The past is never dead. It's not even past
(UT History faculty come from all over the world. Here are their stories.) By Tatjana Lichtenstein Being an immigrant has always been part of my story. More than 50 years ago, my parents left their home country in search of a better life. They ended up in the small country of Denmark in northern Europe. And […]
From the Editors: From There to Here is a new series for Not Even Past in 2021. It builds off a past initiative but expands its focus to document the journeys taken by individual graduate students to Garrison hall and the University of Texas at Austin. Gwendolyn Lockman, who is completing her PhD in History, shares her story with […]
From the Editors: From There to Here document the journeys taken by individual graduate students to Garrison hall and the University of Texas at Austin. Gabrielle Esparza, who is completing her PhD in History, shares her story with us. For more about Gabrielle, see her spotlight here. My great-grandpa Earl died when I was eight years […]
From the Editors: From There to Here is a new series for Not Even Past in 2021. It builds off a past initiative but expands its focus to document the journeys taken by individual graduate students to Garrison hall and the University of Texas at Austin. In this powerful first article in the series, Ilan […]
In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, nobody questioned enslaving Amerindians. In Blacks of the Land (originally published in 1994 as Negros da Terra) Monteiro studies Amerindian slavery in the Capitania de São Vicente, now known as São Paulo, and thus sheds light on practices and debates that took place all over the continent. What happened […]
Luanda and Benguela became the busiest, most profitable slaving ports in the transatlantic slave trade in the seventeenth century precisely because these two ports set up tribunals to hear tens of thousands of enslaved petitioners demand freedom. Paperwork in local tribunals set hundreds of thousands free, even at the risk of bankrupting powerful merchants. As […]
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, […]
Matthew Restall’s When Montezuma met Cortés delivers a blow to the basic structure of all current histories of the conquest of Mexico. Absolutely all accounts, from Cortés’ second letter to Charles V in 1520 to Inga Clendinnen’s masterful 1991 article “’Fierce and Unnatural Cruelty,’”[1] assume that the conquest of Mexico was led by Hernán Cortés, […]
(This is the first of a series that will explore creative ways to think about historic markers in Austin.) By Jesse Ritner 1917 marked a turning point in the history of Austin’s development. A large donation and the dismembering of a family estate spread the city west and north, resulting in dramatic increases in public […]
by A. G. Hopkins Whether commentators assert that the United States is resurgent or in decline, it is evident that the dominant mood today is one of considerable uncertainty about the standing and role of the “indispensable nation” in the world. The triumphalism of the 1990s has long faded; geopolitical strategy, lacking coherence and purpose, […]