Essential reading for anyone interested in higher education or Republican politics, either today or in the past.
Local farmers have long been connected to a much larger capitalist system.
Sarnia has been growing and dying in cycles for a hundred years.
A reader would have to have blinders on to not draw parallels between the past and the present.
I want to help people see themselves as a bridge between the past and the future.
In one way or another, storytelling has been at the crux of what I’ve done all my life.
Enrico Berlinguer led the Italian Communist Party at the height of its power. A new exhibit at the Mattatoio grapples with his legacy.
Through his participation in the medical community, the theater community, and his connections to literary artists, Benjamin openly questioned how medical professionals and society at large defined and categorized gender.
Ironically, Chevron deference — which the conservative Supreme Court scrapped last month — began as a conservative legal tool.
Each community had an overseer who supervised the operations and the commissary. He also enforced the law.
What is possible when white activists heed the call of the Black radical vanguard.
There was nothing inevitable about the kind of gun country the U.S. is today.
America is rapidly changing into a country where we worship strange gods.
Advanced Placement: “a money-making racket that lets states off the hook for underfunding education”
The thing that I thought would be easiest to drop became something of a lifeline for me.
Whatever I write and record could be important for my children and future generations.
Hot pants served as a sartorial riposte to the fashion industry’s relentless campaign for the midi.
The New Bedford Sunday Standard-Times announced: “Indian Nuns Invade College”
“I was amazed to find that the book I wanted to read didn’t exist yet.”
The weirdo researchers were explaining fringe theories to a prime-time audience of millions.
The X-Files plays on our fascination with the camera — and our fear of it.
It seems strange to think of the 1990s as history; it was only 30 years ago, after all.
Who wants to watch a show whose characters never make real moral choices?
With so many crop dusters, somebody’s bound to see a UFO.
This is all wrong. This is not how the story is supposed to end.
A companion list for lit studies scholars.
For the next eight months, I’ll be an independent scholar with a side hustle as a fitness instructor.
When you’re shopping for books this season, consider a contingent scholar.
As I descended into the basement I wondered if copal would ever have a chance to ascend.
“We asked for Central High School but they think it is too good for us.”
Last year was the first academic year I only taught at one institution.
Parenting is a humbling reminder that knowledge does not just magically appear.
In a cruel twist of fate, my children suffer from having a historian for a mother.
I first learned I was pregnant immediately after passing my Ph.D. qualifying exams. A few weeks later I discovered I was carrying twins.
I can tell that they find it both fascinating and frustrating to have a historian as a parent.
Ann Arbor was the New Left’s primary incubator for the movement’s leading activists.
Any historian knows that it is crucial to write to your audience. I’m writing to two audiences.
The Empire launched a massive manhunt to capture her.
Art history research can occasionally fall into the trap of viewing everything through a digital screen.
“I didn’t know my quirky obsession could be a job in its own right.”
The Historical Association of South Africa held its biennial meeting at Rhodes University in Makhanda, South Africa.
For a minute I stood listening to the 9 a.m. bells, breathing deep sighs of relief.
“I have to remind myself – I am the only one who cares if I get paid.”
I was quickly surprised to find that flight — a defining feature of the modern image of the witch — figured relatively little in the earliest medieval sources.
Historians are well aware that a good old map invites curiosity and connection.
I learned that I like to edit in the mornings, when I’m a little less caffeinated and a lot more ruthless with the text.
Warm and welcoming, the Nubar Library is the place to go when researching Armenian history.
Twenty years later, I am living through the making of the Iraq War as history.
Soon after he was elected, Abraham Lincoln received a rather bizarre letter.
Perhaps we can enjoy the Baron’s palace without having to apotheosize him.
It is fitting to research policy history in the heart of Sacramento.
“Why do the best ideas come while I’m driving?”
Imagined meritocracies mean little to extractive institutions.
Why were librarians keeping the titian-haired detective off their shelves?
Attaching a mystery to a famous musician or work gives us something to hold onto.
Smoke your way to a peaceful working-class life.
The master of the psychodrama mystery was Jim Thompson.
Fashion history is rarely as straightforward as Nancy Drew led me to believe.
A companion list for lit studies scholars.
A companion to our 2022 book list.
When you’re shopping for books this season, consider a contingent scholar.
Just because something is cool doesn’t mean it belongs in an archive.
The Hills’ aliens wore clothing and spoke English—albeit with an unspecified “foreign accent.”
What happens when forged documents enter the historical record?
What happens when forged documents enter the historical record?
In those fleeting moments where I’m able to sit down at my desk in silence for five minutes or for two hours, I’d like to think that I’m a writer.
This unflinching depiction of the British Raj and its terror is long overdue in Western pop culture.
It was no longer appropriate for one computer scientist in Marina del Rey to control the Internet’s address book.
“When I entered the Sterling Memorial Library, I felt as though I stepped into a cathedral.”
Two archivists share what it’s like at one of India’s largest archives.
“There aren’t many history PhDs in the policy and advocacy spaces I now circulate in, but there should be more.”
I’m an animal historian — I know the dog always dies in the end.
Frankly, even if I could, I wouldn’t want to.
The most rewarding part of the experience is receiving the story.
“I want my reader to enjoy reading it as much as I want to challenge myself writing it.”
I’m usually the first visitor to arrive, and there are never more than two others at the reading room at any time.
A single choice can branch out to infinite realities.
Scholars of science, technology, and medicine who are building a new community from the ground up.
The entire plot of Stanley Kubrick’s Cold War satire turns around getting people on the phone.
If an academic couple can’t get a partner hire, they’re faced with a life-changing choice.
We are both former yearbook staffers who became professional historians.
I sometimes feel guilty about how much fun I have researching storm chasers.
In both versions of this question, the assumption is that there’s a pure history out there somewhere, perhaps with answers in the appendix.
“. . . if a wide brimmed Stetson gets us going, I’m content to start there.”
“I was trying to write the life of a man who had no life. What other options did I have?”
It didn’t take long for Salieri’s story to become almost completely removed from his music.
“Archival work involves building relationships.”
We can intuitively interact with the history of an artform even when we aren’t explicitly aware of that history.
A companion list for lit studies scholars.
Still in her concentration camp uniform, Olga found her Persian rug.
As a child, I thought it was extremely cool that working for the U.S. government meant that you could get a pen that said “U.S. Government.”
Museums construct knowledge by constructing objects—literally.
It was surprising how much librarianship is about people, not books.
A companion to our 2021 book list.
When you’re shopping for books this season, consider a contingent scholar.
Sometimes it is good to remind oneself how lucky and abnormal this profession can be.
Facebook was assigning me a place in the past, a place for the dead.
They created a space to share their own experiences, and found their experiences were shared by others.
Pick any stretch of road and you can find along it a history of the nation.
If I’m being honest, Dan was probably my best friend all those early years in Newtown.
Many Progressive Era playwrights were women. So how did they become “invisible” in the canon?
Hi, any chance you might have sent Richard Nixon a dick joke fifty years ago?
Kashmir is no longer the peripheral zone of exception, but rather the beta-version of what gets implemented in the mainland.
Publishing off the tenure-track is possible, but not without its challenges.
The Olympics has always relied on two antithetical forces: nationalism and internationalism.
This scholar’s upbringing in a Tibetan refugee camp shaped her interest in history.
The impending demolition of the National Archives Annexe is a crisis, not just for the study of history, but for Indian democracy.
Within the longer history of gay spaces and gay porn, eBay’s policing of “adult materials” is nothing new.
Twenty-five years ago, straight Americans were ready to call an end to the AIDS pandemic. But for Sarah Schulman, it has never receded.
How did human rights and development come to be so intertwined in U.S. foreign policy?
The blue cobblestones of Old San Juan look nice on a postcard, but they also tell a long history of exploitation.
A seven-point memo proposing control of the global insulin market.
If Booker T. Washington never knew when he was born, how are we so sure about it now?
Working at the Old Idaho Penitentiary, you do a little of everything.
I had already completed my freshman year when I first learned what an adjunct was.
The pandemic has shown what happens when universities assume they don’t need to answer to graduate students.
An unexpected job opportunity launched seven years of adjunct teaching and rekindled Aimee Loiselle’s interest in scholarly history.
Loving an alcoholic who is a renowned expert on substance abuse is debilitating.
I was comfortable with the components of a press and the processes of printing. At least in theory.
Though American children could not serve in the war themselves, they could vicariously serve through their dogs.
When the D.C. Metropolitan Police failed to catch a murder suspect, white residents criticized and mocked. Black residents worried.
“For my family, boiled turnips became a reminder of my grandmother’s suffering.”
“I don’t need to fit perfectly into one culture to feel like I truly belong.”
Jell-O remains an easy, popular way to enter the domestic realm.
It was the only dark chocolate my grandmother liked.
A cake made without milk or butter? Don’t tell the Minnesota Dairy Industry Committee!
My great-grandmother Sylvia’s stuffed cabbage held an out-sized role in my culinary imagination.
I suppose it really is addiction. But I’ve quit most of the other fun ones.
As a picky eater, I ate oodles of instant noodles growing up.
“To see scholars use the papers in their own research to produce groundbreaking history is something we celebrate.”
It might be a simple dish, yet it’s one I hold close to my heart—and a symbol, for me, of the Armenian immigrant experience.
When you’re shopping for books this season, consider a contingent scholar.
“I wrote my entire dissertation between the hours of 10 PM and 3 AM.”
A history of the present is by its nature a speculative exercise.
Born out of the Cold War, the course has a great contradiction at its heart: why do we teach history?
We are immersed in a landscape of risk, a damaged place that damages in return.
A first-time biographer approaches writing the first biography–of her great-grandfather.
It can be hard to know what the founders intended when they didn’t know, either.
My agency in choosing modes of expression must extend to my students.
What is the purpose of education? Is it just to fill jobs with skilled workers?
Just as Gannon calls for seeing students as humans we can trust, we also need to humanize and trust adjuncts.
The book is a call to arms, and more necessary than ever.
The greatest strength of the new PBS documentary is its desire to inform contemporary debates. But this may also be one of its weaknesses.
“No one listens unless we tell a good story, so we try to tell good stories.”
How-to books, including those which promise the secret to wealth, are not a modern invention.
After finishing a doctoral program, the goal for many has always been a tenure-track job offer. But what about really terrible offers?
This museum riled illusionists worldwide when its exhibit dared to reveal Houdini’s secrets.
“I think that one misconception about teaching is that love for your subject is enough. You have to have love for your students.”
“I always felt like I’d find answers in the past. I don’t really find any answers.”
“This experience was so ridiculously traumatic for everyone—and it’s not over yet, either.”
“We’re trying to help our students navigate this while also trying to navigate the situation ourselves.”
She was there to promote a way of life that little resembled her own.
A chance internship helped Camille Bethune-Brown find her career.
The SHEAR controversy has only exposed structural problems within the wider historical profession.
Despite challenging circumstances, students and teachers produced compelling digital history.
Through her work at SPLC, Kate Shuster helps educators teach hard histories.
How is the pandemic shaping the work of history and the lives of those who do that work?
This is the first time I write the exact words of one of my biggest fears.
It is ironic that my job is all about helping educators but now I find myself at a loss.
Even if you had told me then, I probably wouldn’t have changed my plans.
It turns out that a high-school Digital History class is hard to teach digitally.
Evidently, reproducing the endowment is more reliable—less disruptive—than investing in students or research.
Having access to childcare during the school year smoothed over certain realities.
Seven years into my grad program at Berkeley, seven months into my pregnancy, and three weeks into the statewide lockdown, I filed my dissertation.
Johny Pitts’s travelogue is a counter to historical narratives that erase the black European experience.
In the 1950s and 1960s, the Dominicans in Cairo collected rare printed books in Arabic, particularly Muslim devotional works rarely found in other libraries.
The scanned image looked sharper than the framed photograph at my grandmother’s house. And only now did I notice a strange detail.
For this historian, the key in telling her subject’s story was to marry the personal with the public, as honestly as it might be possible to do.
How do we make sure faculty and students are on the same page when approaching a writing assignment?
Michael Koncewicz compares Watergate to Russia/Ukraine-gate, pushes back on Richard Nixon revisionism, explains the difference between an archivist and a curator, and recalls his first dance with a girl.
“There’s so much experimentation and innovation happening in libraries” and Jennifer Garcon is right in the thick of it.
Most undergraduate history writing is done by non-majors. Does history writing instruction reflect that?
By adopting middle-class aesthetics, the bar-basement bowling alley became the “poor man’s country club.”
The undergraduate panels I saw in St. Louis served as a good reminder that Slavic Studies is in good hands.
This is the way the American century ends.
In late medieval texts, the Virgin Mary was a skilled debater–and a dab hand with a club.
Start at the beginning. Work towards the present day. This sounds simple, but it often gets overlooked.
Can a classicist study Akkadian? Was the Fertile Crescent part of Western civilization? Why is the history of science nearly a field unto itself?
“What does a postdoc do?” That’s something Anny Gaul has been figuring out all year.
Performed once a year, the Exsultet features rich descriptions of sights, sounds, scents—and bees.
I arrived a day-and-a-half early and stayed a day late in order to do some exploring on my own.
In 1908, Canada tried to deport the South Asian population of Vancouver. But the community stood its ground and won.
Though the “electricity biscuit” thesis is plausible, killjoy historians need more evidence.
What better place to think about authenticity than a wax museum?
What happens if we demystify fandom as a haven for female desire?
Regulation, not culture, is the key to understanding the novel coronavirus.
Meher Mirza’s piece on the Time & Talents cookbook was one of our first pieces here at Contingent. As a special treat for our members, she’s given us this memory of a special dish along with the recipe itself, complete with her mother’s annotations.
Even after 13 years working at the National Trust for Historical Preservation, “there isn’t really a typical day of work for me.”
Why did the priest and the choir singer die, and what was the nature of their love?
A postcard from the annual meeting of the Georgia Association of Historians.
Behind Dover Publications’ eclectic 10,000-title catalog lies a remarkable story of 20th century innovation.
A decades-long quest, bordering on obsession, leads one man to a small village in the Sierra Juarez—and, perhaps, to the Hill of the Jaguar.
Before ancient aliens—before Lizard People—there was the search for living dinosaurs. Eddie Guimont, author of “Hunting Dinosaurs in Central Africa,” tells us more.
Mr. Peanut embodies two seemingly-distinct but deeply-connected Virginian worlds.
One day, in the Mitla library, Oscar Martínez Galindo came across a book that would change his life forever.
Somewhat to my surprise, I didn’t go to my field’s major conference last November. Instead I accompanied a 97-year-old man to the town he fled in 1938.
We were there to share our work on offshore islands across Southeast Asia — an exciting opportunity for a grad student like me, from a landlocked city.
Many who reach for this cliché want it to function as a shield against judgment altogether.
I had never seen a mustache like that before—so blond and full and pin-neat, as it had to be for the power company.
The second in a series on how historians—especially contingent historians and those employed outside of tenure-track academia—do the work of history.
The second half of PBS’s Reconstruction documentary begins where the traditional narrative ends.
“An ex-addict without employment is an ex-addict without cure.” Or so the mantra went.
Packs of historians roam the streets, name tags flapping in the breeze, only to disappear into hotel conference rooms for hours at a time. What are they doing in there? And why?
Who gets to take meaning from things and have that meaning-making respected and valued?
The Rebel Alliance fought for freedom, but this freedom was predicated on the automation of labor — on droids.
A medieval relic economy operates in the Star Wars universe—and in the universe of its fans.
The line between cultural influence and cultural appropriation can be blurry.
How could the Jedi Order vanish from public memory in less than a generation?
Though the genocidal event isn’t canon, many fans apparently wish it was.
By denying access to the original cuts of the saga films, George Lucas has left us without the critical cultural documents needed for understanding the franchise’s power.
To work, a theme park needs to collapse the mythic pasts that it depicts with the pasts of our own lives.
This is about much more than Star Wars—it is about media bias and “information disorder” in the twenty-first century.
When you’re shopping for books this season, consider a contingent scholar.
What happens when academics collaborate with the restaurant industry? Good things (and better food).
The association of embroidery with the feminine has led many to overlook its history as a subversive medium.
At museum conferences, there are usually no easily-portable solutions. Institutional differences matter.
Dogs can be found laying on cooler surfaces or in the shade. Cats saunter into the canteen meowing for attention but also a bite of your lunch.
This is the first in a new series on how historians—especially contingent historians and those employed outside of tenure-track academia—do the work of history.
He wanted to be an ally of the Chinese immigrant. By pretending to be one himself.
Historians tell stories about the past. This philosopher thinks those stories are often wrong–and dangerous.
The mental institution had a lot of old volumes stored in a conference room, but they were behind locked cabinet doors and no one knew exactly what was there.
Seeing Railway Mail Service badges makes the postal carriers and clerks that I read about in other archives seem more real.
Is philosophy uniquely hostile to trans people? No. It is hostile to marginalized people in general.
Philosophy has long been something done to trans people, not by them.
The divided research trip is a necessity for a full-time high school teacher.
From waste containment during the Black Death to a toilet that cost $19 million, the museum is impressively comprehensive.
Archival research can be like spending eight hours looking for lost keys.
This magazine is much bigger than its staff, or even its writers.
For all our planning and grand designs, Contingent’s success has rested entirely on having support from others.
Sharing the products of historical inquiry isn’t enough—we’ve got to show our work.
I’d spent years living simultaneously inside the West and outside of it.
He wrote one of the most contentious works of history from the last century. And he sat down with Daniel Gullotta for his first public discussion of the controversy in nearly a decade.
The architect of the contemporary anti-immigration movement comes from Petoskey.
When visiting these archives, the violent and extractive history of Belgium’s presence in the Congo was impossible to ignore.
Did Western civilization begin in the Fertile Crescent? What’s it like being a modern circus performer?
Over its four-decade run, LIFE Magazine had 105 staff photographers. Six of them were women.
Renaming streets and erecting statues aren’t nothing—but they aren’t enough, either.
Despite being spied on and intimidated during my time in Yorba Linda, I still think presidential libraries are too important for historians to wash their hands of them.
Always talk to your archivist.
150 years before the Da Vinci Code, there was a man who said he could talk to spirits.
Thousands came here in the spring of 1947, attempting to flee famine in eastern and central Ukraine.
She led the movement against Memphis’s Confederate monuments, and now she’s running for mayor. An interview with Tami Sawyer.
Was ancient Mesopotamia the ur-text of the “West”? Is that even a good question?
What does doing history look like? Let today’s history students and teachers show you.
They meant to remake the world, and they left quite the paper trail.
Flowers, a day at the spa, a biography of Andrew Jackson? A meditation on mothers, history, Mother’s Day gift-giving.
The second half of PBS’s Reconstruction documentary begins where the traditional narrative ends.
It is easy to forget, even for historians, that the future does not exist.
The greatest strength of the new PBS documentary is its desire to inform contemporary debates. But this may also be one of its weaknesses.
Veterans get the chance to tell their stories; my role is to facilitate that process.
Simultaneously beloved and despised by the Nazi regime, their stories are now being uncovered by a team of researchers.
The classic Parsi cookbook has changed much over the decades, yet remains curiously old-fashioned.
Why do historians go to archives? Hasn’t everything already been digitized?
Who are museum exhibits for, and what difference does that make?
Before ancient aliens—before Lizard People—there was the search for living dinosaurs.
In general, academic writing doesn’t earn you anything, and most of the time, it costs you.
It is the largest maximum-security prison in the United States. So who is going to its gift shop, and why?
They were a family of seekers, shaped not only by their heritage but by their travels abroad.
Their jobs and salaries may differ, but you should still call them “Professor.”
Was the Left as skeptical about Watergate as it is today about the Trump-Russia story?
In thick woods and swamplands and on small river islands, they bided their time.
We wanted a site that actively considered the people who would use it.
We are making a bet: that a different approach to historical scholarship will have an audience.
