The members of Erstwhile’s editorial board share their summer reading plans. As in the past, those of us at Erstwhile are wrapping up the school year of weekly posts before our summer hiatus with an offering: two recently published books that we’re really excited to read over the break. This year, all of our choices are nonfiction,…
Erstwhile contributing editor Caroline Grego talks about recent-ish music that draws upon the history of the American South for this week’s post. Featured image courtesy Smithsonian Folkways. Rhiannon Giddens, a classically trained, Grammy-winning singer-songwriter intent on re-centering the historical contributions of Black women to American music traditions, gave an interview to National Public Radio one…
Erstwhile’s managing editor Caroline Grego reflects on teaching at a predominantly white institution and how it has altered her pedagogical practices. When I first began applying to academic teaching jobs, I began to see this job requirement everywhere: “Experience teaching in a diverse setting is preferred.” It’s a loaded request for a search committee to…
Erstwhile managing editor Caroline Grego reflects on how the built environment and histories of white supremacy intertwine in her homestate of South Carolina. A warning: This post contains racial slurs in quotes, blotted out but nonetheless present in skeleton form. ‘When Lee surrendered at Appomattox, every man in the Confederate Army, every man out of…
Erstwhile contributing editor Caroline Grego interviews Dr. Natalie Mendoza, a postdoctoral research associate and founder of the History Teaching and Learning Project at the University of Colorado Boulder’s history department. The transcript below has been lightly edited, and the interview’s audio is available in the embedded Soundcloud file. Caroline Grego (CG): Hello and welcome…
In the fourth installment of “The Monuments Among Us” series (see Sara Porterfield’s post on Bears Ears here, Travis May’s discussion of British memorials here and Alessandra Link’s reflection on Louisville’s city parks here), Erstwhile contributing editor Caroline Grego considers how two house museums in her hometown of Columbia, South Carolina, could provide a counterpoint to Confederate statuary. The featured image…
Contributing editor Caroline Grego reflects on the similarities between how southerners and westerners form their regional identities, based on her childhood in the South and living in the West for the past six and a half years as a graduate student. I am lying in a natural rock hot springs pool at Valley View Hot…
Contributing editor Caroline Grego, whose dissertation is about the Great Sea Island Storm of 1893, reflects on historians’ and historically-minded thinkers’ scholarship on “natural disasters.” Header photograph by Marcus Yam for Getty Images. What we call “natural” disasters—hurricanes, earthquakes, mudslides, tornadoes—are not natural at all. This is true, first, because nothing about the experience of…
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 enslaved African Americans in lower Richland County, a rural and predominantly Black community south of Columbia, the…
On July 10th, 2015, members of a South Carolina Highway Patrol honor guard reeled down the Confederate flag from a pole in front of the statehouse. Ten thousand onlookers roared excitedly as the flag descended, some cheering “USA! USA! USA!” – a traditionally patriotic shout that took on new meaning when chanted at the flag representing the Confederate…
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