Congratulations to Dr. Tonio Andrade, Professor of History, on receiving an NEH Public Scholars Fellowship. Awarded for his project “The Dutch East India Company: A Global History,” the fellowship will support the writing of a book about the factors that enabled the Dutch East India Company to become the dominant maritime power in Asia: its financing, its military strength, and its use of trade and information networks. This NEH program supports projects that lead to the “creation and publication of well-researched nonfiction books in the humanities written for the broad public.”
Dr. William S. Cossen, a former history major and 2008 graduate, recently published his first monograph. Titled Making Catholic America: Religious Nationalism in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era (Cornell UP), the book examines how white American Catholics worked to claim privileged and leading roles as model American citizens in the decades after the Civil War and before the Great Depression. Describing the book as “Superb,” Mark Noll (The University of Notre Dame) praises the book’s combination of “exceptionally deep archival research with wide reading in contemporary and historical accounts.” Gossen completed his PhD at the Pennsylvania State University in 2016. He is faculty at the Gwinnett School of Mathematics, Science, and Technology, the top-ranked public high school in Georgia and U.S. News & World Report’s ninth-best high school in the United States.
Dr. Michelle Armstrong-Partida, Associate Professor, was recently recognized for an article the she published in Past & Present with her co-author, Dr. Susan McDonough, Associate Professor of History at the University of Maryland Baltimore County. Titled “Singlewomen in the Late Medieval Mediterranean,” their piece won the article of the month prize from the Mediterranean Seminar. The article challenges prevailing ideas about the supposed distinct marital patterns among mediaeval women in Northern and Southern Europe, offering a persuasive, archivally-rich reinterpretation that the prize evaluator described as “rigorous and thought-provoking” as well as “theoretically sophisticated.” Read the abstract from the article below, along with the full comments from the award evaluation.
This article challenges a long-entrenched model of two discrete marital regimes in northern and southern Europe. Demographer John Hajnal argued in 1965 that a distinctive north-western European Marriage Pattern emerged post-1700 when a large population of unmarried men and women married in their early to late twenties and formed their own household rather than join a multi-generational household. The corollary to this argument is that women in southern Europe married young and universally, and thus rarely entered into domestic service. Medievalists have embraced and repeated this paradigm, shaping assumptions about the Mediterranean as less developed or ‘less European’ than the north and ignoring the experience of women enslaved throughout the region.
Notaries and judicial officials in medieval Barcelona, Valencia, Mallorca, Marseille, Palermo, Venice, Famagusta and Crete recognized singlewomen owning property, buying, selling and manumitting enslaved people, appointing procurators, committing crimes and making wills. We reintegrate the experiences of singlewomen, both enslaved and free, into the daily life of the medieval Mediterranean. Understanding how these women made community, survived economically and participated in the legal and notarial cultures of their cities reframes our understanding of women’s options outside marriage in the medieval past.
The Association for Caribbean Historians has awarded Dr. Adriana Chira’s book Patchwork Freedoms: Law, Slavery, and Race beyond Cuba’s Plantations (Cambridge UP, 2022) with its Elsa Goveia Book Prize. Named for renowned Caribbean historian Elsa Goveia (1925-80), the biennial prize recognizes scholarly excellence in the field of Caribbean history. Patchwork Freedoms was released as part of Cambridge’s Afro-Latin America series. The following citation about Patchwork Freedoms was read at the ACH annual meeting in June 2023:
In Patchwork Freedoms: Law, Slavery, and Race beyond Cuba’s Plantations (Cambridge University Press, 2022), Adriana Chira probes an extensive but little-known archive of legal documents to analyze how Afro-descendent rural cultivators negotiated liberty and landholding rights in nineteenth-century Santiago de Cuba. Her meticulous research demonstrates how protracted struggles against local legal institutions blurred the lines between enslavement and freedom. Chira argues that it was these gradual, lengthy, community-based processes, coupled with the flexibility of customary law, rather than innovations from above, that allowed these landholders to carve out spaces of greater autonomy. Patchwork Freedoms is an important counterpoint to scholarship that emphasize freedoms gained through Atlantic and circum-Caribbean mobility or formal processes of abolition and emancipation. It is essential reading for scholars of Atlantic world slavery, legal regimes, and agrarian societies.
Dr. Yanna Yannakakis, Associate Professor of History, recently published her second single-authored monograph, Since Time Immemorial: Native Custom and Law in Colonial Mexico, with Duke University Press. In the latest installment of our New Faculty Books series, Dr. Yannakakis offers a glimpse into the making of this book.
Books are produced over years if not decades. Give us a sense for the lifespan of this book, from initial idea to final edits.
Inspiration for this book came from different directions and over a long period of time. My interest in how Indigenous people in Latin America reconstituted their communities, social norms, and lifeways under Spanish colonial rule led me to graduate school, as did my engagement with Indigenous activists through the Central America solidarity movement. I began doctoral studies in History in the 1990’s when many Latin American nation-states reworked their constitutions to include official recognition of Indigenous customary law (norms rooted in longstanding cultural practices). At the time, this puzzled me since many of those same nation-states were simultaneously implementing neoliberal policies that undercut collective landholding and privatized public goods and resources. Those policies ran contrary to the interests of many Indigenous communities and peasant farmers.
Against this backdrop of events in the present, through my doctoral research, I encountered legal cases in which Indigenous communities in colonial Mexico haggled with one another over land, labor, and resources, justifying their claims in Spanish colonial courts through recourse to ancient custom. These cases raised questions for me about the relationship between colonial history and contemporary realities. Did the customs of the colonial past bear any relation to pre-Hispanic practices or to customary laws of the present? What exactly was Indigenous custom, what were its origins, and who did it serve in different historical moments? How were claims to Native customary law supported and justified? Why did Indigenous litigants argue with one another over custom? What were the long-term effects of customary claims to land, labor, and self-governance by Indigenous communities?
Over the years, starting in the late 1990’s, I kept a file of references to custom that I found in the colonial archives, even though Indigenous custom was not the focus of my dissertation or first book. Meanwhile, I finished my degree, got a job, earned tenure, and my research went in new directions. I was fascinated by translation in colonial legal settings, so I dove into Indigenous language materials produced by the Catholic Church and court records produced by Native authorities in Mexico’s Indigenous languages. I thought I would write a book about law, religion, and translation in cross-cultural context. But I kept circling back to my initial interests and discovered that much of my work on translation could be harnessed to a broader project on Indigenous custom and law, and in the end, this turned out to be true. So the lifespan of this book has been long, and the path of researching and writing it, jagged and circuitous. A number of fellowships provided space to research and write shorter pieces and develop my ideas. I wrote most of the book during the pandemic from May 2020-July 2021 when I had a sabbatical. For some reason, the moment of the pandemic catalyzed all of the work I had done along the way. It was not a straight line from initial idea to book, but I would not have changed the process one bit. All of the years of research on language, law, and translation enriched the final product.
What was the research process like?
So much of the research that nourished this book was collaborative. My interest in Indigenous languages and colonial translation led to a fruitful interdisciplinary collaboration with a socio-linguist and old friend, which resulted in several co-authored articles and chapters and a community-engaged public humanities project in Oaxaca (Mexico), my primary research site. I also worked collaboratively with colleagues at Emory’s Center for Digital Studies (ECDS) and with a talented and dedicated group of graduate research assistants to produce a digital humanities website on law, imperial space, and Indigenous social networks in colonial Mexico, a project that also nourished the book. Alongside my collaborative work, I continued to collect material from archives, libraries, and special collections in the United States, Europe, and Mexico. Serendipity played a role in my research process as well. A few years ago, the judicial archive in Oaxaca began to catalog and make available the notarial records for one of the regions that figures centrally in my book. This was a great boon to the project because it allowed me to research the workings of Indigenous custom at a very local and granular level. And as I discovered new sources, I returned to some older, well known sources — like Mesoamerican pictographic codices and maps – with fresh questions generated by the archives. In sum, my research process was like a spiral of discovery and re-discovery, of pushing beyond my disciplinary boundaries and returning again to the nuts and bolts of history. It also entailed working collaboratively with colleagues and most importantly, with Indigenous communities whose histories feature centrally in my work.
Are you partial to a particular chapter or section?
Each chapter represents a phase in my long and varied research trajectory, so it is hard to decide which I like best. I wrote the last three chapters (five, six, and seven) first, so in many ways they feel like the beating heart of the book. Those chapters draw from notarial and legal records produced in Oaxaca, some of which were written in Indigenous languages and others in Spanish. They treat the most fundamental aspects of customary law and practice in Indigenous communities: self-governance, land tenure, and labor. In each of these chapters, I feature legal cases that unfolded over a long period of time, which allows me to narrate local histories in a sustained way and bring them to life with detailed storytelling. Because of my longstanding connection to Oaxaca, those chapters feel most immediate to me and resonate with my understanding of the region. My interdisciplinary engagement comes to the fore most fully in chapter two, which focuses on language and translation, and chapter three, which engages the Codex Mendoza, one of the most iconic pictographic texts of Mexico’s early colonial period.
How does this project align with your broad research agenda?
In my research, I have worked to complicate overly simplistic understandings of colonial Indigenous histories, which were complex and not given to neat oppositions. Through my research, I have learned that in the context of colonial violence and exploitation, Indigenous individuals and communities developed strategies to protect and pursue varied interests and to secure rights to land and semi-autonomous self-governance. Some of those strategies can be characterized as resistance, others as negotiation, and others as learning to work within colonial systems and institutions, the most important and powerful of which were colonial law and Christianity. Native people adapted these institutions to their needs and objectives and wove them into the fabric of their forms of self-governance, social relations, and everyday lives. Custom – a European juridical category imported by Spanish administrators to the Americas – provides an ideal means through which to explore this process and analyze how Indigenous peoples made legal claims based on the practices of the past to generate new rights for the future.
Dr. Adriana Chira, Assistant Professor of History, published Patchwork Freedoms:Law, Slavery, and Race beyond Cuba’s Plantationswith Cambridge University Press in 2022. The Nineteenth Century Section of the Latin American Studies Association recently recognized Chira`s work with an honorable mention in the category of Premio Mejor Libro (Best Book Prize). Dr. Bianca Premo, Professor of History at Florida International University, described Chira`s work as a “powerful history of claims-making and political identity formation among enslaved and free people of African descent in a key region of the Atlantic world…Chira deftly upturns superficial narratives about the emancipatory nature of liberalism in the nineteenth century.” Chira is among three current or former Emory History Department members recognized by prizes in the 2023 LASA awards cycle.
Books are produced over years if not decades. Give us a sense for the lifespan of this book, from initial idea to final edits.
I found the seeds of this book project when I unexpectedly came across the diaries of an Emory alum, Yun Ch’i-ho ’1893, our first international student. The summer before I began graduate school, I lived with my parents in South Korea. I hoped to use this opportunity to travel and learn more about the country where I had not lived full-time for a decade. I didn’t plan on using that summer to work on any projects. But one day, I read an interesting newspaper article about a late-19th-century Korean reformer who had studied in the United States. Yun is a prominent figure in Korean history, and there was a lot of existing literature, especially in Korean, that explored his career as a reformer in the final years of the Chosun dynasty. But no scholar at the time had paid attention to what made him stand out to me—that he had studied in the American South at the height of Jim Crow (later, in 2014, Professor Andy Urban at Rutgers University would publish the first article focusing on Yun’s student days in the South based on his postdoctoral work with the Transforming Community Project at Emory). I followed the footnotes in existing studies of Yun and learned that a version of his diaries had been published by the National Institute of Korean History (Kuksa Pʻyŏnchʻan Wiwŏnhoe). So I ended up spending much of my summer in Korea reading his diaries, which he kept from 1883 to 1943. After I entered graduate school, I was able to use this source as an entry point to what eventually become the subject of my doctoral dissertation and my book: race, empire, and transpacific encounters between the US and East Asia from the late 19th century to World War II, an era that is often characterized by the American fear of the “Yellow Peril.”
Over the seven years I spent in graduate school, I had many opportunities to make sense of what I read in Yun’s diaries and find other historical figures who had different takes on some of the same problems with which he grappled. This is where coursework proved important. I was extremely lucky to take seminars with Yumi Moon on the problem of collaboration and empire in East Asia, Allyson Hobbs on 20th-century US history, and Vaughn Rasberry on African American literature in the twilight of Jim Crow. Estelle Freedman taught me how to do archival research and write an article-length paper. Shelley Fisher Fishkin did an independent reading course with me and allowed me to closely examine autobiographies, travelogues, and essays written by some of the figures who later ended up in the book.
Serving as a teaching assistant for an Asian American history course taught by my advisor, Gordon H. Chang, was a transformative experience. It enabled me to see, for the first time, that Asian American history was part of a broader history of transpacific relations between the United States and Asian countries. Previously, I had mistakenly thought of Asian American history simply as a history of immigrants navigating the US legal system and making a new home in different parts of the country. Thinking through various issues in Asian American history with my undergraduate students in sections convinced me that a project like mine could make contributions to the fields of Asian American history, immigration history, and political history, in addition to US-East Asia relations. After reading many thought-provoking books for orals, I decided to make the American West, especially California, a central part of my dissertation. I spent many years researching Japanese and Korean American communities in California, as well as the network of white politicians and policymakers who shaped the lives of these communities and US immigration and foreign policies towards East Asia.
Just as I was finishing my dissertation, I was extremely lucky to land the job I have at Emory. But before I started my job, and even before I finished my dissertation, I began to think about how to build on my dissertation to write a more ambitious book, partly because I had a lot of material that I had researched but had no time to incorporate into the dissertation. Thanks to the timely introductions made by two generous scholars in the fields of Asian American history and US political history, I got an opportunity to speak with my editor Susan Ferber at Oxford University Press at a conference, and our hour-long conversation gave me a great road map to making the project simultaneously more ambitious and more focused.
The title—which names the problem of empire’s allure that my book seeks to address from multiple perspectives, from that of US presidents, diplomats, politicians, missionaries, academics, and anti-immigration activists as well as that of American-educated Asian elites in Asia and Asian immigrant community leaders in the United States—came to me quite late, only as I was finishing the version of the manuscript that was sent out to peer reviewers. The title unexpectedly popped up in my head as I was answering a question posed by my students after class. They were curious as to how my time in the South Korean army (which, for better or worse, forced me to take two years off during graduate school) changed my perspective on the world. I explained that I only began to understand during this period that a violent, hierarchical system of governance maintains itself not simply through suppression of dissent. Crucial to its maintenance are various measures that successfully convince those at the bottom of the hierarchy that, as long as they conform to the norms of this system, they can secure their own self-interests within the system. In my opinion, the problem with empires (and other violent systems of hierarchy) isn’t just that they are repressive. They are attractive to both those who profit from the human hierarchy they maintain as well as to those who are trying to climb up the hierarchy. After I finished my mandatory military service, I reinterpreted all the material I had from my dissertation project to figure out why, despite the rich history of anti-colonial movements and anti-racist activism, empires proved so durable during the first half of the 20th century.
Teaching Emory students and living in Atlanta during the first years of the pandemic made me rethink a lot of my core arguments. Revising my dissertation into a book while teaching courses on Asian American history and US-Asian relations helped me place the individual stories constituting my dissertation within historical changes of a larger scale. Working on community events in response to various incidents of anti-Asian violence from 2020 to 2022 pushed me to think more critically about what’s at stake when I speak and write about some of the most painful aspects of history. I finished the final version of my manuscript last summer (copyediting and other parts of the production process occupied much of my attention in the fall), and the book was released, coincidentally, on March 17th, 2023, one day after the second anniversary of the Atlanta Spa Shootings.
What was the research process like?
After encountering Yun Chi’-ho’s diaries, I began to reconstruct the world he navigated, and it was during this process of historical reconstruction that I came to identify other major figures who appear in the book, including (but not limited to) American missionaries and diplomats who shaped US-Japan-Korea relations; American academics and anti-immigration activists who questioned and challenged the nature of this relationship; and Japanese American, Korean American, and African American intellectuals who navigated the same world that Yun encountered but from different positions of power. The archives of these figures were mostly located in California, New England, and Washington D.C., and I had the great fortune of being able to visit the South Korean archives whenever I went to visit my parents over the summer. At a critical juncture during the dissertation writing process, I got to visit Emory’s Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library to examine Yun Ch’i-ho and Warren Candler’s papers. Little did I know that, years later, I would be getting a job here and that the Rose Library would make the Yun papers available online (https://digital.library.emory.edu/catalog/3655dv42wz-cor) just months before the publication of my book!
Are you partial to a particular chapter or section?
Chapters three and four are special to me because I wrote those two first, and together they anchored the whole project as I developed the book for over a decade. They are also important in that they both exemplify how I address three different areas of historical inquiry that are often treated as separate topics: the lives of Asian immigrants, students, and exiles; the political debates that shaped US immigration policy; and international relations between the United States and Asian countries. It also shows how I ambitiously try to shed new light on topics that have been well covered in existing literature, including the March 1st Movement in Korea that animated a nationwide anti-colonial moment against the Japanese empire in 1919 and the institution of the Immigration Act of 1924 in the United States that barred Japanese immigrants as “aliens ineligible to citizenship.”
Chapter 3 explains why, despite the anti-Japanese immigration movements in the American West from 1905 and on, the United States government worked so hard to maintain a cordial inter-imperial relationship with Japan, especially regarding Korea. American policymakers, diplomats, and academics believed that Koreans were not capable of self-government and needed to be under Japan’s control, just like the Filipinos under US colonial rule and African Americans in the Jim Crow South. So did American missionaries and Woodrow Wilson, the “missionary president” who reshaped US foreign policy based on his faith. When Koreans attempted to reclaim their national independence by appealing to American missionaries and Wilson during the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, their strategy proved unsuccessful. While the United States continued to rule over Filipinos, Japan subdued the anticolonial movement in Korea and deployed stories of white-on-black violence from the United States to discourage Koreans from looking up to the United States as their savior.
Chapter 4 examines how, after World War I, a California nativist lobby led by V. S. McClatchy secured Japanese exclusion in the United States by reframing the immigration debates within an inter-imperial context. Upon returning from his tour of Asia, which included a stop in Korea during the March 1st Movement, McClatchy spread the fear that the Japanese could “colonize” the American West as they had done in places like Korea. His exclusionist lobby then convinced several key members of Congress to see Japan as an exclusionary empire, insisting that Japan was hypocritical to criticize the American desire for exclusion since Japan itself practiced immigration restriction at home, against laborers from Korea and China. Japan’s immigration restriction policy was fundamentally different from what the United States had instituted against various Asians (for example, the Chinese Exclusion Acts and the Immigration Act of 1917). But the existence of Japan’s restrictive immigration policy served as a convenient excuse for Congress to justify the abrogation of the Gentlemen’s Agreement (which had allowed Japan to restrict the outmigration of US-bound working-class immigrants, in exchange for preventing US Congress from passing an immigration law targeting Japanese immigrants as a whole) and the passage of the Immigration Act in 1924 (which allowed the United States to unilaterally prohibit Japanese immigration).
Together, these chapters reveal the intertwined and interdependent nature of “domestic” issues (such as white-on-black violence and anti-Asian immigration movements in the continental United States) and “foreign” issues (such as anti-colonial movements in Asia). By placing empire building and Asian exclusion at the center of its analysis, my book offers a new interpretation of the Progressive Era as well.
How does this project align with your broad research agenda?
This book is part of my larger intellectual journey to think about how ideas about race shape human inequality across the Pacific, and how “domestic” and “foreign” issues influence each other to produce policies that reproduce and reinvent human inequality, both across and within nation states. Everything I write about, in a sense, explores how our limited visions of “progress” have held back our world from becoming more equitable for all and less cruel toward our societies’ most vulnerable populations.
The book also showcases my long interest in intellectuals whose visions of social justice and human progress were animated by their exposure to the world’s different cultures and their own experiences abroad. There is a reason why I begin and end the book with W. E. B. Du Bois and Yun Ch’i-ho. The two had different experiences (the former mostly in the Atlantic World, the latter the Pacific), and the two held different perspectives on the problem of race and empire until World War II. But both approached the struggles that Koreans and African Americans faced as, in Du Bois’ famous phrase, “but a local phase of a global problem.” Probably because I grew up in two different countries, I am drawn to figures who are invested in thinking about problems at the local and national levels within the global context. My nascent second project will follow the lives of several intellectuals who have lived on both sides of the Pacific to understand how they sought to make a difference in their nations and communities by using international comparisons and forming transnational solidarities. I’ve published one article from this project, on the novelist Pearl S. Buck’s campaign to generate popular support for the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) during the Great Depression through provocative comparisons between Chinese and white American women (“America’s Gunpowder Women”: Pearl S. Buck and the Struggle for American Feminism, 1937–1941, Pacific Historical Review, 88, no. 2: 175–207.). And I’ve spent this spring working on an article/chapter on Korean Americans who worked as interpreters and advisors to the US military government occupying the southern half of Korea (1945-1948). As I learned through archival research in South Korea this spring, some of them became radicalized by their experiences, criticized the US military violence during the Korean War, and even collaborated with W. E. B. Du Bois on anti-war campaigns during the height of McCarthyism. I hope that, collectively, these individuals’ stories will help us think more critically about our conceptions of “progress” that continue to shape and reshape our world today.
Dr. Andrew G. Britt, a 2018 alum of the graduate program, has won the Antonio Candido Prize for Best Article in the Humanities from the Brazil Section of the Latin American Studies Association. Titled “Spatial Projects of Forgetting: Razing the Remedies Church and Museum to the Enslaved in São Paulo’s ‘Black Zone’, 1930s–1940s,” Britt’s article appeared in the November 2022 issue of the Journal of Latin American Studies. The piece investigates how anti-Black racism influenced the demolition of São Paulo’s former Church of the Remedies, the headquarters of Brazil’s Underground Railroad in the 1880s and, following formal abolition in 1888, a museum dedicated to the enslaved. The article forms part of Britt’s book manuscript, titled The Paradoxes of Ethnoracial Space in São Paulo, 1930s-1980s. Britt completed his graduate work under the advisement of Drs. Jeffrey Lesser and Thomas D. Rogers. He is currently Assistant Professor of History and Digital Humanities at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts. Britt is among three former or current Emory History Department members recognized by prizes in the 2023 LASA awards cycle. Read the abstract of the article below.
In the shadows of a Shinto torii (gateway) in São Paulo’s ‘Japanese’ neighbourhood rests the city’s first burial ground for enslaved Africans. Recently unearthed, the gravesite is one of the few visible remains of the Liberdade neighbourhood’s significance in São Paulo’s ‘Black zone’. This article excavates the history of the nearby Remedies church, the headquarters of Brazil’s Underground Railroad and a long-time museum to the enslaved. The 1942 demolition of the Remedies church, I argue, comprised part of a spatial project of forgetting centred on razing the city’s ‘Black zone’ and reproducing São Paulo as a non-Black, ethnically immigrant metropolis.
In 1968, Mississippi policemen fatally shot Kathy Ainsworth, a Ku Klux Klan bomber and pregnant schoolteacher, during a sting operation. Decades later, a Federal Bureau of Investigation sniper killed Vicki Weaver, an Idaho white supremacist mother, during a standoff. Both women became martyrs, and today transnational white supremacist communities revere them as antigovernment symbols. William Robert Billups tracks Ainsworth and Weaver across far-right collective memory to analyze the development of modern white supremacist ideologies and networks. He argues that discourses about persecuted white mothers helped spawn far-right antistatism. His study provides new insights into women’s roles in white supremacist movements and demonstrates how anxieties about white motherhood and procreation have fueled antigovernment extremism since the civil rights era.
