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

Not Even Past

NEP Author Spotlight – Alina Scott

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.

Continue Reading…

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.”

Continue Reading…

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.

Continue Reading…

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.

Continue Reading…

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.

Year in Review – Academic year 2021-2022

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

Features

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

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 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
books

Books

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

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

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
Teaching

Teaching

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
Digital and Film

Digital and Film

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

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

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
Blog

Blog

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

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

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

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
IHS & Public History

IHS and Public History

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

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

Author Spotlights

Texas

Texas

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
Author spotlights

Re-imagining Public History: A Tribute to Joan Neuberger

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.

15 Minute History – Austin’s Black History

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

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

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

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

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

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

Suffrage

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

History of Reproduction

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

Women’s Activism

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

Important Figures

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

Recorded Talks and Podcasts

Resources For Teaching Black History

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 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

Slavery & the Family

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

Urban Slavery

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

Key Figures

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

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

Civil Rights & Black Power

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

On #BlackLivesMatter

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

Gender & Sexuality

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

Primary Sources

Reviews in Black History

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

Institute for Historical Studies, Race and Caste Research theme, 2021-22

Not Even Past is delighted to collaborate with the Institute for Historical Studies and its innovative Race and Caste research theme in 2021-2022. Under the leadership of a new Director Dr. Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, the Alice Drysdale Sheffield Professor of History, the Institute’s program this year centers on the work of nine junior and advanced graduate student Fellows from the History Department at The University of Texas at Austin. Each student will develop either an essay for submission to a scholarly publication, or a proposal for a grant application.

Each piece will be workshopped twice during the year. Fellows will present the first draft of their work virtually via Zoom in the Fall semester, and a revised version of the essay in Spring in-person on campus. They will receive two rounds of critical feedback and crucial guidance on their projects from leading scholars in their fields joining from UT and across the globe. At each workshop, the student will be in conversation with three scholars– two from outside of the university and one UT affiliate. With their final, polished essays at year’s end, Fellows will submit their works to scholarly publications in their field, or to grants organizations.

“The intention here is to guide the student on how to transform a good essay into a great essay,” said Cañizares-Esguerra. “There are no formulas, of course. We want discussants to help Fellows identify blind spots in their arguments and in the structure of the essays, if there are any. Each respondent brings a different expertise to bear. That is the beauty of this exercise.”

The Race and Caste cohort has already participated in intensive discussions around the mechanics of essay writing. Last July, Cañizares-Esguerra invited a roundtable of accomplished UT History alums to speak about their publications, and to define how a “great” article follows particular structures. As graduate students, these alums submitted pieces to leading journals, including American Historical Review, The Hispanic American Historical Review, Journal of American History, Renaissance Quarterly, and The William and Mary Quarterly.

“The basic structure we concluded,” Cañizares-Esguerra said, “is to bring two, and sometimes more, separate, unrelated historiographies to bear on a third subject, thus changing perspectives on all three areas at once. To do this, one needs a command of the interventions these historiographies are seeking to make. We need students to do the historiographical work daringly and explicitly.”

In addition to workshopping their essays, Fellows will host podcasts with their respective respondents to explore and engage with the external scholar’s work in relationship to the Fellow’s research. Fellows will also write short articles examining respondents’ publications, particularly those works that speak most closely to the students’ areas of study. Recordings of the workshops, podcast episodes, and short written pieces will all be featured on UT History’s public history resource, Not Even Past. The first podcast is available here.

Alexander Chaparro-Silva

Launching the Race and Caste workshop series on Monday, September 13 at Noon, Fellow Alexander Chaparro-Silva will present “Democracy and Race in the Americas: Readings of Tocqueville’s Democracy in America South of the Rio Grande” in conversation with three prestigious scholars working in his field: Dr. Lina del Castillo (Associate Professor of History, University of Texas at Austin); Dr. Nicola Miller (Professor of Latin American History, University College London); and Dr. James Sidbury (Professor of History, and Andrew W. Mellon Distinguished Professor of Humanities, Rice University). Chaparro-Silva is an intellectual historian and doctoral student in History at UT Austin. His dissertation analyzes how Latin American intellectuals came to the US, offered a sophisticated comparative reflection on democracy and race relations in both Americas, and crafted racialized continental differences during the nineteenth century. His research is supported in part by The Conference on Latin American History and The Tinker Foundation. He coedited a book about print culture in Spanish America during the Age of Revolutions and has published several peer-reviewed articles in the US, Colombia, and Argentina. Register to attend this workshop and receive the pre-circulated paper here, and save the date for his second workshop taking place January 24, 2022, at Noon (details forthcoming).

Read about this year’s Race and Caste Fellows and their projects:

  • Sheena Cox
  • Gary Leo Dunbar
  • Jian Gao 高堅
  • Rafael Nieto-Bello

“The Mexican Empire under Agustin de Iturbide and Indigenous Texas”

By Sheena Cox

Sheena Cox is a Borderlands Ph.D. Candidate at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research is focused on the Liberal Enlightenment in Texas, and its impact on Indigenous relations with Tejanos and Mexicans, 1810-1839. In addition to her dissertation research, Sheena is also dedicated to public history and historic preservation through projects with the Bullock Texas State History Museum and the Texas Historical Commission. From 2019-2021, Sheena worked as the coordinator for TSHA’s annual meeting program. She has served as a graduate research assistant for the Handbook of Texas, and as an assistant editor for the Handbook of Texas Women and Handbook of Dallas Fort-Worth Handbook projects. 

“Pacific Soundings: Race, Abolitionism, and the Birth of Mexican Citizenship”

By Gary Leo Dunbar

Gary Leo Dunbar is a doctoral candidate in Latin American history. His research examines the history of slavery, abolitionism, and citizenship in the Americas with a specific focus on Pacific Mexico. Gary holds a bachelor’s degree in anthropology from the University of Oregon and completed his master’s work at Central Michigan University (CMU) in the U.S. and Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla (BUAP) in Mexico. His research has been funded with grants from the U.S. Department of Education, LLILAS Benson Latin American Studies and Collections, and UT’s history department and College of Liberal Arts. He is the recipient of a President’s Award for Best Conference Paper at the International Graduate Historical Studies Conference, a Graduate Paper Prize from CMU’s College of Humanities and Social and Behavioral Sciences, and an Outstanding Graduate Thesis/Project Award from the Office of Research and Graduate Studies at CMU for his master’s work. Gary is currently at work on the second edition of Thomas Benjamin’s The Atlantic World: Europeans, Africans, Indians and their Shared History, 1400-1900 for Cambridge University Press.

“Reimagining Borders: Triangular Transnationalism and Chinese Mexicans”

By Jian Gao 高堅

Jian Gao is a third-year PhD student at UT Austin. My primary research focuses on the transnational history of the Chinese in Mexico during the first half of the twentieth century, and my secondary research focuses on the global dynamics of Latin America during the Cold War era. My works have appeared in The Latin Americanist, Asian Journal of Latin American Studies, and International Report on Drug Studies. My papers won multiple awards from Latin American Studies Association (LASA), Rocky Mountain Council on Latin American Studies (RMCLAS), Southeastern Council of Latin American Studies (SECOLAS), and the World History Association (WHA).

“Relaciones in Response to a World of Questionnaires: Community Knowledge, Ethnicity and Legal Culture from the Spanish Empire’s Towns (c. 1570-1590)”

By Rafael Nieto-Bello

Rafael Nieto-Bello is a second-year Ph.D. student in the Department of History at UT Austin. He obtained a double B.A. in History and Political Science and a double minor in Philosophy and German Language in the Universidad de Los Andes (Bogotá, Colombia, 2018). In 2021, he was awarded the Fellowship on “Race and Caste” from the Institute of Historical Studies (IHS) for preparing a grant proposal. Additionally, he obtained the Lozano Long Centennial Fellowship from LLILAS Benson for the coordination of the 2022 Lozano Long Conference “Archiving Objects of Knowledge with Latin American Perspectives.” His research is a history of knowledge from the 16th-century Spanish municipalities. He explores how town communities from diverse ethnic backgrounds described and claimed to know their populations and environments through corporate efforts placed on the local councils.

  • Jesse Ritner
  • Rodrigo Salido Moulinié
  • Alina Scott
  • Haley Schroer

“Skiing on the Sacred: The San Francisco Peaks, Indigenous Rights, and the U.S. Ski Industry”

By Jesse Ritner

Jesse Ritner is a Ph.D. candidate studying U.S. environmental history. His dissertation “Elegy of a Dying Sport: Snow, Technology, and the Rise of the North American Ski Industry” explores how science and technology were used to build a weather-dependent sport in climates that lacked the reliable snowpack needed for alpine skiing. His project then traces how new technologies created new classed and racialized relations between the ski industry, skiers, laborers, and the non-human world. “Skiing on the Sacred” is closely related to the final chapter of his dissertation which looks at the ways in which technology created a dependent relationship between the ski industry and the Forest Service at the expense of nearby populations. The article “Skiing on the Sacred” in contrast focuses on the ways in which laws, the Forest Service, and the ski industry systematically invalidated Indigenous claims to the San Francisco Peaks. Jesse has received several grants and Fellowships for his research, including an especially generous grant from the American Meteorological Society. Along with studying history, Jesse is also an avid skier.

“Covarrubias’ Crossings: Picturing the New Negro and the Making of Modern Mexico”

By Rodrigo Salido Moulinié

Rodrigo Salido Moulinié is a writer, photographer, and doctoral student in the Department of History at the University of Texas at Austin, where he is a Fulbright-García Robles Scholar and a Contex Doctoral Fellow. His work explores the interconnections between the histories of photography, science, and anthropology. I trace the tensions between the making of ethnography and the development of new visual methods of representing otherness—photography, painting, sketching, and writing. In 2018, nexos awarded my essay “Testigo (in)voluntario: la muerte de Kevin Carter” with the Carlos Pereyra Essay Prize. I was born and raised on the outskirts of Mexico City, where I worked in various filmmaking and music projects. I graduated in Politics and Public Administration from El Colegio de México. Learn more about his work at www.rsmoulinie.comm and follow him on Twitter at @rsmoulinie.

“’They Have Always Worn Spanish Clothes:’ Indigenous Elites and Sumptuary Legislation in Seventeenth-Century New Spain”

By Haley Schroer

Haley Schroer is a Ph.D. candidate in colonial Latin American history. Her work focuses on the intersection of race and material culture in colonial Latin America. In particular, her dissertation examines the rise of racialized clothing laws in the Spanish Empire throughout the seventeenth century. Her research has received support from the Fulbright Program, The Social Science Research Council International Dissertation Research Fellowship Program, the P.E.O. Sisterhood, and The Conference on Latin American History’s James R. Scobie Award. Schroer received a B.A. in History and Spanish, Summa Cum Laude, from Texas Christian University in 2016. She earned her M.A. from UT-Austin in May 2018 where her master’s report, “‘Scandalizing the Public’: Clothing and Perception in Mexico City’s Seventeenth-Century Inquisitorial Sumptuary Trials” won the 2019 Perry Prize for Best Master’s Thesis/Report. She is currently completing her dissertation under the direction of Susan Deans-Smith and Ann Twinam.

“‘Whether We Bore The Resemblance of Indians’: Kinship and Coalition Building in Black and Indigenous New England”

By Alina Scott

Alina Scott is a History Ph.D. Candidate at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research explores eighteenth and nineteenth-century Native intellectual history and literature, digital humanities, critical race theory, archival studies, gender and sexuality, and religion. Her dissertation,”Murder by Inches: Indigenous Intellectuals, Land, and Sovereignty in Wampanoag Petitions, 1820-1850″  examines Indigenous petitioning campaigns and protests throughout the nineteenth century. Alina has served as Associate Editor and Communications Director at Not Even Past and a managing editor for Native American and Indigenous Studies Journal. She hosts the weekly 15 Minute History Podcast, part of the University of Texas’s Podcast Network. Her research has been supported by Department of History, the University of Texas at Austin, the McNair Scholars Program, Native American and Indigenous Studies Program at the University of Texas at Austin, National Society of the Colonial Dames of America, Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship at the Massachusetts Historical Society, Georgetown Humanities Ambassador Fellowship, and the Institute For Historical Studies, University of Texas at Austin.

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.

Recent Posts

NOT EVEN PAST is produced by

The Department of History



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


Contact

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

    Sign up to receive the monthly Not Even Past newsletter