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

Not Even Past

NEP Author Spotlight – Alina Scott

September 1, 2020

NEP Author Spotlight - Alina Scott

The success of Not Even Past is made possible by a remarkable group of writers, both graduate students and faculty. Not Even Past Author Spotlights are designed to celebrate our most prolific authors by bringing all of their published content across the magazine together on a single page. The focus is especially on work published by UT graduate students. In this article, we highlight the extraordinary contributions of Alina Scott who was also Associate Editor and Communications Director of Not Even Past from 2018-20.

Cynthia Attaquin and a Wampanoag Network of Petitioners

Change.org, Ipetition, petitiononline — today, the digital marketplace has spurred the easy distribution of petitions.  While they are significant, modern petitioning campaigns offer a different contribution to public discourse than their nineteenth-century counterparts. For women, people of color, and others who had little access to political movers and shakers, petitioning placed them a signature and postage stamp away from the eyes and ears of legislators. Petitions provided grounds to begin a range of other campaigns and simultaneously created a network of canvassers and petitioners.

In 1842, Cynthia Attaquin and 13 other female residents of the Mashpee, a Wampanoag tribe on Cape Cod, petitioned the Massachusetts State Senate to clarify laws regarding the passage of people of color on railroads. Their petition represented a community of color with very specific motivations and understandings about what can come with organized petitioning efforts.

Continue Reading…

New Books in Native American & Indigenous Studies You Need to Read on Indigenous Peoples' Day

For decades Native American and Indigenous activists have advocated for a move away from Columbus Day. They argue that such commemorations are a reminder of the genocide of Indigenous peoples in the Americas that followed the arrival of Europeans in the region. Because of Indigenous peoples’ activism, legislatures across the US have started to replace the holiday celebrated on October 12th with Indigenous people’s day. This shift is about more than one day of the year. Instead, it encompasses a  broader discussion about sovereignty, recognition, and accountability.

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Violence Against Black People in America: A ClioVis Timeline

The brutal killing of George Floyd by police in Minneapolis this summer marked a key event in the history of violence against Black Americans. But it was just one of many acts of violence that have been committed in American history. In order to put Floyd’s killing into a larger historical context, our Digital History intern, Haley Price, created four ClioVis timelines to help herself and others learn more about such violence. Alina Scott, a graduate student in the History Department at the University of Texas at Austin and Dr. William Jones, a recent Ph.D. from Rice University, also worked on the timelines, adding relevant scholarship to many of the events to assist readers who want to learn more. Below, Haley, Alina, and Will introduce the timeline by telling us how the timelines were compiled, what they learned in making them, and how they think the timelines can serve as a resource for others. While the timelines are not comprehensive, they provide viewers with a sense of the historical forces at play across time and illustrate how the murder of George Floyd in the summer of 2020 fits into a larger pattern of historical violence.

As readers will see, there are four timelines. We originally started making one timeline. But, as the number of events grew, we decided to break the larger timeline into three separate timelines. You now see an “Overview” timeline that includes 153 events. We then divided the overview timeline into three thematic timelines: “Slavery in America,” “Jim Crow to Civil Rights,” and “Police and Civilian Brutality.”

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An Interview with Jeremi & Zachary Suri

This semester (Fall 2020), Not Even Past announced a collaboration with This is Democracy, a podcast hosted and developed by Dr. Jeremi Suri and his son Zachary. Jeremi Suri holds the Mack Brown Distinguished Chair for Leadership in Global Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin. He is a professor in the University’s Department of History and the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs. NEP Associate Editor, Alina I. Scott sat down with the Suris to discuss the origins of This is Democracy, their reasons for selecting guests, and much more.

Read the transcription or listen to the full interview here…

Digital Archive Review-Authorship and Advocacy: The Native American Petitions Dataverse

Embedded in the (digital) archive are structures of power. The Native American Petitions Dataverse shifts those structures by attributing authorship to tribal and Native individuals in hundreds of colonial and early American era petitions and memorials. However, is attributing authorship the sole responsibility of those curating digital collections? And even more simply, how does one acknowledge Indigenous authorship in the colonial and early American archive? Jane Anderson addresses this in part by saying “wherein colonialism is understood as a cultural project of control, archives function as the locus for the cultural technology of rule” (234). A “decolonial” project, then, would be would offer counter-narratives to the dominant methods of organizing, the hierarchy of archival sources, and the voices represented in the colonial archive.

Read the full article here.

Native Literatures and Indigenous Peoples' Day: A Brief Historiography

October 14th is what most people know as Columbus Day. However, for many Indigenous peoples, the celebration of Christopher Columbus is a reminder of the generations of trauma and settler conquest of Native nations and lands. For that reason, several states, including Alaska, Minnesota, Vermont, and South Dakota (and cities like Austin), have chosen to rename the holiday Indigenous Peoples’ Day. Native activists have been at the forefront of this movement….

On Indigenous Peoples’ Day, I’d like to suggest some easy additions to your syllabus, playlists, and bookshelf. This is a brief review of some seemingly untraditional academic works by Native authors, scholars, artists, and creators. My reflection on Native literature here includes scholarship in a number of forms that could easily be incorporated into a syllabus or added to your Comprehensive Exam List. This list is a starting point and I’d encourage readers to go further by listening to Native leaders, scholars, and artists.

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Missing Signatures: The Archives at First Glance

On February 21, 1831, a petition containing the signatures of over 800 Connecticut residents was submitted to the United States Congress on behalf of the indigenous population in the South who were facing relocation. The petition acknowledged Native peoples as the “original proprietors of the soil” and its authors claimed that to remain silent would be criminal and cowardly. The petition was not unique, as archivists recognized when organizing it in a folder containing several other petitions with fairly similar appeals. The threat of the forced relocation of Native Americans caught the attention of many activists and benevolent societies in the North as well as the South.

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Review of This Land is Their Land: The Wampanoag Indians, Plymouth Colony, and the Troubled History of Thanksgiving by David J. Silverman

““We do ourselves no good by hiding from the truth,” a Wampanoag elder told David Silverman as he prepared This Land is Their Land. In upward of 400 pages, Silverman suggests that, by “we” the elder was referring to those who would prefer to cling to heartwarming narratives of turkey and peace, rather than grapple with the details of the historical record, and the devastation the “first thanksgiving” left in its wake.”

Read the full review here…


Alina also compiled a number of indexes and lists as Assistant Editor of Not Even Past, including Black Resistance and Resilience: Collected Works From Not Even Past, Gender & Sexuality: Collected Works from Not Even Past, and Resources For Teaching Black History. She has also been featured in Creating a Collective Conversation: A Tribute to Joan Neuberger, The Public Archive, and The Public Archive: Woven Into History.

Not Even Past – looking back at 2021-22

September 6, 2022

Year in Review - Fall 2021/Spring 2022

It’s been another busy year for Not Even Past with more than 130 articles published across the academic year. To celebrate all this incredible academic content we have compiled everything in one page below. Not Even Past‘s reach also continues to grow, and we just broke a million page views over the past 12 months, making the magazine an important resource not just for the University of Texas community but for Public History online.

NEP Year in Review 2021-22 by Adam Clulow

To view specific sections, use the links below:

  • Features
  • Books
  • Teaching
  • Digital and Film
  • Blog
  • IHS and Public History
  • Texas
  • Author Spotlights
Features

Features

  • Bears Ears National Monument by Jesse Ritner
  • Learning from U.S History: A Fifth Grade Social Studies Curriculum by Dr. Daina Ramey Berry and Dr. Jennifer Keys Adair
  • Unboxing the Saints: A Curious Case from Early Modern Milan by Dr. Madeline McMahon
  • Tasting Empanadas and Red Wine in Chile’s Popular Unity Revolution by Dr. Joshua Frens-String
  • Journey into the Archive: The McFarland Cuban Plantation Records by Katie Coldiron
  • Primary Source: Notes for a Napoleonic Scandal by Julia Stryker
  • Journey into the Archive: Bringing Together the Relaciones Geográficas and Topográficas of the Spanish Empire by Rafael Nieto-Bello

My life’s story has come to be entwined with the history of the Relaciones. My intellectual place of origin, Bogotá, Colombia, facilitated my first encounter with them. My continued engagement with these sources from Latin American classrooms and special collections to Spanish archives has culminated in my current dissertation project at the University of Texas at Austin – the principal observatory and repository of these documents in the Americas. My life and research paths have allowed me to explore this neglected historical terrain. I argue that by drawing together the Relaciones Geográficas and Topográficas as a genre of documents, we can better envision how people from diverse ethnic compositions on both sides of the Atlantic produced a massive number of descriptions of local nature and societies around the same period. This perspective may allow us to see and understand the complex knowledge networks of Atlantic towns that the Spanish Crown wove together. Consider, for instance, how the Relaciones go beyond the famous Mexican indigenous charts as revealed by Map 2, the Relación of Valledupar, a township located in what is now Colombia.

Rafael Nieto-Bello
  • Hidden in Plain Sight: Re-Viewing Juan de Miranda’s Portrait of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz by Dr. Susan Deans-Smith and Dr. John W. Smith
  • Hidden in Plain (Virtual) Sight: Searching for a Lost Portrait of Sor Juana by Juan de Miranda and Finding a Photograph of it in a Digital Archive by Dr. Susan Deans-Smith and Dr. John W. Smith
  • In the Shadow of Vietnam: The United States and the Third World in the 1960s by Dr. Mark Atwood Lawrence
  • Archives and their Afterlives: Conversing with the Work of Kirsten Weld by Ilan Palacios Avineri
  • Flash of Light, Wall of Fire by Ben Wright
  • The Man Who Sold the Border: The Mercantile Imagination of Robert Runyon by Dr. Annette M. Rodríguez

Robert Runyon was an astoundingly prolific photographer of the Texas-México borderlands at the turn of the twentieth century. The University of Texas at Austin hosts over 14,000 photographs donated by the Runyon family, along with related manuscript materials. Much of the collection is available digitally, and the Briscoe Center for American History also houses Runyon’s glass negatives, lantern slides, nitrate negatives, prints, postcards, panoramas, correspondence, and business records. The sheer scope of his work, which ranges from botanicals to portraiture to quotidian scenes of daily life, has rendered his imagery—in regard to Texas and the U.S.-México border—ubiquitous.

Annette M. Rodríguez
  • The Archive as Nepantla: Dr. Daniel Arbino, The Anzaldúa Papers and The Intricacies of Being Beyond Doing by Ana López H.
  • Adriana Pacheco Roldán and Community Building by Ashley Garcia
  • Primary Source: The Pirate Zheng Yi Sao and a Fine Press Publisher by Jacob Parr
  • A House in the Homeland: Armenian Pilgrimages to Places of Ancestral Memory by Carel Bertram
  • “We may expect nothing but shacks to be erected here”: An Environmental History of Downtown Austin’s Waterloo Park by Dr. Katherine Leah Pace

The largest green space in downtown Austin, Waterloo Park takes its name from the Waterloo hamlet, a frontier settlement that Austin replaced. It sits in a basin along Waller Creek, encompassing a particularly flood-prone stretch of Austin’s most central, urbanized stream. Though the park was built in 1975 as part of the Brackenridge Urban Renewal Project, its history dates to the end of the US Civil War, when formerly enslaved people began migrating to southern cities in search of work, education, lost family members, and haven from anti-Black violence. Many migrants were skilled farmers and craftsmen and had saved money to purchase land. As a rule, white landowners sold Black people only their “poorest” properties, relegating most Black communities to low-lying and otherwise hazardous spaces.

Katherine Leah Pace
  • Diversity, National Identity, and the Fraught History Behind the State Department’s Search for Diplomats Who “Look Like America” by John Gleb
  • Mary Todd Lincoln, Elizabeth Keckley, and the Queer History of the Old Clothes Scandal by Candice Lyons
books

Books

  • Fifth Sun: A New History of the Aztecs by Camilla Townsend (2019), reviewed by Camila Ordorica
  • Cotton, Coal, and Capitalism: Review of Aaron Jakes’ Egypt’s Occupation and On Barak’s Powering Empire reviewed by Atar David
  • The Fishmeal Revolution: The Industrialization of the Humboldt Current Ecosystem by Kristin A. Wintersteen (2021), reviewed by Nathan Stone

I remember the stink of the fishmeal plants in Iquique. During the austral winter of 1983, the vapors that turned tons of whole anchoveta into high protein fish flour lingered over the beach with the coastal fog until the customary afternoon breeze came and carried it away. Local residents called it “the smell of money.” Domestically produced fish flour had become the primary source for fish food in the new salmon farms that had begun to scar the pristine beauty of the lakes and fiords in the Chilean south. It would also become dog food, and the “high protein cookies” on school lunch menus for the undernourished children that General Pinochet’s second recession in ten years had pushed dangerously down the path of deficiency disease. But the smelly fishmeal extracted from the seemingly infinite Pacific coast of northern Chile had already become a vital element in an increasingly global ecosystem of profit-driven food production. Economists and technocrats called it a “non-traditional export.” Along with the farmed salmon, the fresh fruit out of season and the world’s finest red wines for a little less money, Chilean fishmeal would help reduce the local economy’s absolute dependence on the roller coaster of international copper prices. It would fatten pigs in Germany and chickens in California to satisfy the voracious appetites of a competing species now referred to simply as “the consumer.”

Nathan Stone
  • The Optic of the State: Visuality and Power in Argentina and Brazil (2007), reviewed by Rodrigo Salido Moulinié
  • The Good Immigrants: How the Yellow Peril Became the Model Minority (2015), reviewed by Christopher Ndubuizu
  • The Three-Cornered War: The Union, the Confederacy, and Native Peoples in the Fight for the West by Megan Kate Nelson (2020), reviewed by Gwendolyn Lockman

Megan Kate Nelson has written a captivating history of the southwestern theater of the American Civil War. There more than one war took place as different groups of people envisioned futures dependent on control of the region. The balance of perspectives makes it clear the Civil War was not just a battle for the preservation of the Union, or for those states that had seceded, but rather a multicultural war for control of much of the North American continent. The Union, the Confederacy, Mexico, the Apache, and Navajo (Diné) all fought for control of land, water, resources, and trade. Skirmishes in the West were layered contests among several parties. While historians often acknowledge the importance of the West in determining the fate of slavery in an expanding nineteenth-century United States, few have tackled the southwestern theater as Nelson has in The Three Cornered War.

Gwendolyn Lockman
  • Subjected to Science: Human Experimentation in America before the Second World War by Susan Lederer (1995), reviewed by Juliana Márquez
  • Undocumented Lives: The Untold Story of Mexican Migration (2018), reviewed by Jian Gao
  • Hungry for Revolution: The Politics of Food and the Making of Modern Chile (2021), reviewed by Gabrielle Esparza
  • The Approaching Storm: Roosevelt, Wilson, Addams, and their Clash over America’s Future (2021), reviewed by John Gleb
  • The End of Ambition: The United States and the Third World in the Vietnam Era (2022), reviewed by Bryan Port
  • Pulp Empire: The Secret History of Comic Book Imperialism (2021), reviewed by Jon Buchleiter

Pulp Empire is filled with fascinating anecdotes and incisive analysis of the ephemera of US empire. This book offers something for an array of audiences from fervent comic book fans to historians of American foreign policy. Hirsch deftly deals with several dimensions of comics’ hidden history from their perpetuation of racist and sexist tropes to their use as a unique tool of soft-power popular abroad across class lines. Finally, Hirsch’s analysis of the debates over the atomic age played out in comic book pages proves both entertaining and enlightening. Pulp Empire effectively interrogates the intersection between politics and popular culture and profiles how superheroes have been deployed to serve American expansionist goals.

Jon Buchleiter
  • The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber and David Wengrow (2021), reviewed by Dr. Sumit Guha
  • The Men Who Lost America: British Command during the Revolutionary War and the Preservation of the Empire (2013), reviewed by Ben Wright
  • Sex Among the Rabble: An Intimate History of Gender and Power in the Age of Revolution, Philadelphia, 1730-1830 (2006), reviewed by Jon Buchleiter
  • The Butterfly Effect: Insects and the Making of the Modern World (2020), reviewed by Atar David
  • Master of the Game: Henry Kissinger and the Art of Middle East Diplomacy (2021), reviewed by Daniel J. Samet
Teaching

Teaching

  • Documenting Austin Activism, 1965-82 by Dr. Laurie Green
  • Teaching Global Environmental History: A Conversation with Dr. Megan Raby
  • Austin’s Queer Migration History by Dr. Lauren Gutterman

In Spring 2021, my course, “Preserving Austin’s Queer History,” trained undergraduate students to conduct oral history interviews with LGBTQ community members past and present. Despite the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic and the February 2021 weather disaster, the fifteen students in this class conducted oral history interviews with nineteen people. These oral history narrators range in age from thirty-four to eighty-four years old. They include gay, lesbian, bisexual, queer, trans and non-binary people, as well as artists and performers, grassroots activists, and small business owners. They are white, Black, Latinx, Asian American, and multi-racial. And they have contributed to Austin’s LGBTQ history and to local struggles against injustice in a variety of ways. 

Lauren Gutterman
  • Resources For Teaching Black History: Collected Works on Not Even Past, compiled by Alina Scott and Gabrielle Esparza
  • Art and the Public by Dr. Joan Neuberger
  • Resources for Teaching Women’s History: Collected Works on Not Even Past, compiled by Gabrielle Esparza
Digital and Film

Digital and Film

  • The Louvre Museum by Brittany Erwin
  • The American Prison Writing Archive (APWA) by Sarah Porter
  • Visualizing Cultures by Brittany Erwin
  • The Harder They Fall, Directed by Jeymes Samuel, reviewed by Candice Lyons

In one of the final scenes of Jeymes Samuel’s gripping 2021 Black Western The Harder They Fall, androgynous outlaw Cuffee (played by Danielle Deadwyler) says a teary goodbye to her comrade “Stagecoach” Mary Fields (Zazie Beetz). The two share a long, not-quite-chaste kiss goodbye as Nat Love, Mary’s main romantic interest in the film, shifts uncomfortably in his saddle. Mary responds with a coy “What you looking at?” before mounting her horse a final time and literally riding off into the sunset with Love, leaving Cuffee behind. The film, which follows Nat Love and his gang of outlaws on an epic revenge quest across the American southwest, encompasses a litany of historical elisions and inaccuracies, culminating in this moment between Mary and Cuffee. It cements the movie’s final and most glaring lapse: while The Harder They Fall’s vision of the Old West is brazen, bold, and Black, its queer notes amount to little more than whispers. Not only was the real “Stagecoach” Mary Fields (as several writers have noted) much taller, darker, and heavier than she is depicted in the film, she was probably much queerer as well.

Candice Lyons
  • Unlocking the Colonial Archive: Revolutionizing Latin American History with Artificial Intelligence by Eduardo H. Gorobets Martins
  • The Intra-American Slave Trade Database: A Review and Interview with Gregory O’Malley and Alex Borucki by Clifton Sorrell III
  • The University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology by Brittany Erwin
  • Radical Collaboration: Brook Lillehaugen and the Ticha Project by May Helena Plumb

A key thread running through Dr. Brook Danielle Lillehaugen’s career is access—to language, to history, and to education. She recognizes that linguistic research on Indigenous languages is insufficient if members of Indigenous communities cannot access it. Therefore, throughout her career she has sought to remove barriers to such access via creative, collaborative research that goes beyond traditional academic practice.

May Helena Plumb
  • Counter Archives and Archives of Resistance by Anahí Ponce
  • Coding Viceregal Art: Project Arca and Spanish Visual Culture Within the Digital Humanities by Haley Schroer

Throughout the last two years of the global pandemic, digital research has surged among graduate students and faculty alike. Travel restrictions prevented scholars from accessing important sources. Project Arte Colonial and the continuing efforts of Jaime H. Borja Gómez have provided invaluable access to colonial Spanish resources to individuals across the world who are unable to conduct research in-person. The digital humanities have become critical components to fields across the social sciences. ARCA works to create an easily accessible gateway that simultaneously serves veterans and newcomers of remote research. Historians must adopt new and diverse ways to engage with the public and other scholars through the medium of technology.

Haley Schroer
  • The Public, Access, and the Archival Dimensions of Digital Humanities: An Introduction to the Work of Christina Wasson by Eden Ewing
  • The New World and Beyond: A Review of New World Nature by Shery Chanis
Blog

Blog

  • Forward-Looking Perspectives upon Returning to the Classroom and the Zoomroom by Gwendolyn Lockman
  • Conversations with Dr. Miruna Achim by Camila Ordorica
  • Humanities Without Walls: A Reflection by Brandon James Render
  • From Huehuetenango to Here by Ilan Palacios Avineri

My Guatemalan father was born in the middle of a civil war. His childhood house was built from corrugated metal and adobe brick. He grew up clinging to my abuela’s back wrapped in a blanket as she weaved to sustain the family. He did not have shoes until he was 8 years old. He dropped out of school after the second grade. Before he reached my age, he was nearly murdered by the army three times. He worked as a trench digger and then as a laborer before fleeing his home in Huehuetenango. 

Ilan Palacios Avineri
  • Building Your Academic Presence Online in Three Steps by Raymond Hyser
  • In Memoriam: Dr. Robert A. Divine, 1929-2021 by Dr. H.W. Brands and Dr. Mark Atwood Lawrence
  • A More Expansive Atlantic History of the Americas: An Interview with Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra
  • Five Books I Recommend from Comps – Citizenship and Human Rights in Latin America by Gabrielle Esparza
  • HPS Talk: Hacking Airspace: The Insurgent Technology of Brazil’s Hot Air Balloons by Dr. Felipe Fernandes Cruz
  • HPS Talk: How the Histories of Medicine and Public Health Have Fared in the Media During Covid-19 by Rebecca Onion
  • NEP Second Edition: Casta Paintings by Susan Deans-Smith
  • This Used to Be a Synagogue by Amy Shreeve

In New York City, buildings are like wallpaper. If you peeled back the facades and peeked into their histories, you’d find something different, something out of style. The buildings’ old identities wouldn’t match the modern character of the neighborhood. On the Lower East Side, if you peel back the layers of luxury apartments, churches, and fusion restaurants, you’d notice a trend. Many buildings that now house fashionable venues used to be synagogues.

Amy Shreeve
  • Four Books I Recommend from Comps – Law, Knowledge, and Empire in the Middle East and North Africa by David Rahimi
  • Populism in History: An Interview with Federico Finchelstein
  • Five Books I Recommend from Comps – Labor and Citizenship in the United States by Gwendolyn Lockman
  • Archivos de la Represión: The Right to Truth and Memory in Mexico by Janette Nuñez
  • Roundtable: Effects of COVID on the Chinese Diaspora in North America
  • Review of the Flash of Light, Wall of Fire Exhibit by Zachary Bradley
  • The Guatemalan National Police Historical Archive: An archival school for Latin America by María José Pérez Sián
  • Estampa: Mauricio Tenorio by Rodrigo Salido Moulinié

Mauricio Tenorio thinks with his feet. As his soles touch the asphalt, he feels a piece of one of his dearest obsessions: the city. Not Mexico City specifically, although it might be the one he feels closest to, but the idea of the city. Cities have so much to say. A street in Barcelona, an old building in Chicago, an awkward monument in Washington. D.C., a park in Berlin: they all have stories and a history. And Tenorio, a Professor of History at the University of Chicago and Profesor Asociado at the Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas, Mexico City, tells these stories through his work. I like to repeat one about a hidden monument in Mexico City. Inside the column of the Independence monument, the capital’s famous postcard-ready landmark with angel’s wings, the white statue of an obscure figure guards the ashes of Mexico’s founding fathers—a monument of a seventeenth-century Irishman. Tenorio tells the story of Guillerme de Lampart, the “Irish Zorro” who plotted an independence movement with religious undertones in the 1640s—a peculiar reading of the Bible led him to believe that Spain did not have sovereign rights over the Americas. He became a controversial figure in Mexican history. The Inquisition burnt Lampart in 1650, making him a martyr for anti-Church Porfirian liberals. Placing his monument publicly would have surely triggered heated historiographical and political debates, weakening the process of national reconciliation. Thus, Lampart made his way into one of the nation’s central monuments: discretely.[1] Yet Tenorio’s driving curiosity lies elsewhere: it is not so much about what cities have to say, but how they say it. The location and concealment of Lampart’s monument suggest broader discussions on religion and independence, heroes and martyrs, history and the city. Tenorio explores how cities dictate these stories.

Rodrigo Salido Moulinié
  • Writing through the Body: The Work of Cristina Rivera by Ana Cecilia Calle
  • Knowledge and Power are Not the Same: Arndt Brendecke, The Empirical Empire, and the Spanish American Colonial Archive by Rafael Nieto-Bello
  • César Salgado – Boom and Bust: Locating Revolution in the Benson Collection’s Julio Cortázar Papers by Bianca Quintanilla
  • Historians and their Publics – A Profile of Dr. Jacqueline Jones by Dr. Jack E. Davis
  • Archiving the Brazilian Dictatorship: Dr. Inez Stampa and the Memórias Reveladas Reference Center by Timothy Vilgiate
  • Five Books I Recommend from Comps – Empire and Nation in Modern Eastern Europe by Jonathan Parker
  • Archives beyond Intention: The Readings and Writings of Dr. Kelly McDonough by Claudio Eduardo Moura de Oliveira
  • “Reflections on Resistance”: Memoria Abierta preserves the documentary legacies of heroes who faced down the junta by Paula O’Donnell
  • Remembering Pinochet: Dictatorship, Power, and Pushback by Nathan Stone

For the plebiscite of ‘88, Chile had its first political campaign in fifteen years. La Campaña del NO tried to make it fun. We all had many dark tales to tell, and maybe a moral obligation to tell them, but sad stories don’t get votes. Moreover, a very fine line, invisible to carabineros, divided protesting and campaigning. Opposition supporters had to resort to clever strategies. We would drive around with their windshield wipers on, on a dry day. Like saying “no” by moving your index finger from left to right. The cops couldn’t exactly arrest you for using your windshield wiper.

Nathan Stone
  • Statements and Resources on the Russian Invasion of Ukraine
  • The José Vasconcelos Papers: A Brief Introduction by Diego A. Godoy
  • “En las urgencias de la realidad [Within the urgencies of reality]:” Perspectives about the Vicaría de la Solidaridad by Lucy Quezada Yáñez
  • The Archive as a Contested Object of Knowledge: A Conversation with Dr. Sylvia Sellers-García by Roberto Young
  • The African and Asian Diasporas in Early Mexico: A Conversation on Slavery and Freedom with Professor Tatiana Seijas by Gary Leo Dunbar
  • Five Books to Help Make Sense of the War in Ukraine by Jon Buchleiter, Gabrielle Esparza, John Gleb, Jonathan Parker, and Daniel Samet
  • Introducing Texas Digital Humanities (TxDH) by Amy Shreeve, Benjamin Brown, and John Erard
IHS & Public History

IHS and Public History

  • Institute for Historical Studies, Race and Caste Research theme, 2021-22
  • IHS Podcast – Faith in Science? COVID, Antivaxxers, the State, and Epistemological Power with guests Sean F. McEnroe, Stephan Palmie, and J. Brent Crosson
  • Roundtable: “Faith in Science: From the Boxer Rebellion to Covid 19” feat. Sean F. McEnroe (Southern Oregon University), Stephan Palmie (University of Chicago), J. Brent Crosson (UT Austin), Nancy Rose Hunt (University of Florida), and Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra (UT Austin)
  • IHS Podcast – From Republic of Letters and Imagined Communities to Republics of Knowledge: Knowledge in the Making of 19th Century Radical Republics in Latin America with guests Nicola Miller and Alexander Chaparro-Silva
  • Republics of Knowledge, Democracy, and Race in Nineteenth-Century Spanish America by Alexander Chaparro-Silva
  • IHS Podcast -Apache Diaspora in four hundred years of colonialism vs ‘Toltec Antiquities’ Diaspora in Early Republican Mexico” with guests Miruna Achim, Paul Conrad, and Sheena Cox
  • IHS Podcast: Hungry for Revolution with guest Joshua Frens-String

Hungry for Revolution (2021) is an ambitious book that, through the social history of food production, distribution and consumption and through a cultural history of the knowledge and science of nutrition, agriculture, and political economy of rural landholdings, offers a radical new chronology of the political history of 20th century Chile.  Hungry for Revolution masterfully goes over the nitrate export boom in the fin-de-siècle mining towns of northern Chile and the creation of the new-deal welfare state of Alessandri and the Frente Popular in the 1930s and 1940s to offer a striking new genealogy of Allende’s Socialist Revolution.

Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra
  • IHS Podcast – Colonial Peru’s Fractional Freedoms meet Morgan’s thesis: American Freedom, American Slavery with guests Gary Leo Dunbar and Michelle McKinley
  • IHS Book Talk: “Hungry for Revolution: The Politics of Food and the Making of Modern Chile,” by Joshua Frens-String, University of Texas at Austin
  • IHS Podcast – Welcomed and then Expelled: The Plight of Chinese Mexicans from 1910 to 1960 with guests Jian Gao and Julia María Schiavone Camacho
  • IHS Podcast – The social history of 16th and 17th century Andean “ethnographic” knowledge, bottom-up or top down? with guests Rafael Nieto-Bello and Jose Carlos de la Puente
  • IHS Podcast – Mexico’s Social Science Laboratory and the Origins of the US Civil Rights Movement (1930-1950) with guests Rodrigo Salido Moulinié and Ruben Flores
  • IHS Panel: “Prop A in the Context of Race and Policing in Austin, Texas: An Urgent Forum”
  • IHS Book Talk: “‘Tribe and State in Global History’: The Political and Cultural Work of the Category of Tribe in the Historiographies of Asia, Americas, and Africa,” by Sumit Guha, University of Texas at Austin
  • IHS Workshop: “Covarrubias’ Crossings: Picturing the New Negro and the Making of Modern Mexico” by Rodrigo Salido Moulinié, University of Texas at Austin
  • IHS Roundtable: ‘The Eyes of Texas’: Historians’ Perspectives on the Origins of the Song
  • IHS Podcast – The New Faces of God in Latin America with guest Virginia Garrard
  • IHS Podcast – Against the Grain: Textile Relics and the Science of Sanctity in the Global Renaissance with guest Madeline McMahon

For most individuals, the Counter Reformation sought to quash new forms of democratic spiritual participation in the form of Lutheranism and Calvinism. The so-called Galileo affair epitomizes this narrative of the Counter Reformation as retrograde and even villainous. In the popular imagination, Galileo stands as the victim of the Counter Reformation’s stifling prosecution of skepticism, experimentation, and modernity. Yet Dr. Madeline McMahon begs to differ. In her manuscript the Catholic Creation of Early Modern Knowledge, McMahon argues that by creating the institution of the resident (non-absentee) bishop, the Counter Reformation became the lynchpin to the new confessional, interventionist, technocratic early-modern state.

Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra
  • IHS Workshop: “Invading Iraq” by Aaron O’Connell, University of Texas at Austin
  • Talleres y Debates: “Sobre la destrucción y reconstrucción de imperios, de Hispanoamérica continental a Brasil (1810s-1820s)”
  • IHS Podcast – A Time to Gather: Archives and the Control of Jewish Culture with guest Jason Lustig
  • IHS Book Roundtable: “A Time To Gather: Archives and the Control of Jewish Culture”
  • IHS Book Roundtable: “The New Faces of Neoliberal Christianity in Latin America”
  • IHS Podcast – E Pluribus Tria: Colonial Racial Formation in the Making of American Culture with guest James Sidbury
  • IHS Roundtable – The 1619 Project: A U.S. Perspective
  • IHS Symposium: The Curious Case of Race in the Russian Empire (16-19cc)
  • IHS Book Roundtable: What Belongs in Mexico’s National Museum?: Two Centuries of Object Collecting, Display, and Dispersal
  • IHS Roundtable: Between Neocolonial Collecting and Anticolonial Resistance? The Logic of Afro-Latiné/Latiné/Latin-American Archives in the United States (Benson Centennial)
  • IHS Roundtable: The 1619 Project: A Continental, Afro Latiné Perspective
  • IHS Talleres y Debates: “Sobre Talento, Objetos, y Colonias en la Exposición ‘Tornaviaje’ del Museo del Prado”
  • IHS Roundtable: The Foremothers of Women of Color Feminism
  • IHS Book Roundtable: “Ingredients of Change: The History and Culture of Food in Modern Bulgaria” by Mary Neuburger, University of Texas at Austin

Author Spotlights

Texas

Texas

  • Unidos Marcharemos Adelante by Dr. Emilio Zamora
  • Black Cowboys: An American Story by Ronald Davis

In our exhibit Black Cowboys: An American Story, visitors from Texas, and beyond will be introduced to a diverse group of African American cowhands, from Johana July, a free Black Seminole born in 1860 to Myrtis Dightman, called “The Jackie Robinson of Rodeo” who broke the color line at professional rodeos in the late 1960s. In addition to presenting the public with depictions of numerous Black cowboys, enslaved and free, the Witte Museum introduces the audience to the legacy of Black ranches and freedom colonies throughout Texas. The audience learns about several Black owned ranches that have stood the test of time, outlasting white supremacy and Jim Crow. These ranching families, who continue to ranch the land purchased and maintained by their ancestors in the nineteenth-century, display a tenacity of will and a commitment to their family traditions. They often withstood destruction of their family legacy by organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan while also weathering continual threats of encroachment from neighbors and state governments.

Ronald Davis
  • Texas State Historical Association – “Teaching Texas History in an Age of Hyper Partisanship” and “Forgetting and Remembering: Why Does Searching for an Accurate Past Provoke Backlash?”
Author spotlights
  • Nathan Stone
  • Gwendolyn Lockman
  • Gabrielle Esparza

Year in Review – Academic year 2021-2022

May 10, 2022

Year in Review - Fall 2021/Spring 2022

It’s been another busy year for Not Even Past with more than 130 articles published across the academic year. To celebrate all this incredible academic content we have compiled everything in one page below. Not Even Past‘s reach also continues to grow, and we just broke a million page views over the past 12 months, making the magazine an important resource not just for the University of Texas community but for Public History online. As we conclude the academic year, Not Even Past would like to thank Gabrielle Esparza our amazing Associate Editor whose energy, creativity and brilliance as an editor has been a key part of the magazine’s success this year. We would also like to recognize Dr Joan Neuberger, our Founding Editor who will be retiring from UT over the summer. Not Even Past is unimaginable without Joan’s tireless work and we have published a brief tribute to her remarkable achievements here. Finally we would like to thank all our contributors and partners across the past academic year and of course our readers.

To view specific sections, use the links below:

  • Features
  • Books
  • Teaching
  • Digital and Film
  • Blog
  • IHS and Public History
  • Texas
  • Author Spotlights
Features

Features

  • Bears Ears National Monument by Jesse Ritner
  • Learning from U.S History: A Fifth Grade Social Studies Curriculum by Dr. Daina Ramey Berry and Dr. Jennifer Keys Adair
  • Unboxing the Saints: A Curious Case from Early Modern Milan by Dr. Madeline McMahon
  • Tasting Empanadas and Red Wine in Chile’s Popular Unity Revolution by Dr. Joshua Frens-String
  • Journey into the Archive: The McFarland Cuban Plantation Records by Katie Coldiron
  • Primary Source: Notes for a Napoleonic Scandal by Julia Stryker
  • Journey into the Archive: Bringing Together the Relaciones Geográficas and Topográficas of the Spanish Empire by Rafael Nieto-Bello

My life’s story has come to be entwined with the history of the Relaciones. My intellectual place of origin, Bogotá, Colombia, facilitated my first encounter with them. My continued engagement with these sources from Latin American classrooms and special collections to Spanish archives has culminated in my current dissertation project at the University of Texas at Austin – the principal observatory and repository of these documents in the Americas. My life and research paths have allowed me to explore this neglected historical terrain. I argue that by drawing together the Relaciones Geográficas and Topográficas as a genre of documents, we can better envision how people from diverse ethnic compositions on both sides of the Atlantic produced a massive number of descriptions of local nature and societies around the same period. This perspective may allow us to see and understand the complex knowledge networks of Atlantic towns that the Spanish Crown wove together. Consider, for instance, how the Relaciones go beyond the famous Mexican indigenous charts as revealed by Map 2, the Relación of Valledupar, a township located in what is now Colombia.

Rafael Nieto-Bello
  • Hidden in Plain Sight: Re-Viewing Juan de Miranda’s Portrait of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz by Dr. Susan Deans-Smith and Dr. John W. Smith
  • Hidden in Plain (Virtual) Sight: Searching for a Lost Portrait of Sor Juana by Juan de Miranda and Finding a Photograph of it in a Digital Archive by Dr. Susan Deans-Smith and Dr. John W. Smith
  • In the Shadow of Vietnam: The United States and the Third World in the 1960s by Dr. Mark Atwood Lawrence
  • Archives and their Afterlives: Conversing with the Work of Kirsten Weld by Ilan Palacios Avineri
  • Flash of Light, Wall of Fire by Ben Wright
  • The Man Who Sold the Border: The Mercantile Imagination of Robert Runyon by Dr. Annette M. Rodríguez

Robert Runyon was an astoundingly prolific photographer of the Texas-México borderlands at the turn of the twentieth century. The University of Texas at Austin hosts over 14,000 photographs donated by the Runyon family, along with related manuscript materials. Much of the collection is available digitally, and the Briscoe Center for American History also houses Runyon’s glass negatives, lantern slides, nitrate negatives, prints, postcards, panoramas, correspondence, and business records. The sheer scope of his work, which ranges from botanicals to portraiture to quotidian scenes of daily life, has rendered his imagery—in regard to Texas and the U.S.-México border—ubiquitous.

Annette M. Rodríguez
  • The Archive as Nepantla: Dr. Daniel Arbino, The Anzaldúa Papers and The Intricacies of Being Beyond Doing by Ana López H.
  • Adriana Pacheco Roldán and Community Building by Ashley Garcia
  • Primary Source: The Pirate Zheng Yi Sao and a Fine Press Publisher by Jacob Parr
  • A House in the Homeland: Armenian Pilgrimages to Places of Ancestral Memory by Carel Bertram
  • “We may expect nothing but shacks to be erected here”: An Environmental History of Downtown Austin’s Waterloo Park by Dr. Katherine Leah Pace

The largest green space in downtown Austin, Waterloo Park takes its name from the Waterloo hamlet, a frontier settlement that Austin replaced. It sits in a basin along Waller Creek, encompassing a particularly flood-prone stretch of Austin’s most central, urbanized stream. Though the park was built in 1975 as part of the Brackenridge Urban Renewal Project, its history dates to the end of the US Civil War, when formerly enslaved people began migrating to southern cities in search of work, education, lost family members, and haven from anti-Black violence. Many migrants were skilled farmers and craftsmen and had saved money to purchase land. As a rule, white landowners sold Black people only their “poorest” properties, relegating most Black communities to low-lying and otherwise hazardous spaces.

Katherine Leah Pace
  • Diversity, National Identity, and the Fraught History Behind the State Department’s Search for Diplomats Who “Look Like America” by John Gleb
  • Mary Todd Lincoln, Elizabeth Keckley, and the Queer History of the Old Clothes Scandal by Candice Lyons
books

Books

  • Fifth Sun: A New History of the Aztecs by Camilla Townsend (2019), reviewed by Camila Ordorica Bracamontes
  • Cotton, Coal, and Capitalism: Review of Aaron Jakes’ Egypt’s Occupation and On Barak’s Powering Empire reviewed by Atar David
  • The Fishmeal Revolution: The Industrialization of the Humboldt Current Ecosystem by Kristin A. Wintersteen (2021), reviewed by Nathan Stone

I remember the stink of the fishmeal plants in Iquique. During the austral winter of 1983, the vapors that turned tons of whole anchoveta into high protein fish flour lingered over the beach with the coastal fog until the customary afternoon breeze came and carried it away. Local residents called it “the smell of money.” Domestically produced fish flour had become the primary source for fish food in the new salmon farms that had begun to scar the pristine beauty of the lakes and fiords in the Chilean south. It would also become dog food, and the “high protein cookies” on school lunch menus for the undernourished children that General Pinochet’s second recession in ten years had pushed dangerously down the path of deficiency disease. But the smelly fishmeal extracted from the seemingly infinite Pacific coast of northern Chile had already become a vital element in an increasingly global ecosystem of profit-driven food production. Economists and technocrats called it a “non-traditional export.” Along with the farmed salmon, the fresh fruit out of season and the world’s finest red wines for a little less money, Chilean fishmeal would help reduce the local economy’s absolute dependence on the roller coaster of international copper prices. It would fatten pigs in Germany and chickens in California to satisfy the voracious appetites of a competing species now referred to simply as “the consumer.”

Nathan Stone
  • The Optic of the State: Visuality and Power in Argentina and Brazil (2007), reviewed by Rodrigo Salido Moulinié
  • The Good Immigrants: How the Yellow Peril Became the Model Minority (2015), reviewed by Christopher Ndubuizu
  • The Three-Cornered War: The Union, the Confederacy, and Native Peoples in the Fight for the West by Megan Kate Nelson (2020), reviewed by Gwendolyn Lockman

Megan Kate Nelson has written a captivating history of the southwestern theater of the American Civil War. There more than one war took place as different groups of people envisioned futures dependent on control of the region. The balance of perspectives makes it clear the Civil War was not just a battle for the preservation of the Union, or for those states that had seceded, but rather a multicultural war for control of much of the North American continent. The Union, the Confederacy, Mexico, the Apache, and Navajo (Diné) all fought for control of land, water, resources, and trade. Skirmishes in the West were layered contests among several parties. While historians often acknowledge the importance of the West in determining the fate of slavery in an expanding nineteenth-century United States, few have tackled the southwestern theater as Nelson has in The Three Cornered War.

Gwendolyn Lockman
  • Subjected to Science: Human Experimentation in America before the Second World War by Susan Lederer (1995), reviewed by Juliana Márquez
  • Undocumented Lives: The Untold Story of Mexican Migration (2018), reviewed by Jian Gao
  • Hungry for Revolution: The Politics of Food and the Making of Modern Chile (2021), reviewed by Gabrielle Esparza
  • The Approaching Storm: Roosevelt, Wilson, Addams, and their Clash over America’s Future (2021), reviewed by John Gleb
  • The End of Ambition: The United States and the Third World in the Vietnam Era (2022), reviewed by Bryan Port
  • Pulp Empire: The Secret History of Comic Book Imperialism (2021), reviewed by Jon Buchleiter

Pulp Empire is filled with fascinating anecdotes and incisive analysis of the ephemera of US empire. This book offers something for an array of audiences from fervent comic book fans to historians of American foreign policy. Hirsch deftly deals with several dimensions of comics’ hidden history from their perpetuation of racist and sexist tropes to their use as a unique tool of soft-power popular abroad across class lines. Finally, Hirsch’s analysis of the debates over the atomic age played out in comic book pages proves both entertaining and enlightening. Pulp Empire effectively interrogates the intersection between politics and popular culture and profiles how superheroes have been deployed to serve American expansionist goals.

Jon Buchleiter
  • The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber and David Wengrow (2021), reviewed by Dr. Sumit Guha
  • The Men Who Lost America: British Command during the Revolutionary War and the Preservation of the Empire (2013), reviewed by Ben Wright
  • Sex Among the Rabble: An Intimate History of Gender and Power in the Age of Revolution, Philadelphia, 1730-1830 (2006), reviewed by Jon Buchleiter
  • The Butterfly Effect: Insects and the Making of the Modern World (2020), reviewed by Atar David
  • Master of the Game: Henry Kissinger and the Art of Middle East Diplomacy (2021), reviewed by Daniel J. Samet
Teaching

Teaching

  • Documenting Austin Activism, 1965-82 by Dr. Laurie Green
  • Teaching Global Environmental History: A Conversation with Dr. Megan Raby
  • Austin’s Queer Migration History by Dr. Lauren Gutterman

In Spring 2021, my course, “Preserving Austin’s Queer History,” trained undergraduate students to conduct oral history interviews with LGBTQ community members past and present. Despite the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic and the February 2021 weather disaster, the fifteen students in this class conducted oral history interviews with nineteen people. These oral history narrators range in age from thirty-four to eighty-four years old. They include gay, lesbian, bisexual, queer, trans and non-binary people, as well as artists and performers, grassroots activists, and small business owners. They are white, Black, Latinx, Asian American, and multi-racial. And they have contributed to Austin’s LGBTQ history and to local struggles against injustice in a variety of ways. 

Lauren Gutterman
  • Resources For Teaching Black History: Collected Works on Not Even Past, compiled by Alina Scott and Gabrielle Esparza
  • Art and the Public by Dr. Joan Neuberger
  • Resources for Teaching Women’s History: Collected Works on Not Even Past, compiled by Gabrielle Esparza
Digital and Film

Digital and Film

  • The Louvre Museum by Brittany Erwin
  • The American Prison Writing Archive (APWA) by Sarah Porter
  • Visualizing Cultures by Brittany Erwin
  • The Harder They Fall, Directed by Jeymes Samuel, reviewed by Candice Lyons

In one of the final scenes of Jeymes Samuel’s gripping 2021 Black Western The Harder They Fall, androgynous outlaw Cuffee (played by Danielle Deadwyler) says a teary goodbye to her comrade “Stagecoach” Mary Fields (Zazie Beetz). The two share a long, not-quite-chaste kiss goodbye as Nat Love, Mary’s main romantic interest in the film, shifts uncomfortably in his saddle. Mary responds with a coy “What you looking at?” before mounting her horse a final time and literally riding off into the sunset with Love, leaving Cuffee behind. The film, which follows Nat Love and his gang of outlaws on an epic revenge quest across the American southwest, encompasses a litany of historical elisions and inaccuracies, culminating in this moment between Mary and Cuffee. It cements the movie’s final and most glaring lapse: while The Harder They Fall’s vision of the Old West is brazen, bold, and Black, its queer notes amount to little more than whispers. Not only was the real “Stagecoach” Mary Fields (as several writers have noted) much taller, darker, and heavier than she is depicted in the film, she was probably much queerer as well.

Candice Lyons
  • Unlocking the Colonial Archive: Revolutionizing Latin American History with Artificial Intelligence by Eduardo H. Gorobets Martins
  • The Intra-American Slave Trade Database: A Review and Interview with Gregory O’Malley and Alex Borucki by Clifton Sorrell III
  • The University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology by Brittany Erwin
  • Radical Collaboration: Brook Lillehaugen and the Ticha Project by May Helena Plumb

A key thread running through Dr. Brook Danielle Lillehaugen’s career is access—to language, to history, and to education. She recognizes that linguistic research on Indigenous languages is insufficient if members of Indigenous communities cannot access it. Therefore, throughout her career she has sought to remove barriers to such access via creative, collaborative research that goes beyond traditional academic practice.

May Helena Plumb
  • Counter Archives and Archives of Resistance by Anahí Ponce
  • Coding Viceregal Art: Project Arca and Spanish Visual Culture Within the Digital Humanities by Haley Schroer

Throughout the last two years of the global pandemic, digital research has surged among graduate students and faculty alike. Travel restrictions prevented scholars from accessing important sources. Project Arte Colonial and the continuing efforts of Jaime H. Borja Gómez have provided invaluable access to colonial Spanish resources to individuals across the world who are unable to conduct research in-person. The digital humanities have become critical components to fields across the social sciences. ARCA works to create an easily accessible gateway that simultaneously serves veterans and newcomers of remote research. Historians must adopt new and diverse ways to engage with the public and other scholars through the medium of technology.

Haley Schroer
  • The Public, Access, and the Archival Dimensions of Digital Humanities: An Introduction to the Work of Christina Wasson by Eden Ewing
  • The New World and Beyond: A Review of New World Nature by Shery Chanis
Blog

Blog

  • Forward-Looking Perspectives upon Returning to the Classroom and the Zoomroom by Gwendolyn Lockman
  • Conversations with Dr. Miruna Achim by Camila Ordorica Bracamontes
  • Humanities Without Walls: A Reflection by Brandon James Render
  • From Huehuetenango to Here by Ilan Palacios Avineri

My Guatemalan father was born in the middle of a civil war. His childhood house was built from corrugated metal and adobe brick. He grew up clinging to my abuela’s back wrapped in a blanket as she weaved to sustain the family. He did not have shoes until he was 8 years old. He dropped out of school after the second grade. Before he reached my age, he was nearly murdered by the army three times. He worked as a trench digger and then as a laborer before fleeing his home in Huehuetenango. 

Ilan Palacios Avineri
  • Building Your Academic Presence Online in Three Steps by Raymond Hyser
  • In Memoriam: Dr. Robert A. Divine, 1929-2021 by Dr. H.W. Brands and Dr. Mark Atwood Lawrence
  • A More Expansive Atlantic History of the Americas: An Interview with Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra
  • Five Books I Recommend from Comps – Citizenship and Human Rights in Latin America by Gabrielle Esparza
  • HPS Talk: Hacking Airspace: The Insurgent Technology of Brazil’s Hot Air Balloons by Dr. Felipe Fernandes Cruz
  • HPS Talk: How the Histories of Medicine and Public Health Have Fared in the Media During Covid-19 by Rebecca Onion
  • NEP Second Edition: Casta Paintings by Susan Deans-Smith
  • This Used to Be a Synagogue by Amy Shreeve

In New York City, buildings are like wallpaper. If you peeled back the facades and peeked into their histories, you’d find something different, something out of style. The buildings’ old identities wouldn’t match the modern character of the neighborhood. On the Lower East Side, if you peel back the layers of luxury apartments, churches, and fusion restaurants, you’d notice a trend. Many buildings that now house fashionable venues used to be synagogues.

Amy Shreeve
  • Four Books I Recommend from Comps – Law, Knowledge, and Empire in the Middle East and North Africa by David Rahimi
  • Populism in History: An Interview with Federico Finchelstein
  • Five Books I Recommend from Comps – Labor and Citizenship in the United States by Gwendolyn Lockman
  • Archivos de la Represión: The Right to Truth and Memory in Mexico by Janette Nuñez
  • Roundtable: Effects of COVID on the Chinese Diaspora in North America
  • Review of the Flash of Light, Wall of Fire Exhibit by Zachary Bradley
  • The Guatemalan National Police Historical Archive: An archival school for Latin America by María José Pérez Sián
  • Estampa: Mauricio Tenorio by Rodrigo Salido Moulinié

Mauricio Tenorio thinks with his feet. As his soles touch the asphalt, he feels a piece of one of his dearest obsessions: the city. Not Mexico City specifically, although it might be the one he feels closest to, but the idea of the city. Cities have so much to say. A street in Barcelona, an old building in Chicago, an awkward monument in Washington. D.C., a park in Berlin: they all have stories and a history. And Tenorio, a Professor of History at the University of Chicago and Profesor Asociado at the Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas, Mexico City, tells these stories through his work. I like to repeat one about a hidden monument in Mexico City. Inside the column of the Independence monument, the capital’s famous postcard-ready landmark with angel’s wings, the white statue of an obscure figure guards the ashes of Mexico’s founding fathers—a monument of a seventeenth-century Irishman. Tenorio tells the story of Guillerme de Lampart, the “Irish Zorro” who plotted an independence movement with religious undertones in the 1640s—a peculiar reading of the Bible led him to believe that Spain did not have sovereign rights over the Americas. He became a controversial figure in Mexican history. The Inquisition burnt Lampart in 1650, making him a martyr for anti-Church Porfirian liberals. Placing his monument publicly would have surely triggered heated historiographical and political debates, weakening the process of national reconciliation. Thus, Lampart made his way into one of the nation’s central monuments: discretely.[1] Yet Tenorio’s driving curiosity lies elsewhere: it is not so much about what cities have to say, but how they say it. The location and concealment of Lampart’s monument suggest broader discussions on religion and independence, heroes and martyrs, history and the city. Tenorio explores how cities dictate these stories.

Rodrigo Salido Moulinié
  • Writing through the Body: The Work of Cristina Rivera by Ana Cecilia Calle
  • Knowledge and Power are Not the Same: Arndt Brendecke, The Empirical Empire, and the Spanish American Colonial Archive by Rafael Nieto-Bello
  • César Salgado – Boom and Bust: Locating Revolution in the Benson Collection’s Julio Cortázar Papers by Bianca Quintanilla
  • Historians and their Publics – A Profile of Dr. Jacqueline Jones by Dr. Jack E. Davis
  • Archiving the Brazilian Dictatorship: Dr. Inez Stampa and the Memórias Reveladas Reference Center by Timothy Vilgiate
  • Five Books I Recommend from Comps – Empire and Nation in Modern Eastern Europe by Jonathan Parker
  • Archives beyond Intention: The Readings and Writings of Dr. Kelly McDonough by Claudio Eduardo Moura de Oliveira
  • “Reflections on Resistance”: Memoria Abierta preserves the documentary legacies of heroes who faced down the junta by Paula O’Donnell
  • Remembering Pinochet: Dictatorship, Power, and Pushback by Nathan Stone

For the plebiscite of ‘88, Chile had its first political campaign in fifteen years. La Campaña del NO tried to make it fun. We all had many dark tales to tell, and maybe a moral obligation to tell them, but sad stories don’t get votes. Moreover, a very fine line, invisible to carabineros, divided protesting and campaigning. Opposition supporters had to resort to clever strategies. We would drive around with their windshield wipers on, on a dry day. Like saying “no” by moving your index finger from left to right. The cops couldn’t exactly arrest you for using your windshield wiper.

Nathan Stone
  • Statements and Resources on the Russian Invasion of Ukraine
  • The José Vasconcelos Papers: A Brief Introduction by Diego A. Godoy
  • “En las urgencias de la realidad [Within the urgencies of reality]:” Perspectives about the Vicaría de la Solidaridad by Lucy Quezada Yáñez
  • The Archive as a Contested Object of Knowledge: A Conversation with Dr. Sylvia Sellers-García by Roberto Young
  • The African and Asian Diasporas in Early Mexico: A Conversation on Slavery and Freedom with Professor Tatiana Seijas by Gary Leo Dunbar
  • Five Books to Help Make Sense of the War in Ukraine by Jon Buchleiter, Gabrielle Esparza, John Gleb, Jonathan Parker, and Daniel Samet
  • Introducing Texas Digital Humanities (TxDH) by Amy Shreeve, Benjamin Brown, and John Erard
IHS & Public History

IHS and Public History

  • Institute for Historical Studies, Race and Caste Research theme, 2021-22
  • IHS Podcast – Faith in Science? COVID, Antivaxxers, the State, and Epistemological Power with guests Sean F. McEnroe, Stephan Palmie, and J. Brent Crosson
  • Roundtable: “Faith in Science: From the Boxer Rebellion to Covid 19” feat. Sean F. McEnroe (Southern Oregon University), Stephan Palmie (University of Chicago), J. Brent Crosson (UT Austin), Nancy Rose Hunt (University of Florida), and Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra (UT Austin)
  • IHS Podcast – From Republic of Letters and Imagined Communities to Republics of Knowledge: Knowledge in the Making of 19th Century Radical Republics in Latin America with guests Nicola Miller and Alexander Chaparro-Silva
  • Republics of Knowledge, Democracy, and Race in Nineteenth-Century Spanish America by Alexander Chaparro-Silva
  • IHS Podcast -Apache Diaspora in four hundred years of colonialism vs ‘Toltec Antiquities’ Diaspora in Early Republican Mexico” with guests Miruna Achim, Paul Conrad, and Sheena Cox
  • IHS Podcast: Hungry for Revolution with guest Joshua Frens-String

Hungry for Revolution (2021) is an ambitious book that, through the social history of food production, distribution and consumption and through a cultural history of the knowledge and science of nutrition, agriculture, and political economy of rural landholdings, offers a radical new chronology of the political history of 20th century Chile.  Hungry for Revolution masterfully goes over the nitrate export boom in the fin-de-siècle mining towns of northern Chile and the creation of the new-deal welfare state of Alessandri and the Frente Popular in the 1930s and 1940s to offer a striking new genealogy of Allende’s Socialist Revolution.

Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra
  • IHS Podcast – Colonial Peru’s Fractional Freedoms meet Morgan’s thesis: American Freedom, American Slavery with guests Gary Leo Dunbar and Michelle McKinley
  • IHS Book Talk: “Hungry for Revolution: The Politics of Food and the Making of Modern Chile,” by Joshua Frens-String, University of Texas at Austin
  • IHS Podcast – Welcomed and then Expelled: The Plight of Chinese Mexicans from 1910 to 1960 with guests Jian Gao and Julia María Schiavone Camacho
  • IHS Podcast – The social history of 16th and 17th century Andean “ethnographic” knowledge, bottom-up or top down? with guests Rafael Nieto-Bello and Jose Carlos de la Puente
  • IHS Podcast – Mexico’s Social Science Laboratory and the Origins of the US Civil Rights Movement (1930-1950) with guests Rodrigo Salido Moulinié and Ruben Flores
  • IHS Panel: “Prop A in the Context of Race and Policing in Austin, Texas: An Urgent Forum”
  • IHS Book Talk: “‘Tribe and State in Global History’: The Political and Cultural Work of the Category of Tribe in the Historiographies of Asia, Americas, and Africa,” by Sumit Guha, University of Texas at Austin
  • IHS Workshop: “Covarrubias’ Crossings: Picturing the New Negro and the Making of Modern Mexico” by Rodrigo Salido Moulinié, University of Texas at Austin
  • IHS Roundtable: ‘The Eyes of Texas’: Historians’ Perspectives on the Origins of the Song
  • IHS Podcast – The New Faces of God in Latin America with guest Virginia Garrard
  • IHS Podcast – Against the Grain: Textile Relics and the Science of Sanctity in the Global Renaissance with guest Madeline McMahon

For most individuals, the Counter Reformation sought to quash new forms of democratic spiritual participation in the form of Lutheranism and Calvinism. The so-called Galileo affair epitomizes this narrative of the Counter Reformation as retrograde and even villainous. In the popular imagination, Galileo stands as the victim of the Counter Reformation’s stifling prosecution of skepticism, experimentation, and modernity. Yet Dr. Madeline McMahon begs to differ. In her manuscript the Catholic Creation of Early Modern Knowledge, McMahon argues that by creating the institution of the resident (non-absentee) bishop, the Counter Reformation became the lynchpin to the new confessional, interventionist, technocratic early-modern state.

Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra
  • IHS Workshop: “Invading Iraq” by Aaron O’Connell, University of Texas at Austin
  • Talleres y Debates: “Sobre la destrucción y reconstrucción de imperios, de Hispanoamérica continental a Brasil (1810s-1820s)”
  • IHS Podcast – A Time to Gather: Archives and the Control of Jewish Culture with guest Jason Lustig
  • IHS Book Roundtable: “A Time To Gather: Archives and the Control of Jewish Culture”
  • IHS Book Roundtable: “The New Faces of Neoliberal Christianity in Latin America”
  • IHS Podcast – E Pluribus Tria: Colonial Racial Formation in the Making of American Culture with guest James Sidbury
  • IHS Roundtable – The 1619 Project: A U.S. Perspective
  • IHS Symposium: The Curious Case of Race in the Russian Empire (16-19cc)
  • IHS Book Roundtable: What Belongs in Mexico’s National Museum?: Two Centuries of Object Collecting, Display, and Dispersal
  • IHS Roundtable: Between Neocolonial Collecting and Anticolonial Resistance? The Logic of Afro-Latiné/Latiné/Latin-American Archives in the United States (Benson Centennial)
  • IHS Roundtable: The 1619 Project: A Continental, Afro Latiné Perspective
  • IHS Talleres y Debates: “Sobre Talento, Objetos, y Colonias en la Exposición ‘Tornaviaje’ del Museo del Prado”
  • IHS Roundtable: The Foremothers of Women of Color Feminism
  • IHS Book Roundtable: “Ingredients of Change: The History and Culture of Food in Modern Bulgaria” by Mary Neuburger, University of Texas at Austin

Author Spotlights

Texas

Texas

  • Unidos Marcharemos Adelante by Dr. Emilio Zamora
  • Black Cowboys: An American Story by Ronald Davis

In our exhibit Black Cowboys: An American Story, visitors from Texas, and beyond will be introduced to a diverse group of African American cowhands, from Johana July, a free Black Seminole born in 1860 to Myrtis Dightman, called “The Jackie Robinson of Rodeo” who broke the color line at professional rodeos in the late 1960s. In addition to presenting the public with depictions of numerous Black cowboys, enslaved and free, the Witte Museum introduces the audience to the legacy of Black ranches and freedom colonies throughout Texas. The audience learns about several Black owned ranches that have stood the test of time, outlasting white supremacy and Jim Crow. These ranching families, who continue to ranch the land purchased and maintained by their ancestors in the nineteenth-century, display a tenacity of will and a commitment to their family traditions. They often withstood destruction of their family legacy by organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan while also weathering continual threats of encroachment from neighbors and state governments.

Ronald Davis
  • Texas State Historical Association – “Teaching Texas History in an Age of Hyper Partisanship” and “Forgetting and Remembering: Why Does Searching for an Accurate Past Provoke Backlash?”
Author spotlights
  • Nathan Stone
  • Gwendolyn Lockman
  • Gabrielle Esparza

Re-imagining Public History: A Tribute to Joan Neuberger

May 10, 2022

by the Editor of Not Even Past, Adam Clulow

As Not Even Past winds down for another academic year, we want to take a moment to celebrate the remarkable contribution of Dr. Joan Neuberger, our Founding Editor, who will be retiring from the University of Texas this summer. Joan guided the magazine for almost a decade from its formation before stepping down in 2019.

Many people worked on Not Even Past. It received consistent support from successive chairs of the department, the College of Liberal Arts and LAITS. Colleagues across the department and beyond gave generously of their time and expertise in writing for the magazine, which drew as well on the work of a group of exceptionally talented Associate Editors. But Not Even Past is also unimaginable without Joan.

When I first took over as Editor from Joan in 2019, I had no idea what lay ahead. Joan handled the task seemingly effortlessly, responding within minutes to any email and always knowing how to shape an article and improve an argument. In reality, and as I soon learned, this took an immense amount of effort, hundreds and thousands of hours each semester, managing the work of a magazine that publishes like a fully staffed magazine but with no permanent staff. Joan set the standard as editor and her immense energy, creativity and passion underpinned Not Even Past‘s growth and success.

Joan Neuberger, Founding Editor of Not Even Past, testifies on SB 11 (Campus Carry) before the Senate State Affairs Committee
Joan Neuberger, Founding Editor of Not Even Past, testifies on SB 11 (Campus Carry) before the Senate State Affairs Committee (January 2016) Photo by Matt Valentine.

Across her career Joan has won many accolades.  In 2018, she was awarded the Herbert Feis Award that is given annually to recognize distinguished contributions to public history. It is worth quoting the citation, which sums up Joan’s indefatigable energy: “As the driving force behind multiple noteworthy online history projects such as the Not Even Past website, the Thinking in Public project database, and the 15 Minute History podcast, Joan Neuberger’s scholarship harnesses the possibilities of the latest digital platforms for public engagement. Each year her work touches tens of thousands of people, both inside and outside the academy. In addition, she is an enthusiastic mentor and editor for other historians writing for a general audience.”  

Itza Carbajal, Maria Esther Hammack, Rebecca Johnston, John Lisle and Joan Neuberger during the recording of the 15 minute history podcast "Episode 84: Behind the Tower: New Histories of the UT Tower Shooting"
Itza Carbajal, John Lisle, Joan Neuberger, Maria Esther Hammack, and Rebecca Johnston during the recording of 15 minute history podcast “Episode 84: Behind the Tower: New Histories of the UT Tower Shooting“

Joan has always reserved special time and energy for her work in training graduate students to become public historians. Below, we have reproduced just a few testimonials from current and former students, for they speak louder than any other accolades of how hard Joan has worked to train, inspire and accompany students on their academic journeys to become distinctive public voices in their own right.  

Every year Joan recruited an Assistant Editor, who worked closely with her on every aspect of the site.  In 2016-17, that was Emily Whalen, who wrote to us that “Working with Dr. Neuberger on NEP transformed the way I thought about public history. After a year as a graduate assistant for the blog, I began to understand public history was less an added perspective than it was a holistic philosophy, a way to approach our entire professional toolkit and bring the public along with us as we delve into the past. I will also always remember Dr. Neuberger’s generosity with younger scholars. She is a model for professional mentorship and thoughtful guidance.”

In 2017-18, Natalie Cincotta, took on the role. Here are her words: “I am so grateful for Dr. Neuberger’s exhaustive efforts to make public history a core part of the graduate program. Through Not Even Past, 15 Minute History, Thinking in Public and coursework, Dr. Neuberger has engaged graduate students as writers, editors, and producers in the creative process of making history scholarship broadly accessible. Many of the graduate students who have worked or written for NEP (and other projects) have gone on to create their own websites and podcasts, write for national news publications, and use public history tools in the classroom. Thanks to resources like NEP, graduate students will go out into the world with a repertoire of tools and skills to engage the public in our work as historians in new and exciting ways. “

In 2018-19 the role was filled by Jesse Ritner who writes that “I had the privilege of working with Dr. Neuberger as the Assistant Editor and Books Editor of Not Even Past, where I have also contributed several articles.  Writing for NEP, as much as anything has helped me write clearly, in a voice that is my own.  Dr. Neuberger’s guidance, and the tremendous amount of energy she put into my pieces, is rare to receive outside of a student’s relationship with their advisor, and I think is one of the most valuable things that professors can offer graduate students.  Working for her gave me a sense of what it means to work in digital history and public history, as well as to see (and at times experience) the tremendous amount of work it takes to produce and maintain projects as large as NEP.  Her honesty, at times intensity, and her dedication to her project and the students who work for her and write for her, is something that I think the department will sorely miss.”

Alina Scott, the Assistant Editor from 2019 to 2020, explains that “It has been a pleasure working with and learning from Dr. Neuberger. Her Public and Digital History class sparked my interest in public scholarship. Her ability to take her students’ work seriously, prompted me to apply to work with her on NEP. While serving as the assistant editor of NEP, this became even more clear. Dr. Neuberger’s dedication to her students and public history is evident in how much time she spends with our work. Her care and attention to detail in editing and engaging with the main arguments of NEP submissions go above and beyond the requirements of the job. She also pays keen attention to the needs of the public, adapting NEP to reflect those needs. Not Even Past remains an important resource for UT graduate students and faculty, relevant digital tool, and contribution to public scholarship because of the dedication of Dr. Neuberger.”

Many other current and former students contributed to Not Even Past. Kristie Flannery writes that “With Not Even Past, Joan offered history Ph.D. students opportunities to learn about and experiment with how to write the kind of history that people want to read. Joan encouraged us to use our developing expertise to produce clear, engaging, and provocative pieces for public consumption about scholarly monographs as well as novels, films, music and museums that we love (or hate). Producing the high quality stuff you see on the blog involved a lot of patient and kind editing from Joan. Contributing to Not Even Past transformed my understanding of history as practice, of what it means to be a historian and to write history. Thank you!” For Brittany Erwin, a PhD candidate in the department,“Dr. Neuberger’s public history course was a jumping-off point for my digital humanities research. She was a great soundboard and editor, and I am so grateful for her insights.” 

We leave the final words to Rebecca Johnston who writes that “the very existence of NEP encourages history students to think about the importance of our work in the public sphere. But it does more than help us find our relevance to the public – it pulls us out of our academic silos into a collective conversation with others in our own department. With NEP, Dr. Neuberger has created a community space that helps to make our department more whole.”

Not Even Past re-imagined Public History at the University of Texas at Austin and we thank Joan for all she did to turn the magazine into such a valuable resource for history online.


The views and opinions expressed in this article or video are those of the individual author(s) or presenter(s) and do not necessarily reflect the policy or views of the editors at Not Even Past, the UT Department of History, the University of Texas at Austin, or the UT System Board of Regents. Not Even Past is an online public history magazine rather than a peer-reviewed academic journal. While we make efforts to ensure that factual information in articles was obtained from reliable sources, Not Even Past is not responsible for any errors or omissions. 

15 Minute History – Austin’s Black History

May 2, 2022

15 Minute History – Austin’s Black History

Guests: Javier Wallace, Race and Sport Postdoctoral Associate in the Department of African & African American Studies at Duke University

Host: Alina Scott, PhD Candidate in the History Department at the University of Texas at Austin

To kick off the new season of 15 Minute History, we sit down with Dr. Javier Wallace, founder and guide of Black Austin Tours. While those familiar with Austin know the George Washington Carver Museum as well as historically Black East Austin, Dr. Wallace unpacks other hidden, and not-so-hidden elements of Black history in the Texas capital.

Learn more about Black Austin Tours at https://blackaustintours.com/ and follow them on social media at BlackAustinTours.

Episode 134: Austin’s Black History

15 Minute History – Afro-Indigenous Histories of the US

May 2, 2022

15 Minute History – Afro-Indigenous Histories of the US

Guest: Kyle Mays, Assistant Professor of African American Studies, American Indian Studies, and History at UCLA

Host: Alina Scott, PhD Candidate in the History Department at the University of Texas at Austin

Afro-Indigenous histories are central to the history of the United States, tribal sovereignty, and civil rights. Today, Dr. Kyle Mays (Saginaw Chippewa) author of An Afro-Indigenous History of the United States and Hip Hop Beats, Indigenous Rhymes: Modernity and Hip Hop in Indigenous North America, discusses the intersections of Black and Indigenous history through the lens of individuals whose lives existed at those intersections.

Episode 136: Afro-Indigenous Histories of the US

15 Minute History –Connected Histories of Cuba and the United States

May 2, 2022

15 Minute History –Connected Histories of Cuba and the United States

Guest: Ada Ferrer, Professor of History and Latin American and Caribbean Studies at New York University

Host: Alina Scott, PhD Candidate in the History Department at the University of Texas at Austin

While the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Cold War are important aspects of the United States and Cuba’s shared history, they are not the only elements the two share. According to today’s guest and author of Cuba: An American History, Professor Ada Ferrer, there are the centuries of interconnected history between Cuba and the US.

Episode 135: Connected Histories of Cuba and the United States

15 Minute History – The 1844 Philadelphia Riots

May 2, 2022

15 Minute History – The 1844 Philadelphia Riots

Guest: Zachary M. Schrag, Professor of History at George Mason University

Host: Alina Scott, PhD Candidate in the History Department at the University of Texas at Austin

In 1844, Philadelphia, a hub for Irish immigration to the United States, witnessed a series of violent Nativist riots that targeted Irish Americans and Roman Catholic churches. In our season finale, Zachary Schrag discusses the events leading up to the Philadelphia Nativists Riots of 1844, who was there, and how it fits into the broader history of the century. Professor Schrag’s most recent book, The Fires of Philadelphia: Citizen-Soldiers, Nativists, and the 1844 Riots Over the Soul of a Nation (Pegasus Books, June 2021) is an account of the moment one of America’s founding cities turned on itself, giving the nation a preview of the Civil War to come. In the aftermath, the public debated both the militia’s use of force and the actions of the mob. Some of the most prominent nativists continued their rise to political power for a time, even reaching Congress, but they did not attempt to stoke mob violence again.

This episode of 15 Minute History was mixed and mastered by Harper Carlton, Amanda Willis, and Will Kurzner.

Episode 133: The 1844 Philadelphia Riots

Resources for Teaching Women’s History

March 22, 2022

From the editors: To mark Women’s History Month in 2022, we have collected a range of Not Even Past articles and reviews into one resources page organized around seven topics. These articles highlight groundbreaking research but they are also intended as a concrete resource for teachers.

Compiled by Gabrielle Esparza

Topics
  1. Black Women’s History
  2. Suffrage
  3. History of Reproduction
  4. Women’s Activism
  5. Important Figures
  6. Recommended Reading
  7. Recorded Talks and Podcasts

Black Women’s History

  • Beauty Shop Politics by Tiffany Gill
  • Black Women in Black Power by Ashley Farmer

One has to only look at a few headlines to see that many view black women organizers as important figures in combating today’s most pressing problems. Articles urging mainstream America to “support black women” or “trust black women” such as the founders of the Black Lives Matter Movement are popular. Publications, such as Time, laud black women’s political leadership—particularly when they mount a challenge to the status quo such as Stacey Abrams’ victory in the Georgia Democratic Governor primary. At the core of these sentiments is the recognition that black women have developed and sustained a liberal democratic politics that is conscious of and responsive to the interconnected effects of racism, capitalism, and sexism and that their approach can offer insight into current socio-political issues. The media often frames these and other women’s efforts as a manifestation of the current political moment divorced from the longer tradition of black women agitators and organizers to which they belong. Many of the black women making headlines today for their work in advancing civil rights and social justice ideals draw from these earlier traditions, including from the Black Power Movement of the 1960s and 70s.

Ashley Farmer
  • Black is Beautiful – And Profitable by Tiffany Gill
  • Black Women’s History in the U.S.: Past and Present by Daina Ramey Berry and Kali Nicole Gross
  • Ordinary Yet Infamous: Hannah Mary Tabbs and the Disembodied Torso by Kali Nicole Gross
  • Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All by Martha S. Jones (2020), reviewed by Tiana Wilson
  • Wicked Flesh: Black Women, Intimacy, and Freedom in the Atlantic World By Jessica Marie Johnson (2020), reviewed by Tiana Wilson
  • Dreaming with the Ancestors: Black Seminole Women in Texas and Mexico by Shirley Boteler Mock (2010), reviewed by Micaela Valadez

Suffrage

  • “The Eyes of Texas Are Upon You: Have You Paid That Poll Tax?” by Rachel Gunter

In the Austin History Center, there is a curious poster that demands the attention of “WOMEN!” in red, all-capital letters. Below this, a pair of eyes peer out beneath furrowed eyebrows warning “The Eyes of Texas are Upon You: Have You Paid That Poll Tax?” At the bottom of the poster is the instantly recognizable façade of the Alamo, just above the name of the group responsible for the ad, Texas League of Women Voters, Georgetown, Texas.

The poster is in the Jane McCallum collection. After Texas ratified the 19th Amendment in June 1919, the Texas Equal Suffrage Association became the state chapter of the League of Women Voters, and the local suffrage clubs were encouraged to make that transition as well. McCallum was an Austin-area suffragist who went on to spearhead publicity campaigns for the League of Women voters, lead the Women’s Joint Legislative Council, and serve as Texas Secretary of State under two governors. It is likely she had a hand in this particular poster, but we can’t be sure. In fact, there isn’t even a date on the poster, which scholars and archivists have only dated as being from the early 1920s. Both the Texas Equal Suffrage Associations and the League used maternal appeals to get women to pay the poll tax. They argued that this is how Texas funded public schools, and that “90% of Texas educators are women and need a living wage.” The poster is in line with the WWI-era appeals to women to do their duty as citizens.

Rachel Gunter
  • Voting Rights Still Threatened 100 Years After the 19th Amendment by Laurie Green
  • Citizens at Last: Texas Women Fight for the Vote by Nancy Schiesari and Ellen Temple

History of Reproduction

  • Contraception – Letters from French Women, 1960s-70s by Judith Coffin

Listeners wanted to discuss any number of issues: work, housing (in short supply as the economy expanded), credit and debt, the struggles of family businesses, and everything having to do with sex. They asked about sexual dilemmas and crises, pregnancy, family life, parents or in-laws (helpful intrusive, or both), and children, but contraception and abortion topped the list of women’s concerns. (Men wrote as well: they, too, were and are implicated in fertility and reproduction.) In 1967, the same year that Grégoire began broadcasting, the Neuwirth law made it legal for the first time, to discuss contraception in public – and cautiously opened the door to approving the sale of selected oral contraceptives, IUDs, and diaphragms. 

Judith Coffin
  • Dead Babies in Boxes: Dealing with the Consequences of Interrupted Reproduction by Julie Hardwick
  • Parenting in Hard Times: Child Abandonment in Early Modern Europe by Julie Hardwick
  • Woman’s Body, Woman’s Right: Birth Control in America by Linda Gordon (1976), reviewed by Megan Seaholm
  • Contraceptive Diplomacy: Reproductive Politics and Imperial Ambitions in the United States and Japan by Aiko Takeuchi-Demirci (2018), reviewed by Kellianne King
  • Mother is a Verb: An Unconventional History by Sarah Knott (2019), reviewed by Jesse Ritner

Women’s Activism

  • Remembering the Tex-Son Strike: Legacies of Latina-led Labor Activism in San Antonio, Texas by Micaela Valadez
  • The Politics of a Handkerchief: Personal Thoughts on the Motif of Female Activism in Argentina by Paula O’Donnell
  • La Mujer Unidad: Cynthia Orozco (UT History Honors Graduate ‘80) by Nikki Lopez
  • Women’s March, Like Many Before It, Struggles for Unity by Laurie Green

Internal tensions are par for the course in the history of marches on Washington, whether they involved racial justice, women’s rights, or political protest. The several thousand women who paraded down Pennsylvania Avenue in the 1913 Woman Suffrage Procession, the day before President Woodrow Wilson’s inauguration, were not as unified as they might have appeared. Participants included immigrant women sweatshop workers, who linked the right to vote to their movement to organize against deadly factory conditions and piecework wages. But noticeably absent from the front of the march were black women’s organizations, who supported the effort but whose participation was spurned by the militant young suffragist Alice Paul, who feared it would jeopardize support from Southern white women. These African American women ended up participating, but they were required to march behind all the other women. All the women who marched down Pennsylvania Avenue stood up to jeers and violence, but they themselves were divided by an ugly racism rooted in political pragmatism.

Laurie Green
  • The Austin Women Activists Oral History Project by Laurie Green
  • Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600 – 2000 by Laurie Green
  • Why I Ban the Word “Feminism” from My Classes by Jacqueline Jones
  • Women Shaping Texas in the Twentieth Century by Cristina Metz
  • Cynthia Attaquin and a Wampanoag Network of Petitioners by Alina Scott
  • Whisper Tapes: Kate Millett in Iran by Negar Mottahedeh (2019), reviewed by Denise Gomez

Important Figures

  • My Life on the Road, by Gloria Steinem (2015), reviewed by Megan Seaholm
  • Lady Bird Johnson interviewed by Michael Gillette
  • Lady Bird Johnson, In Her Own Words by Michael Gillette
  • Liz Carpenter: Texan by Michael Gillette

Liz’s family tree sprouted strong, adventurous women equal to the men.  A great aunt, Louella Robertson Fulmore, eloquently advocated educational equality for women. Another great aunt, the prominent suffragist, Birdie Johnson, became the first Democratic national committeewoman from Texas. As she exhorted women to organize to make their influence felt at the polls, she declared that it was “our first step” in the exercise of “direct political power.”  No wonder Liz believed that she had inherited her feminist genes.

She was not blind to the shortcomings of her ancestors, whose reputations bore the stain of enslavement and the tragic folly of secession. Nor did her rich Texas legacy confer a sense of privilege or birthright. Instead, it affirmed her belief that ordinary people can overcome adversity to accomplish extraordinary things.  It also instilled a love of Texas history and a respect for its historians, which is why [the Liz Carpenter] award meant so much to her.  Finally, it inspired one of greatest political zingers of all time. When John Connally threw his support to the Republican incumbent President in 1972 and formed a group called “Democrats for Nixon,”  Liz declared that if Connally had been at the Alamo, he would have organized “Texans for Santa Anna.”

Michael Gillette
  • Dolores del Río: Beauty in Light and Shade, By Linda B. Hall (2013), reviewed by Ann Twinam
  • Goddess of Anarchy: Lucy Parsons, American Radical by Jacqueline Jones
  • An Intimate History of the Twentieth Century by Judith Coffin
  • Miss O’Keeffe by Nathan Stone
  • Carrie Marcus Neiman – A Pioneer in Ready to Wear by Lynn Mally

Recommended Reading

  • Great Books on Women’s History: Crossing Borders
  • Great Books on Women’s History: Asia
  • Great Books on Women’s History: Europe
  • Great Books on Women’s History: United States
  • Great Books on Women in US History by Megan Seaholm
  • Great Books on African American Beauty Culture by Tiffany Gill
  • New Books in Women’s History (2013)
  • On Women and Nation in India by Indrani Chatterjee
  • American Girls in Red Russia: Chasing the Soviet Dream by Julia L. Mickenberg

Recorded Talks and Podcasts

  • IHS Book Talk: “Her Neighbor’s Wife: A History of Lesbian Desire Within Marriage,” by Lauren Jae Gutterman, University of Texas at Austin (History Faculty New Book Talk)
  • IHS Book Talk: “Sex in an Old Regime City: Young Workers and Intimacy in France, 1660-1789,” by Julie Hardwick
  • IHS Book Talk: “Sex, Love, and Letters: Writing Simone de Beauvoir” by Judith G. Coffin, University of Texas at Austin (History Faculty New Book Talk)
  • Podcasting Migration: Wives, Servants, and Prostitutes with Sandy Chang
  • 15 Minute History, Episode 50: White Women of the Harlem Renaissance with Carla Kaplan
  • 15 Minute History, Episode 83: Simone de Beauvoir and ‘The Second Sex’ with Judith Coffin
  • 15 Minute History, Episode 93: Women and the Tamil Epics with Andrea Gutierrez
  • 15 Minute History, Episode 120: Slave-Owning Women in the Antebellum U.S. with Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers
  • 15 Minute History, Episode 121: The Case for Women’s History with Ellen Hartigan-O’Connor and Dr. Lisa G. Materson 

Resources For Teaching Black History

February 7, 2022

Over the past decade, Not Even Past has published a wide range of resources connected to Black History written by faculty and graduate students at UT and beyond. To mark Black History Month, we have collected them into one compilation page organized around 11 topics. These articles showcase groundbreaking research, but they are also intended as a concrete resource for teachers and students. This is an evolving compilation that is continually updated.

Compiled by Alina Scott and Gabrielle Esparza

Topics
  1. Economy of Slavery
  2. Slavery & the Family
  3. Urban Slavery
  4. Key Figures
  5. Medicine & Healthcare
  6. Civil Rights & Black Power
  7. On #BlackLivesMatter
  8. Gender & Sexuality
  9. Diasporic Blackness
  10. Primary Sources
  11. Reviews

Economy of Slavery

  • “White Women and the Economy of Slavery” by Stephanie Jones-Rogers

White slave-owning women were not the only ones to insist on their profound economic investments in the institution of slavery; the enslaved people they owned and white members of southern communities did too. The testimony of formerly enslaved people and other narrative sources, legal documents, and financial records dramatically reshape current understandings of white women’s economic relationships to slavery, situating those relationships firmly at the center of nineteenth-century America’s most significant and devastating system of economic exchange. These sources reveal that white parents raised their daughters with particular expectations related to owning slaves and taught them how to be effective slave masters. These lessons played a formative role in how white women conceptualized their personal relationships to human property, imagined the powers that they would possess once they became slave owners in their own right, and shaped their techniques of slave control.

STEPHANIE E. JONES-ROGERS
  • 15 Minute History Episode 120: Slave-Owning Women in Antebellum U.S. with Dr. Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers
  • “Slavery in America: Back in the Headlines” by Daina Ramey Berry  
  • “Slavery and Freedom in Savannah” by Leslie M. Harris and Daina Ramey Berry
  • Visualizing Emancipation(s): Mapping The End of Slavery in America by Henry Wiencek
  • An “Act of Justice”? by Juliet Walker

Slavery & the Family

  • 15 Minute History Episode 88: The Search for Family Lost in Slavery with Dr. Heather Andrea Williams 
  • “Love in the Time of Texas Slavery” by Maria Esther Hammack

I wasn’t looking to find a story of abounding love when researching violent episodes of Texas history. Then I ran across a Texas newspaper article that shed a brief light on the lives of a Black woman and a Mexican man who had lived as husband and wife in the 1840s, twenty-five miles northeast of Victoria, Texas. She was a woman forced to live in bondage in Jackson County, near the town of Texana, in present day Edna, Texas. Her husband was a Mexican man who was likely indentured, employed, or a peon in that same vicinity.

MARIA ESTHER HAMMACK
  • Driven Toward Madness: The Fugitive Slave Margaret Garner and Tragedy on the Ohio by Nikki M. Taylor (2016) – reviewed by Signe Peterson Fourmy
  • “Let the Enslaved Testify” by Daina Ramey Berry

Urban Slavery

  • 15 Minute History Episode 54: Urban Slavery in the Antebellum United States with Dr. Daina Ramey Berry and Dr. Leslie Harris
  • Slavery in Early Austin: The Stringer’s Hotel and Urban Slavery by Clifton Sorrell III

This hotel was one of the many businesses in Austin using enslaved labor, a commonplace practice that extended to every part of Texas. However, urban slavery in Austin differed substantially from slavery on the vast plantations that stretched across Texas’ rural geography. Unlike rural planters, urban slaveholders were largely merchants, businessmen, tradesmen, artisans, and professionals. The urban status of these slaveholders in Austin meant that enslaved people performed a wide variety of tasks, making them highly mobile and multi-occupational. Austin property holders, proprietors, and city planners built enslaved labor not only into the city’s economy, but into its very physical space to meet local needs. This examination of the Stringer’s Hotel provides a brief window for looking into Austin’s history of slavery and perhaps the history of enslaved people in the urban context.

CLIFTON SORRELL III
  • An Inconvenient Past: Slavery at the Texas Governor’s Mansion by Kyle Walker

Key Figures

  • “Andrew Cox Marshall: Between Slavery and Freedom in Savannah” by Tania Sammons
  • 15 Minute History Episode 105: Slavery and Abolition with Manisha Sinha
  • “Rising From the Ashes: The Oklahoma Eagle and its Long Road to Preservation” by Jaden Janak
  • “Goddess of Anarchy: Lucy Parsons, American Radical” by Jacqueline Jones

Lucy Parsons’s biography offers several overlapping narratives— a love story between a former slave and a former Confederate soldier, the rise and decline of radical labor agitation, the evolution of race as a political ideology and social signifier, and the trajectory of social reform from Reconstruction through the New Deal. She was a bold, enigmatic woman. Her power to inform and fascinate is enduring and her story, in all its complexity, remains a remarkable one for its useful legacies no less than its cautionary lessons.

JACQUELINE JONES
  • “Ordinary Yet Infamous: Hannah Mary Tabbs and the Disembodied Torso” by Kali Nicole Gross
  • “Before Red Tails: Black Servicemen in World War I” by Jermaine Thibodeaux
  • “Eddie Anderson, the Black Film Star Created by Radio” by Kathryn Fuller-Seeley
  • Black Cowboys: An American Story by Ronald Davis

In 1921, while reflecting on the height of the cattle drive era, between 1865 and 1895, then President of the “Old Time Trail Drivers’ Association” of Texas, George W. Saunders, estimated that “fully 35,000 men went up the trail with herds…about one-third were negroes and Mexicans.” Eminent historians of African Americans in the West such as Kenneth Porter argue that, “twenty five percent” of all cowboys who participated in cattle drives out of Texas were Black. Yet, this is just the beginning. Some Black cowhands never journeyed to Kansas, driving herds of 2000 to 5000 cattle. Some of these women and men, stayed to work on ranches throughout Texas rather than “go up the trail.” They were cooks, and cowboys, horse breakers and trainers. There was more to being a cowboy than eating dust and crossing swollen rivers.

RONALD DAVIS

Medicine & Healthcare

  • “The Odds are Stacked Against Us: Oral Histories of Black Healthcare in the U.S.” By Thomaia Pamplin

Civil Rights & Black Power

  • “Black Women in Black Power” by Ashley Farmer 

One has to only look at a few headlines to see that many view black women organizers as important figures in combating today’s most pressing problems. Articles urging mainstream America to “support black women” or “trust black women” such as the founders of the Black Lives Matter Movement are popular. Publications, such as Time, laud black women’s political leadership—particularly when they mount a challenge to the status quo such as Stacey Abrams’ victory in the Georgia Democratic Governor primary. At the core of these sentiments is the recognition that black women have developed and sustained a liberal democratic politics that is conscious of and responsive to the interconnected effects of racism, capitalism, and sexism and that their approach can offer insight into current socio-political issues. The media often frames these and other women’s efforts as a manifestation of the current political moment divorced from the longer tradition of black women agitators and organizers to which they belong. Many of the black women making headlines today for their work in advancing civil rights and social justice ideals draw from these earlier traditions, including from the Black Power Movement of the 1960s and 70s.

ASHLEY FARMER
  • “Stokely Carmichael: A Life” by Peniel Joseph
  • “Muhammad Ali Helped Make Black Power Into a Global Brand” By Peniel Joseph
  • 15 Minute History Episode 90: Stokely Carmichael: A Life with Peniel E. Joseph
  • US Survey Course: Civil Rights
  • Student Showcase – Faubourg Treme: Fighting for Civil Rights in 19th Century New Orleans
  • 1863 in 1963 by Laurie Green
  • The Sword and The Shield – a conversation with Peniel Joseph
  • Beauty Shop Politics by Tiffany Gill
  • IHS Panel: “Rodney King and the LA Riots: 30 Years Later”

On #BlackLivesMatter

  • “#Blacklivesmatter Till They Don’t: Slavery’s Lasting Legacy” by Daina Ramey Berry and Jennifer L. Morgan

In less than a month, our nation will commemorate the 150th anniversary of the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery. This should be a time of celebratory reflection, yet Wednesday night, after another grand jury failed to see the value of African-American life, protesters took to the streets chanting, “Black lives matter!” As scholars of slavery writing books on the historical value(s) of black life, we are concerned with the long history of how black people are commodified by the state. Although we are saddened by the unprosecuted deaths of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Eric Garner and countless others, we are not surprised. We live a nation that has yet to grapple with the history of slavery and its afterlife. In 1669, the Virginia colony enacted legislation that gave white slaveholders the authority to murder their slaves without fear of prosecution. This act, concerning “… the Casual Killing of Slaves,” seems all too familiar today.

DAINA RAMEY BERRY AND JENNIFER L MORGAN
  • “Violence Against Black People in America: A ClioVis Timeline” by Haley Price, William Jones, and Alina Scott
  • “Stand With Kap”: Athlete Activism at the LBJ Library by Gwendolyn Lockman

Gender & Sexuality

  • Slavery, Work and Sexuality by Daina Ramey Berry
  • “Black Women’s History in the US: Past & Present” by Daina Ramey Berry and Kali Nicole Gross
  • “We Don’t Have to Boo It:” UT’s Black Lesbian Student Government President by Brynna Boyd
  • “Black is Beautiful – And Profitable” by Tiffany Gill

Black is beautiful.  The Black Power movement of the 1960s and 1970s popularized this slogan and sentiment, but almost half-a-century earlier, black beauty companies used elaborate advertisements like the one pictured here to sell their vision to uplift and beautify black women.  African American women like Madam C.J. Walker produced beauty products and trained women to work as sales agents and beauticians. and in the process, developed an enduring enterprise that promoted economic opportunities and connections with African descendant peoples throughout North and South America.

TIFFANY GILL

Diaspora

  • Slavery and Race in Colonial Latin America
  • 15 Minute History Episode 70: Slavery and Abolition in Iran
  • Frank A. Guridy on the Transnational Black Diaspora
  • African Americans in Ghana: Black Expatriates and the Civil Rights Era by Kevin K. Gaines (2007)
  • IHS Podcast: Mexico’s Social Science Laboratory and the Origins of the US Civil Rights Movement (1930-1950)

Primary Sources

  • The Public Archive: The Paperwork of Slavery

Reviews in Black History

  • King: Pilgrimage to the Mountaintop by Harvard Sitkoff (2009) by Tiana Wilson
  • We Were Eight Years in Power by Ta-Nehisi Coates (2017) By Brandon Render
  • Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive by Marisa Fuentes (2016) By Tiana Wilson

Fuentes’ work contributes to the historical knowledge of early America through her focus on violence and how it operated during slavery and continues today through archives. She cautions scholars to avoid traditional readings of archival evidence, which are produced by and for the dominant narratives of slavery. Instead, she calls for a reading “along the bias grain,” of historical records and against the politics of the historiography on a given topic. In other words, she pushes historians to stretch fragmented archival evidence in order to reflect a more nuanced, complex understanding of enslaved people’ lives. 

Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive by Marisa Fuentes, Reviewed By Tiana Wilson
  • Monroe by Lisa B. Thompson (2018) by Tiana Wilson
  • Historical Perspectives on Marshall (dir: Reginal Hudlin, 2017) by Luritta DuBois
  • African Americans in Ghana: Black Expatriates and the Civil Rights Era by Kevin K. Gaines (2007) by Joseph Parrott
  • Baseball’s Great Experiment: Jackie Robinson and His Legacy by Jules Tygiel (1997) by Dolph Briscoe IV
  • Historical Perspectives on The Birth of a Nation (2016) by Ronald Davis
  • A. City Limits: African American Los Angeles from the Great Depression to the Present by Josh Sides (2003) by Cameron McCoy
  • Wicked Flesh: Black Women, Intimacy, and Freedom in the Atlantic World By Jessica Marie Johnson (2020) by Tiana Wilson
  • The Harder They Fall (2021), Directed by Jeymes Samuel by Candice Lyons
  • Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All by Martha S. Jones (2020) by Tiana Wilson
Next Page »

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