A Place in History - Virginia Wesleyan College

His primary teaching and research
specialty is American foreign relations and
foreign relations law, but he also teaches
a wide variety of classes on topics such
as globalization and empire, Old and New
South, the Civil War, the 19th century, maritime
history, and radicalism and violence in
American history. Originally from Illinois,
Margolies attended Hampshire College in
Massachusetts as an undergraduate and
thought he wanted to study film.
“Finding out that the U.S. had taken over the
Philippines in 1898, which I just never learned
growing up—I couldn’t really understand that
because it seemed very un-American. That’s
kind of why I became a historian. That piqued
my interest—that concept of the U.S. having
an empire and taking over another country.”
Most of all, though, Margolies seems to be
concerned with the intersections of things,
the crossroads where cultures and ideologies
collide, intermingle and evolve into something
new. More often than not, these intersections
are deeply tied to specific places—“hybrid,
malleable, and ephemeral places.”
A Maurice L. Mednick Memorial Fellowship
from the Virginia Foundation for Independent
Colleges gave Margolies an opportunity to
take a series of photographs documenting
the ways in which Latino migrants, primarily
Mexicans, have literally transformed the
landscape in many areas of the South,
specifically in rural and small town Virginia
and especially North Carolina.
These spaces, “the frayed edges of
modern America in roadsides, abandoned
downtowns, decaying strip malls, churches,
and community halls,” he writes, have been
visually redefined because of “an ongoing
discourse between peoples, cultures,
ideas, systems of power, expressions, and
sovereignties.” It’s an abstract but historically
grounded concept sometimes referred to as
“place making.”
“If you think about a space as either a
physical space or a social space or just kind
of a landscape,” Margolies says, “it gets
invested with meaning and becomes a place.
And there are different scales: local spaces,
regional spaces, an entire area of country,
region or neighborhood, a house, a building.
Some of it is smell, some of it is sound, some
of it is image, vibe, language, food, music.”
He recently taught a class at VWC that dealt
specifically with the idea of place making.
“The point of the class is to think about the
way global cultures have created meaningful
places within the United States. So, in Virginia
Beach, one of those might be the Buddhist
Temple that was in Pungo that’s now right
around the corner from Virginia Wesleyan.
Some of it is I was trying to give the students
the ability to read a place historically and
visually and orally, to think about things in
terms of history but also about the way that
history has shaped the spaces and the places
that people are in and how that has an effect
on historical change.”
In the summer of 2012, Margolies plans to
spend time traversing one of American’s most
storied wild places: the Appalachian Trail. Along
with a friend, he will complete the southern
half the 2,184-mile hike, from Front Royal to
Harper’s Ferry, Virginia. They began the hike at
Springer Mountain in Georgia in 2000.
He is currently working on two book
projects: one is a study of sustainability in
Texas-Mexican Conjunto music and the other
is a comparative global study of free zones,
foreign trade zones, special economic zones,
and exclusive economic zones since the 19th
century. He also edited a recently published
collection called A Companion to Harry S.
Truman (Wiley-Blackwell).
In the late 19th century the United States oversaw a great
increase in extraterritorial claims, boundary disputes,
extradition controversies, and transborder abduction and
interdiction. In this sweeping history of the underpinnings
of American empire, Daniel Margolies offers a new
frame of analysis for historians to understand how
novel assertions of legal spatiality and extraterritoriality
were deployed in U.S. foreign relations during an era of
increased national ambitions and global connectedness.
PHOTO: DANIEL S. MARGOLIES
Spaces of Law in American
Foreign Relations:
Extradition and
Extraterritoriality in the
Borderlands and Beyond,
1877–1898
(University of Georgia
Press, 2011)
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