Digital History: A Primer (Part 1)
Internet technology is starting to have a profound influence on the ways we do history. Historians have found new places to write history, new ways to make sources available, and some historians have mastered the digital technology to create new kinds of data and new kinds of sources for asking new kinds of questions about the past.
The Many Histories of South Austin: The Old Sneed Mansion
You wouldn’t think much of the limestone walls hanging on for dear life as you walked along Bluff Springs to get to the grocery store or the bus stop. Not least because they are set back about thirty feet from the road and concealed by trees. I first heard something about the walls and the Sneed mansion they once supported while walking along the Onion Creek greenbelt in South Austin.
Slave Rebellion in Brazil: The Muslim Uprising of 1835 in Bahia by João José Reis (1993)
Shortly after 1:00am on January 25, 1835, a contingent of African-born slaves and former slaves emerged from a house at number 2 Ladeira da Praça and overpowered the justice of the peace and a police lieutenant. Throughout the night approximately six hundred rebels ran through the streets fighting and vandalizing a number of municipal buildings.
The Republic of Nature by Mark Fiege (2012)
Flip through the pages of almost any American history textbook. Within the first few sections, you will find paragraphs dedicated to the American Revolution and the ideological groundwork that supported it; the pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps mythology that surrounds Abraham Lincoln; the rise of a cotton-based economy in the South and the enslaved manpower that sustained it; the westward expansion of the American population and the lines of communication and transportation that they created in the wake of their migration.
Responses from Authors of the NAS Report on Teaching US History at UT
Below you will find two responses we received to my blog about the report of the National Association of Scholars on the teaching of US History at UT and TAMU.
From the Editor: On the Report by The National Association of Scholars about US History at UT
This week the National Association of Scholars released a report critical of the ways US History is taught at the University of Texas at Austin and at Texas A & M.
An “Act of Justice”?
We knowed freedom was on us, but we didn’t know what was to come with it. We thought we was going to get rich like the white folks. We thought we was going to be richer than the white folks, ‘cause
The Emancipation Proclamation and its Aftermath
A compilation of works referred to by this month's featured authors on Slavery, Emancipation, Abolition and their legacy in US History.
The text of the Emancipation Proclamation
Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained (2012)
We all know that films on historical subjects distort events for the sake of entertainment. The goal of this review is to examine this latest rendition of slavery in popular culture from a historian's point of view to see how those distortions are used and what affect they may have on popular ideas about slavery.