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 […]
Review of Catastrophic Diplomacy: US Foreign Disaster Assistance in the American Century (2024) by Julia Irwin
The United States became an influential global actor during the twentieth century, cementing its role on the world stage through decisive interventions in both World Wars and via a range of US cultural and technological innovations. So pervasive was the US presence that some scholars have since christened this era the “American Century.” In Catastrophic […]
Review of A Ritual Geology: Gold and Subterranean Knowledge in Savanna West Africa (2022) by Robyn d’Avignon
Using the goldfields in Kedougou in southeastern Senegal, historian and anthropologist Robyn D’Avignon, in Ritual Geology, explores the instrumentality of African indigenous knowledge systems in developing modern mining economies in French West Africa from the nineteenth century to the present. D’Avignon defines ritual geology as a set of practices, prohibitions, and cosmological engagements with the […]
Recuerdos de guerra: experiencias japonesas en la frontera durante la Segunda Guerra Mundial
Para llegar a un público más amplio, volvemos a publicar en español el artículo de Lucero Estrella, Memories of War: Japanese Borderlands Experiences during WWII. Le agradecemos a Lucero por la traducción. Cuando visité el hogar de Rosy Galván Yamanaka en Piedras Negras, Coahuila, me tenía preparado un plato de udon al estilo mexicano. Me senté […]
Memories of War: Japanese Borderlands Experiences during WWII
When I visited Rosy Galván Yamanaka’s home in Piedras Negras, Coahuila, she had a bowl of Mexican-style udon prepared for me. I sat down in her dining room and listened as she told me stories of her grandfather, José Ángel Yamanaka, a Japanese migrant who arrived in Mexico at the beginning of the twentieth century. […]
3 Great Books about Japan
From the editors: Since its creation, Not Even Past has published hundreds of reviews covering a wide range of periods, places and issues. In this series, we draw from our archives to suggest three great books focused broadly around a single topic. In this article, we present three fascinating and important studies related to Japan. […]
IHS Book Roundtable: The Moderate Bolshevik: Mikhail Tomsky from the Factory to the Kremlin, 1880-1936
The Moderate Bolshevik: Mikhail Tomsky from The Factory to The Kremlin, 1880-1936Brill Publishing (Hard Cover): 2022; and Haymarket Books (Paperback): May 2023by Charters Wynn This first English-language biography of Mikhail Tomsky reveals his central role in all the key developments in early Soviet history, including the stormy debates over the role of unions in the self-proclaimed workers’ state. […]
The Wars of Oppenheimer
It’s a three-hour, ultra-big-screen, deeply-researched box office mega-hit about… J. Robert Oppenheimer, project manager. Leslie Groves, the manager’s manager. Kitty Oppenheimer, the manager’s kids’ manager. Lewis Strauss, the wanna-be manager. Harry Truman, the buck-stops-here manager. James Byrnes, President Truman’s manager. The scientists of the Manhattan Project were thoroughly unmanageable. The bomb? It was everybody’s fault, […]
Two Bombings, Two Movies: From Hiroshima to Grave of the Fireflies
An orphaned boy and girl wander helplessly through a destroyed Japanese city toward the end of World War II. The boy, older but not old enough, has frustrating interactions with the adults they meet, most of whom are preoccupied with their own struggles to survive. Despite his earnest efforts, he cannot keep his little sister […]
Roundtable Review of The Peacemaker: Ronald Reagan, the Cold War, and the World on the Brink
From the editors: William Inboden is the William J. Power, Jr. executive director of the Clements Center for National Security at the University of Texas at Austin. A former State Department official who served on the National Security Council under President George W. Bush, Inboden is also a distinguished scholar of international history. His most […]