By Jesse Ritner Passing Red Hill, we turned onto Colorado Route 133. Ahead of us towered Mount Sopris, an almost 13,000 foot volcano. 133 shoots towards the Elk Mountain Range, a row of peaks frequently topping 12,000 feet, but Sopris still looks immense in comparison. Casting its shadow over the quaint town of Carbondale, it […]
Climate in Context: Historical Precedents and the Unprecedented – Conference Program
April 22-23, 2021Institute for Historical Studies, University of Texas at Austin This conference brings together diverse scholars whose work grapples with the challenges that climate change presents to the discipline of history. Participants will address precedents for this “unprecedented” crisis by uncovering and analyzing the historical roots and analogues of contemporary climate change across a […]
Creating a Collective Conversation: A Tribute to Joan Neuberger
by the Incoming Editor of Not Even Past, Adam Clulow Long before I applied for a position at the University of Texas at Austin, I knew about Not Even Past. Asked to teach a new course in my old university in Australia, I remember the familiar panic about readings: Where could I find something suitable for an […]
Slavery World Wide: Collected Works from Not Even Past
Slavery and the slave trade transformed the world. According to the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, 12.5 million African women, men and children were shipped across the Atlantic to North and South America as slaves. As many as 2 million died in transit. In recent years, historians have started to investigate slavery in other contexts. While the […]
Mother is a Verb: An Unconventional History by Sarah Knott (2019)
By Jesse Ritner The easy correlation contemporary American and British cultures build from sex to pregnancy, pregnancy to birth, and birth to childrearing within a nuclear family is far from uniform throughout history. Mother is not an identity. Not all women will mother during the course of their lives. In Sarah Knott’s words, “mother is […]
The Anthropocene and Environmental History
By Jesse Ritner If you open a textbook on geology and flip through to the chapter on geological time it will tell you we are currently living in the epoch of the Holocene. The Holocene started approximately 10,000 years before present with the end of the last ice age. However, research by a diverse array […]
Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England, by William Cronon (1983)
By Jesse Ritner Thirty-five years ago William Cronon wrote Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England. It has aged well. The continued relevance of the book is likely a result of two things. First, it is eminently readable. Flipping through the pages, one can imagine the forests that Cronon describes and […]
Letter to the Editor
Not Even Past will publish letters to the editor with educational or scholarly merit. When the letter concerns a post on Not Even Past, the author of the article will be invited to respond. We encourage letter writers to refrain from ad hominem discourse. Joan Neuberger, Editor. Remarks on Jesse Ritner’s “Paying for Peace: Reflections on the ‘Lasting Peace’ […]
Austin Historical Atlas: Mapping Austin’s Historical Markers
(Preview of our first page: “Austin Development During World War I”) By Jesse Ritner In recent years, discussions of Confederate monuments have dominated narratives of public memory in the United States. As important as this discussion is, however, Civil War monuments make up a relatively small percentage of historic markers in American cities. Although less […]
Austin Historical Atlas: Development During World War I
(This is the first of a series that will explore creative ways to think about historic markers in Austin.) By Jesse Ritner 1917 marked a turning point in the history of Austin’s development. A large donation and the dismembering of a family estate spread the city west and north, resulting in dramatic increases in public […]