The past is never dead. It's not even past
Conflicting Missions: Havana, Washington, and Africa, 1959-1976, takes readers beyond the familiar categories of the Soviet-American Cold War. In the wake of decolonization, as charismatic national leaders emerged across Africa – from Algeria to Zaire – statesmen in Washington and Moscow waited anxiously to see if the new governments would align with democracy or communism.
Dr. Jonathan Brown, emeritus professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin, followed an unconventional path to academia. Following a master’s degree in history at the University of Arizona, he received a commission in the Army R.O.T.C. program. Brown served as a lieutenant in the Panama Canal Zone from 1968 to 1970. Later […]
The following narrative is adapted from my recent dissertation on revolutions in Latin America. When I shared it with upper division history students for a class discussion, the story surprised them. Most of them had only ever experienced student government as something to put on your resumé for grad school applications. They had never imagined […]
The therapeutic potentials of substances commonly known as “psychedelics”—drugs like psilocybin, lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), and mescaline—have received increasingly favorable coverage in newspapers and TV programs around the world in recent years. Although it was by a relatively small margin, the state of Colorado decriminalized several psychedelic molecules as “natural medicines” through a 2022 ballot […]
During the 1970s, relations between the US and China were transformed. Previously the two nations were cold war enemies. But Kazushi Minami argues that the ’70s saw Americans reimagine China as a country of opportunities, while Chinese reinterpreted the US as an agent of modernization, capable of enriching their country. Crucial to this process was […]
On this episode of This Is Democracy, Jeremi and Zachary are joined by Sheena Chestnut Greitens to discuss the changing political landscape in China and how that affects their relationship to the United States and other world leaders. Zachary sets the scene with his poem entitled, “Far Away.” Sheena Chestnut Greitens is an Associate Professor […]
From the editors: To mark Women’s History Month, we collected a range of Not Even Past articles and reviews and assembled them here, on a single page devoted to resources on women’s history. We’ve organized our content around seven topics. The articles grouped under each topic heading highlight groundbreaking research. However, they are also intended […]
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 […]
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 […]
Motherhood, Patriotism and Enfranchisement: How Mexican Catholic Women Defined Womanhood in the Mid-Twentieth Century