The past is never dead. It's not even past
“Nothing brings history alive like discussing it with students on the spot where it took place.” That’s Professor Charters Wynn, the current Director of the Normandy Scholar Program, a course of study at the University of Texas at Austin that combines a semester of coursework with a three-week trip to historical sites in Europe. “Life-changing” and “unforgettable” are two words that often come up when students describe their experience in the program.
At universities, not all teaching takes place in the classroom. This month Not Even Past features a discussion with the curators of The World at War, 1914-1918, the show currently on display at UT's renowned Harry Ransom Center.
This braided watch chain comes from a private archive. Similar family archives often end up in the collections of local historical museums or even national repositories like the Library of Congress. This archive is housed in a box in my closet.
American History, in many ways, represents the nation’s résumé. It is a catalog of achievements and events – some good, some regrettable – that are used to encourage citizens and outsiders to buy into the nation.
Historians won’t be giving up their visits to archives or their days picking notebooks and letters out of boxes any time soon. But the path to those boxes has changed dramatically as institutions and history enthusiasts have been digitalizing and posting their treasures online.
Knowing one’s exact location was among the greatest challenges of the human push into the air, as it is in the exploration of any new frontier, before there were such things as aeronautical charts, that is, maps for aerial navigation. It is easy for a generation with pocket sized access to Google Maps to underestimate how different our world looks from above if you have only seen it from ground level.
In his novel, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, Laurence Sterne describes the character Uncle Toby and his hobby-horse, the military. A hobby-horse, which the Oxford English Dictionary defines as “a favourite pursuit or pastime,” is something you’ve trotted out and ridden nearly to death. At the risk of losing the remainder of my friends, I am here to once again sing the praises of my hobby-horse, Twitter, and explain why you should be on it if you care about history.
If Digital History is “using new technologies to enhance research and teaching,” as the excellent website from the University of Houston puts it, then African American history is being well-served digitally. In honor of African American History month, I survey here one enormous and useful website that gives us all access to a very wide variety of materials.
The title of Carey’s best-seller is misleading. The True History of the Kelly Gang is not a “true history” at all, but rather an imagined autobiography of Australia’s greatest folk-hero, the bushranger Ned Kelly and his band of Irish-Australian outlaws.
In 1746 Dr. Andrés Arce y Miranda, a creole attorney from Puebla, Mexico, criticized a series of paintings known as the cuadros de castas or casta paintings. Offended by their depictions of racial mixtures of the inhabitants of Spain’s American colonies, Arce y Miranda feared the paintings would send back to Spain the damaging message that creoles, the Mexican-born children of Spanish parents, were of mixed blood.