Kicking off our new series on digital history projects, Dr. Vladislav Beronja, a professor in the UT Department of Slavic and Eurasian Studies, tells us about a class project to build a website on Balkan pop music. By Vladislav Beronja Turbo-folk—a mixture of pounding electronic beats and trilled vocals—can be heard blasting from cafés, taxis, […]
Film/Media
“London is Drowning and I, I Live by the River”: The Clash’s London Calling at 40
By Edward Watson On February 7, Seattle’s non-profit broadcaster KEXP headed to London for their seventh annual International Clash Day. In celebration of The Clash’s London Calling turning 40 in December 2019, KEXP organized a 4-day live broadcast in Seattle and London, featuring performances from contemporary bands and covers of The Clash’s songs. Their intention […]
Photography, Film Criticism, and Left Politics
By Jessica Werneke Each year, a group of artists, art historians, and visual theorists meet at a conference to discuss the intersections of the visual, art, aesthetics, activism, and politics. Among many other important contributions, the conference is designed to involve individuals from a variety of institutions and backgrounds to unite scholars whose critical approach […]
“Stand With Kap”: Athlete Activism at the LBJ Library
By Gwendolyn Lockman The Lyndon B Johnson Presidential Library opened “Get in the Game,” a timely exhibit on the intersection of social justice and sports, on April 21, 2018. In 2014, a new wave of athlete activism began in the United States. That year, NBA teams donned “I Can’t Breathe” shirts during warm ups to […]
Three-year-olds on the world stage
By Nathan Stone When I was very small, I lived six blocks from the Santa Fe Opera. Our home was in the Tesuque Village, which is really just a country road that runs alongside the Tesuque Creek just north of Santa Fe, with twenty tiny cul-de-sacs stretching up into the alluvial crannies of the southern […]
Medieval Facial Hair in Major League Baseball
by Guy Raffa What is it with baseball players and whiskers? The 2013 Red Sox perfected the art of beard-bonding on the way to their third World Series championship in ten years. Boston players and their fans rallied around what Christopher Oldstone-Moore calls the “quest beard” in his history of facial hair, Of Beards and […]
In Defense of the Crime Story
By Diego A. Godoy Judicial records usually provide the empirical grist underpinning historical studies of crime, but journalism is the lifeblood of the field. The efforts of reporters, editors, photographers and illustrators have allowed researchers to resurrect bygone crimes, often in forensic detail. In the more recent Latin American past, for instance, the intrepid sleuthing […]
Civil War and Daily Life: Snapshots of the Early War in Guatemala
by Vasken Markarian (All photos here are published with the permission of the photographer.) Two young Guatemalan soldiers abruptly pose for the camera. They rush to stand upright with rifles at their sides. On a dirt road overlooking an ominous Guatemala City, they stand on guard duty. This snapshot formed the title page of an exhibit […]
Papal Resignation: What the News Media Left Out
When Pope Benedict XVI announced his resignation, effective February 28, 2013, he caught almost everyone by surprise. No sooner was the announcement made than the media began casting about for how long it had been since a pope had resigned rather than die in office. The morning after the announcement, one TV show host stated confidently that it had been 719 years, a number that takes us back to the reign of Celestine V who resigned in 1294. Later, however, a consensus emerged among the various news shows that the most recent resignation of a pope had actually come just under six centuries ago (1415) and involved Pope Gregory XII.
Black Amateur Photography
The passion for recording our lives, fostered today by the availability of simple digital cameras and posting sites like Flickr, has a long history. African American leaders very early on understood the uses of photography for both self-expression and political struggle. Leigh Raiford notes, in her book Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare: Photography and the African American Freedom Struggle, that Sojourner Truth supported her cause by selling photos of herself at lectures and Frederick Douglass wanted to use photography to portray black life more accurately.