Era Bell Thompson Local and Global: Windshield Reconnoiter in Driscoll, Burleigh County, North Dakota

A week or so ago (August 3, 2025), I pulled off a section of Interstate 94 in North Dakota, I-94 Exit 190, in eastern Burleigh County. I’ve been reading the two published works by Era Bell Thompson, American Daughter (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1946), and Africa: Land of My Fathers (Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc.: 1954).

Published in Post-WWII America, in a span of 8 years, these works take the reader from the Iowa to the Northern Plains to Chicago, and across the Atlantic Ocean to Thompson’s attempts at ancestral genesis locus. While reading the latter, last night Thompson was navigating 1950 (or thereabouts) Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and layers upon layers of colonization that arrived to the present.

At page 201, Thompson republished verbatim the slip of paper that prevented her from being able to freely see this section of East Africa:

“NOTICE TO PROHIBITED IMMIGRANT

…Take notice that I have decided that you are a prohibited immigrant on the grounds that your entry in Zanzibar is undesirable. You are hereby ordered to remain on board and to leave Zanzibar by the aircraft in which you arrived at Zanzibar.” 

Thompson says it was signed by an agent of the Principal Immigration Officer of Zanzibar. Reading this felt like similar wine, but different bottle. History resonates that way.

It also got me thinking about how, as the time barge continues pulling us into new iterations of the present, how historians might think of ways to communicate the past to present and future generations. And provide theoretical models in which to understand those infinite pasts. How does one, for example, teach the long nineteenth century to, say, a 4th or 8th grader? It can, at that last sentence, initially feel just completely overwhelming. I mean, so much happened: empires (British, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Netherlands) duking it out. Locals and globals on the ground, perhaps carrying the flag of their dwindling empire, or hoisting a new flag of this or that nation or nation state. And all this, trying to navigate the rubric of global capitalism, locals with traditional barter trade systems that remained relevant for generations upon generations, these same barter systems now swimming in similar waters as industrial global capitalism. 

But getting back to it: this is where sense of place really matters. A person should pick up Era Bell Thompson’s books. Read them. And then consider relocating themselves, in the present, as approximately close as they can safely and legally get to her global and local footprints. I’ll keep on that course.