On July 29th, 1878, Texas skies went completely dark for about two minutes. The last total eclipse in the Lone Star State instigated excitement among scientists from all across the nation who traveled to Texas cities and towns, hoping to capitalize on the rare opportunity to observe the sun directly. But in the days leading […]
Resources For Teaching Black History
Since its creation in 2010, Not Even Past has published a wide range of resources connected to Black History written by faculty and graduate students at UT and beyond. To mark Black History Month, we have collected them into one compilation page organized around 11 topics. These articles showcase groundbreaking research, but they are also […]
Picturing My Family: A World War II Odyssey
“Picturing My Family” is a new series at Not Even Past. As a Public History magazine, we aim to make History more accessible by publishing research features and other articles. But, of course, History doesn’t reach us solely through words. It lives on in images, too. A good photograph transmits as much information as a line […]
Fear and Lust in the Desert, or How Lies, Deception, and Trickery Made California a Date Palm Monopoly
From the editors: The Digest: Food in History is a new series from Not Even Past that focuses on the exciting field of food history . Across these pieces, contributors will explore the intimate intersections between food, people, ecologies, and history. The Digest: Food in History will publish a range of research connected to food production, distribution, and consumption and […]
Review of The Butterfly Effect: Insects and the Making of the Modern World (2020)
Melillo, Edward D. The Butterfly Effect: Insects and the Making of the Modern World. New York: Knopf, 2020. Most of us prefer to avoid insects. A bee, a cockroach, or a fat yellowish worm confront us with nature’s “ugliness” and present a disconcerting threat to our modern, comfortable being. Perhaps even less appealing than meeting […]
Cotton, Coal, and Capitalism: Review of Aaron Jakes’ Egypt’s Occupation and On Barak’s Powering Empire
Scholars of the modern Middle East have long identified the region’s integration into the global economy as one of the most dramatic processes of the nineteenth century. Two recent studies – Aaron Jakes’ Egypt’s Occupation: Colonial Economism and the Crises of Capitalism and On Barak’s Powering Empire: how Coal Made the Middle East and Sparked […]
Introducing the Material History Workshop
Last summer, as the global pandemic threatened to push yet another academic year into the Zoomiverse (a threat that soon became a reality), it became clear that we all needed to put on hold our standard conceptions of graduate school. While online classes became the new normal and access to the library slowly returned, we […]
IHS Climate in Context Roundtable Book Review: Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s (1979) by Donald Worster
By Atar David and Rodrigo Salido Moulinié We are excited to present this roundtable review on the 42nd anniversary of Donald Worster’s Dust Bowl, a classic work in environmental history. *** BOOM, BUST, DUST Atar David Many Americans experienced the 1930s as a nightmare. In the urban centers, the stock market crash of 1929 and […]
IHS Climate in Context Roundtable Book Review: The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution (1980) by Carolyn Merchant
In 2020-21, the Institute for Historical Studies will convene a series of talks, workshops, and panel discussions centered on the theme “Climate in Context: Historical Precedents and the Unprecedented”. As part of that, we are delighted to publish this roundtable discussion consisting of three reviews focused on Carolyn Merchant’s The Death of Nature, a classic […]
The Lived Nile: Environment, Disease, and Material Colonial Economy in Egypt by Jennifer L. Derr (2019)
Jennifer Derr takes her readers down the Egyptian Nile River, past its newly constructed dams and flowing into its irrigation canals, providing them with the opportunity to dive into the complexity of British colonialism in Egypt in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Following their invasion of Egypt in 1882, the British began a […]