A Great New Site For History Fans
Biff Barnes
The History Department at the University of Texas at Austin has just launched a website “For history buffs who want reading recommendations and short, interesting, digestible stories every day, the website offers a meaningful, dynamic, and ongoing conversation about history in the form of text, audio, and video histories on subjects that span the globe. The site is designed for anyone who is interested in history, from an avid reader of history to a history film aficionado.”
The site offers six sections. Here’s a preview of the initial offering in each section
- Main Feature – This section will focus on a recent book by a member of the University’s History Faculty. This month’s book is Saving Savannah: The City and the Civil War by MacArthur Fellowship and Bancroft Prize winning Professor Jacqueline Jones. The site offers a summary of the book, a video interview of the author and a video of the author reading from her book.
- Read - This section presents brief reviews of books: in the initial post Edmund S. Morgan’s American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (1975); Joanne Pope Melish, Disowning Slavery: Gradual Emancipation and Race in New England 1780-1860 (1998) and Frederick Douglass, Narrative of his experience as a slave on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. It also includes a book talk by Professor George Forgie (from whom I took a seminar during my summer as a William Robertson Coe Fellow in American history at Stanford many years ago) on seven Civil War related titles.
- Watch – This section features reviews of films dealing with Chinatown, San Francisco in the 1970s and The Old Man and the New Man in Revolutionary Cuba. All films can be purchased and downloaded from the site.
- Discover – Presents images of Navajo rugs from the University’s Art and Art History Collection and illustrated texts created in a 12th Century German monastery.
- Listen – Presents an oral history interview “Voices of India’s Partition” with Zehra Haider whose Muslim family left India for Pakistan when the countries were partitioned in 1947. A second audio, “LBJ and Vietnam: A Conversation” between the President and National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy is also available.
- Texas – This section includes articles on Texas’ current budget crisis, Texas Jewish cemeteries and “Mexicans in Texas During World War II.”
It looks like an interesting site doing everything it can to use multimedia tools to bring history to life. Not Even Past will be a welcome companion to the University of Houston’s Digital History site.
Click here to visit Not Even History.