After an extended summer vacation, Erstwhile returns with its first post of the 2015/2016 AY. Kathleen DuVal (Ph.D., University of California, Davis) is a professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Garrett Wright, one of DuVal’s graduate students at UNC, chats with DuVal about her latest publication: Independence Lost: Lives on the Edge of…
Guest blogger and CU Boulder Ph.D. student Graeme Pente writes about Mad Men’s last episode. After the final episode of the AMC show Mad Men aired in May, many entertainment critics latched onto the last scene, where the main character, adman Don Draper, meditates at an Esalen-inspired retreat and then smiles before the iconic 1971…
Winner of numerous awards including the Avery O. Craven Award and the Bancroft Prize, Ari Kelman is the McCabe Greer Professor of History at Pennsylvania State University and the author of three books: A River and Its City: The Nature of Landscape in New Orleans (2003); A Misplaced Massacre: Struggling Over the Memory of Sand…
(Photo from the 1943 Detroit riot: Walter P. Reuther Library) Erstwhile blogger Caroline Grego compiles a short list of history-related news links from the past month. What Graduate Advisers Can Do by Vicki L. Ruiz President of the American Historical Association, Dr. Vicki Ruiz of the University of California – Irvine, has placed a personal…
CU Boulder’s Rebecca Kennedy offers some helpful advice for executing oral history research projects. If you are like a lot of history students conducting oral history research abroad, you are probably thrilled by the idea of a serendipitous trip to your country of interest, believing that fate will lead you to your sources. And following…
Erstwhile contributing editor Beau Driver shares some of his insights from the 2015 Organization of American Historians’ Conference with the hopes that some of his lessons will help those attending big conferences make the most of their own first-time conference experiences. As I write this, I sit waiting for the sun to crest the horizon…
In August, Erstwhile conducted an interview with 2015 History Pulitzer Prize winner Elizabeth A. Fenn on her book Encounters at the Heart of the World: A History of the Mandan People. We are republishing the interview today in honor of her well-deserved news yesterday. Congratulations, Lil! Elizabeth Fenn (Ph.D., Yale University) is an associate professor of history…
This week, Erstwhile presents a guest post from Kara McCormack, a Thinking Matters Fellow at Stanford University. Kara recently completed the process of getting her dissertation under contract with the University Press of Kansas, and shares her experiences about the process with us. Hard Work, Humility, and Luck: From Dissertation to Book Contract in Seven…
Erstwhile blogger Caroline Grego compiles a short list of history-related news links from the past month, which may or may not be exactly from March. Trans Atlantic Slave Trade Visualization by Matthew Burdumy and Professor Adam Rothman This website is not an article, but it is a valuable teaching tool and, technically, a “link.” Matt…
Erstwhile’s Sara Porterfield gives her thoughts on California’s new water restrictions and the prescient historians who anticipated the West’s current drought. This past Wednesday California Governor Jerry Brown announced the state’s first-ever mandatory water restrictions in response to the severe drought gripping the state. While snowpack throughout the American West is at a record low, snowpack in…
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