By Adam Clulow On February 23, 1623, a Japanese mercenary called Shichizō in the employ of the Dutch East India Company (Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie or VOC) was arrested for asking questions about the defenses of one of the company’s forts on the remote island of Amboina in modern day Indonesia. When he failed to provide […]
His Whaleship: The Stories of Real, Authentic, Dead Whales
By Lydia Pyne In 1873, there weren’t very many options for the public in the United States to see what a real whale looked like. The occasional whale could wash up on a beach somewhere, of course, but it would rapidly begin to shuffle off its mortal coil, leaving beachgoers with the decidedly unpleasant process […]
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 […]
When Answers are not Enough: The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
By Jimena Perry (All photos are courtesy of the author.) The only facts we know about Rosalia Wourgaft Schatz are that she was raised by Jewish parents in the city of Tulchin in southwestern Ukraine. In 1919 her family emigrated to France and in 1940 when the Germans occupied Paris and began their anti-Jewish politics, she, […]
History For Us at the El Paso Museum of History
By Brittany Erwin In the heart of downtown El Paso, an important Texan border town that lies at the base of the Franklin mountains, centuries of history are at your fingertips. Thanks to a 2016 initiative, the El Paso Museum of History has compiled all of its historical records through to the present day into […]
From PhD to Public Advocate: My Path
An Anticipated Tragedy: Reflections on Brazil’s National Museum
Introduced and compiled by Edward Shore Brazilian researchers have described the fire that consumed the National Museum of Brazil on September 2, 2018 as a “tragédia anunciada” an anticipated tragedy. This week, Not Even Past caught up with historians who have visited and conducted research there. They shared memories of their experiences and explained what […]
The Public Archive: María Luisa Puga and the 1985 Mexico City Earthquake
Millions of tweets and millions of state documents. Intimate oral histories and international radio addresses. Ancient pottery and yesterday’s memes. Historians have access to this immense store of online material for doing research, but what else can we do with it? In Spring 2018, graduate students in the Public and Digital History Seminar at UT […]
How do we talk about Enoch? Enoch Powell, Race Relations, and Public History in Britain
Embed from Getty Images by Edward Watson Few British politicians in the 20th century have been as inflammatory as Enoch Powell. On April 20, 1968, the Conservative MP and Shadow Defence Secretary criticized mass immigration from the Commonwealth into the UK during an address to the Conservative Political Centre in Birmingham. Dubbed the “Rivers […]
Film Review – A View From the Bridge (Directed by Sidney Lumet, 1962)
By Yael Schacher A View from the Bridge is the story of an Italian American longshoreman named Eddie who informs on two of his wife’s relatives, illegal immigrants Marco and Rodolpho, in order to prevent Rodolpho from marrying his niece, Catherine. Critics of the film, and of the play by Arthur Miller on which it […]