The past is never dead. It's not even past
It’s an old question: how did northwestern Europe, seemingly an economic backwater around 1400 CE, rise to trade dominance in just a few centuries? In Going the Distance: Eurasian Trade and the Rise of the Business Corporation, 1400-1700, Ron Harris offers a fresh answer. He traces the financial tools and organizational forms in Eurasia that […]
I grew up watching reruns of The Prisoner, a classic sixties television series created and produced by the famously eccentric TV icon Patrick McGoohan. McGoohan also stars in the series, playing a disillusioned British spy struggling to escape his allotted role in the Cold War. A striking opening montage sets the plot in motion. McGoohan’s […]
Introduction by John Gleb In February 1979, a popular revolution in Iran overthrew the authoritarian government of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, a key ally of the United States. Ten months later, on November 4th, 1979, Iranian college students demonstrating against U. S. support for the Shah seized control of the U. S. embassy compound in […]
From the editors: Through our “Uncharted Waters” article series, Not Even Past has been exploring the history of U. S. international relations, examining understudied historical episodes in an accessible, engaging manner. Uncharted Waters taps into the wealth of knowledge produced by scholars affiliated with the University of Texas at Austin’s Clements Center for National Security. […]
From the Editors: It’s been a remarkable few years for Monica Muñoz Martinez, an award-winning author, teacher, and public historian based in the History department at the University of Texas at Austin. In 2021, Dr. Martinez’s groundbreaking work was recognized when she became a MacArthur Foundation Fellow. The Foundation praised her work “bringing to light […]
One year ago, on March 18th, 2022, I was lecturing via Zoom on the history of Ukraine and Ukrainian cartography in the city of Kherson. My public talk to a classroom of students, faculty, and administrators was entitled “Ukraine Mapped: Between History and Geopolitics.” My talk was not normal. Kherson is a strategic port city […]
For approximately three centuries, the greater Caribbean hosted the Spanish empire‘s most important social, environmental, and political connections. Interactions between people, the environment, and mosquitoes played an essential part in this history, as John McNeill explains in Mosquito Empires. A professor of history at Georgetown University, McNeill uses his book to explore the links between […]
A discussion on Dr. Christopher Heaney’s article “Skull Walls: The Peruvian Dead and the Remains of Entanglement,” American Historical Review, 2022. Christopher Heaney’s “Skull Walls” offers a new history for the foundations of American anthropology and scientific racism, locating their paradigm of collecting Indigenous ancestors in early US encounters with Peruvian and Andean colonial and republican knowledge […]
The success of Not Even Past is made possible by a remarkable group of faculty and graduate student writers. Not Even Past Author Spotlights are designed to celebrate our most prolific authors by bringing together all of their published content across the site together on a single page. The focus is especially on work published by UT […]
From the editors: January 22nd, 2023 marked the passage of fifty years since the death of former president Lyndon Baines Johnson, a man whose remarkable but also controversial career in public life looms large both over the history of his home state of Texas and the United States as a whole. To better understand LBJ’s […]