The past is never dead. It's not even past
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 […]
An earlier version of this review was published on halperta.com. 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 […]
More on the Kiowa from our featured author of the month. by Jennifer Graber In 1890, a strange letter with “hieroglyphic script” arrived at Pennsylvania’s Carlisle Indian Industrial School. It was sent from a reservation in the Oklahoma Territory to a Kiowa student named Belo Cozad. Cozad, who did not read or write in English, was […]
By Kelli Mosteller This article originally appeared in The Atlantic on September 17, 2016. Thousands of Native American protesters are currently fighting against the proposed construction of the Dakota Access pipeline in North Dakota. They are doing more than just trying to protect their land. They are fighting for their culture—and, as the Ojibwe activist Winona LaDuke […]
During the summer of 2016, we will be bringing together our previously published articles, book reviews, and podcasts on key themes and periods in the history of the USA. Each grouping is designed to correspond to the core areas of the US History Survey Courses taken by undergraduate students at the University of Texas at Austin.
by Nakia Parker For decades, scholars peered at the painful and complex topic of American slavery through a purely “black-white” lens—in other words, black slaves who had white masters. The sad reality that some Native Americans, (in particular, the Creek, Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Seminole, or “the Five Tribes”) also participated in chattel and race-based […]
As a German historian, writing a book on the history of beer seems to be a “natural” instinct. I started this project after attending a Beck’s brewery tour in my hometown Bremen in the early 2010s. Before Heinrich Beck opened his eponymous brewery in 1873, he had returned from a 10-year sojourn to the US. […]
A discussion on Dr. Christopher Heaney’s article “Skull Walls: The Peruvian Dead and the Remains of Entanglement,” American Historical Review, 2022. Christopher Heaney’s “Skull Walls” offers a new history for the foundations of American anthropology and scientific racism, locating their paradigm of collecting Indigenous ancestors in early US encounters with Peruvian and Andean colonial and republican knowledge […]
Our First Civil War: Patriots and Loyalists in the American Revolution(Doubleday, 2021) From best-selling historian and Pulitzer Prize finalist H. W. Brands comes a gripping, page-turning narrative of the American Revolution that shows it to be more than a fight against the British: it was also a violent battle among neighbors forced to choose sides, […]
This episode of IHS podcasts highlights the work of Dr. James Sidbury, Andrew W. Mellon Distinguished Professor of Humanities and Professor of History at Rice University where he is also a faculty member of the Center for African and African American Studies . The episode also features Dr. Cañizares-Esguerra, the Director of the IHS, and Ashley Garcia, a […]