Summer Reading 2020: A Sampling of Erstwhile’s To-Read List
Erstwhile editors share a small selection from their summer reading lists.
Strange Disease: Living through a Pandemic as a Historian of Disease
Contributing Editor Kerri Clement reflects on living through a pandemic as a historian of disease.
The Long Shadow of White Supremacy in U.S. Foreign Policy
Alex Langer (Ph.D., CU Boulder, 2020) examines the long legacy of white supremacy in US foreign policy. Last month on Erstwhile, Sarah Luginbill examined the long history of misinformation, bad history, and blatant lies that have led racists and white supremacists to embrace the Middle Ages as an Anglo-Saxon utopia. This week, I want to…
The Environmentalism of Neil Young: Climate Change and Popular Music
Having listened to the forty-odd studio albums comprising Neil Young’s catalogue this spring, Erstwhile editor Graeme Pente traces the thread of the Canadian-American musician’s environmentalism back to the first Earth Day fifty years ago. In the hallways of the ages, on the road to history What we do now will always be with us. It’s a…
White Supremacy and Medieval History: A Brief Overview
White supremacists are co-opting and twisting medieval European history, ignoring the reality of a diverse medieval past while capitalizing on the problems within medieval studies itself.
Securing the China Market: World of Warcraft and Western Accommodation of Communist Party Restrictions
Guest contributor and friend of the blog Evan Willford places Blizzard Entertainment’s recent censorship scandal in the context of a longer history of the company’s accommodation of the Chinese government. Since this summer, hundreds of thousands of protestors have packed the streets of Hong Kong, demonstrating against Chinese encroachment on Hong Kong’s special status under…
From Revolutions to Reconciliation, Celebrating German Unity Day
From steins of beer to David Hasselhoff, Erstwhile Contributing Editor @Katie_Randall2 recently enjoyed a weekend of celebration in honor of German Unity Day.
A Van Down by the Climbing Gym
Erstwhile contributing editor Anna Kramer discusses the historical roots of today’s #vanlife movement and how van dwelling has served as a means to play at being homeless while people experiencing homelessness are increasingly under attack.
Education and the Revival of the Labor Movement
For May Day, contributing editors Beau Driver and Graeme Pente survey the recent history of teachers’ strikes and the revival of the US labor movement in the face of obscene wealth inequality. In early April, The Atlantic’s coverage of history instructor Thea Hunter’s tragic death circulated widely. Hunter’s early death highlights the growing lack of…
The Climate Crisis and the Need for Utopian Thinking
Contributing editor Graeme Pente highlights the prescience of nineteenth-century utopian thinker J.A. Etzler and what that might offer us in the face of climate catastrophe. The future is grim. David Wallace-Wells’s recent New York Times bestseller The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming (2019) looks unflinchingly at what the latest science on climate change suggests is…
Erstwhile: A History Blog 