The past is never dead. It's not even past
How did slavery end in America? It’s a deceptively simple question—but it holds a very complicated answer. “Visualizing Emancipation” is a new digital project from the University of Richmond that maps the messy, regionally dispersed and violent process of ending slavery in America.
This article is part of the series: History beyond Academia Ostrich egg models, Dr Pepper bottles, and toothbrushes preserved in soda. What do these artifacts have in common? At the Dr Pepper Museum, these objects collectively tell a story about the past that otherwise might go unnoticed. Located in the historic downtown of Waco, Texas, […]
As the Roaring Twenties hummed on, a brand-new building was erected on the grassy slopes of central campus at The University of Texas at Austin. A crew of around 50 to 60 people, working with eight car loads of stone, six stone cutters, and ten lathers, pieced together what would become Garrison Hall at breakneck […]
This and other articles in Primary Source: History from the Ransom Center Stacks represent an ongoing partnership between Not Even Past and the Harry Ransom Center, a world-renowned humanities research library and museum at The University of Texas at Austin. Visit the Center’s website to learn more about its collections and get involved. The Harry Ransom Center holds a sammelband of three […]
This article has a Spanish version The History of the Present Time (HPT) in Mexico is emerging as a historiographical field in formation—open, evolving, and still being defined. It constitutes an essential space of reflection for understanding the fractures, continuities, and forms of violence that shape contemporary national reality. Unlike traditional historiography, which focuses on […]
This special roundtable brings together four distinguished scholars to examine the arguments advanced in Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra and Adrian Masters’ recent publication The Radical Spanish Empire: How Paperwork Politics Remade the New World (Harvard University Press, 2026). Drawing on research conducted across 26 archives and tens of thousands of documents, the book offers a new interpretation […]
This essay is part of The Radical Spanish Empire Roundtable, a series of review essays examining the book from different disciplinary perspectives. Read the introduction and explore the other contributions in the series below. As befits a work of such uncommon scope and ambition, The Radical Spanish Empire has already been the focus of a […]
This essay is part of The Radical Spanish Empire Roundtable, a series of review essays examining the book from different disciplinary perspectives. Read the introduction and explore the other contributions in the series below. In The Radical Spanish Empire, Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra and Adrian Masters offer an intriguing interpretation of the formation of the Spanish Empire […]
There was no reprieve from the cold or the hail that accompanied it. With each passing year, the weather claimed more homes, livestock, and children, even as the labor never ceased. In the late sixteenth century, the forests of Lorraine, once an independent duchy near the Netherlands, Luxembourg, and Franche-Comté, now part of northern France, […]
This and other articles in Primary Source: History from the Ransom Center Stacks represent an ongoing partnership between Not Even Past and the Harry Ransom Center, a world-renowned humanities research library and museum at The University of Texas at Austin. Visit the Center’s website to learn more about its collections and get involved. To my fellow researchers: if you are lucky enough […]