Even the most gifted teachers had to learn how to teach history and most of us needed a lot of help getting started. This month Not Even Past asked graduate students to reflect on their first teaching experiences as Teaching Assistants in History classes. They responded with insight, humor, and even a little hard won wisdom. Reflections here by Chloe Ireton, Cacee Hoyer, Jack Loveridge, Cameron McCoy, and Elizabeth O'Brien.
Magical Realism on Drugs: Colombian History in Netflix’s Narcos
Seen through the eyes of Steven Murphy, the DEA agent whose voice-over narrates the new Netflix series Narcos, Colombia appears to viewers all over the world as a land of sicarios (hired young assassins), putas (whores), and malparidos (the fucked-up). In short, Colombia becomes the quintessential Macondo of Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
#Blacklivesmatter Till They Don’t: Slavery’s Lasting Legacy
Texas is Adopting New History Textbooks: Maybe They Should Be Historically Accurate
International History and the Global United States: More to Read
You Say You Want a Revolution? Reenacting History in the Classroom
Two students stand back-to-back in the center of the room. At my signal, they step in opposite directions, turn, and shoot. Afterward, one crumples to the floor dead while the rest of the class erupts in cheers of glee or howls of outrage. This scene took place in my classroom last fall. My students were all “in character,” acting the part of the historical figures.
#BringBackOurGirls: A History of Humanitarian Intervention in Nigeria
by Brian McNeil #BringBackOurGirls has become ubiquitous on the internet, with a wide gamut of politicians and celebrities taking up the cause of the nearly 300 Nigerian schoolgirls kidnapped by the terrorist organization Boko Haram. While the efficacy of this sort of hashtag activism, or slacktivism, has been questioned by scholars—and openly mocked by some […]
Black Slaves, Indian Masters: Slavery, Emancipation, and Citizenship in the Native American South, by Barbara Krauthamer (2013)
by Nakia Parker For decades, scholars peered at the painful and complex topic of American slavery through a purely “black-white” lens—in other words, black slaves who had white masters. The sad reality that some Native Americans, (in particular, the Creek, Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Seminole, or “the Five Tribes”) also participated in chattel and race-based […]
The Tatars of Crimea: Ethnic Cleansing and Why History Matters
Many historical accounts of events in the Crimea simply mention that Nikita Khrushchev “gifted” the Crimea to Ukraine in 1954. This does little to explain the Crimea’s current demographic make-up or what happened to put the strategic peninsula in the position to be “given” by Moscow to Ukraine in 1954.