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…
Whether for conferences or research, being a historian usually requires some form of travel. Here are a few essential apps for traveling anywhere in the world. Do you have other apps you recommend? Tell us in the comments! GeniusScan Academic travelers often run into the problem of needing to send PDFs of tickets, receipts, insurance,…
Erstwhile editor and long-suffering fan of the Washington NFL franchise, Beau Driver, discusses new developments in the ongoing controversy over the team’s nickname. In late January of 1988, I sat down to watch the football team I loved play in Super Bowl XXII. This was the heyday of the Washington Redskins. Coach Joe Gibbs had…
Margaret Jacobs (Ph.D. University of California, Davis) is the Graduate Chair and Chancellor’s Professor of History at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Her latest work, A Generation Removed: The Fostering and Adoption of Indigenous Children in the Postwar World, was published by the University of Nebraska Press. Dr. Jacobs chats with Erstwhile’s Alessandra Link about a variety…
This past Sunday I went for a run in a tank top and shorts. In February. In Durango, a small town in the San Juan Mountains of Colorado. This should be the time of year for snow boots and warm hats, for skiing and skijoring, not for California-like temperatures and thinking it’s just about time…
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