds are obscured by the absence and indeterminacy of primary documentation, and even those traces reconstructed by ingenious historical inquiry prove at best equivocal – at worst inscrutable – to modern minds. I have expressed a number of empirical and conceptual reservations about grounding the cognitive-historical research program in purported cognitive universality. None of these caveats are meant to, nor do, undermine the possibility of universals or the promise of aligning textual historical methods with the experimental approaches of cognitive science. They do suggest, however, that a prioritizing cognitive uniformity begs the very questions cognitive history could make vital contributions to addressing, questions about what exactly constitutes our mental and behavioral architecture and how, under what conditions, and to what extent it is historically variable.

Notes 1 For a recent example of passionate critique of (neuro)scientific incursions into historical territory, see Roger Cooter, “Neural Veils and the Will to Historical Critique: Why Historians of Science Need to Take the Neuro-Turn Seriously,” Isis 105, no. 1 (March 1, 2014): 145–54. 2 Pointing out the institutional and affective dimension of this group identity-defining antagonism, anthropologist Maurice Bloch writes, “Social and natural scientists have come to hate each other. They cannot understand each other’s purpose. They consider each other’s methods either sloppy or dangerous. They are repulsed by each other’s style and mode of presentation.” Maurice Bloch, Anthropology and the Cognitive Challenge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 1. 3 The heuristic value of a neurological approach, for instance, has been invoked for histories ‘from within,’ history of emotion, and metanarratives about the deep past and future of our species, among others. Daniel Lord Smail, On Deep History and the Brain (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2008); Lynn Hunt, Inventing Human Rights: A History (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2008); Jeremy Trevelyan Burman, “History from Within? Contextualizing the New Neurohistory and Seeking Its Methods,” History of Psychology 15, no. 1 (2012): 84–99. By contrast, those seeking conversation with psychology are much more hesitantly dipping their toes into interdisciplinary waters, problematizing rather than overcoming the delicate issue of ‘psychologizing history’ versus ‘historicizing psychology.’ Cristian Tileagă and Jovan Byford, Psychology and History: Interdisciplinary Explorations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). This is part of a larger trend of putting evolution to work, both as a theoretical framework and as a source of empirical methodologies in the study of culture, especially in the service of longue durée histories but also

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more generally as a way of rethinking historical causality. Matthew H. Nitecki and Doris V. Nitecki, eds., History and Evolution, SUNY Series in Philosophy and Biology (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1992); Jared M. Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, 1st ed. (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1997); Robert S. McElvaine, Eve’s Seed: Biology, the Sexes, and the Course of History (New York: McGraw-Hill Publishers, 2002); Peter Turchin, Historical Dynamics: Why States Rise and Fall, Princeton Studies in Complexity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003); Yuval Noaḥ Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (London: Harvill Secker, 2014). Even within this subset of linking history and evolutionary theory, the results are quite different depending on which framework is transposed. For a neat critical overview of the major recent currents applying evolutionary theory to the study of culture, see Tim Lewens, Cultural Evolution: Conceptual Challenges (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). 4 See a recently published edited volume on what most of its contributors call ‘cognitive historiography’ to get a sense of the possibilities and tensions; it contains both theoretical and case study arguments for and against the use of specific frameworks, such as evolutionary psychology, cultural epidemiology, and gene-culture coevolution. Luther H. Martin and Jesper Sørensen, Past Minds: Studies in Cognitive Historiography (Routledge, 2016); Harvey Whitehouse, “Cognitive Historiography: When Science Meets Art,” Historical Reflections / Réflexions Historiques 31, no. 2 (2005): 307–18. 5 Ronald N. Giere, ed., Cognitive Models of Science, Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, v. 15 (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1992); Nancy J. Nersessian, “Opening the Black Box: Cognitive Science and History of Science,” Osiris 10 (1995): 194–211; Hanne Andersen, Peter Barker, and Xiang Chen, The Cognitive Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Ryan D. Tweney, “Toward a Cognitive-Historical Understanding of Michael Faraday’s Research: Editor’s Introduction,” Perspectives on Science 14, no. 1 (March 2006): 1–6. 6 Nersessian, “Opening the Black Box,” 202. Why do we need a history of mentalities? According to Peter Burke’s passage quoted by Nersessian, “We very much need something to occupy the conceptual space between the history of ideas, defined more narrowly, and social history, in order to avoid having to choose between an intellectual history with the society left out and a social history with the thought left out.” Peter Burke, “Strengths and Weaknesses of the History of Mentalities,” History of European Ideas 7, no. 5 (January 1, 1986): 440. 7 “[T]he cognitive-historical method needs to be reflexive in application. Cognitive theories and methods are drawn upon insofar as they help interpret the historical and contemporary practices, while at the same time cognitive theories are evaluated as to the extent to which they can be applied to scientific practices. The assumptions, methods and results from both sides are subjected to critical evaluation, with corrective insights moving in both directions. Practices uncovered in cognitive-historical investigations can provide a focal point for observational studies and for designing experiments. The point is that all three kinds of investigation are needed to develop an understanding of this complex phenomenon.” Nancy J. Nersessian, “The Cognitive Basis of ModelBased Reasoning in Science,” in The Cognitive Basis of Science, ed. Peter Carruthers, Stephen Stich, and Michael Siegal (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 136. “Corrective insights should come from both directions: from cognitive science to cognitive history and the reverse.” John Sutton and Nicholas Keene, “Cognitive History, and Material Culture,” in The Routledge Handbook of Material Culture in Early Modern Europe, ed. David Gaimster, Tara Hamling, and Catherine Richardson. London: Routledge, 2016. 8 “What I propose, here, as a seventh rule of method, is in effect a moratorium on cognitive explanations of science and technology! I'd be tempted to propose a ten-year

78  Alina Shron moratorium. If those who believe in miracles were so sure of their position, they would accept the challenge.” Bruno Latour, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers Through Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 247. 9 Bruno Latour, “Review Essay: The Netz-Works of Greek Deductions. A Review of Reviel Netz (2003) The Shaping of Deduction in Greek Mathematics: A Study in Cognitive History,” Social Studies of Science 38, no. 3 (June 1, 2008): 441; Reviel Netz, The Shaping of Deduction in Greek Mathematics: A Study in Cognitive History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 3. 10 Latour, “Review Essay,” 442. 11 Michael Pettit and Ian Davidson, “Can the History of Psychology Have an Impact?,” Theory & Psychology 24, no. 5 (October 1, 2014): 711. 12 “Psychology is not there to describe events but precisely to cram cognition inside an individual mind. [. . .] To believe that a better cognitive science will simply take over is to miss the anthropology of the moderns and to underestimate the history that made the myth of internal state so essential to our Occidental life.” Bruno Latour, “Cogito Ergo Sumus! Or Psychology Swept inside out by the Fresh Air of the Upper Deck,” Mind, Culture, and Activity: An International Journal 3, no. 1 (1995): 60. For an early problem-statement, see Paul Forman, “Independence, Not Transcendence, for the Historian of Science,” Isis 82, no. 1 (1991): 71–86. 13 Precipitated and enabled as it was by the rise of the computer, standard cognitive science from the ‘cognitive revolution’ of the 1950s onward was dominated by a computational theory of mind. This combination of a representational theory of mind and a computational account of reasoning furnished for more than three decades the conceptual toolbox, terminology, and methodology for the study of the mind. Because it is a formal system, it means that although representations have both semantic and syntactic properties, the computational processes are sensitive to the syntactic properties of the symbols. While productive in many ways, one of the consequences of limiting the cognitive to the symbolic was the tacit assumption that the mind can be studied autonomously from the body and the physical and social environment. Not everyone went as far as Jerry Fodor when he stated in his seminal 1975 The Language of Thought that “neurophysiology is irrelevant to psychology,” and yet the assumption quietly shaped much of empirical research in cognitive science, especially during its first decades. 14 See, e.g., Richard Menary, “Introduction to the Special Issue on 4E Cognition,” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 9, no. 4 (December 2010): 459–63. 15 Nancy J. Nersessian, “Interpreting Scientific and Engineering Practices: Integrating the Cognitive, Social, and Cultural Dimensions.” In Scientific and Technological Thinking, ed. M. E. Gorman, R. D. Tweney, D. C. Gooding, and A. P. Kincannon. (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Publishers, 2005), 18. In his seminal cognitive ethnography, Edward Hutchins documents the ‘distributed cognitive ecology’ on which collective complex problem-solving like navigation relies. Edward Hutchins, Cognition in the Wild (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1995). No one denies that cognitive processes such as remembering, planning, and reasoning rely on information located outside the skull. What remains contentious is whether objects, places, and people ought to count as literal components of these cognitive processes, rather than simply sources of informational input. Critics think this framework loose and overly inclusive. 16 Essentially, things that are hard for humans (say, financial market strategy or calculus) are mind-numbingly easy for computers, who struggle instead with things like common sense, vision, motion, and perception. Andy Clark, Being There: Putting Brain, Body, and World Together Again (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1998), xii. 17 Social historians clearly did not wait for fancy cognitive science terminology to study the ways in which technology affects how humans reason. Cognitive-historical methods can help illuminate how precisely it does so by affecting the choice of sources and thus enrich analysis and render explicit new layers of meaning. However, these methods act in complement – not as an alternative – to rhetorical analysis. Real integration

Extended evolutionary synthesis 79 is about establishing theoretical relations between arbitrarily distinct fields, not by way of ad hoc borrowings or redescription, but by demonstrating the mutual relevance of cognitive and social studies of science, among others. That the revisionist movement in cognitive science has benefited from the existence of sophisticated historical accounts of the materiality of cognitive practices is a case in point. 18 Jeremy R. Lent, for example, puts this principle in the service of cultural history. The Patterning Instinct: A Cultural History of Humanity’s Search for Meaning (Amherst and New York: PB, Prometheus Books, 2017). 19 Sutton and Keene, “Cognitive Theory, History, and Material Culture,” 46. 20 We are particularly likely to encounter opposing voices in the second domain to have attracted early and extensive interest in a cognitive-historical alliance: “for largely serendipitous reasons,” according to doyen Luther Martin, “much cognitive historiographical research has been pursued by those engaged in the study of Graeco-Roman religions.” Luther Martin, “Introduction to the Issue,” Journal of Cognitive Historiography 1, no. 1 (January 23, 2014): 10. 21 Martin, “Introduction to the Issue.” 22 Dimitris Xygalatas, “On the Way Towards a Cognitive Historiography: Are We There Yet?,” Journal of Cognitive Historiography 1, no. 2 (November 15, 2014): 197. 23 “Un- or undertheorised historical accounts are inadequate, because they depend on a set of implicit and problematic assumptions masquerading a ‘common sense.’ ” Neville Morley, Theories, Models and Concepts in Ancient History (London: Routledge, 2004), 1. 24 Jared M. Diamond and James A. Robinson, eds., Natural Experiments of History (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011). 25 Edward Slingerland, “Who’s Afraid of Reductionism? The Study of Religion in the Age of Cognitive Science,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 76, no. 2 (June 1, 2008): 375–411; Michael Pettit, “Historical Time in the Age of Big Data: Cultural Psychology, Historical Change, and the Google Books Ngram Viewer,” History of Psychology 19, no. 2 (2016): 141–53. 26 “If the psychic chasm is so great that the minds of modern people are not in principle as those of historical people, then how is it possible at all to say something about historical people’s actions, motivations or thoughts? There has to be a basic similarity between historical and modern minds in order for us to understand them at all.” Anders Lisdorf, “Towards a Cognitive Historiography – Frequently Posed Objections,” in Chasing down Religion: In the Sights of History and the Cognitive Sciences, ed. Panayotis Pachis and Donald Wiebe (Sheffield, UK: Equinox Publishing, Ltd., 2015), 4. 27 Xygalatas, “On the Way Towards a Cognitive Historiography,” 197–8. 28 Lisdorf, “Towards a Cognitive Historiography – Frequently Posed Objections,” 3. 29 Luther H Martin, “The Future of the Past: The History of Religions and Cognitive Historiography,” Religio 20, no. 2 (2012): 163. 30 To mention only a few points of empirical contention: 1. What are modern human-specific traits? The literature has described them “at many different levels of neural organization, including gross brain size, the relative extent of neocortical areas, asymmetry, developmental patterning, the distribution of cell types, histology, and gene expression.” Chet C Sherwood, Francys Subiaul, and Tadeusz W Zawidzki, “A Natural History of the Human Mind: Tracing Evolutionary Changes in Brain and Cognition,” Journal of Anatomy 212, no. 4 (April 2008): 427. 2. The 100,000-year figure is frequently cited to mark the appearance of anatomically modern Homo sapiens. But in light of (1) continued debate about the empirical record itself and (2) the absence of a coherent theory to define ‘modern human behavior,’ its usefulness is an open question, though probably not the most important one. The authors’ concern here is not archaeological but epistemological. Sally Mcbrearty and Alison S. Brooks, “The Revolution That Wasn’t: A New

80  Alina Shron Interpretation of the Origin of Modern Human Behavior,” Journal of Human Evolution 39, no. 5 (November 2000): 453–563; Christopher S. Henshilwood and Curtis W. Marean, “The Origin of Modern Human Behavior: Critique of the Models and Their Test Implications,” Current Anthropology 44, no. 5 (2003): 627–51. 3. Understanding of the respective relationships between genes as well as neuronal structure, on the one hand, and cognitive function, on the other, is in its infancy. Well-established findings, such as pleiotropy and polygenicity, reinforce the challenging nature of empirical research on these links. Yulia Kovas and Robert Plomin, “Generalist Genes: Implications for the Cognitive Sciences,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 10, no. 5 (May 2006): 198–203; Michael L. Anderson, “Mining the Brain for a New Taxonomy of the Mind,” Philosophy Compass 10, no. 1 (January  1, 2015): 68–77. 4. Apart from semantic and taxonomic caveats, it remains empirically inconclusive how quickly genetic evolution can, in fact, build complex adaptations. With the proliferation of sophisticated methods to investigate it comes new evidence suggesting, e.g., that some of the genes contributing to brain development have been subject to recent selection. Nitzan Mekel-Bobrov, et al., “Ongoing Adaptive Evolution of ASPM, a Brain Size Determinant in Homo Sapiens,” Science (New York, N.Y.) 309, no. 5741 (September 9, 2005): 1720–2; Patrick D. Evans, et al., “Microcephalin, a Gene Regulating Brain Size, Continues to Evolve Adaptively in Humans,” Science (New York, N.Y.) 309, no. 5741 (September 9, 2005): 1717–20; Rasmus Nielsen, et al., “Recent and Ongoing Selection in the Human Genome,” Nature Reviews. Genetics 8, no. 11 (November 2007): 857–68; Stephen C. Stearns, et al., “Measuring Selection in Contemporary Human Populations,” Nature Reviews. Genetics 11, no. 9 (September 2010): 611–22. 5. Last and perhaps foremost, the central scientific objection to strong nativism rests on the evidence for high neuronal plasticity. The degree to which developmental programs are themselves constrained by genes and cognitive structure modular remains contentious. A. H. Mohammed, et al., “Environmental Enrichment and the Brain,” Progress in Brain Research 138 (2002): 109–33; Shu-Chen Li, “Biocultural Orchestration of Developmental Plasticity across Levels: The Interplay of Biology and Culture in Shaping the Mind and Behavior across the Life Span,” Psychological Bulletin 129, no. 2 (March 2003): 171–94. 31 Steven Pinker and Paul Bloom, “Natural Language and Natural Selection,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 13, no. 4 (1990): 707–27. 32 “If one believes in a universal human nature, as we do, one observes variable manifest psychologies, traits, or behaviors between individuals and across cultures, and views them as the product of a common, underlying evolved innate psychology, operating under different circumstances [. . .] The mapping between the innate and the manifest operates according to principles of expression that are specified in innate psychological mechanisms or in innate developmental programs that shape psychological characteristics, these expressions can differ between individuals when different environmental inputs are operated on by the same procedures to produce different manifest outputs [. . .] Individual differences that arise from exposing the same human nature to different environmental inputs relate the study of individual differences to human nature in a straightforward way.” Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, “On the Universality of Human Nature and the Uniqueness of the Individual: The Role of Genetics and Adaptation,” Journal of Personality 58, no. 1 (March 1990): 23. 33 Martin’s statement is indicative: “panhuman proclivities should [.  .  .] be of central concern to historians – to the extent, of course, that we get the science right. (We must recognize that inquiries into the complexity of human minds and their functions are, after all, still new areas of scientific investigation.)” Martin, “The Future of the Past: The History of Religions and Cognitive Historiography,” 166.

Extended evolutionary synthesis 81 34 “Cognitive Historiography thus becomes the latest addition to a number of interdisciplinary areas which combine a subject matter from the humanities with methods and theories from the cognitive sciences.” Xygalatas, “On the Way Towards a Cognitive Historiography,” 193. 35 E.g., “historians must begin seriously to embrace theoretical argument as a matter of ordinary practice rather than as an occasional gesture if they wish to have any critical relevance at all. [.  .  .] The postmodern encounter frames very clearly the quandary that a largely unexamined tradition of epistemological and ethical thinking has created for historians who want to justify doing history. Simply put, there is no way to rescue humanist ideals [. . .] from the implications of the linguistic turn” (p. 62). “If we do not soon make a ‘biological turn’ ourselves, in fact, we might find the relevant territory occupied before we arrive” (p. 79). Michael L. Fitzhugh and Jr. Leckie William H., “Agency, Postmodernism, and the Causes of Change,” History and Theory 40, no. 4 (December 1, 2001): 62. 36 Xygalatas, “On the Way Towards a Cognitive Historiography,” 193–4. Fueling a case for empiricism with anti-‘post-modernism’ polemics is a standard move, notoriously in Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (London: Penguin Books, 2003). Herbert Gintis takes the ignorance of and contempt for traditional social science to be the most consequential critique of evolutionary approaches to culture. “Unless this is overcome, evolutionary social theory will remain marginalized for the foreseeable future.” Herbert Gintis, “Sense & Nonsense: Evolutionary Perspectives on Human Behaviour (Review),” Human Nature Review 2 (2002): 209. 37 “The renewed interest in material culture and physical objects [. . .] deep structure [. . .] perduring ‘human nature’ [. . .] seems located at the opposite pole from the postmodern sense of history-writing as fragmentary, fragile, and, so to speak, under perpetual construction.” Caroline W. Bynum, “Perspectives, Connections & Objects: What’s Happening in History Now?” Daedalus 138, no. 1 (January 1, 2009): 77. 38 Ibid., 78. 39 Luther H. Martin, “Evolution, Cognition, and History,” in Past Minds: Studies in Cognitive Historiography, ed. Luther H. Martin and Jesper Sørensen (Routledge, 2016), 7. 40 Maurizio Meloni, “Biology Without Biologism: Social Theory in a Postgenomic Age,” Sociology 48, no. 4 (August 1, 2014): 733. 41 Eva Jablonka and Marion J. Lamb, “Précis of Evolution in Four Dimensions,” The Behavioral and Brain Sciences 30, no. 4 (August 2007): 364–5. 42 Eva Jablonka and Marion J. Lamb, Evolution in Four Dimensions: Genetic, Epigenetic, Behavioral, and Symbolic Variation in the History of Life (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2005); Massimo Pigliucci, Gerd Müller, and Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research, ed., Evolution, the Extended Synthesis (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2010); Kevin N. Laland, et al., “The Extended Evolutionary Synthesis: Its Structure, Assumptions and Predictions,” Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 282, no. 1813 (August 22, 2015): 20151019. 43 Michael Ruse, “Is Darwinism Past Its ‘Sell-by’ Date? The Origin of Species at 150,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, Defining Darwinism: One Hundred and Fifty Years of Debate 42, no. 1 (March 1, 2011): 317. 44 Hopi E. Hoekstra and Gregory A. Wray, “Does Evolutionary Theory Need a Rethink?: No All Is Well,” Nature 514, no. 7521 (October 9, 2014): 163. 45 Stephen Jay Gould, “The Hardening of the Modern Synthesis,” in Dimensions of Darwinism, ed. M. Grene (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 71–93. 46 “Changed habits produce an inherited effect [.  .  .] In animals the increased use or disuse of parts has had a more marked influence; thus I find in the domestic duck that the bones of the wing weigh less and the bones of the leg more, in proportion to the whole skeleton, than do the same bones in the wild-duck; and this change may be safely attributed to the domestic duck flying much less and walking more than its wild

82  Alina Shron parents.” Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species, 6th ed. (London: John Murray, Albemarle Street, 1872), 8. 47 Key figures were Fisher, E.B. Ford in Britain (where it was known as neo-Darwinism); Theodosius Dobzhansky, Ernst Mayr, George Gaylord Simpson, G. Ledyard Stebbins in the USA (where it was known as the synthetic theory of evolution) 48 S.J. Gould and R.C. Lewontin, “The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm: A Critique of the Adaptationist Programme,” Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B: Biological Sciences 205, no. 1161 (September 21, 1979): 581–98. 49 Not that the program metaphor is intrinsically gene-centric. “The metaphor of a program, borrowed directly from computer science, entered the biological literature in the 1960s [. . .] in at least two distinctly different registers. In its first [. . .], the locus of the program was explicitly identified as the genome, but, over the course of that decade, another notion of program, a developmental program, also surfaced, and repeatedly so. This program was not located in the genome, but instead, distributed throughout the fertilized egg. By the 1970s, however, the program for development had effectively collapsed into a genetic program, with the alternative, distributed sense of a developmental program all but forgotten.” Evelyn Fox Keller, “Decoding the Genetic Program: Or, Some Circular Logic in the Logic of Circularity,” in The Concept of the Gene in Development and Evolution, Cambridge Studies in Philosophy and Biology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 162. 50 Evelyn Fox Keller, The Mirage of a Space between Nature and Nurture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010). 51 Richard G. Delisle proposes that “[t]he historiographical notion of a hardened synthesis is entirely a by-product of an etiological view of science in which causes or mechanisms are believed to be central.” Richard G. Delisle, “From Charles Darwin to the Evolutionary Synthesis: Weak and Diffused Connections Only,” in The Darwinian Tradition in Context (Cham: Springer, 2017), 160; Joe Cain, “Rethinking the Synthesis Period in Evolutionary Studies,” Journal of the History of Biology 42, no. 4 (November 1, 2009): 621–48. 52 “An adequate understanding of culture is also hindered by the fragmentary structure of the social sciences. There is little exchange of theories and findings between economists, sociologists, linguists, historians, psychologists, anthropologists, and archaeologists. In many cases these disciplines hold mutually incompatible assumptions. In other cases, different disciplines end up reinventing concepts from scratch that other disciplines have known about for years, because of the lack of communication. This should not be the case, if every social science discipline is supposed to be studying the same phenomenon – culture – and it is certainly not conducive to scientific understanding. Compare this situation to that of the biological sciences, which for decades have been unified under a single theoretical framework: Darwinian evolutionary theory.” Alex Mesoudi, Cultural Evolution: How Darwinian Theory Can Explain Human Culture and Synthesize the Social Sciences (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 21–2. 53 John Whitfield, “Biological Theory: Postmodern Evolution?” Nature 455, no. 7211 (September 18, 2008): 281–4; Coyne, Jerry. “Are We Ready for an ‘Extended Evolutionary Synthesis’?” in  Why Evolution Is True, February  16, 2009. Web. 20 February  2016.  https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2009/02/16/are-we-readyfor-an-extended-evolutionary-synthesis/; Hoekstra and Wray, “Does Evolutionary Theory Need a Rethink?: No All Is Well.” 54 “[S]ome of the crucial issues are conceptual (i.e., philosophical) in nature and hinge on not just matters of definition (what, exactly, counts as a paradigm?) but also on the entire framework that biologists use to understand what it is that they are doing (e.g., what is the relationship between systems of inheritance and natural selection, or, in multilevel selection theory, what counts as a level and why?).” M. Pigliucci and L. Finkelman, “The Extended (Evolutionary) Synthesis Debate: Where Science Meets Philosophy,” BioScience 64, no. 6 (2014): 2.

Extended evolutionary synthesis 83 55 Peter Godfrey-Smith, “Three Kinds of Adaptationism,” in Adaptationism and Optimality, ed. S. H. Orzack and E. Sober. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. 56 Maurizio Meloni, “How Biology Became Social, and What It Means for Social Theory,” The Sociological Review 62, no. 3 (August 1, 2014): 593–614. 57 “Starting from the early 1970s, DNA technologies have led to the modern period of gene conceptualization, wherein none of the classical or neoclassical criteria are sufficient to define a gene. Modern discoveries include those of repeated genes, split genes and alternative splicing, assembled genes, overlapping genes, transposable genes, complex promoters, multiple polyadenylation sites, polyprotein genes, editing of the primary transcript, and nested genes. We are currently left with a rather abstract, open, and generalized concept of the gene, even though our comprehension of the structure and organization of the genetic material has greatly increased.” P. Portin, “The Concept of the Gene: Short History and Present Status,” The Quarterly Review of Biology 68, no. 2 (June 1993): 173–223. 58 Hilary Rose and Steven Rose, Genes, Cells and Brains: The Promethean Promises of the New Biology (New York: Verso Books, 2013). 59 Humans share the same basic set of approximately 32,000–35,000 genes (similar to mice). Early estimates were in the range of 200,000 and, at the start of the HGP, 100,000. 60 Chimpanzee Sequencing and Analysis Consortium, “Initial Sequence of the Chimpanzee Genome and Comparison with the Human Genome,” Nature 437, no. 7055 (September 1, 2005): 69–87. 61 Different species of mice with 98 percent identical genomes have highly similar phenotypes. Wolfgang Enard, et  al., “Intra-and Interspecific Variation in Primate Gene Expression Patterns,” Science (New York, N.Y.) 296, no. 5566 (April 12, 2002): 340–3. 62 For example, “Our results indicate that the human brain displays a distinctive pattern of gene expression relative to non-human primates, with higher expression levels for many genes belonging to a wide variety of functional classes. The increased expression of these genes could provide the basis for extensive modifications of cerebral physiology and function in humans and suggests that the human brain is characterized by elevated levels of neuronal activity.” Mario Cáceres, et al., “Elevated Gene Expression Levels Distinguish Human from Non-Human Primate Brains,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 100, no. 22 (October 28, 2003): 13030–5. See also: Brenda J. Bradley, “Reconstructing Phylogenies and Phenotypes: A Molecular View of Human Evolution,” Journal of Anatomy 212, no. 4 (April 2008): 337–53. 63 Mary-Claire King and A. C. Wilson, “Evolution at Two Levels in Humans and Chimpanzees,” Science 188, no. 4184 (1975): 107–16. 64 Manuel Rodríguez-Paredes and Manel Esteller, “Cancer Epigenetics Reaches Mainstream Oncology,” Nature Medicine 17, no. 3 (March 2011): 330. 65 Waddington’s seminal paper demonstrated the inheritance of an acquired characteristic in a population in response to an environmental stimulus. He coined the term ‘epigenetics’ to demarcate “the branch of biology which studies the causal interactions between genes and their products which bring the phenotype into being,” but the word has since undergone a shift of meaning, nowadays also being used to refer to chemical modifications of DNA (methylation) and histones, its protein scaffold. C. H. Waddington, “Genetic Assimilation of the Bithorax Phenotype,” Evolution 10, no. 1 (March 1956): 1–13. Mark Ptashne, “On the Use of the Word ‘Epigenetic,’ ” Current Biology 17, no. 7 (April 3, 2007): R233–6; Florian Maderspacher, “Lysenko Rising,” Current Biology 20, no. 19 (October  12, 2010): R835–7; Martyn Pickersgill, et  al., “Mapping the New Molecular Landscape: Social Dimensions of Epigenetics,” New Genetics and Society 32, no. 4 (December 2013): 429–47. 66 Nicole M. Cameron, Eric W. Fish, and Michael J. Meaney, “Maternal Influences on the Sexual Behavior and Reproductive Success of the Female Rat,” Hormones and

84  Alina Shron Behavior 54, no. 1 (June 1, 2008): 178–84; Maderspacher, “Lysenko Rising”; Lucia Daxinger and Emma Whitelaw, “Transgenerational Epigenetic Inheritance: More Questions than Answers,” Genome Research 20, no. 12 (December 2010): 1623–8. 67 For respective examples, see, e.g., (1) a puff piece published in the Guardian: Oliver Burkeman, “Why Everything You’ve Been Told about Evolution Is Wrong,” The Guardian, March 19, 2010, www.theguardian.com/science/2010/mar/19/evolutiondarwin-natural-selection-genes-wrong. Web, February  22, 2016. (2) “Psychologists, psychiatrists and neuroscientists have jousted for years over how much of our behavior is driven by our genes versus the environments in which we grow up and live. Arguments have persisted because there has been little hard evidence to answer basic questions [. . .] A field called epigenetics has finally begun to address some of these issues.” Douglas Steinberg, “Determining Nature vs. Nurture: Molecular Evidence Is Finally Emerging to Inform the Long-Standing Debate,” Scientific American Mind 17, no. 5 (October 2006): 12. (3) “Both evolutionary and genetic orientations are further unsettled by research on epigenesis [.  .  .] As myriad studies demonstrate, whether a given gene is activated depends importantly on environmental circumstances – intercellular, organic, and external to the body – and the time of life in which they occur. [. . .] Any simple linking of the genome to brain functioning is thus precluded” (p. 780). Studies of brain plasticity “undermine the concept of behavior determined by a fixed architecture of the brain, they suggest once again that the brain absorbs or reflects its cultural surrounds and enables the individual to act more effectively within them” (p. 808). Kenneth J. Gergen, “The Acculturated Brain,” Theory & Psychology 20, no. 6 (December 1, 2010): 795–816. 68 M. J. Meaney, “Nature, Nurture, and the Disunity of Knowledge,” Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 935 (May 2001): 51; W F Overton, “On the Assumptive Base of the Nature-Nurture Controversy: Additive versus Interactive Conceptions” Human Development, no. 16 (1973): 74–89. 69 Even the notion of ‘interaction’ is misleading to the extent that it implies separable “causal elements interacting with one another. Indeed, the notion of interaction presupposes the existence of entities that are at least ideally separable – i.e., it presupposes an a priori space between component entities – and this is precisely what the character of developmental dynamics precludes. Everything we know about the processes of inheritance and development teaches us that the entanglement of developmental processes is not only immensely intricate, but it is there from the start.” Keller, The Mirage of a Space between Nature and Nurture, 6. 70 Plomin and Daniels took the gloomy prospect that, if it were true, it was ‘likely to prove a dead end for research.’ “Robert Plomin and Denise Daniels, “Why Are Children in the Same Family so Different from One Another?” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 10, no. 1 (March 1987): 1–16; Eric Turkheimer, “Three Laws of Behavior Genetics and What They Mean,” Current Directions in Psychological Science 9, no. 5 (2000): 161. Turkheimer locates the reason why the debate nevertheless will not die down in the methodological problem characteristic not only of behavior genetics but also of contemporary social science: the disconnect between the analysis of variance and the analysis of causes. The ubiquitous fallacy of confounding statistics and mechanisms and moving from correlational to causal claims is well known, and Turkheimer is not the first nor the last to point out its centrality to the continued confusion. R. C. Lewontin, “The Analysis of Variance and the Analysis of Causes,” American Journal of Human Genetics 26 (1974): 400–11; Keller, The Mirage of a Space between Nature and Nurture. 71 There are clear structural parallels to the integration of the competing cognitivist and constructivist positions into two complementary and mutually corrective aspects of one extended model of mind. The parallel between EES and the extended mind is not accidental and is even clearer when the reliance of nativist EP on the computational theory of mind is taken into account. It has not received extensive treatment yet, but for

Extended evolutionary synthesis 85 a good start, see Karola Stotz, “Extended Evolutionary Psychology: The Importance of Transgenerational Developmental Plasticity,” Frontiers in Psychology 5 (August 20, 2014). 72 Levy offers a pithy overview of the debate, arguing that game theoretical approaches can account for the evidence of universality and variation in patterns of gender difference better than nativist alternatives à la Buss (1994). The Evolution of Desire: Strategies of Human Mating. Neil Levy, “Evolutionary Psychology, Human Universals, and the Standard Social Science Model,” Biology and Philosophy 19, no. 3 (June 1, 2004): 459–72. 73 To be fair, Cosmides and Tooby do not argue that generating a plausible adaptive scenario is sufficient for a strong argument 74 Cecilia Heyes, “Grist and Mills: On the Cultural Origins of Cultural Learning,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 367, no. 1599 (August 5, 2012): 2181–91; Cecilia M. Heyes and Chris D. Frith, “The Cultural Evolution of Mind Reading,” Science (New York, N.Y.) 344, no. 6190 (June 20, 2014). 75 “The various styles of evolutionary social science are historically distinct and have developed quite different research traditions [that] differ in important theoretical and substantive ways. Specifically, these differences involve: (1) the role of formal models and deductive theory; (2) the postulated specificity and rigidity of evolved psychological mechanisms; (3) assumptions regarding the prevalence of adaptive lag and the nature of adaptation to past environments; and (4) the theoretical and methodological relevance of fitness measures to analyses of contemporary behavior. These divergences have several major consequences for analyses of human behavior.” E.A. Smith, M.B. Mulder, and K. Hill, “Controversies in the Evolutionary Social Sciences: A Guide for the Perplexed,” Trends in Ecology & Evolution 16, no. 3 (March 1, 2001): 130; Paul E. Griffiths, “The Historical Turn in the Study of Adaptation,” The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 47, no. 4 (December 1, 1996): 511–32; Cecilia Heyes, “New Thinking: The Evolution of Human Cognition,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 367, no. 1599 (August  5, 2012): 2091–6; Douglas T. Kenrick, Norman P. Li, and Jonathan Butner, “Dynamical Evolutionary Psychology: Individual Decision Rules and Emergent Social Norms,” Psychological Review 110, no. 1 (January 2003): 3–28; Steven J. Scher and Frederick Rauscher, ed., Evolutionary Psychology: Alternative Approaches (Boston, MA: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2003). 76 Lisdorf, “Towards a Cognitive Historiography – Frequently Posed Objections,” 3–4. 77 Ninety-five percent of psychological samples are from countries accounting for 12 percent of the world’s population. Jeffrey J. Arnett, “The Neglected 95%: Why American Psychology Needs to Become Less American,” The American Psychologist 63, no. 7 (October 2008): 602–14; Joan Y. Chiao, “Cultural Neuroscience: A Once and Future Discipline,” Progress in Brain Research 178 (2009): 287–304. 78 This is part of a larger replication ‘crisis’ concerning the reliability of research findings. Harold Pashler and Eric-Jan Wagenmakers, “Editors’ Introduction to the Special Section on Replicability in Psychological Science: A Crisis of Confidence?” Perspectives on Psychological Science: A Journal of the Association for Psychological Science 7, no. 6 (November 2012): 528–30; John P. A. Ioannidis, “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False,” PLOS Medicine 2, no. 8 (August 30, 2005): e124. 79 For an overview, see Joseph Henrich, Steven J. Heine, and Ara Norenzayan, “The Weirdest People in the World?” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 33, no. 2–3 (June 2010): 61–83. 80 Ara Norenzayan and Steven J. Heine, “Psychological Universals: What Are They and How Can We Know?” Psychological Bulletin 131, no. 5 (2005): 772. “A psychological tendency is an existential universal if it is in principle cognitively available to normal adults in all cultures, even though the cultures may differ markedly in the ways or frequency with which the process is utilized in everyday life. Existential universals

86  Alina Shron require a very minimal standard of evidence – they refer to psychological strategies that are cognitively latent, even if they are rarely accessed and deployed in practice. Existential universals presume that adult, non-brain-damaged human beings everywhere are capable of accessing and utilizing the same strategies, even if the conditions under which a given strategy is activated may vary dramatically and if the frequency and degree of strength with which a strategy is accessed may vary as well” (p. 774). “When a psychological process shows cultural variability in accessibility, then the next step is to examine whether it is a functional universal. A functional universal (a) is, in principle, cognitively available to people in all cultures; (b) has functionally the same use across cultures; and (c) can vary across cultures in the extent to which it is accessible” (p. 773). 81 Stanislas Dehaene, The Number Sense: How the Mind Creates Mathematics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). 82 Dov Cohen, “Cultural Variation: Considerations and Implications,” Psychological Bulletin 127, no. 4 (2001): 451–71. 83 “Undoubtedly, numerical reasoning is rooted in human biology in that infants seem to be naturally endowed with a primitive number sense with an analog representational system of quantity, natural language quantifiers, and object representation. Nevertheless, these core competencies are the cognitive building blocks on which the edifice of human numerical thinking is gradually constructed and transmitted to future generations. Natural numerical competencies available to the human infant are capable of representing one and the difference between one, some, and many. However, the cognitive strategies that make possible the representation of, for example, the number ‘31’ or the execution of complex mathematical operations are ‘bootstrapped.’ That is, they emerge as a result of the mutual exploitation of primitive representational systems that were initially independent.” Norenzayan and Heine, “Psychological Universals,” 776. 84 Jesse J. Prinz, “Where Do Morals Come From? – A Plea for a Cultural Approach,” in Empirically Informed Ethics: Morality between Facts and Norms (Springer, 2014), 99–116. 85 Sandra D. Mitchell, “Integrative Pluralism,” Biology and Philosophy 17, no. 1 (2002): 55–70. 86 “Because of globalization, it is especially important that we understand now the different worlds that humans have created  – the physical worlds (e.g., cities, markets, architecture), the institutional worlds, the social alliances, and the mental maps of the world – before they become much more homogenized.” Paul Rozin, “The Weirdest People in the World Are a Harbinger of the Future of the World,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 33, no. 2–3 (June 2010): 108–9. See also: Rumen I. Iliev and Bethany l. Ojalehto, “Bringing History Back to Culture: On the Missing Diachronic Component in the Research on Culture and Cognition,” Frontiers in Psychology 6 (May 27, 2015). 87 Peter T. Struck, Divination and Human Nature: A Cognitive History of Intuition in Classical Antiquity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016), 8–9. 88 What we might nowadays call intuition, i.e., knowledge not obtained via conscious, discursive thought processes. 89 For a similar perspective on Stoicism, see Thomas Habinek, “Tentacular Mind: Stoicism, Neuroscience, and the Configurations of Physical Reality,” in A Field Guide to a New Meta-Field, ed. Barbara Stafford (Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 2011), 64–83. 90 Struck, Divination and Human Nature, 14. 91 R.C. Lewontin, “The Apportionment of Human Diversity,” in Evolutionary Biology (Boston, MA: Springer, 1972), 381–98. 92 Francisco J. Gil-White, et al., “Are Ethnic Groups Biological ‘Species’ to the Human Brain? Essentialism in Our Cognition of Some Social Categories,” Current Anthropology 42, no. 4 (2001): 515–53; Leda Cosmides, John Tooby, and Robert Kurzban, “Perceptions of Race,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 7, no. 4 (April 2003): 173–9.

Extended evolutionary synthesis 87 93 Jerome H. Barkow, Leda Cosmides, and John Tooby, ed., The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 22. 94 “Many contemporary theories of racial categorization are encompassed by two research traditions – social constructionism and the cognitive cum evolutionary approach. Although both literatures have plausibly some empirical evidence and some theoretical insights to contribute to a full understanding of racial categorization, there has been little contact between their proponents.” Edouard Machery and Luc Faucher, “Why Do We Think Racially? A Critical Journey in Culture and Evolution,” 2004; David Sloan Wilson, “Evolutionary Social Constructivism,” in Literature and the Human Animal, ed. J. Gottschall and D. S. Wilson. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press 2005; Bradley Franks, “Social Construction, Evolution and Cultural Universals,” Culture & Psychology 20, no. 3 (September 1, 2014): 416–39. 95 The degree to which supposedly empirical disagreement between evolutionary psychology and social constructionism on universality versus locality is generated by an unarticulated difference in the theories of meaning and reference adopted should not be underestimated, though Mallon and Stich might be overestimating it when they argue that resolving it will dispense with the entire debate. Ron Mallon and Stephen P. Stich, “The Odd Couple: The Compatibility of Social Construction and Evolutionary Psychology,” Philosophy of Science 67, no. 1 (2000): 133–54. 96 Edouard Machery and Luc Faucher, “Social Construction and the Concept of Race,” Philosophy of Science 72, no. 5 (2005): 1214. 97 Justin E.H. Smith, “ ‘Curious Kinks of the Human Mind’: Cognition, Natural History, and the Concept of Race,” Perspectives on Science 20, no. 4 (October  15, 2012): 525. 98 Ian Hacking, The Social Construction of What?, 8. printing (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 6. 99 “I, in no way, mean to suggest that cognitive historicizing can or should replace traditional historical methods” (p. 168). “Explanations for historical events and change cannot, of course, ever be reconstructed with certainty from among the range of possibilities these sets of variables allow. This is not only because of the complexity of these variables and the number of their possible relationships, but also because much history is a consequence of accident” (p. 167). Martin, “The Future of the Past: The History of Religions and Cognitive Historiography,” 168. 100 Ibid., 167. 101 There are grounds for optimism about these critiques penetrating the discourse of those at whom they are directed. Edward Slingerland cites the inadequate appreciation of these staples of philosophy of science by working scientists and ‘firstgeneration’ proponents of consilience as a major motivation for a second wave: “[O]ne of the more puzzling features of the modern academy is that philosophy of science is pursued almost exclusively in humanities disciplines, with most working scientists pursuing their research in blithe unawareness of the developments in philosophy of science in the past several decades that has fundamentally questioned old-fashioned, positivistic models of scientific inquiry. For instance, since at least the early 1970s it has become widely recognized that scientific theory and observation are inextricably intertwined, and that the positivistic ideal of a perfectly corroborated theory is a chimera. Too many working scientists today nonetheless continue to evince an overoptimistic faith in the scientific method as an infallible and direct route to ‘truth,’ an attitude that can blind them to problematical assumptions or culturally specific elements that may be distorting their results.” Edward Slingerland, “Toward a Second Wave of Consilience in the Cognitive Scientific Study of Religion,” Journal of Cognitive Historiography 1, no. 1 (January 23, 2014): 31. 102 Griffiths, “The Historical Turn in the Study of Adaptation”; Mitchell, “Integrative Pluralism.”

88  Alina Shron 103 Donald Brown goes so far as to argue that the belief in a single human nature was pivotal to the development of an historical consciousness in the first place. History writing thus emerged in Ionian Greece and China, whereas mythical views prevailed in those societies that denied human unity. Donald E. Brown, Hierarchy, History, and Human Nature: The Social Origins of Historical Consciousness (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1988).

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92  Alina Shron Mcbrearty, Sally and Alison S. Brooks. “The Revolution That Wasn’t: A New Interpretation of the Origin of Modern Human Behavior.” Journal of Human Evolution 39, no. 5 (November 2000): 453–563. McElvaine, Robert S. Eve’s Seed: Biology, the Sexes, and the Course of History. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2002. Meaney, M. J. “Nature, Nurture, and the Disunity of Knowledge.” Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 935 (May 2001): 50–61. Mekel-Bobrov, Nitzan, Sandra L. Gilbert, Patrick D. Evans, Eric J. Vallender, Jeffrey R. Anderson, Richard R. Hudson, Sarah A. Tishkoff, and Bruce T. Lahn. “Ongoing Adaptive Evolution of ASPM, a Brain Size Determinant in Homo Sapiens.” Science (New York, N.Y.) 309, no. 5741 (September 9, 2005): 1720–2. Meloni, Maurizio. “Biology without Biologism: Social Theory in a Postgenomic Age.” Sociology 48, no. 4 (August 1, 2014): 731–46. ———. “How Biology Became Social, and What It Means for Social Theory.” The Sociological Review 62, no. 3 (August 1, 2014): 593–614. Menary, Richard. “Introduction to the Special Issue on 4E Cognition.” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 9, no. 4 (December 2010): 459–63. Mesoudi, Alex. Cultural Evolution: How Darwinian Theory Can Explain Human Culture and Synthesize the Social Sciences. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2011. Mitchell, Sandra D. “Integrative Pluralism.” Biology and Philosophy 17, no. 1 (2002): 55–70. Mohammed, A.H., S.W. Zhu, S. Darmopil, J. Hjerling-Leffler, P. Ernfors, B. Winblad, M.C. Diamond, P.S. Eriksson, and N. Bogdanovic. “Environmental Enrichment and the Brain.” Progress in Brain Research 138 (2002): 109–33. Nersessian, Nancy J. “The Cognitive Basis of Model-Based Reasoning in Science.” In The Cognitive Basis of Science, edited by Peter Carruthers, Stephen Stich, and Michael Siegal, 133–53. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. ———. “Interpreting Scientific and Engineering Practices: Integrating the Cognitive, Social, and Cultural Dimensions.” In Scientific and Technological Thinking, edited by M.E. Gorman, R.D. Tweney, D.C. Gooding, and A.P. Kincannon, 17-56. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Publishers, 2005. ———. “Opening the Black Box: Cognitive Science and History of Science.” Osiris 10 (1995): 194–211. Netz, Reviel. The Shaping of Deduction in Greek Mathematics: A Study in Cognitive History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Nielsen, Rasmus, Ines Hellmann, Melissa Hubisz, Carlos Bustamante, and Andrew G. Clark. “Recent and Ongoing Selection in the Human Genome.” Nature Reviews. Genetics 8, no. 11 (November 2007): 857–68. Nitecki, Matthew H. and Doris V. Nitecki, ed. History and Evolution. SUNY Series in Philosophy and Biology. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1992. Norenzayan, Ara and Steven J. Heine. “Psychological Universals: What Are They and How Can We Know?” Psychological Bulletin 131, no. 5 (2005): 763–84. Overton, W.F. “On the Assumptive Base of the Nature-Nurture Controversy: Additive versus Interactive Conceptions.” Human Development, no. 16 (1973): 74–89. Pashler, Harold and Eric-Jan Wagenmakers. “Editors’ Introduction to the Special Section on Replicability in Psychological Science: A  Crisis of Confidence?” Perspectives on Psychological Science: A Journal of the Association for Psychological Science 7, no. 6 (November 2012): 528–30.

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5 Common quest The search for the everyday person in the Merovingian age Matthew Gardner

Prologue The historian is generally occupied far more with great events and imposing characters than with the quiet, dim life which flows on in silent, monotonous toil beneath the glare and tumult of great tragedy and triumph. –Sir Samuel Dill1

As Sir Samuel Dill so aptly stated, much of history is merely a list of monumental acts by the rich and powerful in their quest to gain more riches and more power. Much like today, where television audiences are more likely to watch the “trials and travails” of the rich housewives of Beverly Hills as they struggle to maintain their lavish lifestyles, the chroniclers of the Merovingian age actively recorded the flamboyant instances of brutality, war, murder, infidelity, and palace intrigue, which compelled Henri Pirenne to pronounce that “the court of the Merovingians was a brothel”2 and to decry the entire Merovingian state as “profane.”3 The conspicuous lack of primary source material is the most challenging issue affecting the study of the common people of the Merovingian age. The few sources that chronicled the age were of the educated elite and were likely commissioned to record the events for those with money or power – a group with little interest in the comings and goings of commoners. Whatever the reason, sifting through the bits and pieces of information in the sources and gleaning the relevant facts to create a profile of the common people prove daunting. The challenge lies in finding creative tools with which to uncover the daily world of the common people of the Merovingian age. Attempting to bring history to life, historians have drawn upon language, psychology, sociology, and other disciplines. This chapter proposes that through the use of acting techniques developed by Konstantin Stanislavski, in conjunction with the given circumstances we are able to cull from available sources, it is possible to create an image of a common person of a given age, touch upon how they may have behaved in their daily life, and speculate on how they may have felt as events transpired. Konstantin Sergeyevich Stanislavski (January 17, 1863 – August 7, 1938) was a Russian theater actor, director, and teacher, and through the study of theater and

96  Matthew Gardner people’s psychological and physical behavior, he developed his system and the “method of physical actions.” Essentially, Stanislavski’s system entails determining a character’s given circumstances within a play: who they are, what they are doing, where they are, when the action is taking place, why the action is taking place, and how the action plays out.4 Once the character’s given circumstances are determined, one can go through the play and determine their main actions based on the text. After determining the main actions, the actor can then find the “through line of actions” – the character’s logical road map through the play from beginning to end.5 The actor then studies the actions and searches their own emotional memory for times when they have personally fulfilled such actions.6 They then look for their analogous emotional response and how they reacted physically to that response. Using sense memory, the actor can then recreate the physical response to the emotional memory without having to dredge up the specific memory. The physical response triggers the emotional response, and the actor truthfully fulfills the action. While there is no way the actor can actually “become” the character, he or she can transform on stage and inhabit the character wholly and truthfully within the context of the given circumstances that have been gathered both from the text and based upon the shared experiences of the audience. While the creation of an actual facsimile of an inhabitant of Merovingian Gaul may prove elusive, I believe Stanislavski’s “method of physical actions” for actors can help build a “character” that could have appeared on that “stage” and, in turn, open a dialogue that allows us to see other worlds in a different way.7 Before doing so, though, we must gather our given circumstances by examining the available sources, discovering what they had to offer, and reviewing their handling by past historians. In “Act I,” we will examine the primary sources and what information those sources offer to our given circumstances. “Act II” reviews how past historians handled the primary source material. “Act III” explores alternate methods used by historians to uncover various historical worlds. Finally, in “Act IV,” we will apply Stanislavski’s “method of physical actions” to the creation of a character from the Merovingian age.

ACT I: the primary problem I would like to make a brief comparison between the happy outcome of the Christians who have believed in the Holy Trinity and the disasters which have befallen those who have sought to destroy it. –Gregory of Tours8 I cannot tell how I can express in one word the labour on which I am embarking and how, in striving to succeed, my long struggle devours days already too short –Chronicle of Fredegar9 Let us set out the beginnings of the kings of the Franks and their origins and also the origins of the people and its deeds. –Liber Historiae Francorum10

Common quest 97 The primary source material on the reign of the Merovingians is generally found in three main texts: Gregory of Tours’ Historia Francorum, the Chronicle of Fredegar, and the Liber Historiae Francorum. Together, these works comprise an almost continuous account of three centuries, from the end of Roman rule through the rise of the Carolingians, and provide a colorful and brutal, if not entirely accurate, glimpse into the shadowy world of the “long-haired kings.” The above quotes from those sources display the differing viewpoints and attitudes of the writers capturing the major players of the Merovingian realm, but in each case, the everyday happenings of commoners are elusive, as palace intrigue and ruthless power plays provide more compelling drama. As observed by Sir Samuel Dill, “The common people of the Merovingian times were of small account in the eyes of the kings and their great officers and nobles,” though he adds that the Chronicle “yield[s] now and then some glimpses of the life of the common mass, its tragedies, its grinding poverty and diseases, its perils by road and river, its trading life in country towns.”11 Finding such glimpses amongst limited sources is problematic, and one must look past the “facts” that each presents and examine the time, place, circumstances, and attitudes of each of the writers. Like historians of today, each writer had an “angle” with which they approached the material, and by examining how similar events are presented, we gather insight into what each wished to accomplish, laying a foundation from which to reconstruct a foreign world. The most analyzed, referenced, quoted, and debated Merovingian source is Gregory of Tours. For many historians, Gregory is the beginning, middle, and end of source material in the study of the Merovingian period, as his work is by far the largest, most eloquent, and most literarily compelling. Walter Goffart notes that Gregory broke a silence of centuries “by being above all a contemporary historian”12 and “presented himself unblushingly as the authority, at first or second hand, for what he said.”13 From Edward Gibbon to Henri Pirenne to the historians of today, Gregory provided the main source for the explanation and analysis of the events that marked the end of Roman rule in Gaul, saw the rise of Clovis and the Merovingian kings, and continued up until his death in 594 during the reign of Childebert II. In comparison to other sources, by sheer volume, veracity, and loquaciousness, Gregory is generally acknowledged as the quintessential source for Merovingian Gaul, but we must show caution in placing sole faith in his account before examining the given circumstances of his life and work. Born in 539 in Arvernus (what is now Clermont-Ferrand, Puy-de-Dôme), Gregory came from a long line of wealthy Gallo-Roman landed gentry with senatorial ties dating back to the rule of the Roman Empire and members that included bishops and nobility with a tradition of service to the Catholic Church.14 Keeping with family custom, Gregory ascended to the position of Bishop of Tours in 573, which he held until his death, and with such a pedigree, it is not surprising that his perspective would radiate from an ecclesiastical center. Gregory’s allegiance is made clear in the opening of his Historia: Proposing as I do to describe the wars waged by kings against hostile peoples, by martyrs against the heathen and by Churches against the heretics,

98  Matthew Gardner I wish first of all to explain my own faith, so that whoever reads me may not doubt that I am a Catholic.15 Looking through a filter that reflects his intimacy with the Catholic Church and his view of the age as dark and brutal, Gregory recollects and idealizes the glory of Rome and its sense of order and institutions. Pirenne’s sentiments are apt to this argument, asserting that in barbarian Gaul “we must not forget the part played by the Church, within which Rome had taken refuge, and which, in imposing itself upon the Barbarians, was at the same time imposing Rome upon them.”16 Recounting Clovis’s defeat of Alaric at the Battle of Vouillé, Gregory reveals who he believed had God’s backing: “Clovis, who believed in the Trinity, crushed the heretics with divine help and enlarged his dominion to include all Gaul.”17 While chronicling heretics and heirs kept Gregory busy, commoners receive scant mention, and little is known of how events affected their daily lives. Our glimpse must be viewed through the thin spaces found between plunder, brutal deaths, and miracles: As he made ready to march into Clermont, [Theuderic] told his troops again and again they had his permission to bring home with them not only every single thing which they could steal in the region which they were about to attack but also the entire population.18 They were imprisoned in a poor man’s hut. Chramn was held down at full length on a bench and strangled with a piece of cloth. Then the hut was burnt down over their heads. So perished Chramn and his wife and daughters.19 Sometime later there was brought to Hospicius a woman who, on her own admission, was possessed of three devils. He laid his hand on her and blessed her, marking the sign of the Cross on her brow with consecrated oil. The devils were driven out, and the woman went away cured.20 These passages exemplify the commoner’s plight. The powers that be stole their belongings, herded them off in bondage, and used their homes as funeral pyres while “curing” them of possession and disease. Gregory enjoyed a literary knack for the dramatic, and his efforts provide a foundation from which to start, but the given circumstances of the common person are lacking and our stage remains bare, with our characters nothing more than vague sketches seeking further detail. In contrast to Gregory’s bold statement of faith in his preface, Fredegar offers a profound humbleness and challenges the reader to refute his honesty: Thus I am compelled, so far as my rusticity and ignorance permit, to hand on as briefly as possible whatever I have learned from the books of which I have spoken; and if any reader doubts me, he has only to turn to the same author to find that I have said nothing but the truth.21 Analysis of his pedigree and qualifications, though, proves problematic. Unlike Gregory’s identity, Fredegar’s is shadowy and elusive. The name “Fredegar” was

Common quest 99 Frankish but was not assigned to the work in question until the sixteenth century.22 The writer would have been a compiler of information, rather than an originator of thought, and, as anonymity was characteristic of chroniclers, any revelation of authorship would have been purely accidental.23 What is certain is that the Chronicle of Fredegar copied much from Gregory’s Historia Francorum, though Wallace-Hadrill asserts that “Fredegar is no mere copyist. Fredegar is always inserting material of his own, gathered from hearsay and what he has read.”24 The Chronicle covers a period from 584 to 682, though additional authors provided continuations running through 768.25 While the question of authorship is debatable, the Chronicle of Fredegar must be utilized to whatever extent possible. But what is deduced from this work? There is a noticeable lack of religious overtones in Fredegar’s Chronicle when compared to coverage of the same events by Gregory. Another difference, according to Walter A. Goffart, is that Fredegar chose to make his work solely a Frankish history, omitting anything written by Gregory that did not pertain to Frankish affairs.26 While such differences may prove Fredegar’s independence, regrettably, they do not add anything to Gregory or offer insight into the plight of commoners, though examples are mentioned in passing, just as in Gregory’s Historia. While more straightforward in presentation, the subject matter merely touches upon events that directly affected the general populace: In this year, Marseilles and other cities of Provence were devastated by plague; and in the same year the water of the Lake of Thun boiled and cooked shoals of fish.27 . . . and Herpo took vigorous measures to establish peace in his territory and to put down evil-doers. But he was killed in a rising of the inhabitants. . .28 In this year the Slavs (or Wends, as they are called) killed and robbed a great number of Frankish Merchants in Samo’s kingdom.29 Such examples illustrate how plague and a scarcity of food affected Provence and how the common population could inflict death as well as experience it. Though these examples do not yet give us a concrete sense of their daily lives, we are starting to build the given circumstances of our characters through the events that affected them, which will eventually help to give them depth and logical physical actions providing form and life. Our last primary source, the Liber Historiae Francorum, is the product of an anonymous chronicler who, according to Bernard S. Bachrach, “was very probably a functionary of some kind at the court of King Theuderic III from the early 670’s”30 and “was well-educated by the standards of his time in Gaul and a man who, for while at least, was close to the center of political power in Neustria.”31 While Richard A. Gerberding does not speculate on the author’s given circumstances, he notes that “we are thankful (to the author) for much of what we know about the goings-on in the Frankish kingdoms in the late seventh and early eighth centuries.”32 Though this short work was a “best seller” during its time and was more widely read and frequently copied than either Gregory’s Historia or Fredegar’s

100  Matthew Gardner Chronicle,33 its economy of words and straightforward language provide nothing more than the entrances and exits of kings, nobles, and churchmen on their way to carouse, intrigue, kill, or be killed. Again, our glimpses of the common folk are murky: You lay waste to the fields, despoil the meadows, cut the vines, and chop down the olive trees. . .34 Theudebert reached the Danes, fought against them, defeated them with a great deal of slaughter, and killed their king. Theudebert then took the spoils from the Danes and restored them to the people in his territory.35 For it was enacted that each owner of private property should pay one amphora of wine for each arpent of land. They also imposed this tax on the remainder of land tenures and on everything of value including slaves. The people, indeed, were greatly oppressed and cried out to the Lord.36 Property is destroyed, stolen, returned, and heavily taxed. Not surprisingly, the plight of the common folk is the same in all three of the examined primary sources. Brutal existences meet with death and destruction at the hands of the wealthy and mighty, as nameless, faceless beings eking out meager livings are constant fodder for the kings, bishops, and nobles who proclaim God as an ally. Our image of the everyday person is still vague, but we again find situations that our common folk faced on a day-to-day basis, and these situations provide valuable clues that inform their given circumstances. Each and every clue is vitally important and will help flesh out and reconstruct our characters for presentation on the historical stage, but before we do so, we must examine our secondary sources and explore their handling of the primary source material.

ACT II: a secondary issue The court of the Merovingians was a brothel . . . drunkenness seems to have been the usual condition of all. Women got their lovers to murder their husbands. Everybody could be purchased for gold; and all this without distinction of race, for the Romans were as bad as the Germans. –Henri Pirenne37

Henri Pirenne’s quote clearly does not paint the Merovingians in an attractive light. The secondary sources that address the Merovingian era tend to draw solely upon the accounts of Gregory of Tours, the Chronicle of Fredegar, and the Liber Historiae Francorum and recount the brutality and decadence that many testify to as the dynasty’s defining legacy. As Patrick J. Geary points out, many historians prefer to essentially skip the Merovingian period and go straight from the glory of Rome to the rise of the Carolingians and the crowning of Charlemagne.38 The Merovingian reign was indeed brutal and, if one is to take the side of Pirenne, decadent, but was it any more brutal or decadent than the Roman reigns of Nero

Common quest 101 or Caligula or any number of rulers from late antiquity? As we already know, the lack of sources allows for a great deal of conjecture, and as Peter Lasko aptly states regarding the study of the Franks, “The use of the term ‘Dark Ages’ should be restricted to its basic meaning: to describe a period in which the sources of history are often dark indeed.”39 As we have seen, the sources focused on “big” events and notable persons. In the world of the Merovingians, the events were battles, murder, and mayhem and the persons mostly kings, nobles, and churchmen, whether victor or victim. In discussing Gregory’s Historia, Goffart astutely points out that “the horrors and crimes found in (Gregory’s) Histories can be multiplied outside Merovingian times and are all too easily duplicated in any fifteen year period of newspaper reading in the twentieth century.”40 Sir Samuel Dill sees hope in the sources, as “carefully examined, they provide now and then some glimpses of the life of the common mass.”41 How the secondary sources handled the primary source material will help us define the parameters of our given circumstances and help find these glimpses of life. Reviewing them will also demonstrate the different perspectives historians embraced and will help inform our approach to creating our Merovingian character. Published between 1776 and 1789, Edward Gibbon’s epic tome The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is arguably the most famous work on the subject. While the text covers a vast period of time and subject matter, chapter XXXVIII addresses the reign of Clovis and the establishment of the Merovingians. Drawing heavily upon Gregory of Tours as a source, it is not surprising that Gibbon’s discussion of commoners is minimal, and, when mentioned, their absolute servility to the Merovingian kings is made clear: The mansion of the long-haired kings was surrounded with convenient yards and stables . . . the various trades, the labours of agriculture, and even the arts of hunting and fishing, were exercised by servile hands for the emolument of the sovereign. . .42 An absolute power of life and death was exercised by these lords.43 A giant in the field of Roman study, Gibbon waxes eloquently on the state of affairs as he sees them in Merovingian Gaul. He can be commended for breaking new ground and setting the standard for the study of history, but his regurgitation of the same sorts of death, destruction, and “decline” as found in our primary sources leaves us no closer to our goal of uncovering the given circumstances and character seeds of the common person. In Roman Society in Gaul, published in 1926, Sir Samuel Dill devoted an entire chapter to “The Life of the Common People in the Merovingian Age.”44 Dill believed that historians could indeed glean useful information from the Merovingian sources. Dill assures us that “an observant eye may catch here and there glimpses of their condition in the history of Gregory of Tours.”45 Upon further analysis, though, his rosy outlook loses a bit of its luster. In poetic fashion, Dill spins a tale of idyllic settings hidden amidst the woods by the sides of roads traveled by armies and merchants: “We may see the harvest

102  Matthew Gardner field in Auvergne thronged with reapers in the hot noontide, who are supplied with beer by angelic hands,”46 or “we may see S. Remi47 making the round of one of his estates of his see, and cheering the harvesters with drink.”48 Additionally, he elaborates on the sad state of affairs for the common folk, discussing famine, death, and disease. While the picture Dill paints is one where the harvester may be working in his fields and enjoying drink one day and be cut down by a soldier, the plague, or starvation the next, there is no real solidity to the image that we see before us. Try as he might, his imagination and efforts still leave us with vague characters trying to find their corporeal form. As we have already seen, Henri Pirenne, in his posthumously published Mohammed and Charlemagne, pulls no punches in stating his disdain for the Merovingian line. Drafted in the 1930s, Pirenne has little use for anything of Germanic origins, and with Europe still suffering the fallout from The Great War, along with the advent of the rise of Nazi Germany in 1933, it is fairly easy to see how such a biased slant might develop. According to him, the Merovingians are decadent, morally bankrupt absolutists who “once installed in ‘Romania,’ did not evolve an original art”49 and whose contribution to the life of the intellect during this time “was nil.”50 The only saving grace for the continued Roman culture was the Church: The prestige of the (Merovingian) dynasty was very great, and the only explanation of this prestige is to be found in the Church, for it cannot be explained by any kind of Germanic sentiment.51 Drawing heavily on Gregory of Tours, the concentration for Pirenne is on the “parade of kings,” and there is little speculation on the common people. What comes off as a screed against anything considered “Germanic culture” reveals that Pirenne’s gaze is partially fixed looking back at the Roman past and partially fixed looking at the Carolingian future. The Merovingians, be they kings, nobles, churchmen, or commoners, are characters that have no role in Pirenne’s world. In his 1971 book The Kingdom of the Franks, Peter Lasko takes on the Merovingians from a much different angle. Relying on archaeological finds, architectural works, and art samples, Lasko takes a broad approach to the problem: What light it has been possible to shed on [the “Dark Ages”] is the result of bringing to bear on its problems all the disciplines of the modern historian – an intensive study, both textual and interpretive, of the scanty literary remains, the study of archaeology, art-history, numismatics and the study of place-names and linguistics.52 Such finds as rings, Roman fibulae, buckles, and coins from the grave of Childeric, father of Clovis, found near the Belgian city of Tournai in 165353 give us an idea of the wealth and power of the great Frankish king.54 As for architecture, Lasko concedes that “of the architecture of the period, next to nothing survives above ground although we know that it must, of course, have existed.”55

Common quest 103 Aristocratic tombs from Cologne and St. Denis provide further examples of beautiful brooches, pendants, and glass vessels, but such items would be for the graves and tombs of the wealthy. Contrary to Pirenne, Lasko’s work shows that the Germanic peoples of Frankish Gaul were not artistically bankrupt, and the wealth and power attributed to them by such artifacts reveal that “in the lands east and west of the Rhine, the foundations were laid on which Charlemagne was able to build.”56 Though Lasko offers a more complex, nuanced people than Pirenne, our common characters were not costumed with items found in the graves and tombs of kings and nobles. Of the examined secondary sources, the one that comes closest to painting a three-dimensional picture of the common people of the Merovingian era is Before France and Germany: The Creation and Transformation of the Merovingian World by Patrick J. Geary. After setting up the status of the Roman west in the fifth century and covering the movement of the “Barbarians” into the west, he spends a good deal of time examining the people, economy, society, households, and villages in the time of Clovis. Utilizing a host of secondary sources, Geary elucidates the intricacy of the emergence of the Merovingians and reveals the complexity of a society that he feels has been misunderstood and misconstrued. He notes that the “population of Clovis’ kingdom was complex and heterogeneous in its social, cultural, and economic traditions.”57 This mainly agrarian society was deeply rooted in the nature of its economic system, which was characterized by the monopoly of landowning in the hands of a small, extraordinarily wealthy elite, with the vast majority of the population, slave and free alike, destitute and often in desperate straits.58 People lived in concentrated villages, though “peasants and herdsmen might travel a considerable distance to their fields.”59 The village was also the religious center, and religion itself was intensely individual and local.60 Local justice was meted out in the village, and, eventually, an established village would become an important fiscal unit.61 Though not as florally eloquent as Sir Samuel Dill, Geary gives solidity and depth to our characters through realistic given circumstances. While his world offers little chance of carefree landowners serving beer to harvesters in the fields, it begins to set a practical stage for our characters to inhabit and explore. We have gleaned what we can from primary and secondary sources and have uncovered some of the given circumstances of the Merovingian common person from which we will construct our character. It is not enough, though. To create a fully rounded, three-dimensional character, we must dig much deeper. But how do we accomplish this? As shown, our primary and secondary sources are limited in what they reveal. We need to approach our subject differently, extracting further meaning from our sources and filling the wide gaps between the minimal given circumstances we have uncovered. Per Lasko, we need to look at the problem as the Franks did: “It is how they solved their problems, with what creative ingenuity they set about their task, that gives us an insight into their

104  Matthew Gardner civilization.”62 Exploring how other historians employed such creative ingenuity will be our next approach.

ACT III: alternative angles Creating our three-dimensional Merovingian character necessitates viewing history from a new angle, considering all the possibilities. Utilizing any and all tools available, the historian may provide new insights and open new discussions that will, in turn, promote more study and more discussion. Past historical works across many areas of discipline prove that there are varied and creative ways to view source material. In How Race is Made: Slavery, Segregation, and the Senses, Mark M. Smith examines racial bias in the American South by taking into account not only how the sense of sight informs one’s worldview but also how touch, taste, hearing, and smell create a sensory experience that constitutes the building blocks of how we see other people and the world around us. Jan Vansina takes the reader into the realm of “collective imagination” and the idea of society working as a whole in How Societies are Born: Governance in West Central Africa Before 1600. He speculates on how the collective minds of a society affected economic and structural growth and how such growth produced the evolution of the resulting systems of governance. Laura Lee Downs delves into the psychology of the historical mind in the chapter “Gender and History in a Post-Structuralist World” in her book Writing Gender History. Citing the 1669 case of Anna Ebeler, who was charged with murdering the woman she worked for, Downs explains how Lyndal Roper’s analysis “peers into the psychological dynamic that might have arisen between the two women.”63 Not only is the use of psychology of interest in Downs’ argument, but she also speculates on how historical figures such as Anna Ebeler or the woman she was accused of murdering may have actually felt. Creating a three-dimensional world from the available sources and depicting life as it may have been in the Middle Ages from a scholarly standpoint, Philip Ziegler and John Hatcher created drama with fictional accounts of characters and situations they believe may have been probable and likely during the time of the Black Death. In The Black Death (1969), Ziegler devotes chapter thirteen, “The Plague in a Medieval Village,” to the fictional village of Blakwater and its neighboring village Preston Stautney. Based on the given circumstances gleaned from the available sources, Ziegler sought to piece together the information and breathe life into the data and statistics. He creates believable characters and conveys the tension and fear that may have been felt in a typical English village as the Black Death approached and struck. Nearly forty years later, in The Black Death: A Personal History (2008), John Hatcher takes Ziegler’s concept and dedicates an entire book to the fictionalized account of real-life Walsham le Willows in west Suffolk during the Black Death. Hatcher, like Ziegler, creates three-dimensional characters utilizing real-life people pulled from manorial court records.

Common quest 105 Sociology and psychology have created inroads into the study of history, providing the opportunity to mine psychological and emotional data from unknown persons from the past and drawing conclusions utilizing alternative disciplines. These approaches create exciting and dynamic possibilities for the future of historical research, but we must not stop there. Alternative means call for further exploration, and there may be additional ways to unlock the imagination when studying and recreating the past. As Richard A. Gerberding aptly states, “This dimly lit period often demands its own peculiar methods.”64 We will now explore the study of history utilizing acting techniques drawn from Stanislavski and his “method of physical actions” for actors to help uncover our Merovingian commoner  – a method that many may find extremely peculiar, though, upon examination, it draws heavily on such grounded work as sociology, psychology, and other social sciences and helps expose the vital human attributes that will build our historical character.

ACT IV: creating a character All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women are merely players. –William Shakespeare65

Actors are called upon to take words from a page, build characters, inhabit those characters, and, through this inhabitance, bring other worlds to life on the stage. The best actors are able to transform and take the audience to places they have never been, from the mundane to the exotic. The historian is dedicated to pursuing similar goals. We seek available tools to uncover the unknown or give clarity to the known, and we aspire to uncover the mysteries surrounding historical figures and events and reveal worlds in a new light. So far, we have sought the elusive world of the common person of the Merovingian era using conventional historical tools. Divergently, we now veer from convention toward a new path, attempting to uncover that world by employing Stanislavski’s “method of physical actions,” an alternative tool that will provide solidity and substance to our characters and take the “audience” on a journey somewhere new. As stated, the basis of Stanislavski’s system is determining a character’s given circumstances within a play and examining their “through line of actions.” The actor then identifies and examines their own emotional memory, explores their analogous emotional response to those circumstances and actions, and explores and notes how they reacted physically to that response. While historians cannot possibly know exactly what it would be like to live in a particular era, it is still possible for them to accurately define the given circumstances under which historical persons lived. Once those given circumstances have been defined, it may then be possible to determine a person’s actions or reactions within those given circumstances. Though shared experiences may differ across space and time, core emotions, reactions, and visceral feelings have not changed over that same space and time. One can understand the joy, pain, or fear felt by an individual presented

106  Matthew Gardner in a context that is foreign to a contemporary person’s normal understanding. Consequently, it is possible for the historian to gather all relevant information based on the given circumstances and assign an analogous response from their emotional memory to the action or emotion that has been gleaned from research of a historical person. For example, we have all experienced envy or felt threatened at some point, and if one imagines those times and identifies how they reacted physically, one can find the corresponding sense memory. From those seeds, the historian can follow a logical through line of actions for each character. In this way, Stanislavski’s system may allow the historian to make such a world more accessible and historical figures more three-dimensional and “human.” We may never be able to replicate historical time and place precisely, but emotions and emotional responses transcend place, time, language, and religion. The only things that change are the given circumstances and the stimuli that cause those emotions and reactions. With that in mind, our next step is to put this concept to practical use. Utilizing an episode found in two of our three primary sources, we will construct a scenario and attempt to bring a Merovingian character to life. Earlier, Gregory of Tours introduced us to Chramn, son of Clothar I, grandson of Clovis, who was burned to death along with his wife and children in a poor man’s hut. Chramn was killed by his father after his betrayal during one of the many civil wars that plagued the Merovingians after the death of Clovis. For this exercise, we are not interested in the death of Chramn or his family. We are interested in the poor man whose hut was used for Chramn’s funeral pyre. Let us take a look at this poor man’s given circumstances (Figure 5.1):

Figure 5.1  Circumstance diagram of the ‘poor man.’

Taking these scant given circumstances and an ample amount of liberties, we can create a character, “Adalbert,” based on what we know of the period: Adalbert was a Frankish metal worker in Nantes in western Neustria whose craft was making belt buckles for the local aristocracy. He made a good living, but his family was killed and his home and tools destroyed during one of the many civil wars following the death of Clovis. Injuries sustained during the attack left him unable to practice his craft. Seeking work and alms, he made his way to the coast of Brittany. There he found an abandoned hut for shelter and was able to eke out a meager sustenance from the sea and surrounding forests.

Common quest 107 One cold, overcast, early winter day while making gruel from wild grains and herbs, he heard a thundering noise. Looking out of the hole cut in the side of the hut that acted as a window, he saw a group of soldiers ride up. With them were a man, a woman, and some young girls, all of whom were bound. One soldier dismounted and marched to the door of Adalbert’s hut. Adalbert tried desperately to hide, but there was nowhere to go. The soldier broke the door down and dragged him out of the hut. Adalbert scrambled to his feet and ran to some nearby brush to get away, but no soldier followed him. Instead, the soldiers took the man, woman, and girls into the hut, and after a few minutes of commotion, the soldiers came out. To his horror, they then set fire to his hut with the man, woman, and girls still inside. The dry wood and straw of the hut burned quickly, and the hut was soon engulfed in flames. The agonizing screams of the man and the women were unbearable and rekindled the nightmare of his family being murdered. The soldiers watched and laughed while one man who was older than the rest looked on solemnly. After what seemed like an eternity, the screams stopped and the fire waned. The soldiers remounted their horses and, upon the older man’s command, galloped away. Adalbert stood in the cold air in shock. Once again, his home and everything he owned was gone. All he had was the shirt on his back. Cold, hungry, desperately afraid the soldiers would come back for him, and his leg injured from when he was dragged out of his hut, Adalbert gathered himself and went to his knees in prayer. God must be angry with him for his sins. He had tried to make amends, but clearly he had failed. He cried and prayed for forgiveness, asking for God’s help. Done praying, he rose and began making his way to the nearby monastery, where he would ask for shelter and a meal, and where, he hoped, God would reveal to him where he should go next. This is a work of pure fiction, and the details presented may be proven erroneous on deeper investigation, but the point of this exercise is to take available information, derive from it the given circumstances, and attempt to create threedimensional characters and three-dimensional history. When one remembers instances when they have felt terror or helplessness or hunger, then one is able to feel how an historical person may have felt, though in completely different circumstances than their own. This can help us understand better how people of history behaved and/or reacted and provide a more in-depth glimpse into their world. Stanislavski’s system, while excellent training for actors, may never become a driving force in the study of history, but along with such tools as the study of senses, collective imagination, and psychology, it may prove to be invaluable in the approach to historical research and may open doors and add insights that may have previously been unlikely, if not impossible.

Epilogue In concluding our search for the common people in the Merovingian age, we must ask the question, have we indeed found them? As we have seen, finding commoners in the history of late antiquity and the Middle Ages is a monumental task.

108  Matthew Gardner Looking at sources in new and fresh ways is a challenge that historians must face with creativity and an open mind. As the study of history moves forward, it is the duty of the historian to take into account new disciplines and techniques. Can we use Stanislavski’s acting techniques to help us better understand history on a personal and visceral level? It is certainly an option for the historian to explore. Such exploration will spark thought, initiate dialogue, and further exhaust possibilities. By implementing theories from disciplines such as psychology, sociology, the arts, and any others one can think of, we open the door to discussion, and through such discussion, we can find newer, even more interesting ways to approach the study of history. The sky really is the limit, and all potential theories should be examined until their possible usefulness is exhausted. Ultimately, our short story of Adalbert barely touches the surface of what life might have been like for the common person of the Merovingian Age. To provide a more in-depth study would take many more pages than allowed here. Liberties were taken, situations fabricated, and actions created, but we might be able to take away from such an exercise what our poor Adalbert may have felt as he watched his hut burn, with the smell of wood and flesh, and saw his world violently altered. While this approach to the source material may be unique and unusual, is it really that much different than the work of Gregory of Tours? He utilized the sources available, gathered the relevant information, and provided action and, in many cases, dialogue that he was certainly not privy to, yet he is still studied and referenced after all these years. The bottom line is that there really is no “right” and “wrong,” only possibilities that are ripe for exploration. Who knows, a new theory presented by an historian based upon such techniques may spark another historian’s imagination. They, in turn, may embark on a course of study that sparks the imagination of others, and so on and so on. In this information age, with its ever-changing technology, it would seem that such possibilities would be right at home.

Notes 1 Sir Samuel Dill, Roman Society in Gaul in the Merovingian Age (London: Macmillan, 1926), 235. 2 Henri Pirenne, Mohammed and Charlemagne (New York: Meridian Books, 1957), 42. 3 Ibid., 61. 4 Sonia Moore, The Stanislavski System: The Professional Training of an Actor (New York: Penguin Books, 1960), 26. 5 Ibid., 50. 6 Ibid., 41. 7 Ibid., 17. 8 Gregory of Tours, The History of the Franks, trans. Lewis Thorpe (London, England: Penguin Books, 1974), 161. 9 Chronicle of Fredegar, trans. J. M. Wallace-Hadrill (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1981), 1. 10 Liber Historiae Francorum, ed. and trans. Bernard S. Bachrach (Lawrence, KS: Coronado Press, 1973), 23. 11 Dill, Roman Society in Gaul, 235.

Common quest 109 12 Walter Goffart, The Narrators of Barbarian History (A.D. 550–800) (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987), 227. 13 Ibid., 150. 14 Gregory of Tours, The History of the Franks, 7. 15 Ibid., 67. 16 Pirenne, Mohammed and Charlemagne, 142. 17 Gregory of Tours, The History of the Franks, 161. 18 Ibid., 171. 19 Ibid., 216. 20 Ibid., 336. 21 Chronicle of Fredegar, 2. 22 Ibid., xv. 23 Ibid., xiv. 24 Ibid., xi. 25 Ibid., xiii. 26 Goffart, The Narrators of Barbarian History, 122. 27 Chronicle of Fredegar, 12. 28 Ibid., 36. 29 Ibid., 56. 30 Liber Historiae Francorum, 21. 31 Ibid., 9. 32 Richard Gerberding, The Rise of the Carolingians and the Liber Historiae Francorum (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1987), 1. 33 Ibid., 3. 34 Liber Historiae Francorum, 48. 35 Ibid., 57. 36 Ibid., 85. 37 Pirenne, Mohammed and Charlemagne, 43. 38 Patrick J. Geary, Before France and Germany: The Creation and Transformation of the Merovingian World (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1988), ix. 39 Peter Lasko, The Kingdom of the Franks: North-West Europe Before Charlemagne (London: Thames & Hudson, 1971), 11. 40 Goffart, The Narrators of Barbarian History, 231. 41 Dill, Roman Society in Gaul, 235. 42 Edward Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (New York: Fred De Fau & Co., 1907), vol. VI, Ch. XXXVIII, 250. 43 Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, vol. VI, Ch. XXXVIII, 253. 44 Dill, Roman Society in Gaul, 235. 45 Ibid. 46 Ibid., 249. 47 St. Remigius, Bishop of Rheims b. 437 – d. 533. 48 Dill, Roman Society in Gaul, 249. 49 Pirenne, Mohammed and Charlemagne, 131. 50 Ibid., 123. 51 Ibid., 188. 52 Lasko, The Kingdom of the Franks, 11. 53 Ibid., 25. 54 Ibid., 27–32. 55 Ibid., 36. 56 Ibid., 11. 57 Geary, Before France and Germany, 95. 58 Ibid., 96. 59 Ibid., 108.

110  Matthew Gardner Ibid. Ibid., 109. Lasko, The Kingdom of the Franks, 12. Laura Lee Downs, “Gender and History in a Post-Postructuralist World,” in Writing Gender History (New York, NY: Bloomsbury, 2010), 177. 64 Gerberding, The Rise of the Carolingians, 3. 65 William Shakespeare, As You Like It, in William Shakespeare: The Complete Works (Avenel, NJ: Gramercy Books, 1993), 2.7, 239. 60 61 62 63

Bibliography Primary sources Bachrach, Bernard S. ed. and trans. Liber Historiae Francorum. Lawrence, Kansas: Coronado Press, Lawrence, 1973. Gregory of Tours. The History of the Franks. Translated by Lewis Thorpe. London, England: Penguin Books, 1974. Wallace-Hadrill, J. M., trans. The Fourth Book of the Chronicle of Fredegar, with its Continuations. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press Publishers, 1981.

Secondary sources Dill, Sir Samuel. Roman Society in Gaul in the Merovingian Age. London, England: Macmillan, 1926. Downs, Laura Lee. “Gender and History in a Post-Postructuralist World.” In Writing Gender History. New York, NY: Bloomsbury Academic, 2010. Geary, Patrick J. Before France and Germany: The Creation and Transformation of the Merovingian World. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1988. Gerberding, Richard. The Rise of the Carolingians and the Liber Historiae Francorum. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987. Gibbon, Edward. Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Edited by M. A. J. B. Bury. New York: Fred De Fau & Company, 1907. Goffart, Walter. The Narrators of Barbarian History (A.D. 550–800). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988. Hatcher, John. The Black Death: A Personal History. Philadelphia, PA: Da Capo Press, 2008. Lasko, Peter. The Kingdom of the Franks: North-West Europe Before Charlemagne. London: Thames & Hudson, 1971. Moore, Sonia. The Stanislavski System: The Professional Training of an Actor. New York: Penguin Books, 1960. Pirenne, Henri. Mohammed and Charlemagne. New York: Meridian Books, 1957. Shakespeare, William. As You Like It. In William Shakespeare: The Complete Works. Avenel, New Jersey: Gramercy Books, 1993. Smith, Mark M. How Race is Made: Slavery, Segregation, and the Senses. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2006. Vansina, Jan. How Societies are Born: Governance in West Central Africa Before 1600. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2004. Ziegler, Philip. The Black Death. New York: HarperPerennial, 2009.

Section 3

Altered and hostile environments Chapters in this section address human endeavors to map, manipulate, and maintain natural spaces. They integrate environmental history with narratives of imperial and racial knowledge production, resource management, and consumer capitalism. The diversity of approaches to telling environmental histories should not surprise anyone given the explosion of new articles and monographs in environmental history in recent years and the current interest in historicizing the “Anthropocene.” But these chapters move beyond arguments of chronology or semantics, where much of the discussion of this new geophysical era seem to reside. Instead, they offer new arguments about how humanity’s interaction with the physical environment can be understood as an extension of politics and culture. Human endeavors to manage and manipulate the natural world feature prominently in these chapters. Will Wright suggests that “geophysical agency” can offer historians a more precise conceptual term with which to interpret human interaction with the environment. This is to say, humanity acts upon the world as “something akin to a geophysical force of nature.” Each of these chapters shows that this human geophysical force arose out of a complex interaction of capital, technological know-how, reliance on fossil fuels, and a new mentality that the planet can (and should) be reengineered to suit political, social, and cultural needs. In other words, human geophysical agency is a product of specific politics and cultures in a given time and place. These chapters call on environmental historians to look anew at the ways in which ‘natural’ spaces are bounded and to reconsider the imaginaries or mental frameworks with which people claim to understand their environments. Mark Boxell’s examination of the politics of noise pollution in Rocky Mountain National Park reveals the contradictions inherent in the labels of ‘developed’ and ‘wild’ spaces. Sarah Gilkerson asks of readers yet a more difficult challenge. Looking at the historiography of the Sahara Desert and synthesizing it with Fernand Braudel’s now classic examination of the Mediterranean, Gilkerson attempts to reconceptualize how environmental historians think about deserts. They are not borders or barriers to exchange, but a protector of their nomadic inhabitants and the site of a complex network of trade and migration route, connecting regions as a porous borderland.

112  Altered and hostile environments Finally, these chapters reveal ways in which natural spaces help to solidify certain identities and imaginaries of the natural world while also disrupting older ones – particularly environmental imaginaries born from colonization. Wright shows that massive earthworks projects helped to justify New Deal politics. Boxell argues that defense of quiet (from certain kinds of noise pollution), touristfriendly national parks helped to create, paradoxically, both a new automotive tourist culture in the United States and a political movement for combating climate change. And Gilkerson reveals that centuries of Eurocentric ideas about deserts and desert peoples have obscured our understanding of the historical vibrancy of deserts as places of connection, not isolation. There are limits to human knowledge of the natural world, and contrasting colonial and indigenous ways of seeing the desert illustrates this point. In sum, these chapters do not reveal a clear direction or purpose to human geophysical agency, but instead show constant renegotiation between humanity’s ability to affect the world and the cultural frameworks with which we try (and fail) to understand it.

6 Geophysical agency in the Anthropocene Engineering a road and river to Rocky Mountain National Park Will Wright Credit: Originally published as Will Wright, “Geophysical Agency in the Anthropocene: Engineering a Road and River to Rocky Mountain National Park,” Environmental History 22 (October 2017): 668–95. On Saturday afternoon, May 28, 1938, some five hundred Coloradans gathered at the mouth of the Big Thompson Canyon in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains to celebrate the formal dedication of US Highway 34. The modern road traced a ribbon of asphalt through this narrow gorge alongside the Big Thompson River from the low-lying town of Loveland to the high-country reserve of Rocky Mountain National Park. Around 3 p.m., throngs of citizens and dignitaries congregated in front of a raised platform near the banks of the river. On the stage, engineer Charles Vail, chief designer of the road project, and Governor Teller Ammons offered an opening address and asked their audience to consider how this “engineering dream” would draw ever-increasing tourist traffic. Afterward, they led the crowd to a specially constructed gate at the craggy walls of the canyon entrance to close the ceremony. As mountains loomed overhead, Vail and Ammons applied a three-foot-long key to an equally oversized padlock, suggesting their immense powers to unlock this route for future automobile travel. “When we consider that it took nature thousands of years, maybe hundreds of thousands, to make this beautiful can[y]on,” Governor Ammons boasted, “we can realize that we are making progress when we see this fine highway thru the can[y]on.”1 Ammons’ speech during the dedication ceremony reveals a stark judgment. He compared the engineering powers of technocrats and construction laborers, who had erected a paved road within the canyon over mere years, to the erosive powers of flowing water, which had formed the canyon itself over millennia. From the end of the last Ice Age – the final glaciation period of the Pleistocene epoch – to the present, the Big Thompson River had carved and sculpted its course through the eastern slopes of the Rockies. From 1932 to 1938, however, Vail and the Colorado State Highway Department oversaw road-building crews as they chiseled through layers of granite, gneiss, and other geologic formations to construct the modern highway. Both entities were forces of nature in the governor’s mind, and both moved enormous amounts of rock and rubble in the process. By equating these road architects with river effects, Ammons was in essence bragging about a

114  Will Wright

Figure 6.1 The 1938 dedication ceremony for the Big Thompson Canyon highway, with Governor Teller Ammons (second from right with key) and engineer Charles Vail (far right). Credit: Fort Collins Express-Courier, May 29, 1938. Copyright of Fort Collins Coloradoan. Used with permission.

nascent form of human geophysical agency that we might today identify with the concept of the Anthropocene.2 Capturing the idea that humans have become one of the great forces of nature, Nobel laureate and atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen proposed that the earth had entered into a new geologic epoch – the Anthropocene – in a 2000 newsletter for the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme.3 The “Great Acceleration” of the Anthropocene demarcated a stage during which both human enterprises and global biogeochemical changes rapidly escalated.4 Pivoting around World War II, technological breakthroughs merged with free market–oriented institutions to facilitate this exponential outburst. Socioeconomic trends – like primary energy use, total human population, and motor vehicle numbers – have quickly risen in lockstep with Earth system trends – such as atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, flood frequency and intensity, and deforestation.5 After analyzing global data sets, climate scientist Will Steffen and his colleagues observed a critical moment: “In little over two generations – or a single lifetime – humanity

Geophysical agency in the Anthropocene 115 (or until very recently a small fraction of it) has become a planetary-scale geological force.”6 The Anthropocene’s Great Acceleration complicates how environmental humanists understand historical agency – namely, that humans must henceforth be understood as geophysical agents. Earth system science can offer some guidance in negotiating this novel intellectual terrain. For example, human-induced earthmoving accelerated over the last half of the twentieth century with the construction of highways and other types of physical infrastructure, leaving behind artifacts that have provided scientists with one plausible geologic boundary for the Anthropocene. Stratigrapher Jan Zalasiewicz and other scholars argue that the global spread of modern building practices and technologies, principally defined by layers upon layers of concrete and asphalt, could remain imprinted on the lithosphere for millennia to come.7 Indeed, landscape modifications for human uses have become so intensive and widespread that geographer Erle Ellis and his co-authors insist that more terrestrial “anthromes” now exist on the planet than biomes.8 Primarily through industrial agriculture, mine quarrying, and – most important to this chapter – road-building, Earth system scientists estimate that human undertakings during the Great Acceleration have removed, relocated, or repurposed more of the earth’s crust than all other material forces.9 Criticisms of the Anthropocene point out that not all humans have reached this earthmoving status. The cultural anthropologist Alf Hornborg contends that a different name, the “Technocene,” better acknowledges how radically variable powers to command modern technologies have inscribed social inequities across the planet. Only a small portion of the world’s people, Hornborg stresses, have possessed the industrial machines that have wrought most global changes.10 From a Marxist perspective, human ecologist Andreas Malm observes how uneven class differences have been overshadowed by an undifferentiated humanity. Malm asserts that a more fitting label could be the “Capitalocene,” assigning culpability for planetary distress to neoliberal capitalism.11 The environmental historian Timothy LeCain, from a neo-materialist stance, takes issue with the blatant anthropocentrism of the Anthropocene concept, arguing that it tends to reinforce the sharp modernist distinctions between humans and nature, which in many ways have justified modern environmental destruction. LeCain argues that a more reasonable term might be the “Carbocene,” as it would better recognize the powerful role of burning hydrocarbon-based fossil fuels, whose consequences humans rarely comprehended, much less fully controlled.12 All these critiques offer important perspectives on the problem of understanding the sources of Earth system transformations, yet neither coal nor capital nor artifice nor anthropos alone resulted in the advent of modern humans as mass earthmovers. While none of these authors suggests a mono-causal explanation for the Anthropocene, the terms each of them favors nonetheless tend to shift agency from humans to another of the key forces at hand: technology, capitalism, or hydrocarbons. One way in which we might ensure a more systematic historical approach, similar to Earth system dynamics, is to frame humans as earthmovers, focusing on the complex interactions of all these factors as they played out in a specific

116  Will Wright place and time.13 Upon closer examination, the origins of certain geological transformations appear to begin slightly earlier than the standard Great Acceleration chronology. During the 1930s highway construction in Colorado’s Big Thompson Canyon, geophysical agency emerged from the entanglement of concentrated capital, technological machinery, fossil fuels, human labor, and a certain engineering mentality. Highway planners conceived of this New Deal roadway project both as a means to employ Americans during the Great Depression and a way to

Figure 6.2 Map of Big Thompson River and US Highway 34 in relation to the state of Colorado and the world. Credit: Chrissy Esposito and Sophia Linn, Geospatial Centroid, Colorado State University.

Geophysical agency in the Anthropocene 117 encourage automobile tourism through the convenience of modern transportation infrastructure. These New Deal work relief programs relied on massive injections of federal monies, which assisted in generating automobile-oriented landscapes. By modifying the existing geological materials within the gorge, road-building crews not only erected a substantial thoroughfare between the canyon walls, but, to this end, they also altered the form and function of the Big Thompson River. To accomplish this feat, highway engineers used a hydrocarbon energy regime in order to augment the biophysical corporeality of construction labor. Workers’ bodies merged almost seamlessly with the fossil fuel–driven mechanical power of shovelers, bulldozers, and jackhammers, enabling them to become something akin to a geophysical force of nature.14

The new deal and nature In a 1932 issue of Colorado Highways, Frederic Everett, the president of the American Association of State Highway Officials, emphasized the reciprocity between public roads and private cars. “Every dollar spent in road betterment makes the car worth more,” Everett wrote. “The automobile industry is the largest industry, employing, in one way or another, one-tenth of the nation’s workmen. It is large because it serves a public demand and because the United States is building roads.”15 In a similar piece, the leader of the American Road Builders’ Association, W.R. Smith, advised that the profusion “of public money must be maintained at proper working efficiency . . . to reduce the cost of transportation as well as to facilitate the speed and comfort of travel.”16 Like many state engineering magazines, Colorado Highways lobbied the national administration for increased financial support during the global economic downturn of the 1930s in order to construct new highways or renovate existing ones. As these publicists believed, the viability of engineering roads would only expand with further capital investment, laying the critical groundwork for the Great Acceleration to come.17 In the midst of the Great Depression, the United States government looked for ways to make these calls to action a reality and to put Americans back to work. In 1933, when recently elected President Franklin Roosevelt stepped into office, one-quarter of the entire American workforce  – some thirteen million laborers – was jobless, and another quarter was seriously underemployed. Additionally, General Motors executives and other corporate elites lobbied federal policymakers to prime the economic pump with federal subsidies instead of social welfare spending. Without government intervention, Interior Secretary Harold Ickes worried that petroleum overproduction would tumble out of balance with industry demand, hurling “more and yet more oil upon an already glutted market.”18 Roosevelt, in concert with Congress, sought to provide assistance to both companies and citizens through a series of federal programs. New Deal legislation was partly composed of bureaucratic schemes for massive technological systems – such as large dam works or extensive road systems – meant to rearrange the material world in order to reinvigorate industrial capitalism.19

118  Will Wright With the passage of the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) in June 1933, Congress allocated a whopping $3.3 billion to bankroll earthmoving projects such as bridge construction, flood control, harbor improvement, and other types of infrastructure development. From this lump sum, NIRA included provisions that apportioned “not less than four-hundred million dollars, to be expended” toward the “construction, repair, and improvement of public highways and park ways.”20 These funds were to work in conjunction with the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1921, which stipulated that the national legislature would match state governments, through gasoline and vehicle taxes, at a fifty-fifty percent rate for highway construction. These funds would be administered to individual states through the Bureau of Public Roads.21 In Colorado, state highway engineer Charles Vail wanted to put federal dollars to work through road-building. Governor William Adams found Vail, a two-time graduate of the University of Illinois and a skilled railroad civil engineer, well suited for the position and appointed him to the job in November 1930. Vail, an ambitious and hardheaded director, would be later characterized by an associate as “blunt, undiplomatic, tough as leather,” and someone who “never dodged a fight or an issue.”22 He was also a classic technocrat who believed that technical expertise and the rational application of engineering could overcome any material obstacle. Vail used his domineering personality and equally domineering technical skills to his advantage, convincing the Colorado legislature to raise matching funds for the construction of new highways. By the time Vail was finished, he had grabbed a considerable share of federal dollars through NIRA – $6,874,530, to be exact – all of it matched by the state of Colorado, to total nearly $14 million for road production.23 Using these funds, Vail and the Colorado State Highway Department decided that carving modern highways into the Rocky Mountains would be a sound Depression-era investment. They developed a highway plan that would construct six major expressways leading into the Rockies, including one proposal to revamp a dilapidated gravel road within the Big Thompson Canyon. Back in the early 1900s, local business interests had financed the construction of a single-lane dirt roadway in order to connect Front Range cities to their high-country hinterlands. State officials upgraded the road in the following decades – mainly by widening and reinforcing – to expedite travel to the eastern entrance of the newly established wildlife preserve, Rocky Mountain National Park, founded in 1915. Yet traveling along the route still took considerable time and effort as motorists navigated the difficult features. Piloting bumpy roads, steering through hairpin curves, and honking warnings at blind bends all made the passage uneasy for drivers and passengers alike.24 When finished, the proposed twenty-five-mile stretch of road – renamed US Highway 34 – would place sightseers going to the national park site, as one newspaper bragged, at the intersection of “the entire Rocky Mountain playground.”25

The engineer and expertise Vail developed an almost legendary reputation within Colorado during his tenure. Politicians and businessmen called him the “highway dictator” and alleged

Geophysical agency in the Anthropocene 119 he “ruled like a czar.”26 Engineering colleagues addressed Vail solely as “Chief” or “Boss.” Speaking to the eight-fold expansion of Colorado highways under his lengthy reign, one contemporary even remarked that “Chas. D. Vail was an institution.”27 The individual notoriety that Vail had established owed much to the international systems of engineering knowledge that had begun to develop between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. During this time, engineering as a standardized, male-dominated profession began its rapid transition toward university-trained education. It was believed that the more expertise men attained, the more technical authority they achieved and the more command they possessed over people and nature. This engineering paradigm underlay highway building on the verge of the Great Acceleration.28 Demand for the engineer’s trade swelled during the latter parts of the nineteenth century as it became synonymous with economic progress. Railroads, canals, and mines – all symbols of geophysical prowess – moved immense tracts of earth and demanded sophisticated engineering if they were to succeed technically, economically, and socially. With this mounting interest came a gradual shift in engineering education away from the experiential, apprentice-based learning, as pioneered by the railroads, toward more formalized college-based instruction and professional standards. The growth in American engineering schools – supported by the Morrill Land-Grant Act of 1862 – reflected this trend: two university engineering programs in 1840 escalated to seventy engineering departments by 1870, eighty-nine by 1900, and 139 by 1934.29 Membership in professional societies, which frequently upheld the educational standards for civil engineers and others, expanded across much of the Western world as well. In the United States, about 250 members in 1870 increased to 5,300 affiliates by 1910; in England, 1,600 enlarged to 8,850; in Germany, 3,550 skyrocketed to 9,800; and in France, 1,000 swelled to 7,000.30 The individuals who formed these associations traveled to national and, occasionally, international conferences in order to share ideas and instruction.31 Vail had been a member of the American Society of Civil Engineers since 1900, an organization that already featured 341 affiliates from five different continents only ten years later, and was surely influenced by this global technocratic revolution.32 Born in 1868 in Lone Tree, Illinois, Vail became one of the first generation of college-educated engineers.33 After graduating from the University of Illinois in 1891, Vail reinforced his newfound knowledge through work experiences with railroad companies: Union Pacific in Wyoming and Utah, Mexican International, and Chicago, Milwaukee, & St. Paul. After switching to public waterworks construction in Montana and Canada for a short time, Vail finally made Denver, Colorado, his permanent home in 1908. He was appointed engineer for the public utilities commission in 1917 by the state government. Vail held the position until 1930, when he became chief highway engineer for the Colorado State Highway Department, a commanding role he would hold until his death.34 Vail’s graduate work, in particular, offers an understanding of what he perceived as both possibilities and constraints when building US Highway 34. While supervising the Big Thompson Canyon route in 1936, Vail finished a master’s degree

120  Will Wright

Figure 6.3 Charles Vail, the chief highway engineer of the Colorado State Highway Department from 1930 to 1945, orchestrated the rapid expansion of highways in Colorado on the cusp of the Great Acceleration. Credit: Rocky Mountain Contractor, January 12, 1938. Gemmill Library, University of ColoradoBoulder. Copyright of Associated Construction Publications. Used with permission.

in civil engineering at his alma mater. Then sixty-eight years old, he completed a thesis, suitably titled “Highway Location in the Foothills of the Rocky Mountains in a Cloudburst Area.”35 The study detailed a pending scheme for highway construction within Colorado’s Clear Creek Canyon between Golden and Idaho Springs, located about seventy-five miles directly south of the Big Thompson Canyon. Although the thesis did not include any details about US Highway 34, the similarities in topography and hydrology between the constructed and proposed roads within these two canyons provide useful insights into Vail’s thinking. In the thesis, Vail showed that he was well aware that recurring floods periodically overwhelmed the Big Thompson Canyon and other mountain gorges along

Geophysical agency in the Anthropocene 121 Colorado’s Front Range. Vail described these forces in his introduction: “In the foothills region, generally during the summer months, moisture-laden air suddenly deflected upward by the mountains, frequently results in torrential precipitation or cloudburst conditions. The storm-water runoff becomes concentrated quickly in the can[y]on-bound creeks, which, because of steep grades, become raging torrents possessing tremendous erosive power.”36 Vail was also cognizant of the impacts that modern transportation infrastructure could have on floods, observing that road-building “procedure[s] will necessitate the encroachment upon the creek channel in many places by varying amounts.”37 Nonetheless, Vail remained confident that the “flood menace,” as he often called it, could be eluded with technological fixes. Vail reasoned that “it i[s] obvious that the highway plan must provide extensive and adequate bank protection,” with “very substantial walls or riprap [to] be constructed to protect the fill. Otherwise it is inevitable that the highway will be frequently and at times very materially damaged by floods.”38 Vail continued, stating that “highway location in cloudburst areas present [sic] distinct problems which must be solved if disaster and loss of life are to be avoided.”39 Although inundations may occur, Vail believed that technology would mitigate the problem. Economics guided road production for Vail. “Modern highway construction based on careful analysis of the various possible locations with special attention to their relative advantages and disadvantages from engineering and economic points of view is imperative,” Vail wrote.40 Within this vein, he dedicated much of his thesis to maximizing “traffic volume,” which entailed using statistical data to determine how to get as many cars as feasible onto the road. Regardless of how these rivers coursed through their canyons, straight and wide lanes proved the most economical for increasing automobile capacity and speed. “The principle item of [driver] cost in this case,” Vail argued, “would appear to be the loss of time due to the reduced speed at curves.”41 In this process, Vail distilled dynamic river systems down to schematic representations: the planning of roads became an exercise in technical abstractions. Instead of following the contours of the preexisting landscape, Vail and other highway engineers often sought the most economic routes – that is, the most direct ones. These expressways worked for spurring on capitalist growth by accelerating the movement of people and goods.

Energy regimes and earthmovers While civil engineers with similar education and experience received average salaries of over $4,000 annually (about $1.90 an hour) during the 1930s, Vail himself would not touch the wooden handle of any shovel or the steel clutch of any bulldozer at all. Rather, construction laborers and industrial machinery sputtered and roared, clanked and ground, more or less merging together into a geophysical force.42 For road production tasks, Vail and the engineering firms recruited between fifty and two hundred men at a time. Most of the workers were local Coloradans, especially common laborers, although the construction companies brought in a few out-of-staters, including one group from Texas, to run specialized

122  Will Wright machinery. At least half of all laborers were taken from unemployment “relief rolls.” The construction project paid $0.50 an hour to unskilled laborers, or “linemen,” who shoveled rocks and raked concrete; intermediate laborers, who handled jackhammers and drove trucks powered by diesel fuel engines, earned $0.70 an hour; and skilled laborers received $1.10 an hour for operating bulldozers, shovelers, and other heavy equipment. The workers’ pay scale reveals a paradox central to industrial America’s mineral-based, fossil fuel economy that reinforced the value of technical skill over physical toil: the more bodily energy one had to exert on the job, the less monetary compensation one actually received.43 The wage differences that confronted these road workers were the by-products of a relatively novel energy regime. Each time construction laborers drilled into the canyon rock, power shoveled a heaping pile of dirt, or hauled off truckload after truckload of rubble, they tapped into the energy sources of borrowed time. In the deep past, hundreds of millions of years ago, dead organic matter – phytoplankton, plant leaves, and animal excrement – collected in the oxygendeprived recesses of swamps and oceans. Encased in layers of sediment over time, pressure and heat gradually transformed these mixtures of peat and sludge into the substances that humans would later come to know as coal and oil. Dispersed across the planet, these subterranean stores of hydrocarbons offered dense reserves of solar energy captured from eons prior. State engineers and private contractors, in effect, assembled blue-collar workers to channel past geologic processes in order to become geophysical agents in the present.44 This finite supply of fossilized fuels had long been useless to humans while an ancient-organic energy regime dominated societies. Human and animal muscles did most of people’s work, with power derived from the caloric intake of plants and animals, all of which ultimately procured that energy from the sun. Domesticated agriculture allowed human societies to amass larger reserves of energy in the form of foodstuffs, such as cereal grains and pork flesh. Trade networks between Old and New Worlds opened up new items of caloric energy to be exploited. The burning of organic matter was equally important for humans. Domesticated fire offered light for dark places, flames to fend off predators, warmth against the cold, heat for cooking palatable meals, and, eventually, combustion for an energy revolution.45 Only when people figured out how to capture hydrocarbons for mechanized power did the resource become more accessible. Building off the Savery and Newcomen devices, Scottish inventor James Watt built a steam engine in the eighteen century that more effectively burned fossil fuels, which, in part, stimulated Western industrialization and its ever-expanding appetite for coal. Nearly one hundred years later, French engineer Jean Lenoir and German designer Nikolaus Otto similarly established oil’s place in the global economy with technical innovations that produced the petroleum-powered internal combustion engine.46 Relying upon these works, American industrialist Benjamin Holt resolved a common problem during the early twentieth century after witnessing how heavy tractors often sank into California’s soft farmlands. In 1904, Holt replaced the machinery’s standard gasoline-driven wheels with a belted crawler track, to which one commentator

Geophysical agency in the Anthropocene 123 remarked, “If that don’t look like a monster caterpillar.” Some twenty years later, the Holt Manufacturing Company merged with one of its competitors to form the Caterpillar Tractor Company. At about this same time, Caterpillar turned its focus toward selling earthmoving products and began exporting them for state, colonial, and military projects throughout the world.47 The Colorado State Highway Department became just one of many beneficiaries of these road production technologies. Construction crews working on US Highway 34 at any one time utilized an army of industrial machines: one to three bulldozers of Caterpillar Sixty, Forty, or Thirty models; one to three tractors of various Caterpillar varieties; one to three power shovels (with 1- to 1½-cubicyard-sized buckets); five to six 1½-ton dump trucks; three to four 5-ton dump trucks; two to ten jackhammers; one to four air compressors; one to two 2-sack concrete mixers; one 12-foot-wide grader attachment; and one to two steamrollers. Engineers within the Colorado State Highway Department at times anthropomorphized these machines, blurring, at least rhetorically, the lines between humans and technology. Referring to excavation work by a gasoline-driven shoveler, one state technocrat remarked that high-quality fill “material requires handpicking to remove large rocks.”48 In reality, it was these construction technologies – powered by fossil fuels – that paved the way for modern highways.49 The adoption of hydrocarbon sources was both liberating and enslaving. Its embrace shattered the energy bottleneck that had limited human activities for centuries. The mass production of automobiles and highways, supporting greater freedom in transit, would have been an almost impossible task without oil. Even so, the utilization of hydrocarbon energy also meant that people went to even greater lengths to fuel the boom. The petroleum wells in Pennsylvania, Texas, Oklahoma, and California, many of which were enveloped within John D. Rockefeller’s gargantuan oil conglomerate, the Standard Oil Company, attest to the United States’ growing reliance on fossil fuels.50 In 1900, American oil fields generated 174,000 barrels of crude petroleum a day. By the mid-1930s, with highway projects like the Big Thompson Canyon route underway, US wells had surpassed a daily production rate of three million barrels. Meanwhile, a subsidiary company of Standard Oil had secured overseas hydrocarbon access within the Persian Gulf. Increasingly embroiled in the Middle East, American petroleum extraction continued to soar during the Great Acceleration: over six million barrels per day in the mid-1950s and over eight million barrels per day by the mid-1970s.51 The amount of work accomplished by fossil fuel technologies compared to human labor alongside the Big Thompson River demonstrates the revolutionary difference in an ancient-organic versus modern-hydrocarbon energy regime. A healthy, middle-aged adult male steadily contributed 0.1 horsepower of energy toward construction-related activities, such as raking or shoveling, and supplied 1.2 horsepower in short, periodic bursts. In contrast, a Caterpillar Sixty tractor, which received its name from its sixty-horsepower engine, provided a potential 600-fold increase in energy output in relation to one highway laborer. Barring mechanical breakdowns, this heavy equipment faltered only when diesel supplies ran short and maintained an exponentially higher work rate. As an illustration, it

124  Will Wright would have taken six hours for one hundred men to accomplish the same amount of hard-rock excavation that a lone Caterpillar bulldozer was able to accomplish in a single hour. This fundamental revolution in energy systems allowed some humans to become a geophysical force. Instead of struggling against geologic features like in times past, construction laborers used powerful hydrocarbons to almost effortlessly move them.52 The entrenchment of an energy regime based on coal and oil (and eventually natural gas) proved to be a defining step in transforming humans into a geological entity. In order to prepare the Big Thompson Canyon for a modern transportation corridor, road-building crews and their fossil fuel–driven equipment excavated a total of at least 372,397.2 cubic yards of earth.53 To place this figure into perspective, the cumulative amount of rock, gravel, and dirt weighed some 465,500 tons and could have filled around 115 Olympic-sized swimming pools. A newspaper columnist boasted that what “has taken the Big Thompson river centuries to [c]ut into the unyielding granite” has now conceded to “the new ribbon of highway” in only a few short years.54 Humans as earthmovers takes on deeper significance when generalized to a planetary scale. Geographer Dov Nir has noted that for every one-half mile of newly constructed motorway, an average of 450 to 500 tons of erosion is produced. Nir also estimated that mineral extraction in all forms had moved more terrain by 1980 than had the material processes of wind, water, and ice.55 It is thus reasonable to assume, given the rapid growth of highways over the Great Acceleration, that road production likely – if not certainly – paralleled this trend.

The road and river During the early morning hours of November 6, 1936, construction laborer Earl Gainsforth jackhammered into the solid rock of the Big Thompson Canyon. Gainsforth’s duty, with the help of his fellow “relief roll” comrades, was to grade a smooth path into the daunting Colorado landscape for the future asphalt expressway. At 7:10 a.m. Gainsforth directed his jackhammer, driven by a diesel-powered air compressor, toward an area that, unbeknownst to him, contained “a charge of dynamite which had evidently failed to discharge in [a] previous blast.” When his machine struck the envelope of nitroglycerin, it exploded, projecting chunks of rubble onto the ground and into the Big Thompson River. As the dust and debris settled, Gainsforth writhed in agony. “The shot hit him in the face,” a supervisor observed, “and destroyed one eye and injured the other.”56 The accident reveals one intimate moment in the collision of humans and hydrocarbons, of money and machines, of the entanglements responsible for “geophysical agency.” Each stage of building highway infrastructure – often instigated by some combination of mountain geology, hydrocarbon technology, and engineering ego – required alterations to the Big Thompson River to accommodate US Highway 34. These types of earthmoving activities gave Vail and Ammons good reason to believe in their collective telluric status. And yet as Gainsforth’s mishap demonstrates, these geophysical powers were far more tenuous than the engineer

Geophysical agency in the Anthropocene 125 or governor assumed. Highway workers such as Gainsforth paid the social costs of the new motorway with pain-stricken bodies, but they could never fully pacify the river as engineers desired. In fact, most phases of construction had the opposite effect. While the unstable alliance of capital, labor, technology, and fossil fuels flattered engineers’ illusions of geological power, the modern road was actually transforming the mountain river into a more powerful agent. Accelerating cars upon highways, in other words, held the unintended consequence of accelerating waters.57 The Colorado State Highway Department commenced “Federal Aid Project No. 9-R” on paper in 1932 by announcing the invitation for construction bids from private contracting firms. When the project finally got moving in 1933 with a large dose of New Deal monies, Vail and other state engineers would oversee hired companies as they built the newly integrated portion of US Highway 34 in smaller sections – usually one- to three-mile segments – from Loveland to Estes Park. After weighing the submitted options, Vail chose five construction businesses to complete respective sections of highway in the Big Thompson Canyon: Hamilton & Gleason, Sacra & Watts, Lowdermilk Brothers, and Gordon Construction, all from Denver, as well as W.A. Colt & Sons of Lyons, Colorado. Injecting these private companies with public support, the preliminary estimated cost to craft the highway was a sizeable $700,000.58 Before construction crews completed any serious work, highway engineers had surveyed the proposed route and acquired rights-of-way. While Vail and his engineers at times conformed to topographical features, they nonetheless chose the straightest possible lines within the canyon. By eliminating sharp curves and difficult grades, the engineers sought to aid future motorists by making greater driving speed, safety, and comfort possible. Their motivations also likely matched those of a 1934 civil engineering textbook: “The economist demands the straightest road that can possibly be secured,” reflecting the reality that a straight stretch of road typically required less materials and was faster and easier to build than one with curves.59 These technocrats largely disregarded, though, where the road transected homes and river, imposing significant modifications to both human property and stream hydrology.60 One substantial challenge for the Colorado State Highway Department lay in obtaining parcels owned by private citizens – mostly a scattered collection of plots inhabited by motels and cabins. For example, Walter Lawson, a permanent canyon resident, became upset when he discovered that highway plans would destroy a ditch he had built to irrigate a small acreage of pastureland for his cows. When Lawson wrote a letter to Vail about his concern, the unsympathetic highway engineer bluntly responded, “We are not interested in the cattle industry of the State; we are interested in building highways. That is our one and only business.”61 Vail and his highway department were relentless in their road-building crusade, acquiring properties and removing at least eleven buildings to advance construction.62 Once highway engineers surveyed the area and secured easements, the next task involved “Clearing and Grubbing” the upcoming transportation corridor to prepare it for grading. Sweat dripped down the brows of construction workers

126  Will Wright as they removed all debris that would inhibit a smooth motorway, getting rid of old fences and taking away large boulders that stood within the right-of-way. As crews labored, they also cleared away what one report dismissively referred to as “Scattered Pine, Cedar, and Cottonwood Trees and Small Brush” alongside the Big Thompson River. While this indiscriminate removal of streamside vegetation apparently warranted only passing mention by the engineers, it resulted in significant alterations to the features of the canyon watercourse that enhanced the power and pace of geo-fluvial processes. The elimination of riverside plants contributed to increased stream flows, as less water would be absorbed by the vegetation. This critical riparian flora had previously provided buffer zones to check flood height and velocity, helping to mitigate raging mountain river currents. The streamside vegetation had helped to anchor soil in place, improving channel stability and limiting erosion. The crews eventually covered these areas with riprap to slow erosion, yet this also inhibited most riverfront plants from growing again.63 Once obstructions were removed, construction companies transitioned to the next task of grading the landscape to provide a solid foundation for the paved highway. The initial phase involved “Drilling and Shooting,” or blasting away at the impeding geologic features. Laborers drilled holes into the rock at key intervals along the mountainside and placed dynamite in these spaces. When workers ignited the charges, debris flew everywhere with little control. Some jetted toward the ground. Some soared into vacation houses. Some smashed into workers’ bodies, as Earl Gainsforth discovered. Some cascaded down into the Big Thompson River. D.S. Moore, a resident engineer on the project, reported, “During the necessary shooting, some of the material has dropped over the shoulder and into the river. . . . I have had the contractor clean up the channel [but] . . . it is very difficult to get the shovel into the river.” Though Moore maintained that “the flow of water will not be in any way impaired by this condition,” the engineer ignored the fact that accumulating construction debris next to the river would inevitably concentrate stream flow.64 In the secondary “Excavation” phase of the grading process, construction teams with mechanized bulldozers, shovelers, steamrollers, and dump trucks moved into the thoroughfare to create a firm, level substructure before paving. Unloading gravel and moving dirt with the machinery, workers built large embankments to shield the road from the river and enlarged a route that was two to three times wider than that of the original dirt path. While this broad road design permitted two or more lanes for more vehicles, the groundwork altered the form of the river by constricting it in numerous sections. In several cases, the topography of the canyon forced engineers to make channel changes to the Big Thompson River. What technocrats like Vail and regional engineer A.B. Collins labeled as “channel improvements” often entailed straightening out natural bends in the stream. Instead of the twisting and turning that functioned to slow down river current, construction workers realigned the watercourse at some twenty-seven junctures throughout the canyon. By modifying river form – constricting and straightening – highway engineers thus altered river function, increasing its hydraulic power and velocity.65

Credit: Colorado Department of Transportation, Denver.

Figure 6.4 Construction plans for a short section of US Highway 34 between Estes Park and Loveland. Note the intended “channel change” to Big Thompson River – twice.

Figures 6.5a and 6.5b The Big Thompson Canyon route circa 1910 (left) and circa 1940 (right) at the gorge’s mouth. Note the channel constriction of the Big Thompson River due to the massive amounts of earth moved to construct US Highway 34. Credit: Fort Collins’ Museum of Discovery Archives.

Geophysical agency in the Anthropocene 129

Figures 6.5a and 6.5b Continued

The nearer the construction crews inched toward completion, the more frantically they labored to meet engineers’ demanding deadlines: installing 8,107 linear feet total of corrugated metal culvert pipes, pouring 5,453 cubic yards of concrete, reinforcing with 718 tons of steel, erecting six major cement bridges, and steamrolling some 440,000 square feet of terrain.66 All these steps were meant

130  Will Wright to prepare the firm roadbed for the final stage of supposed technological mastery: “oil surfacing.” Hydrocarbons reinforced hydrocarbons as highway workers operated large, gasoline-fueled trucks to apply a sticky “oil” substance, known as asphalt, manufactured as a by-product during fuel refining. Standard Oil of Indiana (Amoco) supplied this petroleum derivative – over 2.5 million gallons in 1933 alone – to the Colorado State Highway Department for applications on their expressways. When construction workers sprayed asphalt onto the road surface, it mixed with dirt and gravel, hardening over hours. Oil surfacing delivered a more durable highway for motorist travel, but it also provided a surface that was more impermeable to water infiltration than even a compacted dirt and gravel road. Instead of a majority of rainfall percolating down into the soil, most now collected on the pavement. This newly erected, impervious surfacing contributed to runoff concentration and overland flow, both of which strengthened the movement of the Big Thompson River. Asphalt paving, while facilitating convenient and dust-free auto tourism, further expedited water accumulation and river speed.67 After nearly seven years, from late 1932 to mid-1938, road builders finished the Big Thompson Canyon route. Although Vail and the Colorado State Highway Department overshot their initial budget (by nearly two times the original plan) of $1.3  million, local Coloradans celebrated this engineering accomplishment. “Mr. Vail has helped these migratory Americans to enjoy the wonders of Colorado,” one engineering journal commended, “first, by his epochal work in improving Denver’s mountain parks, and, second, by his direction of the highway improvement program that makes the Silver State more accessible to visitors who travel by automobile.”68 On Memorial Day weekend in May 1938, Governor Ammons and Vail directed the formal dedication ceremony to “unlock” US Highway 34 at the mouth of the canyon near Loveland. The following day, May 29, around twenty thousand people gathered in Estes Park for a parade and festivities. Among the string of floats that passed by, Rocky Mountain National Park provided one that depicted the evolution of the tourist, praising the benefits of new automotive travel for the national park. Vail’s work was undeniably epochal. It epitomized the heightened geophysical agency of humans manipulating the powers of nature in the emerging epoch of the Anthropocene.69

Conclusion The canyon bottom – occupied by highway and stream – was shaped by a complex network of forces that, when amassed, resulted in giving the geophysical environment unprecedented new levels of power and agency. The Big Thompson River relied upon water, solar heat, and gravity to erode its course through the mountains, while the Colorado State Highway Department depended on huge sums of state money, human labor, industrial machinery, fossil fuels, and a certain engineering logic to do much the same. But instead of building a thoroughfare that would complement the topographical and geological realities within the Big Thompson Canyon, Vail and other highway engineers believed they could shape a malleable environment to conform to their anthropogenic road infrastructure.

Geophysical agency in the Anthropocene 131 In large part, the hydrocarbon energy derived from petroleum – providing the mechanical power for dump trucks, bulldozers, and jackhammers – gave them reason to believe in their geomorphic abilities. These technocrats constructed an automobile highway that they thought would provide smooth transportation for tourists and withstand the forces of nature. Ironically, though, the engineers’ drive to create the former undermined the latter once twelve inches of rainfall arrived one summer night in 1976. Delayed destruction struck the canyon when the Big Thompson Flood, an inundation that was exacerbated by the modern roadway, took 144 human lives.70 The consequences of the Big Thompson Canyon road were particularly dramatic, yet its construction reflected a much larger scale of road-building and geomorphic transformation. Engineers not only altered the geophysical features in a new highway to allow motorists to step on their automobile accelerators, but projects like this also set an early precedent – in roads, cars, and oil consumption in an aggregated sense – for the Great Acceleration. In the state of Colorado, the amount of paved highways increased from 343 miles in 1930 to 3,640 in 1950 to 8,821 by 1970. The total in the United States escalated from 86,515 miles in 1930 to 267,645 in 1950 to 455,915 by 1970.71 The number of highways constructed worldwide has continued to climb, with almost half of all roads paved by 1990.72 Today, this network of paved roadways has risen to over 11.2 million miles and, if connected end to end, would circle the earth some 450 times.73 This road-building explosion, beginning in earnest over the interwar years with the Italian autostrada, German autobahn, and American highway systems, demonstrates the unequal international distribution of concrete and asphalt as a geologic marker for the Anthropocene’s Great Acceleration.74 George Perkins Marsh, in his famous 1864 book Man and Nature, remarked that “human action must rank among geological influences.”75 But as Hornborg, Malm, and LeCain have suggested, unified human action is not totally responsible for the changes to our Earth’s governing systems. They ask us instead to focus on the forces of new industrial technologies, capitalist economic relations, and the non-human power of material things like coal and oil. In reality, the case of the Big Thompson Canyon reveals a complex interplay of all of these factors more akin to theorist Bruno Latour’s networks of human and non-human actors.76 Caterpillar machinery, New Deal capital, and Rockefeller petroleum allowed Vail and his road-building cohort to achieve the status of geological agents. Rather than proposing yet another name for designating a new geologic epoch – “Anthropo-techno-capitalo-carbo-cene” just sounds bad – perhaps environmental humanists might do better to adopt the simpler and more flexible concept of “geophysical agency.” A novel phenomenon emerged when humans became mass earthmovers, demonstrating the entangled reality of culture, political economy, technology, and environment while still meeting Dipesh Chakrabarty’s call “to scale up our imagination of the human.”77 Narrating geophysical agency, then, assists scholars in explaining particular, yet shifting, arrangements of causality while at the same time acknowledging how they contribute to largescale, even global, patterns.

132  Will Wright Will Wright is a Ph.D. Candidate at Montana State University, Bozeman. He is currently working on a dissertation about the construction and consequences of an Anthropocene biosphere on the North American continent.

Notes 1 “Formally Open Thompson Road,” Fort Collins Express-Courier, May 29, 1938, Archives, Museum of Discovery, Fort Collins, Colorado (hereafter FCMOD); “Governor Adams Will Preside at Big Thompson Opening,” Fort Collins Leader, May 27, 1938, FCMOD; James H. Pickering, America’s Switzerland: Estes Park and Rocky Mountain National Park, the Growth Years (Boulder, CO: University Press of Colorado, 2005), 304–6; Kenneth Jessen, “Big Thompson Canyon – Beauty from disaster,” Empire Magazine, January 27, 1980, 37, Folder 8, Box 1, Records of Wright Water Engineers, Inc., Water Resources Archive, Colorado State University Libraries, Fort Collins (hereafter WWE Records); Ammons quoted in “New Highway Thru Spectacular Big Thompson Canon Dedicated,” Denver Post, May 29, 1938, Newspaper Clippings: Subject- Roads. Colorado, State Highway #16, Denver Public Library, Colorado (hereafter DPL). 2 Howard Ensign Evans and Mary Alice Evans, Cache la Poudre: The Natural History of a Rocky Mountain River (Niwot, CO: University Press of Colorado, 1990), 7–14; Keith Heyer Meldahl, Rough-Hewn Land: A Geologic Journey from California to the Rocky Mountains (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2011), 189–95; Scott A. Elias, Rocky Mountains (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2002), 16–22; Richard Cannings, The Rockies: A Natural History (Vancouver, BC: Greystone Books, 2005), 38–9. 3 Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer, “The Anthropocene,” International GeosphereBiosphere Programme’s Global Change Newsletter 41 (May 2000): 17–18. 4 J.R. McNeill and Peter Engelke, The Great Acceleration: An Environmental History of the Anthropocene since 1945 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014). 5 Will Steffen, et al., Global Change and the Earth System: A Planet Under Pressure (New York: Springer, 2004): 131–4; McNeill and Engelke, The Great Acceleration, 1–6. 6 Will Steffen, et  al., “The Trajectory of the Anthropocene: The Great Acceleration,” Anthropocene Review 2 (April 2015): 94. 7 Jan Zalasiewicz, et al., “Stratigraphy of the Anthropocene,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A 369 (2011): 1038–40; Jan Zalasiewicz, et al., “The Anthropocene: A New Epoch of Geologic Time?” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A 369 (2011): 835–41. 8 Erle C. Ellis, et al., “Anthropogenic Transformation of the Biomes, 1700 to 2000,” Global Ecology and Biogeography 19 (May 2010): 589–606. 9 Bruce H. Wilkinson, “Humans as Geological Agents: A Deep Time Perspective,” Geology 33 (March 2005): 161–4; Roger LeB. Hooke, “On the History of Humans as Geomorphic Agents,” Geology 28 (September 2000): 843–6; P. K. Haff, “Hillslopes, Rivers, Plows, and Trucks: Mass Transport of the Earth’s Surface by Natural and Technological Processes,” Earth Surface Processes and Landforms 35 (August 2010): 1157–66; Roger LeB. Hooke, “On the Efficacy of Humans as Geomorphic Agents,” GSA Today 4 (September 1994): 224–5. 10 Alf Hornborg, “The Political Ecology of the Technocene: Uncovering Ecologically Unequal Exchange in the World-System,” in The Anthropocene and the Global Environmental Crisis: Rethinking Modernity in a New Epoch, ed. Clive Hamilton, Christophe Bonneuil, and François Gemenne (New York: Routledge, 2015), 57–69. Although I agree that scholars must address how capitalism and technology impact the

Geophysical agency in the Anthropocene 133 social inequalities of global change, I largely disagree with Hornborg’s sentient form of agency. See Alf Horborg, “Artifacts Have Consequences, Not Agency: Toward a Critical Theory of Global Environmental History,” European Journal of Social Theory (April 2016): 1–16. 11 Andreas Malm, “The Anthropocene Myth: Blaming all of Humanity for Climate Change Lets Capitalism Off the Hook,” Jacobin Magazine, March 30, 2015; Andreas Malm and Alf Hornborg, “A Geology of Mankind? A Critique of the Anthropocene Narrative,” The Anthropocene Review 1 (April 2014): 67. 12 Timothy James LeCain, “Against the Anthropocene: A Neo-Materialist Perspective,” International Journal for History, Culture, and Modernity 3 (April 2015): 1–24. 13 I adopt a paradigm based on Latour’s Actor-Network Theory (ANT), which affords a more distributive ontological view of agency. See Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). 14 Christopher W. Wells, Car Country: An Environmental History (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2012), xxii–xxxiii, 103, 125–6, 221–7; Thomas G. Andrews, Killing for Coal: America’s Deadliest Labor War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 93–6; Zalasiewicz, et al., “Stratigraphy of the Anthropocene,” 1038–9. 15 Frederic E. Everett, “Highway Work Should Proceed at Present Pace,” Colorado Highways 11 (February 1932): 8, Shumate Building Library, Colorado Department of Transportation, Denver (hereafter CDOT-Shumate). 16 W.R. Smith, “An Inventory of Road Traffic,” Colorado Highways 11 (February 1932): 11, CDOT-Shumate. 17 Howard B. Rose, “Start Those Public Works Now!” Colorado Highways 9 (May  1930): 3, CDOT-Shumate; “Highways and Unemployment,” Colorado Highways 9 (August 1930): 3, CDOT-Shumate; and Oliver T. Reedy “The 1931 Highway Program,” Colorado Highways 11 (January 1932): 3, CDOT-Shumate. 18 Matthew T. Huber, Lifeblood: Oil, Freedom, and the Forces of Capital (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 51. 19 David M. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 163–7, 131–59; George A. Gonzalez, Urban Sprawl, Global Warming, and the Empire of Capital (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2009), 61; Donald Worster, Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 3–8, 181–2; David P. Billington and Donald C. Jackson, Big Dams of the New Deal Era: A  Confluence of Engineering and Politics (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2006), 3–12; Paul S. Sutter, Driven Wild: How the Fight Against Automobiles Launched the Modern Wilderness Movement (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2002), 48–51; Neil M. Maher, Nature’s New Deal: The Civilian Conservation Corps and the Roots of the American Environmental Movement (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 70–8. 20 U.S. Congress, Transcript of the National Industrial Recovery Act (1933), accessed January 20, 2015, ourdocuments.gov, www.ourdocuments.gov/doc. php?flash=true&doc=66&page =transcript 21 Ira Katznelson, Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2013), 230; Kennedy, Freedom from Fear, 151–2, 178–9, 181–3; Marion C. Wiley, The High Road (Denver: Colorado State Department of Highways, 1976), 24–5; author unknown, A Brief History of the Colorado State Highway Department (publisher unknown, 1935), 22–4, CDOT-Shumate. 22 W.M. Williams, “To Chas. D. Vail, Colorado Highway Builder,” Rocky Mountain Contractor (January 1945): 29–30, Gemmill Library, University of Colorado-Boulder (hereafter CUB-Gemmill). 23 “Governor Adams Names C.D. Vail Highway Engineer,” Colorado Highways 9 (November 1930): 3, CDOT-Shumate; Wiley, The High Road, 24–5; author unknown,

134  Will Wright A Brief History of the Colorado State Highway Department, 22–4; Robert Autobee, Teela Labrum, and Deborah Dobson-Brown, Highways to the Sky: A Context and History of Colorado’s Highway System (Denver: Colorado Department of Transportation, 2002), 6–1–6–6. 24 “Loveland . . . And Big Thompson Canon’s New Highway,” Denver Post, Vacation ed., June 8, 1937, Newspaper Clippings: Subject- Roads. Colorado, State Highway #16. Big Thompson, DPL. 25 “New Road Up Canon Makes Loveland Area Important,” Denver Post, June 7, 1938, Newspaper Clippings: Subject- Roads. Colorado, State Highway #16. Big Thompson, DPL. 26 “Vail Charged with Unfitness and His Discharge Demanded,” Denver Post, April 14, 1939, Newspaper Clippings: Biography- Vail, Charles D., DPL; Lee Casey, “Charles D. Vail, State Highway Czar,” Rocky Mountain News, February 29, 1943, Newspaper Clippings: Biography- Vail, Charles D., DPL. 27 Williams, “To Chas. D. Vail, Colorado Highway Builder,” 29–30, CU-B-Gemmill. 28 Benjamin Weil, “The Rivers Come: Colonial Flood Control and Knowledge Systems in the Indus Basin, 1840s-1930s,” Environment and History 12 (2006): 3–23; Timothy Mitchell, Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002), 2–13, 19–53. 29 David F. Noble, America By Design: Science, Technology, and the Rise of Corporate Capitalism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977), 110–66; Lawrence P. Grayson, “A Brief History of Engineering Education in the United States,” IEEE Transactions of Aerospace and Electronic Systems 16 (May 1980): 377–8; Amy E. Slaton, Reinforced Concrete and the Modernization of American Building, 1900–1930 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 25–8; Ira O. Baker, “Engineering Education in the United States at the End of the Century,” Science 12 (November 1900): 668; Suhnu Ram Sharma, Vocational Education and Training: History, Methodology, Issues and Perspective (New Delhi, IN: Mittal Publications, 1994), 119–20, 133–4. 30 Peter Lundgreen, “Engineering Education in Europe and the U.S.A., 1750–1930: The Rise to Dominance of School Culture and Engineering Professions,” Annals of Science 47 (1990): 70–5. 31 Jessica B. Teisch, Engineering Nature: Water, Development, and the Global Spread of American Environmental Expertise (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 1–16, 179–88. 32 American Society of Civil Engineers, Constitution and List of Members (New York: American Society of Civil Engineers, 1910), 142, 310–17. 33 Charles Davis Vail, “Thesis on Tensile Strength of Portland Cement & Lime in Mortar” (Bachelor’s thesis, University of Illinois, 1891), Oak Street Archives, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (hereafter UI-OSA). 34 “Charles D. Vail, Colorado’s Chief of Highway Engineering, Dies at 76,” Rocky Mountain News, January 9, 1945, Newspaper Clippings: Biography- Vail, Charles D., DPL; “Charles D. Vail, Colorado Highway Engineer, Is Dead,” Denver Post, January 8, 1945, Newspaper Clippings: Biography- Vail, Charles D., DPL; “Governor Adams Names C.D. Vail Highway Engineer,” 3, CDOT-Shumate. 35 Charles Davis Vail, “Highway Location in the Foothills of the Rocky Mountains in a Cloudburst Area” (Master’s Thesis, University of Illinois, 1936), UI-OSA. 36 Vail, “Highway Location,” 1. 37 Ibid., 21. 38 For “flood menace” references, see Ibid., 7, 35. For other quotes, see Ibid., 21, 37. 39 Vail, “Highway Location,” 57. 40 Ibid., 2. 41 Ibid., 42–50. 42 U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Employment and Earnings in the Engineering Profession, 1929 to 1934, Bulletin No. 682 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office,

Geophysical agency in the Anthropocene 135 1941), 145; David E. Nye, Consuming Power: A Social History of American Energies (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1998), 187–215. 43 Federal Aid Project 9-R-4, “Notice to Contractors,” Colorado State Highway Department, July 20, 1936, Microfilm Roll C-31, Central Files, Headquarters Building, Colorado Department of Transportation, Denver (hereafter CDOT Central Files-C-31); Chas. D. Vail, “9-R-4 Memorandum,” Colorado State Highway Department, July 20, 1936, CDOT Central Files-C-31; Chas. D. Vail, Letter to J.A. Elliott, August 29, 1933, CDOT Central Files-C-31; Chas. D. Vail, Letter to Clyde Walters, January 22, 1937, CDOT Central Files-C-31. For ideas on human labor and energy, see Thomas G. Andrews, “ ‘Made by Toile’? Tourism, Labor, and the Construction of the Colorado Landscape, 1858–1917,” Journal of American History 92 (December 2005): 837–63; and Richard White, The Organic Machine: The Remaking of the Columbia River (New York: Hill & Wang, 1995), 3–29. 44 Stefania Barca, “Energy, Property, and the Industrial Revolution Narrative,” Ecological Economics 70 (2011): 1309–15; Mark Fiege, The Republic of Nature: An Environmental History of the United States (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2012), 362–79; Andrews, Killing for Coal, 29–31. 45 Alfred W. Crosby, Children of the Sun: A History of Humanity’s Unappeasable Appetite for Energy (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2006), 1–44; Steven Vogel, Prime Mover: A Natural History of Muscle (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2001), 1–29, 152–83. 46 John Rae and Rudi Volti, The Engineer in History, Rev. ed. (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2001), 98–105; David P. Billington, The Innovators: The Engineering Pioneers Who Made America Modern (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1996), 23–9; James Kip Finch, Engineering and Western Civilization (New York: McGraw-Hill Publishers, 1951), 196–7. 47 Francesca Russello Ammon, Bulldozer: Demolition and Clearance of the Postwar Landscape (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016), 16–18; Eric C. Orlemann, Caterpillar Chronicle: The History of the World’s Greatest Earthmovers (Minneapolis, MN: Motorbooks International, 2009), 11–13, 24–5; Timothy J. LeCain, Mass Destruction: The Men and Giant Mines that Wired America and Scarred the Planet (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2009), 146–59. 48 Project 9-R-1, Construction Progress Report, December 24, 1932, Sheet 2, CDOT Central Files-C-31, emphasis added by author. 49 Federal Aid Project 9-R-3, Construction Progress Report, February 1, 1936, Sheet 1, CDOT Central Files-C-31; Federal Aid Project 9-R-3, Construction Progress Report, April 18, 1936, Sheet 1, CDOT Central Files-C-31; Federal Aid Project 9-R-3, Construction Progress Report, February 29, 1936, Sheet 1, CDOT Central Files-C-31; Federal Aid Project 9-R-3, Construction Progress Report, May 2, 1936, Sheet 1, CDOT Central Files-C-31; Federal Aid Project 9-R-3, Construction Progress Reports, January 18, 1936, Sheet 1, CDOT Central Files-C-31. 50 H.W. Brands, American Colossus: The Triumph of Capitalism, 1865–1900 (New York: Doubleday, 2010), 71–6, 86–92; Wells, Car Country, 173–85. 51 U.S. Energy Information Administration, “U.S. Field Production of Crude Oil,” U.S. Department of Energy, accessed July 11, 2015, www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/Leaf Handler.ashx?n=PET&s= MCRFPUS2&f=A; Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 74. 52 Ezra S. Krendel, “Muscle-Generated Power,” in Marks’ Standard Handbook for Mechanical Engineers, 11th ed, ed. Eugene A. Avallone, Theodore Baumeister III, and Ali M. Sadegh (New York: McGraw-Hill Publishers, 2006), 9–4; John S. Page, Estimator’s Equipment Installation Man-Hour Manual, 3rd ed. (Houston, TX: Gulf Publishing Co., 1999), 186–7; Keith Haddock, The Earthmover Encyclopedia (St. Paul, MN: Motorbooks International, 2002), 23. 53 Federal Aid Project 9-R, “Statement of Labor and Materials,” April 23, 1938, Sheets 1–13, CDOT Central Files-C-31.

136  Will Wright 54 “Loveland . . . And Big Thompson Canon’s New Highway,” Denver Post, Vacation ed., June 8, 1937, Newspaper Clippings: Subject- Roads. Colorado, State Highway #16. DPL. 55 Dov Nir, Man, A Geomorphological Agent: An Introduction to Anthropic Geomorphology (Boston, MA: D. Reidel Publishing, 1983), 70, 134. 56 Colorado State Highway Department, Clyde Walters, Letter to Roy J. Randall, November 7, 1936, CDOT Central Files-C-31. For the relationship between working classes and nature, see Stefania Barca, “Laboring the Earth: Transnational Reflections of the Environmental History of Work,” Environmental History 19 (January 2014): 3–27. 57 For ideas about envirotechnical systems, see Sara B. Pritchard, Confluence: The Nature of Technology and the Remaking of the Rhône (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 1–27; and Thomas P. Hughes, Human-Built World: How to Think About Technology and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 153–73; Jared Orsi, Hazardous Metropolis: Flooding and Urban Ecology in Los Angeles (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2004). 58 Colorado State Highway Department, “Contract: Federal Aid Project No. 9-R-1,” October 12, 1932, CDOT Central Files-C-31; Colorado State Highway Department, “Contract: Federal Aid Project No. 9-R-3,” September 25, 1935, CDOT Central FilesC-31; Colorado State Highway Department, “Contract: Federal Aid Project No. 9-R4,” August 14, 1936, CDOT Central Files-C-31; Colorado State Highway Department, “Contract: Federal Aid Project No. 9-R-5,” October  3, 1936, Microfilm Roll C-32, Central Files, Headquarters Building, Colorado Department of Transportation, Denver (hereafter CDOT Central Files-C-32); Colorado State Highway Department, “Contract: Federal Aid Project No. 9-R-6,” September 2, 1936, CDOT Central Files-C-32; Colorado State Highway Department, “Contract: Federal Aid Project No. 9-R-7,” November  18, 1936, Central Files-C-32; U.S Department of Agriculture, Bureau of Public Roads, A.E. Palen, Letter to Chas. D. Vail, December 7, 1932, Central FilesC-31. For discussion of public versus private interests, see Karl Brooks, Public Power, Private Dams: The Hells Canyon High Dam Controversy (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006), 3–22. 59 Arthur G. Bruce, Highway Design and Construction (Scranton, PA: International Textbook Co., 1934), 535. 60 Colorado State Highway Department, Plan and Profile of Proposed Federal Aid Project No. 9-R, Right-of-way map, Sheets 1, 7, 8, Online Transportation Information System, Colorado Department of Transportation, accessed January 05, 2015, http://dtdapps. coloradodot.info/otis (hereafter CDOT-OTIS); Colorado State Highway Department, Plan and Profile of Proposed Federal Aid Project No. 9-R-3, Right-of-way map, Sheets 1, 19–21, CDOT-OTIS; Colorado State Highway Department, Plan and Profile of Proposed Federal Aid Project No. 9-R-4, Right-of-way map, Sheet 1, CDOT-OTIS; Colorado State Highway Department, Plan and Profile of Proposed Federal Aid Project No. 9-R-5, Right-of-way map, Sheets 1, 17, CDOT-OTIS. 61 Colorado State Highway Department, Chas. D. Vail, Letter to A. Walter Lawson, July 29, 1937, CDOT Central Files-C-31. 62 U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Allen S. Peck, Letter to Colorado State Highway Department, September  17, 1936; Colorado State Highway Department, Chas. D. Vail, Letter to A.B. Collins, August 7, 1935, CDOT Central Files-C-31. 63 Federal Aid Project 9-R-1, “Right-of-Way Construction Plans,” Sheet 7, CDOT-OTIS; Robert J. Naiman and Henri Decamps, “Ecology of Interfaces: Riparian Zones,” Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics 28 (1997): 621–58. 64 Federal Aid Project 9-R-3, Construction Progress Report, [1936?], Sheets 2, CDOT Central Files-C-31; John A. Cross, Letter to Chas. D. Vail, February 24, 1937, CDOT Central Files-C-31; Mont J. Moses, Letter to Colorado State Highway Department, July 8, 1937, CDOT Central Files-C-31; Colorado State Highway Department, Clyde

Geophysical agency in the Anthropocene 137 Walters, Letter to Roy J. Randall, January 6, 1936, CDOT Central Files-C-31; Federal Aid Project 9-R-1, Construction Progress Report, January 21, 1933, Sheets 1–2, CDOT Central Files-C-31. 65 Federal Aid Project 9-R-4, Construction Progress Report, November 14, 1936, Sheet 1, CDOT Central Files-C-31; Colorado State Highway Department, No. 9-R-6, Right-of-way map, Sheets 9–11, CDOT-OTIS; Colorado State Highway Department, No. 9-R-8, Right-of-way map, Sheet 18, CDOT-OTIS; Colorado State Highway Department, No. AW6010, Right-of-way map, Sheets 12–13, CDOT-OTIS. For the impacts of roads on the upper South Platte Basin, see Ellen E. Wohl, Virtual Rivers: Lessons from the Mountain Rivers of the Colorado Front Range (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 125–37. 66 Federal Aid Project 9-R, “Statement of Labor and Materials,” April 23, 1938, Sheets 1–13, CDOT Central Files-C-31. 67 Federal Aid Project 9-R-3, “Explanation of Overruns and Underruns,” 1935, CDOT Central Files-C-31; Federal Aid Project 9-R-3–4–5–6–7–8, “Colorado State Highway Department-Engineer’s Detailed Estimate,” April 8, 1937, CDOT Central Files-C-31; Standard Oil Company of Indiana, “Rocky Mountain Road Development: A Credit to Rocky Mountain Official and Engineers and Standard Asphalt,” Rocky Mountain Contractor (July 14, 1937): 10–11, CUB-Gemmill; Acting Purchasing Agent, Letter to Chas. D. Vail, June 1, 1933, Folder: Oil Misc. 1929–1933, Box 35: T155 51235, Transportation- Colorado Department of Highways, Colorado State Archives, Denver (hereafter CSA); Wiley, The High Road, 24; Fiege, The Republic of Nature, 367. 68 Nelson Sutro Greensfelder and Harry Roberts, Jr., ed., “Charles Davis Vail – a Biography,” Explosives Engineer 13 (November  1935): 321–5, University of Michigan Libraries. Emphasis added by author. 69 “New Big Thompson Highway Nearing Completion,” June  3, 1937, Binder: 1937– 1938, Box 19213: Press Releases, Transportation- Colorado Department of Highways, CSA; “Formally Open Thompson Road,” FCMOD; “Governor Adams Will Preside at Big Thompson Opening,”; Pickering, America’s Switzerland, 304–6; Kenneth Jessen, “Big Thompson Canyon – Beauty from disaster,” Empire Magazine, January 27, 1980, 37, Folder 8, Box 1, WWE Records; “New Highway Thru Spectacular Big Thompson Canon Dedicated,” State Highway #16, DPL. 70 David McComb, Big Thompson: Profile of a Natural Disaster (Boulder, CO: Pruett Publishing Co., 1980). 71 U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of Domestic and Foreign Commerce, Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1930 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1930), 378; U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of Public Roads, Highway Statistics, 1950 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1952), 116; U.S. Department of Transportation, Federal Highway Administration, Highway Statistics, 1970 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1970), 158. 72 In 1990, based on available data, forty-seven percent of the world’s roads were paved. For statistics, see United Nations, “Roads, paved (% of total roads),” UN data, accessed April 01, 2015, http://data.un.org/Data.aspx?d=WDI&f=Indicator_Code%3AIS.ROD. PAVE.ZS#WDI 73 For numbers of paved highways in each country, see World Factbook, “Country Comparison to the World: Roadways,” U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, accessed March  14, 2016, www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/fields/2085. html. The circumference of the earth is 24,901 miles, while (as of 2016) the total figure of paved roads worldwide is some 11,206,870 miles. 74 McNeill and Engelke, The Great Acceleration, 120. 75 George P. Marsh, Man and Nature: Or, Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action (New York: Charles Scriber & Sons, 1864), 548. 76 Latour, Reassembling the Social.

138  Will Wright 77 Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History: Four Theses,” Critical Inquiry 35 (Winter 2009): 206; Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Anthropocene and the Convergence of Histories,” in The Anthropocene and the Global Environmental Crisis: Rethinking Modernity in a New Epoch, ed. Clive Hamilton, Christophe Bonneuil, and François Gemenne (New York: Routledge, 2015), 44–56; Alexa Weik von Mossner, “Imagining Geological Agency: Storytelling in the Anthropocene,” in Whose Anthropocene? Revisiting Dipesh Chakrabarty’s “Four Theses,” ed. Robert Emmett and Thomas Lekan (Munich: Rachel Carson Center, 2016), 83–8.

7 The politics of solitude Listening to environmental change in Rocky Mountain National Park, 1945–present Mark Boxell Introduction On paper, Rocky Mountain National Park (RMNP) – situated high in the Rockies of northern Colorado and home to 250,000 acres of legally mandated wilderness – might seem like a surprising place to encounter the noisy cacophony of urban industrial society. However, cars and planes have long permeated the tourist-engineered landscape and the skies above it, leading to conflicts over the place of machines in and around the park and the emergence in the late twentieth century of a politics of noise that is now inscribed in law. The anti-noise politics of local residents and park visitors revealed the limits and contradictions of creating “wild” tourist attractions embedded within a global transportation network that rapidly expanded during the twentieth century. Beginning in the 1980s, park advocates formalized their opposition to excessive noise by fighting the operation of air tours over the park. This period of activism sprang from changes to the park’s soundscape that manifested in the years immediately following World War II.1 During the 1950s and 1960s, the National Park Service (NPS) expanded park infrastructure, accommodating and encouraging increased visitor usage. More broadly, the Front Range area of Colorado, encompassing the urban areas situated on the eastern slope of the Rockies surrounding Denver, erupted with urban industrial development centered upon the consumption of hydrocarbon energy. Automobiles driven by new residents and a growing number of tourists clogged the region’s roads. The skies above echoed with aircraft noise as Denver emerged as an air travel hub. A mechanical soundscape shaped by the mass consumption of fossil fuels became an artifact of this enterprise. However, park advocates did not respond to all mechanical noise in the same way. They rejected certain transportation technologies, notably small aircraft, as loud, disruptive nuisances that contaminated a wilderness environment and embraced other machines, such as automobiles, for offering equal access to RMNP’s mountainous splendor. In telling the story of mechanical noise’s proliferation in RMNP and people’s reactions to tourists and their machines, this chapter draws together sensory history and environmental history. Historian Mark Smith explains that sensory history combines “not only the history of a given sense but also its social and cultural

140  Mark Boxell construction and its role in texturing the past.”2 Historians should explain how historically contingent values, ideas, and material environments gave meaning to the noises that people perceived in specific times and places.3 People and the things they build often produce noise, but the acceptability or revulsion certain noises provoke is not purely a function of loudness. People accept certain sounds and noises in certain places, while they may reject those same noises in other settings. In this sense, noise pollution is culturally constructed. In and around RMNP, people experienced and responded to the noise produced by small touring aircraft differently than automobiles and even commercial jets. They sought to alter the local soundscape by banning certain aircraft while continuing to embrace automobiles and grudgingly accepting the presence of commercial aircraft. This is also an environmental history, one concerned with technological change and the consumption of hydrocarbon energy within a specific tourist landscape. RMNP and other national parks in the United States came of age in the midst of the rapid growth of a fossil fuel energy regime. As people burned fossil fuels in order to do work and get around, they not only built new industrial economies but also forged new forms of leisure and an accompanying culture of vacationing and tourism primarily based on petroleum-fueled travel.4 The RMNP stakeholders who fought aircraft-induced noise embodied the tensions that often arise when new, industrial transportation technologies intrude on seemingly idyllic places – intrusions historians such as Leo Marx and Paul Sutter have shown to be the inspiration for potent cultural criticism and political mobilization.5 Detailing the events in and around RMNP also helps answer environmental historian Peter Coates’ call for a better understanding of how the search for silence and solitude coalesced in the wilderness and environmental movements of the post–World War II United States.6 Indeed, anti-noise activists reflected the middle-class roots and pragmatic politics of the wilderness preservation movements, rarely questioning the larger systems of mobility or cultures of consumption that produced noise pollution in the park.7 Even though local political activists did not engage in arguments over the invasiveness of global transportation systems, the forces threatening solitude in the park were inextricably tied to large-scale technological changes and the subsequent intensification of energy consumption. The changes in energy consumption post-war affluence and continued oil abundance brought to the park created the conditions for the rise of noise-based political conflict. A network of technologies and infrastructures supported by federal agencies and policies undergirded the automobile and aircraft noise that grew ubiquitous in and above RMNP. The NPS championed post-war development of transportation infrastructure through roadbuilding campaigns such as Mission 66, which modernized park highways. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) built a largely invisible infrastructure that managed movement through the nation’s skies, assuring commercial airlines that the country’s airspace would be systematically and expertly watched, cultivating better safety and efficiency. The FAA and NPS helped organize and integrate both land and atmosphere into a growing, globalized transportation infrastructure. How tourists and wilderness advocates experienced these envirotechnical

The politics of solitude 141 changes facilitated the growth of anti-noise activism but simultaneously limited its ultimate scope. In their arguments for and against the presence of certain transportation technologies in the park, anti-noise advocates highlighted the ways in which national parks are creations and distillations of a petro-fueled society.

Automobile culture in Rocky Mountain National Park and beyond The centrality of automobile travel in both getting to and experiencing RMNP reveals the park’s close relationship with petroleum-consuming machines and the normalization of automobiles’ presence within its boundaries. While researchers have shown that traffic noise is audible to hikers located up to a mile away from RMNP’s roads, post-war park advocates never identified the growing number of cars that traversed the park’s roads as noise nuisances.8 Park goers and advocates alike developed a culture of park-going that celebrated car-based tourism as inclusive, a culture that assumed the perpetual consumption of petroleum. Growing connections forged between the park’s roads and a broader continent-wide network of highways during the mid-twentieth century bolstered tourism to RMNP and acted as the economic lifeblood to both the park and the communities surrounding it.9 After World War II, Congress and the NPS responded to anxieties surrounding overcrowding by investing in renewed automobile infrastructure in the parks, helping to further cement the presence of automobiles, a normalization of one technology that starkly contrasted with the eventual rejection of another: tourist aircraft.10 Tourism to the United States’ national parks has always been linked to hydrocarbon-fueled transportation, a result of the moment in history when the establishment of national parks grew increasingly attractive and a reflection of the park service’s mission to ensure public access to parks. Beginning in the 1870s, coal-fired engines carried wealthy tourists from eastern cities to Yellowstone Park in the Wyoming Territory along the Northern Pacific railroad.11 Decades later, the NPS embraced automobile travel in parks when cars were still a relative luxury and set in legal stone the creation of a network of roads that would service tourists and define travel within the parks. In RMNP’s case, its founding legislation (1915) defined automobiles as the primary mode of travel within the park, mandating the creation of roads and supporting infrastructure “for the use of automobiles therein.”12 This was the case in parks throughout the country, which emphasized that only non-commercial travel was allowed.13 However, the sheer volume of vehicles in parks such as RMNP did not dramatically increase immediately. Between 1920 and 1933, annual visitation to RMNP fluctuated between 218,000 and 290,000 people, and subsequent growth following the worst of the Great Depression brought the number of visitors to 681,000 by 1941. The number of automobiles traveling in and out of RMNP especially intensified beginning in the late 1940s. Visitation to RMNP increased from just slightly more than 800,000 people in 1946 to 1.5 million by 1956 and over two million by 1968.14

142  Mark Boxell The added pressure this influx of visitors and their cars placed on park infrastructure across the country required updated roads and facilities. In 1949, the director of the park service, Newton Drury, published an article titled “The Dilemma of Our Parks.” In it, Drury called for expansion and modernization of park facilities that could harbor the flood of tourists. Narrow roads and a lack of parking areas could no longer keep automobiles from threatening vegetation, faulty sewers and utilities buckled under the growing number of patrons, and visitors traipsed through parks that lacked trails and staff capable of protecting vulnerable ecosystems.15 The NPS and Congress developed a solution: Mission 66. Signed into law in 1956, the ten-year plan permitted an overhaul of the park system’s physical infrastructure, including the widening of existing roads and construction of new ones. Mission 66 encouraged midcentury increases in park visitation by amplifying the auto tourism vision embedded in the founding legislation of parks such as RMNP. As historian Jerry Frank puts it, the NPS believed that “the key to saving the ‘system’ lay not in curtailing visitation but in facilitating more of it.”16 As a result, park visitation continued to increase, with over 2.5 million annual visitors enjoying RMNP by 1972. Park officials engineered Mission 66 as a response to problems specific to the parks, but the development program reflected a national movement to facilitate increased auto transportation. Between 1940 and 1965, the miles of highway in the US that received federal aid increased from 235,000 to more than 908,000.17 In 1956, the same year Congress created Mission 66, President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed the National Interstate and Defense Highways Act, which created the interstate highway system. Cheap gasoline stood at the core of this transportation transformation. A gallon of gasoline cost as much as $2.78 (adjusted for inflation to 2017 rates) in the midst of the Great Depression. By 1956, however, the average price had fallen to $2.07 per gallon and continued to fall until the oil crisis of the 1970s.18 Promotional materials produced by oil companies illustrated the ways in which the park system was embedded in American automobile culture. During the 1950s and 1960s, Sinclair Oil, Phillips Petroleum, and Standard Oil all produced maps, ads, and promotional guides that touted Mission 66, linking the improvement of an American cultural mainstay – the national parks – to the increased consumption of petroleum via car travel.19 In their vision, oil companies and the national state collaborated to power an infrastructure overhaul, with both benefiting from the subsequent windfall brought by increased visitation to the parks. The Eisenhower administration further shaped the economy in favor of American oil companies in 1959 when it limited oil imports from foreign countries. At the same time, public officials in Front Range cities such as Denver tapped into newfound federal funds to improve roads and highways that channeled their residents and vacationers toward RMNP and other mountain getaways. Mission 66 existed in tandem with these larger infrastructure improvement projects, rendering the Rockies more accessible than ever by way of the automobile.20 American consumer habits between 1945 and the early 1970s reflected the country’s total embrace of automobile travel and seemingly vindicated the federal subsidies that oil companies enjoyed. Between 1945 and 1955, the number of registered passenger cars in the United States more than doubled, increasing from

The politics of solitude 143 just north of 25 million to 52 million. That number had doubled again by 1974. In 1965, Americans consumed nearly seventy billion gallons of gasoline driving – more than triple the rate consumed in 1945. The increase in gasoline consumption was even more marked in Colorado. Travelers burned 241 million gallons in 1945. By 1965, that number had jumped to 886 million gallons.21 New demands for automobiles hastened growth in the domestic automobile industry during this period.22 Ford Mustangs, Chevy Impalas, and Dodge Chargers were some of the era’s big sellers.23 Environmental historian Brian Black identifies these muscle cars as “symbol[s] of the culture of cheap gasoline.” 24 Ford and Chevy, the two biggest players in the American automobile market at the time, acknowledged as early as 1966 that their cars had grown too loud, perhaps best conveyed by a new Chevy slogan at the time: “The Shhhhhhhhevrolet Way.”25 General Motors implored its customers to purchase muscle cars. “Press the accelerator, it roars,” they promised.26 Even if the family sedans that likely outnumbered the era’s popular muscle cars in RMNP and other parks were not marketed for their loud, powerful engines, they were still large, lumbering, inefficient vehicles that guzzled gasoline and further cemented cheap fuel as a prerequisite to Americans’ travel habits. While more and more (and often louder) automobiles traversed RMNP, local residents, the park service, and others who eventually ridiculed air tours celebrated the park as a wilderness space accentuated with roads, providing auto tourists with unobstructed, broadly accessible views of the park’s scenery.27 Estes Park residents supported a view of wilderness tied to “a legacy of knowing nature through machines,” as historian David Louter has put it.28 RMNP’s roads remained cultural attractions and central conduits for experiencing the park’s natural resources throughout the latter decades of the twentieth century. By the 1980s, Trail Ridge Road, which whisked automobiles up above the tree line and around mountain peaks, had become its own historically rich landmark, a cultural and technological touchstone that the Estes Park Chamber of Commerce aggressively promoted. The road celebrated its fiftieth anniversary in 1982, which, as we will see, was the same year noise pollution first became a heated issue in RMNP. Brochures produced around this time described driving Trail Ridge and other roads as historical experiences in and of themselves. Roads such as Trail Ridge framed the park’s dramatic vistas, and the park’s promoters celebrated those roads for providing over half a century of access to RMNP’s alpine landscapes.29 People accepted – or, more accurately, ignored – automobile noise as a by-product of RMNP’s “heavily traveled highway to the sky,” a far cry from the defense of roadless places early wilderness advocates had organized around.30 Roads and automobiles proved to be technologies that accentuated the park experience, an idea that was linked to the historical moment when Americans created RMNP and other parks and the subsequent decades when the United States solidified its status as an automobile-centric country.31

Wilderness ends above the mountaintop The automobile-based tourist culture prevalent in RMNP and other parks accepted horns, screeching tires, and purring engines as unfortunate but benign side effects

144  Mark Boxell of a certain style of travel and leisure. Roads and cars were built into the parks from their beginning as federally managed public lands.32 Lawmakers designated automobile travel the main mode of travel in RMNP when they created the park, in a world where the prospect of cars traveling into the park by the millions per year seemed impossible. Aircraft became prevalent at a much different historical moment, when the proliferation of a wide array of pollutants concerned park goers and tourism advocates. With the creation of the FAA in 1958 and the development of commercial jet aircraft, Denver’s Stapleton Airport facilitated an increasing number of flights. By the 1970s, it was the third busiest hub in the country. Several businesses that used small aircraft to offer tourists scenic flights over striking landscapes, including the Grand Canyon, Kilauea in Hawaii, and eventually RMNP, grew prominent as well. These aircraft entered park soundscapes at a moment of heightened anxiety concerning the preservation of wilderness, and in response, local businesspeople and park visitors depicted aircraft as a threat to natural quiet. Park advocates eventually convinced Congress to ban air tours from taking place over RMNP, but they never truly threatened the hundreds of commercial aircraft that descended daily over the park en route to Denver. The pro-consumption, protourist culture of wilderness protection that shaped debates regarding mechanical noise in the park never wrestled with the seemingly unbending network of commercial flight paths that traversed the skies above RMNP. The United States’ aircraft industry grew rapidly in the years following World War II. According to the Department of Transportation, from 1956 to 1966, the air travel industry’s revenue passenger miles (number of passengers multiplied by total distance traveled) increased from 1.5  million to more than eight million per year.33 Beginning in 1957, the Boeing 707, the first successful commercial jet aircraft, began to scream through the skies over RMNP. Jet aircraft were approximately twelve to twenty decibels noisier on approach and takeoff than the piston-driven aircraft they replaced.34 The park’s location and geography rendered it especially susceptible to aircraft noise. Denver’s close proximity and low altitude relative to RMNP meant planes descending to and climbing from Denver swept within a few thousand feet of RMNP’s roads and trails.35 For example, aircraft flying between Denver and Seattle often traveled directly over the park at roughly twenty thousand feet above sea level, fewer than six thousand feet above the park’s highest peaks.36 By 1971, seven Continental Airlines flights per day covered the Seattle-Denver route, each plane roaring at between seventy and one hundred decibels, depending on the position of the listener, bellowing at levels comparable to a passing car traveling 65 mph or a nearby power lawnmower.37 The influx of aircraft depended upon petroleum. In 1957, the United States consumed two hundred thousand barrels of jet fuel per day. That number eclipsed one million in the early 1970s.38 Petroleum companies such as Standard developed high-octane fuels for aircraft as engines grew increasingly powerful.39 And more power meant more noise. The changing nature of air travel in the United States prompted the creation of a new federal agency capable of handling a pool of aircraft growing in both size and speed. Formerly known as the Civil Aeronautics Authority, the federal

The politics of solitude 145 government created the Federal Aviation Administration in 1958. Imbued with the authority to create a uniform system of air navigation meant to govern US airspace, the FAA rendered American skies safer and more navigable.40 The creation of the FAA facilitated the growth of large air carriers, but it also nurtured private flyers of small planes. Much like its commercial counterpart, the US general aviation fleet – aircraft designed for personal use and commercial purposes other than scheduled transport – grew rapidly following World War II. People labored with these planes and helicopters in myriad ways, dusting crops, rescuing lost hikers, and facilitating new tourist experiences.41 By the 1960s, air travelers landing in Denver had good access to RMNP via automobile. However, with general aviators in mind, residents of Estes Park attempted to build an airport in order to directly integrate their town and the park into the burgeoning network of air transportation. A local committee tasked with purchasing land and seeking government funding for an airport in Estes Park formed in the 1950s. Early supporters of the proposed airport rationalized development in several ways. Serving Estes Park’s and Colorado’s growing populations stood as one incentive, as did facilitating the work of firefighters in case of forest fires.42 Woodrow Bussey, a businessman from Denver, even posited that the airport would be important in aiding civil air defense measures and evacuations “if the bomb drops.”43 Major General Lucas Beau of the US Air Force saw similar strategic advantages and wanted to build airports within the boundaries of various parks.44 However, tourism remained the ultimate incentive for building the proposed airstrips. In a presentation to Colorado Governor John Arthur Love in 1964, the Estes Park Airport Committee wrote, “Estes Park is a unique town partly because of its mountainous scenery, partly because it is a one-industry town and has been for a hundred years. Tourism is our business.”45 This midcentury call by private citizens for an airport to serve RMNP paralleled a broader program whereby the park service sought the construction of airports in and around parks. Minutes from a 1962 committee meeting noted that certain residents objected to an airport due to noise, but sonic disturbances did not greatly concern the committee, which was more interested in negotiating property purchases with residents.46 Only twenty years later, Estes Park residents and park advocates had radically changed their opinions on the presence of small aircraft near RMNP. Commercial air tour services first inquired about setting up shop in Estes Park in 1982, and most residents responded negatively to the proposal, their consternation tapping into a combination of economic anxiety and altruistic environmentalism. Air tour companies rationalized their would-be roles as members of the Estes Park community in similar ways to those who had lobbied for a new airport in the 1960s, claiming their helicopter services could aid search and rescue missions and firefighters as well as become an economic boon.47 However, the Estes Park Board of Trustees correctly read the mood of the community and vetoed the air tour companies’ proposal. The town board, as well as the park, worried about noise pollution, both in the context of visitor experience and in terms of wildlife.48 This latter concern echoed a newfound interest in preserving natural soundscapes for the sake of wildlife. Whether it was aircraft and elk in RMNP or, for instance, tour

146  Mark Boxell boats and whales in Glacier Bay – where researchers worried about the effects noisy motors had on marine wildlife – by the 1970s, environmentalists increasingly worried about the human-made noises wildlife were forced to live with.49 The objections piled on, highlighting how increased air traffic would affect people visiting the area. One letter writer argued that “Estes Park is one of the few quiet places left in the world. Noise is what people come here to get away from.”50 Others specifically decried how low-flying, hovering helicopters would especially interrupt RMNP’s wilderness character. Many of these residents emphasized that air tours might prove detrimental to the local tourist-based economy. Tourists, attracted by the park’s tranquility, would be driven away by rotors buffeting the sky.51 The anti–air tour contingent was not driven by researchers or full-time wilderness advocates, but by business owners and others who relied on tourist revenues. RMNP’s advocates often conceptualized “wilderness” as a consumable product that should be closely guarded, and that product could only be preserved with silence at its core. Local resident David Mooney reflected the attitudes of many of his fellow Estes Park residents in a letter to the editor published in the Estes Park Trail-Gazette in 1982. Mooney urged the air tour companies to better understand “the great importance that silence plays in drawing millions of people to this area.”52 Mooney even quoted Enos Mills, who championed RMNP’s creation at the turn of the twentieth century, when explaining how silence was both a tangible, sensory experience and a culturally created value that people sought to realize by visiting parks such as RMNP.53 Mooney’s articulation of the air tour problem is also important for its apparent contradictions. The idea that silence could be perpetuated even as it roped millions of visitors into the Estes Park area was problematic. Indeed, Estes Park residents and the park service were not interested in creating a total absence of anthropogenic noise in the park. This had been a goal of some wilderness advocates, such as Edward Abbey and Sigurd Olson in the mid-twentieth century, who argued that silence was “more than just an attribute of a wild place. Silence was its essence.” 54 While Abbey, among others, decried the commercialization of national parks, Mr. Mooney’s letter, as well as testimonies from other residents, showed that RMNP’s advocates’ definition of “silence” could in fact allow for noises that echoed pragmatic economics. Anti-noise advocacy evolved from the wilderness and environmental movements, which began to coalesce three decades before air tour operators tried to enter RMNP. With the passage of the Wilderness Act in 1964, Congress tasked the parks with setting aside a majority of their terrestrial property as “untrammeled” wilderness where visitors could experience “solitude.” Early advocates for wilderness protection, such as the founders of the Wilderness Society, had pointed to silence and solitude as worthy reasons for setting aside land where machines should not be used. When the group first met in 1935, they wrote, “Scarcely a month passes in which . . . some quiet glade hitherto disturbed only by birds and insects and wind in the trees does not bark out the merits of ‘Crazy Water Crystals’ and the mushiness of ‘Cocktails for Two.’ ”55 Silence, particularly in terms of freedom from roads and automobiles, undergirded their calls for wilderness activism.

The politics of solitude 147 However, RMNP’s anti-noise advocates reflected historian Mark Harvey’s argument that increased auto travel introduced more and more Americans to parks and wilderness – experiences that compelled many to call for increased protections that did not undermine automobile access.56 For many Americans, national park thoroughfares and roadless wildernesses could coexist well enough. Aircraft represented a new issue. The Wilderness Act did not protect the airspace over parks from mechanical cacophony, which threatened the law’s assurances that solitude be realized where Congress mandated wilderness. Some park advocates at the time worried about air travel and the noise inherent to machinepowered flight. Scientists F. Fraser Darling and Noel Eichhorn produced a critical report covering wilderness characteristics in the parks in 1967. Both lamented the park service’s inability to foresee the changes wrought by the popular proliferation of the internal combustion engine. Darling and Eichhorn nodded to the presence of aircraft in and around the parks and implored the NPS to be wary of air travel. “Certainly it must keep its ear close to the ground,” they wrote, “to hear about such developments as the projected jetport adjoining the Everglades and the access highway through the park, before the wretched scheme becomes as good as a fait accompli.”57 The planned airport at the Everglades constituted part of a wider program of building airports at or near national parks, itself a subset of nationwide airport building campaigns facilitated by the establishment of the FAA. Worries and conflicts over the place of aircraft in parks and wilderness areas only grew over the next two decades. Writing about aircraft over the Brooks Range in northern Alaska in 1980, historian Roderick Nash noted the noise aircraft made as a nuisance and emphasized that aircraft represented symbols of the modern industrial world that people hoped to escape when they traveled to wildernesses. Due to the extensive number of air tours flown over Grand Canyon National Park, Congress identified “natural quiet” as a protected resource at the park in 1975. A  midair collision between tour aircraft in 1986 prompted the 1987 National Parks Overflights Act, allowing the park service to establish noise limitations. However, the volume of flights actually increased over the ten years following the mandate, highlighting the lack of clarity over who enforced access to airspace over parks.58 Commercial air tour operators proved difficult to remove once entrenched. This was the case at Grand Canyon as well as Kilauea in Hawaii, where helicopter tours over the volcano grew predictably popular as well as increasingly dangerous and annoying. This was the larger context within which the fight over air tours in RMNP emerged. RMNP’s overflight issue came to a head in the mid-1990s. Local groups, including the chamber of commerce and the Estes Park chapter of The League of Women Voters, lobbied Congress to create legislation that permanently banned commercial air tours at RMNP. For the first time, anti-overflight activists explicitly tied noise pollution to the Wilderness Act, arguing that areas declared wilderness constituted ninety-two percent of RMNP, and that “these wilderness resources are particularly susceptible to noise from such motorized sources as aircraft.”59 Activists considered aircraft noise especially bad because it affected

148  Mark Boxell park goers in all areas of the park and represented a hierarchy of travel that offered those who could afford it stunning vistas at the expense of automobile tourists. At least automobile noise could be channelized, its presence confined to roadways and their immediate surroundings.60 Furthermore, the vast majority of tourists would continue to enjoy equal access to scenery. By the 1990s, even the Estes Park Chamber of Commerce, which had been foundational in the failed attempt to build an airport in Estes Park in the 1960s, supported the overflight ban. The chamber denied air tour companies from applying for membership.61 Congress permanently banned air tours from operating over RMNP in 1998. Concerned citizens had lobbied, written letters, and campaigned via phone nationwide to prevent private aircraft from operating over the park. The air tour controversy brought about a renewed realization within Estes Park that the town’s economic health relied, in part, upon silence. Air tours threatened “[s]olitude, tranquility, spectacular scenery, the opportunity to view abundant wildlife, and the dramatic contrast to nearby urban environments” that attracted people to RMNP.62 The chamber of commerce and other groups acting in the mid-twentieth century perhaps did not perceive natural quiet as part of RMNP’s appeal. But surely urban growth in the surrounding area during that period, urban-style development in the park via Mission 66, and the growing interest in wilderness advocacy attuned town residents to the sonic threats that suffused the post-war world. When local groups defined tranquility and solitude as vital park features sought out by tourists, they seized upon economically pragmatic reasons for protecting these characteristics and banning air tours. Certain mechanical technologies could coexist with tourism, while others could not.

Conclusion: the noisy Great Acceleration Noise pollution in general and the specific character of the noise-related tensions that arose in RMNP and Estes Park reflected wider changes linked to a post-war explosion in the global consumption of fossil fuels and the expansion of transportation networks, a period that some scientists and historians have termed the Great Acceleration. Environmental historian John McNeill and scientists Paul Crutzen and Will Steffen have noted that an exceptional increase in levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide is the primary quantifiable characteristic of this global movement toward increased hydrocarbon dependency.63 Carbon dioxide levels can indeed be graphed and illustrated for readers, but those changes are for the most part intangible to people in their daily lives. Noise can provide a visceral conduit for experiencing the proliferation of fossil-fueled, mechanical technologies that have caused atmospheric transformations and the subsequent era of global climate change. In particular, mechanical and industrial noise linked to fossil-fueled transportation offers the opportunity to reflect on the intersections of protected areas such as national parks and commercial processes that drive global climate change. The increase in levels of both noise and atmospheric carbon dioxide in and around RMNP can be traced to the accumulation and spread of fossil-fueled machines since World War II. Researchers have found that nitrogen compounds

The politics of solitude 149 from power plants, automobiles, and industrial farms have created air pollution that has transformed the alpine vegetation in RMNP.64 Scientists have linked the beginning of dramatic increases in nitrogen deposits in the park to the year 1950.65 The same fossil-fueled technologies that transformed RMNP’s soundscape in the post-war era also helped precipitate floral and climatological change in the park – broader material changes subsumed in processes of urbanization, industrialization, and population growth linked with the local political activism that noise pollution inspired. The links between noise pollution and climate change are clear, but integrating these connections into a meaningful ethic for understanding parks and other wilderness spaces in a time of environmental upheaval is another matter. Coupled with nitrogen deposition, melting glaciers, and overcrowded roads, aircraft noise has largely been an artifact of a hydrocarbon-based energy regime, one shaped to serve a global economic structure that has transformed both the biogeochemical nature of the planet and the localized sensory experience of visiting a nominal wilderness. Searching for wilderness experiences free of the ever-present specter of aircraft noise and other hydrocarbon-consuming machines can offer moral insights in a world where an overreliance on technologies such as aircraft now presents humans with a host of existential future catastrophes. National parks will continue to be important biological havens in an urbanizing world increasingly reshaped by volatile climates. But they should also act as sources of cultural criticism – places where mechanical noise is listened to critically and where the connections between the enjoyment of national parks and fossil fuel consumption are taken seriously.

Notes 1 Soundscape is defined as “the composition of all sounds heard at a location,” including anthropogenic and natural sounds. See Pijanowski, et al., “Soundscape Ecology: The Science of Sound in the Landscape,” BioScience 61, no. 3 (March 2011): 203–16, accessed April 10, 2017, www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/bio.2011.61.3.6 2 Mark M. Smith, Sensing the Past: Seeing, Hearing, Smelling, Tasting, and Touching in History (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2007), 4. 3 Alain Corbin, Time, Desire and Horror: Towards a History of the Senses, trans. by Jean Birrell (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1995), 183. Further reading pertaining to both sensory history and technological histories of noise: Robert Jütte, A History of the Senses: From Antiquity to Cyberspace (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2005); Alain Corbin, Village Bells: Sound and Meaning in the 19th-Century French Countryside, trans. by Martin Thom (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998; Mark Smith, Listening to Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001); Adam Mach, Sensing Chicago: Noisemakers, Strikebreakers, and Muckrakers (Champaign and Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015); Daniel Morat, Sounds of Modern History: Auditory Cultures in 19th-and 20th-Century Europe (New York: Berghahn Books, 2014); Aimee Boutin, City of Noise: Sound and NineteenthCentury Paris (Champaign and Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015); Emily Ann Thompson, The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America, 1900–1933 (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2002); Karin Bijsterveld, Mechanical Sound: Technology, Culture, and Public Problems of Noise

150  Mark Boxell in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2008); Melanie Kiechle, Smell Detectives: An Olfactory History of Nineteenth-Century Urban America (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2017). 4 John McNeill, Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth-Century World (New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 2000). 5 See Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1964); Paul Sutter, Driven Wild: How the Fight against Automobiles Launched the Modern Wilderness Movement (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2002); 6 Peter A. Coates, “The Strange Stillness of the Past: Toward an Environmental History of Sound and Noise,” Environmental History 10, no. 4 (October 2005): 650–4. 7 For the history of the middle- and upper-class politics of preservation and conservation, see Sutter, Driven Wild; Mark W. Harvey, A Symbol of Wilderness: Echo Park and the American Conservation Movement (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1994); Miles Powell, Vanishing America: Species Extinction, Racial Peril, and the Origins of Conservation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016); Andrew Needham, Power Lines: Phoenix and the Making of the Modern Southwest (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014); Robert Righter, The Battle over Hetch Hetchy America's Most Controversial Dam and the Birth of Modern Environmentalism (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2005). 8 Logan Park, et al., “Modeling and Mapping Hikers’ Exposure to Transportation Noise in Rocky Mountain National Park,” Park Science 26, no. 3 (Winter 2009–10): 59–63. 9 Will Wright, “Geophysical Agency in the Anthropocene: Engineering a Road and River to Rocky Mountain National Park,” Environmental History 22, no. 4 (October 2017): 668–95. 10 See Susan Sessions Rugh, Are We There Yet? The Golden Age of American Family Vacations (Lawrence, RS: University Press of Kansas, 2008). 11 Richard White, The Republic for Which It Stands: The United States During Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865–1896 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 339; Alfred Runte, Trains of Discovery: Western Railroads and the National Parks (Niwot, CO: Rinehart, 1990), 16–19, 31–3, 39–41; Runte, National Parks: The American Experience, 2nd ed. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1987), 44–7, 61, 66, 94, 113, 166. 12 U.S. Congress, An Act to Establish the Rocky Mountain National Park in the State of Colorado, and other Purposes, January 26, 1915, 63rd Cong., 3rd sess., 798–800. 13 Rules and Regulations: Yosemite National Park, 1920 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1920), accessed December 28, 2017, https://books.google.com/ books?id=ofNYAAAAMAAJ&dq=%E2%80%9Cautomobiles%E2%80%9D+%E2% 80%9Cnational+park%E2%80%9D&source=gbs_navlinks_s 14 “Rocky Mountain NP,” Park Report, National Park Service Visitor Use Statistics, accessed January 23, 2019, https://irma.nps.gov/Stats/Reports/Park/ROMO 15 Ethan Carr, Mission 66: Modernism and the National Parks Dilemma (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2007), 24–38; Richard West Sellars, Preserving Nature in the National Parks: A History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 349. 16 Jerry J. Frank, Making Rocky Mountain National Park: The Environmental History of a National Treasure (Lawrence, RS: University Press of Kansas, 2013), 44. 17 Highway Statistics: Summary to 1965 (Washington, DC: Department of Transportation, 1965), 167. 18 “March  7, 2016 Average Historical Annual Gasoline Pump Price, 1929–2015,” U. S. Department of Energy, accessed April 15, 2015, http://energy.gov/eere/vehicles/ fact-835-august-25-average-historical-annual-gasoline-pump-price-1929-2013 19 Maren Thompson Bzdek and Janet Ore, The Mission 66 Program at Rocky Mountain National Park (Fort Collins, CO: Public Lands History Center, 2010), 21.

The politics of solitude 151 20 Thomas A. Thomas, “Roads to a Troubled Future: Transportation and Transformation in Colorado’s Interstate Highway Corridors in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries” (PhD diss., University of Colorado, 1996), 125–7, 130–1, 164–7. 21 Highway Statistics: Summary to 1965, 2, 4–5. 22 “National Transportation Statistics,” Bureau of Transportation, accessed July 13, 2015, www.rita.dot.gov/bts/sites/rita.dot.gov.bts/files/publications/national_transportation_ statistics/html/table_01_23.html 23 Stephen Williams, “Decades of Best-Selling Cars,” The New York Times, August  6, 2009, accessed July  13, 2015, http://wheels.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/06/decadesof-best-selling-cars/?_r=0. The 1965 Chevrolet Impala still holds the American record for most single-year sales of any individual model. 24 Brian Black, “The Consumer’s Hand Made Visible: Consumer Culture in American Petroleum Consumption of the 1970s,” in American Energy Policy in the 1970s, ed. by Robert Lifset (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2014), 257–9. 25 Hal Higdon, “After the Horsepower Race – Now a Silence Race,” The New York Times, May  1, 1966, accessed July  13, 2015, http://search.proquest.com.ezproxy2.library. colostate.edu:2048/hnpnewyorktimes/docview/117090753/286C9395F6C64191PQ/2 0?accountid=10223 26 R. Murray Schafer, The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World (Rochester, VT: Destiny, 1994), 83. 27 “Rocky Mountain National Park: The Rooftop of the Continent,” published by United States Department of the Interior, National Park Service, Rocky Mountain National Park, September 1995, in Sound, Rocky Mountain National Park Museum Storage Facility, Estes Park, CO. This source and most of the sources pulled from RMNP’s museum storage facility and archive were housed in a box labeled “Sound” that, as of fall 2015, had not been accessioned or organized in any way and contained unlabeled folders. Thus, the above citation includes as much detail as I am able to provide. 28 David Louter, Windshield Wilderness: Cars, Roads, and Nature in Washington’s National Parks (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006), 4; also see Peter J. Schmitt, Back to Nature: The Arcadian Myth in Urban America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969). 29 Louter, Windshield Wilderness, 10. 30 For automobile noise, see Logan Park, et al. (footnote #6) as well as this letter to the editor in the Estes Park Trail-Gazette, July 2, 1982: “Restrict helicopters to the business section of downtown Estes Park, and the airspace above its tourist highways, because you couldn’t hear the helicopters above the loud motorcycles and ‘muscle cars’ that are not permitted in more fragile environments such as Boulder,” Sound, Rocky Mountain National Park Museum Storage Facility, Estes Park, CO; “highway to the sky” quote is from the NPS’s “Trail Ridge Road” webpage, accessed April 20, 2015, www.nps.gov/romo/planyourvisit/trail_ridge_road.htm; Sutter, Driven Wild. 31 For the environmental history of the United States’ automobile industry and infrastructure, see Christopher W. Wells, Car Country: An Environmental History (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2012). 32 For the history of earlier eras and automobiles, see Carlos Arnaldo Schwantes, Going Places: Transportation Redefines the Twentieth-Century West (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003); Peter Blodgett, Motoring West: Volume 1, Automobile Pioneers, 1900–1909 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2016). 33 “Historical Aircraft Statistics, Annual 1954–1980,” United States Department of Transportation, accessed April  29, 2016, www.rita.dot.gov/bts/sites/rita.dot.gov. bts/files/subject_areas/airline_information/air_carrier_traffic_statistics/airtraffic/ annual/1954_1980.html 34 Transportation Noise and Noise from Equipment Powered by Internal Combustion Engines, 22.

152  Mark Boxell 35 During a hike along portions of Ute Trail above the tree line in RMNP, I counted eight commercial jets flying only a couple thousand feet above me in the span of thirty minutes. This isn’t counting aircraft flying at cruising altitudes, which can be heard but are not as conspicuous. 36 Historical flight path data are not readily available, but aircraft would likely have taken routes similar to those they take today. Using www.flightradar24.com, a website that provides flight radar data to the public, I  gathered flight path data that include recent flight histories. I gathered data pertaining to Seattle-Denver flights by looking at Southwest Airlines’ present-day Seattle-Denver route, accessed July 13, 2015, www. flightradar24.com/data/flights/wn478/#6c1894a 37 Continental Airlines’ 1971 time tables, accessed July 13, 2015, www.departedflights. com/CO103171p28.html; www.departedflights.com/CO103171p8.html. Historic timetables and route maps are digitized at www.departedflights.com and www.airway snews.com. Decibel-level examples are from IAC Acoustics. www.industrialnoise control.com/comparative-noise-examples.htm 38 Twentieth Century Petroleum Statistics (Dallas: DeGolyer and McNaughton, 1984), 63. 39 Carl Solberg, Conquest of the Skies: A History of Commercial Aviation in America (Boston, MA: Little, Brown and Co., 1979), 318. 40 Jenifer Van Vleck, Empire of the Air: Aviation and the American Ascendancy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 3, 5–6, 9. 41 Roger E. Bilstein, The American Aerospace Industry: From Workshop to Global Enterprise (New York: Twayne, 1996), 147. 42 Michael Marden, Airport Committee, Estes Park Chamber of Commerce – letter to Secretary of Interior, Francis Seaton, March 20, 1958, Subseries 2.6: Lands and Recreation, File Units 219–26, Rocky Mountain National Park Museum Storage Facility, Estes Park, CO. Hereafter cited as “LR.” 43 Woodrow Bussey, Pres. Bussey Hills Corp. – letter to James V. Lloyd, RMNP Superintendent, May 24, 1956, LR, Rocky Mountain National Park Museum Storage Facility. 44 Lucas V. Beau – letter to Conrad Wirth, director of the National Park Service, January 20, 1955, LR, Rocky Mountain National Park Museum Storage Facility, Estes Park, CO. 45 J.R. Bissell Jr., president of Estes Park Airport Committee – text of paper presented to Governor Love’s forum, Loveland, CO, January  10, 1964, LR, Rocky Mountain National Park Museum Storage Facility, Estes Park, CO. 46 “Minutes, Airport Committee,” March 15, 1962, LR, Rocky Mountain National Park Museum Storage Facility, Estes Park, CO. 47 “2 Firms Planning Helicopter Service,” Estes Park Trail-Gazette, May 12, 1982, in Sound, Rocky Mountain National Park Museum Storage Facility. 48 “Town Board Vetoes Helicopters, 4–2,” Estes Park Trail-Gazette, May 21, 1982, in Sound, Rocky Mountain National Park Museum Storage Facility. 49 Coates, “The Strange Stillness of the Past,” 654. For more on marine wildlife, sounds, and late-twentieth century environmentalism, see Kurkpatrick Dorsey, Whales and Nations: Environmental Diplomacy on the High Seas (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2013), 207–19. 50 Ibid. 51 Ibid. 52 David Mooney, “Save Silence, Ground Choppers,” Estes Park Trail-Gazette, June 25, 1982, Sound, Rocky Mountain National Park Museum Storage Facility, Estes Park, CO. 53 Ibid. 54 See Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire (New York: McGraw-Hill Publishers, 1968); Coates, “The Strange Stillness of the Past,” 650. 55 Sutter, Driven Wild, 181, 192, 205, 241–2, quoted in Coates, “The Strange Stillness of the Past,” 650. 56 See Mark Harvey, “Loving the Wild in Postwar America,” in Michael Lewis, ed., American Wilderness: A New History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 187–203.

The politics of solitude 153 57 Fraser Darling and Noel D. Eichhorn, Man and Nature in the National Parks (Washington, DC: Conservation Foundation, 1967), 11. 58 Roderick Nash, “Ideal & Reality in ‘Ultimate’ Wilderness: Aviation and Gates of the Arctic National Park,” Orion (Spring 1983): 5–13; Coates, “The Strange Stillness of the Past,” 652; Robert B. Keiter, To Conserve Unimpaired: The Evolution of the National Park Idea (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2013), 34. 59 “Commercial Tour Overflights,” Prepared for: Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt, May 24, 1995, materials sent by Estes Park League of Women Voters to author, materials in possession of author. 60 “Rocky Mountain National Park: The Rooftop of the Continent,” Sound, Rocky Mountain National Park Museum Storage Facility, 12. 61 “Chamber Joins Lobbying Effort to Keep Helicopters out of EP,” Estes Park TrailGazette, April 26, 1995. 62 “Rocky Mountain National Park: The Rooftop of the Continent,” Sound, Rocky Mountain National Park Museum Storage Facility, 2. 63 Will Steffen, Paul J. Crutzen, and J. R. McNeill, “The Anthropocene: Are Humans Now Overwhelming the Great Forces of Nature?” Ambio 36, no. 8 (December 2007): 614–21, accessed April  30, 2016, www.jstor.org/stable/25547826; Will Steffen, Jacques Grivevald, Paul Crutzen, and John McNeill, “The Anthropocene: Conceptual and Historical Perspectives,” Philosophical Transactions: Mathematical, Physical, and Engineering Sciences 369, no. 1938 (March 2011): 842–3, accessed January 15, 2016, www.jstor.org/stable/41061703 64 “Too much of a good thing: Alpine plants under threat in Rocky Mountain National Park,” Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research, University of Colorado-Boulder, July 6, 2012, accessed April  29, 2016, http://instaar.colorado.edu/news-events/instaar-news/ too-much-of-a-good-thing-alpine-plants-under-threat-in-rocky-mountain-natio/ 65 Alexander P. Wolfe, Jill S. Baron, and R. Jack Cornett, “Anthropogenic Nitrogen Deposition Induces Rapid Ecological Changes in Alpine Lakes of the Colorado Front Range (USA),” Journal of Paleolimnology 25, no. 1 (January  2001): 2–5, accessed July 29, 2016, http://link.springer.com/article/10.1023/A:1008129509322

8 Hidden in plain sight Rethinking Saharan studies as a discipline Sarah Gilkerson

Introduction Antoine de Saint-Exupéry entranced the metropolitan French imagination in the early twentieth century through his writings of the French-perceived exotic spaces of the colonial Empire. He wrote, “I have always loved the desert. One sits down on a desert sand dune, sees nothing, hears nothing. Yet through the silence something throbs, and gleams” (Saint-Exupéry 1943).1 The emptiness and mysticism Exupéry described in many ways mirrored the French colonial administration’s perceptions of the Sahara Desert, which was categorized as ungodly and barren owing to indigenous pastoralism. Following this categorization, and the ensuing colonial science undertaken in the Sahara, much academic scholarship has reproduced this bias. In this way, the Sahara Desert has become vulnerable to miscategorization, with security studies viewing the Sahara as a haven for terror groups, environmentalists warning of the ever-encroaching problem of desertification, and geographers avoiding the space altogether. Within this context, this essay highlights existing literature on the communities, economies, and histories of the Sahara, which together reveal its interconnectivity. In contrast to much of the commonly used historiography on the Sahara, which has typified the Sahara Desert as a cultural barrier, this essay shows the Sahara to be instead a connective corridor. To make this argument, I rely upon the theoretical grounding of Fernand Braudel, whose book on the connectivity of the Mediterranean largely transformed the importance of telling metanarratives in historical inquiry. As this contribution is largely literature review–based, I synthesize Braudelian theory with an overview of the histories and ethnographies of the trans-Saharan trade routes to demonstrate the similarities between each of these connective spaces. Using these historiographies, I ultimately argue that Saharan studies must become a subfield in history and area on the basis of the potential offered by Mediterranean studies.

Theoretical background Braudel’s focus on depth and detail, as well as his opening up of bounded and obscured geographic regions, lends his work an explaining power, a trend the

Hidden in plain sight 155 existing literature on the Sahara can also demonstrate.2 Braudel mastered two centuries of history but situated this period within a longer environmental examination and placed enterprise and the development of local systems of knowledge at the heart of his justification for what he called a “desire and need to see on a grand scale” (p. 22). To present these interconnections, Braudel focused on three “registers” of history: environmental or geographical, social, and individual. This paper will interweave each but will discuss economic, as opposed to individual, to demonstrate the merit of continuing to investigate the Sahara as a connective and central space.

Geography and environment Within the field of environmental geography, the nexus of landscape, culture, and regional studies has demonstrated the importance of understanding how physical geography shapes connectivity.3 Similarly, Braudel opens his analysis by describing the different “faces” of the Mediterranean. In particular, he illustrates how the Mediterranean connected three regions – Western Europe, the Ottoman Empire, and North Africa. Similarly, the scholarship of Ghislaine Lydon has shown that the Sahara connected two regions – North and West Africa – while, given the extensiveness of the trans-Saharan trade routes, several other scholars have shown how the network extended across space and time, such as to the Indian Ocean slave trade and through the Roman Empire.4 Most importantly, George Michael La Rue (2009) demonstrated that the Sahara connected northern, central, and western regions of Africa through economies, but also through geography. Braudel argued that the geography of the Mediterranean bound these very different sociocultural regions together through geographic features; this also applies to the Sahara. Like the Mediterranean, the Sahara appears on a map as an uncrossable natural barrier. However, the Sahara Desert acts paradoxically, both protecting the culture of the nomadic inhabitants of the Sahara and connecting the Sahel via porous borderlands. The physical geography, such as the mountain ranges and rivers, that encloses both the Mediterranean and the Sahara renders them both contiguous spaces with interconnections crucial to area studies. In his section “Mountains Come First,” Braudel demonstrated how the geologic history of the mountain ranges surrounding the Mediterranean (“all-round the sea the mountains are present”) bound the space together.5 In the same way, the Sahara is enclosed by dramatic mountain ranges, or the “bones of the region.”6 To Braudel, the mountains surrounding the Mediterranean enclose the sea in a contiguous space, with a history bound together like the pages of a book. In trans-Saharan history, the Niger River served as another corridor for the trans-Saharan trade routes while also creating a fluid southern border. The Sahara desert and its easily definable borderlands thus create a type of contiguousness similar to that which allowed Braudel to elevate the Mediterranean to a subfield due to the commonality of the bound geographic space.

156  Sarah Gilkerson One such source that shows the lack of focus on the Sahara as a paradoxically bound and porous community can be seen in how cartographers have chosen to represent the Sahara (as was the case for the Mediterranean during Braudel’s time). Maps of the Mediterranean flattened the complex history of the region through simplification and failed to reflect local conceptions of space. John Armstrong described this as one of Braudel’s most importance contributions and most convincing points, writing, “Most impressive are his techniques for converting conventional geographic space into spatial categories that are meaningful for the societies he treats.”7 While the Mediterranean has come a long way in this regard, with the establishment of The Mediterranean Review (2000) and Journal of Mediterranean Studies (1980), the Sahara has no unifying journals or conferences and therefore merits this focus. In regard to the Sahara, cartographers regularly shy away from reflecting the oases and mountain ranges of the desert, and geographers have not divided it into unique regions despite its being one of the most complex and important ecosystems. Because most popular depictions of the Sahara are undertaken by non-local cartographers, the maps lack many of the important but difficult to recognize traits that show the desert to be a diverse ecosystem. As Braudel asserted, geography “is no longer an end in itself but a means to an end. It helps us to rediscover the slow unfolding of structural realities, to see things in the perspective of the very long term.”8 The inaccuracy of geographic representations of the Sahara demonstrates the lack of reflection on its systems and inner workings, pointing to an overall gap in scholarly inquiry. By overlooking the physical geography, scholars fail to recognize how the Sahara has materially connected people and goods. The populations of the Sahara, similar to Braudel’s island populations, relied on the desert or the sea for survival and used the oases as their centers of habitation. Both island and oasis populations maintained their insular culture while participating economically with the larger region. Both were at risk of pirates and marauders, both faced harsh weather and storms, and both faced the threat of besiegement, as their geography provided a shield but also drowned the small populations in isolation. Braudel described the role of islands in the Mediterranean in a manner that can be applied similarly to the Saharan oases: “The islands lay on the paths of the great sea routes and played a part in international relations.”9 An example similar to Braudel’s islands is the many oases of the Sahara desert, which continue to offer refuge for travelers and caravans. Because oases are often not even depicted in cartographic representations of the Sahara, much of the deeper history is overlooked. Exemplifying the paradox of closed yet permeable space, the Saharan borderlands show the ways in which the physical geography of the Sahara connects entire regions, particularly between the Sahara and the Sahel. Ralph Austen offered a challenge to the idea of the Saharan border, particularly in regard to the Sahel: “The boundary between desert and cultivated lands at the south of the Sahara is much less clear than in the north.”10 In a further response, Armelle Choplin and Olivier Pliez have proposed that geographers, historians, and anthropologists construct a new “saharo-sahélien” field to better understand how the western

Hidden in plain sight 157 Sahara and Sahel regions interact. The authors argue, “North African economic and migration tropism is forcefully exhorted against the deserted sections of the meridian states and in a non-negligible manner against the Sahelean parties and their states.”11 Because the economic and sociocultural history of the Sahel and the Sahara are so intertwined, they must be studied collaboratively. Instead of viewing the Sahara as a wall where inquiry ends, they argue that scholars should view it as interconnected. Although the field of borderlands arguably began much later than Braudel’s publication, Braudel focused on the borderlands of the Mediterra­ nean because he argued they could not be understood without these connections.

Social Braudel’s model also guides the ways in which scholars can trace the social history of the desert by acknowledging the communities who have called the Sahara home as well as delineating how the Sahara has become an identity for these communities. To do so, scholars have written on the people of the Sahara, inherently breaking down the false racial barrier between Arab Africa and sub-Saharan Africa. Additionally, historians and social scientists have shown how the socially constructed borders that define the Sahel from the Sahara have been, in fact, porous and fluid. Instead, the Sahara acts as a socially productive space, in terms of language and religion, for both borders and race, both for the communities who live within the desert and those who live on its peripheries. The split between Arab Africa and sub-Saharan Africa potentially began with Umayyad colonization of North Africa but became solidified through French colonial administration. For the French, Algeria and Morocco were prized for their natural resources and potential for settler colonization, whereas the subSaharan holdings were almost exclusively used for resource extraction.12 Lydon explains how “European explorers, and later colonial rulers, reinvented Africa on their own terms by also applying a color line to their racial mapping of the continent.”13 In many ways, this division between Arab and sub-Saharan Africa has largely incapacitated scholarly inquiry into how these racial lines and barriers are, in and of themselves, porous and constructed categories. This became important because this was one of the many fault lines that scholars have used to guide their study, seeing North Africans and sub-Saharan Africans as entirely separate communities. Contrary to this narrative, genetic studies have demonstrated that these regions became interconnected through relationships, marriages, or the production of children. Two studies in particular showed the genetic ties between the two regions of North and West Africa. First, while there was a significant difference between Egyptian and North African Imazighen communities, the West and North Amazigh lineages showed significant similarities. One of the hypotheses proposed in the conclusion of the study was to isolate the Sahara as the main corridor for genetic transfer amongst these populations.14 The second study sought to standardize genotypes throughout the region to better chart genetic relatives. The study’s conclusions affirmed that North Africa’s “genetic proximity with

158  Sarah Gilkerson sub-Saharan Africa is a reminder of the links that connect all Africa regions.”15 Each of these studies demonstrates how the Sahara connected the communities of the supposedly separate Arab and sub-Saharan Africa through marriages or the fostering of children. Additionally, scholars not only define Africa in the false terms of sub-Saharan and North but also overlook the fact that anyone even lives in the Desert.16 The Sahara itself has been home to a diverse array of indigenous communities. Similarly to Braudel’s island communities, scholars might begin by magnifying the history and voices of the largely marginalized and ignored Imazighen communities who have inhabited the Sahara Desert for the past two millennia. Tuareg, Imazighen, and Sahrawi communities used their Saharan identity to unite against the French and Spanish empires during the middle and late nineteenth century. Additionally, the relationship between the Sahara and the communities who have resided there is one of definition and production, as Tuareg Mano Dayak wrote in his autobiography. Dayak communicates the ways in which the Tuareg are inseparable from the Sahara, having their entire identity tied to their existence as desert nomads.17 Historically, the remoteness of the Sahara has played a critical role in maintaining the Amazigh identity of Tuaregs, Kabyles, Chleuhs, and Rifains by constructing environmental boundaries through religious and cultural practice.18 In this way, the Sahara both protected and maintained the Amazigh identity. Furthermore, North and West African scholars have begun to respond to Braudel’s centralizing of the identity of a space like the Mediterranean by showing that the Sahara also shapes identity. Naffet Keïta makes a unique argument – that the Tuareg identity is synonymous with the Sahara to the point where the French government sought to control them by means of taking governmental control of the Malian Sahara. Keïta then discusses how the French colonial government viewed the Sahara as the necessary agent in controlling all of West and North Africa by defeating the Tuaregs. He quotes a military dossier from 1957 that states, “The Sahara is the necessary link between all African elements, not just the forsaken glaze between each.”19 Additionally, the movement of populations in and out of the desert produced and shaped regional languages in a manner similar to Braudel’s demonstration of the spread of African dialects to Venice. For example, he demonstrates how the Sahara most likely gave birth to the West African language of Fulani.20 Austen also describes Tamazight, the standardized Imazighen language, as “the most broadly spread, the first to be written, and the least unified.”21 Tuareg authors have shown how Tamazight depicts the relationship between the Tuareg and the Sahara. For instance, Tamazight refers to the Sahara as a conglomeration of smaller deserts, indicating the ecological complexity and variability of the region.22 Additionally, a Wangara language from Mali and Ghana called Azer became the traditional language of trade throughout the Sahara, showing the prominence and spread of interconnectivity. Braudel equally describes Italian as “the commercial language of the entire Mediterranean.”23 Each economy needed a unifying language during the most active trade years. In this way, language maps both the interconnections and the inhabitants of the Sahara.

Hidden in plain sight 159 Of equal importance in showing connectivity, rather than Arab colonization, the trans-Saharan trade routes were, in many ways, responsible for the spread of Islam as a unifying feature throughout the Sahara and the peripheries.24 Hundreds of Islamic legal documents comprise the backbone of Lydon’s research, showing that the caravans themselves, rather than governmentality, spread religion. She writes that social networks were “rendered more efficient through traders’ reliance on literacy and an Islamic legal and institutional framework for drafting contracts and recording transactions.”25 The sheer extent of the trade network around the Saharan borderlands and within the desert tethered their roots to Mecca and Medina for guidance. Braudel, too, described how the peripheral spaces of the Mediterranean invigorated or converted many groups to Christianity, connecting them to trade networks and higher status. In the case of the Sahara, Islam spread throughout the Imazighen communities of the Sahara as well as throughout North and West Africa, ideologically binding the two together.

Economic Finally, Braudel constructed the Mediterranean as a traversable space, connected by maritime trade and technology. Similarly, the caravanners of the trans-Saharan trade routes connected the desert through their economic networks and the new technology of the camel.26 They were able to utilize these technologies due to these early caravanners’ intimate knowledge of the Sahara, which rivals the sailors of Braudel’s Mediterranean. By tracing the material flows of goods throughout the region, Lydon’s scholarship demonstrates that the Sahara was an interconnected and influential economic zone. By mapping the movement of people and economy through the desert, scholars have detailed the trans-Saharan trade caravan history from Mali, Mauritania, Senegal, and Southern Morocco in the same way that Braudel detailed Venetian, Turkish, Moroccan, and Spanish trade through the Mediterranean. The caravanners could be described as the Saharan version of Mediterranean sailors. Additionally, the caravanners’ day-to-day interactions with the Sahara created a body of knowledge, as they relied on it for passage in the same way that Mediterranean sailors knew the sea. Lydon paints the caravanners as “eager to impart details [. . .] share their unique empirical knowledge about people and places, regional geography, topography, and hydrology.”27 Similarly, Braudel offers an intricate depiction of how seafarers’ knowledge in navigating the Mediterranean was built around slow exploration, eventually leading to major trade routes. In the same way that ships hugged the coast as they began to explore, Lydon attempts to offer a similar illustration of early caravanners navigating the most hospitable borderlands first before forming major trade routes. These caravans relied upon the safe harbor of the oases and were deeply connected to localities in spite of the wide extension of the desert. Known as “grand caids,” the Tuareg tribes controlled the caravan passages of the trans-Saharan trade routes. Briggs describes the Tuareg’s active role in organizing trans-Saharan trade prior to French colonization while living in Ahaggar,

160  Sarah Gilkerson or Hoggar Massif. He writes that they controlled “the Amenokal of the Ahaggar, Guémama, and all of the trade routes between Mourzouk and Timbuctoo, the southwestern Sahara, and southward into northern Nigeria, at least as early as the beginning of the fifteenth century.”28This locally run trade operation grounded the quotidian operations within the Tuareg’s indigenous knowledge of the Saharan ecology but extended far beyond their territory. Braudel illustrated the Mediterranean economy by showing the movement of material goods through this complex trade system. Similarly, caravanners traded everything from books to salt to guns to ostrich feathers, matching Braudel’s descriptions of spices, agricultural products, and luxury goods.29 Of particular importance was how the trans-Saharan book trade interconnected production as well as populations. Books were produced and sold through the trans-Saharan trade routes due to their expansive ability to generate materials and deliver them. This was important because book production relied on natural resources found throughout North and West Africa and connected by the Sahara. In particular, esparto, a coarse grass that was used in the production of paper, and gum arabic, used in book binding and ink, traveled far to be transformed into a vibrant book trade. Gum arabic was harvested along the Senegal River and west of Timbuktu only to travel everywhere from Moroccan ports to Egyptian mosques to serve in the vibrant book trade during this time.30 The book trade not only demarcates the flow of books but also demonstrates a wider interconnection of the umma, or Muslim intellectual society, that shared scholarship through the route. In this way, the book trade offers one of the most vivid and beautiful examples of how the trans-Saharan trade routes acted as a connective corridor. Even then, not all travel through the Sahara – just as with the Mediterranean – was economic. The hajj represents one of the five pillars of Islam. It requires a pilgrimage to Mecca at least once in a believer’s lifetime and used the Saharan routes to connect the distant, but fervent, communities of North and West Africa to the dogmatic centers of the Islamic world. Further, famous travelers’ accounts, such as Ibn Battuta (1304–1377), inspired generations of audiences, showing the possibility of navigating such a vast space. Similarly, the extraordinarily wealthy Mansa Musa (1280–1337) famously traveled from Timbuktu via the trans-Saharan trade routes for hajj, leaving a trail of inflation along the way. There are innumerable examples of the types of flows through the Sahara, showing the importance of elevating it to a subfield in order to focus serious scholarly inquiry. Another way in which the trade networks became a productive and interconnected space was through debt institutions and the creation of Saharan-specific currencies such as baysa. Lydon explains how debts were collected at such a long distance by the Saharan letter writing network or through other traders, who “characterized the cooperative behavior among members of the trade network.”31 Similar to caravanners, many sailors had debts to repay that the intricate trade network enforced. The goods that served as currency due to their popularity show how the region’s economy network functioned. Using baysa, a cotton material, as a primary example of Saharan currency, this flow of currency and material overlaps with Braudel’s description of how salt was used as

Hidden in plain sight  161 a supplement to the Mediterranean economy. Anne McDougall demonstrates how baysa even became a standard unit of measurement from Mali to Algeria due to the trade. In this way, the Sahara acted as a connective and productive space of material goods and culture, which these scholars have traced through the creation of institutions, the establishment of networks, and the innovative uses of technologies.

Conclusion In this paper, I have used Braudel’s Mediterranean model to present the Sahara as a geographic corridor connecting North and West Africa in order to demonstrate that the existing scholarship on the Sahara covers Braudel’s avenues of analysis. In this way, I argue that these trends exist, but that Saharan studies should simply be elevated to a subfield, comparable to the Mediterranean. The study of the Mediterranean has resulted in great increases in the ways scholars understand overlapping ecosystems, sociocultural exchanges, and economic networks, meriting significant attention. As the Sahara is one of the most unique and expansive deserts in the world, it should no longer be the least studied and most poorly understood. Instead, scholars should focus on these exciting and understudied histories in the same way they did Braudel’s publication, founding a new field that has the potential to enfranchise ignored communities and create new conceptualizations of space.

Notes 1 Antoine De Saint-Exupery, The Little Prince (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1943), 24. 2 Fernand Braudel’s field-altering book, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (London: University of California Press, 1995), 74, belonged to the French Annales school of thought, which French historians developed in the twentieth century. The Annales stressed the importance of long-term social history, as opposed to political or diplomatic history, and was one of the first strands of history to use social scientific methods. In this way, Braudel was able to look across the Mediterranean and see the connections between cultural enclaves through trade and explain not only the social and economic centrality of the Mediterranean as an internal system but also its connection to the world. Thus, Braudel transformed the Mediterranean for academics, presenting it as a space worth paying attention to due to the sea’s long durée explaining power. 3 Noel Castree, et al., A Companion to Environmental Geography. Blackwell Companions to Geography (Chichester, UK and Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 238. 4 Robert Collins, “The African Slave Trade to Asia and the Indian Ocean Islands,” African and Asian Studies 5, no. 3 (2006): 325–46. 5 Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, 74. 6 Ibid., 98. 7 John A. Armstrong, “Braudel’s Mediterranean: Un Defi Latin,” World Politics, 1977, 629. 8 Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, 23. 9 Ibid., 154. 10 Ibid., 4.

162  Sarah Gilkerson 11 Armelle Choplin and Olivier Pliez, “(Re)construire l’image des territoires du Sahara et du Sahel,” Mappe Monde, Maison de la géographie (2011): 3. 12 Thomas Martin, Empires of Intelligence [electronic Resource]: Security Services and Colonial Disorder After 1914. University Press Scholarship Online (Berkeley, CA and London: University of California Press, 2008). 13 Ghislaine Lydon,  On Trans-Saharan Trails: Islamic Law, Trade Networks, and Crosscultural Exchange in Nineteenth-century Western Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 6. 14 C. Coudray and A. Olivieri, et al., “The Complex and Diversified Mitochondrial Gene Pool of Berber Populations,” Annals of Human Genetics 73 (2003): 196–214, 205. 15 Nadir Amri and Mohamed Sahnoune, et al., “STR-based Genetic Structure of the Berber Population of Bejaia (Northern Algeria) and Its Relationships to Various Ethnic Groups,” Gene 574 (2015): 147. 16 Gregory Maddox, Sub-Saharan Africa an Environmental History (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2006), 178. 17 Mano Dayak, Touareg, La Tragédie (Paris: Lattès, 1992). 18 Béligh Nabli,  Comprendre Le Monde Arabe (Paris: Armand Colin, 2013), 125. 19 Ibid., 100. 20 Ralph Austen,  Trans-Saharan Africa in World History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 9. 21 Ibid., 105. 22 Lloyd Cabot Briggs, Tribes of the Sahara (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960), 127. 23 Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, 128. 24 Hill, Margari, “The Spread of Islam in West Africa; Containment, Mixing, and Reform from the Eighth to the Twentieth Century,” Spice Stanford Digest (2009), 1 25 Lydon,  On Trans-Saharan Trails, 277. 26 Richard Bulliet, “The Camel and the Watermill,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 42, no. 4 (2010): 666–8. 27 Lydon,  On Trans-Saharan Trails, 28. 28 Lloyd Cabot Briggs. Tribes of the Sahara (London: Oxford University Press, 1960), 141 29 Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, 181. 30 Graziano Kratli and Ghislaine Lydon, The Trans-Saharan Book Trade (Boston, MA: Proquest, 2011). 31 Lydon,  On Trans-Saharan Trails, 365.

Works cited Amir, Nadir, Mohamed Sahnoune, Lounes Chikhi, and Djebbar Atmani. “STR-based Genetic Structure of the Berber Population of Bejaia (Northern Algeria) and Its Relationships to Various Ethnic Groups.” Gene 574 (2015): 140–8. Austen, Ralph A. Trans-Saharan Africa in World History. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010. Braudel, Fernand. The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II. London: University of California Press, 1995. Briggs, Lloyd Cabot. Tribes of the Sahara. London: Oxford University Press, 1960. Bulliet, Richard. “The Camel and the Watermill.” International Journal of Middle East Studies 42, no. 4 (2010): 666–8. Castree, Noel. A Companion to Environmental Geography. Blackwell Companions to Geography. Chichester, UK and Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009.

Hidden in plain sight  163 Choplin, Armelle and Olivier Pliez. “(Re)construire l’image des territoires du Sahara et du Sahel.” Mappe Monde, Maison de la g´eographie (2011): 3. Collins, Robert. “The African Slave Trade to Asia and the Indian Ocean Islands.” African and Asian Studies 5, no. 3 (2006): 325–46. Coudray, C., A. Olivieri, A. Achilli, M. Pala, M. Melhaoui, M. Cherkaoui, F. El-Chennawi, M. Kossmann, A. Torroni, and J. M. Dugoujon. “The Complex and Diversified Mitochondrial Gene Pool of Berber Populations.” Annals of Human Genetics  73 (2003): 196–214. Davis, Diana K. Environmental Imaginaries of the Middle East and North Africa. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2011. Dayak, Mano. Touareg, La Tragédie. Paris: Lattès. 1992. Games, A. “Atlantic History: Definitions, Challenges, and Opportunities.” The American Historical Review 111, no. 3 (2006): 741–57. Gautier, E.F. “The Trans-Saharan Railway.” Geographical Review 15, no. 1 (1925): 51. Horden, P. and N. Purcell. “The Mediterranean and ‘the New Thalassology’.” The American Historical Review 111, no. 3 (2006): 722–40. Accessed October 24, 2015. Krätli, Graziano and Ghislaine Lydon.  The Trans-Saharan Book Trade [electronic Resource]: Manuscript Culture, Arabic Literacy, and Intellectual History in Muslim Africa. Library of the Written Word, 8. Leiden and Boston, MA: Brill, 2011. Lydon, Ghislaine. On Trans-Saharan Trails: Islamic Law, Trade Networks, and Crosscultural Exchange in Nineteenth-century Western Africa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. ———. “Writing Trans-Saharan History: Methods, Sources and Interpretations Across the African Divide.” The Journal of North African Studies 10, nos. 3–4, 293–324. Maceachern, Scott. “Genes, Tribes, and African History.” Current Anthropology 41, no. 3 (2000): 357–84. Maddox, Gregory. Sub-Saharan Africa an Environmental History. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2006. Martin, Thomas. Empires of Intelligence [electronic Resource]: Security Services and Colonial Disorder after 1914. University Press Scholarship Online. Berkeley, CA and London: University of California Press, 2008. Matsuda, Matt. “The Pacific.” American Historical Review 111, no. 3 (2006): 758–80. Mattingly, D.J. and M. Sterry. “The First Towns in the Central Sahara.” Antiquity 87, no. 336 (2013): 503–18. McDougall, Anne E. “Conceptualising the Sahara: The World of Nineteenth-century Beyrouk Commerce.” The Journal of North African Studies 10, nos. 3–4 (2005): 369–86. Nikita, Efthymia, David Mattingly, and Marta Mirazón Lahr. “Sahara: Barrier or Corridor? Nonmetric Cranial Traits and Biological Affinities of North African Late Holocene Populations.” American Journal of Physical Anthropology  147, no. 2 (2011): 280–92. “Professor Gautier to Lecture Today.” The Harvard Crimson. News, 1922. Print. Retaillé, Denis and Olivier Walther. “Terrorisme Au Sahel. De Quoi Parle-t-on ?” Guerre Au Sahara-Sahel: La Reconversion Des Savoirs Nomades 75, no. 3 (2011): 51–68. Rue, George Michael La. “Bridges Across the Sahara: Social, Economic and Cultural Impact of the Trans-Sahara Trade During the 19th and 20th Centuries – Edited by Ali Abdullatif Ahmida.” Historian 74, no. 2 (2012): 332–3. Saint-Exupery, Antoine De. The Little Prince. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1943.

164  Sarah Gilkerson Tli, Graziano and Ghislaine Lydon. The Trans-Saharan Book Trade Manuscript Culture, Arabic Literacy and Intellectual History in Muslim Africa. Leiden: Brill, 2011. Wigen, Karen. “Oceans of History: Introductions.” The American Historical Review 111, no. 3 (2006): 717–21. Wilson, Andrew. “Saharan Trade in the Roman Period: Short-, Medium- and Long-distance Trade Networks.” Azania 47, no. 4 (2012): 409–49.

Section 4

Contested places and spaces

The chapters collected in this section are bound together by their exploration of deeply contested historical instances. But what makes these chapters so intriguing when read together is how they highlight a range of understandings of what a contested place or space is. It is easy to visualize a contested territory, border, or property as a place. It is far more difficult, however, to expand that understanding to an abstract space or even mentality of contestation. Much of the difficulty lies in recognizing that memory and memorialization of an event can themselves become contested spaces. It is crucial to realize that memory itself does not have agency. Every remembering of an event is inherently developed by an individual or societal narrative. While it can be quite entertaining or enlightening for historians to engage in deliberately counterfactual exercises, these exercises serve only to demonstrate how easily contestation can move beyond the physical space and into a mental space.1 In the following chapters, our contributors have taken three very different but equally intriguing approaches to investigating how a place or event can be contested physically or intellectually. In Taylor Kirsch’s chapter on the praying towns of the New England borderlands, she examines the effects of legal contestation and claiming on a variety of cultural and political outcomes. This chapter is firmly rooted in the physical space and the lasting impact of the contestation itself. The next chapter by Srijita Pal moves us from the concrete physical idea of contestation into the abstract sphere of contested memory. By examining the memorialization and memory, or lack thereof, of the Spanish influenza pandemic of 1918, she demonstrates a different kind of contestation. The forgetting or misremembering of an event as massive and widespread as the Spanish flu demonstrates a useful space for further investigation that might contest older memorial narratives. The third chapter in this section by Arianna Barzman-Grennan develops this idea of contested narratives further with her study of memory and lived experience during the Algerian decolonization process. By critically examining sources from the period, she casts light on the difficulties of examining a contested space and the use of memorialization in which the memory is not only poorly remembered, but often deliberately obscured by lies, counterfactual accounts, and doublespeak.

Note 1 Catherine Gallagher, Telling It like It Wasn’t: The Counterfactual Imagination in History and Fiction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018).

9 Indigenous land ownership in the praying towns of the Southern New England borderlands Taylor Kirsch Beginning in the mid-seventeenth century, the English colonial project in and around Massachusetts Bay sponsored dozens of communities called “praying towns.” English missionaries and colonial officials intended these towns to be insular hamlets in which Indigenous people of the area could live apart from outside influences and learn English Christianity and “civility.”1 However, documentary and archaeological evidence indicates that English goals of remaking Indigenous people in their image as servants of the British Empire and Christian God were not the most important driving forces in praying town development. Amid the intentions of English missionaries to develop praying towns as colonial sites where Indigenous Americans would be transformed into Christian subjects of the English King, multitribal communities of the praying towns shaped these spaces into sites of cultural and physical survival.2 Although they were highly circumscribed by English colonialism, Indigenous individuals and communities utilized praying towns to maintain a hard-won degree of sovereignty, autonomy, and safety in a tumultuous borderlands world between the founding of the first praying town in 1650 and Metacom’s War in 1675. Indigenous people within the praying towns continued valued cultural practices and traditions, utilized English technologies to their own advantage, leveraged English alliance for political power and protection from English and Indigenous enemies, and, perhaps most importantly, successfully navigated the English legal system to gain and retain ownership of ancestral land. This chapter presents the argument that Indigenous people used the praying towns as a pathway to land reclamation. The opportunity to gain legal title to ancestral lands consumed by the uncertainties of borderlands was a primary impetus for Indigenous people to support the missionary project by helping to create and make their lives in praying towns. Research on the political, cultural, and spiritual importance of Indigenous land ownership in the praying towns is surprisingly rare. Scholarship dedicated to the praying towns is normally focused on missionization and the “praying Indians’ ” responses to it.3 More plentiful than works focusing directly on the praying towns are those that include them to varying degrees in broader studies. In these Early New England histories, praying towns are most often discussed

168  Taylor Kirsch incidentally or as examples in larger arguments surrounding war and colonialism.4 While other crucial aspects of praying towns have been rigorously studied, legal ownership of praying town land by Indigenous people has gone unacknowledged or unexplored by a majority of historical studies with few, but very important, exceptions.5 Perhaps the current shortage of research on this subject can be attributed to a problematic colonial source base. However imperfect, colonial documents can be useful when sources that record Indigenous actions are privileged and interpreted in conversation with available Indigenous sources, such as oral histories and material culture. Though they were still undoubtedly written from a non-Indigenous perspective and with colonial motivations, sources documenting Indigenous people selling property, moving to a praying town, getting involved in a land dispute, petitioning to start a congregation, signing a treaty, selecting praying town land, or winning a court case involving property are highly revealing. Archaeological studies of material culture within the praying towns will also be evaluated in this chapter as material expressions of Indigenous action. While it is impossible to uncover firsthand Indigenous voice and perspective from documents written by colonists, I contend that insight into their lives can be gleaned through careful and critical analysis of the things they are recorded to have done. While missionary and other records purporting to record Indigenous voices are examined here, they are used with special care and caution.6 In examining land ownership as an important motivation to support praying towns, it is not my intention to argue that no Indigenous people could have supported missionary projects and lived in praying towns for sincere spiritual reasons. Religious belief has always been an important driver of historical change, and intense spiritual experiences and conversions have often accompanied times of upheaval. However, attempting to accurately portray another person’s spirituality is extremely difficult even with access to verifiable personal accounts of their spiritual experiences, which are not available for this study. Thus, this chapter does not include speculation or analysis of religion as a motivation to support praying towns. The creative and strategic use of colonial institutions by Indigenous individuals and communities hints at answers to crucial and intertwined questions: why did thousands of Indigenous people from several tribes across Southern New England choose to support English missionary projects and live in praying towns, and why did some of them go to such great lengths to own land there under a foreign legal system? The stakes of these questions are apparent in the sacrifices and compromises Indigenous people made to support praying towns. Life in a praying town was circumscribed by physical fixity, intense labor, restrictive notions of propriety, and outward submission to a new god and foreign government that sought to “reduce them to civility.”7 This lifestyle was very different from the ones most Indigenous people held before colonization of their territories began and more restrictive in most, if not all, aspects. Praying town inhabitants exercised a significant degree of autonomy in governing their towns and choosing their own Indigenous leaders, but it was also very clear that they were under the jurisdiction

Indigenous land ownership in New England  169 of the English colonial government and dependent on the precarious goodwill and good opinion of missionaries and colonial officials.8 Indigenous men and women in praying towns adopted English styles of dress and were expected to follow town rules that in many ways contradicted previously held customs, especially regarding gender and family dynamics. These norms underwent a radical shift as missionaries preached the patriarchal system to praying town inhabitants. Polygamy and flexible habitation customs were prohibited under the colonial government, and the bonds of marriage became far more rigid. Missionaries expected men to give up hunting and take on the farming work traditionally done by women and instructed women to remain in the home, obedient to their husbands and responsible exclusively for domestic duties. Women were also excluded from any aspect of town government, which had not previously been the case under Indigenous systems in which women sometimes inherited leadership responsibilities, such as the role of sachem, and always had a voice in village life.9 Further, the “civility” that was required to own praying town land under the English system had no place in it for visible Indigenous religion. English courts wrote into law harsh penalties for “blaspheming” and practicing the Indigenous religion that English missionaries believed to be the work of the Devil. In 1646, Massachusetts Bay Colony’s general court mandated capital punishment for any “Indians that have submitted to our government” caught blaspheming the Christian god and imposed fines for practicing traditional religious rituals, ordering that “no Indian shall at any time pawwaw, or perform outward worship to their false gods, or to the devil in any part of our jurisdiction.”10 Intense changes in lifestyle appear to have been an essential part of living in a praying town. Yet, thousands of Indigenous Americans did so. Among the varied reasons that Indigenous people would have chosen to align themselves with praying towns, spiritual, political, economic, or otherwise, the opportunity to gain or regain land they had lost due to English invasion stands out as an especially compelling factor. In order to see why the Indigenous people of Southern New England went to such great lengths to own land in the legal English style, we must understand why land ownership was an essential survival strategy in the dangerous environment they called home. In the New England borderlands, having a safe land base was necessary for survival, and dispossession could mean death. By the time the first praying town was established in 1650, many Indigenous people of Southern New England had already been alienated from their land by English invaders. As multiple expansionist forces from America and Europe violently struggled for dominance over land, people, and even souls, life as an Indigenous person in Southern New England became increasingly dangerous and uncertain over the course of the seventeenth century. A disastrous combination of epidemic disease, English invasion, and intertribal violence left many Indigenous people without access to the ancestral land they depended upon for survival.11 The role that Afro-Eurasian diseases played in the initial dispossession of Southern New England’s Indigenous people cannot be overstated. Between 1616 and 1619, a plague swept through New England, reaching twenty to thirty miles

170  Taylor Kirsch inland from Massachusetts Bay. The exact pathogen that destroyed so many lives is unknown, but scholars estimate that it killed between fifty and ninety percent of the Indigenous population, depending on the area. Barely a decade later, in 1633, Massachusetts Bay Governor John Winthrop described a “great mortality” in the form of smallpox that devastated the survivors of the first plague. Years after these first great waves of sickness and death, Indigenous people in Southern New England remained vulnerable to diseases for which they lacked immunity and to invasion by European and Indigenous powers.12 This cataclysmic depopulation meant that many crop fields, villages, and hunting and gathering grounds were temporarily abandoned as survivors of disease banded together in smaller, often fortified areas. Gathering together in forts was necessary for protection against more populous English and Indigenous enemies but led to increased alienation from land and its resources, leading Daniel Gookin, superintendent of Indians between 1656 and 1686, to describe the forts as characterized by “poverty,” so much so that people living in these constricted areas were in danger of starving.13 This in turn meant that land looked empty and unused to English colonists ignorant of or indifferent to Indigenous methods of land use and contributed to their expedient view that they were claiming empty, unimproved land, which was both legally and biblically permissible in their eyes. To enemy tribes such as the Mohawk, the land would have looked undefendable, if not unused. With the English and Mohawk encroaching, and bordered by the more populous and powerful Narragansett to the South, the people overwhelmed by disease in Southern New England were pushed into ever more confined territories.14 English colonial institutions and settlers undoubtedly played the biggest role in Southern New England tribal dispossession, yet the often overlooked role of intertribal politics and war was all too real. Indigenous people in this area had reason to fear for their lives at the hands of enemy tribes and confederacies, especially if they left their increasingly shrunken land base or did not have land to securely inhabit. Weakened by epidemic disease, many of Southern New England’s Indigenous people had cause to fear death, capture, and the destruction of their homes by Mohawk warriors, in particular.15 Gookin wrote that Southern New England’s Indigenous people lived in constant fear of Mohawk raids, especially if they were forced to live near Mohawk territory. This significantly disrupted their subsistence practices, mainly by forcing them to abandon many settlements and live sedentary lives on smaller plots of fortified land for security.16 If they lost that land, they were left even more vulnerable to Mohawk attacks. Combined, Mohawk and English encroachment accelerated the dispossession of Southern New England’s Indigenous people and made landlessness potentially fatal. 17 Praying towns provided a viable Indigenous space in a contested borderlands landscape, and ownership of land in a praying town secured one of the most stable land bases available in mid-seventeenth century New England. Life in these towns was an avenue for protection from multiple expansionist forces in the region. In addition to providing safe spaces away from English settlers intent on harming and dispossessing Indigenous New Englanders, praying towns also provided a measure of protection against the Mohawk and other enemy tribes. It seems that

Indigenous land ownership in New England 171 living on land protected by English law and martial strength carried the benefit of fewer attacks by Mohawk raiders. It is unlikely that legal title to the praying towns would have had much effect on this trepidation on the part of Mohawk raiding parties, and they may not have even known about it. Yet the claim that praying town residents held to their territory was backed by the martial and political power of an English government intent on retaining their Indigenous subjects as well as their political and spiritual jurisdiction. At least some Indigenous people in the praying towns also possessed English guns and ammunition, making them less tempting targets for Mohawk attacks. Perhaps even more importantly, legal ownership of land meant that under colonial law, Indigenous people could not be banished from their secure land base and pushed into unfortified or enemy held areas at the whim of aggressive English settlers.18 Several waves of disease, war, and invasion left many Southern New England tribes in a vulnerable position. All of these factors facilitated land theft by English colonists, leaving thousands of Indigenous people stripped of land they depended on for subsistence and security. However, contrary to what is often assumed, not all Indigenous people automatically lost their land with the advent of English colonialism in New England. English attitudes and policies toward Indigenous land led both to rampant dispossession and opportunities for Indigenous people to gain legal title to land that would be recognized and protected by what was, at the time, a powerful force in Southern New England. A complex combination of factors meant that while some Indigenous people had their land rights recognized by English colonial governments, many others were alienated from the land they depended on for their safety and livelihoods.19 Somewhat paradoxically, inhabiting a praying town provided a means of owning land in the English fashion, with legal title that would be respected by the same English settlers and government who had dispossessed Indigenous people in the first place.20 Though the prevailing theme of English colonialism was dispossession and exploitation, English attitudes toward Indigenous land and the decisions of the Massachusetts court system could work in favor of Indigenous people who turned certain aspects of colonial institutions to their advantage. The official Massachusetts Bay colonial government’s position toward Indigenous people was in many ways paternalistic and offered avenues for dispossessed Indigenous people to be “granted” back ancestral lands that the English had claimed or bought, all with the aim of encouraging Christianity and drawing Indigenous Americans into the British Empire as subjects. While clearly working within an imperial framework that positioned Indigenous people as inferior and had goals of English supremacy in the region, the official position within the church and colonial government did not indicate intentions to completely dispossess or eliminate Indigenous people from the region. Rather, in keeping with what was listed as one of the primary goals of the Massachusetts Bay Colony in its royal charter, and a major reason for being in America, the official goal of the colonial government and church was to encourage Christianity among the Indigenous population of New England, converting as many as possible to this religion, which was inseparable from English notions of “civilized” life. English colonial officials and missionaries viewed land grants

172  Taylor Kirsch to Indigenous people in praying towns as facilitating these social and spiritual conversions.21 Superintendent Gookin’s Historical Collections, written primarily from his own experience, provides a telling look at the colonial government’s perspective regarding Indigenous land rights. This account includes rationalization of English land theft, and Gookin reasoned first that “the English claim right to their land, by patent from our king,” and second that “the English had the grant of most of the land within this jurisdiction, either by purchase or donation from the Indian sachems and sagamores, which were actually in possession, when the English came first over.” Characteristic of colonial officials, Gookin used the double-edged justifications of royal charter and “land sales” by Indigenous individuals to establish English ownership over much of New England. However, Gookin acknowledged ancestral Indigenous land rights and continued to assert that “therefore the propriety is in the English; and it is necessary for the Indians, as the case stands, for their present and future security and tranquility, to receive the lands by grant from the English, who are a growing and potent people, comparatively to the Indians.”22 Gookin made clear his knowledge that the English were in a position of power over many of the Indigenous people they lived among and had taken land from. Yet Gookin proposed that this power be utilized not to further dispossess Indigenous people, but to grant their land back to them under the English legal system. His account exemplifies the ironic views the colonial government held about Indigenous land rights as well as the potential for Indigenous people to gain legal title to land under the same system that had taken it from them. Gookin was not the only government official to hold these views. Winthrop also wrote that it was only right of the English to grant Indigenous people land “sufficient for their use,” even as the English claimed vast swaths of it, all for the goal of encouraging Christianity within the colony.23 These colonial attitudes were expressed in binding legal documents as well as the personal accounts of officials. A particularly crucial example is a 1652 Massachusetts court order that Indigenous people used in tandem with the praying towns to gain legal ownership over their ancestral land. The unique characteristics of praying towns provided an expedient avenue for Indigenous people to take advantage of the conditions laid out in this court order. As it stipulated, Indigenous people could be granted legal title to land if they met any of the following four criteria: First, if they owned land prior to English settlement and had not sold it, they could gain legal title to that land. This was very difficult to prove to the English court since legal title held by individuals was an English concept not in existence prior to English invasion. Furthermore, vast swaths of land had already been claimed by English settlers by the time this court order was declared in 1652, and the English technically asserted ownership of all land anyway by virtue of their royal charter. This does not mean that ancestral rights to land were never proven and recognized; they sometimes were. Still, this first requirement was one that many, if not most, Indigenous people would find impossible to fulfill. Second, they could claim title to land by “improvement” and “by subdueing of the same, they have just right thereunto, according to that Gen:1:28 chap:9:1, Psa: 115, 16,” the same biblical mandate the English colonists

Indigenous land ownership in New England 173 used to justify taking Indigenous land for themselves. Third, if they were “brought to civility” and lived like the English, they could own land in the English way, all for the purpose of “civilizing & helping them forward to Christianity.” Fourth, if “a competent number” of Indigenous people were “brought to civility, so as to be capable of a township,” they could be granted land to start a town in the same manner that the English were, with “lands undisposed of for a plantation, as the English have.”24 Through the application of the second, third, and fourth conditions, praying towns were established throughout Massachusetts Bay, Plymouth, and beyond. At least fourteen praying towns were sponsored by John Eliot’s missionary project in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, with approximately one thousand one hundred Indigenous people living there by 1674. An estimated eleven praying towns existed in and around Plymouth Colony, with the total population of Indigenous people estimated at over one thousand in that same year. Additionally, smaller unofficial praying towns appear to have existed throughout Southern New England. Praying towns were widespread across the New England borderlands, and Indigenous Americans strategically used them to gain a measure of autonomy and safety on their own property.25 Given that the praying towns were so heavily influenced by missionary projects, it would be reasonable to assume that the Indigenous people who lived there simply lived on church or government owned land set aside for their habitation and encouragement toward Christianity. However, there is documentary evidence to prove that Indigenous people officially and legally owned land in the English style within the praying towns. The first indication that Indigenous people owned praying town land is apparent in the way this land was written about in colonial records. Gookin wrote in his Historical Collections regarding Natick: “The land was granted to the Indians, at the motion of Mr. Eliot, by the general court of Massachusetts; and in the year 1651, a number of them combined together, and formed a town.” According to Gookin, an official personally involved in Indigenous land affairs, praying town land was granted by the court of Massachusetts “to the Indians” – not to Eliot, nor to any missionary society or guardian or advocate, but to “the Indians.”26 Gookin’s accounts consistently refer to praying town land this way, as do other colonial records. Court testimonies within the Dedham Town Records refer to praying town land as belonging to Indigenous people, including references to “land possessed at Natick by the Indians,” “the tender of Dedham to the Indians of 2,000 acres,” and, tellingly, a 1662 court record ordering “that the Indians be not dispossessed of such lands as they at present are possessed of there [Natick].”27 Other Massachusetts court records from 1658 to 1659 reference “a committee appointed by the General Court to lay out a plantation of six thousand acres to the Indians.” The land referenced was Marlborough praying town land, and these court records also discuss policies surrounding the potential sale of that land by “Indians.”28 In addition to the language in colonial documents across several contexts, there are records of Indigenous people selling praying town land after the towns were established. One such document is a deed in which eight Indigenous landowners

174  Taylor Kirsch including John Anoosamaye, Andrew Pithme, Thomas Cray, Nehemiah, Daniel Takasoombaitt, and Anthony Cray, sold fifty acres of land in Natick to the colonist John Grout in 1682.29 It is unclear whether they were town leaders selling a town owned parcel of land, owned the fifty acres collectively as a group, or were selling a collection of individually owned parcels amounting to fifty acres. What is clear is that this was a legal land deed establishing ownership after the English fashion, and that if praying town land was sold by Indigenous people through these English legal practices, they had to have had legal ownership of it.30 Sometimes, ownership of praying town land was expressed in a legal and political agreement, such as the one between missionary and colonial official Thomas Mayhew, Sachem Kochanomin, and the “praying Indians” of Martha’s Vineyard. In this 1670 agreement, Kochanomin, who held the land upon which the praying town of Manitootan stood and had granted a mile of that land for praying town use, agreed that Manitootan would “remain forever in the possession of the praying men,” and that the town would be enlarged when twenty more families moved there. The agreement does not state that this town would “remain forever in the possession” of Thomas Mayhew or any other missionaries or colonial officials; praying Indians were the official recipients of this land. Further, more land was promised if more families moved to this praying town, incentivizing habitation there on the basis of land grants. This document presents the intriguing possibility that Kochanomin, an Indigenous leader whose ancestral land rights were already recognized by the English, might use praying towns as an avenue to secure and protect legal land ownership not for himself, but for other Indigenous people whose land rights had not been legally acknowledged under the colonial government. While this is speculative, it is entirely possible that Kochanomin was aware of the favor that colonial courts showed Christian towns and carved one out of his own land base to protect Indigenous land after he was gone.31 In praying towns, legal land ownership followed the English structure. That the aforementioned 1652 Massachusetts court order specified directly that land was to be dispensed to Indigenous people after the English fashion and governed in an English manner is highly relevant because it meant that if Indigenous people could gain legal title to land according to the English custom, their rights were protected under English law. This proved to be especially important in the face of aggressive English settlers encroaching on Indigenous lands. Hostile English settlers who tried to harass Indigenous people on their own land were subject to the authority of colonial courts, which decreed that “if any plantation or person of the English shall offer injuriously to put any of the Indians from their planting grounds or fishing places, upon their complaint & proof thereof, they shall have relief in any of the Courts of justice amongst the English.”32 It is never guaranteed that laws intended to protect vulnerable people will be enforced by the population in power, but town and court records from seventeenth-century New England include cases showing colonial courts ruling in favor of Indigenous landowners at the expense of English settlers. Shortly after its establishment, the praying town of Natick and the neighboring English town of Dedham claimed the same large tract of land. In this protracted legal dispute,

Indigenous land ownership in New England 175 Indigenous claims to praying town land trumped those of English settlers. At the end of the twelve-year struggle, the Indigenous residents of Natick won legal recognition of their rights to this praying town land. The Massachusetts General Court cited “improvement” made upon the land as well as “native right” as the reasons for favoring the Indigenous claim over the English one.33 In doing so, the court helped legitimize the legal claim of all Indigenous people to their praying town land and reinforced praying town occupancy as a way to defend existing ownership of land as well as a way to gain or regain it. While this land dispute illuminates the legal title and power that Indigenous people had over their land in the praying towns, records of this battle are also a sobering reminder that land ownership carried the price of accepting English colonial sovereignty. Even though the people of Natick won acknowledgment of their legal ownership of this praying town via the colonial court system, they were compelled to acknowledge that they held their land through the “love and Christian condescendency” of their English neighbors.34 While this may have been a last-ditch face-saving effort on behalf of the Dedhamites, it also served as a reminder to the Indigenous people of Natick that they were living under English rule, protected by their laws, but also dependent upon their continued goodwill. It is important to note that the 1652 Massachusetts Bay court order did not specifically state that an Indigenous person had to be Christian in order to be granted land on the basis of “improvement” or “civility.” Neither was professing Christianity a requirement for living in the praying town of Natick, though anyone who directly opposed the religion was expelled. What was required to live in a praying town was visible adherence to a prescribed set of English cultural and material expectations. The praying towns facilitated Indigenous land ownership so expediently mainly because they provided a way for Indigenous people to visibly fulfill the court’s requirements of “civility” and “improvement” of the land as well as “competent” numbers to establish a town.35 Living in and supporting praying towns facilitated strategic alliances with English missionaries, who testified to colonial courts that Indigenous people who followed English rules and mores were making progress in “civility” and were therefore deserving of land grants. With the goal of “helping them forward to Christianity,” missionaries like Eliot and officials like Gookin were eager to vouch for Indigenous progress toward English notions of civilization and Christianity and even more eager to help facilitate the creation of Indigenous-owned towns dedicated to furthering Christianity. Missionary records express gratitude to Indigenous individuals and communities for their important roles in the success of the praying towns, and court documents and officials’ accounts demonstrate that missionaries testified for and assisted them in navigating the colonial bureaucracy that would grant them legal land title in the English fashion. In the Dedham versus Natick land dispute, for instance, Eliot’s testimony included strong language warning the court that if they ruled in favor of Dedham, the loss of Indigenous land would result in a lamentable loss of potential Christian converts for God and the crown. Given the goals of evangelism expressed in Massachusetts

176  Taylor Kirsch Bay’s original charter, this would have been a compelling argument on the side of Indigenous landowners.36 In at least one case, a propertied English evangelist decided to use his own personal land grants to further Christianity. Rather than going through the court system, a group of Mohegan people gained ownership of land directly through this individual English landholder. An account of wars between English colonists and Indigenous people written by Samuel Penhallow discusses the “Rev. Mr. Fitch” giving some of his own lands to a community of thirty Mohegans in the late seventeenth century. He wrote that Fitch did so because the Mohegans professed a desire to hear the gospel, and he gave them land so that they might be nearer to his preaching and start their own holy community.37 Indigenous people not only worked with missionaries to gain legal ownership of land, they also worked alongside them to select specific sites and shape praying towns within the contours of land they wanted. One missionary record describes an unnamed sachem negotiating for a specific tract of land near an English settlement. When asked why he did not desire a land grant elsewhere (and one more convenient for the English to part with), the sachem replied, “He knew that if the Indians dwelt far from the English, that they would not so much care to pray, nor so ready to hear the word of God . . . but dwelling near the English he hoped it might be otherwise.” In the end, the sachem won the argument. This account, and all missionary records professing to quote Indigenous words and opinions, must be interpreted with special caution, partially because tracts like this one were used as propaganda to secure funding. Still, taking into account the English emphasis on obedience as a virtue of their Christian subjects, this tract describing English missionaries deferring to the wishes of an Indigenous leader is intriguing. It is also suggestive of the possibility that the aforementioned sachem knew of and used English goals of evangelism as leverage in his negotiation for land rights.38 Further, a 1650 letter by John Eliot to Henry Whitfield describes the process by which Eliot and a contingent of Indigenous men chose the site upon which Natick was to be built and demonstrates that the founding members of Natick did not simply move to a site that Eliot and the colonial government had set aside for them.39 They traveled with Eliot and selected a specific acreage that, as it turned out, was land that “Indians then planted, and had done of old, even beyond the memory of the oldest man alive.”40 The Indigenous men who worked with Eliot to establish the boundaries of Natick thus laid claim to land upon which their people already lived and, as this document indicates, wanted to legally own. These men were invested in Natick from its beginning, literally building this town from the ground up on their ancestral land. As the Southern New England landscape became increasingly fenced, bounded, and restricted by English colonists, reliance on traditional Indigenous livelihoods became increasingly challenging. Alternatives to seasonal and mobile farming, hunting, and gathering were crucial to survival as Indigenous land bases shrank due to English land claims and potential violence from English and Indigenous enemies. On praying town land, Indigenous people were supported in their shift to a sedentary economy by missionary funds that provided them with tools for

Indigenous land ownership in New England 177 intensive farming as well as training and implements for artisanal English trades, all as part of the “civilizing” mission. In addition to land itself, living in a praying town carried with it access to English tools, trades, and markets that made economic prosperity on that land easier. We can only imagine how difficult and perhaps traumatic these radical lifestyle adjustments were, but they were important survival strategies for many who found themselves with few options in the colonial borderlands.41 It makes sense that to secure land grants and funding to support the praying towns, missionaries would paint a picture of praying town inhabitants progressively adopting English life-ways at the expense of Indigenous ones. It also makes sense that this is what would have been visibly presented to them by the people of the praying towns since it was made quite clear that progress in “civility” facilitated legal land ownership. Selective adoptions of new modes of subsistence, customs, technologies, alliances, and spirituality are fairly universal survival adaptations that we continue to see in the world today, especially in times and places of rapid change. Sources indicate that visibly embracing English customs and technology in praying towns was an important contributing factor in land grant eligibility. However, as Indigenous people adopted aspects of English systems, they resisted cultural erasure. The praying towns were thus sites of cultural and spiritual as well as physical and corporeal survival. Archaeological studies of material culture in praying towns provide windows into aspects of life there not visible in colonial records, particularly regarding culture and spirituality. Archaeological findings from two praying towns (Magunkaquog and Hassanamesit), studied collaboratively by the Nipmuc Nation and the Fiske Center for Archaeological Research at the University of Massachusetts at Boston, have been interpreted by Stephen Mrozowski, Rae Gould, and Heather Pezzarossi as evidence of innovative cultural survival. Their conclusions after studying material culture from these towns problematize the commonly held notion that for an Indigenous group to be “authentic” they must remain in a static past, and that any changes made to their way of life after English invasion constituted a wholesale loss of culture. Indigenous societies have never been static, but this pervasive and damaging idea has made its way into United States federal policy as well as many cultural and academic discourses as a prerequisite for legitimacy and recognition in the present day. It is undoubtedly true that colonial invasion has caused cultural devastation and loss throughout Indigenous history, and necessary changes Indigenous people have made in the face of colonialism can rarely, if ever, be considered positive or voluntary. However, archaeological evidence attests to “Indigenous innovation and cultural perseverance” in praying towns throughout colonial ordeals.42 At the Magunco Hill site in Magunkaquog, Indigenous lithic technology was found with English tools and material culture. Mrozowski, Gould, and Pezzarossi assert that this combination is suggestive of blending and selective use of older and newer technologies in everyday life.43 Archaeologists also uncovered the foundations of a building constructed in 1650. It is thought to be a meetinghouse (a church as well as gathering place ubiquitously seen in English Christian

178  Taylor Kirsch towns of seventeenth-century Massachusetts) or a dwelling where Ponhamen (the spiritual leader of Magunkaquog) or Job (Magunkaquog’s resident teacher) lived. It may also have been a place where valuables were stored and where Indigenous women were taught to sew using English materials, based on the wealth of English and Indigenous artifacts found there. Mrozowski, Gould, and Pezzarossi argue that it was most likely used for all these things.44 In this structure with strong English as well as Christian associations, archaeologists found quartz crystals built into the foundations of the building. Quartz has been found in other spiritually significant Indigenous sites in New England, such as burials, and may have been an important part of Southern New England Indigenous spiritual traditions for at least four thousand years. If this is indeed the case, quartz built into a structure with so much English cultural and spiritual significance suggests the presence of Indigenous spiritual practices in this colonial structure.45 Sewing implements found at the Magunco hill site have been interpreted by both Magdelena Naum and Mary C. Beaudry as material manifestations of failed attempts on the part of English missionaries to change Indigenous life-ways.46 The thimbles found were too small for most adult fingers, suggesting they were intended for girls and young women. Teaching girls and women to adopt English notions of femininity and gender roles was a critical part of English missionization; early indoctrination of young girls would have been especially important. The introduction of English tools such as metal needles and thimbles to Indigenous women in praying towns facilitated training for their new expected role in the “civilized” domestic sphere as Christian wives. However, the sewing tools unearthed at Magunco Hill showed little to no wear or evidence of use. Naum and Beaudry both contend that the women and girls who lived in Magunkaquog either rarely used or simply discarded these implements meant to “reduce them to civility.”47 Indigenous people in praying towns adopted English tools and customs selectively and strategically. At Magunkaquog, women and girls may have refused to use sewing implements, but other English technologies were used advantageously, sometimes in ways not intended by English distributors. English pottery unearthed at Magunkaquog, for instance, shows signs of being placed directly in fire, an Indigenous method of preparing food.48 Diana DiPaolo Loren argues that Indigenous people in praying towns created and wore English style clothing as part of a deliberate and flexible performed identity, a “visual signifier of one’s allegiance to the Christian god” that could be donned or shed depending on the context and motives of the wearer, enabling greater freedom of movement across New England’s cultural landscape. Placed alongside the Massachusetts court order specifying “civility” as a pathway to land ownership, we can interpret Indigenous adoption of English clothing as strategic and possibly intermittent, rather than evidence of wholesale cultural loss.49 There is much more archaeological work to be done in praying towns, and the above evidence and interpretations do not represent anything close to exhaustive

Indigenous land ownership in New England 179 excavation and study of praying town land. Yet they all demonstrate one critical reality: the presence of English material culture, religion, missionaries, politics, and customs in praying towns did not stop Indigenous people there from retaining their own cultural and spiritual practices, even as they were forced to adapt to violent upheaval and change. For more than twenty years after the first praying town was established, Indigenous people found a viable place for themselves in the New England borderlands by living on land they legally owned, with rights that were respected by English settlers as well as other Indigenous groups. There, on their own ground, they managed to retain Indigenous identity, community, and cultural survival amidst intense adaptations. Though life in praying towns was circumscribed by English dominance, it provided a way for thousands of Indigenous people to live in relative safety and comfort in a chaotic and perilous new world. Eventually, however, the exploding English population and demand for land, combined with increasingly exploitative colonial policies toward Indigenous people, strained already tense relations and led to the devastating borderlands conflict known as Metacom’s War. When violence erupted in 1675, Indigenous people within the praying towns had no good options and found themselves suspected as enemies and traitors by both Metacom’s followers and English colonists. The towns that had shortly before provided English alliance and protection no longer did so. As individuals coped with the devastating war in different ways, some siding with Metacom, others casting their lot with the English, and still others struggling to stay neutral and avoid the whole affair, many praying town communities fragmented, with some individuals staying on their land and others fleeing or fighting. Those who remained faced violence by angry English settlers and found their liberty increasingly restricted by English government officials, who suspected them of aiding Metacom. Attempts by English missionaries to prevent violence against praying towns and their people proved futile in wartime. Most remaining praying town inhabitants were eventually deported to the infamous Deer Island, a bleak, windswept islet near Boston. It is estimated that at least half of them lost their lives there due to starvation and exposure, neglected and persecuted by their former allies.50 After Metacom was killed in 1676 and hostilities declined, a group of Indigenous survivors, Eliot, and Gookin joined together and made efforts to revive the praying towns. Though war had dealt praying towns a devastating blow from which they never fully recovered, survivors succeeded in rebuilding some of them. After this episode of trauma and depopulation, the surviving people of the praying towns persisted, weathering subsequent dispossessions, removals, and wars. Many of their descendants still live in Southern New England today and have fought to continue longstanding spiritual and cultural practices on ancestral praying town land now held sacred. Powwows and ceremonies are held every year in former praying towns, such as Hassanamessit, Pakachoog, and Natick, and drumbeats can still be heard emanating from Natick’s Eliot Church, signaling the start of Indigenous services on the same land they have worshipped on since “beyond the memory of the oldest man alive.”51

180  Taylor Kirsch

Notes 1 This chapter uses specific tribal names to refer to Indigenous groups and Indigenous names when referring to individuals as often as possible. Because the population of the praying towns was multitribal and the colonial source base is often frustratingly non-specific about tribal affiliation, this chapter uses “Indigenous people” to describe individuals and groups whose tribal affiliations are unknown or unclear or to describe a multitribal group. This chapter uses “Indigenous” (with a capital I) in keeping with historical decolonization models proposed by Indigenous scholars. For more on decolonization methodology in American History, see Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (London, UK: Zed Books, 2012); Susan A. Miller, “Native America Writes Back: The Origin of the Indigenous Paradigm in Historiography,” Wicazo Sa Review 23, no. 2 (Fall 2008): 9–28; Susan A. Miller, “Native Historians Write Back to the Indigenous Paradigm in American Indian Historiography,” Wicazo Sa Review 24, no.1 (Spring 2009): 9–28. 2 Though individuals are most often simply called “Indians” in colonial documents relating to the praying towns, sources indicate that the praying towns drew their populations from the Mohegan, Wampanoag, Massachusett, Pawtuckett, Pennacook, Kennebeck, Pokomtakuke, Quabaug, Nashaway, Ponkapoag, and Nipmuc groups, tribes, and confederacies. It is entirely possible that members of other groups not listed here were also part of the praying towns. For more information on who may have lived in praying towns, see Daniel Gookin, Historical Collections of the Indians of New England (Boston, MA: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1792), 34; Samuel Penhallow, The History of the Wars of New-England with the Eastern Indians, or a Narrative of Their Continued Perfidy and Cruelty (Cincinnati, OH: Re-printed for Wm. Dodge, by J. Harpel, 1859). 3 For examples, see Julius Rubin, Tears of Repentance: Christian Indian Identity and Community in Colonial Southern New England (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2013); Kristina Bross, Dry Bones and Indian Sermons: Praying Indians in Colonial America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004); Neal Salisbury, “Red Puritans: The ‘Praying Indians’ of Massachusetts Bay and John Eliot,” William and Mary Quarterly 31, no.1 (January 1974): 27–54; Richard W. Cogley, John Eliot’s Mission to the Indians before King Philip’s War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009); Henry W. Bowden and James P. Ronda, John Eliot’s Indian Dialogues: A Study in Cultural Interaction (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1980); Kathryn Gray, John Eliot and the Praying Indians of Massachusetts Bay: Communities and Connections in Puritan New England (Plymouth, MA: Bucknell University Press, 2013). 4 For examples, see Jean M. Obrien, Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians Out of Existence in New England (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2010); James Axtell, The Invasion Within: The Contest of Cultures in Colonial North America (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1985); Ann Marie Plane, Colonial Intimacies: Indian Marriage in Early New England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000); Michael Leroy Oberg, Uncas: First of the Mohegans (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006); Neal Salisbury, Manitou and Providence (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982); Jill Lepore, The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity (New York NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998); Jenny Hale Pulsipher, Subjects unto the Same King: Indians, English, and the Contest for Authority in Colonial New England (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014); Daniel K. Richter, Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003); Charles M. Segal and David C. Stineback, Puritans, Indians, and Manifest Destiny (New York: Putnam, 1977); Robert Murray Thomas, Manitou and God: North-American Indian Religions and Christian Culture (Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2007); Francis Jennings, The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonists, and the Cant of Conquest (Chapel Hill, NC:

Indigenous land ownership in New England 181 University of North Carolina Press, 1975); James David Drake, King Philip’s War: Civil War in New England, 1675–1676 (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999); Kristina Bross and Hilary E. Wyss, Early Native Literacies in New England; A Documentary and Critical Anthology (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2008); Lauren Benton, A Search for Sovereignty: Law and Geography in European Empires, 1400–1900 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 5 For historical research that delves into land tenure as motivation to live in a praying town, see Jean M. O’Brien, Dispossession by Degrees: Indian Land and Identity in Natick, Massachusetts, 1650–1790 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Drew Lopenzina, “Praying Indians, Printing Devils: Centers of Indigeneity Within Colonial Containments (1643–1665),” in Red Ink: Native Americans Picking up the Pen in the Colonial Period (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2012), 87–135. Three additional histories mention the potential importance of land ownership briefly in their larger studies: James W. Springer’s, “American Indians and the Law of Real Property in Colonial New England,” The American Journal of Legal History 30, no.1 (1986): 25–58, acknowledges Indigenous land ownership as part of a rigorous legal study. James Drake’s King Philip’s War includes praying towns only briefly, but points out that living in a praying town carried benefits of secure land tenure. According to Drake’s analysis, the privilege of praying town land protection compared to the disrespect shown to other Indigenous people’s land was one of the tensions that led to “King Philip’s War.” Julius Rubin’s Tears of Repentance includes and cites Drake’s argument. 6 For examples of studies employing sophisticated analysis of missionary records related to praying towns, from which this chapter draws lessons, see O'Brien, Dispossession by Degrees; Lopenzina, Red Ink; Richter, Facing East from Indian Country; Plane, Colonial Intimacies; Bross, Dry Bones and Indian Sermons; Kristina Bross, “Come Over and Help Us’: Reading Mission Literature,” Early American Literature 38, no. 3 (January 2003): 395–400; Rubin, Tears of Repentance. 7 Gookin, Historical Collections, 60; Nathaniel B. Shurtleff, ed., Records of the Governor and Company of the Massachusetts bay in New England Volume 2 1642–1649 (Boston, MA: William White Press, 1843), 55–56. See also: Michael C. Clark ed., The Eliot Tracts (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003). 8 O’Brien, Dispossession by Degrees, 48–9; Gookin, Historical Collections, 65–6; Henry Whitfield ed., “Strength Out of Weaknesse,” in The Eliot Tracts, ed. Michael C. Clark (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003), 226–8. 9 “Conclusions and Orders Made and Agreed Upon by Divers Sachims and Other Principal Men Amongst the Indians at Concord, in the End of the Eleventh Moneth, Au. 1646” in Thomas Shepard, “The Clear Sunshine of the Gospel Breaking Forth Upon the Indians in New England,” in The Eliot Tracts, ed. Michael C. Clark (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003), 115–16; Plane, Colonial Intimacies; O’Brien, Dispossession by Degrees, 47, 142–50. See also: Gookin, Historical Collections. 10 Shurtleff, Records of The Governor & Company, vol. 2, 176–7. 11 For more on imperial competition in the New England borderlands, see Axtell, The Invasion Within; Daniel Richter, The Ordeal of the Longhouse: The People of the Iroquois League in the Era of European Colonization (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1992). For scholarly debates and perspectives on defining borderlands, see Pekka Hämäläinen and Samuel Truett, “On Borderlands,” The Journal of American History (September 2011): 338–61; Jeremy Adelman and Stephen Aaron, “From Borderlands to Borders, Empires, Nation States, and the People in between in North American History,” The American Historical Review 104, no. 3 (June  1999): 814–41; Jorge Cañazares-Esguerra, “Entangled Histories: Borderland Historiographies in New Clothes?” American Historical Review 112, no. 3 (June 2007): 787; Nathaniel Millet, “Borderlands in the Atlantic World,” Atlantic Studies 10, no. 2 (April 2013):

182  Taylor Kirsch 268–95; Pekka Hämäläinen, The Comanche Empire (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008). 12 John Winthrop, History of New England from 1630 to 1649, ed. James Savage (Boston, MA: Little, Brown and Co., 1853), 319; John Eliot and Thomas Mayhew, “Tears of Repentance,” in The Eliot Tracts, ed. Michael C. Clark (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003), 292–4; O’Brien, Dispossession by Degrees, 5; William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (New York: Hill & Wang, 2003), 85–90. 13 Gookin, Historical Collections, 34–43. 14 Since the beginning of the English colonial project in Massachusetts Bay, English settlers on an official and individual level asserted their entitlement to Indigenous land on the basis of the royal charter granted by King Charles I  in 1629 and the Bible. Soon after this charter was granted, sales and grants from Indigenous people were added to biblical and charter-based justifications for claiming Indigenous land, leading to increased dispossession of Indigenous people. Even as English colonists claimed wholesale ownership of all the land in New England, they sought to legitimize their claims by buying land from individual Indigenous people. In 1629, the same year that the Massachusetts Bay Colony received its royal charter granting ownership over much of New England, but before they had actually set sail from England to America, the soon to be elected Governor John Winthrop asserted that any Indigenous claim to land in Massachusetts Bay was “pretend,” but that settlers should “endeavor to purchase their tytle, that we may avoyde the least scruple of intrusion.” See: The Charter of Massachusetts Bay, Yale Law School Lillian Goldman Law Library, accessed February  15, 2016, http://avalon.law.yale.edu/17th_century/mass03.asp; Robert C. Winthrop ed., Life and Letters of John Winthrop, Governor of the Massachusetts Bay Company at their emigration to New England, 1630 (Boston, MA: Ticknor and Fields, 1864), 309–12; Nathaniel B. Shurtleff ed., Records of The Governor & Company of The Massachusetts Bay In New England Volume 1 1628–1641 (Boston, MA: William White Press, 1853), 394; Cronon, Changes in the Land. 15 The Mohawk Nation was an integral part of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, also known as the Five (later six) Nations, or Iroquois Empire, one of the most powerful and expansionist forces in the Northeast during the seventeenth century. 16 Gookin, Historical Collections, 34–43. 17 Eliot, John Eliot’s Brief Narrative; John Eliot, “From the Rev. John Eliot to the Hon. Robert Boyle, Governor of the Company,” in Some Correspondence between the Governors and Treasurers of the New England Company in London and the Commissioner of the United Colonies in America, the Missionaries of the Company, and Others between the years of 1657 and 1712 (Privately Printed from the Originals in Possession of the New England Co., London, UK: Spottiswoode & Co. 1896); Eliot and Mayhew, “Tears of Repentance,” 292–4. See also: Lopenzina, Red Ink, 87–135; Richter, Facing East from Indian Country, 126–7. 18 Gookin, Historical Collections, 34–7; Anonymous, “New England’s First Fruits,” in The Eliot Tracts, ed. Michael C. Clark (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003), 76; Shepard, “The Clear Sunshine of the Gospel,” 132–4; Axtell, The Invasion Within, 148, 222–3; Nathaniel B. Shurtleff, ed., “At a Second Session of the General Court Held at Boston, 1652,” in Records of the Governor & Company of The Massachusetts Bay In New England Volume 3 1644–1657 (Boston, MA: William White Press, 1854), 281–2; Cogley, John Eliot’s Mission to the Indians Before King Philip’s War, 149–60. 19 Sidney Perley ed., The Indian Land Titles of Essex County, Massachusetts (Salem, MA: Essex Book and Print Club, 1912); O’Brien, Dispossession by Degrees; Springer, “American Indians and the Law of Real Property in Colonial New England”; Cronon, Changes in the Land; O’Brien, Firsting and Lasting. Most recorded transactions were between males, though Indigenous women’s rights to property were sometimes

Indigenous land ownership in New England 183 recognized, especially those of female sachems. See: Plane, Colonial Intimacies; Shurtleff, Records of the Governor & Company vol. 2, 69. 20 Kenneth Lockridge has written much on the particular structure of New England colonial towns. Though he omitted Indigenous praying towns from his study, his work on colonial town structure is helpful for understanding Indigenous land ownership because Indigenous praying towns and English towns were set up according to the same system, according to the Massachusetts General Court. In both praying towns and English towns, land was granted to petitioning groups collectively, with town authorities vested with the power to dispense holdings to individuals. As in any English town, land was granted collectively to a “competent number” of petitioning Indigenous people, with the town then having the power to give legal title to individuals. For a more detailed discussion of New England town structure and civil laws, see Kenneth Lockridge, A New England Town: The First Hundred Years: Dedham, Massachusetts, 1636–1736 (New York: W.W Norton and Co., 1985); Shurtleff, Records of the Governor and Company vol. 2, 281–2. 21 Shurtleff, Records of the Governor & Company vol. 3, 281–2; Eliot, John Eliot’s Brief Narrative; Don Gleason, et al. ed., Early Records of Dedham vol. 4 (Dedham, MA: Printed at office of Dedham Transcript, 1894), 241–2; Shepard, “The Clear Sunshine of the Gospel,” 114. 22 Gookin, Historical Collections, 63. 23 Winthrop, Life and Letters of John Winthrop, 312. 24 Shurtleff, Records of the Governor and Company vol. 3, 281–2. 25 Gookin, Historical Collections of the Indians of New England, 87; Nathaniel Morton, New England’s Memorial (Boston, MA: Congregational Board of Publication, 1855), 387–91; Penhallow, The History of the Wars of New-England with the Eastern Indians, 36; Daniel Gookin, An Historical Account of the Doings and Sufferings of the Christian Indians in New England, in the Years 1675, 1676, 1677 (New York: Arno Press, 1972). 26 Gookin, Historical Collections, 65. 27 Gleason, et al., Early Records of Dedham vol. 4, 262, 97, 252–9, 270. 28 Shurtleff, Records of the Governor and Company vol. 1, 362, 394, 408. 29 Two more landowners signed this deed, but their names and marks are not legible enough to spell here. 30 John Anoosamaye, et al., “Testimony: This Writing Witnessed That We Whose Names Are Under Written . . . 18 Dec 1682” (Land Title, Manuscript, The Newberry Library, The Edward E. Ayer Collection, Vault Box Ayer MS 23, American Indian Histories and Cultures). 31 Thomas Mayhew, “The 9th day of January  1670, agreed by my selfe and Kochanomin  .  .  . 09 Jan 1670” (Official Record, Manuscript, The Newbury Library, The Edward E. Ayer Collection, Vault Box Ayer MS 589, American Indian Histories and Cultures). 32 Shurtleff, Records of the Governor and Company vol. 3, 281–2. 33 Gleason, et al., Early Records of Dedham vol. 4, 270. 34 Ibid., 249. 35 John Eliot, “Letter from Eliot to Mr. Steele, 1652” cited in O’Brien, Dispossession by Degrees, 46. Eliot, John Eliot’s Brief Narrative; “Conclusions and Orders made and Agreed Upon by Divers Sachims,” 115–16; Shurtleff, Records of The Governor & Company vol. 3, 281–2. See also O’Brien, Dispossession by Degrees. 36 Henry Whitfield, “The Light Appearing More and More Towards the Perfect Day or a Farther Discovery of the Present State of Indians in New England,” in The Eliot Tracts, ed. Michael C. Clark (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003), 201–2; Gleason, et  al., Early Records of Dedham vol. 4, 255–61; The Charter of Massachusetts Bay; Gookin, Historical Collections, 65; Eliot, John Eliot’s Brief Narrative.

184  Taylor Kirsch 37 Penhallow, The History of the Wars of New-England with the Eastern Indians, 36. 38 Shepard, “Clear Sunshine of the Gospel,” 114. 39 In this document, there is no mention of women joining the group, which would fit with the patriarchal goals of Eliot’s missionary project. However, it is reasonable to speculate that Indigenous women were probably in communication with the delegation of men that accompanied Eliot and had a say in the land selection process. 40 Whitfield, “The Light Appearing More and More Towards the Perfect Day,” 201–2; Gleason, et al., Early Records of Dedham vol. 4, 255; O’Brien, Dispossession by Degrees, 31–4. 41 Shepard, “The Clear Sunshine of the Gospel,” 132; Eliot, John Eliot’s Brief Narrative; Cronon, Changes in the Land; Lopenzina, Red Ink, 87–135; Cogley, John Eliot’s Mission to the Indians Before King Philips War, 107, 210. 42 Stephen A. Mrozowski, D. Rae Gould, and Heather L. Pezzarossi, “Rethinking Colonialism: Indigenous Innovation and Colonial Inevitability,” in Rethinking Colonialism: Comparative Archaeological Approaches, ed. Craig N. Cipolla and Katherine Howlett Hayes (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2015), 121–5. Jean O’Brien also makes this argument in Dispossession by Degrees. 43 Mrozowski, Gould and Pezzarossi “Rethinking Colonialism,” 127–30. 44 Ibid., 129. 45 Ibid., 127–30. 46 Magdalena Naum, “Re-emerging Frontiers: Postcolonial Theory and Historical Archaeology of the Borderlands,” Journal of Archaeological Method Theory 17 (Spring 2010): 101–31; Mary C. Beaudry, Findings: The Material Culture of Needlework and Sewing (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 112–14. 47 Gookin, Historical Collections, 60; Naum, “Re-emerging Frontiers,” 119–21; Beaudry, Findings,112–14. 48 Naum, “Re-emerging Frontiers,” 121. 49 Diana DiPaolo Loren, “Casting Identity: Sumptuous Action and Colonized Bodies in Seventeenth-century New England,” in Rethinking Colonial Pasts through Archaeology, ed. Neal Ferris, Rodney Harrison and Michael V. Wilcox (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2014), 251–67. 50 Gookin, Doings and Sufferings; Morton, New England’s Memorial, 387–92; Drake, King Philip’s War, 87–8, 102–4; Pulsipher, Subjects unto the Same King, 140–55; Lepore, The Name of War, 136–50; Lauren Benton, “Treacherous Places: Atlantic Riverine Regions and the Law of Treason,” in A Search for Sovereignty: Law and Geography in European Empires, 1400–1900 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 40–104. 51 Gleason, et al., Early Records of Dedham vol. 4, 255; Gookin, Doings and Sufferings; Morton, New England’s Memorial, 391–2; Karsten Fitz, “Commemorating Crispus Attucks: Visual Memory and the Representations of the Boston Massacre, 1770–1857,” Amerikastudien / American Studies 50, no. 3 (2005): 463–84; “Our History” Praying Indians of Natick and Ponkapoag, accessed February  15, 2016, http://natickprayingindians.org/history.html; “New England Powwow Schedule 2018” Wandering Bull, accessed June 10, 2018, http://wanderingbull.com/ wp-content/uploads/2016/03/PowwowSchedule.pdf; Brian Benson,“Natick Indians Hold Historic Service at Eliot Church,” The Metro West Daily News (Framingham, MA), accessed August  12, 2012, www.metrowestdailynews.com/x521655906/ Natick-Praying-Indians-hold-historic-service-at-Eliot-Church.

10 Forgotten The Spanish influenza pandemic of 1918 Srijita Pal

On September 23, 1918, a group of perhaps the best medical minds in the country was sent to Fort Devens, Massachusetts, on behalf of the Army Surgeon General, William C. Gorgas, to battle the Spanish influenza pandemic that was sweeping American army training camps. Among them was Dr. William Henry Welch, a physician who kept meticulous diaries of his travels around the training camps. On the first day, Welch found 45,000 men crowded into a camp that was only meant to hold 35,000.1 What had started out as a small flu outbreak of thirty-six men on September 16 turned into a massive outbreak of 12,604 cases by the time Welch and his colleagues arrived.2 On that first day alone, 63 men died.3 By October, 787 would die before even going off to war.4 This chapter argues that there was a contradiction between how medical professionals personally viewed the influenza pandemic of 1918 and how they publicly spoke of it. This, in turn, impacted how the pandemic was remembered. The Spanish influenza pandemic killed more globally than World War I, yet it is mentioned often only as a corollary to the year 1918. The disease played a part in the First World War, but beyond that, it also affected civilians and baffled medical professionals. Despite all this, the pandemic garnered little popular attention, both during its course and afterward. The pandemic was not a focus of scientific publications in 1918 because the scientific advancements that would allow scientists to fully understand the influenza virus did not even come into existence until the 1950s.5 Furthermore, the pandemic interacted with the war not only physically but also in the sector of memory. Before America shipped out soldiers for war, they had to fight another enemy that did not discriminate between countries or loyalties. The influenza virus ordinarily is just like any other virus. Armed with protein spikes called hemagglutinin and neuraminidase, viruses exist to take over the cells of the body. Since viruses cannot reproduce themselves, they integrate their RNA-based genomes into existing nuclei and reproduce through host bodily cells. As reproduction is their primary task, viruses are helpless without a host. Usually, influenza affects the youngest and eldest members of the population disproportionately, owing to the weaker immune systems and thus greater susceptibility to the virus of the mentioned groups. However, the victims of the 1918 strain were mostly between the ages of 20 and 40.6 In the case of the particular strain that caused the 1918

186  Srijita Pal pandemic, many deaths were caused by the human immune system’s overreaction to the virus as well as secondary bacterial infections. Since adults between 20 and 40 years had the best immune systems, they disproportionately succumbed to this particular strain of influenza. In response to infected cells, the body released white blood cells and other liquid components into the lungs and created what medical professionals term a “cytokine storm.”7 Victims would experience normal flulike symptoms that would worsen into a high fever and coughing. Fluids flooded the lungs in areas where there needed to be space for the exchange of gases, and victims struggled to breathe, turning characteristically blue and purple in the process. Eventually, victims either succumbed by drowning in their own fluids or faced a long road to recovery. Even after surviving their own immune response to the virus, many victims caught bacterial infections, most notably pneumonia, and died as a result. Since Spanish influenza was so widespread, there are few unique memories of it. This is to say that everyone who had an experience with the flu had more or less the same experience, as the body’s reaction to the virus meant there could be only two possible outcomes: slow recovery or death. The sudden onset of the disease, coupled with fever, pneumonia, and suffering, is not only the typical story but also the only story. There are no miraculous survival stories, just narratives of the aforementioned outcomes. Katherine Anne Porter, whose novel Pale Horse, Pale Rider reiterated her own experience with the pandemic, best illustrates the two outcomes of the pandemic. In the novel, Porter reflects on her experiences as Miranda Gay, a reporter who becomes ill with influenza long enough to miss the death of her fiancé.8 This dichotomy of sudden death and long recovery was not uncommon, appearing frequently in the testimony of survivors as well as medical professionals. This typical arc of symptoms does not make the flu a unique experience in the memories of many individuals. Because influenza affected both civilians and those in combat, the exclusivity relegated to deaths due to combat was not applied to deaths due to influenza. The non-discriminatory nature of the virus further meant that the experience with the flu was a general one and not something that only soldiers felt. Since the experience of the flu was not particular to a certain group, it was less special than other select events, such as entering into battle. Paradoxically, in this pandemic, all socioeconomic classes and races suffered, making it a commonality among all.9 In trying to piece together the often extraordinary circumstances of world events, writers of the time tended to focus on events that they did not find commonplace, not knowing that the detailing of commonplace events might be useful to those who later read their accounts. The flu, being seasonal and usually an ordinary event, was easy to overlook – that is, until researchers looked back at the event and realized such a large population of the world had died during that period due to influenza. Influenza was not seen as much out of the ordinary when compared to the war of massive proportions raging in Europe. While newspapers reported glowing headlines about a “Big American Offensive” in The Times in September 1918, doctors and nurses in the European theater struggled to contain and treat the

Forgotten: the Spanish influenza pandemic of 1918 187 rapidly spreading influenza among troops.10 When the disease did make it into the newspapers, it was hardly ever the headline; that spot was reserved for the Great War.11 The interest of the general public was in the war, less so the pandemic. In fact, many civilians “knew very little about the . . . pandemic outside of what they could observe in their local communities.”12 American newspapers grossly underestimated the number of people affected by the virus, with the flu not even being a reportable disease in 1918 despite later research proving its existence as early as March of that year.13 However, it is worth noting that publications exclusive to medical professionals, such as the Journal of the American Medical Association, were sources of more accurate information.14 This disparity between the amount of knowledge civilians and medical professionals held about the pandemic showed that the understanding of the pandemic differed among separate populations. Initially, scientists tried to experiment with vaccines against influenza. Vaccines had worked in the past and were a way to inoculate people before they were infected. However, results were very mixed, with some scientists reporting “noteworthy success” and others finding their results “very disappointing.”15 During World War I, although immunization and scientifically directed sanitation could reduce the rates of many communicable diseases, influenza, the various forms of pneumonia, and the complications of these infections remained dangerous threats to the Army, especially when large numbers of young and vulnerable recruits were crowded together under conditions of emotional and physical stress.16 Additionally, the 1918 influenza pandemic was not an example of the triumph of man over natural diseases. It was an outlier among the recent discoveries in bacteriology and in the field of military medicine. During World War I, many new medical technologies emerged as a by-product of the need to effectively treat wounded men in combat. New ideas, such as having a blood bank on hand before casualties came, and new inventions, such as the Thomas splint, made the survival rate of wounded soldiers increase by the end of the war.17 In the unsanitary conditions created by crowding of recruits in army training camps, medical professionals were expecting the transfer of communicable disease, but on a scale they had seen before. With the acceptance of germ theory, there was a general “optimism about the ability of scientific medicine to control disease.”18 Influenza itself was a problem, but so were the conditions that soldiers found themselves in during the war. The cases of the mentioned medical advances and other diseases such as typhus are still remembered because they represent an outcome in which man gained superiority over and conquered disease. Influenza was the exact opposite. In fact, whatever was used to try to combat it on the battlefield was largely inefficient. The pandemic came to represent the “utter failure of science, the greatest achievement of modern man, in the face of the disease.”19 Even Dr. Welch himself made it clear that there were “a large number of infectious diseases which [had] thus far resisted all efforts to discover their specific

188  Srijita Pal infectious agents”.20 It was not until 1933 that researchers learned that the virus that caused influenza was among these diseases. Many scientists thought that a bacterium, named Pfeiffer’s bacillus after the scientist who had discovered it, was to blame for the disease.21 Yet while the bacteria showed up in the remains of flu victims, exposing healthy individuals to Pffeifer’s bacillus did not cause them to contract deadly influenza.22 This violated one of the scientific tenets of establishing causality, ruling out the bacterium as the source of infection. Puzzled by this, scientists continued to debate the cause of the disease. Later on, they would realize that these bacteria correlated with secondary pneumonia many influenzaridden soldiers were subject to.23 When repeated attempts to find the pathogen responsible yielded no result, the only measure left to both civilian and military doctors was to prescribe rest and fresh air. The first case of Spanish influenza in the United States occurred in March 1918, in Camp Funston, an army training camp. By September 1918, the virus had made its appearance in many more army training camps in the United States. There is no doubt that the spread of the Spanish flu was exacerbated by the conditions of the war. “Influenza . . . collaborated with the Great War” to create an atmosphere in which the spread of diseases was inevitable.24 The overcrowded conditions in the camps, coupled with the grouping together of thousands of men from different parts of the country, resulted in disaster for the American population. From army camps to urban centers, the flu spread across the continent while simultaneously spreading around the globe. Trench warfare further made it possible for large numbers of men to spend time packed together, making the conditions ideal for a virus. Even among the countries that were not affected by the conflict, the flu of 1918 became a problem. The Surgeon General of the United States in 1918 was Dr. Rupert Blue. Early on, he expressed his concern with the pandemic and how it would affect army training camps. In the autumn, he issued a bulletin recommending “that influenza be kept out of the camps as far as practicable. To this end it must be recognized as a disease which is distinct and separate from the so-called cold.”25 However, it was too late: by that time, the first cases of influenza in many camps had already been confirmed. Once the pandemic took hold in the country, Blue was among the physicians who realized how much of a problem a pandemic flu created. Most medical professionals were “depleted by World War I,” and Blue convinced many of his retired colleagues to reenter the workforce to care for civilian influenza victims.26 As the Surgeon General of the Public Health Service, he gave out public statements on the state of the pandemic, noting clearly, “There is as yet no specific cure for influenza.”27 The Army Medical Department was noted for being “at the forefront of many scientific advances.”28 In the army training camps, while medical progress “such as vaccinations and sanitation brought many water- and insect-borne diseases under control,” respiratory diseases such as “measles, pneumonia, and influenza had not yielded to systematic remedy.”29 Dr. William C. Gorgas, the Surgeon General of the Army, was experienced in dealing with infectious disease during warfare. However, his experience was with vector-borne diseases, such as

Forgotten: the Spanish influenza pandemic of 1918 189 yellow fever, which he had encountered in Cuba and Panama. Influenza, a respiratory illness that spread by direct contact without the use of a vector, was quite different. Gorgas was convinced that “the old ratio of several times as many deaths from disease as from combat would have no place in modern warfare.”30 In previous conflicts, however, there was not one solitary disease that was responsible for the high death count of soldiers. Instead, soldiers were commonly affected by a host of common diseases, including influenza. But Gorgas had reason to be confident. Most scientists agree that the number of army flu victims has been underestimated worldwide. In the United States Army, establishing a case definitively as influenza was difficult because the medical department did not keep separate statistics on influenza until September 1918.31 The disease was difficult to diagnose with certainty since the symptoms of influenza were similar to that of the common cold. In addition, early cases of influenza could have been easily confused with pneumonia, as Welch’s diaries revealed. While the outcomes of the flu were limited, the range of symptoms a person experienced differed due to the body’s reaction to the virus and the multitude of secondary infections that quickly attacked a victim with a weak immune system. Even as early as 1887, Welch seemed to realize that infectious diseases were “a class of diseases which have been more devastating to the human race than any upheavals of nature or any wars. They have left their imprint upon the political, the social, and the intellectual history of the world.”32 Even with this foresight, Welch and his colleagues were underprepared for a pandemic that would occur only thirty-one years later. The fact that very few physicians chose to write about the flu during or even after its occurrence is very puzzling, especially as Rufus Cole later remarked on how affected Welch was by the initial scene at Fort Devens.33 The effect the afflicted soldiers had on military and medical veterans such as Welch and Vaughan correlated with the effect the virus had on many people: a reluctance to reflect on or discuss it. While Welch made it clear that infectious diseases were debilitating, he never acknowledged the flu by its name.34 In fact, in the massive collection of papers and addresses he left behind for the public, not one mention of the 1918 pandemic appears. This seems rather strange, especially given that Welch dealt with some of the worst cases of influenza when he visited army training camps on the East Coast. However, it is important to note that the public was meant to view these papers. Since Welch could not have possibly had a lot of information about the flu at the time, it makes sense that his public addresses would have little to say on the flu. Welch was not the only prominent scientist who left little mention of the pandemic in his writings. Victor Vaughan wrote extensively about his experiences as a medical professional but declined to comment on the pandemic in detail, simply stating in his biography, “I am not going into the history of the influenza epidemic.”35 However, he also admitted to being very “depressed” by the situation when he came upon Fort Devens.36 It became apparent that the pandemic “was not only a national trauma, then, but a professional disaster for physicians . . . and an experience in failure for the national government.”37 Historian George Dehner

190  Srijita Pal comes up with an idea for why such esteemed scientists may have neglected the pandemic in their public writings: The failure of medical research to cure or even identify the agent responsible must have come as a shock to the researchers whose professional career spanned the . . . successful application of the germ theory of disease. The scientists had witnessed and participated in research that had brought many dreaded killers to heel.38 Most of the men working on the influenza problem had been successful in defeating diseases before. Vaughan, for example, was a veteran of the SpanishAmerican War and had dealt with the outbreaks of yellow fever the troops faced. It is reasonable that in the face of such a lack of knowledge, scientists whom many looked to for information would keep silent. It was not even until the end of Welch’s life that influenza was confirmed by science to be caused by a virus. The reluctance to write about the pandemic was coupled with a lack of publications in the scientific community. In a graph detailing how many scientific publications mentioned “influenza” and “1918” from 1918 to 2016, there is evidence that following the pandemic, there were few publications in which it was mentioned (Figure 10.1).39 There are significant spikes corresponding to the years during which the pandemic became relevant. Events such as the 1976 and 2009–2010 swine flu outbreaks predictably caused more mention of the 1918 pandemic. Significant scientific events, such as the sequencing of the virus’s genome, also caused more mentions of the 1918 virus. The creation of the World Wide Web and convenient Internet access caused the number of mentions of the flu to increase dramatically in the twenty-first century. To exclude the skew presented in the graph, taking out data from the twentyfirst century shows an additional trend. The number of publications in the first five years after the pandemic is nearly equal to the number of publications in the following forty-six years (Figure 10.2).40 A t-test performed on the graph yields only a 0.0008 percent chance the data are due to chance alone. For this specific type of t-test, it is best to compare normally distributed variables for two independent groups.41 Of course, as with all mathematical functions, it cannot tell us what factor makes it unlikely that the changes occurred due to chance alone. Scientists and medical professionals were specialists in their field, but when they were up against a problem that had no feasible solution at that time, their response to the public was more or less nonexistent. Looking more closely at the personal diaries of William Henry Welch reveals more of how he actually felt. While his diaries are mostly methodical accounts of his travels to the different army training camps and filled with numbers of those sick with certain diseases, he occasionally penned his own thoughts. The purpose of even sending a team of scientists to the various training camps was “in connection with the investigations of pneumonia.”42 His diaries begin before the September 1918 height of the pandemic. Even as late as December 1917, Welch notes the number of pneumonia

Forgotten: the Spanish influenza pandemic of 1918 191

Year vs. menons of "Influenza 1918” Number of menons

140 120 100 80 60 40 20 0 1900

1920

1940

1960

1980

2000

2020

2040

Year

1918: Spanish influenza pandemic

1976: Swine flu outbreak

2009/2010: Swine flu outbreak

1997: Taubenberger and team sequence virus 2005: Compleon of virus genome sequence

Figure 10.1  Incidence rate of mentions of “Influenza 1918” by year.

cases in Camp Jackson, located in South Carolina, to be at 155 for the preceding two months.43 Pneumonia is the only disease on his list that influenza could have been misidentified as. Assuming completely correct diagnoses, besides pneumonia, respiratory illnesses do not even show up in his accounts at this time. At the end of December 1917, the number of cases of measles at Camp Jackson was at 142 for the preceding two months, showing that influenza was not the disease with the most priority. In addition, the cases of pneumonia were not alarming. Welch and his colleagues saw this lack of influenza and concluded that other communicable diseases were going to be priorities. In Camp Gordon, the sixty-three cases of pneumonia were outnumbered by the eighty-eight cases of venereal disease. Even in June 1918, the diseases Welch listed as prevalent in Camp Gordon

192  Srijita Pal

Years vs. Number of Publicaons 40

Number of publications

35 30 25 20 15 10

5 0 1918–1923

1924–1970 Years

Figure 10.2  Rate of Influenza-related publications by period. By just looking at these quantitative data, it looks as if scientists were largely ignoring the pandemic after its occurrence, but to fully understand how medical professionals felt during this time, it is important to also look at the qualitative observations as well, such as Welch’s diaries.

included pneumonia, emphysema, measles, scarlet fever, meningitis, diphtheria, mumps, chickenpox, whooping cough, smallpox, and strep throat. Influenza was not even mentioned. It is interesting to note that the cases of meningitis were often the highest in the camps during this time. Meningitis is also the result of a virus infecting the human body, and since scientists had not yet discovered the concept of a virus, meningitis was particularly prevalent and deadly. In September 1918, Welch returned to Camp Jackson on the orders of the Surgeon General of the Army to do something about the influenza outbreak that was sweeping that and other camps. Camp Jackson had “one of the best laboratories [Welch] had ever seen” but was still underprepared for the number of influenza victims.44 Welch’s early reports indicate the discovery of “primarily influenza bacilli” (Pfeiffer’s bacillus) in the sputum of a recently deceased soldier.45 On September 11, 1918, in Camp Gordon, Welch lamented that he had “no confidence in the separation of lobar from bronchial pneumonia.”46 This is crucial because lobar pneumonia is usually a primary bacterial infection with which influenza is not connected; however, bronchial pneumonia is a secondary pneumonia, which indicates a primary infection such as influenza.47 This statement is immensely important because it leads to the idea that many previous cases of influenza were being misdiagnosed as pneumonia. When Welch, one of the most distinguished medical professionals of the time, expressed clear doubt of the validity of a diagnosis, there must have been a reason. Welch may not have known it during that

Forgotten: the Spanish influenza pandemic of 1918 193 time, but he was dealing with the beginning stages of the pandemic that would later become the primary concern of most camps. As late September approached, Welch became less sure of himself and less sure of identifying the disease that seemed to be in all the camps. Still, at Camp Gordon, he wrote that he and another colleague were “not convinced that so much of the present pneumonia is streptococcus, at least laboratory evidence is unsatisfactory.”48 To further add to his doubts, Welch notes that in Camp Wheeler, there was influenza in April 1918 in which “influenza bacilli and streptococci” were found.49 By “influenza bacilli,” Welch was referring to Pfeiffer’s bacillus, a red herring that threw many scientists off the real perpetrator – the influenza virus. Besides this doubt over the microbiology of the organism actually causing influenza, Welch seemed unconcerned about the disease, citing the early cases as “expect[ed] outbreaks.”50 Eleven days from the start of the worst of the pandemic, Welch was more concerned with the outbreaks of typhus in the camps he was visiting. This attention to other diseases shows that he and most other medical professionals were taken by surprise by the sudden and virulent nature of the influenza pandemic that was soon to follow. The fact that Welch expressed doubt and uncertainty is also important. In his public papers and addresses, Welch came across as very sure of his discipline. To the public, he was calm and steady, as he needed to be to keep the situation under control. Personally, he experienced doubts and was just as confused about influenza as everyone else. Reducing speculation and staying away from misinformation were two things medical professionals strived to do. Welch and his peers were no different. So although they had striking personal doubts, they chose to keep these unsupported doubts to themselves. Welch was representative not of the average physician, but of a very highly regarded physician. If someone as experienced and revered as Welch was expressing doubts about the origins of a disease, lesser physicians would have probably followed suit. It is understandable that in order to keep a façade of control and understanding, medical professionals would choose not to speak of the flu simply because they had nothing to add scientifically to the discussion. Welch’s personal diaries are crucial in understanding how medical professionals personally dealt with the pandemic. Welch’s attention to personal detail is what makes his diaries a compelling primary source. These diaries were not meant to be released to the public on the same scale as all of his addresses and speeches. The honesty of his observations makes Welch a more human figure and adds validity to the doubts he expressed. Most importantly, Welch’s personal discussion of influenza and its potential confusion with pneumonia makes it clear that medical professionals and scientists of 1918 were not ignoring the pandemic. In fact, they were actively trying to understand its causes, an endeavor that would ultimately be fruitless for some time. Besides not understanding the virus well enough to publish anything on it, another possibility could be that medical professionals began focusing on other, more pressing demands. At the end of the First World War, the diseases that existed in the United States were not as widespread and did not kill as many

194  Srijita Pal individuals as the Spanish influenza pandemic, leaving medical professionals with no standard procedures to follow for a crisis on such a large scale. It seems that the reason medical professionals and researchers did not address the flu was because they just could not. The pandemic eventually ended on its own, without any major scientific breakthrough. While many metropolitan cities discouraged contact between civilians by mandating face masks and asking residents to stay away from crowds and off the streets during certain peak times, this was a realm that medical professionals and researchers had little experience in. The pandemic was essentially solved because of public health measures and time. The lack of scientific publications reflects the fact that science had little success mitigating the pandemic. Correspondingly, there just was not very much for the scientists to publish on. This inherent disconnect between science and the flu continued into the future. The official estimate of how many influenza victims died worldwide was revised three times as more data became unearthed. In 1927, Edwin Oakes Jordan estimated 21.6 million died of the virus, but in 1991, Gerard Pyle and K. David Patterson estimated that 24.7–39.3 million died globally.51 Finally, in 2002, Niall P.A.S. Johnson and Juergen Mueller calculated the number to be around 50 million, and today the number is accepted as being between 50 and 100 million.52 Being turned away from the battlefield due to illness was a source of embarrassment for many soldiers. Medical doctors tried their best to keep sick troops isolated and away from the front lines, but they occasionally did make it through by lying. Ivan Farnworth, an American soldier clearly ill with the flu, managed to alter his thermometer reading, allowing him to go into battle while his captain “cried like a little child” at not being able to fight with his troops, as he, too, was sick with influenza.53 The willingness of Farnworth to put the lives of other healthy soldiers at risk for the potential glory associated with warfare is largely representative of how soldiers felt about influenza and how far soldiers were willing to go for personal glory even when the flu was involved. In addition, the pandemic was largely collectively forgotten because dying in the war due to influenza was seen as less honorable than dying due to combat and therefore less useful to the process of nation-building. While surviving soldiers were awarded medals and honors for their bravery in the field, the army did not “reward people for surviving lethal illness.”54 If there are so very few significant memories of soldiers dying from the flu and no way to commemorate death due to disease, it is natural that the pandemic affecting the army becomes less and less tangible to later generations. Even those who wished to mourn the influenza victims were torn between that and a “worthier” cause: death due to warfare. Besides, even as the war subsided and the Armistice was signed, the pandemic raged on. No one can blame a war-weary population for wanting to move on and stop focusing on anything remotely connected to the war. In the long run, however, this unwillingness to reflect on the pandemic resulted in the erasure of the event in the collective memory. For Americans, it was difficult to untangle the pandemic from World War I, especially since the worst of the pandemic hit just as the United States prepared for and entered into the global conflict. While Americans associated all the unpleasantness of the War with the pandemic, the redeeming qualities

Forgotten: the Spanish influenza pandemic of 1918 195 the Great War had in strengthening nationalism and associating glory with dying in battle did not apply to the pandemic. The way events are memorialized, or, in this case, not memorialized, speaks not to how they were perceived at the time of the event, but rather to the fact that remembrance is more of a “symbolic exchange between those who remain and those who suffered or died.”55 The entire idea of the memory of an event depends heavily on those who remain, as those who are affected the most do not survive and do not have a say in how they are remembered. Nowhere does there exist a monument for victims of the pandemic. Memorials do exist for influenza victims in the United States, but unlike those for combat deaths, these memorials are small, sheltered, and apologetic. One memorial in Cresskill, New Jersey, simply reads, “In memory of those soldiers who gave their lives for their country while on duty in Camp Merritt.”56 There is no mention that the 563 men buried there died from influenza, and nothing more than a simple stone obelisk marks the point. The monument in Cresskill is largely representative of the remembrance that influenza victims received. Two hours away from Cresskill, in Atlantic City, lies another memorial, but this time for combat victims of World War I. Fondly called the Greek Temple Monument, the structure is well planned, cost $19,000 when it was built, and features a rotunda and sculpture dedicated to the soldiers.57 This is representative of an overall trend in the United States. There are over 30 memorials dedicated to fallen soldiers in World War I in the US alone, while nearly no memorials exist for influenza victims. This tendency is similarly repeated in many parts of the world. However, diseases also do not lend themselves easily to physical memorialization. While war memorials exist to boost morale and commemorate the decisions of a nation and of individuals, memorials to disease cannot play a similar role. Since diseases are not a decision, nor patriotic, their memorialization is of little objective use to the nation. In addition, the pandemic did not create grand changes in “the structure and procedures of governments” or armies.58 It had little influence on “the course of political and military struggles because it affected all sides equally.”59 While many individuals intimately remember the pandemic, the memory of the pandemic has not transcended individual memory into collective memory. But in other ways, the pandemic managed to leave its mark. The public health measures cities put into place as a result of the flu became an important learning point. Public sanitation became more important and cities and the government learned how to react in case of a major outbreak. Sometimes diseases are seen as distinctly separate from history, but biological elements frequently shape history. In the case of the First World War, Spanish influenza plagued all sides. The Germans, too, were affected, to the point where crucial battles were called off because a significant number of soldiers were too sick for the July offensive to continue.60 Some even say that this one disease changed the course of the war and even dictated how the subsequent peace process was finalized.61 Historian Alfred Crosby has done some of the most comprehensive research thus far on why the pandemic was forgotten. He came up with a couple of theories that are interesting. Crosby noted that “in the 1920s public and private expenditures on

196  Srijita Pal medical research in general were barely one-fiftieth of what they would become after World War II.”62 Despite all the gains in the field of public health and disease, very little was spent on combating the virus, especially when compared to money spent on other causes. The influenza pandemic affected the lives of many people who would go on to be authors, such as Fitzgerald and Faulkner, yet their works seem unmoved by the experience. Other physicians who contributed to the war effort also had little to say about the pandemic. Crosby alluded to the nondisfiguring nature of the flu, which made it hard for the virus to leave a perceptible physical mark on its victims. Another interesting point was that the flu did not kill anyone of notable prominence. The virus “characteristically killed young adults and therefore rarely any men in position of great authority.”63 He ended with noting that the pandemic had “a permanent influence not on the collectivities but on the atoms of human society – individuals.”64 Crosby therefore considered the pandemic a largely forgotten component of the collective narrative of history. From this research, however, it is clear that the Spanish influenza pandemic was never truly forgotten. On a personal level, forgetting the emotional scars of the pandemic was not possible. But collectively, the pandemic had accumulated all the negativity associated with World War I, without the heroic and patriotic connotations that came with combat and combat deaths. The science available in 1918 was inadequate to understand the complicated virus. This led to a lack of publications and a virtual erasure of any mention of the pandemic in a scientific sense until the 1990s, when more advanced technology allowed scientists such as Jeffery Taubenberger and Peter Palese to decipher the genetic secrets of the virus.65 Earlier, in 1933, English scientists Christopher Andrewes, Wilson Smith, and Patrick Laidlaw “definitively proved” that the 1918 outbreak was caused by a virus.66 The fact that scientists returned to the problem of the 1918 virus shows that they were far from apathetic when it came to understanding it. The technology available in 1918 was not advanced enough to decipher the virus, but in the late 1990s, genetic sequencing technology became available and scientists went back to the problem of the pathogenicity of the 1918 virus. To find live remnants of the virus, scientists dug up the preserved lung tissue of victims buried in the permafrost of the Alaskan tundra.67 Similarly, the efforts by men such as Dr. Welch and others to combat and decipher the virus point to anything but scientific indifference. In the personal realm, the pandemic affected enough people for remembrance to continue through generations through personal stories and anecdotes. The literature left behind by survivors of the flu details the guilt they felt at mourning influenza deaths when others were dying in ways not more gruesome or violent, but in ways that affirmed their nationalism. There was not time to mourn both influenza victims and combat victims, and choosing to commemorate the death of heroic soldiers was seen as more patriotic and therefore the right thing to do. At a time when the immediacy of World War I consumed all resources and attention, the pandemic had little chance of being independently remembered. There was no honor associated with gasping for breath on a hospital bed, no glory from becoming ill without ever reaching the battlefield. Influenza deaths served no purpose in the hyper-militarized era of the First World War. Deaths due to

Forgotten: the Spanish influenza pandemic of 1918 197 influenza were sometimes simply overshadowed by deaths on the battlefield. So no matter how individuals themselves remembered the flu and its consequences, as a whole, Americans placed more of an emphasis on deaths due to combat. Furthermore, the pandemic and World War I remain intertwined in the memories of those who lived through both. The pandemic is seen as part of World War I, rather than a separate event. This is particularly true for Americans, whose entrance into the First World War coincided almost exactly with the peak of the pandemic outbreak. There has been little work done on how disease is remembered in general, let alone how its memory fares during and after times of global conflict and upheaval. The pandemic of 1918 is understudied, especially given the number of lives it affected. The little scholarship available on the memory of the pandemic focuses exclusively on civilians and medical professionals and has been largely excluded from the subsequent history. Influenza still hits seasonally, and while science gallops forward at a rapid pace, all scientists can do is guess which strain of virus will be the next to infect humans. However, recent scientific advancements have pointed toward a future in which a universal vaccine might be used to treat any form of the seasonal virus.68 The most recent swine flu pandemic (2009–2010) makes it clear that there is still a good deal left to learn about the virus and how to prevent mass outbreaks in the future. Some historians suggest that the failure to conquer the flu is “too amorphous, bitter, and disempowering to remain the focus of public attention.”69 The incidence of viral diseases continues to rise, and pandemics are made even more possible with the rapidity of travel and frequent contact caused by areas of high population density. With advances in medical technologies, sometimes it seems as if the threat of a biological catastrophe is something of the past. However, pandemic flu hit three times in the twentieth century, and agencies such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) make it clear that the next flu pandemic is not a matter of if, but when.70 Crosby perhaps said it best when he explained that people are “justified in ignoring [the flu] because the alternative would be to sink into the quicksand of speculation without any limits.”71 The memory of flu is easy to ignore because the inconsistencies are easy to ignore. To acknowledge that the pandemic has been forgotten naturally leads to the question of why it was forgotten. The idea of an entire nation forgetting a deadly disease that wiped out more people globally than the conflict the world was mired in seems absurd, so the absurdity is never addressed. The influenza pandemic leaves behind a mixed legacy. On one hand, it stands in the scientific community as one of the defining instances in which a disease that initially defied explanation later provided so much information. On the other hand, it is subtracted from the narrative of the war and often put into its own category. Inserting the narrative of the flu into spaces traditionally not occupied by diseases infuses understandings of the conflict with part of a different discipline. There is no definitive answer to why the pandemic remains isolated in either a scientific or historical discourse, as opposed to a narrative that includes both. Looking into the personal papers of the medical professionals grappling with the pandemic

198  Srijita Pal can help bridge the gap between scientific analysis of the flu as a disease and the existing narrative of the pandemic as an historical event, laying the foundation for understanding the event in the context of and in connection with the First World War, rather than as an independent, isolated episode.72

Notes 1 Alfred W Crosby, America's Forgotten Pandemic: The Influenza of 1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Print, 4. 2 Ibid., 5. 3 Mary C. Gillett, The Army Medical Department, 1917–1941 (Washington, DC: Center of Military History, U.S. Army, 2009). Print, 353. 4 Ibid., 349. 5 Ton Van Helvoort, “When Did Virology Start?” ASM News  62 (1996), accessed January  29, 2019, www.asm.org/ccLibraryFiles/FILENAME/0000000246/620396p 142.pdf 6 Jeffery K. Taubenberger and David M. Morens, “1918 Influenza: The Mother of All Pandemics,” Emerging Infectious Diseases 12, no. 1 (2006): 15–22. Web. 7 George Dehner, Influenza: A Century of Science and Public Health Response (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012). Print, 54. 8 Katherine Anne Porter, Pale Horse, Pale Rider: Three Short Novels (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1939). Print. 9 William Ian Beardmore Beveridge, Influenza, The Last Great Plague: An Unfinished Story of Discovery (London: Heinemann, 1977). Print, 31. 10 Lyn Macdonald, The Roses of No Man’s Land (London: Joseph, 1980). Print, 286. 11 “Influenza Encyclopedia,” The American Influenza Epidemic of 1918: A Digital Encyclopedia. University of Michigan Center for the History of Medicine, n.d. Web. 13 March 2016. 12 Jane Elizabeth Fisher, Envisioning Disease, Gender, and War: Women's Narratives of the 1918 Influenza Pandemic (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). Print, 13. 13 “How the 1918 Flu Pandemic Revolutionized Public Health,” Smithsonian.com, accessed September  27, 2017, www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-1918-flupandemic-revolutionized-public-health-180965025/   “First Cases Reported in Deadly Influenza Epidemic,” History.com,A&ETelevision Networks, www.history.com/this-day-in-history/first-cases-reported-in-deadly-influenzaepidemic 14 Ibid. 15 Gillett, The Army Medical Department, 1917–1941, 170–1. 16 Ibid., 172. 17 “How Did WW1 Change the Way We Treat War Injuries Today?” IWonder. BBC, 2016. Web. 13 March 2016. 18 Carol R. Byerly, Fever of War: The Influenza Epidemic in the U.S. Army During World War I (New York: New York University Press, 2005). Print, 15. 19 John M. Barry, The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History (New York: Viking, 2004. Print, 393. 20 William Henry Welch, Papers and Addresses (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1920), vol. 2. Print, 31. 21 Edwin Oakes Jordan, Epidemic Influenza: A  Survey (Chicago: American Medical Assn., 1927). Print, 357. 22 Ibid., 376. 23 Byerly, Fever of War, 87. 24 Ibid., 8.

Forgotten: the Spanish influenza pandemic of 1918 199 “Biography: Rupert Blue,” American Experience. PBS, 2013. Web. April 10, 2016. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 53. Byerly, Fever of War, 21. Gillett, The Army Medical Department, 1917–1941, 163. Welch, Papers and Addresses, 566. Crosby, America's Forgotten Pandemic, 11. Welch, Papers and Addresses, 566. Victor C Vaughan, A Doctor’s Memories (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1926). Print, 432. 36 Crosby, America's Forgotten Pandemic, 7. 37 Byerly, Fever of War, 7. 38 Dehner, Influenza, 48. 39 Data sourced from Pubmed by searching the terms “influenza” and “1918.” The data the search generated, as broken up by year, can be found at www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/ pubmed?p$l=Email&Mode=download&term=infuenza%201918&dlid=timeline&file name=timeline.csv&bbid=NCID_1_203928181_130.14.18.34_9001_1522169351_9 21911793_0MetA0_S_MegaStore_F_1&p$debugoutput=off. Accessed 2016. 40 Data sourced from Pubmed. 41 “What Statistical Analysis Should I Use?” Institute for Digital Research and Education. UCLA, 2016. Web. March 10, 2016. 42 William Welch, Diary #12, Military Camp Inspection Trip September 1918. n.p., 1. 43 William Welch, Diary #11, Military Camp Inspection Trips January-June 1918, n.p. 44 Welch, Diary #12, 9. 45 Ibid., 10. 46 Ibid., 56. 47 “Lobar Pneumonia Vs Bronchopneumonia,” Medical Study Notes. N.p., January 31, 2008. Web. March 26, 2016. 48 Welch, Diary # 12, 63. 49 Ibid., 87. 50 Ibid., 77. 51 Dehner, Influenza, 56. 52 Ibid. 53 Ivan Farnworth, Oral History, Mss. Sc 3191, L. Tom Perry Special Collections Library, Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah. Transcribed in Fever of War. 54 Byerly, Fever of War, 134. 55 Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975). Print, 279. 56 “563 Flu Victims Died Here, Cresskill, New Jersey,” Roadside America. N.p., n.d. Web. April 10, 2016. 57 “Greek Temple Monument,” The Atlantic City Experience. N.p., n.d. Web. April 13, 2016. 58 Crosby, America's Forgotten Pandemic, 323. 59 Ibid. 60 Erich von Ludendorf, Ludendorff’s Own Story (New York: Harper and Bros., 1919), vol. 2, 277, 317. 61 Crosby, America's Forgotten Pandemic, 194. 62 Ibid., 314. 63 Ibid., 322. 64 Ibid., 323.

25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35

200  Srijita Pal 65 “Integrating Historical, Clinical and Molecular Genetic Data in Order to Explain the Origin and Virulence of the 1918 Spanish Influenza Virus,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 356, no. 1416 (2001): 1829–39. Web. 66 Fisher, Envisioning Disease, Gender, and War, 3. 67 J. K. Taubenberger, J. V. Hultin, and D. M. Morens, “Discovery and Characterization of the 1918 Pandemic Influenza Virus in Historical Context,” Antivir Ther., 12 (2007): 581–91. 68 Alexandra Sifferlin, Scientists Unveil “Promising First Step” to Universal Flu Vaccine. TIME.com, August 24, 2015. Web. April 10, 2016. 69 Fisher, Envisioning Disease, Gender, and War, 18. 70 “The Next Flu Pandemic: What to Expect,” (n.d.): n. pag. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, October 2008. Web. 71 Crosby, America's Forgotten Pandemic, 322. 72 This research was funded by the Linn Family Honors Research Award from the UC Davis department of History. Access to Welch’s diaries was provided by the Alan Mason Chesney Medical Archives at Johns Hopkins University. Additionally, Dr. Ian Campbell, along with Dr. Adam Zientek and Dr. Susan Miller from the UC Davis History department significantly helped with the manuscript from which this chapter was created from.

11 Historical realities Voices from the war of Algerian decolonization Arianna Barzman-Grennan

The Algerian War of Independence,1 which was waged from 1954 to 1962, was the end of Algeria’s time as a French colony and is remembered today as a powerful example of violent decolonization. The war was the product of one hundred and twenty-four years of colonial control and the rising tensions between people and nations. The ways in which the war is remembered have had real consequences in terms of both immediate and long-term timeframes. Specific individuals within the French command in Algeria mapped out strategies that still exist as methods of warfare, and the Front de Libération National (FLN), the main group working for an independent Algeria, developed powerful strategies of their own. The fighting in Algiers is commonly referenced as the singular cultural touchstone of the war, but in reality, the fighting extended into the countryside and over many years. This disruption was a marked element of French colonialism in Algeria, from the beginning of French colonization to subsequent Algerian government administrations. The narrative around the war itself was informed by repeated privileging of French information and the colonial perspective, which did not give equal weight to the Algerian perspective. French voices determined the established truths about the war, particularly the fact that they refused to call it a war at all. French officers and politicians wrote the first truths about the war, and they dictated how it was thought of and fought. General Paul Aussaresses, Lieutenant Colonel Roger Trinquier, General Jacques Massu, and Captain David Galula were four people who contributed significantly to the thinking around the war. General Massu was in charge of paratroopers in Algiers, and Aussaresses and Trinquier were part of a special staff put together to formulate a new mode of warfare when traditional warfare was not working. General Aussaresses detailed the process in his memoir The Battle of the Casbah, and he remembered being asked to work specifically for Massu, with the understanding that it would be difficult and unpleasant work and include torture.2 With him was Lieutenant Colonel Roger Trinquier, who wrote Modern Warfare, a doctrine on a new strategy of asymmetrical warfare tactics to fight Algerian guerrillas. Trinquier’s task was “draft[ing] a counter-subversion plan that included a population control mechanism.”3 Trinquier stated, In modern warfare we are not up against just a few armed bands spread across a given territory, but rather against an armed clandestine organization

202  Arianna Barzman-Grennan whose essential role is to impose its will upon the population. Victory will be obtained only through the complete destruction of that organization. This is the master concept that must guide us in our study of modern warfare.4 The entire act of engaging in this type of warfare, particularly as it evolved in Algeria, involved political doublespeak and tricks. For example, the Détachement de protection urbaine (DPU) was established partway through the Battle of Algiers, and the soldiers used “the guise of the [DPU]” to conduct invasive enhanced security checks throughout Algiers, with a focus on the Casbah, the Algerian section of the city.5 Aussaresses had already been in Algeria before being transferred to Massu’s command, and he saw the construction of the French warfare apparatus from the ground up. He made the 1956 introduction of the paratroopers to Algiers seem logical: “Since it was impossible to get rid of urban terrorism through normal police and judicial procedure, [the government was] asking the paratroopers to replace both the policemen and the judges.” This marked a definite disruption to daily life. Massu’s newly assembled “secret staff” was in place to ensure a French victory, which in Massu’s words meant that they would “knock them [the FLN] off very quickly and by every possible means. These are the government’s orders.” Massu also told General Aussaresses that they would have to be implacable, which “meant using torture and summary executions.” At the time, Aussaresses claimed he felt defeated by this understanding, but he later tortured men himself, and in his account of his first experience of torture, he described feeling “neither hatred nor pity. . . [A]ny method was enough to make him talk.”6 Aussaresses was only one – admittedly an important and subsequently famous one – of many soldiers and officers who participated in torture and the integration of the police and military. In addition to the use of torture and paratroopers in Algiers, soldiers were in the countryside working to suppress the FLN. David Galula was a French captain, and his memoir, Pacification in Algeria: 1956–1958, detailed French strategy and has become one of the foremost texts on counterinsurgency. This strategy involved the main tenets of counterinsurgency as applied to Algeria, and it gives a clear picture of the ways in which the French began to approach the conflict – particularly on the heels of the devastating French defeat at Dien Bien Phu in 1954 and the impending losses of Tunisia and Morocco.7 Galula’s writing used the term pacification, which referred to the effort to win the Algerians’ hearts and minds, helping the French to cut off the guerrillas’ ‘supply’ of new fighters and support. Galula described a meeting he and other soldiers attended, during which they heard “a lecture on pacification by a psychological warfare officer from Paris.”8 This short statement is full of the contradiction inherent in the war and the strategy of counterinsurgency. The aforementioned lecturer was qualified for this talk because he had been captured by the Vietminh, and he told the soldiers that “[t]he key of the process [. . .] was to start a dialogue with the prisoners, to break the psychological barrier between the prisoners and the political commissar.”9 Euphemistic language, such as ‘pacification,’ was key in

Historical realities 203 the French approach to the war, but they absolutely knew it was a war, no matter what words were used publicly. At the outset of the war, François Mitterrand, the minister of the interior, reportedly told the Parliament that he “would not agree to negotiate with the enemies of the homeland. The only negotiation is war.”10 Euphemistic language and public truths were used to work around the unpleasant reality that France prepared for and engaged in warfare with Algeria. Torture and the other French operations were a product of the extant colonial environment that prioritized Europeans in general and the settler-colonists in particular. Torture was a ubiquitous part of the war and something the French recognized, although their actions were those of a guilty party. As Aussaresses and French historian Pierre Vidal-Naquet observed, torture grew out of customary police behavior, and sociologist Marnia Lazreg made the explicit connection that before 1954, torture “was part of a general pattern of police brutality exercised on a population that lacked the legal protection enjoyed by French colonists,” and that “justifications of torture found fertile ground in the myths spun on natives’ flawed nature and a narcissistic view of French cultural supremacy.”11 In the torture scenario, both the torturer and the prisoner understood that there was a desire on the part of those doing the questioning and torturing to force the prisoner to submit, even going so far as to make the prisoner believe he would die. Although essentially everyone involved knew that torture was happening, efforts were still made to validate or cover it up.12 Over time, torture was referred to as la question (the question) or ‘the examination’ – another example of language being used to disguise actions. In 1955, Roger Wuillaume, a government inspector, was sent to prisons in Algeria and asked to write a report. “The Wuillaume Report” was finished in march of 1955, and it covered in detail some methods of torture, although it condoned rather than stopped the brutal practices. The report determined, through Wuillaume’s conversations with police officers and prisoners, that the “police force in Algeria does therefore use violence,” and that “many forms of violence leave no mark,” so Wuillaume might not have been aware of the totality of torture in use.13 Wuillaume concluded that although violence had occurred, it was difficult to pin responsibility on any one individual, and that torture was successful; therefore, it should continue. Wuillaume suggested that because of the present situation, Algeria needed “a more than ordinarily efficient police force,” which apparently depended upon “their being able to use certain ‘methods,’ ” although these should only be used in certain conditions.14 The word torture was used very little in Wuillaume’s report. It came up once when he argued for the police force’s being able to continue using the methods they saw fit, saying that “[t]he regular police” (as opposed to the paratroopers or soldiers) did not approve of forceful interrogation or ‘abuses’ when “they [the abuses] amount to torture.”15 Wuillaume later attempted to pin the blame on the gendarmerie when he noted that violence amounting to torture was used but, for the most part, only in cases involving the gendarmerie.16 Torture at the hands of the French was typified by what historian and political scientist Darius Rejali defines as “clean techniques”17 – ones that leave few or no visible marks on their victims – as Wuillaume found in his report. Electricity from

204  Arianna Barzman-Grennan the gégène (short for génératrice) was accessible essentially everywhere because the machine was a generator for the field telephones and radios. The gégène was a literal piece of equipment heavily implicated in the colonial practices from which the war had come.18 The gégène had electrodes that were “attached to the prisoner’s ears or testicles, then electric charges of varying intensity were turned on.”19 French Algerian Henri Alleg described the feeling of being subjected to electroshock torture “as if a savage beast had torn the flesh from [his] body.”20 Water torture, often in combination with electric shocks or with various restraints, was ubiquitous, and its use in Algeria has been described as the precursor to modern waterboarding. Water was used not only to achieve near-drowning but also to amplify electric shocks and to increase discomfort. It was referred to as ‘the water,’ ‘water torture,’ or ‘water treatment.’21 Aussaresses once tortured a prisoner in an airplane hangar by putting a cloth over the man’s face, tying his hands behind his back, and using a hose to spray his face, completely cutting off the prisoner’s air supply; the man died as a result of this ‘questioning.’22 Henri Alleg was also subjected to water torture, which he described at length. He was tied to a wooden plank, a wedge was put into his mouth, a rag was wrapped around his head, and a tube was put into his mouth. He was unable to breathe, forced to take in water, and then violently forced to expel it, and this process was repeated three times before he passed out. When describing the waterboarding he endured, Alleg said that the rag wrapped around his face forced the water to go everywhere, and he had “the impression of drowning, and a terrible agony, that of death itself, took possession of [him].”23 Alleg felt that he would rather talk than die, as he was unable to endure anything more. Truth serum, or sodium pentothal, was another aid used in torture and was specifically mentioned by Alleg in his experience. An Algerian schoolteacher in Kabylie, Mouloud Feraoun, kept a diary for the duration of the war, until his death at the hands of the French in 1962, and in some entries he recorded the effects of torture on those he knew.24 For instance, Feraoun wrote, There are endless ways to torture. In every police station and in the military camps, the policeman and the officer take all sorts of initiatives and think up all sorts of ways to improve techniques that cannot be listed here because there are too many to mention. Those who have endured these treatments will never forget them because they are forever inscribed in their flesh.25 One friend who had been in a jail told Feraoun of another man’s “crumpled scrotum” that had been burned with electricity. One of the most horrifying methods described was called the spring, which was “a tool pushed into the anus that increases in size when they push on the spring. Then they pull it out brutally, and you feel your entrails tear.” This was only one of many “instruments of torture” laid out before the man while the soldiers questioned him. In an entry on March 31, 1956, Feraoun transcribed parts of a young Algerian man’s notes describing torture.26 The notes said there were two main cycles during interrogation: first a

Historical realities 205 beating and process of verbally breaking down the prisoner, followed by a more intense “second round of questioning” in which the police used torture of various kinds.27 The bathtub “consist[ed] of plunging the prisoner’s head into a basin filled with water soiled with urine and keeping him in that position until he black[ed] out.” Electricity was “applied to the fingers and the ears,” and Feraoun noted that it affected the entire body, particularly the brain. There was also the bottle, which was “an ordinary bottle, preferably with a broken neck. The prisoner [was] forced to sit on it and the policemen push[ed] down with all their strength on the shoulders of the poor fellow.” Rope was used to deprive the prisoner of oxygen by placing “a slipknot [. . .] above the jaws” with the prisoner “suspended for a moment, and left to dangle, with death clouding his eyes.” The rope was also used to beat the prisoners, and sometimes their feet would be beaten, “preferably with a pickaxe handle.”28 While clean torture techniques might have left fewer lasting visible marks, those who went through them could never forget what had happened. As Feraoun wrote, “Those who have endured these treatments will never forget them because they are forever inscribed in their flesh.”29 The explicit connection between torture and sexuality emerged in the specifics of many cases. Rape and humiliation were common in torture. Women were raped by soldiers or by bottles, and men were forced to sit on bottles with broken necks.30 Rape and humiliation were used to subjugate male and female torture victims. A young Algerian, Djamila Boupacha, had been brutalized and raped with a bottle. Electricity was applied to genitals, and the bottle technique was used, so sensitive areas were clearly targets for torture, and the gégène “permitted the most direct attack on the sexuality of the victim.”31 Djamila Boupacha and Henri Alleg were both electrocuted by attaching the clamps to their nipples and their genitals; in Djamila’s case, this happened simultaneously.32 Boupacha told her lawyer that “[the soldiers] took the electric terminals, and they fastened them . . .” Djamila Boupacha’s inability to articulate her experience is extremely telling. In trying to share her experience, she was forced into silence – “she had gone dumb.”33 Both Alleg and Boupacha were also burned in sensitive areas – Alleg’s nipples, penis, and thighs with a paper torch and Boupacha’s right breast and thigh with cigarettes.34 Alleg’s and Boupacha’s experiences were not rare cases. They were simply two of the more public ones, and although there was public upset over torture, the army released very little information, and cases of dissent occurred but were rare. General Jacques Pâris de Bollardière asked to be relieved of his position after getting an inadequate response to his protestation over the use of torture. He was tried, convicted, and served two months of house arrest (which was incidentally “the most severe [punishment] given to any officer in relation to the Algerian war”). The Prefect of Algiers, Paul Teitgen, resigned over the issue of torture, and in his resignation letter, he wrote that he could not be part of actions amounting to “irresponsibility which can only lead to war crimes,” and he claimed that “France risk[ed] losing her soul through equivocation.”35 His strong moral position and concern for consequences were not unwarranted. French officers who protested torture gave voice to the ethical conscience of the nation, although they were not

206  Arianna Barzman-Grennan able to change the situation. General Jacques de la Bollardière, a senior officer in the French army, brought up his dislike of torture to Massu – the man in charge of the situation on the ground in Algiers – and Bollardière asked to be sent home. He disagreed that torture was the best way to get information quickly and saw it as tantamount to Nazi practices that France had seen during World War II. Bollardière wrote that it would be terribly dangerous “to lose sight, under the fallacious pretext of immediate expediency, of the moral values which alone have, up till now, created the grandeur of our civilisation and of our army.”36 If no wrongs had been committed, why did France take the steps of enacting amnesties for actions up to Algerian independence?37 France’s perspective on the public perception of the war undoubtedly changed over time, as they finally admitted in 1999 that it was a war and slowly began recognizing the damage done. Finally, in 2001, Paul Aussaress was put on trial for “justifying war crimes committed during France’s brutal colonial war.”38 The international ‘truth’ of the war, that the French were not to blame (or to be held accountable), was the product of a narrative produced and controlled by France, as the party with more power in the world of Western politics. This meant that the accusations of torture were published and taken to court, and the repercussions were essentially negligible. According to statutes and laws already in place, torture should not have been used at all. Torture itself “had, in theory, been banned since the Revolution of 1789,” and the laws then enacted should have applied in Algeria because it was a province of France.39 The French Penal Code, adopted in 1791, “placed the torturer in the same category as the murderer by making it a capital offence.”40 In the time leading up to the war, there were other provisions that should have outlawed torture – the 1949 Geneva Conventions and the United Nations Convention on Human Rights (1948) – that France “had been largely instrumental in drafting.”41 And yet all these statutes and supposedly extant moral codes were not enough. The legality and applicability of the Geneva Conventions of 1949 to the conflict were particularly fraught issues. France refused to declare the fighting a war and so maintained that the Conventions were not applicable to this conflict, making the French military’s abuse of individuals in Algeria and in France unproblematic. The Algerian office in New York published a “White Paper Report” in 1958 calling for recognition and application of the 1949 Geneva Conventions to the war. The publication stressed the necessity of applying the 1949 Conventions and pointed out that the Provisional Government of the Algerian Republic (GPRA) had acknowledged the Geneva Conventions on their part as an acting government, which showed their willingness to enter into combat on theoretically equally accountable terms with France. The first appendix to the Report specifically cited the First and Third Articles of the 1949 Conventions, which dictated that any conflict of “an international character occurring in the territory of one of the High Contracting Parties” would be pursued according to the Geneva Conventions.42 France maneuvered around this stipulation by claiming that the war was a civil conflict, rather than one between two nations, and therefore they were simply going to police it as a domestic matter. Whatever the GPRA’s intentions

Historical realities 207 with regard to the Geneva Conventions and their proposed aims, the conflict did evolve into one in which the forces were ill-matched and not participating in a traditional war. This turn to what Trinquier defined as modern warfare changed tactics and standards for both forces – the guerrilla forces’ continued use of their tactics and the French reactions and attempts to control the conflict somewhat on their terms.43 Modern warfare, as it was being defined by the French, seamlessly integrated torture to the extent that it became an expected part of such wars. In this case, specifically, torture was instituted through a series of diplomatic and legislative maneuvers that legalized it in various ways, making it possible for troops and policemen to torture without fear of reprisal. Many elements of French strategy were set up to facilitate an appearance of innocence. Legislative changes were used to facilitate cooperation between the military and the police and to give them increased power (including the ability to torture without fear of legal consequences).44 The installation of soldiers in positions of civic and judicial power meant that there was little to no recourse for those abused at their hands. Official language took responsibility for wrongdoing away from the soldiers and criminalized those they were fighting. Trinquier’s doctrine treated prisoners – the captured “terrorists” – differently from ordinary criminals because as he, and other French soldiers and government officials, saw it, the Algerian fighters were not obeying common laws of combat and had thus forfeited their roles and rights as combatants. This meant that captured individuals would not get the same treatment captured soldiers did.45 The main implication was that codes of behavior such as the Geneva Conventions would not be applied because they did not apply to the people against whom the French were fighting. Throughout the war, there was a sense of cognitive dissonance around torture and other military actions. Torture evolved from police interrogation techniques, which Aussaresses admitted, but he and others were keen to disconnect their actions from what they saw as ‘real torture,’ such as that used by the Nazis. When a French official was confronted with the reality of Djamila Boupacha’s torture, he said the “Nazis are responsible for this canker [torture] in our midst [. . .] A bit of roughing up is fair enough, you can’t run a police force without it. But torture is quite another thing. It’s beyond the pale.”46 This disavowal constituted a deliberate misrecognition of their actions. Misrecognition – méconnaissance in French – comes from Lacan’s concept of self-realization. Misrecognition, in the wider sense of the term, is a constitutive disavowal that allows something to proceed, specifically something that would otherwise be abhorrent or impossible. This purposeful misunderstanding and concealment were built into the military operations in Algiers and grounded in a fundamental disbelief of shared humanity. The very ways soldiers were told to report on Algerian deaths necessitated erasure. In a discussion with Massu, Aussaresses described the system for keeping track of prisoners after interrogations: “In order to avoid any mistakes for those who are dead, we’ll place a mark next to their names. We won’t put ‘D’ – that would be too obvious. We’ll use ‘LL’ as in ‘liberated,’ ” and for those who are actually free, “we’ll put ‘FF’ as in ‘free.’ ”47 The system itself was thus set up to

208  Arianna Barzman-Grennan facilitate the erasure of the paratroopers’ actions, and, in an even more sinister manner, this facilitated the erasure of entire human beings. Misrecognition was accompanied by a system of what can be described as willful forgetting. There was an effort to name actions and plans in a way to obscure the reality around what was happening and decrease responsibility. There was also a concerted effort after the war to forget about what had happened. The conclusion of the war, the Évian Accords, contained amnesties and new regulations designed to help France and Algeria move forward, but these amnesties and those that followed also obscured legitimate history. There was an amnesty issued in 1964 for any crimes committed prior to Algerian independence, and a New York Times article from December 1964 pointed out that “[i]n French law an amnesty goes beyond a Presidential pardon. As its Greek roots indicate, it calls for ‘forgetting’ the past and wiping it off the records.”48 The same article also used the phrases “France cautiously turned a page of her history” and “[t]he law will wipe out the crimes of several hundred minor actors in one of the great divisive dramas of modern French history.”49 As always, France controlled the narrative, telling what would be the official truth of the experience and denying Algeria a voice. Although French voices by and large dominated what the world understood of the war, Algerians and those who agreed with them also spoke their truths in various ways even if that was not directly through the historical record. Representations and stories of the war, particularly literature, often written or told later, were a way to share experiences. As Edward Said argues, representations of a society, such as those found in literature, can be seen as reflective and representative of their culture.50 Literature functions “as a sort of theater where various political and ideological causes engage one another,” and thus it can be looked to for information about society, particularly at moments of massive political shifts, when history has been buried in silence.51 Literature, in different forms and from different sources, can provide a range of perspectives on the way different people experienced the war. This is visible in the ways Algeria and Algerians are described, who responds to the literature (such as the United States utilizing The Battle of Algiers), and the consideration of personhood in the texts. The novels of European-Algerian writer and philosopher Albert Camus are especially useful in grasping the dynamics of colonialism and the particulars of the Algerian situation. The Stranger offers insight into the prevailing French and European view of the Algerians. The question of the land, the physical space of Algeria, is central to the text and was incredibly important in the war itself. France’s view of Algeria as a settler colony and an extension of France itself meant that the land was incredibly important to decisions made about the war. Meursault, Camus’s main character, feels connected to and influenced by the land; this feeling culminates in the murder of a nameless Arab on a beach under the physical pressure of the sun’s heat, with a shattering sound fired into the space in front of him.52 Camus depicts a dehumanization – a disconnection – so complete that it is one from which Meursault cannot return; the blankness of the murder, the lack of marks, and the lack of an acknowledged human victim all condemn Meursault. He is more concerned about having disturbed the “harmony of the day,

Historical realities 209 the exceptional silence of a beach where [he had] been happy” than having shot a person, to whom he refers as “the motionless body where the bullets had lodged without leaving a trace.”53 Even if the obliviousness depicted is meant to be Meursault’s in particular, the use of the Algerians as background and their existence as nameless figures contributes to the general sense of their dehumanization as they become the setting for the European colonizer. Frantz Fanon said that “[t]he Algerians, the veiled women, the palm trees and the camels make up the landscape, the natural background to the human presence of the French.”54 With the idea that the Arab is a part of the beach, The Stranger supports Fanon’s assertion that Algerians were merely part of the landscape. Although Camus wrote eloquently about Algeria’s beauty, giving the Algerians a voice required a different story. Algerian author Kamel Daoud’s The Meursault Investigation is a response to The Stranger, written seventy-three years later.55 Daoud’s novel takes up the question of Meursault’s victim’s identity, and the effect of the text is to force the reader to see both the Arab in the present and the Arab in the past as humans, not simply as a landscape to be possessed or occupied. The Meursault Investigation stands as a response to a long history of Western colonialist literature, such as The Stranger, and shows the humanity of those previously identified by only the reductive, objectifying label of ‘Arab.’ Fanon said that “every ontology is made unattainable in a colonized and civilized society [. . .] In the Weltanschauung of a colonized people, there is an impurity, a flaw that outlaws any ontological explanation.”56 Daoud’s work is a way of creating ontologies where there were previously none, creating humanity where there was previously blank space. The main character, the Arab’s brother, speaks and drinks and has stories to tell – facts about lives that were non-material in The Stranger. He references the terrible murder and expresses the idea that Musa (the Arab killed by Meursault) “was an Arab replaceable by a thousand others of his kind, or by a crow, even, or a reed, or whatever else.”57 This is the very foundation of the novel. The main character and narrator may or may not actually be Musa’s brother – he may just be “a compulsive liar” – but, as the narrator says, it is his word, and “[i]t’s all [he] can offer.”58 Daoud’s novel functions as a way for the Arab world to speak from the Arab perspective and question the colonial perspective. The story is all the narrator can offer, and it is only his word against that of whomever he is speaking to. The act of giving space to Algerians to speak is one way to organize space and privilege for their speech. Algerian author Assia Djebar is another person whose work provides a space for Algerian voices – specifically women’s voices. Her text, Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade, gives voices to the multitudes of Algerians affected by colonization, with particular attention paid to women’s stories. The three parts of the text are called “The Capture of the City or Love-letters,” “The Cries of the Fantasia,” and “Voices from the Past.”59 Each section has subsections that employ voice, speech, and writing in different ways. The experience of colonization, taken from the oral histories Djebar transcribed into stories, is a distinct way of giving voice to an Algerian subjectivity. Djebar interviewed women about their experiences of the war and of colonialism, and themes of rape, torture, and conquest are

210  Arianna Barzman-Grennan ubiquitous throughout the work. When trying to interview women about rape, she finds she cannot articulate the words she needs to ask explicit questions.60 There is a cultural inability to articulate these ideas, and Djebar cannot compensate. The women struggle in general to articulate their experience of the war. As one of them says, she is uncertain of exactly whom she should be offering her memories to or what good it would do to either “the Lords of yesterday’s war, or to the young girls who lay in hiding and now inhabit the silence that succeeds battles.”61 This process of writing her story and her voice into existence was fraught because of the nature of language itself. Djebar describes language as “a dark repository for piled-up corpses, refuse, sewage.” Further, Djebar asserts that “autobiography practised in the enemy’s language has the texture of fiction.”62 Frantz Fanon, Kamel Daoud, and Assia Djebar all offer another insight and way into the voices of Algerians, humanizing their voices and creating an Algerian subjectivity from which they (the people) can speak with authority, bringing their voices into the realms of speech, rather than being confined to an animalistic background filled only with noise. Representations of the war were very important because they made lasting impressions and taught lessons. The Battle of Algiers (1966, dir. Gillo Pontecorvo) is perhaps one of the best known cultural artifacts from the Algerian war of decolonization, and it has performed a large role in the understanding people have of the history. Indeed, noted historian Benjamin Stora remarked that the film seemed almost like real footage of the events.63 The film was made at the request of Yacef Saadi, who wanted it to be a specific commentary on colonialism and Algeria.64 The film is not without a political angle, and it does much to expose the realities of what was happening in Algeria during the war, with a particular eye toward French torture and FLN tactics. More than simply telling the story of the war, the film has stood as a testament to the style of warfare itself, although the lasting message was different from what Saadi likely intended. The Pentagon arranged a viewing of it, and the flyer – which was leaked to the press – said, How to win a battle against terrorism and lose the war of ideas. Children shoot soldiers at point-blank range. Women plant bombs in cafes. Soon the entire Arab population builds to a mad fervor. Sound familiar? The French have a plan. It succeeds tactically, but fails strategically. To understand why, come to a rare showing of this film.65 This came out in September 2003, within months of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, and it was clearly a showing designed to facilitate discussion on tactics in asymmetrical or irregular war. Thus, this cinematic representation of the war, designed to tell a story from a specific point of view – and engage the viewer’s sympathy for the FLN – has been used instead to teach lessons and start discussions about this war and others like it. The Battle of Algiers was not the only piece of art that served to inform people about the war. French author Jean Lartéguy’s The Centurions (Les Centurions) provided its own set of lessons regarding how the French and others thought and

Historical realities 211 continue to think about torture. The text was praised, won prizes, was adapted into a Hollywood movie, and appears to have been the first to use the ticking time bomb scenario – a common justification for using torture.66 This scenario justifies torture or some form of brutal interrogation because information is urgently needed to divert disaster. The Centurions was set up to validate the brutalities employed by the French soldiers, specifically the paras (paratroopers), and Darius Rejali argues that the novel centers on the struggle to find a hardened masculinity and democratic values, and that it validates “the right, manly decision [to torture] and so being the proper moral agent in democratic life.” Essentially, as Rejali says, “Many things in the novel happened as the Paras imagined they should have [. . .] It won praise for its military realism, and French Paras embraced the novel because it seemed Boisfeuras [the main character] spoke for them.” Just as with The Battle of Algiers, the text has provided lessons for Americans not only because of media saturation, with the aforementioned use of the torture scenarios, but also because it has made its way onto reading lists for American servicemen (and therefore is genuinely intended to teach lessons), as Rejali notes with some irony, “alongside real classics such as Sun Tzu’s The Art of War.”67 This is one example of the way the representations of the war that are commonly used and praised by Western countries privilege the French narrative of the Algerians as savages. Although the Algerian War ended French colonialism in Algeria, it also proved that colonial warfare was just another brutal extension of colonialism itself. The war also typified the type of asymmetrical warfare fought between a Western power and a relatively less resource-rich colonial or quasi-colonial power. The war was a series of exercises in dehumanization and torture, pulling from French experience in Vietnam (Indochina) and from their experience at the hands of the Nazis in World War II. These ideas crystallized into a brutal system of policing and torture that codified actions and found ways to write them into acceptability by doing things such as renaming Algerian citizens, fighting for their freedom, as insurgents and rebels (thus making them no longer party to the Geneva Conventions and alleviating French responsibility for actions around torture and warfare). France was able to get away with as much as it did because it was able to control the narrative presented to the world. More recently, with new literature and recognition of wrongdoings (the trail of General Aussaresses, the recognition of the war itself), things are changing, and more of the story is being shared. French colonial society had “overdetermined from without” an entire culture, deciding the story to be told about an entire people, and the introduction of Algerian and pro-Algerian voices is a way of changing the structural method of viewing the war and what it meant for those other than the French.68 The French did not want to lose their colonial hold in Africa, but there was no agreeable solution. Jean-Paul Sartre, in his preface to Alleg’s The Question, references Tunisian author Albert Memmi’s assertion that “colonisation ends by the annihilation of the colonised,” and Sartre argues that Algerians as a whole were not going to be annihilated.69 Therefore, the war was not only to end colonialism but also to find a new Algeria – an Algeria without France. It was a process of finding ontological foundations for Algerians when they had been stripped of that possibility for so long.

212  Arianna Barzman-Grennan

Notes 1 This war was, in fact, a war. Noted historians and scholars, such as Raphaëlle Branche (“Torture of Terrorists? Use of Torture in a ‘War Against Terrorism” Terrorism’: Justifications, Methods and Effects: The Case of France in Algeria, 1954–1962,” International Review of the Red Cross 89, no. 867 (2007): 546), Alistair Horne (A Savage War of Peace (London: Macmillan London Limited, 1977); “Shades of Abu Ghraib,” The National Interest, no. 104 (2009): 23–9) and Darius Rejali (Torture and Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 35; “Torture Makes the Man,” South Central Review 24, no. 1, On Torture (2007): 151, 153, 154, 153), have used the term. Although it took approximately forty years, in 1999, France itself acknowledged the fact that it was a war (Henri Alleg, The Question, trans. John Calder (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006), 99). 2 Paul Aussaresses, The Battle of the Casbah: Terrorism and Counter-Terrorism in Algeria 1955–1957, trans. Robert L. Miller (New York: Enigma Books, 2006), 78. 3 Ibid., 71. 4 Roger Trinquier, Modern Warfare: A French View of Counterinsurgency, trans. Daniel Lee (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, Publisher, 1964), 9. 5 Aussaresses, The Battle of the Casbah, 93–4. 6 Ibid., 69, 77, 78, 78, 31. 7 The latter half of the twentieth century was characterized by the breakup of Western empires, and France was no exception. Their loss at Dien Bien Phu became emblematic of the ability to break away from colonial control. Tunisia and Morocco were also asserting their right to self-determination while the struggle in Algeria was happening, and France was unable to face the fact that its empire was coming to an end. Although Tunisia and Morocco were different from Algeria (because Algeria was a settler colony and thus seen as physically an extension of France), this made their approach to the Algerian situation all the more desperate. 8 David Galula, Pacification in Algeria: 1956–1958 (Santa Monica: RAND Corporation, 2006): 52. 9 Ibid. 10 Aussaresses, The Battle of the Casbah, 2. 11 Ibid., 21; Marnia Lazreg, Torture and the Twilight of Empire: From Algiers to Baghdad (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 3, 6. 12 In reality, torture became the dirty, open secret of the war. France publicly denied it was happening but kept lists of individuals who died and had reports such as the one from Wuillaume. The French government excused away their actions, used amnesties after the war, and sealed archives to protect the powerful men who had committed atrocities. 13 Roger Wuillaume, “Text of the Wuillaume Report,” reprinted in Torture: Cancer of Democracy by Pierre Vidal-Naquet, trans. Barry Richard (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1963), 171. 14 Ibid., 178–9. 15 Ibid., 178. 16 Ibid., 178–9. 17 Darius Rejali, Torture and Democracy, 35. 18 Lucie Knight-Santos, Violent Beginnings: Literary Representations of Postcolonial Algeria (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2015), 10. 19 Aussaresses, The Battle of the Casbah, 20. 20 Alleg, The Question, 45. 21 Jabhat al-Taḥrīr al-Qawmī, White Paper on the Application of the Geneva Conventions of 1949 to the French-Algerian Conflict (New York: Algerian Office, 1960), 77; Alleg, The Question, 35; Aussaresses, The Battle of the Casbah, 20, 129, 132; Simone de

Historical realities 213 Beauvoir and Gisèle Halimi, Djamila Boupacha: The Story of the Torture of a young Algerian Girl Which Shocked Liberal French Opinion, trans. Peter Green (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1962), 31. 22 Aussaresses, The Battle of the Casbah, 131–2. 23 Alleg, The Question, 48–9, 49. 24 Mouloud Feraoun, Journal, 1955–1962: Reflections on the French-Algerian War, ed. James D. Le Sueur, trans. Mary Ellen Wolf and Claude Fouillade (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000). 25 Ibid., 105. 26 Ibid., 103–4. 27 The police and the military or armed forces all tortured prisoners and those they were questioning. In this case, Feraoun is relating an experience about which he was told, and in this case it was with the police. 28 Feraoun, Journal, 105. 29 Ibid. 30 This tactic extended into fictional representation as well. In Jean Lartéguy’s novel The Centurions, the soldiers force female prisoners to wash the soldiers’ clothes, an act heavily connected to feelings of violation and rape. The women were “[b]ent over all morning,” and they “felt as though they were submitting to being raped over and over again by the soldiers whose garments they were purifying.” This idea of violation and dehumanization was shared and accepted and proudly displayed in a text hailed by French paratroopers for its portrayal of the French armed forces. 31 Knight-Santos, Violent Beginnings, 10. 32 de Beauvoir and Halimi, Djamila Boupacha, 28; Henri Alleg, The Question, trans. John Calder (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006), 55. 33 de Beauvoir and Halimi, Djamila Boupacha, 28. 34 Alleg, The Question, 51, 60; de Beauvoir and Halimi, Djamila Boupacha, 29. 35 Horne, “Shades of Abu Ghraib,” 27. 36 Ibid., 27. 37 Henry Giniger, “France Enacting Algeria Amnesty,” The New York Times CXIV, no. 39,044 (December 17, 1964). 38 Jan Repa, “France’s ‘Brutal Colonial War,’ ” BBC News, November 27, 2001, accessed May 21, 2017, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/1678557.stm 39 Horne, “Shades of Abu Ghraib,” 25. 40 Duncan Forrest, ed., Amnesty International Report on Torture (London: Duckworth, 1973), 2. 41 Raphaëlle Branche, “Torture of Terrorists? Use of Torture in a ‘War Against Terrorism’,” 546. 42 Jabhat al-Taḥrīr al-Qawmī, White Paper on the Application of the Geneva Conventions of 1949 to the French-Algerian Conflict, 59. 43 Trinquier, Modern Warfare, 9. 44 French Parliament established “a state of emergency law” in April 1955 (AUS), and in March 1956, the French government passed the Special Powers Law, which increased military power and destablized the normal judicial system (WHITE PAPER). A 1960 decree “revised the structure of military tribunals” and created complicated legal hoops, which had devastating effects in cases such as Djamila Boupacha’s (Surkis, “Ethics and Violence: Simone de Beauvoir, Djamila Boupacha, and the Algerian War,” French Politics, Culture & Society 28, no. 2 (2010): 42). 45 Trinquier, Modern Warfare, 21. 46 de Beauvoir and Halimi, Djamila Boupacha, 14. 47 Aussaresses, The Battle of the Casbah, 103. 48 Giniger, “France Enacting Algeria Amnesty.” 49 Ibid.

214  Arianna Barzman-Grennan 50 Culture in Said’s work refers to “all those practices, like the arts of description, communication, and representation, that have relative autonomy from the economic, social, and political realms and that often exist in aesthetic forms,” and the novel is well suited to this form of study because Said claims it is “the aesthetic object whose connection to the expanding societies of Britain and France is particularly interesting” (Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993), xii). 51 Said, Culture and Imperialism, xiii. 52 Albert Camus, The Stranger, trans. Matthew Ward (New York: Vintage International, 1989), 59.   The scene in which Meursault shoots the Arab uses the word ‘Arab’ thirteen times to describe Algerians, but never once, in the entire text, are they given any other more substantive or individual identifiers. 53 Camus, The Stranger, 59. 54 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove Press, 1963), 250.   This is part of Fanon’s writings on colonialism, and his was another key voice in the explanation and thinking surrounding the war. 55 Kamel Daoud, The Meursault Investigation, trans. John Cullen (New York: Other Press, 2015). 56 Weltanschauung: world view; Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New York: Grove Press, 1968), 109–10. 57 Daoud, The Meursault Investigation, 48. 58 Ibid., 143. 59 Assia Djebar, Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade, trans. Dorothy S. Blair (Portsmouth: Heinemann, 1993), v. 60 Ibid., 201. 61 Ibid., 142. 62 Djebar, Fantasia, 181, 216. 63 Benjamin Stora, interview by (uncredited), “Remembering History.” 64 Gillo Pontecorvo, interview by PierNico Solinas, Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers: A Film Written by Franco Solinas, 165.   Saadi was a leader of the FLN. 65 Michael T. Kaufman, “The World: Film Studies; What Does the Pentagon See in ‘Battle of Algiers’?” The New York Times, September 7, 2003, accessed May 18, 2017, www.nytimes.com/2003/09/07/weekinreview/the-world-film-studies-what-does-thepentagon-see-in-battle-of-algiers.html 66 Lost Command, 1966, dir. Mark Robson. 67 Darius Rejali, “Torture Makes the Man,” 151, 153, 154, 153. 68 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 116. 69 Jean-Paul Sartre, preface to Alleg, The Question, xl.

Works cited Alleg, Henri. The Question. Translated by John Calder. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006. Aussaresses, Paul. The Battle of the Casbah: Terrorism and Counter-Terrorism in Algeria 1955–1957. Translated by Robert L. Miller. New York: Enigma Books, 2006. Barzman-Grennan, Arianna. “Historical Realities: Voices from the Algerian War of Decolonization.” Senior Honors Thesis, UCD. May 31, 2017. The Battle of Algiers. Directed by Gillo Pontecorvo. 1966. Casbah Films, Inc. The Criterion Col-lection, 2011. DVD.

Historical realities 215 Branche, Raphaëlle. “Torture of Terrorists? Use of Torture in a ‘War Against Terrorism’: Justifications, Methods and Effects: The Case of France in Algeria, 1954–1962.” International Review of the Red Cross 89, no. 867 (2007): 543–60. Camus, Albert. The Stranger. Translated by Matthew Ward. New York: Vintage International, 1989. Daoud, Kamel. The Meursault Investigation. Translated by John Cullen. New York: Other Press, 2015. de Beauvoir, Simone and Gisèle Halimi. Djamila Boupacha: The story of the torture of a young Algerian girl which shocked liberal French opinion. Translated by Peter Green. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1962. Djebar, Assia. Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade. Translated by Dorothy S. Blair. Portsmouth: Heinemann, 1993. Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. Translated by Charles Lam Markmann. New York: Grove Press, 1968. ———. The Wretched of the Earth Translated by Constance Farrington. New York: Grove Press, 1963. Feraoun, Mouloud. Journal 1955–1962: Reflections on the French-Algerian War. Edited by James D. Le Sueur and Translated by Mary Ellen Wolf and Claude Fouillade. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000. Forrest, Duncan, ed. Amnesty International Report on Torture. London: Duckworth, 1973. Galula, David. Pacification in Algeria: 1956–1958. Santa Monica: Rand Corporation, 2006. Giniger, Henry. “France Enacting Algeria Amnesty.” The New York Times CXIV, no. 39,044 (December 17, 1964). Horne, Alistair. “Shades of Abu Ghraib.” The National Interest, no. 104 (2009): 23–9. Jabhat al-Taḥrīr al-Qawmī. White Paper on the Application of the Geneva Conventions of 1949 to the French-Algerian Conflict. New York: Algerian Office, 1960. Knight-Santos, Lucie. Violent Beginnings: Literary Representations of Postcolonial Algeria. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2015. Lartéguy, Jean. The Centurions. Translated by Xan Fielding. New York: Penguin Books, 2015. Lazreg, Marnia. Torture and the Twilight of Empire: From Algiers to Baghdad. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008. Kaufman, Michael T. “The World: Film Studies; What Does the Pentagon See in ‘Battle of Algiers’?” The New York Times, September 7, 2003. Web, accessed May 18, 2017