The past is never dead. It's not even past
Moviegoers who recently flocked to cinemas around the country to take in George Lucas’ World War II aviation blockbuster, Red Tails, may be unaware of the long and checkered history of black servicemen in the American military in the decades before the ascendance of the now famous Tuskegee Airmen.
The relationships that Langston Hughes developed with Afro-Cubans exemplify the personal and artistic connections that helped shape the political strategies of both Afro-Cubans and black Americans as they attempted to overcome a shared history of oppression and enslavement. These encounters illustrate the significance of cross-national linkages to the ways black populations in both countries negotiated the entangled processes of U.S. imperialism and racial discrimination.
In the last decade, the history of Muslims in America has come into its own and A History of Islam in America provides one of the most comprehensive and even-handed treatments of the subject. Many previous studies breezily pit “Islam” against the “West.”
In 2001, I was a junior at the Bronx High School of Science in New York City. On the morning of September 11th, I was sitting in my second period AP US History class, taught by Dr. Melvin Maskin. On days when he was feeling particularly enthusiastic about a lesson, he’d scrawl things like, “The Doc is IN DA HOUSE” on the blackboard. He was always doing things like that: making silly jokes or referencing song lyrics in tests, to get us excited about settling in for a class period of history.
Matthäus Schwarz of Augsburg was, in many respects, a rather typical (if unusually successful) early modern merchant: he worked his way up from an apprentice clerk to a chief accountant in the powerful Fugger banking dynasty, he married, went to war, had children, and, in 1574, he died.
In his response to the recent resignation of Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, President Barack Obama situated the event within a longer history of popular freedom struggles. His references to Gandhi and the fall of the Berlin Wall evoked powerful images for most Americans, but Obama’s allusion to the small West African nation of Ghana may be less familiar.
As one of the students in my U.S. women’s history class put it, “Women are just like men; except that they are different.” For all that men and women have had in common these many millenia, women’s experience has often been different.
On Saturday, September 21, 2024, I had the privilege of joining a diverse group from Austin’s activist community for a workshop, Archiving Activism Freedom School, organized by Dr. Ashanté Reese and Dr. Ashley Farmer–both of them Associate Professors of African and African Diaspora Studies (AADS) at the University of Texas at Austin. Funded by the […]
From the editor: Not Even Past Teaching Profiles are designed to explore how historians at the University of Texas and beyond teach, how they inspire and galvanize students. In this article, we speak with Dr Ashley Farmer. Dr Farmer has a remarkable record of achievement in the classroom. She won the 2020 Faculty Teaching Award […]
It’s been another busy year for Not Even Past with more than 130 articles published across the academic year. To celebrate all this incredible academic content we have compiled everything in one page below. Not Even Past‘s reach also continues to grow, and we just broke a million page views over the past 12 months, […]