15 Minute History

Climate change and population growth is creating a new appreciation — and anxiety — around water infrastructure, both in the western United States and around the world. We’re joined today by Professor Erika Bsumek, whose new book, The Foundations of Glen Canyon, focuses on America’s  second highest concrete-arch dam. Not simply a massive piece of physical infrastructure it is also […]

The Hapsburg Empire was founded in 1282 (or 1526, depending on who you ask) and lasted until 1918. Despite its increasingly antiquated and illiberal tendencies, it survived the reformation, the thirty years war, the enlightenment, the age of Revolution, the revolutions of 1848,  and the Austro-Prussian war of 1866 — but not World War I. […]

In the wake of the Civil War, the Reconstruction Era emerged as a time of radical change in the 19th century United States. Dr. Peniel Joseph brings this conversation into the 20th and 21st centuries as we discuss his most recent book, The Third Reconstruction: America’s Struggle for Racial Justice in the Twenty-First Century.

Ridley Scott’s new film, Napoleon, is a monumental historical epic that has endured mixed reviews since its release last month, due to historical inaccuracies and narrative jumps. But do such criticisms miss the point? Today 15 Minute History is joined by Professor Judith Coffin, who studies and teaches French history at UT Austin, including the […]

“How can a nation founded on the homelands of dispossessed Indigenous peoples be the world’s most exemplary democracy?” asks Professor Ned Blackhawk (Te-Moak Tribe of Western Shoshone), author of The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History. Today, Dr. Blackhawk discusses what it would look like to build a new theory […]

Traditionally, we think about European power being built with ships and swords. However, new scholarship uncovers a more nuanced and complex picture. Today, 15 Minute history is joined by Mélanie Lamotte, a historian of the French Empire whose work demonstrates the role that sex, race and labor played in the global expansion of French power […]

In 1967, the French philosopher Jean Paul Sartre traveled to Egypt and Israel on a quest to understand the region and its conflicts. The trip would challenge and change him — and lead to accusations of betrayal. Today, 15 Minute History is joined by Yoav Di Capua, author of “No Exit Arab Existentialism, Jean-Paul Sartre, […]

Afro-Indigenous histories are central to the history of the United States, tribal sovereignty, and civil rights. Today, Dr. Kyle Mays (Saginaw Chippewa) author of An Afro-Indigenous History of the United States and Hip Hop Beats, Indigenous Rhymes: Modernity and Hip Hop in Indigenous North America, discusses the intersections of Black and Indigenous history through the […]

While the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Cold War are important aspects of the United States and Cuba’s shared history, they are not the only elements the two share. According to today’s guest and author of Cuba: An American History, Professor Ada Ferrer, there are the centuries of interconnected history between Cuba and the US.

To kick off the new season of 15 Minute History, we sit down with Dr. Javier Wallace, founder and guide of Black Austin Tours. While those familiar with Austin know the George Washington Carver Museum as well as historically Black East Austin, Dr. Wallace unpacks other hidden, and not-so-hidden elements of Black history in the […]

In 1844, Philadelphia, a hub for Irish immigration to the United States, witnessed a series of violent Nativist riots that targeted Irish Americans and Roman Catholic churches. In our season finale, Zachary Schrag discusses the events leading up to the Philadelphia Nativists Riots of 1844, who was there, and how it fits into the broader […]

Historians argue that several versions of the group known as the Ku Klux Klan or KKK have existed since its inception after the Civil War. But, what makes the Klan of the 1920s different from the others? Linda Gordon, the winner of two Bancroft Prizes and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, writes in The […]

How do historians teach Environmental History in an age where climate catastrophe fills the headlines? Megan Raby and Erika Bsumek, both History Professors and Environmental Historians discuss what drew them to the field, how they talk about environmental history with their students, and the 2021 Institute for Historical Studies Conference, "Climate in Context: Historical Precedents and the Unprecedented" (April 22-23). "Among many other questions, the conference will ask: Can history offer an alternative to visions of the future that appear to be determined by prevailing climate models, and help provide us with new ways of understanding human agency?"

Nineteenth-Century Indian Territory (modern-day Oklahoma) was home to a wide array of groups including Native American Nations, enslaved Indian Freed-people, African Americans, White settlers, and others. In a conversation on Black Reconstruction in Indian Territory, Alaina Roberts discusses what Reconstruction might have meant for Black people in what is now called Oklahoma in the years immediately following the Civil War, and why it should be included in broader conversations about Reconstruction. Roberts' new book, I’ve Been Here All the While: Black Freedom on Native Land (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021), ties African American and Native American history tightly together, revealing a western theatre of Civil War and Reconstruction in which Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek, and Seminole Indians, their Black slaves, and African Americans and whites from the eastern United States fought military and rhetorical battles to lay claim to land in Indian Territory that had been taken from others.

In the antebellum years, freedom and unfreedom often overlapped, even in states that were presumed "free states." According to a new book by Kevin Waite, this was in part because the reach of the Slave South extended beyond the traditional South into newly admitted free and slave states. States like California found their legislatures filled with former Southerners who hoped to see California and others align with their politics. "They pursued that vision through diplomacy, migration, and armed conquest. By the late 1850s, slaveholders and their allies had transformed the southwestern quarter of the nation – California, New Mexico, Arizona, and parts of Utah – into a political client of the plantation states." But it didn't end there. The "continental South" as Waite calls it, had visions of extending into Central and South America as well as the Pacific. In West of Slavery, Waite "brings to light what contemporaries recognized but historians have described only in part: The struggle over slavery played out on a transcontinental stage."