The past is never dead. It's not even past
For so many students this year, the cancellation of commencement meant the lack of an important milestone. And in this unsettling time, with it many demands on our attention, it’s possible to overlook the extraordinary accomplishment involved in completing a PhD in History. So we decided to take this opportunity to celebrate the 2019-2020 class […]
By Laurie Green Since 2017, undergraduate students in my postwar women’s history seminars have had the unique opportunity to engage in intergenerational dialogues with women who were student activists at the University of Texas and the surrounding community during the 1960s and 1970s. As part of the Austin Women Activists Oral History Project, they have […]
There are roughly one million practicing physicians in the US and less than 6 percent of those physicians are African-American.[5] Meaning that for the 44 million black residents of the U.S., there are about 60,000 black practicing physicians. That is one black doctor for every 700 black patients. This is not to say that only African-American physicians can treat African-American patients, but distrust in healthcare institutions could potentially be alleviated by having providers be of the same ethnicity as the patient...One way to understand the causes of racial health disparities, and the role of women in health care, inside and outside of black churches, is through oral histories, such as the interviews I conducted among lower-income women from a small congregation in southeast Texas.
By Jesse Ritner The easy correlation contemporary American and British cultures build from sex to pregnancy, pregnancy to birth, and birth to childrearing within a nuclear family is far from uniform throughout history. Mother is not an identity. Not all women will mother during the course of their lives. In Sarah Knott’s words, “mother is […]
This month on Not Even Past we are celebrating the accomplishments of seventeen students who completed their doctoral dissertations and received their PhDs in History in 2018-2019. Above you see some of them pictured. Below you will find each of their names and the title of their dissertations. Many of these students were also contributors […]
In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, nobody questioned enslaving Amerindians. In Blacks of the Land (originally published in 1994 as Negros da Terra) Monteiro studies Amerindian slavery in the Capitania de São Vicente, now known as São Paulo, and thus sheds light on practices and debates that took place all over the continent. What happened […]
By Samuel Ginsburg Marfa, a West Texas town of less than 2,000 permanent residents, attracts a lot of visitors. Known as the backdrop to 1959 James Dean film Giant, the town’s main attractions include two main streets lined with galleries, the mysterious Marfa lights that only seem to come out when nobody is looking, and […]
By Namrata B. Kanchan “Let this really be brief!” was the first thought that crossed my mind as I read the title of Patu and Schrupp’s book. It was listed on the syllabus for a course on Gender and Decolonization and after some heavy reading on decolonization, I was less than enthusiastic about reading this book. […]
By Megan Raby This essay is adapted from Dr. Raby’s remarks at a symposium to honor Al Crosby that was sponsored by the Institute for Historical Studies at UT Austin on February 4, 2019. Alfred Crosby’s work has been with me for a long time––actually longer than I can remember. I routinely assign Ecological Imperialism […]
Films about historical events have enormous power to affect us, both to enlighten and to mislead. Historical films are perennially popular, often because they tell history through individual lives, because they invent characters and add personal, emotional drama to events that we want to learn about. Those same fictionalizing qualities make them great tools for […]