This week, contributing editors Caroline Grego and Graeme Pente share their tips for organizing a graduate student conference. Both have served as co-chairs of the CU Boulder History Department’s Rocky Mountain Interdisciplinary History Conference (RMIHC), which is in its eighteenth year and attracts graduate students from across the country. Graeme was a co-chair in 2015…
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…
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…
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…
Erstwhile reflects on the rise of skepticism about observed reality and what it means for the intellectual foundations of our modern world. The president lives in his own reality. From erroneous claims about voter fraud to explain away his losing the popular vote to “alternative facts” about the size of the inauguration crowd, Donald Trump and…
As Libertarian Party presidential candidate Gary Johnson’s political fortunes fluctuate, Erstwhile editors Beau Driver and Graeme Pente offer an overview of the history of attempts, from both within and without parties, to change the United States’ two-party political system. With the spectacular collapse of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign during the last two weeks, political pundits are…
Erstwhile guest contributor Nick Johnson shares some historical context on the history of marijuana in the Centennial State. Nick is the author of the forthcoming book Grass Roots: An Agricultural History of Cannabis in the American West (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2017). Known to the internet as “The Hempiricist,” he also blogs at Hempirical Evidence and…
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…
In Erstwhile‘s second podcast, editors Beau Driver and Graeme Pente and regular contributor Travis R. May discuss the Oscar frontrunner and its representation of the frontier West. Click here to download!
Following last week’s post on the plausibility of The Man in the High Castle, Erstwhile editor Graeme Pente and friend of the blog Travis R. May (Ph.D. student, CU-Boulder) investigate the history of stories with alternate timelines and suggest reasons we tell them. “The only way to view the truth of life is to stand apart from…
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