For many first-year graduate students, the advent of the school year brings all the promise of new experiences, new knowledge, and new challenges. Among the most nerve-racking of these challenges is the prospect of working as a teacher’s assistant for the first time. This August marks the eighth new school year that I have faced…
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…
Erstwhile contributing editor Graeme Pente reflects on a summer of research and how researchers are amassing personal digital archives with thousands of photographs in each one. He believes we have an obligation to share them. Like many graduate students, I spent a good part of my summer rapidly snapping pictures of archival documents. I only had…
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…
The members of Erstwhile’s editorial board share their summer reading plans. In the last two years, we have had a great guest post reminding us of the value of reading fiction and our fiction summer reading list. This year, we offer (for the most part) one fiction and one non-fiction work that we’re hoping to get to…
Erstwhile editor Graeme Pente examines the relationship between neoliberalism and the spread of market thinking to the proliferation of different conceptions of truth, competing truth-claims, and the “post-truth era.” There’s truth that lives And truth that dies I don’t know which So never mind — Leonard Cohen, “Nevermind” (2014) Politicians’ increasingly widespread use of…
Erstwhile contributing editors Sara Porterfield and Caroline Grego write about their experiences at the American Society for Environmental History’s 29th annual conference, this year held in Riverside, California, from March 14th to 18th, in a dialogue format. In 2019, the conference will be held in Columbus, Ohio, from April 10th to 14th. Introduction Caroline:…
In the fifth installment of “The Monuments Among Us” series (see Sara Porterfield’s post on Bears Ears here, Travis May’s discussion of British memorials here, Alessandra Link’s reflection on Louisville’s city parks here, and Caroline Grego’s review of South Carolina house museums here), Erstwhile contributing editor Graeme Pente draws attention to the National Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin. Covering…
The word “fascist” has been used as an epithet rather casually in the last two years, especially in commentary on US politics. In the hope of bringing clarity to this slippery term, Erstwhile editor Graeme Pente sat down with Dr. Mike Ortiz (Ph.D., CU Boulder, 2017), whose dissertation focused on global anti-fascism in the interwar period, and…
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…
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