The past is never dead. It's not even past
This vision of the borderlands recognizes that it is more than a single geographic space along the U.S.-Mexico border. Rather, the borderlands encompasses a wider swath of American interaction with Spanish peoples in asserting influence and control. American Catholics simultaneously benefited from and sought to undermine various aspects of American expansion.
In Ordinary Lives in the Early Caribbean, Kristen Block explores the role of religious doctrines as rational, strategic discourses in the seventeenth-century Caribbean. Certainly, Christianity shaped inter-imperial diplomacy, economic projects, and “national” identities.
At 58 Grafton Way, a blue plaque celebrates the “precursor of Latin American Independence” Francisco de Miranda (1750-1816), resident at this address between 1802 and 1810, and the subject of Karin Racine’s book, Francisco de Miranda, a Transatlantic Life in the Age of Revolution.
By Ben Breen Sanjay Subrahmanyam is a historian of remarkable erudition and imagination. His personal itineraries over the years—from the New Delhi School of Economics to the École des Hautes Études in Paris, and from Oxford to UCLA, where he currently holds an endowed chair in history—mirror those of the early modern travellers who frequently […]
Charting the rise of the United States from a peripheral, comparatively weak power in the late nineteenth century to the pinnacle of its military, diplomatic, and cultural influence in the early twenty-first. How and why did this momentous transformation occur? Who resisted and why? What were the attitudes of foreign nations as the United States became a great power of the first order and then surpassed them all?
People think they know everything about slavery in the United States, but they don’t.
John Salmon “Rip” Ford had a long military career as a soldier of the Texas Republic (1836-46). He was a volunteer in the Mexican War, a Texas Ranger on Texas’s borders, and commander of a Confederate Cavalry Regiment in the Civil War. Ford’s archive at UT-Austin’s Center for American History, contains records of his activities as a physician and newspaper editor, as well, revealing an uncommon breadth of occupational skills.
As football returns to living rooms across the United States, it’s worth remembering that the sport has an international appeal for many who have spent time in this country. Fifty years ago, one such foreign fan led a revolution from Tanzania.
Cats and dogs in art are rarely mere props. More than decoration, their presence serves a meaningful purpose. They may represent human endeavors, moralities, values, and behaviors. Alternately, their image may signify the lives and conditions of individual animals themselves, or entire categories of such animals, existing in domestic relationships with humans, as suppliers of labor, or even as a sources of food. Animals in art offer novel and useful ways to understand historical trends and events.