By Steven Richter Beginning with the title and continuing through the final pages, James C. Scott’s Against the Grain seeks to subvert the historical narrative of inevitable progress toward civilization that has been dominant for millennia. Instead of framing agriculture as a driver of enlightened civilization, he conceives of it as a social and ecological […]
The Public Archive: Texas Czech Culinary Traditions
Kolaches (Credit: Whitney, via Flickr) 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 […]
Feeding of the Body and Feeding of the Soul: Colonial Latin America Through Objects (No. 5)
This series features five online museum exhibits created by undergraduate and graduate students at the University of Texas at Austin for a class titled “Colonial Latin America Through Objects.” The class assumes that Latin America was never a continent onto itself. The course also insists that objects document the nature of historical change in ways […]
What Makes a Good History Blog?
by Jesse Ritner I love food blogs. It’s true. The bad jokes. Exclamation marks run rampant. Mouthwatering photographs. The word chocolate, over 70 times in only 1,000 words. Unsurprisingly, my first foray into history blogs was through food. Websites such as Cooking in the Archive (which posts about antiquated recipes with pictures and all) were […]
Domesticating Ethnic Foods and Becoming American
How to Cook and Eat in Chinese was the earliest popular, English-language guide to Chinese cooking. First published in 1945 and reprinted several times, it remains in wide use today.