Record number of students have dropped by my office hours today unprompted, or have emailed to set up meeting. Must be the fact that we have exactly one month left of classes!

Anyways, Scotland 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 was looking 🔥 in today’s rugby game. US seemed asleep. Now on to cheer the All Blacks! 🇳🇿🏉

Maybe it’s just my neurodivergence, but I really hate it when I’m kinda new to a thing and someone who might know more about said thing acts like they are superior. Let me just enjoy, please.

'His book tour brought him to Cambridgeshire, where he would marry and have two children with Susannah Cullen, an Englishwoman from Ely. They settled in Soham, supported by a local network including abolitionist friends, safe...when reactionary “church and king” mobs were targeting reformers.' 1/3

Viago, my beloved.

This semester has been kind of ridiculous, but for one magical night I got to speak at a lighthouse!

Feels symbolic that a Confederate statue first installed in 1901, at the peak of the consolidation of the Jim Crow system—when the states of the former Confederacy were in the midst of revising their constitutions to disfranchise Black citizens—has been reinstalled. www.npr.org/2025/10/27/n...

*creeps back onto bsky* Hello? Anyone out there?

As someone with a chronic illness that makes me incredibly sensitive to heat and thus my body cannot regulate temperature, I am not looking forward to this AT ALL.

On Juneteenth, a reminder that Commonplace has 25 years of free, open access articles on slavery and abolition up through this week's piece by Jayne Ptolemy about documents related to William Ansah Sessarakoo. Browse the Slavery and Abolition subject page here: commonplace.online/topic/slaver... 🗃️

This is cool. I always explain to students that broadsides were kind of like an early modern blog post!

I cannot emphasize enough how much this reminds me of kidnappings and false arrests in the wake of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850.

While reading some of Tom Mayes 2013 blog series “Why Old Places Matter” this morning I couldn’t help but think about how the current admin is attempting to reshape the narrative of American history at old places like those overseen by NPS. 1/3

Living in this timeline is exhausting.

Having read two NYT articles related to historical work this morning, this is the one that makes me optimistic about the future of our discipline.

I get why some people would want to use an LLM to gather, organize, or administrate. But what upsets me here is the suggestion that history can be written with a mere imitation of the human experience. Writing is personal—that is what makes it so hard and beautiful. What is history without heart?

This whole thread 👏

For those claiming protests don’t mean anything… How do you think movements are built, fueled, sustained, & grown? How do you prove the spirit of resistance is loud, proud, present, & powerful? How do you prove democracy is loved, valued, & worth fighting for? This IS what democracy looks like.

Seeing all the social media posts of yesterday’s NO KINGS protests from so many small towns, including my own, across NC has really made my heart happy. 💙

Historians of Presbyterianism! Question: what would lead a woman in 18c America to sign a covenant? I’m guessing this was part of church discipline?

In a bit of good news, Scottish Loyalism in the British Atlantic World @routledgehistory.bsky.social arrived today, featuring essays by me, @kbsherman.bsky.social, Nicola Martin, @matthewcward.bsky.social, @kmccullo.bsky.social, & Graeme Morton. Thanks to Katie and Graeme for editing this project!

No kings.

Okay #histmed and #earlymodern folks: *Someone* out there has to be making replica wooden apothecary searces. TELL ME WHO.

If you live in NC, call every Republican politician you know. Call every farmer you know and ask them to do the same When money walks , voters talk. Make sure they know this effects everyone in their town and state www.wunc.org/news/2025-03...

It’s really hard not to be down about everything happening right now, but my sibling just informed me that, to their surprise, a large group of older residents were holding signs AGAINST Trump, Musk, et al at one of the city’s major intersections.

New book mail!

When I tell students that history can be weaponized:

Every day I wake up, read the news, and feel like I’ve weirdly time traveled back to the 19c. I don’t like it.

Idc about people being motivated by spite as long as they can also be motivated by love. It doesn’t have to be the fuel you use every time you hit the gas. I don’t really care what gets you there, I just want you to have a full set of tools. Dependence on one kind of motivation is self-destructive.

I have to say, I was really impressed with how @goodnightscomedy.bsky.social do their disability accommodations when I went to see @rhysiedarby.bsky.social last week. Totally made both evenings easy and fun!

My first improv quilt is finally done! I threw out the rulebook and all my perfectionism with this one so I could embrace all the weird and wonky parts. She’s partly inspired by the 19c Victorian “crazy quilt” and feedsack quilts from the 1930s. // EMBRACE THE WEIRD // Cotton and linen, 2025

"The law is king." Thomas Paine #CommonSense #UpholdAndDefendTheConstitution

Woohoo! I have zero energy today, but I am ready to talk abolition and the Haitian Revolution through Julius S. Scott’s THE COMMON WIND in my research seminar this afternoon!

My abolition seminar students LOVED this week’s reading of Rediker’s ‘The Fearless Benjamin Lay’! If you haven’t encountered this amazing 18c activist, get thee to your local library or bookstore: bookshop.org/p/books/the-...

😭

How can we use Rev250 to foster a more nuanced appreciation for the Loyalists and their experience during and after the war? It's a real privilege to kickoff a three-part exploration of Loyalist memory in H-Net's Remembering the American Revolution at 250! journals.h-net.org/America250/a...

I grew up in girl scouts and as an enby I am so happy to hear that this is the case! I’ve been wondering and wanting to look into it.

Looks like I’m stuck at home for the rest of the week. Living in a place that very rarely gets snow is all well and good until you get a proper snow. Roads, sidewalks, everything is like a skating rink now.

Yaaasss! This looks fantastic.

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it, and those who can remember the past are like, what the hell, man?

The most NC beach snow day thing so far: watching a couple and their dog take a skim board up the hill at the end of our street to sled back down. At 10PM!

It’s snowing! It’s snowing! It’s snowing!

Something tells me that my current teaching on how abolitionists responded to and did not comply with the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law is going to be rather relevant.

We know who we are. They will not change us. We will outlast and this will end.

Welp, when you live in coastal NC and it's supposed to snow . . . I'll only be working half a day tomorrow 🫠

I’m not watching the thing today. I’m bolstering some teaching materials, then I’m going to meditate and read and take care of myself. We have to take care of ourselves if we are going to be the resistance.

This whole thread 👇

"We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable — but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words." - Ursula K. Le Guin

Seems about right to be writing a lecture on New England history while listening to Noah Kahan