The past is never dead. It's not even past
I was on a train listening to the podcast The Road to Now and I couldn’t stop laughing. The hosts joked about 19th century daredevil Sam Patch’s drunken slogans, a feud fought by jumping off Passaic Falls, and a ship with an effigy of Andrew Jackson being sent over a waterfall. [1] As I stifled […]
In honor of the centennial of the Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection, the 2022 Lozano Long Conference focuses on archives with Latin American perspectives in order to better visualize the ethical and political implications of archival practices globally. The conference was held in February 2022 and the videos of all the presentation will be available soon. Thinking […]
This week, Jeremi and Zachary sit down with Samuel G. Freedman to talk about the often overlooked contributions of Hubert Humphrey to American history and civil rights. The discussion traces Humphrey’s rise from a small-town boy in South Dakota to a pivotal figure in the civil rights movement and U.S. politics. Despite not achieving the […]
What is the ‘Enlightenment’? This is a question that has occupied scholars ever since Kant. But historians no longer focus on great white heroes to provide answers. Yet sociologies of knowledge on the ‘Enlightenment’ continue to render the experiences of the north Atlantic normative. These sociologies tell us that the Enlightenment was not about secular […]
Thomas Jackson’s story has been largely untold, but the record he left behind demands historical analysis. His erudite letters have much to contribute to our understanding of the abolitionist movement, the evolution of attitudes to race, and everyday experiences of the U.S. Civil War. Jackson’s status as a British immigrant also provides us with an […]
Census records are invaluable historical documents, but they are frustratingly limited, especially when you try to use them to tell the stories of formerly enslaved people. One example is Bondy Washington, a woman likely trafficked from Africa into slavery who became a long-term Austin resident. For the past three years, I have been working with […]
Not Even Past is republishing this moving and insightful article by Dr Jonathan Cortez to celebrate them joining the faculty of the Department of History at UT Austin as an Assistant Professor of Borderlands History. Dr. Cortez was an Early Career Postdoctoral Fellow when they wrote this piece about the significance of returning to Texas to teach […]
This week, Jeremi and Zachary are joined by Dr. John W. Hall to discuss the D-Day landing during World War II, and what lessons can be learned from its legacy. Zachary sets the scene with his poem entitled, “In Leipzig on D-Day.” John W. Hall is a professor and holder of the Ambrose-Hesseltine Chair in […]
The legal cases of activists, including Angela Davis, Huey Newton, and the Chicago Seven, captured public attention throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Crowds crammed into courtrooms to watch these high-profile cases unfold, and many people became directly involved in efforts to free the defendants. While the United States has a long history of trying and […]
My grandparents and I looked down onto the vast Sonoran Desert from Mount Lemmon, north of Tucson, Arizona. At nearly 8,000 feet, quaking aspen, cottonwood, alder, and other tree species surrounded us—a stark contrast with the desert below. An audio guide played on my grandma’s Samsung Galaxy as we took in our surroundings. The voice, […]