The past is never dead. It's not even past
In the months following his resounding electoral triumph over Barry Goldwater in November 1964, President Lyndon Baines Johnson made momentous decisions to escalate U.S. military involvement in Vietnam. Most consequentially, he ordered the bombing of North Vietnam: first retaliatory strikes following a National Liberation Front attack on the U.S.
In They Would Never Hurt a Fly, Slavenka Drakulic follows the stories of the Hague War criminals from the former Yugoslavia. Drakulic argues that ordinary men transformed into war criminals gradually through intensifying rhetoric containing a perfect storm of prejudice, myth, propaganda history and culture.
As Austin considers building a new electric light rail system—streetcars, really—it is worth looking back to the city’s first streetcar era. For fifty years, from 1891 until 1940, Austin had an extensive network of electric streetcar lines, running from Hyde Park in the north to Travis Heights in the south, and from Lake Austin in the west to the heart of East Austin.
A new exhibit at the Texas State History Museum, Women Shaping Texas in the Twentieth Century, tells the history of Texas women who revolutionized key areas, such as healthcare, education, civil rights, the workforce, business, and the arts.
While 2013 marks the sesquicentennial of Lincoln’s 1863 Emancipation Proclamation, this year also marks the 50th anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington, the most famous event of the Civil Rights Movement, made so by the continual remembrance of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech. In the five decades since the March, many people have forgotten or fail to realize the tremendous meaning that the 100th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation bore for the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s.
We are proud to announce that Not Even Past is now a partner with the Texas history site, Teaching Texas!
For African Americans in the twentieth century, Los Angeles was a dream destination; black migrants were drawn to it (much as they were drawn to Chicago and Detroit) in search of freedom from the Jim Crow South. However, Los Angeles African Americans quickly confronted their limitations as a minority group.
Writers of ethnically-themed novels are often pegged as simply recording their family stories. However, by the time National Book Award finalist Julie Otsuka set out to capture her mother’s stories of “camp,” dementia had already stolen her once-clear memories.
The global history of tobacco—the weed that captured the hearts, minds, and imaginations of so many in the twentieth century—has been told in splendid and enlightening detail. Historians have delved into the stark economic, political, and social implications of the production, consumption, and exchange of this commodity in various national contexts, most notably the United States.
“How low do you have to stoop in this country to be President?" Forty years on, that question still haunts the pages of Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72 like the ghost of Boss Tweed.