This week at Erstwhile, Travis R May examines crises in the UK’s Labour Party and the US’s Democratic Party in light of the history of anti-Semitism. Since taking office in January, U.S. Representative Ilhan Omar has provoked a firestorm of debate in the Capitol and the press, mostly over her criticisms of the…
Erstwhile Contributing Editor Travis R May examines the connections between Marvel’s Black Panther and the ongoing debate surrounding museums and artifact collections acquired during the colonial period. This post does contain spoilers for Black Panther. Writer/Director Ryan Coogler’s first foray into the Marvel Cinematic Universe, 2018’s Black Panther, is a fairly radical…
Erstwhile Contributing Editor Travis R May looks at how the Alt-History of The Man in the High Castle and Wolfenstein: The New Colossus has responded to the rise of the Alt-Right in America. This post does contain spoilers for The Man in the High Castle Season 3 and Wolfenstein: The New Colossus See also our earlier coverage of The Man…
Contributing Editor Travis R May delves into the history behind Operation Finale, a recent film depicting the capture of notorious Nazi war criminal Adolph Eichmann in Argentina in 1960. This post does contain spoilers for the film. The historical record and the 2018 film Operation Finale agree on the basic facts: on the night of May…
Amid Confederate memorial debates in the U.S., and in the second installment of our series “The Monuments Among Us,” Erstwhile contributor Travis R. May (PhD candidate, CU Boulder) reflects on memorialization in Britain and parts of its former empire. The first in our series treats Bears Ears National Monument. In 1877, the British viceroy Lord Lytton organized…
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…
This week, friend of the blog, Travis R. May (Ph.D. student, University of Colorado Boulder), talks Disneyland and the exoticization of the tropics. Just ahead, a rickety wooden bridge crosses a narrow stream, and the footpath beyond leads into a primitive village of wattle-and-daub buildings crowned with high thatched roofs. Tropical birdcalls and animal growls echo…
While debates over high school curricula are heating up in Erstwhile’s home state of Colorado, Travis R. May (Ph.D. student, University of Colorado Boulder) explores the potential pitfalls of another teaching trend: “Big History.” There is a revolution in the offing in secondary education. Not one involving guillotines and cockades and (likely apocryphal) cake, mind you, but a…
Erstwhile: A History Blog 