History

The ‘Forgotten War’ asks to be remembered

Rachel Sauer — Tue, 24 Jun 2025 19:25:31 +0000

The ‘Forgotten War’ asks to be remembered Rachel Sauer Tue, 06/24/2025 - 13:25

Cody DeBos

On the 75th anniversary of the United States entering the Korean War, CU Boulder war and morality scholar David Youkey discusses the cost of the ‘forgotten war’

Seventy-five years ago this month, on June 27, 1950, President Harry S. Truman ordered U.S. troops to the Korean Peninsula. North Korea had invaded the South just two days earlier, and with that decision, the United States entered a conflict that would claim millions of lives on its way to fading from the collective memory of the American public.

The Korean War, often called “The Forgotten War,” rarely features in Hollywood productions or history classrooms. But David Youkey, a CU Boulder associate teaching professor of philosophy who teaches the course War and Morality, believes it deserves a closer look.

“Being eclipsed by Vietnam is a major factor (in why the Korean war is often overlooked), but I’m not sure it’s the whole story,” he says.

David Youkey, a CU Boulder associate teaching professor of philosophy, studies applied ethics, including war and morality.

What makes a ‘just’ war?

In Youkey’s class, students examine centuries of moral and philosophical reasoning about when it is permissible to go to war and how wars should be conducted. One key concept, the just war theory, traces back to ancient philosophy, but its definitions were sharpened in the 20th century by the horrors of the world wars and the Geneva Conventions.

“Concerning justice of war, the idea is that only wars of defense are justified,” Youkey says, “and just war theory tends to define ‘defense’ very narrowly.”

This idea looks beyond the events preceding a conflict.

Youkey explains, “Within just war theory there is a basic distinction between justice of war, and justice in war. That is to say, the war itself might be just, but behaviors within the war might be unjust.”

Even a war that begins for morally sound reasons can turn morally questionable when boots—or bombs—hit the ground. Take the decision to drop atomic bombs on Japan at the end of World War II or the firebombing campaigns that killed hundreds of thousands of civilians in the preceding days. These actions may have helped end the war, specifically one the U.S. was “justly” involved in after Japanese attacks on Pearl Harbor, but they raise enduring moral questions.

“The most important idea is that civilians are off limits,” Youkey says. “There will be accidental civilian casualties in any war—that’s acknowledged. But civilians cannot be directly targeted, and the warring parties should do what they can to minimize civilian casualties.”

A morally gray conflict

So, how does the Korean War measure up under the framework of just war theory?

“I’d say, if we narrowly focus on South Korea defending itself from the North, that’s justified by just war theory. But the larger context is this Cold War element,” Youkey says.

North Korea’s invasion was a clear act of aggression, he notes. Therefore, South Korea’s response can be seen as just. But when it comes to U.S. intervention, the lines begin to blur. At the end of WWII, the Korean Peninsula was divided at the 38th parallel not by the Korean people, but by external powers—namely the United States and the Soviet Union.

“Were we in Korea to defend the universal human rights of the Korean people, or were we there because we didn’t like the ideologies of the Soviets and the Chinese?” Youkey asks. “Some of both, probably, but just war theory would only support the first.”

Then there’s the matter of how the Korean war was fought.

Soldiers of the 3rd Battalion, 34th Infantry Regiment, 35th Infantry Division take cover behind rocks to shield themselves from exploding mortar shells, near the Hantan River in central Korea. (Photo: Library of Congress)

“Apparently, McArthur gave the order to burn North Korea to the ground, and the same firebombing tactic used against Japan in World War II was imported to Korea. Again, from the point of view of just war theory, civilians are off limits,” Youkey says.

He adds, “It’s hard to understand how to interpret the scorched earth strategy used against North Korea except as an atrocity.”

What forgetting costs us

Youkey is less interested in labeling wars as “good” or “bad” than he is in encouraging critical moral reflection. Such introspection becomes even more imperative when a war fades from public memory.

“The U.S. military is currently, and has for a long time been, involved in conflicts all over the planet, and few civilians pay attention,” he says.

“How many military conflicts have we been involved with recently in Africa where the average American citizen has no idea? That’s not history. It’s stuff going on right now.”

That same forgetfulness—or perhaps willful ignorance, Youkey says—helps explain why the Korean War receives so little attention in our national memory despite its massive human and political costs. Remembering Korea only as a footnote to Vietnam or the Cold War limits our ability to engage with its moral complexity—and to question the long-term consequences of outside intervention.

“There are plenty of movies out there about the heroic deeds of U.S. troops in World War II. And there certainly were a lot of heroic deeds. But we also intentionally murdered hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians during the firebombings, a strategy we later exported to Korea and then to Vietnam,” Youkey says.

He argues that when wars are remembered selectively, often highlighting heroism while omitting brutality, our understanding of history becomes distorted.

Memory and maturity

If there is a lesson to draw from the Korean War 75 years later, reflecting on just war theory alone won’t teach it. Rather, Youkey says he hopes to see a collective cultivation of the moral maturity needed to seek peaceful solutions before conflict happens.

“I do believe there is such a thing as just war. And the world would be better off if more of its nations paid attention to just war theory,” he says. “But we really ought to be moving toward a world where diplomatic solutions are the focus.”

Realizing that vision requires a seismic moral shift in how Americans think about global conflict, he adds. Remembering wars like Korea—those living in shadows of more iconic battles—pushes us to look beyond easy right-versus-wrong debates. It reminds us that even wars waged with justification leave behind legacies of destruction.

As Youkey suggests, the burden of memory is not to glorify the past but to help us imagine a better future where we don’t repeat—or forget—our mistakes.

Did you enjoy this article? Subscribe to our newsletter. Passionate about philosophy? Show your support.

On the 75th anniversary of the United States entering the Korean War, CU Boulder war and morality scholar David Youkey discusses the cost of the ‘forgotten war.’

Traditional

White

Top image: Father Emil Kapaun (right) and Capt. Jerome A. Dolan (left), a medical officer, help an exhausted GI off a battlefield in Korea. (Photo: Catholic Diocese of Wichita)

What’s more hardcore than history?

Rachel Sauer — Wed, 18 Jun 2025 22:24:13 +0000

What’s more hardcore than history? Rachel Sauer Wed, 06/18/2025 - 16:24

CU Boulder alumnus Dan Carlin brings a love of history and a punk sensibility to a new season of “The Ampersand” as he discusses his hit podcast, Hardcore History

Listen to The Ampersand

There are a lot of places to experience punk: in the dim, smoky basement of Club 88 in Los Angeles in 1983, listening to a then-little-known band called NOFX, but also on the ancient battlefields of Britannia, where Briton warriors drew their swords against the invading Romans.

In the first scenario, Dan Carlin was actually there wearing his signature black T-shirt and Orioles cap. The battlefield? He visits it in his vivid imagination (still in a black T-shirt and ball cap)—drinking in the details and drawing a sensory-rich narrative from historical texts and records.

CU Boulder history graduate Dan Carlin brings a punk sensibility to his wildly popular podcast, Hardcore History.

Carlin, a �� history graduate, is something of a journalist of the past—a punk rock kid who became a punk rock adult who brings that counterculture ethos to Hardcore History, among the most popular podcasts in the United States with millions of downloads per episode.

He recently joined host Erika Randall, CU Boulder interim dean of undergraduate education and professor of dance, to kick off a new season of "The Ampersand,” the College of Arts and Sciences podcast. Randall joins guests in exploring stories about “ANDing” as a “full sensory verb” that describes experience and possibility.

Their conversation covered everything from creativity to punk rock to a dog named Mrs. Brown.

DAN CARLIN: So, what makes the past interesting is not so much that it's just, oh, here's a wild story from the past. It's that even though—what did Shakespeare say? Right, "All the world's a stage, and all the people merely players"—the people in the story are people just like we are.

And so, the ability to touch base with something that is otherwise impossible for us to relate to, right, the past is a foreign country, as the saying goes. They do things differently there. Trying to imagine living in a society where they perform human sacrifice, for example, is not possible for us. But you can start to realize that the people in the story are the same as we were.

And if you took a human infant out of the incubator at your local hospital, put them in a time machine, sent them back in the past to a time where people enjoyed visiting public executions, and that child was raised in that culture, they, too, would enjoy going to public executions. So, genetically speaking, we're the same people. And I think that's the end toward understanding the past. I mean, if people ever end up on Mars someday, we might not be able to imagine what it's like to be on Mars. But we can imagine what it's like to be people, even on Mars.

ERIKA RANDALL: I teach dance history, and it really, to me, is about the people and then the context, right, and the people who are next to the people, and how going to see a World's Fair was akin to having access to the world wide web because you suddenly got to be in a moment in time. In the 1900s, all these people came together, and then the forum changed.

So, to say that with just dates and facts but not to go, “Imagine that in this moment Loie Fuller is there with Marie Curie at the same event, running into each other. And look at what that did to dance. Look how technology and art, creativity and science came together because of that confluence of human people at an event.”

And that helps to get students excited versus, “This is the kind of piece that was made at this time on this date,” but to really get into the storytelling. And then the letters, the archives, the archival material that actually brings those humans to life, I find, oh, I want students to get as excited about that as I do. What do you think we do in this generation of people who are learning with so much information that they maybe don't read the bylines perhaps the way you and I did or dive into the works cited to get into the detail of, like, what can make me feel here?

CARLIN: There's a lot to unpack in that question because I think it touches upon a lot of things that I think about but don't have any answers for. I think this is self-evident and obvious, but we're involved in a mass giant human experiment right now. And anybody who's raising kids, even my kids are late teens, early 20s, so, I mean, but they're not really kids anymore.

Dan Carlin's "The End Is Always Near" explores some of the apocalyptic moments from the past as a way to frame the challenges of the future.

But this is all part of this generation, as I tell my oldest, that cropped up literally right after she was born. I mean, once the iPhone comes around, and we're walking around with—what did Elon Musk say? We're all cyborgs now, right? Once we enter that world, we firmly leave the analog world behind.

And what I mean by that is I try to explain to people that the entire history of humanity up until about the 21st century, maybe the very, very end of the 20th, that's an analog world, right? So, if you grew up, as I did, in a pre-computer world, you lived in the same world that the people in ancient Assyria lived in, right? I mean, they came home when the metaphorical streetlights went on, just like we did, right? No way to call mom, no tracking.

But the point is so, all of a sudden, now we enter into a world where we don't know how this plays out because there hasn't been enough time. What's more, unlike ancient times, where the pace of change was slow, so that even if there was some revolutionary new discovery, right, a brand new plow is invented that's going to change the entire world, you would probably have several hundred years to incorporate that new technology and see what that was going to do to society. Even movable print, which shook up the whole world, is nothing compared to what we have now because what we have now, if you said nothing's really going to change for another 50 years, then we could sit there and try to incorporate what's happened, right?

So, there's the ability to absorb and sort of make it a part of. In other words, society redirects around the inventions so that it then becomes the society plus those inventions. But what I think we're all aware of now is that the pace of change is so quick that by the time we would incorporate, oh, my gosh, what is the world plus Facebook like…

RANDALL: It's already moved on.

CARLIN: We're off of Facebook. Yes! And so, the ability to ever get to the absorption phase is gone. What that does for society is a big unknown.

So, the question is often brought up about things like the ability to think deeply or to contemplate. Or, I mean, do people get bored without their cell phone for two minutes? Does that rob us of the ability that ancient thinkers used to have to just sit out in the open air amongst the trees and think? Or as one person pointed out—and I think there's real benefit to this, too—the counterreaction to boredom, right, what boredom makes us do.

RANDALL: Yes.

CARLIN: To not be bored ends up being…

RANDALL: It sparks creativity. It actually lights us up.

CARLIN: Yes. The games you have to invent as a kid because there is no easy access to something else, right?

RANDALL: Yeah.

CARLIN: I don't know what that means for society. I tell my kids all the time that if you happen to be somebody who bucks that trend, it reminds you of the line, "In the world of the blind, the one-eyed man is king," right? I mean, if you can do math and nobody can do math anymore, that's an advantage, right? So, I always try to turn it into, well, if you're one of the few who reads, that's going to help you.

I think doing the show when you're doing five hours of history podcasting sometimes, and that there's an audience for that, helps you go, oh, well, good. There's still that out there. But when you have more than a billion people as your potential audience, getting a few million here or there that are interested in your little niche thing is not necessarily reflective of broad societal trends.

So, I don't know that our audience is representative, and I'm not sure I can draw many conclusions from that.

RANDALL: But it doesn't make you want to go get those other billion. It makes you—like, you don't want to have to necessarily adapt your path towards those folks who want the quick flip and quick hit.

Dan Carlin has hosted Hardcore History since 2006.

CARLIN: I wouldn't do that. No, I wouldn't do that for several reasons. One, there's people who have that lane—lots of people who have that. It’s an easier lane, to be honest. But also, because it's the same thing with why I'm following the Baltimore Orioles when I live in Los Angeles, and I've never been to Baltimore. I mean, this is—I was a punk rock person. I'm a Generation X person.

There's a whole bunch of things in my biography where you just go, oh, this guy is going to do it differently. My wife would say, you just have to be different, don't you? And, yeah, I think that's what it is. So, I don't want those other people. I kind of take pride that the audience invented a name for themselves. They call themselves the "hardcorps," C-O-R-P-S.

RANDALL: Oh, I love that.

CARLIN: This is how I always was as a kid, too. It's not that I'm different and bad. I'm different, and I'm going to take pride in that. And I want my several million, instead of the billions, because it's us, right? It's our own private "hardcorps" club.

RANDALL: In the basement.

CARLIN: We're doing our own thing. You can go enjoy your 30-second TikTok pieces of entertainment.

RANDALL: I can't imagine you in that ball cap and black T-shirt as a punk rock guy. Like, who were you listening to? Were you pierced? What are we talking about? Did the visual change, or were you a contrarian there, too, when you rolled up with your Orioles cap into the basement with people with mohawks?

CARLIN: Well—and I'm speaking to people who were there now in your audience who remember—punk is a caricature of what it was then. It's hard to describe what it was like in '79 or '80 or '81.

RANDALL: In L.A., right?

CARLIN: Yeah. I mean, listen, I remember John Doe, who was the lead singer of X. He had a great line. He said punk was wearing black jeans and having a normal haircut—what we would call a normal haircut today.

If you had short hair in 1978, people would yell out the car. You know, he said people would yell out the car and yell Devo at you because that was contrary. He said, “All I had was a normal American haircut, but that was a statement in 1978.”

So, we looked more normal. A lot of times, we had a lot of hair colors. But with me, if you saw me at CU, I didn't look… I had long hair at CU.

RANDALL: Were you punk? Were you punk at CU?

CARLIN: I was always punk.

Click the button below to hear the rest of the conversation.

Listen to The Ampersand

Did you enjoy this article? Subscribe to our newsletter. Passionate about history? Show your support.

CU Boulder alumnus Dan Carlin brings a love of history and a punk sensibility to a new season of “The Ampersand” as he discusses his hit podcast, Hardcore History.

Traditional

White

India and Pakistan once again step back from the brink

Rachel Sauer — Fri, 16 May 2025 16:44:25 +0000

India and Pakistan once again step back from the brink Rachel Sauer Fri, 05/16/2025 - 10:44

Rachel Sauer

CU Boulder historian Lucy Chester notes that the recent tensions between the two nations, incited by the April 22 terrorist attack in Kashmir, are the latest in an ongoing cycle

When a gunman opened fire April 22 on domestic tourists in Pahalgam, a scenic Himalayan hill station in Indian-administered Kashmir, killing 26 people, the attack ignited days of deadly drone attacks, airstrikes and shelling between India and Pakistan that escalated to a perilous brink last weekend.

A U.S.-brokered ceasefire Saturday evening diffused the mounting violence between the two nuclear-armed nations that increasingly seemed on a trajectory toward war. It was the latest in a string of escalations spanning many decades between India and Pakistan, which invariably led to the question: Why does this keep happening?

CU Boulder historian Lucy Chester notes that the recent conflict between India and Pakistan is part of a broader history that includes not only religion, but water, maps and territorial integrity.

Lucy Chester, an associate professor in the �� Department of History and the International Affairs Program, has studied the region and relations between the two nations for many years; her first book, Borders and Conflict in South Asia, explores the drawing of the boundary between India and Pakistan in 1947.

Despite President Donald Trump’s assertion that the origins of the conflict date back a thousand years, “that’s not the case,” Chester says. “I would say it’s mainly about Kashmir, with some additional issues at play this time around that changed the dynamics a bit.”

When more than a century of British colonial rule of India ended in August 1947, the Indian subcontinent was divided into Hindu-majority India and Muslim-majority Pakistan—a bloody, devastating event known as Partition. An estimated 15 million people were displaced and an estimated 1 to 2 million died as a result of violence, hunger, suicide or disease.

The first Indo-Pakistani war ignited two months after Partition, in October 1947, over the newly formed Pakistan’s fear that the Hindu maharaja of the princely state of Kashmir and Jammu would align with India. The Indo-Pakistani wars of 1965 and 1971 and the the Kargil War of 1999 followed, as well as other conflicts, standoffs and skirmishes.

Chester addressed these and other issues in a recent conversation with Colorado Arts and Sciences Magazine.

Question: These decades of conflict are often framed as Hindu-Muslim conflict; is that not the case?

Chester: There’s an older dynamic of Hindu-Muslim tension that definitely plays a role in this, but a significant aspect of the conflict over Kashmir is a conflict over water, which is really important. It has to do specifically with Kashmir’s geopolitical position and how a lot of the water that is important to India, that flows through India into Pakistan, originates in Kashmir.

It was a lot about popular pressure this time—Hindu nationalist pressure—on (Indian Prime Minister Narendra) Modi, which is a dynamic that he has very much contributed to. So, in that sense, it could be framed as Hindu-Muslim tension.

But it’s also about territorial integrity—that’s a phrase that kept coming up—and it’s a very loaded phrase that does go back to 1947 and the kinds of nations that India and Pakistan were conceived of in the 1940s and the kinds of national concerns they’ve developed in the years since.

Question: What role did Hindu nationalism, which has been very much in the news since Modi’s re-election last year, play in this recent conflict?

Chester: Hindu nationalism has been important in South Asia since the late 19th century, certainly, and it’s become more important since the 1930s. It’s one strand of the larger Indian nationalist movement—Indian nationalism was behind the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi in 1948. So, it’s always been there, but Modi, of course, has really ramped it up. For a while he distanced himself from the BJP (the Bharatiya Janata Party political party associated with Hindu nationalism), but he’s since made it very clear that he is very much in line with Hindu nationalist ideals and played on those symbols and those dynamics centered to what Hindu nationalist voters wanted.

Colonel Sofiya Qureshi addresses the media about Operation Sindoor at the National Media Centre in New Delhi May 7, 2025. (Photo: Government of India Ministry of Defence)

This whole idea of Hinduness gets back to the various ways both India and Pakistan are conceived of as nations. Hindutva (a political ideology justifying a Hindu hegemony in India) conceives India as a fundamentally Hindu nation, and that idea has gotten so much more reinforcement from Modi and the national government over last 10 years. So, part of what happened with this awful terrorist massacre two weeks ago is that it created a lot of pressure on Modi to respond in a way that previous Indian administrations haven’t felt they had to respond.

Question: In the recent conflict, India accused Pakistan of perpetrating the attack, which Pakistan denied, and framed the response as a defense of ‘Mother India.’ What does that mean?

Chester: Sumathi Ramaswamy explained it best in her book (The Goddess and the Nation: Mapping Mother India), where she talks about Mother India as this cartographed divine female figure who’s very much identified with the cartographic body of the nation. So, any attack on the territorial integrity (of India) is an attack on this woman, this mother figure.

The (recent) Indian Operation was called Operation Sindoor—sindoor is the red coloring that married Hindu woman put in the part of their hair—a call-out to this idea of Mother India and a call to the nation’s sons to be willing to die for her or to kill for her in this case.

In 1947, with the Partition of British India into India and Pakistan, the conception for many in India was a really tragic carving up of the body of the nation, and for a number of Hindu nationalists, that was a specifically female body. For a lot of people in India to this day, the 1947 Partition is this massive failure and an amputation of key elements of the national body. On the other side in Pakistan, for many it’s this great narrative of victory, but on the Indian side there’s this recurring existential fear that further parts of the country could be carved off this way. I think a big part of why conflict keeps happening is that both sides feel very strongly about defending the national territory because it was torn apart in such a violent way, and I think that fear is just most vividly present in Kashmir.

Question: How does the history of Kashmir in terms of British rule and Partition come into play?

Chester: In terms of British India, there were areas that were directly ruled and areas that were indirectly ruled. The indirectly ruled areas were princely ruled, and this is important because Kashmir was a princely state with a Hindu maharaja and a majority-Muslim population. With princely states, in theory they could decide for themselves whether to accede to India or Pakistan, and the maharaja of Kashmir, most would say he was angling for some kind of autonomy or independence and delayed the decision on whether to accede to India or Pakistan.

In October of 1947, militia groups—almost certainly supported by Pakistan—invaded Kashmir and the maharaja appealed to India for help. India airlifted troops in, because there was no all-weather road efficient for deploying troops, which gives you a sense for both how remote Kashmir was and parts of it still are, and also that there weren’t a lot of infrastructure connections.

So, the first Indo-Pakistan war was in 1947 to 1948, then a second war in 1965 and a third in 1971. This reinforces that fear of the country fragmenting and losing parts of the national body, because it was after the 1971 war that Bangladesh became independent (from Pakistan).

In 1949, India and Pakistan established a Ceasefire Line that became the Line of Control in 1972 with the Simla Agreement. The Line of Control is significant because it’s treated as an international boundary—not de jure (existing by law or officially recognized), but de facto. In 1972, officials came up with a textual description for the Line of Control and they define it up to NJ9842, which is the northernmost point on the map where it ends. The text of treaty says something like, “Proceed thence north to the glaciers.” This territory is so remote, so geopolitically useless, that no one at the time thought spending time to define where boundary line ran was important.

In the mid-1980s, both India and Pakistan sent troops to the Siachen Glacier, creating one of the highest more-or-less permanent military bases at about 22,000 feet. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

So, north of NJ9842 is this really undefined area—you’ve got Pakistan-controlled territory, India-controlled territory, China is right there, the Karakoram Pass is right there. What happened in the late 1970s, and possibly earlier even into the late 1960s, was Pakistan began issuing permits to international climbing expeditions, and in the early 1980s Indian troops discovered evidence of these international climbing expeditions. India realized that Pakistan had been exercising a certain form of administrative control over this undefined territory, and that’s what triggered the mid-1980s sending of troops from India and Pakistan to the Siachen Glacier. It includes what I think is the highest more-or-less permanent military base at something like 22,000 feet.

As a map geek, I find it really interesting that maps have contributed in pretty direct ways to these conflicts. One of the really tragic elements is that we know that on the Indian side, 97% of conflict casualties in that area are due to terrain and weather, and we can assume similar numbers on the Pakistani side. You’ve got these two countries fighting this battle, but they’re also fighting Mother Nature. In fact, the 1999 Kargil War happened because Pakistan tried to move some of its troops to a higher altitude where they could overlook an Indian road that supplied these high-altitude posts.

Question: What role did water play in the recent conflict?

Chester: All of the water that feeds the rivers that run downstream into western India and Pakistan originates in that region, which gives it real geopolitical value. One of the things that had me particularly concerned this time was India suspended the Indus Waters Treaty from 1960, which was a really landmark agreement governing the sharing of these waters. Some of these rivers flow through India before they get to Pakistan, and at this point India doesn’t have the infrastructure to turn off the water. But Pakistan has said if India starts building that infrastructure, they will consider it an act of war.

Question: Is there anything that makes you feel even slightly hopeful amid these ongoing tensions?

Chester: Over the last two weeks, both sides have been very carefully walking this fine line between being very visibly seen to acknowledge popular pressure on them to stand up strongly to their adversary, but also making very carefully planned choices that as far as possible avoided uncontrollable escalation. Everyone is keenly aware these are both nuclear-armed powers. I was very concerned that it escalated as much as it did on both sides, particularly in the use of airstrikes, but I think both sides were doing their best to leave themselves and their adversaries an off-ramp.

Part of the significance of (the Kargil War in) 1999 was both sides had just come out of the nuclear closet, so everyone was watching that conflict very closely, but both sides were able to walk back from edge. That gives us a lot of reason to hope and to believe that there are very professional people on both sides—in addition to people who are whipping up popular frenzy—who have a good sense for what the limits are, what signals they can send, and who are saying to the population, “We listen to you, we respect your grievances,” but they also know where the edge is and aren’t crossing it.

Did you enjoy this article? Subscribe to our newsletter. Passionate about history? Show your support.

CU Boulder historian Lucy Chester notes that the recent tensions between the two nations, incited by the April 22 terrorist attack in Kashmir, are the latest in an ongoing cycle.

Traditional

White

Historian reflects on lessons learned 50 years after Vietnam

Rachel Sauer — Tue, 06 May 2025 13:30:00 +0000

Historian reflects on lessons learned 50 years after Vietnam Rachel Sauer Tue, 05/06/2025 - 07:30

Doug McPherson

The April 30, 1975, fall of Saigon marked the end of the Vietnam War; CU Boulder scholar Vilja Hulden discusses the war, its beginnings and what we’ve learned

Of all that’s been said about the Vietnam War, perhaps it was this in 1964 from U.S. Sen. Wayne Morse that still stings, even today:

“I believe this resolution to be a historic mistake. I believe that within the next century, future generations will look with dismay and great disappointment upon a Congress which is now about to make such a historic mistake.”

Vilja Hulden, a CU Boulder teaching associate professor of history, notes that a crucial misconception about the Vietnam War is that the conflict was pro-Western South Vietnam against Communist North Vietnam.

Morse was speaking about the Senate’s vote to adopt a resolution that authorized President Lyndon B. Johnson to take "all necessary measures" to repel any armed attack against U.S. forces in Southeast Asia.

A few months later, on March 8, 1965, U.S. combat troops landed in Vietnam. By the end of the war, more than 58,200 U.S. soldiers would be dead. Some 25 years into the “next century,” dismay and great disappointment abound.

How could this happen—why did the United States enter the conflict?

“This is probably the most hotly debated question regarding the war—and there’s no simple answer,” says Vilja Hulden, a teaching associate professor in the Department of History at the ��, who teaches a class called The Vietnam War in U.S. Culture and Politics.

“The broad background is, of course, the competition with the Soviet Union over the allegiance of developing countries, but why the U.S. decided to go all out to back South Vietnam and eventually to send large numbers of U.S. troops is far from clear.”

Hulden’s theory: “That each decision was made in a sort of a fog of arrogance and wishful thinking; that is, ‘If we do this, then the problem will be off everyone's radar, and we won't have to do more.’ But every step took the U.S. further in, and once you have significant numbers of dead Americans, it’s hard to back out and say, ‘Oops, those soldiers didn’t really need to die. We made a mistake.’”

‘It’s Tuesday’

Still, in the 50 years since the fall of Saigon, which marked the end of the war, the United States has learned many lessons. One, of course, is that having more troops or superior technology doesn’t guarantee victory. Another: Congressional oversight is important. In 1973, Congress passed the War Powers Act to limit the president’s ability to commit U.S. forces without congressional approval. Hulden adds another key lesson: Avoid committing large numbers of American troops. Doing so, she says, will cause the American public to care about what happens.

A Vietnamese woman carries her sleeping son onboard the U.S.S. Hancock during Operation Frequent Wind, during which the U.S. military evacuated people from Saigon before it fell on April 30, 1975. (Photo: National Archives)

“The prime example of that lesson—besides moving to an all-volunteer military in 1973—is the first Gulf War in the early 1990s. Very deliberately, that war was fought using airpower almost exclusively and not … boots on the ground.”

One crucial misconception about Vietnam, Hulden says, is that the conflict was “pro-Western South Vietnam against Communist North Vietnam.” Instead, she says, it was a “complicated civil war” with many South Vietnamese backing the communist side and conducting guerrilla warfare in the south.

“Lots of South Vietnamese, and probably also lots of North Vietnamese, just wanted it to be over. Hence, the bombing of South Vietnam and the dropping of defoliants like Agent Orange to get rid of jungle cover the guerrillas found useful.”

Repercussions of the war for American veterans—even those without post-traumatic stress disorder (a term that Hulden notes many veterans hate because they figure a reaction to what they saw and did in Vietnam is not a disorder but a normal human response)—manifest in how they were affected by their experiences in many ways. “As one veteran put it, ‘The person who returns is not the same person who left.’”

Hulden adds that the repercussions in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia have been massive—most concretely in terms of birth defects and other problems related to Agent Orange exposure and continuing injuries from unexploded ordnance.

“A not-so-fun-fact: More bomb tonnage was dropped on Indochina during the Vietnam War than the U.S. Air Force dropped during the entirety of World War II.”

And finally, there was the repercussion of the American public losing trust in its government.

Hulden says that at the start of the war, people had “a large amount of trust in the government, but … when … the government was not being straight with the American people, the shock effect was much larger. As one of my students noted, ‘These days, if we’re told the government lied to us, our reaction tends to be a shrug. ‘It’s Tuesday,’ was how she put it. But that was not how people thought back then; they expected the government to be honest and reasonably competent.”

Did you enjoy this article? Subscribe to our newsletter. Passionate about history? Show your support.

The April 30, 1975, fall of Saigon marked the end of the Vietnam War; CU Boulder scholar Vilja Hulden discusses the war, its beginnings and what we’ve learned.

Traditional

White

Top image: A CIA employee helps Vietnamese evacuees into a helicopter on the U.S. embassy in Saigon on April 29, 1975, a day before the fall of Saigon. (Photo: Hubert van Es/UPI)

Patty Limerick and George Orwell merge to celebrate anniversaries

Rachel Sauer — Tue, 18 Mar 2025 15:17:07 +0000

Patty Limerick and George Orwell merge to celebrate anniversaries Rachel Sauer Tue, 03/18/2025 - 09:17

Daniel Long

The historian loaned her voice to the author in the summer of 2024 to commemorate her 40th year in Boulder and the 75th anniversary of 1984

It was a hot summer evening in June of 2024, in a barn on the east side of Boulder, Colorado. On a low stage blanketed with a small, thin rug, two empty chairs sat facing each other, and between them, tall and menacing against the black backdrop, stood a red banner with “1984” written on it.

A large gray eye gazed out upon the audience from the center of that banner, lidless and all-seeing, an icon of surveillance.

Big Brother, it seemed, was watching, and he likely disapproved of what he saw.

CU Boulder Professor Patty Limerick embodied 1984 author George Orwell in several public conversation, guided by the belief that “historians are people who try to reactivate the voices of the departed.”

His creator and harshest critic, George Orwell (born Eric Arthur Blair), had returned from the dead to discuss his life and work nearly 75 years after succumbing to tuberculosis at the age of 46 on Jan. 21, 1950, seven months following the publication of his most famous novel, 1984, the nightmare-vision that gave the world Room 101, memory holes, Newspeak and doublethink.

It would be the first of two public conversations he’d have over the summer, this one with TV show host Aaron Harber and the second with scholar, author and educator Clay Jenkinson.

Harber took the stage and faced the humble gathering of spectators. “I would like to introduce to you George Orwell,” he said.

Applause mounted in the sweltering barn as the author of Animal Farm, Road to Wigan Pier and numerous essays ambled down the aisle dividing the crowd and stepped up to meet Harber, dressed sharply but unseasonably in a jacket, trousers, tie and hat . . .

. . . and bearing a remarkable resemblance to �� history professor Patty Limerick.

Why channel Orwell?

“Tragedy . . . belonged to the ancient time, to a time when there was still privacy, love, and friendship, and when the members of a family stood by one another without needing to know the reason.”
—George Orwell, 1984

The year 2024 marked Limerick’s 40th in Boulder, which is another way of saying she moved there in 1984. She wanted to celebrate, but how?

“Then I thought, ‘Yes, 1984—when was that published?’ I thought I knew, but I didn't. And when I checked, it was the 75th anniversary.”

This convergence of round numbers gave Limerick an idea: Maybe she could observe both anniversaries together, with the same event, as only a historian would.

Her initial thought was to ask her friend Jenkinson to don Orwell’s persona while she interviewed him. Having impersonated many historical figures—Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt and J. Robert Oppenheimer, among others—for a variety of audiences, including Supreme Court justices and U.S. Congress, he seemed the natural choice.

But Jenkinson didn’t have sufficient time to prepare for the role, which left Limerick wondering: Could she do the impersonation herself?

She’d impersonated President Richard Nixon in her American History survey course several years prior, thinking this would prove more engaging than her usual lecture on the man. “The lecture on Richard Nixon was so useless because I, as a person of my age group, have a lot of feelings about Nixon,” Limerick says. “The lecture would be quite interesting if you were curious about my feelings about Nixon, but if you thought you might want to learn about Richard Nixon, you came to the wrong place.”

Even without the standard accoutrements—makeup, clothing, five o’clock shadow—Limerick’s impersonation of the 37th president did the trick, she says. Her students asked thoughtful questions, and she got the chance to put some flesh and sinew on the bones of her Nixonian knowledge.

“I certainly conveyed some moments in which Nixon was insufferably full of questionable convictions, but I also . . . conveyed his accomplishments,” such as “the lessening of tensions with China and the signing of crucial environmental laws,” she recalls. “I feel I got it right.”

So, why not impersonate Orwell? Why not lend him her voice as she had Nixon?

Why not indeed. After all, Limerick says, “historians are people who try to reactivate the voices of the departed.”

Guaranteed tyranny

“Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.”
—George Orwell, 1984

One of 1984’s most famous innovations is Newspeak, a language Orwell constructed to represent the nation-state of Oceania’s drive to control not just its citizens’ behavior but also what went on in their heads.

Patty Limerick (left), a CU Boulder historian, embodied George Orwell during a televised conversation with Aaron Harber. (Screen grab: PBS)

“The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc (English socialism), but to make all other modes of thought impossible,” Orwell says in his appendix to 1984, “The Principles of Newspeak.”

“It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought—that is, a thought diverging from the principles of Ingsoc—should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words.”

“Newspeak,” says Limerick, “is the foundation of guaranteed tyranny. You don’t let people have the words that they need. What became of justice? What became of freedom? What became of honor? They can’t ask those questions if they don’t have those words. People can’t resist if they don’t have the word ‘resist.’”

Orwell held strong views about the relationship between word and thought. He famously criticized nebulous prose in his essay “Politics and the English Language” by arguing that fuzzy writing both emerges from and leads to fuzzy thinking.

Decades later, not fully realizing her indebtedness to Orwell, Limerick made a similar case in her essay “Dancing with Professors,” though she approached the issue from an educational rather than a political angle. Yet both agreed that the stakes of clarity are high: freedom of thought for Orwell, the legitimacy and survival of academia for Limerick.

But what about some of the words that appear in the media these days—words like “mistruths” in place of “lies”? Would Orwell consider these examples of Newspeak?

Not necessarily, Limerick argues. For one thing, these words, wooly as they may be, add to the English language, creating new shades of meaning, while Newspeak feeds on subtraction.

“Do you know that Newspeak is the only language in the world whose vocabulary gets smaller every year?” the Newspeak enthusiast Syme asks of 1984’s protagonist, Winston Smith. “Every year fewer and fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a little smaller.”

For another thing, a word like “mistruth,” says Limerick, is often used not by the powerful to maintain their power but by media outlets that are trying to report on falsehoods without using incendiary words like “lie” or “liar.”

“If you're going to call the leader of the United States a liar repeatedly, and his supporters are not gentle and forgiving people, you’re going to spend much of your conscious life wondering how you’re going to cope with the consequences of your having said he’s lying.”

Newspeak does not deal in such subtleties, Limerick believes. Newspeak is where subtlety goes to die.

Two plus two equals five

“You are a slow learner, Winston,” said O’Brien gently.
“How can I help it?” (Winston) blubbered. “How can I help seeing what is in front of my eyes? Two and two are four.”
“Sometimes, Winston. Sometimes they are five. Sometimes they are three. Sometimes they are all of them at once. You must try harder. It is not easy to become sane.”
—George Orwell, 1984

Another of Orwell’s stickier inventions in 1984 is doublethink, or the capacity to believe two logically opposed things at once—things like war is peace, freedom is slavery and ignorance is strength.

“Doublethink is the power of tyrants to say contradictory things and not be held responsible for the disparities,” Limerick explains. “It is really bad, and really dangerous, and really perilous.”

Winston discovers how perilous when he’s interrogated by O’Brien, a character he assumes is a friend but who turns out to be a member of the Thought Police tasked with rooting out thought-criminals. After learning of Winston’s secret opposition to Ingsoc, O’Brien tortures him relentlessly to convert him back into doublethink, arguing that it “is impossible to see reality except by looking through the eyes of the Party.”

Yet Limerick points out that it is important not to mistake the direct contradictions of doublethink in 1984 with the paradoxes of real life.

Take historical figures, for example. The more one learns about them, says Limerick, the more complex they become, to the point that they may force students of history to hold seemingly contradictory thoughts when appraising them.

This happened to Limerick herself with William Stewart, senator of Nevada from 1865-75.

“Environmental activists and historians hold Stewart in contempt because he was the guy who wrote the 1872 mining law, which enshrines the notion that individuals can just go out and make mining claims and owe nothing in the way of revenue to the government,” she says.

Yet Stewart also proved crucial to getting the Fifteenth Amendment passed in 1870, which granted African American men the right to vote—an accomplishment Limerick urges everyone to admire.

Evidence sometimes demands conflicting feelings, Limerick says. Villains can do heroic things, and heroes can do villainous things, including Orwell. The great champion of free thought also expressed complicated, often inconsistent views about women, Jews and Catholicism. He wasn’t perfect, and any estimation that claimed he was would be flat. Posterity can both praise and blame him simultaneously—paradoxical, but true.

But that doesn’t mean two plus two will ever equal five.

Orwell’s lingering relevance

“We are the dead. Our only true life is in the future. We shall take part in it as handfuls of dust and splinters of bone. But how far away that future may be, there is no knowing.”
—George Orwell, 1984

The conversation between Jenkinson and Limerick’s Orwell, organized by the Vail Symposium, took place on Aug. 21, 2024, at the Donovan Pavilion in Vail. That night, the two engaged in an often funny and frequently tetchy back-and-forth about Orwell’s childhood, his views on socialism and his enduring legacy.

“Doublethink is the power of tyrants to say contradictory things and not be held responsible for the disparities. It is really bad, and really dangerous, and really perilous,” argues historian Patty Limerick.

When, about three-quarters of the way through the discussion, Jenkinson revealed he was wearing a 1984 T-shirt, Orwell stared at it, nonplussed, and asked, “My understanding from that shirt is that my name and that book are still recognizable?”

“Universally!” Jenkinson proclaimed. “One of the most recognizable books written in English and certainly one of the most recognizable books of the 20th century. And it has become extremely important again in the last dozen years or so because the world is having a strange flirtation with authoritarianism, and one of the ways that people have coped with this abroad and at home . . . is to go back to your book. And they find solace in it, they find warning in it, they find hope in it, and they find discouragement in it, but it is a key text as people try to sort our way through this extraordinarily difficult time in modern history.”

A long silence followed while Orwell gathered his thoughts.

“I’m having such mixed feelings,” he admitted to Jenkinson. “I hoped that what I wrote about (in 1984) would become mocked, humorous. ‘He thought these terrible things were going to happen. Nothing like that happened! Boy, did he get that wrong!’

“As an author, I am gratified knowing that (1984) went on and on,” he added. “(But) as a human being who welcomed a child (his adopted son Richard Blair) into the world, I’m not anything but shaken to believe that this book is still so relevant.”

Yet Orwell’s distress turned to horror when Jenkinson delivered the worst news of the night: the definition of the word “Orwellian.”

“When we say ‘Orwellian,’” Jenkinson said, “we mean surveillance, torture, discrimination, disappearances, propaganda, lies, permanent war, keeping the class system, keeping down the poor … ‘Orwellian’ is a dystopian word for us meaning a nightmare world.”

Orwell winced at this revelation. “The things I tried to prevent, the things I tried to warn people about, they associate with me?” he railed. “Change that word!”

Jenkinson held out his hands, welcoming Orwell’s ideas. “What would you prefer?”

Orwell offered two alternative definitions: one about intellectual openness and diversity, the other about the necessity of precise language.

But a third definition, one governed not by foreboding or criticism but by a zeal for life and all it contained, can be culled from the beginning of Orwell and Jenkinson’s talk.

“If you think . . . that I wrote 1984 when I knew I was dying, and knew that this would be my last book, and that the grimness of this book comes from the melancholy and despair of a dying man, you have that wrong,” Orwell said. “I lived with a commitment to being alive that never, never faltered.”

Perhaps the only thing comparable to Orwell’s commitment to being alive is Limerick’s commitment to keeping him alive—or, if not him, at least his memory. He won’t be memory-holed on her watch.

“I hate it so much that he died when he did, just a few months after 1984 came out, and that he was so sick and so frail while he was writing it,” she says. “I wanted to do anything I could to provide people today with an interlude where he was speaking.”

Did you enjoy this article? Subscribe to our newsletter. Passionate about history? Show your support.

The historian loaned her voice to the author in the summer of 2024 to commemorate her 40th year in Boulder and the 75th anniversary of '1984.'

Traditional

White

Top illustration: Márton Kapoli

Historian Henry Lovejoy wins $60,000 NEH fellowship

Rachel Sauer — Thu, 16 Jan 2025 00:41:10 +0000

Historian Henry Lovejoy wins $60,000 NEH fellowship Rachel Sauer Wed, 01/15/2025 - 17:41

NEH funding also was awarded for two other humanities projects at CU Boulder

�� Department of History Associate Professor Henry Lovejoy has won a $60,000 fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities to allow him to research and write a book about involuntary African indentured labor between 1800 and 1914.

Lovejoy’s research focuses on the political, economic and cultural history of Africa and the African Diaspora. He also has special expertise in digital humanities and is director of the Digital Slavery Research Lab, which focuses on developing, linking and archiving open-source data and multi-media related to the global phenomenon of slavery and human trafficking.

CU Boulder Department of History Associate Professor Henry Lovejoy has won a $60,000 NEH fellowship to research and write a book about involuntary African indentured labor between 1800 and 1914.

Additionally, Lovejoy spearheaded the creation and update of the website www.liberatedafricans.org, a living memorial to the more than 700,000 men, women and children who were “liberated” but not immediately freed in the British-led campaign to abolish African slave trafficking.

The term “Liberated Africans” coincides with a now-little-remembered part of history following the passage of the Slave Trade Act of 1807 by the United Kingdom’s Parliament, which prohibited the slave trade within the British Empire (although it did not abolish the practice of slavery until 1834).

Around the same time, other countries—including the United States, Portugal, Spain and the Netherlands—passed their own trafficking laws and operated squadrons of ships in the Atlantic and Indian oceans to interdict the slave trade.

However, in a cruel twist of fate, most of those “liberated” people weren’t actually freed—but were instead condemned as property, declared free under anti-slave trade legislation and then subjected to indentures lasting several years.

Lovejoy said the NEH fellowship is allowing him to take leave from work to write his book, focused on lax enforcement of anti-slavery laws, migratory patterns of African laborers, their enslavement and subsequent use as indentured laborers around the world from 1800 to 1914.

“I’m deeply grateful for being awarded this opportunity, as the NEH plays such a vital role in supporting the humanities by funding projects that foster our cultural understanding, historical awareness, and intellectual inquiry,” he said.

Meanwhile, Lovejoy said he is also writing a biography about Sarah Forbes Bonetta, a “liberated African” who was apprenticed by Queen Victoria, after conducting research in royal, national and local archives in England, Sierra Leone and Nigeria. Lovejoy also wrote the book Prieto: Yorùbá Kingship in Colonial Cuba During the Age of Revolutions, a biography of an enslaved African who rose through the ranks of Spain’s colonial military and eventually led a socio-religious institution at the root of an African-Cuban religion, commonly known as Santería.

CU Boulder Professor Patrick Greaney (left) won a $60,000 NEH fellowship to research and write a book about German manufacturer Braun; Wilma Doris Loayza (right), teaching assistant professor in the Latin American and Latinx Studies Center, along with co-project directors Joe Bryan, Leila Gomez and Ambrocio Gutierrez Lorenzo, won a two-year, $149,925 grant to develop course modules and educational resources about Quechua and Zapotec language and culture.

Lovejoy’s NEH fellowship was one of three NEH awards to CU Boulder faculty. Other awards granted were:

Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures Professor Patrick Greaney won a $60,000 fellowship to research and write a book about German manufacturer Braun, National Socialism and the creation of West German culture between1933-1975, focusing on Braun from the beginning of the Nazi regime through the 1970s in the Federal Republic of Germany. Greaney’s research focuses on literature, design and modern and contemporary art.

Wilma Doris Loayza, teaching assistant professor at the Latin American and Latinx Studies Center, and affiliated faculty of the Center for Native American and Indigenous Studies, along with co-project directors Joe Bryan, Leila Gomez and Ambrocio Gutierrez Lorenzo, won a two-year, $149,925 grant to develop course modules and educational resources about Quechua and Zapotec language and culture as part of efforts to expand and strengthen the Latin American Indigenous Languages and Cultures program.

The awards to CU Boulder faculty were part of $22.6 million in grants the NEH provided to 219 humanities projects across the country. The awards were announced Tuesday.

“It is my pleasure to announce NEH grant awards to support 219 exemplary projects that will foster discovery, education, and innovative research in the humanities,” said NEH Chair Shelly C. Lowe.

“This funding will strengthen our ability to preserve and share important stories from the past with future generations, and expand opportunities in communities, classrooms, and institutions to engage with the history, ideas, languages, and cultures that shape our world.”

Did you enjoy this article? Subscribe to our newsletter. Passionate about history? Show your support.

NEH funding also was awarded for two other humanities projects at CU Boulder.

Traditional

White

Historian still making a strong case for Black Majority

Rachel Sauer — Mon, 06 Jan 2025 22:53:30 +0000

Historian still making a strong case for Black Majority Rachel Sauer Mon, 01/06/2025 - 15:53

Bradley Worrell

CU Adjunct Professor Peter H. Wood’s seminal 1974 book on race, rice and rebellion in Colonial America recently celebrated its 50th anniversary with an updated version

If Peter H. Wood wants to stump some University of Colorado history majors about early American history, he’ll ask them which of the original 13 colonies was the wealthiest before the American Revolution and also had an African American majority at the time.

“Often, they will see it as a trick question. Some might guess New Jersey or New York or Connecticut, so most people have no idea of the correct answer, which is South Carolina,” says Wood, a former Rhodes Scholar and a Duke University emeritus professor. He came to the CU Boulder Department of History as an adjunct professor in 2012, when his wife, Distinguished Professor Emerita Elizabeth Fenn, joined the department.

Peter H. Wood has been an associate professor at CU Boulder for more than a dozen years, following a lengthy career teaching American history at Duke University.

South Carolina colonial history is a topic with which Wood is intimately familiar, having written the book Black Majority: Race, Rice and Rebellion in South Carolina, which was first published in 1974 and has been described as one of the most influential books on the history of the American South of the past 50 years. W. W. Norton published a 50th anniversary edition of the book in 2024.

Recently, Wood spoke with Colorado Arts and Sciences Magazine about how he first brought the story of colonial South Carolina to light, reflecting on how the book was received at the time and why this part of history remains relevant today. His responses have been lightly edited for style and condensed for clarity.

Question: How did you become aware of this story of colonial South Carolina, which was unfamiliar to many Americans in 1974 and perhaps still is today?

Wood: I knew when I was an undergraduate that I wanted to study early American history. After a two-year stint at Oxford in the mid-1960s, I came back to Harvard for graduate school.

At that time, the Civil Rights Movement was going on. I’d been very interested in those events, as most of my generation was, and I wanted to see how I could put together my interest in interracial problems with my interest in early American history.

What I found was that early American history was very New England-oriented in those days. Ivy League schools were cranking out people writing about the Puritans, and when they wrote about the South, they would mainly write about Virginia. They talked about Jefferson and Washington. South Carolina had hardly been explored at all. There are only 13 British mainland colonies, after all, so to find that one of them had scarcely been studied was exciting.

Specifically, I was motivated by the Detroit riot in 1967, watching it unfold on television in the summer of 1967. Roger Mudd, the old CBS reporter, was flying over Detroit in a helicopter the way he’d been flying over Vietnam. He was saying, ‘I don’t know what’s going on down there.’ I realized that he was supposed to be explaining it to us, but he didn’t really have a very good feel for it himself. No white reporters did.

And the very next morning I went into Widener Library at Harvard and started looking at colonial history books to see if any of them covered Black history in the very early period … and South Carolina was completely blank. So, that was what set me going.

Question: If there wasn’t any significant scholarship about South Carolina prior to the American Revolution, particularly about African Americans living there, how did you conduct research for your book?

Wood: I went to the South Carolina State Archives in Columbia, not knowing what I would be able to find. I understood that if I did find materials, they would be written by the white colonists … because enslaved African Americans were not allowed to read and write. There wasn’t going to be anybody who was African American keeping a diary.

But what I did find was that the records were abundant. That’s partly because these enslaved people were being treated as property; they had a financial value. So, when I would open a book, there would be nothing in the index under ‘Negroes’ (that was the word used in those days). But I would look through the book itself and there were all kinds of references to them. They just hadn’t been indexed, because they weren’t considered important.

At every turn, there was more material than I expected, and often dealing with significant issues. …

And when you’re researching early African American history, you learn to read those documents critically. The silver lining of that sort of difficult research is that it forces you to be interdisciplinary and to use any approach you can.

Black Majority by CU Associate Professor Peter H. Wood was updated for its 50th anniversary in 2024. First published in 1974, the book broke new ground in showing how important slaves were to the South Carolina economy in Colonial times.

So, I ended up using some linguistics and some medical history (about malaria) and especially some agricultural history. Most people back then—and most Americans still today—don’t realize that the key product in South Carolina was rice. I argued successfully and for the first time in this book that it seemed to have originated with the enslaved Africans. The gist of the book is that these people were not unskilled labor; they were skilled and knowledgeable labor, and it was a West African product (rice) that made South Carolina the richest of the 13 colonies.

Question: With regard to Black Majority, you made the statement, ‘Demography matters.’ What do you mean by that?

Wood: I realized early on that demography was a very radical tool in the sense that it obliges you, or allows you, to treat everybody equally. In other words, to be a good demographer, you have to count everybody: Men, women and children, Black and white, gay and straight—everybody counts equally. As a born egalitarian, that was appealing, especially in a period where there were lots of radical ideas bouncing around that I was a little leery of.

But demography seems very straightforward, as in: All I have to do is count people. So, the very title of the book, Black Majority, is a demographic statement. It’s not saying, ‘These people are good or bad’ or anything else. It’s just saying, ‘Here they are.’ It becomes what I call a Rorschach test, meaning it’s up to the reader as to what they want to make out of these basic facts. …

The book—especially in those days—was particularly exciting for young African Americans, because they’d been told they didn’t have any history, or that it was inaccessible.

Remember, this was even before Alex Haley had published Roots. I actually met Alex while he was working on his book, because I was one of the only people he could find who was interested in slavery before the American Revolution. Most of the people who were studying Black history—which was only a very small, emerging field in those days—were either studying modern-day Civil Rights activities and Jim Crow activities, or maybe the Civil War and antebellum cotton plantations.

Question: You initially undertook your research on this topic to write your PhD dissertation. At what point in the process did you think your findings could make for a good, informative book?

Wood: Very early on, I thought I wanted to write a book. I mean, I wanted to be able to publish something and I wanted to start at the beginning. … If I could go all the way back to 1670, when this colony began, and find records, and tell the story moving forward—instead of going backwards from the Civil Rights movement—I wanted to do that.

If I could write a book about that, then it would show lots of other people that they could write a book about Blacks in 18th-century Georgia or 19th-century Alabama, for example. All of those topics had seemed off limits at the time.

So, I was going to start at the beginning and move forward and see how far I had to go to get a book. I thought, ‘I’ll probably have to go up to 1820,’ but by the time I got to 1740, by the time I got through the Stono Rebellion—which was the largest rebellion in Colonial North America, in 1739, and it was unknown to people—I had enough for a book.

I had enough (material) for a dissertation so I could get my degree, but I also had enough for a book. And, luckily for me, it was just at the time when there was a lot of pressure on universities to create Black Studies programs, in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

That put a lot of pressure on New York publishers to find books about Black history. And so, Alfred Knopf in New York took the book and gave me a contract within two weeks. I was very lucky in that regard: That was a moment where it was just dawning on everybody that, ‘My goodness! There’s a huge area here where we have not shone a searchlight.’ …

I'll tell you a funny story. At Knopf, they said, ‘You should go talk to our publicity director,’ because they were excited about this book. I walked into her office, and she was this burly, blonde advertising woman. Her face just dropped. She said, ‘Oh, Dr. Wood, I thought you were Black!’ And then she brightened up. ‘That’s all right,’ she said. ‘I'll get you on the radio.’ (laughs)

Peter H. Wood, here exploring chimney remains, is revising his book Strange New Land: Africans in Colonial America, which will be published in an expanded edition this year.

So, that just illustrates, if I’d been Black, it would have been even better, but at that point, anything was grist for the mill, especially if it was opening up new territory in American history.

Question: That actually raises a question: Did you face any criticism as a white author writing about Black history, like author William Styron did?

Wood: That was the controversy about William Styron’s 1967 book, The Confessions of Nat Turner. Styron was a white Connecticut author, and quite well-informed and well-intended. He had been raised in Virginia himself, so he’d grown up with versions of this story.

He was not a historian. Still, he wanted to try to write about Nat Turner’s rebellion from Turner’s perspective. So, he had the freedom of a novelist, of trying to put himself inside Nat Turner’s head. That effort was troublesome to a lot of folks.

It bothered some Black folks because it was a white author trying to do that and showing a complicated version of things. It was also upsetting to some white folks. If they knew about Nat Turner at all, it was that he was some crazy madman who killed people, so the idea that you should try to get inside his head, that was upsetting to them.

But, in answer to your question, I was lucky in that … the critique that white people shouldn’t do Black history had not really taken hold. At that time (1974), very little was being written about African Americans in Colonial times … and so there was a desire for anything that could shine some light on the subject.

Question: Why do you think Black Majority has maintained its staying power over the years? And what changes were made for the 50th-anniversary edition that W. W. Norton published?

Wood: As I’ve said, it came along at the right time. Along with other works, it opened up a whole new area, and so early African American history is now a very active field.

When I did the revisions for this 50th-anniversary edition, I didn’t change it drastically, because it is a product of the early 1970s, of 50 years ago. I think the points I made then have held up pretty well. That’s why I’d say it has been influential in the academic community, but for the general public, not so much.

Question: Why do you think that is?

Wood: It’s very hard to change the mainstream narrative, especially in regard to our childhood education about early American history. From elementary school on, we hear about Jamestown and about the Puritans; we learn that colonists grew tobacco in Virginia, but almost nothing beyond that. …

I think that’s part of our failing over the last 50 years. The idea of having a national story that everyone can agree upon has fallen apart, and I wish we could knit it back together. It may be too little, too late. But if we if we can ever manage to knit it back together in a more thorough, honest way, African Americans in Colonial times will be one of the early chapters.

Twenty years ago, I worked on a very successful U.S. history textbook called Created Equal, where I wrote the first six chapters. Even then, our team was trying to tie all of American history together in a new and inclusive way—one that everyone could understand and share and discuss. … I hope that book, and Black Majority, is more relevant than ever.

Did you enjoy this article? Subscribe to our newsletter. Passionate about history? Show your support.

CU Adjunct Professor Peter H. Wood’s seminal 1974 book on race, rice and rebellion in Colonial America recently celebrated its 50th anniversary with an updated version.

Traditional

White

Top image: Remnants of rice fields along the Combahee River in South Carolina. (Photo: David Soliday/National Museum of African American History and Culture)

Remains from CU's Medical School still in Boulder

Anonymous — Fri, 25 Oct 2024 20:20:38 +0000

Remains from CU's Medical School still in Boulder Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 10/25/2024 - 14:20

Silvia Pettem

Cadavers used in anatomy classes were buried in unmarked lots in Columbia Cemetery

The University of Colorado Department of Medicine and Surgery opened in Boulder in 1883 with two students. By 1890, the medical school included more than a dozen students, two of them women. In order to graduate, each student was required to dissect an entire human body.

Records of these cadavers reveal a little-known cross section of life and death in Boulder County. The body parts were interred in unmarked lots, where they remain today, in Boulder's Columbia Cemetery.

Prior to the school's opening, Dr. Lumen M. Giffin moved to Boulder from New York to become professor of anatomy and physiology. In the early days, tuition for the three-year program was a one-time fee of $5 for in-state students and $10 for those from out of state. The courses included lectures, chemical laboratories and dissections.

CU Boulder alum Silvia Pettem is an acclaimed local historian and author of Separate Lives: Uncovering the Hidden Family of Victorian Professor Mary Rippon.

One of the bodies donated to Giffin's class was that of miner Frederick Nelson. He had sought refuge from a forest fire and suffocated in the shaft of the Bald Mountain Mine near the town of Sunset. His relatives were unknown, and no one claimed his remains.

Many of the deceased met similarly unusual or violent deaths. According to coroners' records, in 1909 Herman Schmidt's skull was crushed by a falling rock while he worked as a laborer on the construction of Barker Dam, below Nederland. Schmidt was a recent immigrant with no known family or friends.

No one knew anything about Michael Clifford at the time of his death except his name. He was murdered in a drunken brawl in the town of Marshall. The university also welcomed his body.

Few, if any, of the cadavers used in the classroom dissections were female until 1914, when Cyrus Deardoff donated the body of his 70-year-old wife, Ellen, who had been declared insane and starved herself.

Cyrus had, at one time, been a prominent gold miner in Ward. However, he died destitute a few months after Ellen's death. He saved the expense of a funeral and the stigma of being consigned to a pauper’s grave by agreeing in advance to give the university his body, as well.

The year was a busy one for the medical students. By then, CU had purchased its second cemetery lot, and bought a third one a couple years later.

Additional bodies came from people who died by suicide or from influenza or other infectious diseases. Some, like Thomas McCormick, died from an overdose of morphine in the county jail.

Then there was William Ryan, a farmer, who had suffered from chronic alcoholism and was found dead in bed. He had no family, but he did have a watch and chain and a horse and buggy. CU got those items, too.

In 1924, citing a lack of appropriate medical facilities, CU's medical school moved to Denver. In 2008, the school transformed itself again with a move to the Anschutz Medical Campus in Aurora.

A year before the school left Boulder, Giffin died of a stroke at age 72. At the time, he was the oldest physician in Boulder. He, too, was buried in Columbia Cemetery—intact and in his own grave with family members. But while Giffin is resting is peace, the other bodies in Columbia Cemetery are resting in pieces.

Top image: Luman M. Giffin (center) and his class in the CU Medical School during the late 1890s. (Photo: courtesy Carnegie Library for Local History, Boulder)

Silvia Pettem is a CU Boulder alum (1969) and is the author of Separate Lives: Uncovering the Hidden Family of Victorian Professor Mary Rippon. This column originally appeared in the Daily Camera. She can be reached at silviapettem.com.

Cadavers used in anatomy classes were buried in unmarked lots in Columbia Cemetery.

Traditional

White

Veteran sees Vietnam the country beyond the war

Anonymous — Fri, 25 Oct 2024 17:30:37 +0000

Veteran sees Vietnam the country beyond the war Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 10/25/2024 - 11:30

Rachel Sauer

CU Boulder alum and regent emeritus Peter Steinhauer shares Vietnam experiences with students, to be featured in the in-progress documentary Welcome Home Daddy

Peter Steinhauer joined the U.S. Navy because that’s what young men of his generation did.

“I was brought up to finish high school, go to college, join a fraternity, get married, spend two years in the military, then work the rest of my life,” he explains. “Of everybody I went to high school with in Golden, most of the boys went in (the military).”

So, after graduating the �� in 1958—where he met his wife, Juli, a voice major—he attended dental school in Missouri, then completed a face and jaw surgical residency, finishing in 1965. And then he joined the Navy.

Peter Steinhauer (left) and Steven Dike (right) after Steinhauer's presentation during the Oct. 18 class of The Vietnam Wars, which Dike teaches.

He had two young daughters and a son on the way, and he learned two weeks after being stationed at Camp Pendleton that he’d be shipping to Vietnam, where he served from 1966-67.

“How many of your grandparents served in Vietnam?” Steinhauer asks the students seated in desks rimming the perimeter of the classroom, and several raise their hands. Steinhauer has given this presentation to this class, The Vietnam Wars, for enough years that it’s now the grandchildren of his fellow veterans with whom he shares his experiences of war.

Even though Steinhauer had given the presentation before, the Oct. 18 session of The Vietnam Wars, for students in the Honors Residential Academic Program (HRAP), was different: It was filmed as part of the in-progress documentary Welcome Home Daddy, which chronicles Steinhauer’s experiences during and after the war and his deep love for the country and people of Vietnam.

“Pete told me once that he dreams about Vietnam all the time, but they’re not nightmares,” says Steven Dike, associate director of the HRAP and assistant teaching professor of history, who teaches The Vietnam Wars. “He’s spent his life as a healer and an educator, and I think one of the values (for students) is hearing how his experiences in the war informed his life after it.”

‘An old guy there’

Steinhauer, a retired oral surgeon and CU regent emeritus, served a yearlong tour with the 3rd Marine Division, 3rd Medical Battalion in Da Nang, Vietnam. Lt. Cmdr. Steinhauer was a buzz-cut 30-year-old—“an old guy there,” he tells the students—with a Kodak Instamatic camera.

He provided dental care and oral surgery to U.S. servicemen and servicewomen as well as Vietnamese people, and he took pictures—of the rice paddies and jungles, of the people he met, of the nameless details of daily life that were like nothing he’d experienced before.

“This was the crapper,” Steinhauer tells the students, explaining a photo showing a square, metal-sided building with a flat, angled roof. “There were four seats in there and no dividers, so you were just sitting with the guy next to you.”

When the electricity went out, he and his colleagues worked outside. When helicopters came in with the wounded, it was all hands on deck.

Left image: Pvt. Raymond Escalera holds the since-deactivated grenade that Peter Steinhauer (to Escalera's left) removed live from his neck, in a photo that made the front page of The Seattle Times; right image: Peter and Juli Steinhauer (on right) visit Raymond Escalera (white shirt) and his wife in California.

“They’d be brought off the helicopter and taken to the triage area,” Steinhauer says, the photo at the front of the classroom showing the organized chaos of it. “A lot of life-and-death decisions were made there, catheters and IVs were started there. The triage area is a wonderful part of military medicine.”

Steinhauer also documented the casualties, whose starkness the intervening years have done nothing to dim. One of his responsibilities was performing dental identification of bodies, “one of the hardest things I did,” he says.

Then there was Dec. 21, 1966: “A guy came in—it was pouring rain, and we had mass casualties—and he came in with trouble breathing,” Steinhauer recalls. “We discovered he had an unexploded M79 rifle grenade in his neck. We got it out, but a corpsman said, ‘Doc, you better be careful with that, it can go boom.’”

Not only did Marine Pvt. Raymond Escalera survive a live grenade in his neck, but about 12 years ago Steinhauer tracked him down and visited him at his home in Pico Rivera, California. “We call four or five times a year now,” Steinhauer says.

Building relationships

Steinhauer and his colleagues also treated Vietnamese civilians. “One of the most fun parts of my year there was being able to perform 60 or 70 cleft lip surgeries,” Steinhauer tells the students, showing before and after photos.

Peter Steinhauer (left) and medical colleagues in Vietnam, with whom he worked during many of his 26 visits to Vietnam since the end of the war.

He then shows them a photo of the so-called “McNamara Line” between North and South Vietnam—a defoliated slash of brown and gray that looks like a wound that will never heal.

Healing, however, has happened, and continues to. “I was blessed by the ability to go back to a place where so many horrible things happened during the war and make something beautiful of it,” Steinhauer says.

In the years since he returned from war—and met his almost-one-year-old son for the first time—Steinhauer has gone back to Vietnam more than two dozen times. Acknowledging that his experience is not all veterans’ experience, he says he has been blessed to learn about Vietnam as a country and not just a war.

“How veterans dealt with the war, how they’re still coming to terms with it as we’re getting further away from it, are really important issues,” says Mark Gould, director and a producer of Welcome Home Daddy. “It’s not just a war that we quote-unquote lost, but it was the most confusing war the United States has ever fought. We never had closure, but that didn’t stop Dr. Steinhauer from reaching out. Our tagline is ‘Governments wage war, people make peace,’ and that’s what he stands for.”

The idea for the documentary originated with Steinhauer’s daughter, Terrianne, who grew up not only hearing his stories but visiting the country with him and her mom. She and Gould served in the CalArts alumni association together, and several years ago she pitched him the idea for Welcome Home Daddy, which they are making in partnership with producer Rick Hocutt.

Peter Steinhauer with his children upon his return home after serving in the Vietnam War; the "Welcome home daddy" message inspired the title of the documentary currently being made about Steinhauer's experiences during and after the war.

The documentary will weave Steinhauer’s stories with those of other veterans and highlight the relationships that Steinhauer has built over decades—through partnering with medical professionals in Vietnam and volunteering his services there, through supporting Vietnamese students who study in the United States, through facilitating education and in-person visits between U.S. and Vietnamese doctors and nurses. At the same time, Juli Steinhauer has grown relationships with musicians and other artists in Vietnam. Both parents passed a love for Vietnam to their children.

An ugly war, a beautiful country

The stories of Vietnam could fill volumes. In fact, Steinhauer attended a 10-week course called Tell Your Story: A Writing Workshop for Those Who Have Served in the Military in 2008—offered through the Program for Writing and Rhetoric and the Division of Continuing Education—and wrote Remembering Vietnam 1966-67, a collection of his memories and photographs of the war that he published privately and gives to family, friends and colleagues.

�� 10 years ago, Steinhauer asked to audit The Vietnam Wars—“wars” is plural because “we can’t understand the American war without understanding the French war,” Dike explains—in what was only the second time Dike had taught it.

“So, I was a little nervous,” Dike remembers with a laugh, “but he comes in and is just the nicest guy in the world. I asked if he’d be interested in sharing his experiences, and he’s given his presentation during the semester every class since.”

In the Oct. 18 class, Steinhauer shares stories of bamboo vipers in the dental clinic, of perforating vs. penetrating wounds, of meeting baseball legends Brooks Robinson and Stan Musial when they visited the troops, of a since-faded Vietnamese tradition of women dyeing their teeth black as a symbol of beauty.

“It was an ugly war, but it’s a beautiful country,” Steinhauer says. “Just a beautiful country.”

Did you enjoy this article? Subscribe to our newsletter. Passionate about history? Show your support.

CU Boulder alum and regent emeritus Peter Steinhauer shares Vietnam experiences with students, to be featured in the in-progress documentary Welcome Home Daddy.

Traditional

White

William Wei is again named Colorado’s state historian

Anonymous — Wed, 23 Oct 2024 14:43:11 +0000

William Wei is again named Colorado’s state historian Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 10/23/2024 - 08:43

Adamari Ruelas

CU Boulder historian serving second term in position, focusing on an accurate and comprehensive portrayal of Colorado’s history

William Wei, a �� professor of history and faculty affliate in the Center for Asian Studies, has been named state historian by History Colorado, his second time receiving the honor.

William Wei, CU Boulder professor of history and Colorado state historian, is the author of Asians in Colorado: A History of Persecution and Perseverance in the Centennial State.

Wei was one of the five founders of History Colorado’s State Historian’s Council, which “reaches across the state to aid in the interpretation of the history of Colorado and the West, providing opportunities to expand the understanding of the historical perspectives, cultures and places of Colorado.”

The State Historian’s Council was founded in 2018 and comprises five interdisciplinary scholars who provide complementary perspectives and rotate the state historian position every year on Aug.1, Colorado Day. Wei’s first term as state historian was from 2019-2020.

"It is a great honor to be appointed the Colorado state historian again,” Wei says. “I remain committed to ensuring that Coloradans receive an accurate and comprehensive portrayal of the Centennial State's history. This commitment naturally extends to Colorado's marginalized communities, whose stories have often been neglected, overlooked and forgotten.”

Wei was named the 2022 Asian American Hero of Colorado and is the author of Asians in Colorado: A History of Persecution and Perseverance in the Centennial State. He also was a founding editor-in-chief of History Colorado’s Colorado Encyclopedia and a lead advisor for the organization’s Zoom In: The Centennial State in 100 Objects.

“William brings a broad global perspective alongside an encyclopedic interest in Colorado to the role of State Historian,” notes Jason Hanson, chief creative officer and director of interpretation and research at History Colorado, in announcing Wei’s second term. “He is passionate about how historical perspective can help us see the present more clearly and in ways that can truly improve people’s lives. I am excited for him to share his knowledge and passion with the people of Colorado as the state historian once again.”

Did you enjoy this article? Subscribe to our newsletter. Passionate about history? Show your support.

CU Boulder historian serving second term in position, focusing on an accurate and comprehensive portrayal of Colorado’s history.

Traditional

White

History

The ‘Forgotten War’ asks to be remembered

Related Articles

What’s more hardcore than history?

Related Articles

India and Pakistan once again step back from the brink

Related Articles

Historian reflects on lessons learned 50 years after Vietnam

Related Articles

Patty Limerick and George Orwell merge to celebrate anniversaries

Related Articles

Historian Henry Lovejoy wins $60,000 NEH fellowship

Related Articles

Historian still making a strong case for Black Majority

Related Articles

Remains from CU's Medical School still in Boulder

Related Articles

Veteran sees Vietnam the country beyond the war

Related Articles

William Wei is again named Colorado’s state historian

Related Articles