there are two kinds of historians: historians who need to stop reading and write, and historians who need to stop writing and read
04.03.2026 18:18
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there are two kinds of historians: historians who need to stop reading and write, and historians who need to stop writing and read
New Directions in Quaker Literary History, a special issue of Early American Literature that I was honored to co-edit, is currently accessible for free!
If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace Behind the wagon that we flung him in, And watch the white eyes writhing in his face, His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin; If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs, Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,— My friend, you would not tell with such high zest To children ardent for some desperate glory, The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est Pro patria mori.
And on and on
it would be a very funny bit if The Onion added straight DC metro and sports coverage
We are a few thousand subscribers away from being a bigger print newspaper than the Washington Post.
We are a mere flurry away from humiliating one of the two Big Space Perverts.
Ask not how a Space Pervert can dominate you. Ask how you can dominate a Space Pervert.
Subscribe below.
Is this what they call soft power?
This is a really powerful piece, all the better for not being hyperbolic—it captures the tremendous loss that this represents with context and empathy
In less than a week the Kennedy Center has effectively closed and our local DC paper has been gutted, both by billionaires.
I don’t think immigrants are our problem in this country.
The Baltimore Sun and the Washington Post, both the papers I grew up reading, have been hollowed out and gutted by sad old men who think that firing people is innovation.
This is such fucking bullshit. How much do you have to suck at running a newspaper to not make money off sports coverage? And how do you "restructure" a metro section that's already been strangled into near-irrelevance? Just a complete betrayal of the Graham family's trust in Jeff Bezos.
Bezos isn't destroying the Washington Post because it isn't profitable. He's destroying the Washington Post because he's calculated that a robust free press threatens the ability of his class to warp society around their interests
Everybody hates you
RIP to lovely colleague and co-author Susan Klepp. Susan's brilliant scholarship, foregrounding women and the material realities of their lives including their reproductive bodies in revolution, is an enduring inspiration. www.legacy.com/us/obituarie...
The newest video shows very clearly that they attacked him for coming to an aid of a woman that the agents pushed, and then executed him while he was immobilized. Everything the government has said, like with Good, has been a complete lie.
Memory is a fragile thing in this moment, so it is important to keep in mind that Hakeem Jeffries refused to whip his caucus against ICE funding earlier this week.
The Twin Cities aren’t playing when they say Abolish ICE.
Here’s another graphic for our Minnesota friends.
I really need people not to forget, ever, that all the “FIRE” and other assorted “free speech” (on campus and everywhere) people who could not say no to a single op-ed or alarmist media appearance ever
are still completely mum during this moment. Not a peep. Remember that forever.
Interested in the history of enslaved people, Black history, and George Washington?
Download this report, which is still on the NPS site (for now).
My research team spent 3 years collaborating with descendants of people enslaved at the Washington's Headquarters site and the wonderful NPS staff:
The Scottish Ben Davies
It is time to eradicate AI from all educational environments. Find another way. Maybe teach kids about AI like when we learned about drugs in middle school.
“The risks of AI outweigh the benefits” - new report about AI in elementary schools.
Pride of the Washington Federals
Friends, I hope you’ll share this widely. The @jcblibrary.bsky.social is hiring 2 3-yr research associates for collaborative work on religions and freedoms in the early Americas. Info is here and I’m happy to take questions offline: brown.wd5.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/staff-...
kind of darkly funny that "gender studies" is the stereotypical "useless degree" because gender studies will help you understand a large and important chunk of the current psychosis in american life
yep. i can identify any number of structural issues but at the end of the day the basic problem is the republican party. this has been apparent for at least 20 years. it is also an incredibly unpopular observation to make among “serious” people.
No man is a literature,
Entire of himself;
Every man is a piece of the historiography
Unread on the shelf
Salt Vampire
Dr. Nah
When the 18th-century writer Samuel Johnson asked why “we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes,” he was identifying no mere contradiction, but liberty as it was imagined by men who owned other human beings as property. Slaveholders such as John Calhoun saw slavery as inseparable from their own freedom, and they worried that the false doctrine of abolitionism would eliminate that freedom away. “Already it has taken possession of the pulpit, of the schools, and, to a considerable extent, of the press; those great instruments by which the mind of the rising generation will be formed,” Calhoun said. (It seems the “woke mind virus” was telling lies about the great and benevolent institution of American slavery as far back as two centuries ago.) Defending slavery, however, required invasive uses of power, such as banning antislavery literature and returning escaped Black people to bondage. Many white Americans in the 19th century began to understand that the “Slave Power” curtailed their freedoms as well. And this is what many people forget: Systems of domination rarely spread their blessings widely. The Redemption-era revocation of Black freedoms didn’t result in prosperity for white people writ large, but a Gilded Age in which the upper classes gained unfathomable wealth and economic crises left millions destitute. The nation may have held on to white supremacy, but it also got low wages, a threadbare welfare state, and a society dominated by the rich. Everyone else was too divided by race and class to challenge them.
The right, along the Roberts Court, is trying to nullify the Reconstruction amendments guaranteeing equality under the law, in order to restore the Antebellum Constitution, which envisions “liberty” as an eternal aristocracy of race and class (gift link) www.theatlantic.com/politics/202...
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