The past is never dead. It's not even past
Thinking about the future POTUS, with the first debate of the 2016 campaign on TV tonight? Read up on Presidents of the past in articles we have posted here on Not Even Past. Let’s begin with Jack Loveridge’s review of Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72: “Thompson, author of Hell’s Angels and Fear […]
NEP has published numerous articles and book reviews on Slavery and Race in Colonial Latin America. What hierarchies conditioned the relations between Africans, Europeans, and native groups? How did these socio-racial systems work on the day to day of life in Colonial Latin America? And, how did racially discriminated groups resist? These are some of the key questions addressed in the articles below.
In the late nineteenth century, white Southerners imposed a system of constraints on African Americans, denying blacks their Constitutional rights, and, indeed, their human rights. This system—often violently enforced—was called “Jim Crow,” named after a minstrel song that stereotyped blacks. It included the disfranchisement of black men, the forcible segregation of blacks from whites in public spaces, and forms of state-sanctioned terrorism such as lynching, which included hanging, mutilating, and burning victims alive.
In the wake of the shooting at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, the United States has undergone a deep soul searching. Images of the confessed shooter posing with the Confederate Battle Flag have launched a long-overdue national debate about the meaning of Confederate imagery. But they have quickly overshadowed the shooter’s use of two other symbols: the defunct standards of Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) and apartheid South Africa.
Over the next few weeks, Not Even Past will offer readers historical sources, readings, and commentary on these events. Last week, Mark Sheaves collected past articles devoted to the history of slavery and its legacy in the US and provided us with an annotated list. Today we offer the historical analysis and commentary from journalists and historians primarily writing online. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter for more reading and news from the Task Force.
Not Even Past has published many feature articles, book and film reviews, and podcasts on slavery in the American South, brought together on this page. Approaching this topic from different angles, this body of work provides an overview of key issues important for anyone wanting to understand slavery and its lasting legacy.
By Christopher Babits Recently, the Texas State Board of Education faced a firestorm of protest, from conservatives and liberals alike, over the statewide adoption of textbooks for teaching history. On November 21, 2014, the Board approved the use of 89 social studies textbooks. This vote was the culmination of a long and contentious debate about […]
By Tatjana Lichtenstein and Jonathan Parker This first section of this post is by Tatjana Lichtenstein Wedged between Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Empire, Eastern Europe was the site of unprecedented human and material destruction in the years between 1938 and 1948. As the staging ground for Hitler’s vision for a new racial order in […]
Nations have long confronted the need to manage features of the natural environment – whether disagreeable pollutants, fragile habitats, or desirable resources – that, acting with a kind of agency of their own, pay little or no heed to artificial geopolitical boundaries drawn and defended by humans.
During World War II, thousands of German “Propaganda Company” (PK) photographers took at least three and a half million pictures of every front on which the Germans were fighting. Hundreds of these photographs were published in mass circulation illustrated magazines and newspapers and seen by millions of readers. These images helped in significant ways to shape the way that Germans and Europeans saw the war between 1939 and 1945 and also to affect the visual memory of World War II up to the present day.