This year Not Even Past asked UT History faculty to tell us about a book that they love teach. What makes it a great book for teaching history? What interesting and revealing questions does it raise? How do students respond to it? This is the first article in what we hope will be a series […]
Gender/sexuality
Whisper Tapes: Kate Millett in Iran by Negar Mottahedeh (2019)
by Denise Gomez On March 7, 1979, just one day before International Women’s Day, the highly influential American feminist scholar, Kate Millet, appeared in Tehran, in the Iranian Revolution’s afterglow. Invited alongside other prominent feminist scholars and activists to speak at a demonstration organized by Iranian woman activists, Millet was accompanied by her partner and […]
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 […]
Contraceptive Diplomacy: Reproductive Politics and Imperial Ambitions in the United States and Japan. By Aiko Takeuchi-Demirci (2018)
By Kellianne King In her first book, Aiko Takeuchi-Demirci enters a longstanding conversation surrounding twentieth-century eugenics projects. Contraceptive Diplomacy adopts a transpacific approach to reproductive politics, focusing on joint Japanese-American efforts to curb population growth and maintain strong national bodies. Takeuchi-Demirci grounds her analysis in two women central to the movement: Margaret Sanger and Ishimoto Shizue. […]
A Brief History of Feminism by Patu (illustrations) and Antje Schrupp and translated by Sophie Lewis (2017)
By Namrata B. Kanchan “Let this really be brief!” was the first thought that crossed my mind as I read the title of Patu and Schrupp’s book. It was listed on the syllabus for a course on Gender and Decolonization and after some heavy reading on decolonization, I was less than enthusiastic about reading this book. […]
Dreaming with the Ancestors: Black Seminole Women in Texas and Mexico by Shirley Boteler Mock (2010)
by Micaela Valadez This outstanding ethnographic history explores the migration of Black Seminole people across the South and Southwest of the United States, highlighting the survival of cultural and spiritual practices by Black Seminole women. Boteler Mock uses ethnographic research and oral history to weave together the long migratory route that Black Seminoles made since […]
Arresting Dress: Cross-Dressing, Law, and Fascination in Nineteenth-Century San Francisco by Clare Sears (2015)
by John Carranza Clare Sears, associate professor of sociology at San Francisco State University, explores cross dressing and its place in the formation of San Francisco as an urban center in the mid- to late-nineteenth century. Sears uses codebooks, arrest records, and court reports to reconstruct the history of cross dressing in an urban setting. […]
Peace Came in the Form of a Woman by Juliana Barr (2007)
by Justin Heath “A legion of horribles, hundreds in number, half naked or clad in costumes attic or biblical or wardrobed out of a fevered dream with the skins of animals and silk finery and pieces of uniform still tracked with the blood of prior owners…all howl(ed) in a barbarous tongue…riding down upon (the posse) […]
How to Survive a Plague: The Inside Story of How Citizens and Science Tamed AIDS, by David France (2016)
By John Carranza In the 1980s, the United States experienced a new disease that seemed to target young, gay men living in New York City and San Francisco. From the beginning, those doctors and scientists willing to treat members of the gay community remained perplexed as to why these men, their ages ranging from their […]
Veiled Empire: Gender and Power in Soviet Central Asia, By Douglas Northrup (2003)
By Natalie Cincotta When the Soviets launched their campaign, known as the hujum, against the veil in Uzbekistan in 1927, their goal was not just to liberate women. Without a class framework or a working class to build socialism in Uzbekistan, Soviet activists instead attempted to transform society through the liberation of women. Northrop argues that a woman’s behavior […]
- 1
- 2
- 3
- 4
- Next Page »