The past is never dead. It's not even past
In Puerto Rican Chicago: Schooling the City 1940-1977, Mirelsie Velázquez provides an eye-opening account of Puerto Ricans’ relationship to colonialism and education as they migrated to the city of Chicago in the mid-twentieth century. The book presents a thorough examination of how these migrants built and fought for a community through the lens of K-12 and postsecondary […]
This article coincides with an upcoming public talk at UT on Pauliceia 2.0, January 28 at 4:00 p.m. For more details, please visit the event page. While passing through Austin on vacation in 2015, Brazilian historian Luis Ferla went for a walk across the UT campus. He was mulling over new projects for the research lab […]
What does a Catholic Cardinal sequestered in the US embassy in Budapest and the dead body of an American found in Prague’s Vltava River in the 1960s have in common? Characters in a true crime podcast? No, at least not yet. Instead, these are examples of lives (and lives lost) whose stories are buried in […]
This article is part of the series: History beyond Academia The term “public history” entered my vocabulary only after I moved to the United States, where it designates a well-defined professional field. In Latin America, by contrast, similar practices have long existed without requiring a defined institutional/formal designation. Communities have always engaged in the making and sharing […]
We are excited to announce the upcoming History Beyond Academia series, curated by Associate Editor Raquel Torua Padilla. This series explores how history reaches people outside universities, showing how it is transmitted, shared, and sustained through public projects, community initiatives, and oral traditions. Contributors will reflect on a range of projects and practices that reveal […]
In September 1935, Jimmie Lee Robinson and fourteen other Black Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) workers stationed at Palo Duro State Park in the Texas Panhandle wrote to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to protest their treatment in the CCC camp. “We work some time six days in a week,” they said, “and have to go to […]
I learned a few months ago that the old Star Seeds Café near the UT campus had been demolished, a casualty of the I-35 expansion project. I was sad about this not because I miss the food—the old Star Seeds was always an acquired taste. My sense of loss, rather, has to do with the fact that […]
In Making Never-Never Land: Race and Law in the Creation of Puerto Rico, Caribbean historian, and Black studies scholar Mónica A. Jiménez offers a new interpretation of Puerto Rican legal and political history. In her first book-length project, Jiménez explores the intersections between law, and race in the creation of Puerto Rico. More specifically, Making […]
The Briscoe Center’s latest exhibit, History and Fate, is drawn from the personal papers of Richard (Dick) and Doris Kearns Goodwin. The pair met after their time in the Lyndon Johnson administration, in which Dick, a holdover from the Kennedy administration, had been one of Johnson’s principle speechwriters until 1965, and in which Doris was […]
Utopia of the Uniform is a powerful book that challenges historians to broaden their approach to the archive and their sources. It asks how affect and feeling can add nuance to our study of the past, significant historical shifts, and the future. When we met for the first time, Tanja Petrović signed my copy with […]