The past is never dead. It's not even past
2020 is a significant moment in the history of the United States. As some locations begin the process of opening up in the midst of the Covid19 pandemic, the country is now collectively mourning and joining in protests against police brutality in the wake of the murder of George Floyd at the hands of Minnesota […]
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 […]
This article was originally posted in the Briscoe Center for American History’s Newsletter. By Benjamin Wright In 1918, Spanish influenza ravaged a war-weary world, killing as many as 40 million people across the globe and over half a million in America. In the oil fields of Texas, the flu was particularly vindictive due to poor […]
By Madeline Hsu Several UT history faculty, including Daina Berry, Madeline Hsu, Peniel Joseph, Jeremi Suri, and Provost Maurie McInnis, extend their expertise to K-12 classrooms by teaching for the Pace-GLI Master of Arts in American History, with courses such as “The Lives of the Enslaved” and “American Immigration History.” GLI, or the Gilder Lehrman […]
By Raymond Hyser April 22-23, 2021Institute for Historical Studies, University of Texas at Austin This conference brings together diverse scholars whose work grapples with the challenges that climate change presents to the discipline of history. Participants will address precedents for this “unprecedented” crisis by uncovering and analyzing the historical roots and analogues of contemporary climate […]
By James Sidbury, Rice University Note: This is adapted from a talk given at the Houston Museum of African American Culture. The last several years have brought surprisingly quick if long-overdue changes to the politics surrounding memorials to the Confederacy and the soldiers who fought for it. Most recently Virginia, for so long the proud […]
by Sheena Cox In March 2020, an art dealer in New York emailed a Vietnamese art curator named An Nguyen and revoked his participation in an upcoming event. A “high level of anxiety” surrounding COVID-19, and concerns that Asians carried the virus might discourage audience attendance, she explained. When reports of the Coronavirus first hit […]
In 2001, many of Lizzie Scott Neblett’s diaries and letters were published in a volume entitled A Rebel Wife In Texas. The text provides a harrowing glimpse into the desperation, brutality, and minutiae of everyday life in antebellum Texas from the perspective of a landed, slaveholding, Southern wife. Letters written to Neblett prior to her […]
by Ashley Garcia The Field of Blood is a timely publication that examines congressional violence in antebellum America. The work reorients our understanding of the road to American disunion and the political conflicts that dominated Congress in the three decades before the Civil War. Freeman has unearthed an overlooked history of congressional brawls, fights, duels, […]
By Candice D. Lyons In the spring of 1852, Benjamin Roper, overseer to Galveston area plantations Evergreen and Headquarters, wrote a short letter to his employer to inform him that “on the night of [April] 30 I cut Lewis [an enslaved man] with a knife . . . . He is now and has been […]