by Cullan Bendig In January 1968, Alexander Dubček became the First Secretary of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, replacing the unpopular communist hardliner Antonín Novotný. The following months of 1968, known as the Prague Spring, brought Czechoslovakia to the attention of the international community. Dubček’s goal was to create “socialism with a human face” through […]
Writers/Literature
Sky Pilot, How High Can You Fly
by Nathan Stone I started going to camp in 1968. We were still just children, but we already had Vietnam to think about. The evening news was a body count. At camp, we didn’t see the news, but we listened to Eric Burdon and the Animals’ Sky Pilot while doing our beadwork with Father Pekarski. […]
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 […]
Dorothy Parker Loved the Funnies
by David Ochsner “It is amazing, it is even a little terrifying to see how the spirit of the comic strip has changed,” wrote Dorothy Parker in her Dec. 3, 1927 “Reading and Writing” column for The New Yorker. Time was, she lamented, when the daily strips concerned themselves “with chubby children blowing their elders […]
Antonio de Ulloa’s Relación Histórica del Viage a la America Meridional
By Haley Schroer Nineteen-year-old Antonio de Ulloa set sail for the Americas in the spring of 1735. Ulloa was traveling as one of two assistants to a contingency of French scientists appointed to South America. The observations Ulloa and his counterpart, Jorge Juan, made on the excursion culminated in Relación Histórica del Viage a la […]
Longfellow’s Great Liberators: Abraham Lincoln and Dante Alighieri
By Guy Raffa “We breathe freer. The country will be saved.” Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s response to the reelection of Abraham Lincoln in 1864 is a timely reminder of how, while they all matter, some presidential elections matter much more than others. Five years earlier Longfellow was one of many who believed the time for peace […]
An Apology for Propaganda
By David Rahimi Writing in the middle of World War II, Freya Stark, a well-known British explorer and Arabist working for the Ministry of Information in the Middle East, penned an unpublished – and ultimately unfinished – twenty-five page essay, which she entitled Apology for Propaganda. When we think of government propaganda, we typically think […]
How to Write for the Public
Norton editor, Alane Salierno Mason, offers ten rules on writing for a general audience. Great advice here for everyone writing for Not Even Past! For the rest of the time, there are reasons why academic writers break these rules, but they’re worth considering even in our most scholarly work! 10 Tips for Academics Writing for a […]
Between Traditions: A Nigerian Writer’s Funeral
By Chukwuemeka Agbo Amos Tutuola Odegbami was a Nigerian amateur novelist interested in promoting Yoruba culture to the outside world. Tutuola was born in 1920 at Wasimi, Abeokuta, Ogun State, Nigeria. The young Amos had limited western education, stopping at high school level before moving to Lagos, Nigeria, in 1939 to learn smithing. He later joined […]
Painters, Pigments, and the Making of the Florentine Codex
When Franciscan missionary Bernardino de Sahagún [image] arrived in New Spain (Mexico) in 1529, he embarked on an extraordinary project: the compilation of an encyclopedic compendium of the world of the Aztecs in the wake of the Spanish conquest a decade earlier.