About Tempus: Tempus: The Harvard College History Review is the History Department’s undergraduate journal. Tempus was founded by a pair of undergraduates in 1998 as a forum for original undergraduate historical work, through which students have the opportunity to learn from their peers. Tempus also sponsors history events and aims to promote an undergraduate community within the department. In the spring of 2009, Tempus became an online publication. Four years later, in the spring of 2013, Tempus returned to print. Visit us at http://hcs.harvard.edu/tempus to see our latest issue. The Editorial Board, Fall 2013: Anne Marie Creighton Editor-in-Chief Forrest Brown Deputy Editor-in-Chief Cody Dales Senior Business Editor Matthew Bewley Nathaniel Hay Anton Khodakov Harper Sutherland Julia Wang Honor Wilkinson Jacob Moscona-Skolnik Stefan Poltorzycki Martin Carlino* Alice Han* Santiago Pardo* Eli Lee* *Congratulations to our new members! Cover art by Honor Wilkinson, with thanks Acknowledgments: The editorial staff of Tempus would like to express its gratitude for the support of the Harvard History Department. Special thanks to Ryan Wilkinson for helping revise the papers in this issue. Tempus would also like to thank all those who submitted papers for consideration for the high quality of their work. Art and Craft of Modernity 1 TABLE OF CONTENTS A Note From the Editors ..................................................................................................i Anne Marie Creighton 1. ‘Country and State Gone Mad’? The 1968 Northampton Dump Dispute and the Rise of Federal and State Regulation .....................................................................................1 Rebecca Robbins 2. The Art and Craft of Modernity: Louis Comfort Tiffany in a New Light ...............12 Isaac Dayno 3. “The World of Today”: The Polish Pavilion At The 1939-40 World’s Fair .............22 Leah Schulson 4. Dressed in White: A Mysterious Rebellion at San Juan Ixcoy ..................................38 Sascha Berkovitch 5. Up in Smoke: Greco-Egyptian Encounters Through the Cigarette Industry (c. 1880- 1956) ..............................................................................................................................48 Amy Alemu 6. Disputing the Past: Reconciling Family History with Historical Scholarship ...........60 Eli Lee 7. Identity Crisis of the Semitic Museum .....................................................................62 Santiago Pardo 8. “We Are Our Story”: Schama’s The Story of the Jews ...................................................64 Alice Han 9. The Vitality of History .............................................................................................66 Martin Carlino 1 EDItoR’S Note Dear Reader, Welcome to the Fall 2013 Issue of Tempus, Volume XIV, Issue 2. Last semester, we received so many quality submissions that we published five papers, which may then have been our largest issue ever. This semester, it happened again. There was so much excel- lent undergraduate historical work that we could not choose any fewer than five papers to publish. This task could only be completed thanks to the tremendous efforts of our authors and the members of our board, all of whom have worked very hard this semester. The five papers here represent a diversity of subject, method, and location. Three papers examine the twentieth century United States and its modernity. Isaac’s paper, a beautifully written work of art history, uses that lens to examine the artwork of Louis Comfort Tiffany and the electrification of the United States. Leah’s essay examines the Polish-American experience in 1939 and 1940 as centered around Poland’s pavilion in the New York City World’s Fair. The Polish Pavilion, intended to symbolize the young country’s entry onto the modern world stage, opened mere days before the Soviet Army invaded Poland, an ocean away. Rebecca’s paper skillfully shows the role of activist organizations in the much-studied conflict between local and federal/state government in the United States of the late 1960s.We also have two excellent papers from other world regions. Amy’s essay discusses how the cigarette industry proved an important symbolic component of the Egyptian diaspora in early twentieth-century Egypt. As a student of Latin America myself, I am particularly pleased to welcome Sascha’s submission on a vil- lage in nineteenth-century Guatemala. The papers this year have some of the strongest and most interesting methodologies I have seen in my four years on Tempus. Amy and Isaac’s papers both powerfully use art to prove their point. Leah’s and Rebecca’s papers are based on a large quantity of insight- ful primary source research, above and beyond what is usual for undergraduate work. And Sascha took a very difficult subject, a Maya worker’s revolt about which there are few sources, and showed how Subaltern Studies and local history could add to the usual picture of the event. We have two features to present to you in print this semester, and two more may be found online because of space constraints. The two in print discuss family history and the history of the Harvard Semitic Museum, close to home. Online, we have a review of a documentary series on Jewish history and a reflection on what history means. As my time on Tempus ends, I hope you enjoy reading this nearly as much as I have enjoyed helping to create it. Anne Marie Creighton Editor-in-Chief Rebecca Robbins, “‘Country and State Gone Mad’? The Northampton Dump Dispute and 1 the Rise of Federal and State Environmental Regulation,” Tempus, 14.2 (Fall 2013), 1-11. ‘COUNTRY AND State GONE MAD’? THE 1968 NORTHAMPton DUMP DISPUTE AND THE RIse OF FEDERAL AND State ENVIRonmental RegUlatION REBECCA ROBBINS Northampton Mayor Wallace Puchalski was at his wit’s end. It was August 15, 1968, and the clock was ticking to find a solution to the city’s waste disposal crisis. In just six weeks, a state order banning the burning of trash at Northampton’s only dump site would go into effect—meaning that if city officials were unable to agree on a more ecologically friendly waste disposal method before the looming September 30 deadline, residents would be left without a place to dump their trash. As Puchalski’s efforts to find an alternate solution failed to gain local support, his frustrations finally boiled over at a city council meeting that night. In a performance that The Springfield Union deemed the city’s most heated in 80 years, Puchalski lashed out against his fellow council members, accusing them of “grandstanding” and telling another that his proposals were “idiotic.” But Puchalski saved his most vitriolic criticism for the state-level organizations and agencies—the state Department of Public Health, the state Department of Natural Resources, the Local Pioneer Valley Air Pollution Control District, and the Massachusetts Audubon Society— who he believed were improperly interfering in a municipal affair. These “outsiders,” Puchalski reportedly said, had the nerve to “come in here and tell us we can’t burn anymore.”1 Puchalski was officially a Democrat, but in practice he was a fiscal conservative, committed to keeping the tax rate stable and the budget balanced. More often than not, keeping costs down necessitated keeping the state out.2 The mayor was afraid that heavy- handed state officials and prodding environmentalists were wrenching away control of the city from him—and these fears were not unfounded. Across the country in the 1960s, pollution was showing its ugly colors, prompting a growing consensus among state and federal officials that land use must be more closely monitored—and that municipal 1 “A Night to Remember,” The Springfield Union, August 17, 1968, 17. 2 Associated Press, “Arruda Fall River Poll Victor; Lawler Upset In New Bedford Race,” Newport Daily News, November 8, 1961, 7; “‘Hamp’s Mayor Puchalski Says He’s Stepping Down,” The Springfield Union, February 5, 1969, 8. 2 Robbins governments were not up to the task. In this climate, state governments and federal agencies increasingly began taking up the municipality’s traditional role of regulating environmental matters. Pressured by conservationist groups, state and federal lawmakers started passing strict legislation to protect natural resources. In turn, state-level agencies set to work enforcing these new environmental protection laws with unprecedented vigor. Left without a say in the changing landscape were municipal officials who found themselves stripped of their traditional regulatory powers and burdened with new state- levied regulations. The rise of the federal and state-level regulation of environmental matters at the expense of municipalities is well documented in the historical literature. Without exception, these histories tell the story of increased environmental oversight in the 1960s as a narrative of powerful and determined state and federal players who swooped in to save the environment by correcting the mistakes of bumbling local officials. In his 1987 seminal text Beauty, Health, and Permanence: Environmental Politics in the United States, 1955-1985, historian Samuel P. Hays tracks the proliferation of federal statutes and the expansion of federal aid to state governments beginning in the 1930s—changes that he argues empowered the previously impotent state government to “reach farther than it had before” with environmental oversight.3 In 2010, environmental historian Adam Rome added to the discussion with The Bulldozer in the Countryside: Suburban