Alina Scott, Author at Not Even Past

IHS Climate in Context: Earth and Outer Space in Environmental History

As part of the Institute for Historical Studies’ “Climate in Context: Historical Precedents and the Unprecedented” series for the 2020-2021 academic year, Not Even Past will be publishing a weekly blog organized around the speakers who will present across the year and key topics in Climate History.

Dr. Dagomar Degroot of Georgetown University delivered the inaugural presentation for the “Climate in Context” series on September 21, 2020. Dr. Degroot is an Associate Professor of Environmental History whose work incorporates both scientific research and historical analysis to study the Little Ice Age. Previous blog posts have described the environmental history website he created (HistoricalClimatology.com) as well as his groundbreaking book.

This blog post reflects on one of Dr. Degroot’s recent articles, entitled “‘A Catastrophe Happening in Front of Our Very Eyes’: The Environmental History of a Comet Crash on Jupiter.”

The article suggests that humanities scholars and scientists of environmental history should rethink the role of space in their research. Dr. Degroot argues that “changes in environments far removed from Earth have had profound consequences for human history.” The essay “explores complex intellectual, cultural, and political responses to the collision between Jupiter and the fragments of comet Shoemaker-Levy 9” in 1994.

Dr. Degroot urges environmental historians to “see the whole universe as one big environment, a mosaic of natures connected by human thinking and Newtonian, relativistic, and quantum physics.” He argues that environmental history “should explore humanity’s historical relationships with the nonhuman universe, not just the nonhuman Earth.”

He continues, “[u]ntil now, scientists have taken the lead in identifying the most dramatic human responses to changes in extraterrestrial environments. However, environmental historians are uniquely qualified to disentangle complex connections between human histories and environmental changes beyond Earth.”

The article serves as an important jumping off point for future research into both the effects of earthy phenomena on the world’s climates and also the consequences of the “agency of cosmic environments.”

For access to the full article, see The Journal of Environmental History, 2017-01, Vol.22 (1), p.23-49.

Image Credits: NASA.gov

Navigating the PhD and Beyond: David Conrad

Compiled by Alejandra C. Garza, Ph.D. candidate, AHA Career Diversity Fellow 2018-2020

This is the third post in a wider series, Navigating the PhD and Beyond: Lessons from the AHA Career Diversity Initiative. The series is presented and curated by Alejandra Garza as part of the AHA Career Diversity for Historians Initiative. As the 2018-20 graduate student fellow, Alejandra’s goal was to show graduate students and professors that the skills developed in a PhD program “are applicable no matter what we do when we leave”. Here Alejandra interviews Dr. David Conrad. He received his Ph.D. in December 2016 with a dissertation entitled, “The Greatest Good for the Greatest Number: American Land Redistribution in East and Southeast Asia, 1945-1969,” supervised by Dr. Mark Metzler. Dr. Conrad is currently a degree evaluator in the Office of Graduate Studies at The University of Texas at Austin.

What motivated you to enter a PhD program? Did your motivations change over the course of the program?

I entered because I loved studying history and I knew what topic I wanted to research. I had worked in the private sector a bit and thought academia would be more fulfilling. I soon found that it wasn’t, which was disheartening and disorienting.

Finishing the Ph.D. became more about justifying the time and resources I’d already spent on it. Ultimately even that wasn’t enough to keep me going, and I asked my supervisor if I could take a Master’s degree and get out. He convinced me that I was close enough to the Ph.D. and that it would be just as easy to finish the dissertation. That made me realize something important: I had set a higher bar for myself than was necessary. Yes, a dissertation should have a high bar, and I’m proud of the one I wrote, even though I see its flaws. I finally realized, though, that what I wrote didn’t have to be the ideal dissertation that I imagined it could be. It just had to be good enough for my committee.

What do you wish you had learned in graduate school?

I wish I had learned more about the process of publishing a book. Especially a book that’s somewhere between academic and mainstream press material. Even though I’m not currently seeking a tenure-track job, I recently finished the first draft of a book, and I’m having to learn everything about publication as I go. It’s a complicated and daunting challenge.

What was your experience with the initial entry into the job market? / How did you end up in the career you currently have?

Upon graduation I didn’t want to pursue a faculty position, but I wanted to keep working for a university because I feel most useful and at home in an educational setting. I also wanted to maintain my access to university resources, especially library resources, and I wanted to stay in Austin for family reasons.

There are a lot of staff jobs at UT-Austin that involve working with students, undergraduate or graduate, and I applied to several. I got a few interviews and then finally a job offer. A lot of UT staff move around from one office to another in order to advance their careers, and I’ve witnessed colleagues and supervisors be very supportive of people who choose to do so, but so far I’ve stayed in one spot.

If COVID-19 has impacted or even taken your job in these difficult months, please share that with us, too.

My office has been working from home since March with no end in sight. There are some challenges that come with that, but I’m enjoying getting to spend more time with my family, including my 15-month-old toddler.

Any other advice you have for new PhDs entering the job market?

I chose to be brutally honest in my job interviews about where I was coming from and where I saw myself in five years, and this was a liberating feeling. In at least one case that might have led to me not being the top choice, but that’s OK. If you can afford to take some time finding the right fit, it’s worth it.

This blog series was created by Alejandra C. Garza with assistance from Dr. Alison Frazier and Dr. Michael Schmidt as part of the AHA Career Diversity for Historians Initiative 2018-2020.

David Conrad is the Degree Plan Evaluator III in the Office of the Vice Provost and Dean of Graduate Studies, University of Texas at Austin

Navigating the PhD and Beyond: Verónica Martínez-Matsuda

Compiled by Alejandra C. Garza, Ph.D. candidate, AHA Career Diversity Fellow 2018-2020

This is the second post in a wider series, Navigating the PhD and Beyond: Lessons from the AHA Career Diversity Initiative. The series is presented and curated by Alejandra Garza as part of the AHA Career Diversity for Historians Initiative. As the 2018-20 graduate student fellow, Alejandra’s goal was to show graduate students and professors that the skills developed in a Phd program “are applicable no matter what we do when we leave.” Read more about her experience here. This post features an interview with Dr. Verónica Martínez-Matsuda. She received her Ph.D. in December 2009 with a dissertation entitled, “The Making of the Modern Migrant: Negotiating Labor and Community in the Federal Migratory Labor Camp Program, 1935-47,” supervised by Dr. Emilio Zamora. She recently received tenure at Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations.  Here, Dr Martínez-Matsuda shares her experience of the PhD and beyond.

What motivated you to enter a Ph.D. program? Did your motivations change over the course of the program?

At the time I applied, I was burned out from the nonprofit, community work I was doing and simply saw graduate school as the next step in my education. I wanted to become a teacher, and saw myself teaching at the community-college level where I might serve students with similar backgrounds to mine as a first-generation Latina. Although graduate school was extraordinarily challenging for me—mainly because I was underprepared for how vastly different it was from my undergraduate experience, and I did not have the same resources some of my peers had—I quickly learned to love history as a profession. I began to see myself as a researcher and a writer, and not simply as a teacher. In other words, it became more evident to me as I engaged with my mentors, especially with my fellow graduate students in Chicanx/Latinx Studies across UT, that I could contribute to the profession in significant ways.

What do you wish you had learned in graduate school? 

Perhaps not to be so hard on myself! I was fortunate to have found a caring and encouraging community of mentors, advisors, and allies across UT that helped me “survive” graduate school. I felt a lot of what’s commonly referred to as “impostor syndrome.” This is why I’m glad that the recent protests around racial injustice and systemic inequality have reached our profession in ways that seem more committed to real institutional change than anything I ever encountered as a graduate student or junior faculty. In my early years I would have benefited immensely from a more practical commitment to diversity in the form of professional support for first-generation, graduate students of color.

In part related to the point above, I would have also really appreciated taking a basic methods course. A class that covered topics like: How do you access certain records or documents? How do you apply a qualitative vs. quantitative approach to your research? How do scholars keep track of their sources? Such a course may have been available at the time I was a graduate student, but if it existed I wasn’t aware of it and it was not required. For students like myself, with limited first-hand research experience prior to graduate school, such a course would have lessened the stress and time wasted in figuring things out along the way. 

What was your experience with the initial entry into the job market?

I think like many graduate students, I first entered the job market when I still had a couple of chapters to finish up in my dissertation. The pressure of finishing my degree made applying for jobs super stressful. And, as we know, it’s hard to compete on the job market as an ABD. Thankfully, I also applied to every postdoctoral fellowship I could find! And, that’s actually the route that helped me out the most. Both times that I went into the job market more seriously, I did so having another year available to me in the fellowship or visiting position I was in. Having another year to fall back on gave me some flexibility in terms of the jobs I considered. 

The other thing I’ll mention, which I think is important to remember, is that I was often surprised by which institutions were interested in my work (and in hiring me) and which were not. Sometimes positions where I thought I was the “perfect fit” didn’t show any interest. And, on the contrary, some institutions where I thought I was a longshot invited me for an interview. I learned that you really just have to put yourself out there. At the very least, more scholars will have read your work and become familiar with your research. 

How did you earn the position you currently have?

This is a good example of what I was just referring to. I only applied to Cornell’s ILR School because it was a visiting position for two years. I didn’t think I was a great fit because I didn’t see myself as a traditional labor historian—i.e., studying industrial unions, or factory workers, etc. But, because it was only a visiting position, I applied thinking I could teach there for a couple of years while I published some work and gained some experience. Well, after one year of that visiting position, the department opened up a tenure-track line in history and I got the job! I know this is rare, but getting hired out of a visiting appointment can happen and I think sometimes we close ourselves off to those possibilities. 

*By Rachel Philipson – Archives at ILR School, Cornell University, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=9895713*

If COVID-19 has impacted or even taken your job in these difficult months, please share that with us, too.

Well, it’s certainly impacted my job—but, it’s impacted everyone’s job! Of course, it’s not impacted everyone’s job in the same way, and I do recognize how incredibly privileged I am to be tenured at a well-resourced institution during this crisis. As universities respond to the pandemic, many adjunct and contingent faculty, as well as graduate students, are experiencing even more harmful cuts and compromises to their working conditions that do not safeguard their wellbeing. As a member of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), I have truly valued the work being done across campuses to protect the rights and security of all academic professionals during these times. I would encourage all graduate students to consider becoming a member of the AAUP.

Any other advice you have for new PhDs entering the job market?

It’s true that entering the market is tough—even when there isn’t a pandemic to deal with! So, my first piece of advice is that it’s important to take care of your mental health throughout the process. Remind yourself often of the many things in life you love, that bring you peace and happiness, beyond the profession and your work. Odds are that it’s these things that will sustain you in your career and make you a better historian in the end.

My more practical advice is that you have to apply for a lot, even to those places or positions you don’t think you’d consider, and take the time to craft your applications so that they are detailed to the job or position. Have people read your cover letters, offer feedback on your writing samples, etc. Also, remember why you love this work! It’s good to be confident and competitive in the market, but be mindful of how you communicate this to others. People will respond to your enthusiasm and sincere passion for your work, so there’s no need to be arrogant, which might dissuade others from wanting you as a colleague. Personality does factor into hiring decisions.

For those who still have some time before they enter the market, my advice is to be persistent in applying for fellowships, grants, and other external opportunities, such as participating in conferences. During my time as a graduate student, mainly out of financial necessity, I applied for a lot of external fellowships. Although they can be incredibly time consuming to prepare for, they are absolutely worth your time! Regardless if you get the award or not, your project becomes sharper every time you refine your application. And, in the process of being considered for the award or position, other scholars become more familiar with you and your research. All of this pays off when it’s time to enter the job market. 

This series was created by Alejandra C. Garza with assistance from Dr. Alison Frazier and Dr. Michael Schmidt as part of the AHA Career Diversity for Historians Initiative 2018-2020.

Dr. Verónica Martínez-Matsuda received her Ph.D. in December 2009 with a dissertation entitled, “The Making of the Modern Migrant: Negotiating Labor and Community in the Federal Migratory Labor Camp Program, 1935-47,” supervised by Dr. Emilio Zamora. She recently received tenure at Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations. 

The Alchemy of Conquest: Science, Religion, and the Secrets of the New World By Ralph Bauer (2019)

This book has been an intellectual adventure to read, all 600-plus pages of it. The Scientific Revolution, Ralph Bauer argues, carries a connotation of “the discovery of new worlds” in nature. In historiography, the early modern revolution in cosmology has long been connected to the Age of Discovery in cosmography. Yet the two things remain conceptually distinct. We can indict Christopher Columbus for the violence of conquest but not Galileo for the discovery of spots on the sun. Yet what if discovery and conquest were conceptually intertwined from the very beginning? The Alchemy of Conquest completely reframes the concept of the Scientific Revolution by taking medieval nominalism and alchemy seriously.

Bauer traces the origins of the categories of discovery and conquest back to the thirteenth-century Renaissance, particularly to the rise of Franciscan nominalism, artisanal alchemical experimentation, and the late medieval spiritual conquest of pagan and heathen souls. Both the alchemical-atomistic conception of matter and the nominalist interpretation of nature led to a voluntarist understanding of divine and human creation. Nature and thus God could be understood not through Aristotelian logic and Scholastic syllogism but through a painstakingly empirical exploration of randomly assembled matter. Universal law could only be known though the careful empirical codification of myriad local laws. The discovery of the secrets of nature happened through violent artisanal extraction and alchemical fire. Artisanal tinkering, in turn, could improve nature.

Such a voluntarist understanding of God’s power and human knowledge of nature led to a voluntarist understanding of religious conversion and to Franciscan global chiliastic religious missions of spiritual conquest. The empirical conquest of both nature and souls (religious transformation) began with William of Ockham, Roger Bacon, Albertus Magnus, Ramon Llull, Arab Aristotelians, and dozens of other artisan alchemists.

By remapping the medieval conceptual history of discovery and conquest, Bauer’s The Alchemy of Conquest does a number of things. First, it shows the deep alchemical, Franciscan, Llullian roots of Columbus’s ideas of discovery as the artisanal conquest of the occult.

Second, it presents New World missionary Franciscan notions of conversion as tied to alchemical notions of material and spiritual transformations and to demonology and apocalyptic chiliasm. In colonial Spanish America, there was a science of conversion. Religious reducciones (the congregation of natives in towns and missions) did not merely mean social reengineering, as the scholarship on colonial missions and Indian cabildos seems to suggest. Reducción meant a craft, artisanal, and alchemical transformation of the soul via an empirical science of ethnography.

Third, it radically reframes the origins of early modern Epicurean atomism. As Bauer shows, atomism as a commentary on the structure of matter and as a moral-religious discourse of disorderly teleologies first began as a commentary on American cannibalism.

Fourth, the book squarely connects English discourses of colonization to Spanish Franciscan and Spanish Neoplatonic humanist ones (not Spanish Scholastic Dominican ones). English and Spanish interpretations of conquest were connected to alchemical nominalism, demonology, and the natural right to reshape American humans and religious landscapes through craft and conquest. The similarities arose despite the obfuscating English rhetoric of negative contrast (the Black Legend) and England’s outright denial of conquest (the White Legend). Finally, Bauer’s completely reframes Francis Bacon’s new revolutionary empiricism as a deliberate project of applying Spanish alchemical discourses of American colonialism not to peoples but to objects.

This book will remain an enduring accomplishment of scholarship and erudition.

Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra is the Alice Drysdale Sheffield Professor of History, the University of Texas At Austin

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 undergraduate audience but written by a genuine expert, an article with a clear argument but also incorporating suggestions for further readings, a piece with its own voice but easily accessible to all. Here for me, as so many, Not Even Past came to the rescue.

For a decade now, Not Even Past has provided the premier platform to communicate the History department’s groundbreaking scholarship to the University of Texas community and the general public. Drawing tens of thousands of readers each year, it is, quite simply, one of the department’s great treasures and something that sets our community of scholars apart from hundreds of others across the country and the globe.

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 and contributors gave generously of their time and expertise in writing for the site, which drew as well on the work of a group of remarkably talented Assistant Editors. But Not Even Past is also unimaginable without the work of its founding editor, Dr. Joan Neuberger, who has guided the site for the past ten years and is stepping down this month. Joan’s vision of great history writing that is accessible to all courses through every part and every page of Not Even Past. It is a vision that is very difficult to realize and anyone who has worked with Joan knows her tireless skills as an editor and the time she invests in guiding a contribution through to final publication.

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.

Not Even Past has been marked by constant innovation, the pushing of boundaries ever outwards and by a remarkable growth in its ambition and reach. The site started with the idea of a book blog but it has become something so much more: a full-service platform for the department, the university, and the discipline more generally. Joan’s interview which details the history of the site can be seen here.

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“

Such words are echoed by Jackie Jones, the outgoing Chair of the Department of History and the President-elect of the American Historical Association, who writes that she is “delighted to join in celebrating Joan’s extraordinary editorship of Not Even Past from its inception ten years ago until the summer of 2020. The site is a testament to her creativity, energy, tech savvy, broad historical knowledge, and commitment to bringing the past to life for people inside and outside the academy. NEP exemplifies the UT History Department’s highest standards in terms of scholarship, teaching, and service to the department, the College of Liberal Arts, and the University. Because of Joan’s hard work, NEP reminds us that the study of the past can take us to new, surprising, and fascinating places, with the help of texts, images, music, videos, and interviews. Congratulations to Joan on leading NEP through its first decade and showcasing excellent features by faculty, graduate students, and alums!”

Since Joan announced that she was stepping down from Not Even Past, there have been a steady stream of tributes from across the department and the university. Joan has always reserved special time and energy for her work in training graduate students to become public historians. To mark the 10 year anniversary of Not Even Past and to celebrate Joan’s achievement we wanted to collect 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.

Photos of the creators of the Behind the Tower digital history project.

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 current Assistant Editor, 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.”

Banner for *Public and Digital History* class projects : The Public Archive

Many other current and former students contributed to Not Even Past. Kristie Flannery, who has just accepted a position at the Australian Catholic University in Melbourne, 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 also provided the title of this piece. She 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.”

In her tireless work, Joan has created a collective conversation that links students and faculty but also the department’s scholarship to the wider world. As incoming editor, I thank Joan for all she has done and applaud her singular achievement in giving life, with the support of many, to Not Even Past. I hope to do justice to her vision of great history writing accessible to all, and it is an honor to succeed Joan in this role.

Other Projects Mentioned Above:

Professor Neuberger studies modern Russian culture in social and political context, with a focus on the politics of the arts. She is the author of a range of publications, including Hooliganism: Crime and Culture in St Petersburg, 1900-1914 (California: 1993), Ivan the Terrible: The Film Companion (Palgrave: 2003); co-author of Europe and the Making of Modernity, 1815-1914 (Oxford: 2005); and co-editor of Imitations of Life: Melodrama in Russia (Duke: 2001) and Picturing Russia: Explorations in Visual Culture (Yale: 2008); Everyday Life in Russian History: Quotidian Studies in Honor of Daniel Kaiser (Slavica, 2010); and The Flying Carpet: Studies on Eisenstein in Honor of Naum Kleiman (Mimésis International. 2017). Her most recent book is This Thing of Darkness: Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible in Stalin’s Russia (Cornell: 2019).

Who Killed Berta Cáceres? Dams, Death Squads, and an Indigenous Defender’s Battle for the Planet by Nina Lakhani (2020)

On Monday, July 5, 2021, the high court in Tegucigalpa, Honduras convicted Roberto David Castillo, former head of the Desarrollos Energéticos dam company, for the murder of Berta Cáceres. The court ruled that Castillo coordinated, planned, and financed the assassination of Cáceres.

Speaking in Honduras’ Río Blanco in 2013, Berta Cáceres rallied a sea of supporters against the construction of a new hydroelectric dam. She stressed that the joint economic effort, pursued by China’s state-owned Sinohydro company, the World Bank’s International Finance Corporation, and Honduras’s Desarrollos Energéticos company, threatened to disrupt countless communities along the Gualcarque River. The project would not only prevent villagers from accessing water for agricultural and traditional medicines, but signaled the plundering of sacred lands. After lambasting the dam, Cáceres briefly paused to ask her supporters if they understood the risks involved in fighting the powerful interests before them. “Are you sure you want to fight this project,” she asked with intensity, “[because] I will fight alongside you until the end, but are you, the community, prepared?” The captivated crowd instantly raised their hands in support of Cáceres and the forthcoming fight against the imperialist venture. Just three years later, however, Cáceres was brutally murdered in her hometown of La Esperanza in western Honduras.

Such vicious violence and steadfast activism is the subject of Nina Lakhani’s captivating new book Who Killed Berta Cáceres?. Drawing on extensive interviews and legal documents, the investigative reporter paints a stunning picture of a woman who refused to let overwhelming bleakness dampen her spirit. Lakhlani begins by spotlighting Cáceres’ service in the “health brigade” of the Salvadoran Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) during the Cold War. During those bloody years, the young Cáceres witnessed the brutality perpetrated by state security forces. These close encounters with death, according to Lakhani, prompted Cáceres to establish a non-violent political organization in 1993 named the Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras (Consejo Cívico de Organizaciones Populares e Indígenas de Honduras or COPINH). Over the following decades, the group headed the local communities’ resistance against foreign capital. Indigenous activists staged sit-in demonstrations and set up roadblocks to prevent multinational corporations from extracting from their lands. In Lakhani’s engrossing account, Cáceres stands at the center of this movement, as a leader who for years endured death threats and sexual harassment from defenders of the dam.

Yet Lakhani’s work goes beyond documenting Cáceres’s courageous life and tragic death. The journalist makes considerable efforts to highlight resistance across the broader Honduran population. She gestures to solidarity between Lenca activists like Cáceres and Garifuna leaders like Mariam Miranda in opposition to ecological destruction. Moreover, she highlights how campesino (farmer) organizers like Margarita Murillo relentlessly advocated for the rights of women farmers amidst frequent intimidation from security forces. She then reveals how COPINH members like Juan Galindo and William Rodriguez advocated for environmental justice, eventually giving their lives for the cause. In this way, Lakhani offers a corrective to prevailing media narratives that cast Honduras as a “basket-case,” devoid of significant popular resistance. Like Dana Frank in The Long Honduran Night, she portrays 21st-century Honduras from the activist’s perspective, which affords agency to the people.

Additionally, Lakhani repeatedly reflects on the role of the U.S. in promoting disruptive policies across Central America. She criticizes the Washington Consensus for advocating free-market policies at Honduran communities’ expense. She excoriates former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, in particular, for legitimizing a 2009 military coup that deposed democratically elected President Manuel Zelaya. While Lakhani highlights the violent repression that emerged from the coup’s ashes, she keeps her focus on the activists. She foregrounds Cáceres’ opposition to Clinton who knew “what was going to happen in Honduras” and who authorized the “meddling of North America in our country.” In doing so, the journalist showcases the Lenca activist’s acute awareness of the web of power relations she operated within. Such rich analysis casts Cáceres as a symbol of Honduras: a decent woman caught in a quagmire of self-serving interests.

Berta Cáceres Graffiti in Tegucigalpa, Honduras (via Wikimedia Commons)

In essence, Lakhani offers an incisive and impassioned account of the life and death of an incredible activist. Employing meticulous research, including an interview with Cáceres herself, she unveils how Honduran organizers continually fight for their lands in the face of unrelenting threats. She invites readers to recognize the ongoing battle for human rights in Honduras and the human costs of multinational corporations’ plunder. In this way, Lakhani shows that to answer “Who Killed Berta Cáceres?” we must go beyond investigating individual perpetrators. We must also interrogate how corporate quests for profit can corrupt governments and render human life expendable.

You might also like:

Not Even Past at 10: An Interview with Joan Neuberger

With Joan Neuberger

This is a conversation with Dr. Joan Neuberger, the Founding Editor of Not Even Past. Not Even Past was born in 2010 and launched in January 2011. In 2020, it marks its ten-year anniversary. Since its creation, the site has emerged as a robust and influential platform for Public History. This owes a great deal to the extraordinary work of Dr. Neuberger, who has expertly steered the site for the past decade. In this conversation, she reflects on the origins and development of Not Even Past and on some of her wider work in the field of Public History. The interview is best read alongside the tribute to Dr Neuberger, which can be seen here. The Not Even Past Conversations Series was born out of the extraordinary circumstances of the COVID-19 pandemic. It takes the form of an interview held informally (usually at home) over Zoom with leading scholars and teachers at the University of Texas at Austin and beyond. Here Adam Clulow speaks with Joan Neuberger.

AC: Could you explain what Not Even Past is to someone who isn’t familiar with the site?

AC: In 2020, we’re marking the 10th anniversary of Not Even Past. How did the idea for the site come about?

JN: The idea came from Alan Tully, who was chair at the time. Alan had put together the Visiting Committee, made up of alumni and donors and supporters of history to promote the department, and they came up with the idea of having a book blog so that people in the History Department would be able to recommend books for anyone who loved to read History. Alan presented the idea to the Executive Committee, which I happened to be on at the time, and I thought it was a great idea. I wasn’t writing my own blogs, but I was reading a lot of history blogs at the time, and generally spending a lot of time reading on the internet. And I was really enjoying the kinds of creative work historians were doing on the web. For example Edward Ayers’ site, “The Valley of the Shadow: Two Communities in the American Civil War” site or the work of James Billington, who was head of the Library of Congress on “Meeting of Frontiers,” comparing territorial expansion in the U.S. and the Russian Empire, were just two of the exciting things appearing online.

So I thought it was a great idea, but I also thought a book blog wasn’t really expansive enough to get attention and do what we wanted to do to promote the department. I thought it would be a good idea to make our project a kind of full-service History website. So that was how we got started. We began sketching out ideas with the help of George Christian in the English department in the spring of 2010 and then in the fall of 2010, we really started developing the website. With our departmental development advisor, Rick Geyer, we talked to designers, we gathered a couple of focus groups, we figured out what categories of articles we wanted to include, and then the “implementers” at LAITS constructed the site for us, and we launched in January 2011.

A view of Not Even Past in its first year. (Internet Archive Screengrab of Not Even Past, September 2011)

AC: Did you have any models in mind of other departments that might be doing something similar?

JN: I don’t think there was really anything like Not Even Past. To be honest, I didn’t have any idea what I was doing, and I didn’t really look around for models. What I was looking at were people who were doing really great blogging work in history, including some of our graduate students, such as Ben Breen, who had his own blog, Res Obscura, at the time. It just seemed to me to be a good idea to combine a lot of things that historians write about and put out a sort of general history website that would be appealing to the many people who like history.

AC: What was the original audience and how did this change over time?

JN: The original idea was to appeal to UT History alumni and to history buffs, whoever they might be. We had no idea how many people there were in these categories or who they would be. But we wanted to connect with alumni, both our undergraduate and graduate alumni, and we made the site to appeal more generally. When we started, I didn’t even know there was such a thing as Public History. And I didn’t know there was such a thing as Digital History. I was really in the dark and learned almost everything from trial and error. In the beginning, I learned a lot from Twitter, of all places. Twitter was a great way to learn about Public History and Digital History because public historians and digital historians were posting new projects all the time. I learned a great deal from public historians at the National Council for Public History, for example, about how people were using the Internet to reach out to potential readers and about how people wrote for the public. So I began with intuition and then drew ideas from all over the place.

AC: Can you tell us about how the structure of Not Even Past has evolved?

AC: Can you tell us about some of the contributions that have been most memorable to you or have drawn the most readers?

JN: Those are really two different categories. One of the articles that’s been really popular all along is a review that Nakia Parker wrote about Barbara Krauthammer’s book, Black Slaves, Indian Masters. Susan Dean Smith, one of our faculty members, wrote a very popular piece about Casta paintings that depicted people of mixed races in colonial Latin America. Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra wrote an article on the origins of the phrase, the “city upon the hill”, which Reagan and Kennedy used but which originated in a 17^th-century New England sermon. Those are three perennially popular articles. We have a series of articles on the Vietnam War that Mark Lawrence wrote that are also really popular. But as I was going back and looking through the site, I realized just how many great articles we have posted over the years. And that really has nothing to do with me. The high quality of our archive is the product of the great historians among our faculty and grad students who are willing to write for the public.

One of the things that I wanted to do from the beginning was focus on subjects that are either absent from the school curriculum or poorly taught in our schools and the most obvious example was slavery. Around the time that we began, the state of Texas decided that one of its educational objectives was going to be to teach the so-called “good sides of slavery,” an incredibly outrageous and offensive idea. So from the beginning, I’ve wanted to feature African-American history and the history of slavery. And luckily, we’ve had some great historians either as visitors here through our Institute for Historical Studies or from our own faculty. Daina Berry in particular, our new chair and an important historian of slavery, has been regular contributor. As a result I think we have a solid body of articles on African-American history in general and the history of slavery, in particular.

We’ve also had great pieces on teaching history. We have Bob Olwell writing about using Reacting to the Past in his class, Debating the American Revolution. Eyal Weinberg and Blake Scott wrote a wonderful piece on using music in the classroom. Nakia Parker also wrote an inspiring piece on using popular culture in the classroom and Karl Miller, a former colleague, and Penne Restad, who is retired, wrote about innovations in teaching the U.S. history survey, all of which together form a rich resource for teachers thinking about teaching history.

AC: Beside faculty in the Department of History, who else has contributed to the site over the years?

JN: We feature a book or a project every month and for the most part, those are usually UT History faculty. But we also have reached out to people doing history in other departments. So, for example, we featured a book by Julia Mickenberg in American Studies on American leftist women who went to the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 30s. We featured Stephanie Jones-Rogers last year, when her incredible book on white women who owned slaves had just come out and then won multiple awards. Jen Graber in Religious Studies writes about Native American religion. We featured her work on the site and also Ted Gordon, who is now the UT Vice Provost for Diversity. For many, many years, Ted Gordon has been running something called the Racial Geography Tour of the UT campus. When our designer in LAITS, Stacy Vlasits, helped him put the tour online, we did a feature on the new digital Racial Geography Tour. John Morán González did a fantastic project with a group of people at the Bullock History Museum, the Texas History Museum across the street from campus, on the violence against Mexican Americans at the beginning of the 20th century called Refusing to Forget. We featured his work on 15 Minute History and on Not Even Past.

AC: Why do you think it’s important for a History department to have a site like this?

JN: I think it’s really positive for the History Department to be working on reaching out to people other than fellow academics. And I think that everyone who has written for Not even Past appreciates being in an institution that is actively practicing Public History. In addition, we have tons of data showing us that employers of all kinds want people with humanities degrees, that employers want the skills that history majors have. But we still live in a world where the humanities is denigrated constantly. And so I think it’s extremely important for us to be producing high-quality history writing that is based on evidence, that focuses on important topics, and that is available to anyone in the public who wants it.

I also think that Not Even Past has provided important writing and publishing experience for the graduate students who’ve submitted articles. One of the completely unexpected things that happened is that Not Even Past turned out to be a kind of writing workshop for graduate students. I do a lot of intensive editing of all submitted material as I have had a very high standard for the quality of writing that we post. I want only to publish articles with arguments that are clearly based on documentary evidence and I want all our writing to be accessible and clear. One of the things I”ve enjoyed most about editing Not Even Past has been the chance to work with grad students I would never have otherwise met. I’ve argued from the beginning that if students can write good clear sentences and make their ideas easily understood, they would be better academic history writers.

*Internet Archive Screengrab of Not Even Past, April 2018*

AC: What kind of support have you received from the department and the university across the past ten years of Not Even Past?

JN: We’ve had incredible support from the College of Liberal Arts and the Department of History. Most people I know at other universities who are trying to do podcasts or websites or blogs don’t have anywhere near the kind of financial and technical support that we’ve had under both Alan Tully and Jackie Jones. I’ve had a graduate student Assistant Editor every year for Not Even Past, and for 15 Minute History, we have a professional recording studio with an extraordinary staff, led by Jacob Weiss and Michael Heidenreich, who edit all of our podcasts. They do a superb job for us. When we did more videos, we also had a video staff at LAITS.

AC: Can you tell us about 15 Minute History, which is attached to Not Even Past and has been extraordinarily successful?

JN: 15 Minute History is a project that I started with a graduate student in Middle Eastern History, Chris Rose. Before doing his Ph.D. in History, Chris worked as Outreach Coordinator for the Center of Middle Eastern Studies. Because I was editing Not Even Past, he came to me one day to brainstorm about doing something else specifically for high school teachers to provide sources for them about World History, in particular about subjects that were being distorted in the Texas state requirements for K-12 teachers. His field of Middle Eastern history and the history of Islam were represented in the state standards and textbooks almost uniquely through terrorism, ignoring the incredibly rich history and culture of the Middle East.

We came up with the idea of a podcast. We did a couple of trial episodes, which became episodes 1 and 2, that are slightly embarrassingly stiff. But we learned how to conduct interviews in a more conversational style as time went on. At first, we had a reasonable rate of listeners for a new podcast but then we had an incredible stroke of luck when the UT PR department tweeted about us. The podcast was on iTunesU at the time and Apple retweeted our UT PR tweet. All of a sudden we went from having 300 to 3000 and then 30000 listeners. And then we became the top-ranked podcast on iTunesU. We weren’t the number one history podcast in the world, that is a whole different universe but among academic podcasts, we were ranked number one or number two from about 2013 until ITunesU was discontinued. We alternated with a UCLA meditation podcast for a long time. And so we had some luck but then also, as people discovered us, they found that they really liked the podcast. And gradually it became a little bit less oriented towards teaching. A lot of students still use it and we recommend it all the time for faculty to include in their curricula, on their syllabi, and so on.

AC: In 2018, you received the Herbert Feis Award from the American Historical Association for distinguished contributions to Public History. You worked on many other public history projects but one that stands out particularly for me is ‘Behind the Tower’ which documents the 1966 Tower shooting and which I read before arriving in Austin. Could you tell us more about that?

AC: Thank you for joining us and for your incredible work on Not Even Past.

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.”

Introduction
By Haley Price

The purpose of these timelines is to visualize the history of Black Americans and to connect the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests to their historical context. Even as a History and Humanities major, this part of US history was still very new to me. I had learned about “Jim Crow Laws,” “The Great Migration, and “The March on Washington” in my entry-level U.S. history classes, but they were often tacked onto the ends of units, a footnote in a whitewashed version of our past. Black history is not given its rightful space in the American history curriculum. It is no wonder many Americans feel unprepared to fully understand the June 2020 protests.

Making this timeline was a way for me to educate myself, but much more importantly, I hope it will be a helpful resource for others to do the same. If you take one look at this timeline and feel overwhelmed, I encourage you to push past that feeling. Pick one event that you recognize and start there. See what caused that event and then look at its impact. Take things slowly, learn a little bit at a time, and then share with a loved one who wants to learn, too.

What I Did:
As I added events and eras to the timeline, I filled in their dates and wrote descriptions, added images, connections to other events, and more. I predominantly used information from websites like history.com, blackpast.org, and recent news articles. These sites fall into the category of popular history, so they are accessible to all kinds of learners. I was encouraged to find so much information through simple web searches because that means that viewers who want to go beyond the timeline will be able to do the same.

To Use ClioVis timelines:

Click on points, connections, and eras to read about specific events and people.
View in presentation mode to navigate the timelines chronologically.
Zoom in and out of periods to see how historical events are connected to each other.
Drag your mouse left and right to navigate the timeline manually.

View “Overview: Context for the 2020 BLM Protests” in full screen here .

I. Slavery in America

View “I. Slavery in America” in full screen here.

What I Did:
By Dr. William Jones

I edited the timeline for content, grammar, and punctuation, focusing on the years before 1860. I also added academic sources that both substantiate the descriptions of the events and point viewers to additional reading. In choosing representative scholarship, I attempted to stick to academic sources that are comprehensive narratives published recently or considered classics. I found that describing the events themselves and finding sources for them was less difficult than deciding what should be included on the timeline. I always felt an internal tug between comprehensiveness, legibility, and simplicity.

A wide geographic perspective is often crucial for understanding the colonial era because all the European colonies in North America were part of larger empires, which included colonies in the Caribbean and South America. Yet I was also afraid of adding too many events to the timeline and making it illegible. For some events, I decided to include geographically broad connections in the descriptions rather than enter them onto the timeline. For instance, the authors of the South Carolina Slave Code of 1691 based that code on Jamaica’s code of 1684, which itself was based on Barbados’s code from 1661; this information (and sources to substantiate it) is only available on the timeline in the description of the South Carolina code. In other instances, I did not mention how historical developments outside the United States influenced a specific event on the timeline, but viewers who consult the readings will find that information. For instance, the nineteenth-century Atlantic slave trade in the Spanish Empire, sugar production in Cuba, and Great Britain’s attempts to police the slave trade on the west African coast are all background elements of the Amistad case, but none of that appears on the timeline. Finally, I felt like I needed to include some events (the Haitian Revolution, in particular) that occurred beyond the geographic boundaries of the United States because they influenced a great deal of the history of slavery and race.

II. Jim Crow to Civil Rights

View “II. Jim Crow to Civil Rights” in full screen here.

What I Did:
By Alina Scott

“My role in the project was to edit the period after 1860 for content and source material to ensure that Black voices and scholarship were included in the dialogue. The Black radical tradition and the movement for Black lives have a rich legacy of cultural, political, and historical contributions so incorporating novels, critiques, and histories by Black authors was not difficult. I also wanted to incorporate sources that are accessible to an audience outside academia by including e-books, podcasts, and documentaries available online.

As noted above, we divided the “Overview” timeline into three sections for the sake of user readability, though the timelines are best read together. A key goal of the project is to show the continuity of antiblackness from the highest levels of government to state leaders and local organizations. The project also shows the continuous resistance and resilience of Black people to systemic oppression.”

III. Police and Civilian Brutality

View “III. Police and Civilian Brutality” in full screen here.

“While revising, I was struck by the way the timeline highlights protest, legislation, and presidential power as key themes. While it includes a large number of important individuals, organizations, and events, the timelines is incomplete. Overall, the timelines do a tremendous job highlighting key dates in Civil Rights activism and legislation even if it was not possible to include all historical actors and events. They make an excellent tool for teaching and learning about the political genealogy of the historic moment we are currently in. The movement for Black Lives is bigger than politics and legislation and we encourage others to make their own timelines. For instance, how might this timeline overlap with another on Black life, joy, and healing practices? Or a timeline centering Black Women and their role as intellectuals, in community building, religious life, and organizing? Or a timeline on Black Internationalism, international BLM movements, or coalition-building in the African Diaspora? There is potential, with a tool like ClioVis, to digitally show the many ways Black people have advocated for our lives and liberated ourselves in a way that is historically accurate, representative, and educational.

We hope you find thatthe timelines a useful building block for teaching and learning history.”

If you would like to know more about using these and other timelines or use ClioVis in your classroom, contact admin@cliovis.org.
Visit ClioVis.org for more information on how to create an account, view tutorials, and other sample projects.

Gender & Sexuality: Collected Works from Not Even Past

By Alina Scott

The study of gender continues to evolve and push the discipline of history forward. Over the years, Not Even Past has published a wide range of pieces on the topic. The articles, podcasts, book reviews, and teaching materials span the globe.

This collection features articles and books about gender, the way it is performed, and the myriad of ways it manifests in our day to day lives. This is an index of our articles on gender, sexuality, family, protest, and beyond. It includes film, play, and book reviews, oral histories, discussions with historians of gender, and useful resources for teaching histories of gender in the classroom.

Portrait of Angela Davis (Photo: Thierry Ehrmann / Flickr)

Articles

UNITED STATES

“Black Women’s History in the US: Past & Present” by Daina Ramey Berry and Kali Nicole Gross
“Black Women in Black Power” by Ashley Farmer
“White Women and the Economy of Slavery” by Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers – In an article based on her groundbreaking book They Were Her Property, Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers describes the ways White women willingly engaged in enslavement and benefitted from the labor of enslaved Africans. For example, women typically received slaves from their parents after their death and enslaved women often served as nurses. As Jones-Rogers points out, “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.” (Jones-Rogers, 2019)
“Voting Rights Still Threatened 100 Years After the 19th Amendment” by Laurie Green
“Remembering the Tex-Son Strike: Legacies of Latina-led Labor Activism in San Antonio, Texas” by Micaela Valadez – On the 60th anniversary of the Tex-Son strike, Micaela Valadez historicizes its legacy and draws our attention to the importance of Latina leadership in Texas labor activism.
“Historians on Marriage and Sexuality in the United States” by Alex Taft
“Goddess of Anarchy: Lucy Parsons, American Radical” by Jacqueline Jones
“Ordinary Yet Infamous: Hannah Mary Tabbs and the Disembodied Torso” by by Kali Nicole Gross
“Cynthia Attaquin and a Wampanoag Network of Petitioners” by Alina Scott–Petitioning significant part in mobilizing Indigenous communities. Alina Scott describes two nineteenth-century petition drives, the networks of Indigenous petitioners that emerged to support them, and a historical legacy of petitioning by and for Indigenous people.
“The Austin Women Activists Oral History Project” by Laurie Green
The Day the Gridiron Turned Pink by Seth Franco and Dylan Gill (Cedar Bayou Junior School, Junior Division, Group Exhibit)
“Women’s March, Like Many Before It, Struggles for Unity” by Laurie Green
“Missing Signatures: The Archives at First Glance” by Alina Scott

Chinese Lady-in-Waiting Attending to Her Chinese Mistress’ Hair, c.1880s (Courtesy of the National Archives of Singapore).

EUROPE & ASIA

“Confucian Patriarchy and the Allure of Communism in China” by Alan Roberts
“Kusumoto Ine: A Remarkable Woman in Meiji Restoration Japan” by Mark Ravina
“A Historian’s Gaze: Women, Law, and the Colonial Archives of Singapore” by Sandy Chang– Sandy Chang describes her journey in the National Library of Singapore looking for “traces of Chinese migrant women who sailed across the South Seas and settled in British Malaya in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.” (Chang, 2017) In “A Historian’s Gaze” Chang recounts the myriad of ways women’s voices appeared, disappeared, and then reappeared in the colonial archive.
“American Girls in Red Russia: Chasing the Soviet Dream” by Julia L. Mickenberg
“Turbo-folk: Pop Music in the Crucible of Balkan History” by Vladislav Beronja
“Podcasting Migration: Wives, Servants, and Prostitutes“

Seminole women with their hand-crank sewing machines (via State Library and Archives of Florida)

LATIN AMERICA

“The Politics of a Handkerchief: Personal Thoughts on the Motif of Female Activism in Argentina” by Paula O’Donnell

Reviews

Mother is a Verb: An Unconventional History by Sarah Knott (2019)
The Drama of Celebrity by Sharon Marcus (2019)
Whisper Tapes: Kate Millett in Iran by Negar Mottahedeh (2019)
Monroe by Lisa B. Thompson (2018) – Tiana Wilson reviews Lisa B. Thompson’s Monroe, a story of how African Americans navigated life in the Jim Crow era, but more importantly presents rich ideas about “blackness as it pertains to the body, spirituality, cultural traditions, imagined spaces, and racial terror.” (Wilson, 2018).
Contraceptive Diplomacy: Reproductive Politics and Imperial Ambitions in the United States and Japan. By Aiko Takeuchi-Demirci (2018)
The Miseducation of Cameron Post (Dir: Desiree Akhavan, 2018)
A Brief History of Feminism by Patu (illustrations) and Antje Schrupp and translated by Sophie Lewis (2017)
Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive by Marisa Fuentes (2016)
Arresting Dress: Cross-Dressing, Law, and Fascination in Nineteenth-Century San Francisco by Clare Sears (2015)
The Gender of Memory: Rural Women and China’s Collective Past, by Gail Hershatter (2011)
Dreaming with the Ancestors: Black Seminole Women in Texas and Mexico by Shirley Boteler Mock (2010)
Gender and Decolonization in the Congo: The Legacy of Patrice Lumumba (2010)
Trading Roles: Gender, Ethnicity, and the Urban Economy in Colonial Potosí by Jane Mangan (2005)
Plaza of Sacrifices: Gender, Power, and Terror in 1968 Mexico by Elaine Carey (2005)
State of Virginity: Gender, Religion, and Politics in an Early Modern Catholic State by Ulrike Strasser (2004)
Veiled Empire: Gender and Power in Soviet Central Asia, By Douglas Northrup (2003)
Partners in Conflict: The Politics of Gender, Sexuality, and Labor in The Chilean Agrarian Reform, 1950-1973, by Heidi Tinsman (2002)
Gendered Compromises: Political Culture and the State in Chile, 1920-1950 by Karin Alejandra Rosemblatt (2000)
From Virile Woman to Woman Christ: Studies in Medieval Religion and Literature, by Barbara Newman (1995)
Five Sisters: Women Against The Tsar | Faculty Recommendation Series

Podcasts on Gender, Sexuality, and the Family

Episode 50: White Women of the Harlem Renaissance with Carla Kaplan– Guest Carla Kaplan, author of Miss Anne in Harlem: White Women of the Harlem Renaissance, joins us to talk about the ways white women crossed both racial and gender lines during this period of black affirmation and political and cultural assertion.
Episode 83: Simone de Beauvoir and ‘The Second Sex’ with Judith Coffin – Simone de Beauvoir was one of the most important intellectuals, feminists, and writers of the 20th century. Her life and writings defied the expectations of her birth into a middle-class French family, and her philosophies inspired others, including Betty Friedan. Judith Coffin from UT’s Department of History is here to help contextualize and parse out the context, influences, and impact of one of the 20th century’s greatest feminist works.
Episode 88: The Search for Family Lost in Slavery with Heather Andrea Williams– One of the most callous and tragic aspects of slavery in the United States was the slave owners’ practice of dividing families: children were taken from parents, husbands and wives were separated, brothers and sisters too. Our guest, Heather Williams, Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania, has written a moving book about on the subject, Help Me Find My People: The African American Search for Family Lost in Slavery.
Episode 91: The History of the Family with Steven Mintz – Steven Mintz (UT History Department) has long been interested in the transformations of family life through the ages and, in this episode, talks about how nearly everything we think we know about family life would be unrecognizable even a century ago.
Episode 93: Women and the Tamil Epics with Andrea Gutierrez – Guest Andrea Gutierrez introduces us to epic South Asian poems from the beginning of the first millennium that past the Bechdel test, when women’s narrative critiqued, cajoled, narrated, and provided guidance for the devout.
Episode 102: The “Servant Girl Annihilator” with Dr. Lauren Henley – In 1885, the world’s attention was focused on a series of grisly murders that took place in the otherwise quiet town of Austin, Texas. Several African-American women were murdered in the middle of the night, leading the press to dub the unknown assailant “the Servant-Girl Annihilator.” Some even went so far as to speculate that Jack the Ripper was the same person. Lauren Henley describes the events of 1884-85, but also discusses how these murders tell us something about the uneasy racial history of the postbellum south, and also asks what drives our fascination with serial killers and unsolved mysteries.
Episode 108: A History of the U.S. Marine Corp with Aaron O’Connell– In the early part of the 20th century, the Marine Corp was the poorest funded and least respected branch of the military, and at the end of World War Two there was actually a movement to shut them down. How, then, did this transformation from relative unpopularity to the most prestigious armed service in the United States occur? Aaron O’Connell, a history professor at UT Austin, joins us today to describe how, as the Cold War heated up, Marines utilized their own internal culture to win power and influence throughout U.S. political and social circles.
Episode 112: Harvey Milk, Forty Years Later with Lisa L. Moore – Harvey Milk was one of the first openly gay politicians in California, and his short political career was not only emblematic of the wider gay liberation movement at the time, but his death and legacy inspired a new generation of activism which was seen not only during the 1980s AIDS crisis, but has lingering impacts four decades later. In this episode, we are joined by Lisa L. Moore from the University of Texas’s English Department and incoming chair of the new LGBTQ Studies portfolio program, to discuss the legacy of Harvey Milk on the 40th anniversary of his assassination.
Episode 120: Slave-Owning Women in the Antebellum U.S. with Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers– Historians have long assumed that white women in the U.S. south benefited only indirectly from the ownership of enslaved people. Historians have neglected these women because their behavior didn’t conform to the picture we have of the patriarchal culture of the 18-19 century marriage. In an extraordinary new book, Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers shows that “slave owning women not only witnessed the most brutal features of slavery, they took part in them, they profited from them, and they defended them.” Prof. Jones-Rogers joins us today to talk about the narratives of formerly enslaved people, whose testimony changes the way we view those white women and the lives of the enslaved in the U.S.
Episode 121: The Case for Women’s History with Ellen Hartigan-O’Connor and Dr. Lisa G. Materson – Both editors of the Oxford Handbook of American Women’s and Gender History, Hartigan O’Connor and Matterson, professors of history at the University of California, Davis, join us to discuss the field of women’s studies, which as they’ve argued in the introduction to the book, is not an esoteric topic at all, but actually quite critical to our understanding of American history.
Episode 122: The History of Sexual Orientation Conversion Therapy in the U.S. with Chris Babits– Sexual orientation conversion therapy, the attempt to change one’s sexual orientation through psychological or therapeutic practice, has now been banned in 17 American states and the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico, three Canadian provinces, one state in Australia and several nations in Latin America, Europe, and Asia. Beyond the merits of sexual orientation conversion therapy as a medical practice, however, lies a social importance of what the practice represents for a segment of American society.Chris Babits, is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Texas at Austin, where he researches the history of the practice and why so many people still support it, even in the face of opposition from medical and psychological professionals.

Additional episodes available on 15MinuteHistory.org

Teaching Materials

Related Collections on Not Even Past:

Hate and Hope in the Upside Down World

by Anne M. Martínez, American Studies, University of Groningen, The Netherlands

A few years ago we had a speaker at an American Studies event here in Groningen who claimed that the field of American Studies and America itself, revolved around ideas of democracy and equality until the 1980s, when ethnic studies became more widespread, and people of color staked their claim on the American project. These histories of racism, exclusion, and inequality, with their focus on the legacies of the hatred and violence that are woven into the very fabric the United States, we were told, made America and American Studies much less attractive to people around the world.

Perhaps you can imagine how I felt in that moment, as a Chicana whose life was transformed by taking a Chicano history class and learning that my family story was part of a much bigger history of conflict between the United States and Mexico. That Chicano history class is the reason I got a PhD. I wanted to study Mexicans in the United States and to show other students of color that the story of America was their story, too, with all its power, beauty and yes, devastating hate – not just historically, but very much in the present. We are, after all, a nation that trains police forces to summarily execute Black people for allegedly selling cigarettes illegally, playing in parks, or simply driving while Black. We are a nation that separates brown children from their parents and puts them in cages for months on end, debates for a moment whether or not this is good policy in a supposedly civilized society, and gets right back to it. My heart breaks for the families and communities that continue to be devastated by the racist violence that is foundational to the history of the United States. This legacy of exclusion in the service of white supremacy is once again coming to the fore in the United States. But in spite of the brutal police repression, we are seeing on the streets of Minneapolis and other cities across the United States, I have hope.

I have hope because Jael Kerandi, the student body president of the University of Minnesota, and her fellow students told the University of Minnesota administration that her campus was not a safe place for them if the Minneapolis Police Department were contracted to be on campus. And the university listened. In the wake of police violence against George Floyd and the people protesting Floyd’s murder, the University of Minnesota cut ties with the police department for major events.

I have hope because 16-year-old tennis sensation Coco Gauff is speaking out against racism, and white tennis players around the world are stepping up to support her and promote the lessons she is teaching. Coco continues to push and educate them, regardless of how many majors they have won. It was not that long ago that any mention of racism by Serena Williams was met by media criticism, isolation, and the furthering of racist narratives about successful black athletes by other players on tour.

I have hope because the commissioner of the National Football League, an organization with a strict racial hierarchy that puts the mighty dollar before even the safety of its profit-producing players, stepped up last week to say it was wrong to condemn the silent protests of Colin Kaepernick and other players. I have hope not because I think the commissioner, who does not deserve to be named, is any less committed to that exploitation and those dollars than he was a month ago. I have hope because a focus group of regular people, or a few highly paid consultants, told the commissioner that he was on the wrong side of this. They said the American people are starting to understand how damaging white supremacy is to our society and they support peaceful protest. You should, too.

Image by David Geitgey Sierralupe (Flickr)

I have hope because Teen Vogue is doing better political writing than the New York Times. The New York Times condemns police unions for protecting their members, rather than questioning why we need police forces that are better equipped to go to war – against their own citizens – than most militaries around the world. Meanwhile, Teen Vogue is writing about why we must say Breonna Taylor’s name and that gives me hope because young women are being recognized as more than just vehicles for make-up and fashion.

I have hope because 23-year-old Maddy Malone organized a Black Lives Matter rally in Vidor, Texas, and 150 people came. One hundred and fifty people came to one of the most notoriously racist towns in East Texas and joined Maddy in saying “my generation is reaching to break the cycle” of racist hate.

I have hope because the prime minister of the Netherlands, Mark Rutte, admitted last week that Zwarte Piet, a Dutch holiday character in blackface, is problematic. I don’t applaud Rutte for finally hearing how damaging this tradition is to Black people in this country. I applaud those protesters who were brave enough to fight this fight long enough to get a small concession from the prime minister, which might educate people about why this tradition is so insulting and painful, and quicken its demise.

Coronavirus turned our lives upside down but it didn’t just happen. Like the racist violence that permeates the country of my birth, the devastating spread of coronavirus is the product of decisions over the course of centuries to exploit human and other natural resources for economic or political gain. This world didn’t just happen. It was created – or destroyed, more appropriately – by us. That’s the bad news. The good news is that we can fix it. We can change ourselves and the world around us. That’s what I tell my students every day. What starts here changes the world. It’s a great moment for scholars to teach about these legacies of violence and destruction, to transfer our vast knowledge to eager audiences. It’s an even greater moment for scholars to listen to the Jaels, Cocos, Serenas, and Maddys and follow their lead.

Anne Martínez taught at the University of Texas at Austin, 2005-2014.

« Previous Page