by Candice D. Lyons In the spring of 1852, Benjamin Roper, overseer to Galveston area plantations Evergreen and Headquarters, wrote a short letter to his employer to inform him that “on the night of [April] 30 I cut Lewis [an enslaved man] with a knife…He is now and has been since his misfortune at Dr. […]
Texas
The Enslaved and the Blind: State Officials and Enslaved People in Austin, Texas
By Daniel Josiah Thomas III On November 6, 1855, Washington Hill commissioned Abner H. Cook to build a southern plantation house in Austin, Texas. The Texas Historical Commission reported that “the property worth $900 in August 1855 was worth $8,000 when Hill paid his taxes for 1856.” When the two-story limestone home was completed, Hill […]
Voting Rights Still Threatened 100 Years After the 19th Amendment
by Laurie Green 100 years ago, Congress approved the 19th Amendment, which prohibited the denial or limitation of voting rights “on account of sex.” The agonizing, fourteen-month struggle by suffragists to get three-quarters of the states to ratify the Amendment, especially its dramatic culmination in the Tennessee statehouse, has garnered much attention. But it may […]
Dean Page Keeton and Academic Freedom at UT Austin: Three Archival Letters
by Josiah M. Daniel, III One bonus of archival research is to discover documents irrelevant to the topic but so evocative that they can’t be ignored. In the State Bar of Texas archives, I found three letters from June 1960 between W. Page Keeton (1909-1999), Dean of the School of Law of The University of […]
Remembering the Tex-Son Strike: Legacies of Latina-led Labor Activism in San Antonio, Texas
By Micaela Valadez The year 2019 marks the 60th anniversary of the Tex-Son strike, a major labor battle waged in San Antonio, Texas from 1959 to 1963 by mostly Mexican, Mexican-American, and some Anglo women all of whom were active members of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU) Local 180. This strike is important […]
Love in the Time of Texas Slavery
By María Esther Hammack An earlier version of this story was published on Forth Part of the World. I wasn’t looking to find a story of abounding love when researching violent episodes of Texas history. Then I ran across a Texas newspaper article that shed a brief light on the lives of a Black woman […]
The Blackwell School in Marfa, Texas
By Samuel Ginsburg Marfa, a West Texas town of less than 2,000 permanent residents, attracts a lot of visitors. Known as the backdrop to 1959 James Dean film Giant, the town’s main attractions include two main streets lined with galleries, the mysterious Marfa lights that only seem to come out when nobody is looking, and […]
A Longhorn’s Life of Service: Tom Ward
By Nicholas Roland On March 23, 1961, recently-inaugurated President John F. Kennedy held a press conference at the State Department on Laos, a country little-known to most Americans at the time. Using a series of oversized maps, Kennedy detailed the advance of Communist Laotian and North Vietnamese forces in the country’s northeastern provinces. Rejecting an […]
Letter to the Editor
Not Even Past will publish letters to the editor with educational or scholarly merit. When the letter concerns a post on Not Even Past, the author of the article will be invited to respond. We encourage letter writers to refrain from ad hominem discourse. Joan Neuberger, Editor. Remarks on Jesse Ritner’s “Paying for Peace: Reflections on the ‘Lasting Peace’ […]
Fandangos, Intemperance, and Debauchery
By Ben Wright “Can any good come out of San Antonio?” This was the question at the heart of an 1846 letter penned by the Rev. John McCullough. He was writing to his Presbyterian superiors on the East Coast, who had assigned him the task of conducting missionary work on the new American frontier in […]
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