• Features
  • Books
  • Teaching
  • Digital & Film
  • Blog
  • IHS
  • Texas
  • Spotlight
  • About

The past is never dead. It's not even past

Not Even Past

Of Merchants and Nature: Colonial Latin America Through Objects (No. 1)

(via Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana)


This new series features five online museum exhibits created by undergraduate and graduate students at the University of Texas at Austin for a class titled “Colonial Latin America Through Objects.” The class assumes that Latin America was never  a continent onto itself. The course also insists that objects document the nature of historical change in ways written archives alone cannot.

Diana Heredia López’s exhibit centers on the Florentine Codex, a twelve volume encyclopedia of Aztec knowledge compiled by Franciscan friars and dozens of Nahua scribes trained in the mid sixteenth century in in Latin and classical learning. These polyglot Indians surveyed the natural history of central Mexico using Pliny’s model. The latter described objects along the ways they were processed, consumed, and transformed. She focuses on Nahua agave, cotton, figs, and gourds and the fabrics and containers they engendered.

Recent Posts

  • Celebrating 200 Episodes of This Is Democracy: A Conversation about Conversations with Jeremi and Zachary Suri
  • NEP Faculty Feature – Dr. Daina Ramey Berry
  • Resources for Understanding and Celebrating Juneteenth
  • The Fight for Freedom and Justice: A Forum with Formerly Incarcerated Black Women Leading the Movement
  • Year in Review – Academic year 2021-2022
NOT EVEN PAST is produced by

The Department of History

The University of Texas at Austin

We are supported by the College of Liberal Arts
And our Readers

Donate
Contact

All content © 2010-present NOT EVEN PAST and the authors, unless otherwise noted

    Sign up to receive the monthly Not Even Past newsletter

    • Features
    • Books
    • Teaching
    • Digital & Film
    • Blog
    • IHS
    • Texas
    • Spotlight
    • About