The past is never dead. It's not even past
In 1958, an American biblical scholar named Morton Smith was inspecting the book and manuscript collections of Mar Saba, a 1500-year-old monastery in the Judean wilderness. While leafing through a 17th-century printed book Smith discovered something unexpected–a note in Greek written on the blank pages at the back of the book. At the start of […]
Citizens at Last is a documentary film that tells the story of the grit, persistence, and tactical smarts of the Texas women who organized, demonstrated, and won the vote for women. The film is available via PBS Austin/KLRU and www.citizensatlastfilm.com.. March is Women’s History Month, a time to explore and celebrate the lives of women whose contributions […]
In 1699 Cotton Mather published a 16-page catechism in Spanish, La Fe del Christiano. The only three surviving copies reveal a hastily printed catechism riddled with improvisations and errors. To get an “ñ,” as in Señor (Lord), the anonymous typesetter split a fragment of a double long “ff” serif. Mather’s catechism was printed in miniature: […]
From the Editors: This article first appeared A User’s Guide to History. It is reprinted here with the kind permission of the author. In Herman Melville’s day, businesses in cities like New York employed small armies of scriveners, as professional copyists were called. They had to write legibly, uniformly and swiftly. A person who could […]
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 […]
Review by Danielle Sanchez Joseph, Peniel E. The Third Reconstruction: America’s Struggle for Racial Justice in the Twenty-First Century. New York: Basic Books, 2022. Reconstruction is often a topic of confusion for readers. When did it begin? When did it end? What did it entail? Peniel Joseph’s latest book, The Third Reconstruction: America’s Struggle for […]
The author of the Gospel of John wrote that Jesus told Nicodemus “Amen, amen I say to thee, unless a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.”[1] Nicodemus responded in bewilderment, “How can a man be born when he is old? Can he enter a second time into his mother’s womb, […]
Guaraná: How Brazil Embraced the World’s Most Caffeine-Rich Plant is a luminous social biography of a single Amazonia fruit. Historian Seth Garfield re-invigorates the abiding relevance of the history of commodities as an entry point into Latin American history. As a history of consumption, science, and national mythology, the book invites readers into new terrain in the […]
From the editors: This article first appeared in QT Voices, which is the online magazine of the LGBTQ Studies Program at The University of Texas at Austin. For the original article see here. “If at all possible and, if my voice is loud enough, your house will be spared by the bulldozer.” This was the encouraging message received in […]
Civil War by Other Means: America’s Long and Unfinished Fight for Democracy(Public Affairs, Hachette Book Group, October 2022) In 1865, the Confederacy was comprehensively militarily defeated, its economy shattered, its leaders in exile or in jail. Yet in the years that followed, Lincoln’s vision of a genuinely united country never took root. Apart from a […]