The past is never dead. It's not even past
Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra is the Alice Drysdale Sheffield Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin.
In 1699 Cotton Mather published a 16-page catechism in Spanish, La Fe del Christiano. The only three surviving copies reveal a hastily printed catechism riddled with improvisations and errors. To get an “ñ,” as in Señor (Lord), the anonymous typesetter split a fragment of a double long “ff” serif. Mather’s catechism was printed in miniature: […]
From the editors: One of the joys of working on Not Even Past is our huge library of amazing content. Below we’ve updated and republished Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra’s brilliant and moving review of Felipe Fernández-Armesto’s magisterial Our America: A Hispanic History of the United States. I first came across Felipe Fernández-Armesto many more years ago than […]
IHS podcasts are a new podcast series initiated by the Institute for Historical Studies’ Director, Dr. Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra. This episode highlights the scholarship of Madeline McMahon, post-doctoral fellow in the Department of History at the University of Texas at Austin. Each episode features Dr. Cañizares-Esguerra and Ashley Garcia, a PhD Candidate in History at UT Austin. […]
From the editors: This interview was first published in August 2021 by the Toynbee Prize Foundation. Named after Arnold J. Toynbee, the foundation seeks to promote scholarly engagement with global history. The original interview can be accessed here. This interview is published here as part of a new collaboration with the Toynbee Prize Foundation. The […]
I was recently elected as the incoming director of the Institute for Historical Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. One of the projects I have in mind for my first year, 2021-22, is a detailed examination of the Benson and its collections by creating two working groups formed of six graduate students and […]
In Spring 2020, Dr Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra taught a new variant of his highly successful course, Colonial Latin America through objects. The course description is as follows: Objects (furniture, textiles, tools, maps, books, guns, kitchen ware, buildings, settlements, monuments, ships, tombs ) often shed more light about past societies than text themselves. This course explores the […]
From the Editors: The Not Even Past Works in Progress series highlights groundbreaking new research that is not yet published. The idea is to give our readers a first look at current projects and upcoming publications. As the first in the series, we are fortunate to feature an important new work, The Radical Spanish Empire: Petitions and the Creation of the New […]
This book has been an intellectual adventure to read, all 600-plus pages of it. The Scientific Revolution, Ralph Bauer argues, carries a connotation of “the discovery of new worlds” in nature. In historiography, the early modern revolution in cosmology has long been connected to the Age of Discovery in cosmography. Yet the two things remain […]
In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, nobody questioned enslaving Amerindians. In Blacks of the Land (originally published in 1994 as Negros da Terra) Monteiro studies Amerindian slavery in the Capitania de São Vicente, now known as São Paulo, and thus sheds light on practices and debates that took place all over the continent. What happened […]
Luanda and Benguela became the busiest, most profitable slaving ports in the transatlantic slave trade in the seventeenth century precisely because these two ports set up tribunals to hear tens of thousands of enslaved petitioners demand freedom. Paperwork in local tribunals set hundreds of thousands free, even at the risk of bankrupting powerful merchants. As […]