City Fathers Research Articles

Populism and the Africanists in East London in the 1940s and Early 1950s

This article considers popular political mobilisation in East London prior to the launch of the Defiance Campaign in the city in 1952, which ignited a racial war. It suggests that the failure of the municipal authority to assimilate urbanising Africans from regional mission stations and schools, especially in the 1940s, created a crisis of legitimacy for the white city fathers, who had previously promised to find a place for educated and ‘civilised’ Africans. As young, educated African elites were blocked from climbing the class ladder, despite the growth and prosperity of the city, and were prevented from escaping the congestion and filth of its neglected African locations, a strong sense of affinity was forged between them and the urban poor despite their cultural and class differences. This was intensified when apartheid-style laws were introduced that treated and prosecuted all Africans in the same racialised ways. After the African National Congress Youth League was established in the city, educated elites and ordinary people participated in a single set of protests against the municipal leadership around living conditions and their right to urbanise. This was framed by a strongly Africanist ideology, analysed here through a discussion of populism.

Play and Pay: The Ill-Starred Project of the Municipal Tax on Musical Instruments in Prague, 1910–1913

Utilising archival documents and the press, this article scrutinises aspects of the connections between local government, taxation and domestic music in Prague, 1910–1913; of all the European tax initiatives on musical instruments, the Prague one was the most ambitious and comprehensive. The administration aimed at raising considerable revenues and lessening the disturbance from music by taxing pianos, harmoniums, gramophones and orchestrions in inns and private homes. The initiative included an inventory of musical instruments, after which the officials began drafting the tax law. The press published on the inventory and planned tax measures, and several interest groups from the music and restaurant business submitted appeals to the city’s representative bodies. Some interest groups cooperated and cleverly exploited public opinion, forcing the city fathers to remove the tax from the agenda of the public sitting of the City Assembly. The initiative was doomed in several respects, including its unrealistic schedule, excessive complexity and lack of clarity.

New Mexico's Spanish Catholic Past

New Mexico's Spanish Catholic Past Ramón A. Gutiérrez La Conquistadora: The Autobiography of an Ancient Statue, by Fray Angelico Chavez (Paterson, NJ: St. Anthony Guild Press, 1954), 96 pp. In the years following the initial voyage of Christopher Columbus seeking a western route to the riches of the East Indies in 1492, Spain rapidly established a far-flung empire. By the 1560s Spain's sovereignty extended from Madrid to Manila. Its expeditionary forces had captured the wealth of the Aztec and Inca Empires and explored much of what became known as the Spanish Borderlands of North America, that southern third of what became the United States extending from Florida to California. The Kingdom of New Mexico, established in 1598, is the oldest and most enduring of Spain's settlements in the United States, antedating the founding by the English of Jamestown in 1607 and Plymouth colony in 1620. The person who chronicled New Mexico's Catholic history most intensively during the twentieth century was Fray Angélico Chávez. In his lifetime he published twenty-three books and more than six hundred articles describing different facets of Catholic experiences here under Spanish, Mexican, and U.S. rule. The focus of this essay is on Chavez's 1954 book, La Conquistadora: The Autobiography of an Ancient Statue, in which he narrates the history of New Mexico's Christianization through the eyes of a wooden statue of Our Lady of the Rosary, brought by the Franciscan friars in 1625. Fray Angelico performs as a ventriloquist, giving the statue her feminine voice, which in turn she uses to narrate her triumphs and travails as New Mexico's virgin, queen, and mother over a span of more than three centuries. Chavez occasionally wrote with the female pseudonym as "Ann Jellico" assuming the persona of a woman, making his work by today's standards rather queer and campy. Males assuming female personas in [End Page 61] European and American literature is hardly unusual; what is, is that a piece of wood does. Chavez was born in 1910 to Fabian and Nicolasa Roybal in Wagon Mound, New Mexico and baptized as Manuel Ezequiel. When ordained a Franciscan friar in 1937 he chose Angélico as his clerical name to honor Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles, the Catholic patroness of Los Angeles, California. Fray Angélico was born into an ancestral line he traced to members of one of the first Spanish colonizing parties to enter New Mexico in 1598. A year after Angélico's birth his family moved to San Diego, California where his father worked as a carpenter building the pavilions for the Panama-California Exhibition inaugurated in 1915 to celebrate the opening of the Panama Canal. New Mexico's exhibition there, modeled after Acoma Pueblo's Franciscan church, became the pavilion that attracted the fair's largest crowds and subsequently inspired Santa Fe's city fathers to refashion the town's architectural style from Victorian to Spanish colonial in the 1930s. Some scholars opine that young Manuel's exposure to Spanish neocolonial architecture in San Diego and later Santa Fe may have inspired his fascination with the region's Spanish past. As a child Angelico was educated by the Sisters of Loretto who undoubtedly encouraged his pursuit of a clerical career. At the age of fourteen he enrolled at St. Francis Seraphic Seminary High School in Cincinnati, Ohio, moving to the nearby novitiate of the Saint John the Baptist Province of the Order of Friars Minor in 1929, obtaining a bachelor's degree in theology at Duns Scotus College in 1933. On returning to Santa Fe he was ordained a Franciscan priest at St. Francis Cathedral on May 6, 1937. He was the first native-born New Mexican ordained by the Order of Friars Minor begun by St. Francis of Assisi in 1210, having been educated entirely in Catholic schools by priests and nuns. Angelico Chavez became a prolific writer at a young age, first of poetry while he was still in high school, eventually adding essays and tomes on colonial art, history, and imaginative fiction to his literary repertoire anchored in themes derived from New Mexico...

Interpersonal Networks of the First Ambassadors of Dubrovnik to the Sublime Porte

Abstract In 1430, after the Ottoman sultan Murad II had been assigned the role of arbitrator in the conflict between the people of Dubrovnik and the Bosnian duke Radoslav Pavlović over the territory of Konavle, the authorities of Dubrovnik decided to send ambassadors to the Sublime Porte for the first time. For even though the city fathers possessed practical knowledge and information about the customs, traditions, and culture of the Muslim lands, preparing missions to present Dubrovnik's interests in person at the Sublime Porte was difficult. In the period between the establishment of these first official diplomatic contacts and the time Dubrovnik become a tributary state of the Sublime Porte in 1458, new political and sociocultural circumstances arose that required different approaches and practices. During this time, Dubrovnik's leadership was forced to search for help, protection, and advice from all who could support their pragmatic goals. Analysis of these relationships yields valuable information on sources of support for the ambassadors, what kind of support and advice they sought, how that support was proffered, what rewards were given for support, what role was played by emotions in forging ties to the Sublime Porte, and the power of emotions to shape historical events.

Diamond Town Toil and Trauma: Weaving Material Counter-Narratives of Kimberley's Pasts

ABSTRACT The discovery of South Africa's mineral wealth from the 1870s transformed what was a pastoral backveld amongst Britain's imperial possessions. Tent towns sprang up overnight as diggers and labour migrants “rushed” to the Diamond Fields. The colonial boundary was expanded rapidly to incorporate the new tracts; conquest followed in the region. The telling of Kimberley's history tends to valorise colonial “pioneers” and “city fathers,” their diamonds and mining feats, in museums and other media. Different readings are possible, inter alia through public participant engagements – outlined in case studies. Lyotardian petit recits are provoked by the experiences and/or by material traces, such as the worn-out patch in a linoleum floor of an erstwhile ironing room at a colonial mansion. Counter-narratives emerge, pointing to ways that an outwardly colonial heritage site is key to exploring multiple, intersecting social roles and relationships that extend well beyond the inner walls and garden fence. Other case studies add to a consideration of the museum as a “contact zone” where, as Witz suggests, there can be a future for many, varied and different pasts. Between past and future lies a present in which, as Dipesh Chakrabarty might argue, museums have their greatest opportunities and challenges.

Gift-Giving in Dubrovnik’s First Diplomatic Contacts with the Sublime Porte / Dubrovački diplomatski pokloni odaslani na Visoku Portu (1430. – 1458.)

In 1430 Dubrovnik’s authorities decided to send ambassadors to the Sublime Porte for the first time. An important part of the preparatory activities was to decide to whom gifts should be presented, and what should be the nature and value of the gifts presented to the various recipients. Gifts were carefully wrapped diplomatic messages that their recipients could interpret in various ways. Gift rhetoric was used primarily to achieve strategic interests and was an ideological tool used both as a sign and an instrument. An analysis of the nature and value of the objects that ambassadors gave to their hosts reveals the “collective identity” of the community that preoccupied the City fathers, offers an insight into Dubrovnik’s trade connections and local production of luxury goods, as well as their reception in a different cultural landscape. Sources kept in the Dubrovnik State Archive allow us to reconstruct the list of Dubrovnik’s diplomatic gifts presented to various individuals at the Sublime Porte from the time of the establishment of the first official diplomatic contacts until the City became a tributary state. The gifts can be categorized according to the political and social rank of the recipients. Interpretation of the reasoning underlying the selection of gifts offers an interdisciplinary approach to the analysis of their pragmatic purposes, their origin and production, their value (economic, social, cultural, practical, emotional), and manipulation of their usage. As well as influencing both contemporary and future Ragusan – Ottoman relations, the gifts encouraged symbolic, material, and cultural exchanges between diverse civilizations.

The Effects of Transfer of Learning and Literacy: An Analysis of Graffiti and Sgraffitiin the City of Johannesburg

The study examined the social effects of graffiti as pieces of writing or drawings scribbled, scratched or sprayed on surfaces of public toilets or bus termini. The study followed a qualitative exploratory design in which the researchers observed the messages expressed in the graffiti and conducted a discourse analysis on their effects on the moral fabric of society. Themes and perceptions towards some societal ills emerged from the analysis. The main aim of the study was thus to unravel the possible social issues expressed through this art of graffiti and sgraffitti. A purposive total sample size of 10 public toilets and bus termini was used for the study. Among the major findings of this study was the view that the messages conveyed through the graffiti and sgraffitti expressed a disapproval and distaste of such anti-social acts as promiscuity, prostitution and crime that are prevalent in the city of Johannesburg and its environs. In addition, gender based violence, stereotypes prejudices and stigmas against women, homosexuality and HIV/AIDS were among the dominant graffiti and sgrafitto messages. The study concluded that although graffiti and sgraffitti artists tend to deform and deface some public utilities, their call for normative social behaviour in society shows that there is a need to deconstruct a number of societal biases such as gender biases, sex, sexual orientation, stigmas, stereotypes and other prejudices associated with the diverse nature of the human species. The recommendation made by this study is that there is a dire need for advocacy by social workers, the city fathers, the metro police division and other human rights organisations to deconstruct and demystify certain human practices, acts and mind sets.

The Language of Street Signs in Dualist Transylvania and the Banat

Abstract Twice in the history of late Habsburg Austria, local conflicts over the languages used on street signs spilled out into all-out political crises on the imperial level – first in 1892, when the Prague municipality’s decision to replace the city’s bilingual signs with Czech-only ones and to rename a multitude of streets after Czech national heroes sparked violent demonstrations across the Empire’s German-speaking cities. Then in 1911, a plan to display street names in three scripts in Sarajevo led to a tug of war between the Bosnian parliament and the imperial authorities. If there were no such high-profile symbolic fights over urban spaces in the contemporary Kingdom of Hungary, that was not because Magyarizing policies had successfully purged the linguistic cityscape, as the earlier literature on the era may lead one to believe. The picture that unfolds from the sources employed here is indeed diverse. But unlike in the western half of the Empire, city fathers were more interested in papering over rather than playing up national conflicts. The story of street signs in Dualist Transylvania and the Banat is one of resistance and consensus, of complex power relations and of subtle ways to signal them.

Open Space Worship: A Religious Identity of the Johane Masowe Chishanu Church in Zimbabwe

This study examines ‘open space’ worship that has typified the religious identity of the Johane Masowe Chishanu Church (‘John of the wilderness’ Church that congregates on Fridays) in Zimbabwe. The Johane Masowe Chishanu Church (JMCC) is a Zimbabwean African indigenous church with branches in many countries. These congregations, being in Zimbabwe and other countries, are recognizable by their white garments and gatherings in open spaces for church services. The practice of congregating in open spaces has been condemned by city fathers, town planners, and government autho-rities guided by health policies and by-laws (Lubinda 2015; Ncube 2016). In spite of these condemnations, the JMCC has continued to use available open spaces for its services. Our understanding is that congregating in open spaces has become an integral part of the JMCC’s history and theological identity. In this article, we examine the veracity and provenance of this assumed identity by interrogating the church’s traditions, its relations with colonial authorities, and its theology of open spaces. Borrowing from the theory on identity formation (Dominelli 2002), our contention is that a combination of factors contributes to the JMCC’s continued practice of gathering for worship in open spaces. These factors include the sectarian influences on the JMCC, the African spiritual ethos within which it was founded, as well as the colonial ‘othering’ and subsequent marginalization. Keywords: Johane Masowe Chishanu Church (JMCC), African indigenous churches (AICs), colonial government, identity formation, ‘othering’, open spaces, sect, pseudo-religious movements

Sleuthing for Mr. Crow: Detective William Baldwin and the Business of White Supremacy

Sleuthing for Mr. Crow:Detective William Baldwin and the Business of White Supremacy T. R. C. Hutton (bio) The lynch mob that formed in Roanoke, Virginia, one day in September 1893 was not the first in the town's brief history, but it was undeniably the largest. After northern capital and the newly consolidated Norfolk and Western Railroad (N&W) had transformed the village formerly called Big Lick into the fastest-growing city in the South, Roanoke's racial and political demographics changed dramatically during the 1880s, creating tensions between employers and workers, as well as locals and newcomers, white and black. The new city had come into being less than twenty years after emancipation, a time when the traditional southern relationship between race and labor was in flux, especially in southwestern Virginia, where most black residents had only recently arrived. Southerners and northerners flocked to Roanoke, ultimately creating a Gilded Age city thrown together without care or planning. In historian Rand Dotson's words, "White migrants from the mountains or countryside and white working-class residents from the North existed in one world, white upper-class natives and newcomers in another, and black residents in yet one more." The year 1893 was particularly tense. City fathers added fuel to the fire by attempting to impose the prohibition of alcohol on a population already suffering from massive unemployment caused by a nationwide economic panic. The sudden revelation of a violent crime allegedly committed by a black assailant was the final catalyst. A white farmer's wife was found bleeding from her head near a midtown produce market. She described her attacker as a young black man wearing a black hat, and soon thereafter a crowd pursued Thomas Smith, a young man loosely matching her description who was seen jumping onto a passing boxcar nearby.1 [End Page 285] Smith was temporarily rescued by a white man named William G. Baldwin, the N&W's chief detective, who arrived soon after the mob had formed. Baldwin spirited Smith away on horseback to a tavern and then, after the alleged victim positively identified Smith as her attacker, to the city jail. Once Smith's location was made known, the crowd gathered outside the jailhouse and compelled the overawed police force (there were fewer than twenty men patrolling a city of more than 20,000) to give Smith up. As he protested his innocence, Smith was hanged, his body desecrated and riddled with bullets. Roanoke's mayor, Henry S. Trout, had tried to protect Smith, but having been injured himself by gunfire from the crowd, he escaped to Richmond aboard an N&W passenger car with Baldwin by his side. For days afterward, a provisional government struggled to return order to Roanoke, while Baldwin zoomed back and forth on the N&W between the two cities, handling public relations for Trout.2 "The guilt of the negro Smith, doubtless, was evident," a letter to the editor of the Washington (D.C.) Evening Star concluded, but "the most serious outcome of this sad occurrence" was the "suspension of Mayor Trout" and "the encouragement of future violence." There were no victors in the affair save the spirit of white supremacy, but perhaps also Detective Baldwin, the one man who emerged from the affray above reproach. In early 1894 Baldwin arrested "one of the most active participants in the September riots," who, in a seemingly adventitious coincidence, was also under indictment for stealing pieces of brass from the N&W.3 The historiographical consensus on Virginia between Reconstruction and World War I suggests a Jim Crow system dedicated to the good of business elites, moderation, paternalism, social order, and hierarchy; it was [End Page 286] a complex system involving, in the words of historian J. Douglas Smith, "equal parts white supremacy and white responsibility" (in contrast to the populism, herrenvolk democracy, and violence associated with other parts of the South).4 The trajectory of William Baldwin's career roughly between 1885 and 1910 concurs with this consensus but also complicates it. His occupation as an independent contractor in law enforcement (as opposed to a publicly funded policeman) was suitable to a state where...

Petroleum and Risk Management in the Gulf South by James B. McSwain

Reviewed by: Petroleum and Risk Management in the Gulf South by James B. McSwain Diana Davids Hinton Petroleum and Risk Management in the Gulf South. By James B. McSwain. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2019. Pp. 368. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index.) When widespread drilling for natural gas in the Barnett Shale underlying the Fort Worth metroplex took place after 2000, it presented area cities with new and perplexing problems. While the economic benefits of the gas drilling boom were obvious, cities faced safety issues raised by the production of large volumes of a highly flammable substance in heavily populated areas. They had to identify hazards and devise regulations in the interest of public safety, which was no easy matter. As James B. McSwain points out, cities on the Gulf Coast had faced similar challenges a century earlier when oil began to displace coal as a boiler fuel. That makes his study most timely. [End Page 367] Working within the context of the modernization of the Gulf South and, more generally, the demand for cheap fuel in growing industrial centers of the early twentieth century, McSwain looks at how Mobile, Houston, New Orleans, and Galveston approached safety issues raised by increased use of fuel oil, particularly during 1901–02. The enormous Spindletop discovery made the use of crude or fuel oil far cheaper than coal and economically attractive for large-scale energy consumers. But a half century's experience with urban use of flammable liquids, principally kerosene, showed that public safety required regulation to prevent disastrous fires. As McSwain describes at length, cities elsewhere worked with insurers and engineers to construct a body of risk-reducing guidelines and regulations, information circulated by the National Board of Fire Underwriters. By 1901 all four cities could draw on that information to regulate such matters as location and size of storage tanks, proper tank construction, and transport of fuel to consumers. Applying national guidelines, however, proved a challenging matter. City governments had to mediate between oil vendors and consumers, who argued that the economic advantages of fuel oil far outweighed hazards, and insurers who could threaten to cease underwriting in the absence of regulation. In this regard, Texas historians will be especially interested in how regulation was negotiated in Houston and Galveston. Business interests in both cities saw cheap fuel from oil as a tremendous spur to industrial growth; Galveston businessmen also saw it assisting recovery from the devastating hurricane of 1900. Locating substantial storage facilities in or near downtowns made it easier for fuel to reach consumers but created a significant fire hazard, an issue that took differing shape in the two cities. In Houston, the hottest controversy eventually focused on the size and location of consumers' storage tanks at downtown buildings. In Galveston, locals differed about where petroleum would be offloaded from barges docked at wharves; shippers feared offloading anywhere near their bales of cotton awaiting shipment, and Sealy family interests faced off against Charles Clarke's circle over which wharves would be used. McSwain minutely details how locals negotiated regulation. In an epilogue, he briefly indicates what happened after the turn of the century. To describe McSwain's research as exhaustive would be an understatement. He consulted forty-seven newspapers and forty-three periodicals. There are eighty-nine pages of notes and forty-five of bibliography. This reader, however, found details of city fathers' deliberations slow going. Abbreviations of names of the many organizations and interest groups, while logistically necessary, meant constant referral from text to the abbreviations list at the beginning of the book, which grew tedious. That said, McSwain has made a welcome contribution to urban—and Texas—history. [End Page 368] Diana Davids Hinton University of Texas of the Permian Basin Copyright © 2019 The Texas State Historical Association

The Mediated Jorge Washington

In the early years of the Great Depression, as Laredo's annual Washington Birthday Celebration entered its third decade, the bilingual Laredo Times crusaded for the cash-strapped city it served to keep staging yearly commemorations of the first U.S. president. This article analyzes 339 articles, photos, columns, cartoons, and advertisements that appeared in the Times between 1929 and 1934 to show how the newspaper created a cross-border public memory of George Washington for its increasingly desperate imagined community of transnational readers. Moreover, this article demonstrates the role of the Times in transforming the Washington celebration from its origins as an 1898 Americanization tactic of Anglo city fathers into a twentieth century regional, cultural, and economic vehicle that conceptualized “American” liberty as English and Spanish and Mexican and American.

The Man Who Fell out of a Tree

The Man Who Fell out of a Tree Robert Leonard Reid (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution On the morning of October 19, 1559, the organist and sometime mathematician Stefano Di Pasqua assumed the position of choirmaster of the Basilica of Saint Anthony the Lesser in the city of San Egregio del Costos. Had you [End Page 69] arisen early that day to observe the city fathers as they greeted the new arrival at the basilica, you would have been disappointed. Stefano Di Pasqua was not a popular choice for the position (actually, no one had ever heard of him), and the city fathers stayed home. Far more qualified men had been not beaten out for the job but rather swift in beating their retreats from it. Cardinal Moschella’s determined search for a harmonious replacement for the disgraced former choirmaster Giuseppe Russo yielded in the end but a single candidate, Signor Di Pasqua. We enjoy the belief that Italy was in excellent shape in those days. This conviction arises from a well-meaning but misinformed inclination to equate the splendors of Rome, Venice, Florence, and a few other centers of high culture with those of the rest of the country—those of, say, San Egregio del Costos, an unpleasant city far from any such center, whose principal church’s only claims to fame were that it had been snubbed by Michelangelo (this after Cardinal Moschella invited Il Divino to paint what he termed the “Sistine-like” ceiling of Saint Anthony’s main chapel, or, were that not feasible, the floor; in a somewhat crisp letter to Cardinal Moschella declining the offer, the Master blamed his decision on a lingering backache) and that three others of the church’s chapels were hung in ghastly paintings by a local “artist” named Giovanni Monforto, who later gained renown as a swindler, a pimp, and Mayor of San Egregio del Costos. (One critic does award points to Monforto for his “interesting” idea of depicting a scene that was somehow omitted from the Gospels, “Jesus Embracing the Moneychangers.”) To put it another way: Neither the city of San Egregio del Costos nor the basilica of Saint Anthony the Lesser was enjoying what you would call a renaissance. Now, Cardinal Moschella was a good man. His heart was pure, he labored unceasingly and selflessly on behalf of the poor and the afflicted, and he did not resent his appointment seventeen years earlier as chief cleric of his archdiocese, despite the snickers that inevitably accompanied the announcement of his name at any conclave he attended with his peers. In his morning prayers the Cardinal always thanked God for the Basilica of Saint Anthony the Lesser and for the city of San Egregio del Costos and then asked humbly for strength to endure another day. What he faced were no small challenges. Driving nearly all of them was the plague, then in its so-called second pandemic. The basilica seated twelve hundred. Rarely were more than a tenth of the pews occupied, and then only for mass funerals. On such occasions, as many as [End Page 70] fifty believers at a time were sent off to their rewards. Left behind for the Cardinal and his small staff to minister to were hordes of grief-stricken relatives and a less and less livable city. Rome made frequent promises to render financial assistance, but somehow the monies never arrived. Managing the day-to-day affairs of the basilica was bad enough; to Cardinal Moschella fell the additional tasks of providing for his despairing flock not only spiritual guidance but sometimes food, medicine, and even shelter. Given those distressing circumstances, the matter of Russo, the recently dismissed choirmaster, might have seemed minor. But no succor that Cardinal Moschella could provide for his people was more healing than music, especially the music of the Saint Anthony the Lesser Boys Choir. Each week for nearly seven years, Giuseppe Russo, by all accounts a genius, had composed an anthem of soaring beauty for the boys to perform. The choir—twenty-four boys aged eight to nineteen—rehearsed to exhaustion five days a week and performed three times on Sundays. Their effect...

« La ville aux deux théâtres ». Strasbourg et la genèse d’une métropole biculturelle

Humanist circles laid the groundwork for the theatrical life in sixteenth-century Strasbourg. Their didactic aims, as illustrated by Sebastian Brant (The Play of Virtue, 1512), served a Christian vision of society.After some rear guard actions fought by the ecclesiastical Convent, the foundation of the Gymnasium (1538) by Jean Sturm led to a unique synthesis of a higher learning establishment, a town and Lutheran thought, embodied in awe-inspiring outdoor theatre performances. Once the free imperial city was seized in 1681 and turned into a French garrison town, the situation changed radically.The development of a generously endowed French theatre in the following decades occurred simultaneously with the new dominance of early modern professional theatre. After 1710, German travelling players were still hugely popular among audiences. But, while they were protected by the city fathers, they were authorized to stay only for a limited period of time, whereas the new opera-house was recognized as an institution.This paper sheds light on the two parallel theatrical spheres whose rivalry is thoroughly investigated.

Mohenjo-Daro's Small Public Structures: Heterarchy, Collective Action and a Re-visitation of Old Interpretations with GIS and 3D Modelling

Together, the concepts of heterarchy and collective action offer potential explanations for how early state societies may have established high degrees of civic coordination and sophisticated craft industries in the absence of exclusionary political strategies or dominant centralized political hierarchies. The Indus civilization (c. 2600–1900 bc) appears to have been heterarchical, which raises critical questions about how its infrastructure facilitated collective action. Digital re-visitation of early excavation reports provides a powerful means of re-examining the nuances of the resulting datasets and the old interpretations offered to explain them. In an early report on excavations at Mohenjo-daro, the Indus civilization's largest city, Ernest Mackay described a pair of small non-residential structures at a major street intersection as a ‘hostel’ and ‘office’ for the ‘city fathers’. In this article, Mackay's interpretation that these structures had a public orientation is tested using a geographical information systems approach (GIS) and 3D models derived from plans and descriptions in his report. In addition to supporting aspects of Mackay's interpretation, the resulting analysis indicates that Mohenjo-daro's architecture changed through time, increasingly favouring smaller houses and public structures. Close examination of these small public structures also suggests that they may at times have been part of a single complex.

Tales From the Haunted South: Dark Tourism and Memories of Slavery from the Civil War Era by Tiya Miles

Reviewed by: Tales From the Haunted South: Dark Tourism and Memories of Slavery from the Civil War Era by Tiya Miles Leigh Fought TALES FROM THE HAUNTED SOUTH: Dark Tourism and Memories of Slavery from the Civil War Era. By Tiya Miles. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 2015. By its nature, dark tourism embraces the ugly parts of history and human relations shunned by tours that focus on elegant architecture and heroic city fathers. As such, haunted history tours have become one of the few venues through which public historians have engaged the history of slavery. In Tales from the Haunted South: Dark Tourism and Memories of Slavery from the Civil War Era, the product of Pennsylvania State University’s Steven and Janice Brose Lectures in the Civil War Era, Tiya Miles questions the use of such methods as didactic tools. With a good eye for poetic detail and a thoughtful, charming voice situated somewhere near Fox Mulder on the spectrum between believer and skeptic, Miles acts as her reader’s tour guide through her own inquiries and observations. She begins by sketching out an overview of the popularity of haunted history shows and tourism, and briefly takes her readers on forays into the business of ghost hunting, ghost stories, and of dark tourism as an industry and field of study. The bulk of her analysis focuses on the Sorrel-Weed House in Savannah, Madame LaLaurie’s house in New Orleans, and the Myrtles Plantation near St. Francisville, Louisiana. Naturally, all three insisted upon the title of most haunted in America and appear regularly on ghost-hunter television programs. Miles notes several troubling features of the stories told at these sites. First, each story absolves white, American, male slaveholders from blame for historical wrongdoings, casting the villains as outsiders or the victim as deserving of her fate. They also gloss over the exploitation of black women by describing serial rape as “an affair,” “concubinage,” “infidelity,” and an assortment of other euphemisms that fail to engage the limited choices and realities faced by enslaved women. In each, too, African American spiritual practices are represented differently than evangelical Christianity, Catholicism, or other serious, syncretic belief system holding great power for believers, but as mysterious drums, disturbing rituals, and gris-gris tchotckes. Furthermore, the black communities surrounding these sites do not control the story. As Miles observes of the storytellers and their audiences, these are largely stories told by white people for white people, allowing tourists to brush up against a disturbing past without becoming honestly disturbed. Then, of course, there is [End Page 170] the problem of evidence for the historical events behind these stories and the coincidence of the ghost stories appearing on record just as dark tourism became a market. Miles is less concerned with the lack of evidence behind the stories and more worried about the ways that the owners of these sites squander opportunities to use the “holistic experience” of visiting a house and the frisson of a ghost story to understand a life lived under slavery. Just as southern heritage tours do little to teach about the history of enslaved people, so do these ghost tours flatten their lives into a grand guignol. The possibility of seeing a ghost overshadows sympathy for the pain of a life and death so tragic that, according to lore, would cause a spirit to haunt a site. More upsetting, as Miles points out, the commercial success of tours that trade in stories about violence inflicted upon slaves parallels the business that traded in slaves. Still, she sees potential for these types of tours to engage not only the history but also questions about truth and fact. The engaging and subversive tour given by “Tommy,” the popular, openly gay, African American descendant of the Myrtles’ slaves, Miles believes, suggests that “tourists were apparently willing, even eager, to hear a spirited perspective from an unlikely source even though it challenged conventional expectations” (114). At 132 pages of text, Tales of the Haunted South is a short but deep and complicated volume, combining the history of slavery, the antebellum south, and tourism, as well as public history, folklore, sociology, and the dubious...

THE ‘GLOUCESTER BENEFACTORS’ AFTER FOUR CENTURIES

Some time in the early years of the seventeenth century, the city fathers of Gloucester evidently commissioned twelve paintings of past benefactors to that city. The paintings survive in the Gloucester Folk Museum and were exhibited in the spring of 2014 to mark the approximate date of their four-hundredth anniversary. Given the absence of critically important sources that would have given precise information on their commissioning, their origin and history have remained somewhat obscure. This paper nevertheless strives to understand why, and by whom, they may have been painted, and why they remain significant today, both to the City of Gloucester and to the history of English portraiture. It argues that they were commissioned to bolster a sense of community identity and to encourage further benefaction at a time of local hardship and stress. It comments on them as examples of the regional English vernacular style in portraiture of the day, reflects on their current condition and very tentatively suggests who might have painted them.

In search of the contemporary shape of self-government

The twenty-fifth anniversary of self-government in Poland is a good occasion to reflect on the road we have travelled so far. While we still remember well the intentions of the creators of the system (members of the First Senate) we can now compare them with the current state of affairsand the status quo of government in Poland today. Two concepts have always been there since the beginning. Whereas the original solutions were to be inscribed in the tradition of Polish self-government, everything was done from the very start to draw as much as possible from the achievements of legal political thinking, later manifested in the provisions of the European Charter on Local Self-Government – a document which is the quintessence of the Western model of a local authority. Self-government is an institution characteristic of Western civilisation, practically unknown elsewhere, and it extends the principles of representation onto the local space inhabited by its citizens. Examples offered in the article illustrate how the initially planned model of government in Poland, rooted in the city fathers model has, in the course of subsequent reforms, been losing its original Western clarity in favour of the previous host model of local authority that characterised the past system.

Regionalists on the Left: Radical Voices from the American West Edited by Michael C. Steiner (review)

Reviewed by: Regionalists on the Left: Radical Voices from the American West Edited by Michael C. Steiner J. Dee Kille Regionalists on the Left: Radical Voices from the American West. Edited by Michael C. Steiner. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2013. xv + 399 pp. Notes, photographs, index. $39.95 cloth. Regionalists on the Left: Radical Voices from the American West is a study of sixteen regional artists focused mainly on the 1930s and beyond. This collection of essays, each by a different scholar, examines artists from the Great Plains, the Midwest, the Northwest, and California. The fifteen scholars who wrote these studies closely examine how each of these artists represents regionalism and the depth to which their radicalism informed their works. In this study, “left radicalism” has been painted with a broad brush, a radical being defined as anyone who steps outside the mainstream. Meanwhile, the definition of a leftist runs the gamut from humanitarian to Communist and member of the Popular Front. Regionalism, too, has been redefined in several ways, as noted in each of the essays. The overall thesis behind these studies demonstrates that, where once all regionalists were considered conservative and regressive, many were actually radical and progressive. The radical writers Meridel Le Sueur, Josephine Herbst, Mari Sandoz, Sanora Babb, B. A. Botkin, Angie Debo, J. Frank Dobie, Américo Paredes, and the artist Joe Jones are familiar to many readers in the Great Plains. These regionalists covered the entire spectrum of radicalism and often reinforced each other’s work. In addition, many midwesterners will also be familiar with the works of Joseph Howard, D’Arcy McNickle, Robert Cantwell, John Sanford, Carlos Bulosan, John Steinbeck, and Carey McWilliams from the Northwest and California. Many of these regionalists were acquainted with the Great Plains writers, often traveling in the same leftist circles. Each brought his or her own interpretation to regionalism: Le Sueur and Herbst emphasized how local voices strove to be heard through the regional myths created by those later arrivals who conquered them and the land. Jones, in spite of efforts by local city fathers, insisted on painting the dignity of downtrodden workers. Botkin, on the other hand, took the unusual tack of demonstrating that diversity is integral to any understanding of regionalism. These are but a few of the radical regional stances presented in this book. But it is love of the land that informed their works, and through which these defenders of the downtrodden helped redefine regionalism while also broadening the definition of socialism to include human rights and human dignity. Thus these radical regionalists attempted to speak for the people who made the region what it really was; significantly, this was at a time when anyone who spoke against conservatism and accepted traditions was viewed as a Socialist or worse. Steiner has brought together a well-documented and informative study. The essayists have detailed the beliefs and actions of their chosen regionalist and fully demonstrated what made each effective radicals. Every essay is well constructed, highlighting regional perspectives, accomplishments, and failures. In addition, each scholar brings his or her own “regionalist take.” This not only broadens the understanding of these regionalists and their works, but also expands the definitions of regionalist, left, and radical, squarely placing these writers in the forefront. Regionalists on the Left points the way for further studies into the lives of lesser known but no less important regional radicals whose works helped [End Page 397] shape the ideas of class, community, and region that still inform us today. J. Dee Kille History and Core Humanities University of Nevada, Reno Copyright © 2014 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln

Two Venuses: Historicizing the anatomical female body

Near the gardens in the centre of Cape Town in South Africa is a street called Burg Street. In 1790 the city fathers briefly re-named Burg Street Venus Street. Their objective was to guide newly ar...