Erstwhile editor Caroline Grego reflects on her dissertation research from the summer and explores the ways in which African Americans in the South Carolina and Georgia sea islands – the Lowcountry – understood the Great Sea Island Storm of 1893, a hurricane that killed thousands of African Americans. Meteorologists later estimated that the storm was…
Erstwhile introduces this weekend’s conference run by CU’s history graduate students. Every year for the past sixteen years, the graduate students in the Department of History at the University of Colorado Boulder have hosted the Rocky Mountain Interdisciplinary History Conference (RMIHC). This conference brings together aspiring historians from across the country for two days in…
Erstwhile’s Graeme Pente continues the new review series of historical graphic novels with Kate Evans’s Red Rosa: A Graphic Biography of Rosa Luxemburg. Read the first in the series here. “Shamed, dishonoured, wading in blood and dripping with filth, thus capitalist society stands. Not as we usually see it, playing the roles of righteousness, of order,…
Erstwhile editor Caroline Grego assembles and interprets history-related news links from roughly the past month. With this post, we also welcome our readers to a new school year! Erstwhile will now be posting weekly until May. Teaching Trump to College Students by Jason Blakely As the fall semester starts, those of us in history departments…
Our friends in the history department are organizing this year’s graduate student conference. See below the call for papers. Please distribute widely. Call for Papers Submission Deadline: June 6th, 2016 The graduate students of the Department of History at the University of Colorado Boulder are pleased to announce the seventeenth annual Rocky Mountain Interdisciplinary History…
Erstwhile contributor Rebecca Kennedy reflects on the value of reading fiction, with a reading list for the summer days ahead. Last Friday spring arrived in Vermont. The sun was shining, buds were emerging on the trees, flowering bulbs were making their first appearance, and a cool northerly wind was blowing off of Lake Champlain reminding us…
On the hundred and second anniversary of the Ludlow Massacre, Erstwhile editor Graeme Pente reflects on memory and class at the site, which he visited last month. The plain stretches to the east—to the west, the hills from which the miners extracted coal. Nestled at one of the canyon mouths stands the monument to…
Alessandra Link reflects on the importance of seeking professional networks outside of the classic conference circuit. Heavy rain obstructed my view as I turned off of I-290 on to College Drive, but it didn’t stop the memories from pouring over me: darting from my ramshackle house through the wrought iron gates to campus, a…
Erstwhile editor Graeme A. Pente compiles a list of history-related news links from the past month. With the election cycle in full swing, the intersection of politics and history is particularly fruitful at the moment, as old phenomena re-emerge and what appears new in fact has a long pedigree. How the 2016 election undermines Fukuyama’s…
Erstwhile editor Sam Bock reflects on the burdens of knowledge and the academic’s obligations while on vacation. I’m writing this piece while I recover from the jet lag of my return flight from Maui. I am lucky enough to have spent eight days relaxing there in the Hawaiian sun with my family who were there celebrating my…
Erstwhile editor Julia Frankenbach recounts her experience at “E is for Environment,” UW-Madison’s recent graduate student symposium hosted by the Center for Culture, History & the Environment (CHE). Last Saturday morning, an unfamiliar rosy light filtered through curtains. Expecting a rosy sunrise, I looked from my window on the fourth floor of a conference center…
Regular contributor Travis R. May looks into the history of witches as it relates to the recently released and well-regarded horror film The VVitch (2016). This post does contain spoilers. “The most notorious traitor and rebel that can be is the witch, for she renounceth God himself, the king of kings, she leaves the society of his…
Erstwhile blogger Caroline Grego compiles a short list of history-related news links from the past month. The Academy’s Dirty Secret by Joel Warner and Aaron Clauset The gloomy news from the academy is nearly farcical in its pervasion and consistency, but such is the world that corporatizing universities have made. A recent study published in…
In Erstwhile’s second podcast, editors Beau Driver and Graeme A. Pente and regular contributor Travis R. May discuss the Oscar frontrunner and its representation of the frontier West. Click here to download!
Erstwhile editor Graeme A. Pente offers a brief history of socialism in the United States, highlighting its relationship to Bernie Sanders’s campaign. Bernie Sanders’s campaign for the Democratic Party nomination has produced an incredible amount of public discussion. As his polling numbers have risen and after his surprising successes in the early primaries, one…
