For so many students this year, the cancellation of commencement meant the lack of an important milestone. And in this unsettling time, with it many demands on our attention, it’s possible to overlook the extraordinary accomplishment involved in completing a PhD in History. So we decided to take this opportunity to celebrate the 2019-2020 class […]
Audio Archive: Spanish Flu in the Texas Oil Fields
This article was originally posted in the Briscoe Center for American History’s Newsletter. By Benjamin Wright In 1918, Spanish influenza ravaged a war-weary world, killing as many as 40 million people across the globe and over half a million in America. In the oil fields of Texas, the flu was particularly vindictive due to poor […]
IHS Talk: The Problem of Newness: Art Cinema in India
Monday October 28, 2019 • GAR 4.100 12:00 PM – 1:30 PM How do we think about newness in an aesthetic and commercial medium such as cinema? This talk explores this question with attention to the Indian new wave of the late 1960s-1970s. There is much controversy around the point that the body of films referred […]
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 […]
Digital Archive Review – Authorship and Advocacy: The Native American Petitions Dataverse
An earlier version of this review was published on halperta.com. Embedded in the (digital) archive are structures of power. The Native American Petitions Dataverse shifts those structures by attributing authorship to tribal and Native individuals in hundreds of colonial and early American era petitions and memorials. However, is attributing authorship the sole responsibility of those […]
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 […]
The Quilombo Activists’ Archive and Post-Custodial Preservation, Part I
By Edward Shore (This is the first of two articles on a post-custodial digital archiving project being carried out by a group of researchers and archivists from UT Austin’s LLILAS Benson Latin American Studies and Collections together with their colleagues in the Ribeira Valley in Brazil.) The author dedicates this essay to anti-dam activists on […]
Promiscuous Power: An Unorthodox History of New Spain by Martin Nesvig (2018)
Power, he argues, was “promiscuous” in sixteenth-century Michoacán because there were dozens of claimants to overlapping jurisdictions: indigenous nobilities, native commoners, encomenderos (tributary lords responsible for conversion of entrusted indigenous communities), bishops, parish priests, friars, audiencia (high court) magistrates, alcaldes mayores (city mayors), city councils, corregidores (regional authorities), viceroys, general inquisitors, inquisitorial delegates, cathedral chapters, […]
Paper Cadavers: The Archives of Dictatorship in Guatemala (2014)
Archives, especially state archives, have political agendas. Whether private or public, holdings of individual, institutional, and government documents can serve to invade and control the lives of citizens and societies. Their organizations shape historical knowledge and national narratives about the past. Kirsten Weld addresses these political issues of government intrusion, historical memory, and archival knowledge […]
The Public Archive: Sicilian-American Puppetry
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 […]