“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 Texas. McCullough’s letter, […]
The Littlefield Lectures 2018: The Van and the Rear: Abolitionist Roots of Radical Reconstruction (Day 2)
On February 26-27 2018, The History Department at the University of Texas at Austin was pleased to welcome Dr. Manisha Sinha, Professor and James L. and Shirley A. Draper Chair in American History at the University of Connecticut, as the featured speaker for The Littlefield Lecture Series. Dr. Sinha’s first lecture, titled “Abolition and the Making of Southern Reaction,” […]
The Littlefield Lectures 2018: Abolition and the Making of Southern Reaction (Day 1)
On February 26-27 2018, The History Department at the University of Texas at Austin was pleased to welcome Dr. Manisha Sinha, Professor and James L. and Shirley A. Draper Chair in American History at the University of Connecticut, as the featured speaker for the Littlefield Lecture Series. Watch Professor Sinha’s first lecture on Not Even Past, titled “Abolition and the […]
The Public Archive
Doing History Online and In Public by Joan Neuberger Millions of tweets and millions of state documents. Intimate oral histories and international radio addresses. Ancient pottery and yesterday’s memes. Historians have access to this immense store of online material for doing research, but what else can we do with it? In Spring 2018, graduate students […]
The Public Archive
Doing History Online and In Public by Joan Neuberger Millions of tweets and millions of state documents. Intimate oral histories and international radio addresses. Ancient pottery and yesterday’s memes. Historians have access to this immense store of online material for doing research, but what else can we do with it? In Spring 2018, graduate students […]
Cynthia Attaquin and a Wampanoag Network of Petitioners
Change.org, Ipetition, petitiononline — today, the digital marketplace has spurred the easy distribution of petitions. While they are significant, modern petitioning campaigns offer a different contribution to public discourse than their nineteenth-century counterparts. For women, people of color, and others who had little access to political movers and shakers, petitioning placed them a signature and […]
Missing Signatures: The Archives at First Glance
On February 21, 1831, a petition containing the signatures of over 800 Connecticut residents was submitted to the United States Congress on behalf of the indigenous population in the South who were facing relocation. The petition acknowledged Native peoples as the “original proprietors of the soil” and its authors claimed that to remain silent would […]
Did Race and Racism Exist in the Middle Ages?
We Were Eight Years in Power by Ta-Nehisi Coates (2017)
by Brandon Render Prior to the publication of “The Case for Reparations” in 2013, Ta-Nehisi Coates was a little-known blogger turned Senior Editor of The Atlantic magazine. Today, Coates has emerged as not only the top contemporary black intellectual, but a leading American thinker – regardless of race – with stinging critiques of President Barack […]
Historians on Marriage and Sexuality in the United States
by Alexander Taft In June 2015, by a vote of 5 to 4, the Supreme Court of the United States resolved decades of debate by declaring marriage a fundamental right regardless of sexual orientation. The Obergefell v. Hodges decision changed the landscape of American marriage law, but what was this landscape in the first place? […]