By Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra How can the life of an artisan who specialized in punchcutting and engraving help us shed light on “the idea of the Spanish Enlightenment”? Donahue-Wallace offers an illuminating perspective on the Enlightenment through the biography of an expert medal caster, Jerónimo Antonio Gil, whose career took him from provincial Zamora to Madrid […]
A Texas Historian’s Perspective on Mexican State Anticlericalism
By Madeleine Olson Housed in a miscellaneous folder in the Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection is an assortment of thirteen broadsides, letters, newspapers, and drafts of two articles by prominent Texas historian Herbert Gambrell (1898-1982). Gambrell had a long and prestigious academic career studying Texas history as a fixture at Southern Methodist University. These documents all […]
Dolores del Río: Beauty in Light and Shade, By Linda B. Hall (2013)
By Ann Twinam Linda Hall provides a compelling biography of one of the most famous and beautiful women of the twentieth century: actress Dolores del Río. She traces critical stages from del Río’s sheltered life as a daughter of a Mexican elite family to her early marriage and transition to Hollywood starlet in the 1920s, […]
Textbooks, Texas, and Discontent: The Fight against Inadequate Educational Resources
By Alejandra Garza and Maria Esther Hammack Controversies surrounding textbooks are nothing new, especially in Texas. For years, textbook selection in Texas has grabbed headlines and generated great discontent and debate. Textbooks adopted by the Texas State Board of Education (SBOE) are unusually important because they are also adopted for use in classrooms across the country. Whatever Texas adopts, students across […]
Acapulco-Manila: the Galleon, Asia and Latin America, 1565-1815
by Kristie Flannery A new exhibition at the Benson Latin American Collection explores the history of the Spanish galleons that sailed across the Pacific Ocean between New Spain (Mexico) and the Philippines almost every year for two and a half centuries. These ships were the ‘umbilical cord’ that sustained the Spanish colonization of the islands […]
A Narco History: How the United States and Mexico jointly created the Mexican Drug War, by Carmen Boullosa and Mike Wallace (2015)
The “war on drugs” originated in the late nineteenth century when the United States and Mexico began to combat the narcotics industry. By 1914, the Harrison Act criminalized non-medicinal use of opiates and cocaine in the United States.
Mexico-US Interactions
Based in a border state, the historians at UT Austin are in a good position to offer historical perspectives on the Mexican-American borderlands regions. Below we have compiled a selection of articles on this topic previously published on NEP.
History Museums: Museo Nacionál de Antropología, Mexico
My favorite history museum, and one of my favorite museums of any type, is the Museo Nacionál de Antropología in Mexico Cit
No Mere Shadows: Faces of Widowhood in Early Colonial Mexico, by Shirley Cushing Flint (2013)
What would Mexico City—or Tenochtitan as it was known to its indigenous population—have looked like to ten year old Doña Luisa Estrada, when she arrived with her parents in 1524, three years after it fell to Spain?
Sixteen Months in a Leaky Boat
Could Alvarenga really have drifted for 8000 miles from Mexico to the Ebon atoll in the Marshall Islands? If we look into the history of the great Pacific Ocean, we find several stories of survival that suggest Alvarenga is not telling the truth.