The past is never dead. It's not even past
I started going to camp in 1968. We were still just children, but we already had Vietnam to think about. The evening news was a body count. At camp, we didn’t see the news, but we listened to Eric Burdon and the Animals’ Sky Pilot while doing our beadwork with Father Pekarski. Pekarski looked like […]
In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Cuba was profoundly shaped by its proximity to and multi-layered relationship with Haiti, or Saint-Domingue as it was called before the 1803 Haitian Revolution. In the decades leading up to Saint-Domingue’s 1791 slave revolt, Cuban planters looked with envy on the booming sugar economy of their neighbor […]
Bby Laurie Green 100 years ago, Congress approved the 19th Amendment, which prohibited the denial or limitation of voting rights “on account of sex.” The agonizing, fourteen-month struggle by suffragists to get three-quarters of the states to ratify the Amendment, especially its dramatic culmination in the Tennessee statehouse, has garnered much attention. But it may […]
by Jaden Janak On May 31, 1921, Greenwood, a district in Tulsa, Oklahoma crafted by Black business people and professionals, burned to the ground. After a young white girl accused Dick Rowland, a Black elevator attendant, of sexual assault, mobs of white vigilantes attacked this Black community and its citizens for what the white rioters […]
October 14th is what most people know as Columbus Day. However, for many Indigenous peoples, the celebration of Christopher Columbus is a reminder of the generations of trauma and settler conquest of Native nations and lands. For that reason, several states, including Alaska, Minnesota, Vermont, and South Dakota (and cities like Austin), have chosen to […]
One bonus of archival research is discovering documents irrelevant to the topic but so evocative that they can’t be ignored. In the State Bar of Texas archives, I found three letters from June 1960 between Werdner Page Keeton (1909-1999), Dean of the School of Law of The University of Texas, and two lawyers. Those letters […]
The year 2019 marks the 60th anniversary of the Tex-Son strike, a major labor battle waged in San Antonio, Texas from 1959 to 1963 by mostly Mexican, Mexican-American, and some Anglo women all of whom were active members of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU) Local 180. This strike is important for the history […]
By Tiana Wilson After reading this book in three different graduate seminar courses, I can confidently argue that Marisa Fuentes’ Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive is one of the most important texts of our time, and a must read for anyone interested in overcoming the limitations of archival research. For many scholars […]
By Adam Clulow and Tom Chandler The Virtual Angkor project aims to recreate the sprawling Cambodian metropolis of Angkor at the height of the Khmer Empire’s power and influence in the twelfth century. A collaboration across disciplines and technologies, it has been built from the ground up by a team of Virtual History Specialists, Archaeologists […]
Slavery and the slave trade transformed the world. According to the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, 12.5 million African women, men and children were shipped across the Atlantic to North and South America as slaves. As many as 2 million died in transit. In recent years, historians have started to investigate slavery in other contexts. While the […]