Road Trip Through History: The Bob Bullock Texas State History Museum
My Own True Love and I recently spent a week in Austin, Texas. The reason for the visit was a family wedding. It was everything a wedding should be, full of love, creativity, and open-hearted hospitality. (Not to mention great food and dancing.) We ate, danced, mingled,* toasted the newlyweds, and danced some more
.
I'm sure it doesn't surprise you to hear that we left ourselves plenty of time for history nerd side trips.
Our first stop was the Bob Bullock Texas State History Museum: three beautifully designed floors of Texas history, from the arrival of the Spanish (1528) through the Apollo 11 moon landing (1969), with a few random events on either side of that time line. We planned to spend the morning and stayed most of the day.
The museum won my heart in the first few minutes with a single exhibit heading that upended the normal way we tell colonial history: "Coastal Indians Discover the Spanish". The rest of the museum wasn't quite so radical, though it kept our attention for five hours. The first floor concentrated on European settlement through Mexican independence. The second floor told the story of the Texas war of independence against Mexico and the Republic of Texas's subsequent admission to the United States. The third floor covered the period after the American Civil War. I think it's a fair statement that the history grew less nuanced with each floor. By the third floor, narrative disappeared altogether, replaced with a series of themes in the style I think of as "just one dang thing after another". **
If you already know a lot about Texas history, this probably isn't the museum for you. Personally, I was shocked to discover how little I know about the early history of the American West in general and Texas in particular, though I know more than I did ten days ago. Here are some of the historical bits that caught my imagination at the Texas State History Museum:
- It's no coincidence that New Orleans and San Antonio were founded the same year. The Spanish settled Texas as a buffer zone against those pesky French, who were moving west along the coast from the Mississippi.
- After gaining its independence in 1821, Mexico put systems in place to encourage immigration and settlement in the open plains of "Tejas". Foreigners poured in from Germany, France and the southern United States. (The land deals were so good that some Americans walked away from existing homesteads leaving signs on the door that said simply "GTT": Gone To Texas. Evidently text-speak isn't new.) By 1830, Anglos (loosely defined) outnumbered native Tejanos by as much as 10 to 1 in some parts of the region.
- Independent Mexico built its army with equipment purchased from Great Britain, which had a surplus of gear after the end of the Napoleonic Wars. Great Power supplies small/new country with arms. Hmm, sounds familiar.
- A great motto from the Women's Club of Waco, Texas: "If we rest, we rust." I'm tempted to paint that on the wall of my new office.
I would have liked more about native cultures in the regions prior to the arrival of the Spanish and about the forces that drove Europeans to Texas. But neither of those would have fit into the avowed mission of the museum: Texas state history.
Next stop: the LBJ Presidential Library
* Or at least tried to mingle. I'm better at dancing.
**In all fairness, the closer you get to the current day the harder it is to create a meaningful large scale narrative. There is too much to choose from and it's difficult to identify what items are truly meaningful.
Shin-Kickers From History: Gandhi’s March to the Sea
The American Revolution had the Boston Tea Party; the Indian independence movement had Gandhi's salt march.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, the British government in India had a heavily taxed monopoly on the production and sale of salt. It was illegal for anyone to make or sell salt. If a peasant who lived near the sea picked up a piece of natural salt, he could be arrested.
In 1930, Gandhi used the issue of the salt tax to turn non-violent protest against British rule into a mass movement. The Indian independence movement had long focused on British laws that concerned middle and upper class Indians, such as discrimination against Indians who applied for government jobs. Gandhi argued that the salt tax was an example of British misrule that affected all Indians.
Gandhi began his campaign against the salt tax on March 2 with a letter to Lord Irwin, the Viceroy of India, announcing his intention of breaking the salt laws. Ten days later he began a 240-mile march to the sea with seventy-eight followers--carefully chosen to represent a cross-section of India.
Crowds gathered along the route to cheer the marchers on. The international press followed them, reporting their progress each day to a watching world. More protestors joined the march each day. By the time Gandhi reached the shore, twenty-five days later, several thousands protestors marched with him.
Gandhi spent the night of April 5th in prayer with his followers. Early the next morning, he waded into the surf, then walked along the beach until he found a place where the evaporating water had left a thick crust of salt. He picked up a lump of natural salt and urged Indians to resist the tax by manufacturing their own salt.
People across India responded to the Mahatma's call for civil disobedience. Villagers all along India's coastline went to the beach to make salt. Volunteers from the nationalist movement openly sold illegal salt in the cities and distributed pamphlets telling people how to make salt. Over the course of a month, the police arrested tens of thousands of people for salt-related crimes and protests. True to Gandhi's principles, his followers did not resist arrest, even when the police beat them with clubs. Gandhi himself was arrested on May 4 and held without trial or sentence until January. News of the Mahatma's arrest led to more protests--and still more arrests.
With salt protests breaking out all over India, the British government was forced to negotiate with Gandhi. On March 5, 1931, Lord Irwin signed the Gandhi-Irwin pact, ending the salt protest. Indians were now allowed to collect salt for their own use. Gandhi and other political prisoners were released. More important, the British scheduled a conference in London to discuss changes in Britain's rule of India.
Gandhi's 240 mile march had brought India one step closer to independence.
Victorian People
Asa Briggs' Victorian People first crossed my path again when A. Scott Berg unexpectedly quoted Briggs in his new biography of Woodrow Wilson.* (Coming soon to a blog post near you.) Soon I was stumbling over it everywhere--a phenomenon I've commented on before. When I needed to check a quick fact about the Crimean war and wanted to avoid a special library run, I gave in and pulled Victorian People off the shelf. I was immediately sucked in. Quite frankly, the library trip would have been quicker.
In Victorian People, sub-titled A Reassessment of persons and themes, 1851-1867, Briggs sets out to understand what he describes as the "social balance" of the high Victorian period--a term that he immediately and appropriately qualifies. His work is in many ways a response to Lytton Strachey's iconoclastic Eminent Victorians. Strachey's work, published in 1918, is an act of rebellion against his immediate forebears. He indulges in a bit of hero-bashing: not only showing his selected "specimens" warts and all, but possibly making the warts a little bigger than warranted.** Like Strachey, Briggs considers a selection of "specimens": his own slate of eminent Victorians who made a contribution to the character of their time. Unlike Strachey, Briggs enjoys the distance of time. His Victorians are neither ridiculous nor veiled with period charm, but serious and interesting characters. Rather than choosing heroic figures like Florence Nightingale and General Gordon, Briggs considers social critics, chroniclers, reformers, and exemplars of social values. Men like John Bright, Samuel Smiles and Thomas Hughes.**
So far, Brigg's companion study, Victorian Cities has left me alone. I suspect it's just a matter of time.
* A salutary reminder that Wilson, linked irrevocably to World War I and an architect of the 20th century, was a child of the Victorian era. People very seldom fit neatly into one historical era. Even Victoria was a child of the Georgian period.
**Transforming the art of biography in the process. If you haven't read Eminent Victorians you've missed a sharp-penned treat.
***Yep, all men. Mr. Briggs, b. 1921, is a product of his time.