History

The wondrous world of the UW Digital Collections

By Caitlin Tyler-Richards
A few weeks ago, I had the pleasure of attending a presentation on archiving commemorative African fabrics, through the course of which I learned about the University of Wisconsin’s Digital Collections Center. As a historian-in-training and digital archive enthusiast, I became immediately intrigued by all the resources and projects described by Melissa McLimans, a digital librarian who works with the Center and helped digitally archive the fabric.

Shakespeare and the controversy over Richard III’s remains

By Philip Schwyzer
What are we going to do with Richard III? More than a year after his bones were unearthed in Leicester, the last Plantagenet king is still waiting for a resting place.

The sounds of American counterculture and citizenship

By Michael J. Kramer

We’re told many stories about the 1960s, typically clichéd tales of excess and revolution. But there’s more to the popular music of the 1960s. There are many ways in which rock music has shaped our ideas of individual freedom and collective belonging. Rock became a way for participants in American culture and counterculture to think about what it meant to be an American citizen, a world citizen, a citizen-consumer, or a citizen-soldier.

Five things you may not know about Chester Arthur

By Michael Gerhardt It is hard to imagine there is anything worth knowing about Chester Arthur. Many Americans might not even recognize that he was a president of the United States. By almost any measure, he is one of our most forgotten presidents: Never elected to the office in his office and a political hack […]

The first woman senator

While I was racing through the tunnels that link the concourses at Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport, trying to make a tight connection, faces of famous Georgians adorning the walls flashed by. Among them I spotted Rebecca Latimer Felton and wondered how many other travelers might recognize her as the first woman to serve in the United States Senate. Not that her term lasted all that long. When the governor appointed her on October 2, 1922, the Senate was not in session. By the time it convened in November, an election had taken place that chose her successor.

In the footsteps of the fashionable world

By Hannah Greig
Each autumn, throughout the 1700s, London’s West End was transformed. Previously quiet squares were populated again, first by servants and tradesmen. After the houses were readied, their employers journeyed to the capital from their country estates between October and January. Snow, noted one observer, ‘brings up all the Fine folks [to London], flocking like half-frozen birds into a Farm-yard, from the terror…of another fatal month’s confinement…in the country’.

Why is Gandhi relevant to the problem of violence against Indian women?

By Judith M. Brown
The global media has, in recent months, brought to the attention of a world audience the prevalence of violence against women in India. The horrific rape of a woman student, returning home after watching an early evening showing of The Life of Pi, in Delhi in December 2012, and the subsequent trial and conviction of her drunken and violent attackers, has led to considerable comment about violence against women.

Five things you may not know about Jimmy Carter

By Michael Gerhardt
Most people think of Jimmy Carter, if they ever do, as a failed president and perhaps overly energetic former president. Yet, a closer look at his four years in office suggest there was more to his presidency than his forging a Middle East peace initiative and his landslide loss in his reelection campaign.

The price of free speech

By Ronald K.L. Collins
It is ironic: Free speech is seldom free. It often demands a price. There is a comic adage that says, “tell your boss what you think of him and the truth will set you free.” Indeed. Too often, such is the cost of free speech.

Judging a book by its cover: recordings, street art, and John Coltrane

By Tony Whyton
Created by the Berlin-based street artist MTO, a graffiti artwork was painted on a Parisian wall a few years ago and only on display for a few days before being painted over. A few photographs of the image, taken by MTO at the scene, are all that remain of the work.

Cheers to the local bar

By Christine Sismondo
“Where everybody knows your name.” Easily one of the best phrases ever written. That string of five words summed up the idea of the “local,” a refuge from the dynamism of modernity where a small clutch of people get together nearly every day to shoot the shit over a pint – or four.

How to be an English language tourist?

By David Crystal
Hilary and I asked ourselves this question repeatedly when we were planning the tour that we eventually wrote up as Wordsmiths and Warriors: The English-Language Tourist’s Guide to Britain. Where can you find out about the places that influenced the character and study of the English language in Britain? How do you get there? And what do you find when you get there?

2013 OHA will be much more than OK

By Troy Reeves
Thanks to a professional development grant, I spent a few days earlier this month visiting colleagues in Oklahoma and Texas, hoping to steal — I mean borrow! — ideas and procedures to improve the UW-Madison oral history program.

The amended Constitution

By David J. Bodenhamer
Veneration of the Constitution—and of the Founders who drafted it—began early in the nation’s history. Thomas Jefferson, who in 1787 expressed reservations about the Philadelphia convention, hailed the document two years later as “unquestionably the wisest ever yet presented to men.”

What should we do about Syria?

By Nigel Biggar
It could well be that current negotiations between the United States, France, and Russia will lead to the Assad regime’s surrender of its chemical weapons. Everyone — bar the regime itself — has a legitimate interest in seeing that happen. Meanwhile, the civil war in Syria drags on, in which far more people have been killed — and will yet be killed — by conventional weapons than by chemical ones. What stance should we take toward this complex conflict, morally speaking?

The Gold Corner

By Charles Geisst
One of the more audacious trading operations in Wall Street history occurred in September 1869. The “Gold Corner” as it quickly became known, involved nothing less than an attempt to force up the price of gold using the resources of the United States government in the process.