Can't wait to celebrate this book out in the world, @mmendoza.bsky.social !! 🎉🎉

Some of my favorites are @tiyamiles.bsky.social @marthahodes.bsky.social, & @arikelman.bsky.social

Please share! We are looking for TWO postdoctoral scholars in African American history and history of the Civil War era. Fellowships are for TWO years, and the anticipated start date is July 1, 2026. The deadline to apply is NOVEMBER 1! Links are in the replies below.

🗃️ The CFA for the @richardscenter.bsky.social AFAM & Civil War Era history postdocs beg. Fall 2026 are live! These fellowships are 2yrs, include no teaching, generous research funds, & a great scholarly community! psu.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/PSU_Academic... psu.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/PSU_Academic...

I debated writing this. It can feel tempting, upon encountering yet another instance of this administration’s racism, to let it be. How many ways can you say the same thing over and over again? And yet we have to write it down, if for nothing else, so those who come after us know we were against it.

🗃️ The CFA for the @richardscenter.bsky.social AFAM & Civil War Era history postdocs beg. Fall 2026 are live! These fellowships are 2yrs, include no teaching, generous research funds, & a great scholarly community! psu.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/PSU_Academic... psu.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/PSU_Academic...

It’s a terrific conference! Join us!

This is such a wonderful series! Each symposium is full of insightful gems and models of scholarly engagement, disagreement, and responses from authors. Glad to see them organized all in one place.

Justice Sotomayor suggests—implausibly—that justices somehow have a vested property interest in their office. Yet another reason why relying on judges to be reformers is an absolute disaster.

Friends, this book is FANTASTIC! Can't wait to see it in print, @emilysneff.bsky.social!! 🎉

Historian friends: tell me about your favorite research & writing tools. As a bonus, would love to know where you learned how to use them & if you'd be interested in sharing your knowledge w/ others.

So thrilled to see @jgienapp.bsky.social's important book on this phenomenal list! Congrats to all! 🎉

Such a tell that Roberts likes to repeat this anecdote.

Congratulations to @adamxmcneil.bsky.social on the @shearites.bsky.social dissertation prize! Can’t wait to see this great project out in book form.

So thrilled to see Alison recognized by @shearites.bsky.social for her exceptional book, The Interbellum Constitution! 🗃️

Yes! One way I explain this to students is imagine a foreigner trying to understand unwritten driving practice vsv speed limits. The legal limit tells you little about practice & enforcement, & varies by road type (ie: ppl don’t drive 10 over in neighborhoods but might on highways), time of day, etc

Seems to me an increasing amount of bad history is based on the idea that you can just keyword search terms (esp. 21st c. terms) to locate origins & relative usage. It's totally unimaginable to these keyword searchers why folks in the past would use diff terms or not mention common practice at all.

✈️ Very excited to head to Rhode Island for the annual meeting of the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic, at which I’m both an interloper & facilitator of what promises to be a terrific discussion with @gauthamrao.bsky.social, @jedshug.bsky.social, Jennifer Tucker & Saul Cornell!

Among others panels, I’m also super looking forward to Saturday’s session on new directions in const’l history w/ @jdmortenson.bsky.social, @tannerallread.bsky.social, @rachelshelden.bsky.social, @janemanners.bsky.social & Mary Bilder

This was Vin Scully's call of Henry Aaron's 715th home run. Tonight Major League Baseball cut off the first sentence, starting it with the "What a marvelous moment" part because they don't want to anger the white supremacists who run our country and of whom Rob Manfred is an ardent supporter.

Have you read a law review article recently that you thought was particularly great and deserving of a wider readership? If so, leave a link to it as a reply, together with a quick take on what made it great.

A great piece on colonial parties is Amy Watson’s “The New York Patriot Movement: Partisanship, the Free Press, and Britain’s Imperial Constitution, 1731–39,” WMQ 7 (Jan 2020): 33-64.

💯 a variety of competing political parties or factions (definitions debatable) existed in the colonial era; there was no need to invent the them—and many of the networks that made up these parties would transform into new state-level parties in the eras that followed.

Important to read this decision in the context of longer-term efforts by SCOTUS to chip away at private enforcement of civil rights & social welfare laws. I'll put a bunch of relevant background reading in the thread 🧵:

A little-known SCOTUS reform fact: in the 1880s a popular proposal among some leading jurists & lawyers was to expand the Court to 15 or 21. This was a solution to the Court's ever-expanding docket that maintained circuit riding and did not provide the cert docket control of later reforms. 1/2

One thing that worries me about this episode from an academic standpoint is what it might portend for who teaches history & how administrators evaluate students' claims to fairness. B/c this paper is as bad as it is offensive. Take this last paragraph where he quotes Lincoln's first inaugural 1/3

I’ll join Erika Lee, Kate Masur, and Tom Wolf for this conversation about BIRTHRIGHT CITIZENSHIP. Thursday June 12. Join us!

Excited to have these folks with us in State College next year!

We're announcing our 2025-26 @richardscenter.bsky.social fellows this week! So excited to have Ryan Quintana with us as our next Persun Visiting Scholar. This non-residential fellowship for associate professors rotates between scholars working on Civil War Era politics & military history. 🗃️

Thrilled to welcome these great scholars to the @richardscenter.bsky.social next year!

Out in paperback today! www.amazon.com/Against-Cons...

I am a history professor at Penn State. Students in my classes come from a variety of backgrounds & voice a wide range of political views. They disagree about a lot. But almost universally they think public universities should be free; all should get the opportunity to learn w/out going into debt.

Trump & his lawyers rely on the 14th Amendment's treatment of Native people to redefine birthright citizenship. In our Essay coming out in the NYU Law Review Online, Greg Ablavsky & I show how wrong that argument is. papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

🗃️ Friends, if you're in the State College area Monday, 4/21 join us for a conversation with Lori Ginzberg about her new book, Tangled Journeys, featuring predoctoral fellows @adamxmcneil.bsky.social & Hope McCaffrey. The registration deadline has passed, but you can still message us to join!

A story for Roberts and the institutionalists (which is, by the way, a terrible band name): It was 1944. Thousands of Americans had been summarily rounded up and detained in internment camps, solely on the basis that their race and national origin made them a threat.

The AHA's Congressional Briefing from January on the history of the US House of Representatives will air on C-SPAN2 TODAY at 3:55 PM ET and will be available to watch on C-SPAN American History TV’s website. With panelists @kathrynbrownell.bsky.social, Matthew Green and @rachelshelden.bsky.social. 🗃️

🗃️ Folks who can attend the OAH Friday plenary w/ Rosen might consider asking him about this lopsided podcast w/ the brilliant @amandafrost.bsky.social and Kurt Lash, Ilan Wurman, & John Yoo. Lash & Wurman have been peddling the view that the 14th Amend does not guarantee birthright citizenship. 1/2

Good thread. This is why you need working historians to explain how and why particular clauses made their way into the text, which requires thinking contextually as well as linguistically. That need not make one an originalist. It just means that history is always relevant to constitutional analysis

the constitution isn’t is a word game and the fact that you can abuse the language to produce an outcome does not mean the constitution allows that outcome. the 22nd amendment was ratified to restrict a president to two terms in office, period. that is what it does.

⬇️ Deadline for this workshop is April 1 ⬇️. Please apply if you've got a relevant article in the works and want a structure for getting feedback and moving toward submitting to a peer reviewed journal! @jcwe.bsky.social @richardscenter.bsky.social

Happy opening day to all my people, including those who could use this kind of (misplaced) hope.

If you work on political economy in the Civil War era check out this CFP! It will be a wonderful issue of the @jcwe.bsky.social plus you’ll get to participate in a manuscript workshop with the other contributors at @richardscenter.bsky.social at Penn State as part of the process. 🗃️

In my new piece for @theatlantic.com, I explain the structural constitutional claim implicit in Musk’s dramatic seizure of government data systems: Congress may have the power of the purse, but the President has the power of data. www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archiv...

🗃️ Excited to see the new @wmborj.bsky.social issue out feat essays from last spring's symposium on Jack Balkin's Memory & Authority by @richardprimus.bsky.social @katemasur.bsky.social @mgraber1.bsky.social & a *fiery* critique of originalism by Saul Cornell wm.billofrightsjournal.org?page_id=673

With his permission, I'm sharing Dean Treanor's response to Ed Martin's letter:

So incredibly thrilled that our article, 𝘉𝘪𝘳𝘵𝘩𝘳𝘪𝘨𝘩𝘵 𝘊𝘪𝘵𝘪𝘻𝘦𝘯𝘴𝘩𝘪𝘱 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘋𝘶𝘯𝘯𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘚𝘤𝘩𝘰𝘰𝘭 𝘰𝘧 𝘜𝘯𝘰𝘳𝘪𝘨𝘪𝘯𝘢𝘭 𝘔𝘦𝘢𝘯𝘪𝘯𝘨𝘴, is forthcoming in the online companion of Cᴏʀɴᴇʟʟ Lᴀᴡ Rᴇᴠɪᴇᴡ! I think you all will thoroughly enjoy what @evanbernick.bsky.social, @paulgowder.bsky.social, and I have coming your way!

As someone who publishes in both peer-reviewed history journals and law reviews, I think there's an obvious point missing from the conversation about the tradeoffs between peer review & student editors--RESOURCES. 1/

Hey y'all, @jgienapp.bsky.social made it here. Don't know about you but I've been sharing his great little piece w/ non-academics even more than usual lately, on historical methodology & why originalism (esp in its current form) is so far from that practice 🗃️: www.processhistory.org/gienapp-know...