• Features
  • Books
  • Teaching
  • Digital & Film
  • Blog
  • IHS
  • Texas
  • Spotlight
  • About

The past is never dead. It's not even past

Not Even Past

The Rise and Fall of the Austin Dam

Black and white image of the completed Austin dam from the 1890s

If you cross the Colorado River at Redbud Trail and look upstream toward Tom Miller Dam, there amid the tumbled rocks you can still see the wreck of Austin’s dream. In 1890, the citizens of Austin voted overwhelmingly to put themselves deeply in debt to build a dam, in hopes that the prospect of cheap waterpower would lure industrialists who would line the riverbanks with cotton mills.

Recent Posts

  • IHS Roundtable: “Teaching Climate Change: Perspectives from History and the Humanities”
  • The Death of Yukio Mishima, 50 Years On
  • 15 Minute History – Black Reconstruction in Indian Territory
  • IHS Panel: “Rodney King and the LA Riots: 30 Years Later”
  • “Though she wasn’t a man, she was as good as one”: Labor, Seapower, and Nineteenth-Century Seafaring Stewardesses
NOT EVEN PAST is produced by
The Department of History
The University of Texas at Austin
We are supported by the College of Liberal Arts
And our Readers

Donate
Contact

All content © 2010-present NOT EVEN PAST and the authors, unless otherwise noted

    Sign up to receive the monthly Not Even Past newsletter

    • Features
    • Books
    • Teaching
    • Digital & Film
    • Blog
    • IHS
    • Texas
    • Spotlight
    • About