Personal Pan Histories
Personal Pan Histories: Turnips
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“For my family, boiled turnips became a reminder of my grandmother’s suffering.”
Personal Pan Histories
Personal Pan Histories: Dorayaki
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“I don’t need to fit perfectly into one culture to feel like I truly belong.”
Personal Pan Histories
Personal Pan Histories: Jell-O
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Jell-O remains an easy, popular way to enter the domestic realm.
Personal Pan Histories
Personal Pan Histories: Wilbur Buds
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It was the only dark chocolate my grandmother liked.
Personal Pan Histories
Personal Pan Histories: Wacky Cake
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A cake made without milk or butter? Don’t tell the Minnesota Dairy Industry Committee!
Personal Pan Histories
Personal Pan Histories: Stuffed Cabbage
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My great-grandmother Sylvia’s stuffed cabbage held an out-sized role in my culinary imagination.
Personal Pan Histories
Personal Pan Histories: Instant Coffee
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I suppose it really is addiction. But I’ve quit most of the other fun ones.
Personal Pan Histories
Personal Pan Histories: Instant Noodles
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As a picky eater, I ate oodles of instant noodles growing up.
How I Do History
How Spencer McBride Does History
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“To see scholars use the papers in their own research to produce groundbreaking history is something we celebrate.”
Personal Pan Histories
Personal Pan Histories: պանիրով հած
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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.
Shorts
2020 Contingent Book List
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When you’re shopping for books this season, consider a contingent scholar.
How I Do History
How Naomi Rendina Does History
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“I wrote my entire dissertation between the hours of 10 PM and 3 AM.”
Featured in Category
History of The Present/Contemporary History Resources
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A history of the present is by its nature a speculative exercise.
Shorts
The Strange World of AP U.S. History
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Born out of the Cold War, the course has a great contradiction at its heart: why do we teach history?
Field Trip
The Desert Keeps Receipts
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We are immersed in a landscape of risk, a damaged place that damages in return.
Bonus
Paper Trails and Primary Sources
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A first-time biographer approaches writing the first biography–of her great-grandfather.
Shorts
The Electoral Punt
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It can be hard to know what the founders intended when they didn’t know, either.
Featured in Category
Expressions Of Radical Hope
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My agency in choosing modes of expression must extend to my students.
Reviews
Radical Hope and a Liberal Education
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What is the purpose of education? Is it just to fill jobs with skilled workers?
Reviews
Contingency Is Not Complacency
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Just as Gannon calls for seeing students as humans we can trust, we also need to humanize and trust adjuncts.
Reviews
Kevin Gannon’s “Radical Hope”: A Roundtable Introduction
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The book is a call to arms, and more necessary than ever.
Podcast
Contingent Podcast #1: A Usable History of Reconstruction
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The greatest strength of the new PBS documentary is its desire to inform contemporary debates. But this may also be one of its weaknesses.
How I Do History
How Chris Deutsch Does History
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“No one listens unless we tell a good story, so we try to tell good stories.”
Shorts
How-to Booke
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How-to books, including those which promise the secret to wealth, are not a modern invention.
Shorts
What About The Bad Job Offers?
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After finishing a doctoral program, the goal for many has always been a tenure-track job offer. But what about really terrible offers?
Field Trip
The Magician In The Castle
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This museum riled illusionists worldwide when its exhibit dared to reveal Houdini’s secrets.
Bonus
Teaching In The Age Of COVID Part IV
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“I think that one misconception about teaching is that love for your subject is enough. You have to have love for your students.”
Features
Teaching In The Age Of COVID Part III
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“I always felt like I’d find answers in the past. I don’t really find any answers.”
Features
Teaching In The Age Of COVID Part II
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“This experience was so ridiculously traumatic for everyone—and it’s not over yet, either.”
Features
Teaching In The Age Of COVID Part I
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“We’re trying to help our students navigate this while also trying to navigate the situation ourselves.”
Shorts
Selling Splitnik; or, Aunt Olga Goes to Moscow
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She was there to promote a way of life that little resembled her own.
Field Trip
How Camille Bethune-Brown Does History
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A chance internship helped Camille Bethune-Brown find her career.
Features
The White Background
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The SHEAR controversy has only exposed structural problems within the wider historical profession.
Field Trip
2020 Student Digital History Roundup
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Despite challenging circumstances, students and teachers produced compelling digital history.
How I Do History
How Kate Shuster Does History
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Through her work at SPLC, Kate Shuster helps educators teach hard histories.
Features
History Now
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How is the pandemic shaping the work of history and the lives of those who do that work?
History Now: Liliana Toledo-Guzmán
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This is the first time I write the exact words of one of my biggest fears.
History Now: Megan Smeznik
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It is ironic that my job is all about helping educators but now I find myself at a loss.
History Now: Hanna Howard
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Even if you had told me then, I probably wouldn’t have changed my plans.
History Now: Jonathan Burdick
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It turns out that a high-school Digital History class is hard to teach digitally.
History Now: Emilie Egger
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Evidently, reproducing the endowment is more reliable—less disruptive—than investing in students or research.
History Now: Jeanna Kinnebrew
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Having access to childcare during the school year smoothed over certain realities.
History Now: Sarah Stoller
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Seven years into my grad program at Berkeley, seven months into my pregnancy, and three weeks into the statewide lockdown, I filed my dissertation.
In Search of Black Europe
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Johny Pitts’s travelogue is a counter to historical narratives that erase the black European experience.
Field Trip
Catholic Library, Muslim Books
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In the 1950s and 1960s, the Dominicans in Cairo collected rare printed books in Arabic, particularly Muslim devotional works rarely found in other libraries.
Features
The Star in the Stones
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The scanned image looked sharper than the framed photograph at my grandmother’s house. And only now did I notice a strange detail.
Featured in Category
How Do You Write A Biography?
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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.
Featured in Category
The Process of Writing History
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How do we make sure faculty and students are on the same page when approaching a writing assignment?
Bonus
Contingent Podcast #5: All The Presidents’ Librarians
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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.
Archives & Museums
How Jennifer Garcon Does History
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“There’s so much experimentation and innovation happening in libraries” and Jennifer Garcon is right in the thick of it.
Reviews
Starting With The Essentials
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Most undergraduate history writing is done by non-majors. Does history writing instruction reflect that?
Shorts
Bowling For Suburbia
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By adopting middle-class aesthetics, the bar-basement bowling alley became the “poor man’s country club.”
Postcards
A Postcard from St. Louis
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The undergraduate panels I saw in St. Louis served as a good reminder that Slavic Studies is in good hands.
Features
Escape from New York (and from Columbia University)
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This is the way the American century ends.
Shorts
Queen of Heaven, Empress of Hell
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In late medieval texts, the Virgin Mary was a skilled debater–and a dab hand with a club.
Mailbag
The Five Oral History Commandments
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Start at the beginning. Work towards the present day. This sounds simple, but it often gets overlooked.
Bonus
Contingent Podcast #4: In Memoriam: Panbabylonianism
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Can a classicist study Akkadian? Was the Fertile Crescent part of Western civilization? Why is the history of science nearly a field unto itself?
Field Trip
How Anny Gaul Does History
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“What does a postdoc do?” That’s something Anny Gaul has been figuring out all year.
Shorts
This Is The Night
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Performed once a year, the Exsultet features rich descriptions of sights, sounds, scents—and bees.
Postcards
A Postcard from Granada
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I arrived a day-and-a-half early and stayed a day late in order to do some exploring on my own.
Features
An Interrupted Journey
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In 1908, Canada tried to deport the South Asian population of Vancouver. But the community stood its ground and won.
Shorts
The Trouble with Triscuits
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Though the “electricity biscuit” thesis is plausible, killjoy historians need more evidence.
Field Trip
When John Brown’s Body Is Wax
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What better place to think about authenticity than a wax museum?
Shorts
The Pitfalls of Fandom for Women of Color
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What happens if we demystify fandom as a haven for female desire?
Shorts
Bats and Snakes and Dogs and Things Like That
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Regulation, not culture, is the key to understanding the novel coronavirus.
Bonus
Moong Dal Bhajias from Meher’s Mum
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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.
Field Trip
How Priya Chhaya Does History
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Even after 13 years working at the National Trust for Historical Preservation, “there isn’t really a typical day of work for me.”
Shorts
Lovers Under an Apple Tree
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Why did the priest and the choir singer die, and what was the nature of their love?
Postcards
A Postcard from Augusta, GA
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A postcard from the annual meeting of the Georgia Association of Historians.
Shorts
This Is A Permanent Book
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Behind Dover Publications’ eclectic 10,000-title catalog lies a remarkable story of 20th century innovation.
Features
Oscar’s Hill
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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.
Bonus
Contingent Podcast #3: Hunting Dinosaurs in Central Africa
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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.
Features
The Life And Times Of Mr. Peanut
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Mr. Peanut embodies two seemingly-distinct but deeply-connected Virginian worlds.
Oscar’s Hill, Part 1
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One day, in the Mitla library, Oscar Martínez Galindo came across a book that would change his life forever.
Postcards
Stumbling Stones
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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.
Postcards
A Postcard from Singapore
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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.
Mailbag
Don’t We Have To Judge People By The Standards Of Their Time?
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Many who reach for this cliché want it to function as a shield against judgment altogether.
Shorts
guys (etc)
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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.
Field Trip
How Nick Hurley Does History
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The second in a series on how historians—especially contingent historians and those employed outside of tenure-track academia—do the work of history.
Bonus
Contingent Podcast #2: What Happened to My People
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The second half of PBS’s Reconstruction documentary begins where the traditional narrative ends.
Shorts
The Work of Getting Clean
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“An ex-addict without employment is an ex-addict without cure.” Or so the mantra went.
Mailbag
Why Do Historians Go To Conferences?
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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?