"nearly 75% of instructional staff in American higher education now work outside the tenure system. Contingency no longer exists at the edges of academic life; it increasingly defines the structure through which the university teaches, adapts, + reproduces itself." working-mass.com/2026/06/04/i...

The IDF are not monsters. They're what happens when there are no consequences for any form of violence an army enacts against what are considered legitimate targets. There is no army or police force in the world that will not act like this once freed of constraints.

Members of the American Diabetes Association (ADA) were removed by police during the organization's annual meeting on Friday as they handed out copies of an editorial criticizing Trump administration changes to U.S. biomedical research. www.medpagetoday.com/special-repo...

Who are the influential people on the policy center-left with sway among Democratic elites who are thinking about the reconstruction of the federal government knowledge infrastructure post-Trump & how do we as humanists reach them to make the case for robust public funding for humanities research?

“They’re afraid of us coming together,” Rep. @aoc.bsky.social told the crowd. “They’re afraid of us protecting one another.” www.al.com/news/birming...

ICYMI: The House Appropriations Committee voted 35-25 yesterday to advance a bill that would underfund WIC and cut fruit and vegetable benefits for almost 5.4 million toddlers, preschoolers, new moms & pregnant women in low-income families.

I do frequently wonder what the average citizen of the U.S. knows about Reconstruction. As Du Bois would later point out, the backlash of lost cause propaganda didn’t just create mass disinformation about the civil war itself, but about the opening for actual democracy that briefly came after it.

This is the result of decades of organizing in the conservative legal community that’s been allowed to flourish in plain sight as anything but a committed ideological movement.

This is why the “people are shoplifting for fun/revenge against corporations” angle is bad all around. Actual things are happening to actual people, which is driving actual behavior, and it all gets subsumed into an internet culture war that contributes to the justifications for these policies.

When people talk about self-censorship, they often focus on campus events or classroom discussions. But self-censorship of research is different and more impt. Big difference btw "I don't want to offend others" to "I don't want to speak truth to power" www.chronicle.com/article/near...

As you know, Hampshire College is closing, and hundreds of our wonderful staff & faculty colleagues are facing sudden job loss without severance. Hampshire staff & faculty have launched an Emergency Relief Fund—if you’re able, please donate or share! www.helphampshireworkers.com

Tomorrow morning I will be giving a talk on the origins of Portuguese Atlantic Slave Trade at the Huntington Library, come through if you are interested: calendar.usc.edu/event/copy-o...

A group of African American coeds pose on the steps of a building at Atlanta University. This photograph, included in the exhibit that Du Bois curated for the 1900 Exposition Universelle in Paris, remains one of my favorites. Their dress is striking, but it is their posture that animates the image.

It’s funny how we never talk about the fact that the one historian in our field who ultimately became a certified Reaganite neoliberal emphatically argued that slavery was the antithesis of capitalism.

The Introduction of my book is currently free to read. assets-us-01.kc-usercontent.com/f7ca9afb-82c...

Rhetorically Biden rejected Defund, and the only minor reform that the Dems embraced post Ferguson/Minneapolis was to enforce a handful of consent decrees across the country via the DOJ. They didn’t do anything structural and it’s now all being reversed by the current administration.

My book TROOP MOVEMENTS is coming soon. Check it out? It’s about political struggles over fascism & war, the imperial & the carceral, class & race & global freedom. www.pennpress.org/978151282990... If you might want to assign it, or review it, or preorder it — please stay tuned, or get in touch!

The illegal, immoral, and unaccountable murders are continuing and are getting far too little attention. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

Devastating: Hampshire College is permanently closing following the Fall 2026 Semester. A beautiful institution & community that has done so much for so many. My child is a current Hampshire senior. Hampshire's approach to education is so unique, humane, & exciting—I've seen it first hand. Tragic

Thank you for this perceptive review @thiagokrause.bsky.social!

I would read a content analysis of the way the Times. WAPO, CNN, Jake Tapper etc... covered Biden leaving Afghanistan compared to this absolute debacle of the War on Iran by Trump.

Can't tell you how many members of Congress who *at best* had nothing to say when I asked about the Minab girls school attack. There is a profanely cold detachment inside Capitol Hill, a mode completely unrecognizable to common human decency I wish I could properly convey to you.

Friends in the Boston area: I'll be in Tufts in a few weeks for this symposium I organized with @isabelaf.bsky.social and a brilliant group of scholars. We have been engaged in these conversations for a few years and are excited to keep them going.

Two-year-old Kaleth is being locked away at the Dilley trailer prison. He is getting sicker with each passing day. He will not eat the food CoreCivc serves, which detainees have said sometimes has mold and worms. He now has a fever.

I am struggling to understand the extremely muted international response to this. whatever you think of the regime, it is not the regime that is suffering. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

"Black women ...comprise 6 percent of the overall U.S. labor force and 12 percent of the federal labor force. But of the almost 300,000 federal jobs slashed in 2025, Black women were a stunning 33 percent of those cuts."

The U.S. was responsible for a strike on an Iranian elementary school, an ongoing military investigation found. The inquiry said the strike — which Iranian officials said killed at least 175 people, most of them children — was the result of a targeting mistake. www.nytimes.com/2026/03/11/u...

"The abolition of gender studies is a way of further guaranteeing impunity to the elite men whose contempt for and exploitation of women and girls apparently knew no bounds" - Joan Scott www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Epstein’s economic power among academics was made possible by a capitalist system that makes higher education dependent on the charity economy rather than a public good supported by taxing the rich

remember when the panama papers came out and we found out every rich person on earth was committing tax fraud and then nothing happened

He was doing what many have been saying white men should be doing. He went outside to observe, he documented, he put his body on the line to protect another person and for this he was murdered by the gatekeepers of the fascist regime.

New Book! Brooke Newman's The Crown's Silence 'The book reveals that by 1807, when Britain abolished the slave trade in its empire, the British crown had become the world’s largest buyer of enslaved people, buying 13,000 men for the army for £900,000." www.theguardian.com/world/2026/j...

"Negroes are not now merely a subject of change but an active organ of change. This is the new political equation in contemporary society." Dr. MLK Jr. Forgotten Call for Economic Justice in 1966 published by @thenation.com remains evergreen. #MLK #blacksky

ICE raids are not the first time this was made explicit. I think people downplay how much Jim Crow was not just about controlling Black people but it was also about controlling white people. If you thought racism was dumb and acted that way you could end up with a bomb in your home

The standard for “cultural revolution” according to centrist and right wing commentators is “liberals being loud about their opinions” whereas Trump is making prosecution, regulatory, and funding decisions based on the politics of the speaker but that’s also libs fault for making him mad

W.E.B. Du Bois lives!

MAGA, a movement of cynical cruelty that is fueled by atomization, has accidentally created the conditions for in person communities to be formed around resisting their repression bsky.app/profile/aaro...

This is the context in which “how harmful has diversity been for white people's employment?” conversations dominate our discourse for weeks on end.

Just got my author copy of Black Atlantic Worlds! I’m honored and delighted to be a part of this volume. www.hup.harvard.edu/books/978088...

In case you need a positive reminder: How effective is protesting? According to historians and political scientists: very www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

Can I risk proclaiming the end of a historical process before the dust has completely settled? The woke wars are over methinks.

Thanks Kelly! I was very lucky to be able to have some wonderful conversations about my book last year. You can check out one here:

Santa managed one book from my list this year, and I’m right pleased it was this one @maryhicks.bsky.social Thanks for the work Dr Hicks! #MaritimeHistory

The people who profited most from the cancel culture/free speech panic were less interested in actual freedom of speech than establishing their own control over public discourse. You don't even have to take my word for it. www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2025/1...