Bibliographical Mysteries! "Share your successes and failures, cold cases, breakthroughs, speculative practices, novel uses of technology, collaborative momentum, and other stories." CFP *by 10.7* for a special session of @bibsocamer.bsky.social annual meeting. bibsocamer.org/news/cfp-bsa26

Happy 195th birthday to the Colored Conventions movement! The first convention debated whether this country would ever be a place for Black people to enjoy their full civil rights and citizenship. As those fights continue today, it is powerful reading omeka.coloredconventions.org/items/show/70

Next month a new collection of Pat Parker’s crucial work—edited by yours truly—will be published. Essential Poems by Pat Parker features some of her most beloved writing. Available wherever you buy books. Still feeling so chuffed after receiving my copies!!!

'Instead, the trans past can be a tool for imagining how we might build liveable trans lives in community, outside of and without reference to the state and other institutions— and perhaps even in the face of, and in active resistance to, state violence and repression.'

🚨I've been timid to announce the exhibition "Weaving Dreams" which centers my #quilts as well as work by my Mom and alumna Carter Watson. The opening on 10/3 features an excerpt of the choreopoem, PURPLE, by SLMDances w/a talkback. Pls RSVP by 9/29 library.barnard.edu/events/weavi...

‘Citizen historians' are documenting the Smithsonian to track historical erasure over time. www.capeandislands.org/2025-09-22/w... If you visit the Smithsonian, particularly the NMAAHC, take and share pictures.

Justice Sotomayor, not mincing words, also says that today's decision will lead to the "creation of [] a second-class citizenship status" for Latinos, who now will have the burden to "carry enough documentation to prove that they deserve to walk freely."

📝Reviewed in PBSA: Laura E. Helton's book, Scattered and Fugitive Things 📖 Read Melissa Barton's full review in the June 2025 issue of PBSA. Link in Bio 🔗 🔎 DOI: https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/735894 #BookReview #Bibliography

Excited to finally announce the release of my first ever book, and the first ever book from we here press. It is a pocket-size guide to my archival theories and experiences in the form of essays- some you may have heard in part as lectures, some which are unpublished until now. www.weherepress.org

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 gradual inclusion of truth about the experience of slavery in American museums has been one of the most deeply researched and considered and consequential developments in public history over the last half century. Enraging we have to defend it in this way.

Been thinking about this for days. So many recent re-examinations of our history have been made possible through archives held in Black cultural institutions. Cuts aren't only about erasing the past but undermining the potential to grapple with who we are as a nation in the present and future

Faculty who wrote to defend their president and object to a DOJ investigation of their university...are now being investigated by the DOJ. The most banal defense of free speech and academic freedom will trigger the full wrath of the US government now. www.nytimes.com/2025/07/28/u...

I've seen some talk about how we are witnessing the end of the professoriate as we know it and this may be true, but I think it's bigger: it's the decimation of the mission-oriented profession. Want to make a middle-class living serving the public good? Capitalism doesn't want that for you.

We are pleased to announce that Laura Helton's SCATTERED AND FUGITIVE THINGS is awarded the Honorable Mention for the 2025 S-USIH Annual Book Prize from the Society for U.S. Intellectual History. buff.ly/Q3rYHuJ #AwardWinner #Archive #BlackHistory @lehelton.bsky.social @susih.bsky.social

Here Vox's explainer for just what is going on at the Department of Education which includes me saying I don't have faith in financial aid disbursement next year and, oh yea, I think we're in a constitutional crisis www.vox.com/policy/40233...

“If some of us are not free to speak out, our whole university breaks.” —Zachery Samalin, Vice-President of the NYU-AAUP chapter, on why his chapter joined the lawsuit against the Trump administration to halt the arrests & deportations of international students who speak out on Palestine.

‼️ Colleagues: If you're teaching this Summer or prepping for the Fall, please let me know how I can help & be in touch if you're teaching immigration, free speech/association, Cold War/McCarthyism, or ideological exclusion/deportation. 🗃️ @harvardpress.bsky.social www.hup.harvard.edu/books/978067...

Solidarity with the 9,000+ AFSCME District Council 33 Philadelphia city workers on strike for a fair contract! We are #AFSCMEStrong.

Well, I guess it’s never too early to post this again —

Published now open access ✨️ Scholars have invented men to explain away women's labor in the British print trades. In this ex, a misgendering travels from a catalog to WorldCat and Amazon. It shows how linked data's fragmentation perpetuates old assumptions. oajournals.fupress.net/index.php/bs...

Echoes www.loc.gov/item/2021771...

"For the child born this summer in Texas, whose parents receive no documents, whose name never appears in any system, and who grows up asking why she can’t go on field trips, apply for scholarships, or open a bank account, the consequences are not legal theory. They are her life."

the president does not actually have the power to fire a university president or a museum director, but if elites simply roll over under pressure, then effectively he does

Two bleak stories from NYT this evening about the extraordinary pressure on universities, public and private. Together these stories show how the multifold destruction of major research institutions that's taking place. First on UVA: www.nytimes.com/2025/06/26/u...

The Society of American Archivists (SAA) Calls on Members to Advocate for Robust NARA Funding 📜 www2.archivists.org/news/2025/sa...

I’m so excited that my book is now out in the world. It pulls together my scholarly training in African American literature with my turn to digital humanities. I’ve also published the complete data dataset of 100 years of AFAM and am lit anthologies that is the backbone of the book.

I’ll join your footnote 12, Justice Jackson, even if nobody else will!

Lastly, the National Museum of African American History and Culture has digitized a lot of the Freedmen's Bureau Records and made them text searchable. It's a great resource for learning more about the experiences of Black Americans during Reconstruction. /18 nmaahc.si.edu/explore/free...

Celebrating Juneteenth with our NAACP Image Award-winning book, ENVISIONING EMANCIPATION, by Deborah Willis and Barbara Krauthamer, which illustrates what freedom looked like for black Americans in the Civil War era.

"Perhaps the burning of Nottoway Plantation is a small act of poetic and cosmic justice—reminding us that, just maybe, the arc of history bends toward justice after all."—Jarvis C. McInnis buff.ly/M2WnEOT#Plan... #BlackFutures #Juneteenth #PlantationHistory #BlackFutures #BlackHistory

Chatbots — LLMs — do not know facts and are not designed to be able to accurately answer factual questions. They are designed to find and mimic patterns of words, probabilistically. When they’re “right” it’s because correct things are often written down, so those patterns are frequent. That’s all.

It's ideological exclusion. Nothing more than censorship & speech chilling. "In internal guidance sent to consular officers, the dept. said they should be looking for “any indications of hostility toward the citizens, culture, government, institutions, or founding principles of the United States.”

For Juneteenth, @columbiaup.bsky.social is featuring some amazing books from its Black Studies list, including two recent books in the Black Lives in the Diaspora series: AFTERLIVES OF THE PLANTATION, by Jarvis McInnis and SCATTERED & FUGITIVE THINGS, by @lehelton.bsky.social tinyurl.com/32sdahvz

Thank you Philadelphia. #NoKings

The NEH has been a singular force for bringing people together. In this moment of hate, fear and isolation, the NEH helped us learn about our past and about each other. Today we are losing almost all of the NEH public servants. We are all in their debt. A national shame. A profound cultural loss.

Has there ever been a government office that has felt more fully a part of the community it represents? A staff as universally respected? An absolutely devastating blow.

The AAUP calls for the immediate release of David Huerta & the immediate cessation of these violent & reckless ICE raids that are terrorizing hard-working families from coast to coast. An injury to one is an injury to all. #FreeDavidEndRaids www.aaup.org/media-releas...

I refuse to listen to the audio or to this person’s voice, but: ▪️Library of Congress is NOT a library that children browse. ▪️I’m amazed the “journalists” in the room didn’t correct her. ▪️Pursues “DEI and putting inappropriate books in the library for children” will be used to attack all libraries.

If you don’t do anything else today, do this. Dr. Carla Hayden has impeccable credentials and has revitalized the Library of Congress. Trump does not have the authority to dismiss her, but Congress must intervene.

Today ACLS, AHA, and MLA filed a lawsuit in federal district court seeking to reverse the recent actions to devastate the National Endowment for the Humanities, including the elimination of grant programs, staff, and entire divisions and programs. bit.ly/4lWubq5

So relieved to see that Mellon will be providing emergency relief funding the US’s state and jurisdictional humanities councils. If I learned one thing during my years at NEH, it was how crucial these organizations are to our public humanities infrastructure. www.mellon.org/news/america...

A program that allows Chicago-area libraries to shares books is in jeopardy after President Donald Trump gutted the federal agency that helped fund it.

Let’s keep the context up front. In early April masses of NEH grants were terminated as “an urgent priority.” Those included grants that fund 50 state humanities councils, which do community-based work all across the country. And rigorously peer-reviewed grants to individual scholars & orgs.

I ran grant programs at @nehgov.bsky.social for over a decade. With colleagues, oversaw review of thousands of grant applications. Witnessed care & thoughtfulness of hundreds of reviewers. This statement is insulting to all of them. Whoever wrote it should be ashamed. www.neh.gov/news/update-...

Amid visa revocations, students call on University of Delaware to resist Trump @whyy.org whyy.org/articles/stu...