The past is never dead. It's not even past
Steven Spielberg’s latest historical drama chronicles the 16th President’s final months and the struggle for passage of the 13th Amendment by the House of Representatives. Despite the excellent performances turned in by the star-studded cast, "Lincoln" has a number of shortcomings from the historian’s point of view.
In The Cuban Connection, Eduardo Saénz Rovner rethinks Cuba’s position as a hotbed of drug trafficking, smuggling, and gambling and he considers how these illicit activities shaped Cuban national identity from the early twentieth century through the rise of Fidel Castro.
I have known and loved this book since I first read it as a college student, enthralled by its first-person narratives of spiritual melancholy and ecstasy as well as James’s vivid characterizations of the “once-born,” the “twice-born,” and “the reality of the unseen.” Later, as a scholar, I came to value its unique window on the tumultuous world of late-nineteenth-century American scientific and religious culture. In the years since its publication, The Varieties of Religious Experience has piqued the interest of generation after generation of the lay public and remains a touchstone for students of religion, psychology, and intellectual history.
Judith Brown’s Gandhi, Prisoner Of Hope published in 1989 amply reflects the decades of quality research that went into its production. Brown elucidates Gandhi’s transition from being “a man of his time” to “a man for all times and all places” by his unswerving and whole-hearted submission to the idea of satyagraha or truth-force, most significantly reflected in the deep questions that he asked, many of which he himself did not find answers to.
By the early autumn of 1862, Americans were reconciled to the fact that the military struggle to determine the fate of the Union was going to be a long and bloody one.
In November 2005, Anissa "The Assassin" Zamarron entered the ring for one of her most important bouts: a chance to win the Women's International Boxing Association junior flyweight title.
On the surface, Train Dreams appears to be an historical novel; most of the story takes place during the first third of the twentieth century, and it includes real people and places. Yet as a narrative, the novel—or rather, novella (consisting of 116 short pages)—is fundamentally ahistorical.
All the debates about health insurance have emphasized how expensive health care has become. According to the Center for Medicare & Medicaid Services, as of 2010 (the most recent year available) health care constituted 17.9% of the U.S. economy.
This year, third year doctoral student Ava Purkiss received the prestigious L. Tuffly Ellis Best Thesis Prize for Excellence in the Study of Texas History. Her paper, titled “‘Home Economics Training is for the Improvement of Home and Family Life?’: African American Women Professionals and Home Economics Training in Texas, 1930-1950,” examines African American enrollment in the home economics major at Prairie View A&M University in the 1940s.
Four hundred and fifty miles west of the University of Texas at Austin, thirty-seven miles (as the car drives) north of the town of Marfa, Texas, and almost 6,800 feet above sea level sit the white and silver domes of the McDonald Observatory.