Subjected to Science: Human Experimentation in America before the Second World War by Susan Lederer explores the production of medical knowledge through human experimentation and animal vivisection. Lederer’s contextualization of the subject and her well-chosen examples enlighten readers and allow us to explore the intersection between politics, economy, medicine, and, of course, issues of ethical […]
The Catholic Church and the Dirty War: Documents from the Benson Latin American Collection
By Pearce Edwards From the editors: In 2021, Not Even Past launched a new collaboration with LLILAS Benson. Journey into the Archive: History from the Benson Latin American Collection celebrates the Benson’s centennial and highlights the center’s world-class holdings. On February 24, 1999, the Catholic Episcopal Conference of Argentina issued a stern rebuke of the Mothers of […]
HPS Talk – “Vannevar Bush and Cold War Science Policy,” by Johnny Miri
This talk took place on Friday March 26, 2021 Vannevar Bush is best remembered for his leadership of American military research during World War II, overseeing the creation of such formidable technologies as the atomic fission bomb, radar, and the proximity fuse. In the closing stages of the war, Bush prepared the groundbreaking report Science: The Endless Frontier, […]
How a city plan, the atomic age and Cold War economics converged to shape today’s Austin
Austin’s creation of what today we call its “creative class” was made possible by developments that hived the city into two realities: A pleasant, well-groomed and very White West side, and an out-of-sight, out-of-mind East side for those who would never be in any promotional brochures By Brooke Shannon This article first appeared in Urbanitus, […]
Why Study the Ugliest Moments of American History? Reflections on Teaching Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States
History professors often look for ways to use the past to inform present debates. With long-past events, that sometimes requires some acrobatic leaps over centuries or millennia, but in my own courses on violence in American history, the connections are often pretty obvious. Every day, a stream of new or ongoing violent events invite historical […]
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 […]
The Sword and The Shield: A Conversation with Peniel E. Joseph (Part II)
In this conversation, Dr. Peniel Joseph discusses his new book, The Sword and the Shield: The Revolutionary Lives of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. This dual biography of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King upends longstanding preconceptions to transform our understanding of the twentieth century’s most iconic African American leaders. This is part II […]
Yugoslavia in the Third World: Not a New Bloc but Unity of Action in the Interest of Peace
by Samantha Farmer In July 1956, Gamel Nasser of Egypt (then the United Arab Republic), Jawaharlal Nehru of India, and Josip Broz Tito of Yugoslavia met in the Croatian coastal city of Pula to reaffirm the Bandung Principles, a platform for decolonization established the previous year in Indonesia. [1] In doing so, Tito formally threw […]
Queering Postwar Marriage in the U.S.
By Lauren Gutterman At first look, Barbara Kalish fit the stereotype of the 1950s wife and mother. In 1947, at age eighteen, Barbara met and married a sailor who had recently returned home from the war. The couple bought a house in suburban Norwalk, California and had two daughters. While her husband financially supported the […]
The Quilombo Activists’ Archive and Post-Custodial Preservation, Part II
By Edward Shore Carlitos da Silva was an activist and community leader from São Pedro, one of 88 settlements founded by descendants of escaped slaves known in Portuguese as quilombos, located in the Atlantic Forest of Brazil’s Ribeira Valley. During the early 1980s, amid an onslaught of government projects to develop the Ribeira Valley through […]