The past is never dead. It's not even past
by the Incoming Editor of Not Even Past, Adam Clulow Long before I applied for a position at the University of Texas at Austin, I knew about Not Even Past. Asked to teach a new course in my old university in Australia, I remember the familiar panic about readings: Where could I find something suitable for an […]
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 Adam Clulow On February 23, 1623, a Japanese mercenary called Shichizō in the employ of the Dutch East India Company (Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie or VOC) was arrested for asking questions about the defenses of one of the company’s forts on the remote island of Amboina in modern day Indonesia. When he failed to provide […]
By Lydia Pyne In 1873, there weren’t very many options for the public in the United States to see what a real whale looked like. The occasional whale could wash up on a beach somewhere, of course, but it would rapidly begin to shuffle off its mortal coil, leaving beachgoers with the decidedly unpleasant process […]
By Edward Shore Carlitos da Silva was an activist and community leader from São Pedro, one of 88 settlements founded by descendants of escaped slaves known in Portuguese as quilombos, located in the Atlantic Forest of Brazil’s Ribeira Valley. During the early 1980s, amid an onslaught of government projects to develop the Ribeira Valley through […]
By Jimena Perry (All photos are courtesy of the author.) The only facts we know about Rosalia Wourgaft Schatz are that she was raised by Jewish parents in the city of Tulchin in southwestern Ukraine. In 1919 her family emigrated to France and in 1940 when the Germans occupied Paris and began their anti-Jewish politics, she, […]
By Brittany Erwin In the heart of downtown El Paso, an important Texan border town that lies at the base of the Franklin mountains, centuries of history are at your fingertips. Thanks to a 2016 initiative, the El Paso Museum of History has compiled all of its historical records through to the present day into […]
By Yael Schacher In my first year on the job market in the fall of 2015, with a fresh PhD in American Studies from Harvard, I did not get an interview for a job at another university where I had been teaching as an adjunct (and getting stellar evaluations) for three years. This kind of […]
Introduced and compiled by Edward Shore Brazilian researchers have described the fire that consumed the National Museum of Brazil on September 2, 2018 as a “tragédia anunciada” an anticipated tragedy. This week, Not Even Past caught up with historians who have visited and conducted research there. They shared memories of their experiences and explained what […]
Millions of tweets and millions of state documents. Intimate oral histories and international radio addresses. Ancient pottery and yesterday’s memes. Historians have access to this immense store of online material for doing research, but what else can we do with it? In Spring 2018, graduate students in the Public and Digital History Seminar at UT […]