Crude Entanglements: The Dakota Access Pipeline Controversy and the Troubling History of Corporations in Indian Country

Erstwhile contributing editor Alessandra Link reveals disturbing parallels between the present-day Dakota Access Pipeline controversy and the long history of covert corporate maneuvering in Indian Country. While mainstream media outlets focus on the legal conflict between the Standing Rock Sioux and the federal government, the oil company itself has slid beyond wide public recognition. Link…

Remembering the Great Sea Island Storm of 1893: Mermaids, culpability, and the postbellum Lowcountry

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…

Cover photo of Red Rosa

Graphic Histories: “Red Rosa” by Kate Evans

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,…

August Links Round-Up and Welcome Back!

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…