Erstwhile editor Julia Frankenbach recounts her experience at “E is for Environment,” UW-Madison’s recent graduate student symposium hosted by the Center for Culture, History & the Environment (CHE). Last Saturday morning, an unfamiliar rosy light filtered through curtains. Expecting a rosy sunrise, I looked from my window on the fourth floor of a conference center…
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…
Erstwhile blogger Caroline Grego compiles a short list of history-related news links from the past month. The Academy’s Dirty Secret by Joel Warner and Aaron Clauset The gloomy news from the academy is nearly farcical in its pervasion and consistency, but such is the world that corporatizing universities have made. A recent study published in…
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!
Erstwhile editor Graeme Pente offers a brief history of socialism in the United States, highlighting its relationship to Bernie Sanders’s campaign. Bernie Sanders’s campaign for the Democratic Party nomination has produced an incredible amount of public discussion. As his polling numbers have risen and after his surprising successes in the early primaries, one of…
Erstwhile‘s Beau Driver kicks off a news series on historical graphic novels by reviewing Jonathan Fetter-Vorm’s Trinity: A Graphic History of the First Atomic Bomb in the inaugural edition of Erstwhile‘s “Graphic Histories.” Last year, I had the pleasure of interviewing Ari Kelman about his and Jonathan Fetter-Vorm’s wonderful graphic history of the Civil War, Battle…
Erstwhile blogger Caroline Grego compiles a short list of history-related news links from the past month. She admits that this month’s links round-up is even more grab-bag than usual, opening with dispatches from academia, and ending with two (hopefully useful) online resources. Academics Get Real by Colleen Flaherty During the last two weeks of…
Erstwhile editor Julia Frankenbach reflects on the vitality of the notion of wildness in her everyday life, arguing for the inseparability of academic and non-academic learning. It was a sunny mid-October day on the Colorado Front Range. I had just finished the week’s work, so I drove the twelve miles north from Boulder to visit…
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…
This week, friends of the blog, Daniel Carney and Katie Randall (M.A. students, CU Boulder) evaluate the historical plausibility of Amazon’s new series The Man in the High Castle. Also see the follow-up on the meaning and purpose of alternate histories. A haunting rendition of “Edelweiss” chills viewers to the bone as they are introduced to…
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