The past is never dead. It's not even past
In the study of history, it’s easy to fall back on national identities: “Irish music,” an “English accent,” “American Exceptionalism” are just a few examples. But a closer examination of the local cultures—music, dialects, history—that exist within nations demonstrates how misleading those generalizations can be. Just look through one of the British Library’s “Sound Maps” and you’ll be convinced.
Historian Jules Tygiel presents not only an account of Jackie Robinson’s heroic struggle to integrate Major League Baseball, but a larger history of links between African American history, baseball, and the modern civil rights movement. Baseball’s Great Experiment further raises questions about race and sports in our current day.
As the Roaring Twenties hummed on, a brand-new building was erected on the grassy slopes of central campus at The University of Texas at Austin. A crew of around 50 to 60 people, working with eight car loads of stone, six stone cutters, and ten lathers, pieced together what would become Garrison Hall at breakneck […]
This and other articles in Primary Source: History from the Ransom Center Stacks represent an ongoing partnership between Not Even Past and the Harry Ransom Center, a world-renowned humanities research library and museum at The University of Texas at Austin. Visit the Center’s website to learn more about its collections and get involved. The Harry Ransom Center holds a sammelband of three […]
This essay is part of The Radical Spanish Empire Roundtable, a series of review essays examining the book from different disciplinary perspectives. Read the introduction and explore the other contributions in the series below. The action seems frenzied, turbulent, anxious, and, at the same time, thorough and calculated. At the beginning of Chapter Three of […]
This essay is part of The Radical Spanish Empire Roundtable, a series of review essays examining the book from different disciplinary perspectives. Read the introduction and explore the other contributions in the series below. In The Radical Spanish Empire, Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra and Adrian Masters offer an intriguing interpretation of the formation of the Spanish Empire […]
This essay is part of The Radical Spanish Empire Roundtable, a series of review essays examining the book from different disciplinary perspectives. Read the introduction and explore the other contributions in the series below. Reading The Radical Spanish Empire made me reflect on the experience of two historical subjects. The first subject is Domingo, a […]
Aidan Dresang stands out as one of our most active and consistent undergraduate voices at Not Even Past. Working under the mentorship of Erika Bsumek at The University of Texas at Austin, Dresang’s work explores the relationship between communities, infrastructure, technology, and democracy. His research examines how ordinary people have challenged large institutions and technocratic systems that they believed threatened their values, livelihoods, or environments. From antinuclear […]
Throughout U.S. history, Black Americans have been victims of a range of violent and coercive systems, including slavery, segregation, and state-sanctioned violence, leaving enduring strains on the nation’s past and present. Among the most overt and brutal manifestations of this history was lynching, which made racial domination visible through public acts of terror. Emerging in […]
By José A. Adrián An Independence Within an Empire When the thirteen British colonies declared their independence in 1776, the world witnessed not only the birth of a new nation but also a decisive shift in the balance of global power. As historians such as Jeremy Adelman, J. H. Elliott, and Anthony Pagden have noted, […]