June 2, 1776: The Maryland Council of Safety assures its Virginia counterpart that if Gov. Lord Dunmore "expects to meet in Maryland with more favour than he has experienced in Virginia, he will, we trust be greatly disappointed."

As horrifying as this campaign of premeditated murder is, what might be even more disturbing is the utter indifference of Congress, the public and our allies to such a shocking and unapologetic obliteration of the many laws and norms against targeting civilians. www.nytimes.com/2026/05/31/w...

This guy is having the time of his life

FRED data has updated with 2025 numbers for new residences by building permit, and that means we can now point at the numbers for housing price index, population, and new homes and go "HUH, seems bad"

If your Jeffersonian architecture tour doesn't include the word "insane" at least once you are not getting a true story

here's my take on why they are doing this. Here's four reasons.

Mason Weems was a scammy Evangelical con artist in the exact way that our current government is made up of scammy Evangelical con artists so this all makes sense.

The word “Black” has been almost completely removed from a package of bills to address the Black maternal health crisis, frustrating some advocates who feel Black women are being erased from the policy.

📢Call for papers for our 2026 conference ‘All Mapped Out: Maps, Plans and Charts in the Archives’ on Tuesday 24th November 2026. Abstracts submission deadline 5pm on Wednesday 1st July 2026. For more information: www.britishrecordsassociation.org.uk/news/call-fo...

Technology is bad because Colonial Williamsburg used to have an incredible index of the entire corpus of the Virginia Gazette that let you look things up so easily, and they've trashed it for a digitized search that is always broken and only works if you already know what you need.

Encyclopedia Virginia's new entry on tenant revolts in Virginia during the revolution gets into this a little bit! encyclopediavirginia.org/entries/tena...

Yet *another* c19 Boston cross dressing case: 1807, Unice Pearce “appearg on the public streets on Sunday . . . dressed in men’s apparel & rioting about the Street in a disorderly manner & using profane Language to the great uneasyness and disturbance of the neighbors.” 🗃️

I am with you in spirit but I am afraid I will need a source for that hat anecdote.

This idea, that the poor have to die (and like three men must get obscenely rich) so that we can fund cancer research, is one of the most despicable things about our country

I read my son the "Butter Battle Book" too early—he's 4—and instead of getting a poignant message about the futility of an arms race he now thinks it's very important to eat your bread with the butter side up and he keeps saying "Big Boy Boomeroo" and giggling

I keep accidentally saying that Zara Larssen's summer bop "Midnight Sun" is by respected eighteenth-century material culture historian Zara Anishanslin. This is a problem that I believe may be specific to only me.

Planned Parenthood's Melanie Newman: "When the people in power substitute their beliefs for our rights, that is tyranny ... we now have judges who are more interested in imposing their ideology than following the law ... our rights are not up for debate."

Racial entitlement only counts when it's non-whites who benefit.

I was tipped off to this story by a friend in the National Park Service. It's another insult to the men and women tasked with protecting and interpreting our most important historic sites. open.substack.com/pub/kevinmle...

Rick-rolled by BL Add. MS 45964 (cc: @stemma.bsky.social)

And if you’ve lived with the anxiety of doing the work of a human writer—fearing the absolutely mortal consequences of a screw up that may well be innocent or at least an understandable fall to temptation—it’s incredibly galling to see fortunes made off utterly unapologetic theft and deception.

freedom of religion who?

"Scientists don't want you to know-" Buddy there are so many things I, as a scientist, want you to know and the only thing stopping me from writing more papers and posts about it and then starting a podcast to tell you even MORE things is that I am limited by hours in the day

If you've got a free $80,000 to $120,000 lying around and have a weird obsession with the Custises you should buy this portrait! www.bidsquare.com/online-aucti...

To my mind, you'd have to twist yourself into a real intellectual pretzel to recruit Paine for today's right, but it's also not appropriate to see Paine as someone who'd simply and straightforwardly be a 21st century progressive. The 18th century Paine can't resolve our contemporary arguments.

me, buying a book written by someone who I've never met but we sometimes like each other's posts on Bluesky: my friend wrote this

"For too long, the university has ignored the wisdom of the donor class and hired based on academic excellence. Regrettably, this has led to the underrepresentation of discredited viewpoints in elite higher education." www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/wer...

Trying to cite an archival document using google docs insane citation system and this might be the thing that pushes me over the edge

This is particularly maddening because the court allowed the election to go ahead when all the legal facts were exactly the same. The only real new information they have now is what the result was.

Story of enslaved boy featured in 1748 Joshua Reynolds portrait emerges in new study: www.theguardian.com/world/2026/m...

Word to George Washington’s dentures.

At last! The archived British Library blogs are viewable online. Check the index of blogs at blogs-archive.bl.uk and the hundreds of posts on the Digital Scholarship blog going back to 2013 blogs-archive.bl.uk#digital-scho...

Antislavery petition of the "Natives of Africa now forcibly detained in Slavery" in New Hampshire, Nov. 12, 1779: "the God of Nature gave them Life and freedom upon the Terms of the most perfect Equality with other men" #slaveryarchive www.nps.gov/articles/000...

Big fan of this epitaph:

Happy #pubday to "Freedom in the Age of Slavery: A History of Free People of Color in Virginia" by @wemilteer.bsky.social! An authoritative study of the free people of color in the largest state of the Old South upress.virginia.edu/title/10193/ #readUP #booksky #skystorians

this isn't even gambling it's just theft

It's awesome when you finally read a book that you knew it was going to be great, and it is just as good as you expected it to be. Isadora Mota's "Freedom Horizon" is definitely one of those. Extraordinary archival research to recover Black resistance from 1848 to 1870 and many wonderful stories!

Learning about the short lived state of Franklin and it is buckwild! Buckwild!!!

Who will be the leftist of 2026 to create the next schlock collection? www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

Right now, if you google image search a historic image, google gives you six hundred websites trying to sell it to you. Free, out of copyright images. These are scams, and they're prioritized over the lovely museum websites who digitized the source originally, because money.

Just the type of thing to find in our collections: a sheet with rows of characters probably printed as a working proof to assess wear & damage. This would explain why no frisket was used: the sheet was not a type specimen intended for presentation to potential clients. #bookhistory #rarebooks 📚💙📜

A wholesome story for nerds: On Saturday, I was signing books at a local bookstore for Independent Bookstore Day. The store had a signing-palooza with new authors every hour; toward the end of my hour, a woman came up and asked what my book was about. "Dictionaries," I said, and she lit up. 1/n

banging my head into a wall

Spent 18 years in Alabama, did all of K-12 education in Alabama public schools, and (unsurprisingly) never heard of this man. Yet nobody in power was mad about that erasure of history or lack of viewpoint diversity.

generally helpful to remember about 19th C US, like much of history: major social issues of the day were no more settled then than they are now, and contesting them took forms we'd readily recognize today

If I was Miss B—y R—ts, and some guy got so mad about me he published this call out in the Virginia Gazette in 1776, I'd wear it as a badge of honor. I'd buy a hundred copies and hand them out to my future suitors.

After a decade in editorial work I have something shameful to admit. My punctuation instincts are all wrong.