Alpata: a Journal of History

Alpata: A journal of history Volume XIII, Fall 2016 A publication of the University of Florida Managing Editor Brent Cornett Book Review Editor Madison Cates Editors Chelsey Hendry Luke Jeske Guest Editor Alec Carver Faculty Advisor Dr. Jack Davis Design Brent Cornett Underwiting Partner Kelly History Fund Contents Editorial Section on Revolutions in Print Revolutions in Print: An Introduction Brent Cornett...............................................5 Paper Crown and Bloody Sword: Emperor Faustin Soulouque in the Political Caricature of Honoré Daumier Chelsey Hendry............................................7 Soviet Speak?: Reforming and Spreading the Rus- sian Language in the Soviet Union Luke Jeske..................................................17 Featured Articles The Island of Affliction: Robben Island’s Leper Asylum at the Turn of the Twentieth Century Chelsey Hendry..........................................24 Westoxification: A Conceptual History Onur F. Muftugil........................................41 “The Blame and Shame of It”: Samuel Sewall’s Re- pentance Lauren Amos..............................................69 Rebels With a Cause: The Rebels, Raiders, Patriots, and Gators of Escambia High School Brad Woods................................................98 Book Reviews R.S. Deese. We Are Amphibians: Julian and Aldous Huxley on the Future of Our Species. Oakland: Uni- versity of California Press, 2015. Ryan Thompson.......................................119 Adrienne Monteith Petty. Standing Their Ground: Small Farmers in North Carolina Since the Civil War. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. Madison W. Cates....................................122 Lawrence Wright. In the New World: Growing Up With America, From the Sixties to the Eighties. New York: Vintage, 1987. Holland Hall............................................126 Carl A. Zimring. Clean and White: A History of En- vironmental Racism in the United States. New York University Press, 2015. Tim Blanton..............................................130 David La Vere. The Tuscarora War: Indians, Set- tlers, and the Fight for the Carolina Colonies. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013. Jessica Taylor..........................................133 A Note on the Contributors .............................136 Revolution in Print: An Introduction 5 Editorials Revolutions in Print : An Introduc- tion Brent Cornett The drastic decline in paper format newspapers and magazines ushers the discussion of whether there is a looming end for printed media. Newspapers may become only a nostalgic interest in the future but online media poses as a phoenix for the scope of disseminated information. The ex- pansion, and subsequent repressions, of online social media has influenced revolutions in many modern countries. The Egyptian revolution at Tahrir Square in 2011 was led by an online media pres- ence, between like minded individuals, discovering cultural dissent against long standing oppression. Similarly, Chelsey Hendry analyzes the mid- 1840s events leading to the Haitian revolution. Fo- cusing on the caricatures printed by Honore Daum- ier, popular French artist and political revolutionist. Hendry shows a greater depth to Daumier’s lithographs than their surface suggests. In the wake of Napoleon III’s rise to power, the presses were cen- sured for any political dissent. Hendry explores why the subject of Hatti became the focus of French political revolutionaries like Daumier and expectedly led to the Haitian revolution. Paper Crown Bloody Sword 6 Luke Jeske would be the first to refute that the reformation of the press is a maleficent act how- ever. Jeske reviews the world of the political press in a revolutionized Russia. In 1924, Stalin was at- tempting to unite one of the largest nations in world history but was unable to reach a largely illiterate populace. The effort of “Russification” mandated Russian printers to print in only one language, re- ducing the complexity of their printed language and unifying a new nation. Jeske reveals that the loss of many minor languages was the result of Stalin’s ef- forts but the future of Russian education was greater because of it. These two events in history reverberate in our modern society and can be seen in our modern media. The modern street art of Banksey and the countless memes circulating around the internet, can easily be related to the form of lithography pro- duced by French revolutionists living in a world, they also felt, was repressive. If anything, the pres- ence and pervasiveness of social media and internet news, has met Stalin’s dream of unifying a common people. Now the words of revolution, and also those of progress, can live free of their former paper bodies. 7 VOLUME XIII, FALL 2016 Paper Crown and Bloody Sword: Emperor Faustin Soulouque in the Political Caricature of Honoré Daumier Chelsey Hendry Four decades after the independence of the French colony of Saint Domingue, the new nation of Haiti had been ruled by a governor-general, three presidents, one king, and an emperor. In 1843, the twenty-five-year rule of President Jean-Pierre Boyer came to an abrupt end as he was forced into exile by a military coup enacted by Charles Rivière-Hérard. The next four years saw four new presidents, chos- en by the mulatto Boyerist ruling class, who were pushed out of power or died within a year of their presidency. After the death of Jean-Baptiste Riché in 1847, the ruling elite selected the unassuming Faustin-Élie Soulouque as the next president of the nation. Soulouque, formerly the captain of the Presi- dential Guard, was a former slave and career military officer with no political experience and seemed the perfect candidate to continue the puppet-regime controlled by the senate. Within a year of his ap- pointment to the office of president, Soulouque would have a large portion of his own senate and cabinet executed as well as any others who opposed Paper Crown Bloody Sword 8 his rule. The April 1848 Cabinet Purge would mark the beginning of a decade-long authoritarian rule. 1 Soulouque’s rise to power was concomitant to the popularization of political caricature as a means of personal expression and political dissent. Soulouque became known throughout Europe and the Americas as a despotic ruler and was the subject of a significant number of political cartoon caricatures during and after his reign. One of the most well-known and prolific caricaturists of nineteenth- century France, Honoré Daumier, made Soulouque the focus of over twenty of his lithographs. Fifteen years before Soulouque’s presidency began, Daum- ier was imprisoned by the French government for his depiction of King Louis-Philippe as Gargantua, from François Rabelais’s sixteenth-century tale Gargantua et Pantagruel. Gargantua, known for his insatiable appetite and gluttony, famously required the milk of 17,913 cows to feed him during his in- fancy. Drawing on the fictional character, Daum- ier’s caricature vulgarly displays an enormous Louis-Philippe seated on a chaise percée being fed coins provided by the emaciated masses, while dis- pensing papers labeled “prefecture,” “nomination of peers,” and “military commission” to the clamoring 1 A more thorough treatment of Soulouque’s rise to power can be found in John E. Baur, "Faustin Soulouque, Emperor of Haiti His Character and His Reign." The Americas 6, no. 2 (1949) 2 The equivalent of a “night stool.” A chair with an opening in the seat meant to be placed over a chamberpot. 9 VOLUME XIII, FALL 2016 ministers beneath his chair.23 After Daumier’s im- prisonment, his work showed a greater degree of subtlety when criticizing the French government. While on their face, Daumier’s caricatures of Sou- louque might have been racist criticisms of a dicta- torial ruler in a faraway country, closer scrutiny reveals that Daumier’s depictions of Soulouque serve a dual purpose as a means to bypass press censorship laws in France during the Second Empire; Daumier, eager to avoid another six-month prison sentence, opted to utilize Emperor Soulouque as a substitute for Emperor Napoleon III. Daumier’s first lithograph featuring Soulou- que, published in Le Charivari in June of 1850, displays the newly crowned Haitian Emperor dipping a European journalist into a boiling cauldron. The subtitle reads: “The Emperor Soulouque having heard that a European journalist criticized some pro- cedures of his administration, succeeded in catching the guilty fellow and plunged him into a bowl of boiling tar.” The subtitle also facetiously encour- ages the French government to enact the same meth- od for “suppressing different opinions.”4 The caricature seems to be a direct response to the seizure of a republican magazine, La Siècle’s, May 1850 issue by order of the president, then Louis-Napoleon Bo- 3 Elizabeth Childs, "Big Trouble: Daumier, Gargantua, and the Censorship of Political Caricature," Art Journal 51, no. 1 (1992): 26-37. 4 Honoré Daumier, “L'Empereur Soulouque ayant appris qu'un journaliste européen s'était permis de critiquer quelques uns des actes de son administration… “ Cartoon. In Le Charivari. (Paris : Charles Philipon, 1850) Paper Crown Bloody Sword 10 naparte. Louis-Napoleon was only one year away from enacting a military coup to establish himself as emperor, much as Soulouque has only a few years before, and taking on the name Emperor Napoleon III. Only months after his coup on February 17, 1852, Napoleon III enacted a set of strict laws con- cerning the press. Newspapers

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