Erstwhile editors Beau Driver and Graeme A. Pente offer a recap of their experience attending the 2015 conference of the Society for U.S. Intellectual History in Washington, D.C., October 15-18, 2015. Last weekend, the Society for U.S. Intellectual History (S-USIH) held its seventh annual conference in Washington, D.C. By all accounts, it was the largest…
Erstwhile’s Sara Porterfield reports on the first annual Fool for a Day Award presented by the Center of the American West and the nonstop laughter at the awards ceremony. On Wednesday evening Bob Mankoff, cartoon editor at The New Yorker magazine, received CU Boulder Center of the American West‘s inaugural Fool for a Day Award. Along with providing…
Peter H. Wood earned his Ph.D. at Harvard and taught early American history at Duke for more than three decades. In 2011, he won the Asher Distinguished Teaching Award of the American Historical Association. Now semi-retired, he lives in Colorado. Last fall Wood taught a graduate seminar on slavery at CU Boulder, and next April…
Erstwhile blogger Caroline Grego compiles a short list of history-related news links from the past month(-ish). This month, Erstwhile presents a special edition focusing on African American history. Teaching Slavery to Reluctant Listeners by Ed Baptist We historians are most familiar with Ed Baptist because of his book, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery…
Erstwhile‘s Sara Porterfield looks at the legacy of mining in southwest Colorado that led to the most recent pollution of waterways in the region. There is a phrase in the water quality world that goes “keep it clean, ‘cause we’re all downstream.” Water quality agencies from the local to the national, from the water utility…
It’s a nightmare scenario for all of us. One minute you’re chugging along on an article or paper, and suddenly your hard drive starts making funny noises before your screen turns black. No matter what you try, your computer doesn’t restart. Or, you host a dinner party and play some music off your trusty laptop…
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…
Erstwhile: A History Blog 