White Power by @gauthamrao.bsky.social - the inaugural book in our new W. Hodding Carter III trade imprint! A brutal, brilliant history showing how America’s slave-policing system never really ended--just evolved. uncpress.org/978146969484...

Seems like a good day for big ideas.

CFP for Slavery North conference on "Rebellion, Resistance, and Refuge: Slavery and Border-Crossing during the American Revolution" @umassamherst.bsky.social 7/9-7/12/2026, abstracts due 12/19/2025 #vastearlyamerica slaverynorth.com/event/call-f... 🗃️

and then the Democrats sent 10 million spam texts to us asking for $

“Please think about students using chatbots to ‘augment’ their learning and thereby becoming conditioned to expect that their interactions with their educators, whether human or digital, should start from a foundation of obsequiousness.” - @benjaminjriley.bsky.social

To a large extent, @teenvogue.com's Politics section was doing the only dedicated progressive reporting on American higher education. While higher ed issues sometimes receive coverage in places like The Nation & The American Prospect, Teen Vogue treated campuses like a dedicated beat.

This is messed up. The Teen Vogue politics section was doing the best coverage of American politics of any major journalism outlet. So much better than the likes of NYT, WaPo.

Thank you, capitalism!

She didn’t mention how little time Harvard tenured faculty have to spend in the classroom, what with the low teaching load and the sabbatical every 3 years.

Some significant %age of quantitative work is just rediscovering stuff that humanists (or indeed ordinary people) already know (b/c we read literature, understand history, do ethnography, etc.), but which doesn't count as "real" knowledge b/c not quantified or experimentally "proven." Sigh.

Genuinely delighted to download a PhD thesis from a university repository where the author has neglected to remove the words "BITCH THIS IS YOUR THESIS" from the filename.

Was Zohran Mamdani indoctrinated by his radical professor father Mahmood Mamdani or by the woke communist faculty at Bowdoin? Ezra Klein and Ross Douthat discuss on the next episode of the @nytimes.com ”Interesting Times” podcast.

Congrats to the @nytimes.com for finding a way to merge its antipathy to Mamdani with its long standing war against American higher ed in general & the humanities in particular.

Today, a coalition of seven charitable foundations announced the launch of the Literary Arts Fund, a historic philanthropic investment of at least $50 million to strengthen the nonprofit literary arts field in the U.S.

I was at the Getty Villa last week and it was a reminder that the wealthy in this country, evil as they might have been, once believed in human progress — which they thought they represented, naturally — and feared retribution. They now fear nothing and are ambivalent about the human being.

lol what the wealthy today don't seem to understand is part of staying wealthy in society is not pissing off the masses. There's a reason why Carnegie and the Rockefellers poured money into institutions. Gutting institutions and making it harder for the masses to survive is a...choice.

Really well done this defector.com/higher-eds-r...

This parchment is FUR REAL! Remnants of animal hair on a parchment leaf originally intended as the exterior of the earlier binding for a 13th-century manuscript with English origin containing theological texts of Guillaume Peyraud, William of Tournai, Hugh of St Victor, and Richard of St Victor.

looks like there are two Britain/British empire jobs this cycle, both of them modern. networks.h-net.org/jobs/search?...

One of my fave things to do while traveling is see which authors who’ve been on the pod are stocked at bookstores and look who’s in Edinburgh! @asheeshksi.bsky.social @profgabriele.com @lollardfish.bsky.social @andrewhartman.bsky.social

Every time there is a major announcement of cuts to PhD programs at a major institution, it reactivates my own deep worry: to reduce or shutter doctoral programs endangers whole fields, and yet to bring young people into those fields, with no ability to provide jobs for their future, seems wrong.

It's fine & true to say that in some of these fields there aren't really jobs but the better perspective is to emphasize that there's so much to be investigated in these fields-yes, even in German literature-and so fewer opportunities for that investigation is a bad thing for culture and society.

A play, in one act: An inequalities scholar who earns >$350,000 a year is invited to a public institution under distress to give a talk and charges their normal rate of $5,000 for the day, plus travel expenses. Name of the play?

the "blue humanities" . . . for when you're depressed about the future of the humanities

maybe we shouldn't let amazon power the web

The way one company can bring down half the fucking internet

If you work in a history department where a book is required for tenure: do tenured faculty in your department ever offer to read untenured faculty draft book manuscripts? Is there a formal system for doing this, and if so when does this happen (i.e. 3rd/mid-track year review)? 🗃️

In about three years the entire university pivot to AI curricula and schools and programs is going to be so deeply embarrassing. We will all pretend it never happened and I will be standing there, looking at people with a mirror in my eyes. This is all so embarrassing.

Indiana just paid their coach 11 million a year over 8 years. At the same time, they’re cutting humanities programs because……. Money

Heartiest congratulations to @sethrockman.bsky.social, whose wonderful new book Plantation Goods: A Material History of American Slavery has been awarded the Beveridge Prize!

Because Ben's generally too modest in promoting his own wonderful work, #skystorians: www.pennpress.org/978081222434...

AI creating hell on earth - literally: www.nytimes.com/2025/10/16/t...

Love to see the humanities college at UMass run a workshop on how to obtain research funding for humanists that features 3 STEM folks and not a single humanist.

"The University of Chicago’s architecture once paid homage to the medieval trivium and quadrivium—the bedrock of the liberal arts. Now it pays homage only to money."

this old take is rattling around in my brain again.

In 1776, a Scottish housepainter called James Aitken set out on a secret mission to destroy the British navy and win the War of Independence for the United States. His story is the core of my book, EMPIRE ABLAZE: The American Revolution and the Atlantic Working Class, out next summer with Verso!

know what's good? a great lecture by someone who really knows their shit

flipped classrooms & the unquestioned shift toward “student-led learning” were also part of the deprofessionalization->adjunctification->mechanization program whose ultimate goal was a fully administrative university

What if @umassamherst.bsky.social just gave faculty time, space, resources to actually do research?

Every year around this time I think about how bad for the discipline it would be if there was a Nobel Prize in History. I don’t think it’s good for knowledge production in a humanistic discipline to do incentive a particular elite’s definition of what constitutes a worthwhile scholarly ‘problem’

The noble prize

Full blown authoritarianism

“Someone” cancelled my family’s flight out of the country at the last second. We got our boarding passes. We checked our bags. Went through security. Then at our gate our reservation ‘disappeared.’

"where's the left media?" "where's fact-checked reporting?" lately @teenvogue.com has run profiles: of Assata Shakur's revolutionary history; a 23-year-old Palestinian journalist; what's happening in Chicago's ICE protests; and organizing supporting LGBTQ+ youth 📍 www.teenvogue.com/news-politics

what if you got the Nobel prize and the MacArthur in the same week

What's happening to my colleague Mark Bray is disgusting. Him and his family are being doxed and getting death threats by right wing supposed "free speech" advocates bc wrote a book about anti fascism. You can't make this shit up! Our universities must fight back.

I’ve received multiple death threats + doxing (including my home address) directly following harassment from Turning Point USA, Jack Posobiec, Andy NGO, + Fox News which called me an antifa ‘financier.’ I have been forced to move my classes online. If journalists want to talk, DM me or reply here.

Looks pretty freaking fire

The cuts at the National Endowment for the Humanities go far deeper than any of these agencies - almost 70% of 179 people were terminated, despite no change to the agency's budget. There were no savings here - only idealogical destruction. #NEH

Great call to arms by @cnewf.bsky.social, following the tactic of Jed Esty's "Future of Decline" by looking to Stuart Hall & the New Left, & urging us to forego "private agency within our universities" in favor of "collective agency by running them."