Erstwhile‘s editorial board offers recommendations for good fiction the members have recently read or hope to get to this summer. Last year, Rebecca Kennedy wrote a good reminder about the value of reading fiction. The post proved a good segue into summer, so we have decided to offer some fiction suggestions again. Here are some…
Erstwhile editor Sara Porterfield weighs in on the current debate over national monuments in the wake of President Trump’s April 26th executive order mandating a “review” of all monuments created since 1996 and Secretary Ryan Zinke’s visit to Grand Staircase-Escalante and Bears Ears national monuments in Utah this past week. Jailhouse Ruin. Junction Ruin. Perfect Kiva.…
Erstwhile editor Julia Frankenbach has been recognized for the outstanding quality of her writing in the Center of the American West’s Thompson Writing Awards contest. Two of her Erstwhile blog posts “I Remember You: Wildness, Gratitude, and Western History on Horseback” and “The True Tale of Periquillo: Early Borderlands Literature, American Memory, and the Space Between” were honored this year. Erstwhile…
Graeme Pente reviews Reinhard Kleist’s graphic novel surveying the life of former Cuban leader Fidel Castro in Erstwhile‘s Graphic Histories series. “No one fears that we should transform ourselves into dictators. Only he who does not have the support of the people becomes a dictator.” — Fidel Castro, January 1959 Few figures of the twentieth century…
Maps have oriented humans in space for millennia. Today Alessandra Link adapts her recent American Society for Environmental History (ASEH) roundtable presentation for Erstwhile. Link reflects on the roundtable theme of Indigenous mobility and place by exploring how Western mapmaking served an expanding U.S. empire and, in turn, how Indigenous cartographic knowledge shaped colonial encounters…
This week, Erstwhile editor Beau Driver interviews historian, blogger, and educator Kevin Gannon. Gannon is Professor of History and Director of the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning at Grand View University in Des Moines, Iowa. He teaches and writes on race and politics in US and Latin American history and is a consultant…
Erstwhile guest contributor Kerri Clement (PhD student, CU Boulder) gives us her report on the annual meeting of the American Society for Environmental History that took place last week in Chicago. After attending last week’s American Society for Environmental History (ASEH) conference, I struggled with how to recap my experience at the 2017 meeting. This…
Erstwhile guest contributor Amelia Brackett (Ph.D. student, CU Boulder) considers the perplexing influence of identity in the practice of oral history. Unlike other historians, oral historians must consider how the outward manifestations of their identities and personas shape the conversations they can incite and, therefore, the evidence they can gather. Brackett shares some of her experiences…
Lincoln Bramwell is the Chief Historian for the United States Forest Service (USFS). In his role as a public historian he has thought deeply about the role of history in people’s everyday life and how graduate students can prepare for a career outside of the academy. This week he generously sat down with Erstwhile to answer our…
This week Erstwhile’s Alessandra Link meditates on the creative possibilities and common stressors that touch writers during these unsettling times. Drawing inspiration from Aaron Sachs’s “Letters to a Tenured Historian,”[1] Link considers the seeming tensions between the craft of writing and the disciplinary requirements of the historical profession in a series of letters to a…
This week, Erstwhile editor Sam Bock chimes in with a light-hearted summary of the history of beer in Denver. No matter which side of the political divide you may be on, odds are good that the phrase “I need a beer” has passed your lips at some point in the last five weeks. But for…
On February 14th, 2017, Representative Joseph “Joe” Neal (D) from Richland County, South Carolina, died unexpectedly at age sixty-six. Rep. Neal served as a pastor, an advocate for environmental justice, and a civil rights activist. He descended from slaves in lower Richland County, a rural and predominantly African American community south of Columbia, the state’s…
Jen McPherson (PhD Candidate, University of New Mexico) is a graduate project assistant for the American Historical Association’s Career Diversity Initiative at the University of New Mexico. Today she shares some important lessons from her work with Erstwhile. For the last three years, the History Department at the University of New Mexico has been one of four pilot programs participating…
This week, Erstwhile draws attention to an ongoing online encyclopedia project on the state of Colorado. A number of our editors have contributed entries to the encyclopedia. Contributing editor Graeme Pente produced the piece below on the history of Populism in the state. For more information on the Colorado Encyclopedia, please visit their website and explore the…
Erstwhile editor Beau Driver returns to the Graphic Histories series with his review of Wobblies: A Graphic History of the Industrial Workers of the World (2005), edited by Paul Buhle and Nicole Schulman. Author’s note: In the wake of the recent shooting of an IWW member and apparent anti-fascist demonstrator at the University of Washington…
