by Gwendolyn Lockman Megan Kate Nelson. The Three-Cornered War: The Union, the Confederacy, and Native Peoples in the Fight for the West. New York: Scribner, 2020. xx+331 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index. Megan Kate Nelson has written a captivating history of the southwestern theater of the American Civil War. There more than one war […]
Fighting against Oblivion and Obscurity: Asian American Studies and its Place in U.S. Education
After receiving my two doses of Pfizer, I decided that it was time to depart a bit from my hermetic lifestyle, re-socialize, and gradually reinsert myself back into the society. While meeting new people, I always introduce myself as a graduate student at UT Austin studying the history of Chinese in Mexico. Upon hearing my […]
The Vanishing American Century?
By Jeremi Suri (with comment by Daniel Immerwahr) From the Editors: This article is accompanied by a comment from Daniel Immerwahr (Northwestern University) who specializes in twentieth-century U.S. history within a global context. Such comments are a new feature for Not Even Past designed to provide different ways to engage with important new work. One […]
The War in Afghanistan is Nineteen Years Old: What Can it Teach us about Violence in American History?
From the Editors: This article is accompanied by a comment from Jeremi Suri, the Mack Brown Distinguished Chair for Leadership in Global Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin. Such comments are a new feature for Not Even Past designed to provide different ways to engage with important new work. This week marks the […]
America for Americans: A History of Xenophobia in the United States by Erika Lee (2019)
by Sheena Cox In March 2020, an art dealer in New York emailed a Vietnamese art curator named An Nguyen and revoked his participation in an upcoming event. A “high level of anxiety” surrounding COVID-19, and concerns that Asians carried the virus might discourage audience attendance, she explained. When reports of the Coronavirus first hit […]
Native Literatures and Indigenous Peoples’ Day: A Brief Historiography
October 14th is what most people know as Columbus Day. However, for many Indigenous peoples, the celebration of Christopher Columbus is a reminder of the generations of trauma and settler conquest of Native nations and lands. For that reason, several states, including Alaska, Minnesota, Vermont, and South Dakota (and cities like Austin), have chosen to […]
Precarious Paths to Freedom: The United States, Venezuela, and the Latin American Cold War (2016)
By Marcus Oliver Golding The role of the United States during the Cold War is one often marked by tragedy, repression and the support for authoritarian regimes throughout the western hemisphere. That perception is shared throughout Latin America, which makes one wonder if there are cases in which U.S. foreign policy actually helped Latin Americans […]
Rethinking American Grand Strategy in the Asia Pacific
By More than Providence: Grand Strategy and American Power in the Asia Pacific Since 1783. By Michael J. Green. Illustrated. 725 pp. Columbia University Press. $45. by Jonathan R. Hunt University of Southhampton First Published by The Imperial and Global Forum (October 23, 2017). Otto von Bismarck once remarked that the United States was blessed: “The Americans are truly […]
The Gunning of America: Business and the Making of American Gun Culture, by Pamela Haag (2016)
By Isaac McQuistion Guns and America enjoy a symbiotic relationship, the one constantly evoked when you refer to the other. A Congressional Research Service report estimated that, in 2009, the number of firearms in the United States surpassed the number of people, 310 million compared to 306.8 million. That gap has continued to widen, and […]
My Alternative PhD in History
By Ben Weiss A recent piece in The Economist claims that, “One thing many PhD students have in common is dissatisfaction. Seven-day weeks, ten-hour days, low pay and uncertain prospects are widespread. You know you are a graduate student, goes one quip, when your office is better decorated than your home and you have a […]