From Segmentary ‘Tribes’ to Ethnic Nationalism: A Historical Study of Nuer Identity

Reviewed by: Preserving German Texan Identity: Reminiscences of William A. Trenckmann, 1859–1935 ed. by Walter L. Buenger and Walter D. Kamphoefner Robert Briwa Preserving German Texan Identity: Reminiscences of William A. Trenckmann, 1859–1935. Edited by Walter L. Buenger and Walter D. Kamphoefner. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2018. vii + 248 pp. Illustrations, tables, appendixes, bibliography, index. $42.00, cloth. Memoirs are often terrific sources for scholars examining historical events and patterns, especially when presented by skilled editors. In Preserving German Texan Identity: Reminiscences of William A. Trenckmann, 1859–1935 (hereafter Preserving German Texan Identity), historians Walter Buenger and Walter Kamphoefner display how editors can make memoirs more accessible. Focused on the Gulf Coastal Plains of southeastern Texas, Trenckmann's memoir documents German Texan experiences of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Preserving German Texan Identity opens with a preface and introduction that explains the process of editing the memoir and offers an overview of Trenckmann's life. The editors draw on their previous scholarship to set Trenckmann into the contexts of Texas politics and economic histories, patterns of German immigration and ethnic identity in Texas, and twentieth-century race relations between African Americans and German Texans. Similarly, the editors' annotations of the published memoir connect Trenckmann to wider historical contexts while also offering necessary background about individual people and events mentioned in the work. Overall, the text's editorial work is superb. Subsequent sections present Trenckmann's own writings. "Erlebtes und Beobachtetes (Experiences and Observations)," appeared intermittently in Trenckmann's German language newspaper, Das Wochenblatt. Published between 1931 and 1933, the memoir proceeds chronologically, beginning with Trenckmann's childhood during the Civil War and concluding with his views of the United States' perspectives on Germany following World War I. Two nostalgic episodes—an 1863 Christmas celebration and Trenckmann's time at Texas A&M—round out the text, followed by a brief selection of primary and secondary sources for further reading. Trenckmann is less concerned with the minutiae of daily life and instead focuses on selected experiences and topics. These include Trenckmann's experiences in Texas's early public education system, the role of Germanlanguage newspapers in consolidating and maintaining German ethnic identity, and German Texan political interests. Permeating the work is a tension at the heart of twentieth-century German Texan life. On one hand, Trenckmann shows how German Texans sought to maintain a distinct ethnic identity by establishing and participating in German festivals, social clubs, and newspapers. On the other, he felt it necessary for German Texans to assimilate into wider American society, particularly through education and by participating in local and state politics. Trenckmann's explicit focus on these themes throughout Preserving German Texan Identity make it a treasure trove for historical and cultural geographers exploring topics of ethnic boosterism and identity formation in the twentieth- century Plains. [End Page 328] Robert Briwa Department of History Angelo State University Copyright © 2021 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln

Empowered through Labor and Buttressing Their Communities: Mayan Women and Coastal Migration, 1875-1965

Teaching & Learning Guide for: Literature, Social Science, and the Development of American Migration Narratives in the Twentieth Century

Ethnic identity can have a different basis locally than it does at the level of the larger society or ethnic group. This point is illustrated with a reconstruction of the early twentieth-century ethnic classification used in three villages in southwestern Taiwan. Discrepancies between estimates of ethnic intermarriage based on government records and on interview reports result from cross-ethnic adoptions. Interview reports more accurately portray the social experience of ethnic identity for adopted daughters and thus yield better estimates of intermarriage. Analysis of the discrepancy shows the local basis of Han identity to be culture, not, as for most Han, ancestry. (Ethnic identity, historical records, memory, intermarriage, adoption, Taiwan) Ethnic identities are changeable in their content and (e.g., Harrell 1996), yet they are commonly portrayed as fixed, with clear-cut borders, the product of a person's culture and/or ancestry, in which there is no choice about belonging or departing. In order to mobilize people behind their political agendas ... [governments and ethnic leaders] actively hide the fluidity and changeability of identity and group membership (Harrell 1996:5); they discuss identity in terms of purported common descent and/or purported common culture (including language), even though ultimately it is common sociopolitical experience that binds group identity (Brown n.d.). The concealment of fluidity is accomplished by constructing of (Bhabha 1990:1; Harrell 1996:4), origin myths (Keyes 1981:8; Williams 1989:429), or a reified History (Duara 1995:4) that portrays the group as having a long and unified history distinguished from other groups.(2) These narratives draw heavily on selected historic sociopolitical events to galvanize support for the claim that the group constitutes a socially and/or culturally distinct people. Although these narratives attempt to mask them, relatively recent changes in ethnic identity can nevertheless be deciphered and the basis for such changes can be reconstructed. At the end of the twentieth century, political leaders frequently used ethnic identity as constructed by narratives of unfolding to motivate and justify warfare. Indeed, ethnic identity in relation to national identity fuels tensions between Taiwan and China that could potentially lead to warfare. Why have these ideologies succeeded in their hegemonic goal of naturalizing ethnic relations and tensions? To answer this question requires analysis of the experience of ethnic identity for ordinary people in addition to other analyses of social power hierarchies (e.g., Gates 1996). Reconstructing ethnic identity and its changes is no less an interpretation of the past than are narratives of unfolding, but it offers a different vantage point: ordinary people's experience rather than the ideology of the elite. This article contributes to our understanding of ordinary people's experience of ethnic identity in two ways. First, by analyzing ethnic identities in terms of the social experience of individuals, it shows that local ethnic identity can have a different basis than that underlying identity claims in the larger ethnic group or society.(3) With contemporaneous variation, there is the potential for future change. Second, it offers a methodology for reconstructing past ethnic identity by comparing documentary and oral history reports. Analyzing the early twentieth-century ethnic classification used in the southwestern Taiwan villages of Jiashe, Yishe, and Bingshe brings out discrepancies between information drawn from the Japanese-period government household registers and information drawn from interview reports. Jiashe, Yishe, and Bingshe were considered plains Aborigine villages in the early twentieth century, in spite of their cultural similarity to neighboring Han villages and in spite of some patrilineal Han ancestry.(4) About 1930, however, Jiashe, Yishe, and Bingshe changed their ethnic identity from plains Aborigine to Han (Brown 1996, n. …

Most histories of the California Mother Lode have focused on the mines around the American and Yuba Rivers. However, the Southern Mines - those centered around Calaveras County in the central Sierra - were also of importance in the development of California's mineral wealth. Calaveras Gold offers a detailed and meticulously researched history of mining and its economic impact in this region from the first discoveries in the 1840s until the present. Mining in Calaveras County covered the full spectrum of technology from the earliest placer efforts through drift and hydraulic mining to advanced hard-rock industrial mining. Subsidiary industries such as agriculture, transportation, lumbering, and water supply, as well as a complex social and political structure, developed around the mines. The authors examine the roles of race, gender, and class in this frontier society; the generation and distribution of capital; and the impact of the mines on the development of political and cultural institutions. They also look at the impact of mining on the Native American population, the realities of day-to-day life in the mining camps, the development of agriculture and commerce, the occurrence of crime and violence, and the cosmopolitan nature of the population. Calaveras County mining continued well into the twentieth century, and the authors examine the ways that mining practices changed as the ores were depleted and how the communities evolved from mining camps into permanent towns with new economic foundations and directions. Mining is no longer the basis of Calaveras's economy, but memories of the great days of the Mother Lode still attract tourists who bring a new form of wealth to the region. Calaveras Gold is based on extensive research in manuscript collections, oral histories, and rare imprints, and includes numerous period photographs and other illustrations.

Conflict on Mount Lebanon: The Druze, the Maronites, and Collective Memory

Café Space, Communication, Creativity, and Materialism

By combining digital humanities text-mining tools and a qualitative approach, we examine changing concepts in forestry journals in Sweden and the United States (US) in the early twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Our first hypothesis is that foresters at the beginning of the twentieth century were more concerned with production and less concerned with ecology than foresters at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Our second hypothesis is that US foresters in the early twentieth century were less concerned with local site conditions than Swedish foresters. We find that early foresters in both countries had broader—and often ecologically focused—concerns than hypothesized. Ecological concerns in the forestry literature have increased, but in the Nordic countries, production concerns have increased as well. In both regions and both time periods, timber management is closely connected to concerns about governance and state power, but the forms that governance takes have changed.

Bound to the Land: Cove Fort in Kesler Family History and Memory

The food Australians ate immediately prior to the 1950s has been popularly remembered in stark contrast to post-Second World War gastronomic upheaval: as a plain, stodgy, monocultural prelude to the increasing diversity and sophistication of food in the second half of the twentieth century. What cultural values did Australians of the 1930s and 1940s attach to food, however? How were the meanings of food understood and contested within the contemporary context of class relations, economic austerity, ethnic identity, regional variation, and gendered social and family roles? And how was the predominant British-derived ‘meat and three veg’ diet implicated in broader notions of Australia’s cultural development and national progress? This study examines these questions in relation to the food culture of 1930s and 1940s Australia and its disputed remembrance in the post-Second World War decades. There have been many excellent academic and non-scholarly empirical studies of twentieth century Australian eating habits and culinary trends. The intended contribution of this study is to step back from questions of food consumption patterns to explore how mid-twentieth century eating habits interacted with broader cultural meanings and social identities. These questions are important, as they address the wider post-war management of White Australia’s cultural memory and the reassuring role food came to have in national storytelling. Although the multicultural culinary revolution deserves its historical prominence, pre-1950s eating habits are better understood as the product of economic austerity, British cultural dominance and the restriction of women’s labour to the home. When these three factors were eroded in postwar life, the old food culture began its popular association with the perceived sins and simplicity of a fading White Australia. This thesis adopts a cultural history approach, constituting a set of linked, illuminating case studies. The research methodology embraces sources that offer evidence of meaning-making in relation to food: diaries, letters, memoirs, oral histories, contemporary print media and government reports. These sources demonstrate that 1930s and 1940s Australians understood food in complex and contested ways. As much of this source material has yet to be examined by historians of food, it is hoped this study will open new avenues of inquiry in the burgeoning field of Australian food history. This primary research is contextualised within secondary scholarship from the fields of food history, food studies, feminist history, gender studies, migrant history, urban history, oral history, media history, as well as broader works of Australian social and cultural history. This engagement with historiographical questions and traditions beyond the food history field is intended to emphasise the non-culinary significance of food and the broader historical contexts within which issues of food history can be analysed.

Reviewed by: Growing Up with the Country: Family, Race, and Nation after the Civil War by Kendra Taira Field Quincy D. Newell Growing Up with the Country: Family, Race, and Nation after the Civil War. By Kendra Taira Field. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018. ix + 216 pp. Illustrations, notes, index. $38.00, cloth. Drawing on her own family history, contextualized among countless other primary sources, including (but not limited to) oral histories, photographs, archived letters, and newspaper stories, Kendra Taira Field offers a fascinating story of migration by "freedom's first generation" (2) in Growing Up with the Country. Focusing on the multigenerational stories of three families after the Civil War, Field persuasively argues that the dominant understanding of the Great Migration as an event that took African Americans from the rural South to the urban North in the early twentieth century is incomplete. Instead, Field contends, we should understand the Great Migration as part of a larger movement by newly free African Americans in search of what Nell Irvin Painter called "real freedom" (1). In Field's analysis, this movement was transnational and multiracial, and it took black people west to Indian Territory and across the Atlantic to Africa—as well as north to the urban centers traditionally associated with the Great Migration. Crucially, Field demonstrates that we must see all these movements in relation to one another, rather than as unrelated movements in response to distinct impulses. Field's analysis begins with an examination of black movement to Indian Territory and early Oklahoma. Illustrating a range of connections between black, Indian, and black Indian people, Field helpfully undermines the racial categories on which the United States relied, even as she chronicles the construction and imposition of those categories on people in Indian Territory and early Oklahoma as well as more broadly in the US. The book's final chapter examines the Chief Sam movement, an effort to transport African Americans from the US to Africa's Gold Coast (present-day Ghana), where Sam was from. In many ways, this chapter demonstrates the payoff of Field's method: her focus on specific individuals allows her [End Page 112] to trace the connections between movement west and migration to Africa, showing that the same people kept moving in search of a home beyond the reach of American racism. Simultaneously, Field's sources reveal the ways this movement—and the transnational, multiracial character of the larger search for "real freedom" of which it was a part—have been obscured, forgotten, and erased. This book will be of great interest to scholars of African American history and the history of the North American West. Like other excellent books, Field's Growing Up with the Country will leave readers wanting more, and I expect that graduate students will find fertile ground here for innumerable projects elaborating on the ideas that Field advances so elegantly here. Quincy D. Newell Religious Studies Department Hamilton College Copyright © 2020 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln

Reviewed by: Growing Up with the Country: Family, Race, and Nation after the Civil War by Kendra Taira Field Justin Isaac Rogers Growing Up with the Country: Family, Race, and Nation after the Civil War. By Kendra Taira Field. (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2018. Pp. 256. Illustrations, notes, index.) Over the past three decades, historians have created a thriving body of scholarship that centers questions of race and identity among Black and Indigenous peoples across the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth century. Historian Kendra Taira Field's complex and elegant microhistory elevates this scholarly dialogue by tracing the movements of three multiracial freedpeople from whom she descended, Thomas Jefferson Brown, Monroe Coleman, and Alexander "Elic" Davis. She provides new perspectives on westward expansion and the migrations of African-descended peoples, the rise of ideas about racial destiny and Black nationalism, and the emergence of biracialism between 1865 and 1915. Throughout four chapters, Field reconstructs her ancestors' lives and weaves an intricate tapestry rooted in her family's generational knowledge and personal letters, alongside archival and genealogical records. The first chapter focuses on Brown, born the son of a Black father and an Irish mother during the 1850s, and his migration from Arkansas to Indian Territory in the 1870s. After emancipation, according to Field, African-descended men like Brown distanced themselves from slavery by participating in American westward expansion. Although Brown entered Indian Territory as an "intruder" or "non-native," his marriages to Black Indian women allowed him to acquire more than a thousand acres of land, which became a Black and Creek settlement known as Brownsville. At the turn of the twentieth century, however, White land speculation and an emerging biracial system led to land loss among Brown and other Africandescended and Creek property owners. The Black-white racial dichotomy ultimately obscured the multinational history of Brownsville, which later descendants came to remember as part of Oklahoma's "all-Black" town movement. Succeeding chapters concentrate on the next generation, including Coleman and Davis, at the turn of the twentieth century. Intensifying violence, increasing political exclusion, and hardening Black-White racial lines in Mississippi eroded Coleman's relative prosperity as the mixed-race [End Page 217] son of a freedwoman and her former enslaver. According to Field, Coleman and his mixed-race contemporaries—forced into the category of "Black"—formulated ideas about a common racial destiny from their efforts to secure the "real freedom" associated with the acquisition of land and the reconstitution of kinship ties in "all-Black" western towns. In contrast to Coleman, poverty, in addition to political exclusion and violence, pushed men like Davis, a sharecropper who migrated westward from Mound Bayou, Mississippi, into "all-Black" western towns. Migrations as a response to such conditions provided a pretext for Davis to join Chief Alfred Sam's 1913–15 back-to-Africa movement after Oklahoma imposed Jim Crow laws. In her most powerful analysis, Field situates the transnational Chief Sam movement within a larger "continuum of flight from the late nineteenth-century United States" (137). Earlier Black departures from the South, then, constituted not discreet movements, but instead harbingers for a series of migrations that linked American expansionism to pan-Africanism. Taken together, migrations and notions of "racial destiny" responded to biracialism, yet erased a complex multiracial—African, mixed-race, and Black Indian—past and provided a foundation for the later Great Migration. Field's unique perspective, rigorous documentation, and astute analysis provide a shining example for historians using family stories in their own work and for students enrolled in historical methodology courses. The broader public, likewise, will find Field's narrative approach engaging and accessible. Historians of Texas and the Native South and Southwest will appreciate her focus on the multinational and multiracial dimensions of migration during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Justin Isaac Rogers University of Mississippi Copyright © 2020 The Texas State Historical Association

Riding to Learn, Learning to Ride: Early School-busing in Connecticut, 1900–1945

Why I Call Australia ‘Home’?

Students of human fertility have been aware for a long time that there may be some special relation between the number (quantity) of children ever born to a family and the "quality" of their children as perceived by others if not by the parents. One need only cite the negative correlation between quantity and quality of children per family so often observed in both cross-section and time-series data. One of us (Becker 1960) more than a decade ago stressed the importance for understanding fertility (quantity) of the interaction between quantity and quality, and we are pleased to note that this interaction is emphasized in most of the papers in this Supplement, especially those by De Tray and Willis. Some economists have argued that the negative relation between quantity and quality often observed is a consequence of a low substitution elasticity in a family's utility function between parents' consumption or level of living and that of their children (see, e.g., Duesenberry 1960; Willis 1969). The approach followed by De Tray in this volume is different, but it makes equally special assumptions about the substitution between quantity and quality in the utility function and in household production.