The past is never dead. It's not even past
On March 27th, 1873, still more than 1,600 miles from New York and with Liverpool just as far behind, John Godbold, a steerage steward aboard the steamship SS Canada, made a telling discovery. While sweeping “after steerage,” he “found in the waterway of the single women’s quarters a placenta (human). After some investigation,” the ship’s […]
Both detailed environmental and medical histories of the Antebellum South are rare. Works that combine the two even more so. In The Health of the Country: How American Settlers Understood Themselves and Their Land, Conevery Bolton Valencius does just that. She argues that 19th-century American settlers saw an important relationship between the “health” of the […]
From the editors: Historical scholarship is underpinned by rigorous investigation of sources and archives. But historians can also leverage their knowledge of the past to think critically about the present. Jeremi Suri, the Mack Brown Distinguished Chair for Leadership in Global Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin, exemplifies this practice. In October, Dr. […]
One of our preeminent historians of race and democracy argues that the period since 2008 has marked nothing less than America’s Third Reconstruction. In The Third Reconstruction, distinguished historian Peniel E. Joseph offers a powerful and personal new interpretation of recent history. The racial reckoning that unfolded in 2020, he argues, marked the climax of a […]
“It happened during the sixth month of the sixth year of Kaei, on a windless summer day; I was only a little over twenty. For over two hundred years, Edo had stood as our political center. For over two hundred years, Japan had been in peace and prosperity… At least on the surface. No foreigners. […]
Foreword by John Gleb This is the second half of a two-part article. To read the first part, click here. Ivonne del Valle (University of California-Berkeley), Anna More (Universidade de Brasília), and Rachel Sarah O’Toole (University of California-Irvine) are prominent scholars of colonial Latin America. Earlier this year, they sat down with Fernando Gomez Herrero […]
Una pintura enigmática cuelga en el Kunsthalle Mannheim en Alemania: Édouard Manet retrató un grupo de hombres en uniformes azules fusilando a tres figuras, un emperador de México caído entre ellos. Aunque el pintor francés despreciaba la “pintura histórica,” la fuerte imagen de un Hasburgo muriendo frente a un pelotón de fusilamiento en México pedía […]
Foreword by John Gleb This is the first half of a two-part article. To read the second part, click here. Ivonne del Valle (University of California-Berkeley), Anna More (Universidade de Brasília), and Rachel Sarah O’Toole (University of California-Irvine) are prominent scholars of colonial Latin America. Earlier this year, they sat down with Fernando Gomez Herrero […]
From 2017 to 2021, the United States witnessed a dramatic expansion of its immigration policy restrictions. Approximately fourteen countries were placed on what was popularly known as the Trump Travel Ban list (Executive Order 13780). The ban largely prevented nationals from countries such as Nigeria, Eritrea, Myanmar, and others from entering or obtaining legal permanent […]
At about nine o’clock on the morning of September 11, 1973, Beatriz Allende, the daughter of Socialist President Salvador Allende, arrived with her younger sister Isabel at the Chilean presidential palace in the heart of downtown Santiago.[1] The military coup that would end her father’s presidency, and Chile’s dream of a peaceful revolution, had begun […]