Recently featured on Wired's Tech Support, Ned Blackhawk's NBA award-winning book, The Rediscovery of America, reframes U.S. history with a spotlight on Indigenous peoples.  Now 30% off with code GIFT30: https://shorturl.at/Ev2rX

How a system of colonial trusteeship converted Native wealth into settler capital. Vested Interests by Emilie Connolly is now available (20 Jan UK pub). Learn more and order yours: press.princeton.edu/books/hardco... #History #AmericanHistory #USHistory #ReadUP

In disbelief. The NYT named Born in Flames one of 100 Notable Books of 2025

Tbilisi Mural Fest’s Dynamic #Murals Brighten the Sides of Buildings Throughout the City #art #TbilisiGeorgia #Georgia Link for #photos of more of these amazing mural: www.thisiscolossal.com/2025/11/tbil...

And check out @bencarp.bsky.social's The Great New York Fire of 1776. Who set the mysterious fire that burned down much of New York City shortly after the British took the city during the Revolutionary War? yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300...

Hello historians 🗃️! Planning on attending #AHA26 and have book ideas in mind? Now is a good time to start thinking about contacting editors to meet with in Chicago. It's fun, it's easy, and you'll be chatting with people who love to chat about books! 👇

The perfect Thanksgiving read now out in paperback! yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300...

New post! I discuss how Marlene Daut’s new book on Henry Christophe and Julia Gaffield’s book on Jean-Jacques Dessalines are helpful to world history courses. 🗺️🗃️ www.liberatingnarratives.com/astonish-the-world/

Our book, Race and the Scottish Enlightenment, now published, @lindaaburnett.bsky.social and I were challenged to the ‘Page 99 Test’. The challenge, as defined by Ford Madox Ford, is whether the whole book can be seen in a single page. Here’s our response. page99test.blogspot.com/2025/09/lind...

A new book by John Turner is always an event, and this book is an especially big event! So glad to see this, @yalepress.bsky.social! The vitality of Mormon history as a subfield has been nothing short of remarkable.

Up and at 'em on Monday morning!

“I fooled myself. I had to. Everybody has to.” — An ex-Nazi. A chilling reminder that ordinary people often choose comfort over conscience. Complicity isn’t always active—it’s the everyday refusal to truly see evil.

Some days I find it hard to go on.

No film gets historians right, but that's only because no audience wants to watch someone quietly work their way through a cardboard box of old papers, in total silence, for eight straight hours.

See new essays in New Republic. I have gathered and edited eleven essays by historians on teaching and writing history in the time of Trump. We are fighting back! I'll be on MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell tonight at 10 to talk about the special issue of TNR. newrepublic.com/series/67/tr...

Drop an old person that you're going to turn into in the future.

Historians need to be represented by an organization committed to the position that historical sources, interpretation, argument, and, above all, understanding matter more and demand more than producing grammatical sentences incorporating suggested keywords in response to prompts.

We're at the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic Conference! Enjoy 30% off American history titles through October 18!  https://yalebooks.yale.edu/SHEAR25/

[destroys civil liberties, trade, education and health care] I have been speaking to Kellogg’s about using REAL froot in Froot Loops in the United States

I was explaining to my Ukrainian colleague the phrase ‘There’s no such thing as a free lunch’. She told me the equivalent in Ukrainian is ‘The only free cheese is in the mousetrap’ - which is so much better

New kitchen rug is a hit!

Words to live by

I rarely comment on these things, but these are unusual times. 249 years ago the Declaration called Natives "Merciless Indian Savages.," and the Constitution excluded us from protection while enabling our dispossession. We remember this history not to cause harm, but to grasp the consequences./1

This by Barbara Fields is wonderful: "You must like to read, furthermore, not just to retrieve information, but for love of language and for admiration of people who know how to use it elegantly and effectively. All kinds of reading may teach you to be a better historian." (h/t Deborah McDowell)

"The children are always ours, every single one of them, all over the globe; and I am beginning to suspect that whoever is incapable of recognizing this may be incapable of morality." - James Baldwin

The New York Times might want to read up on when it's appropriate to use anonymous sources, according to (checks notes) The New York Times, from an article dated 6/11/25.

Author Julia Gaffield was interviewed by the @vulgarhistory.bsky.social  podcast about her book, I Have Avenged America. 

Have been doing some research on my family and was just reading about my grandfather's court case fighting denaturalization as a Jew in Romania in 1938. Plus ça change?

Hello historians of early America! If you're attending #SHEAR2025 and want to chat about book ideas now would be a good time to get in touch and set up a time to meet. Don't be shy, I love to talk about books!

We're at the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association Conference! Enjoy 30% off select titles using code NAISA25 through June 26!  https://yalebooks.yale.edu/NAISA25/

"manuscript under review"

Got a call from the New York Times today. Something cool coming, hopefully this week…

Speaking of learning from my sons! AmericanStudier Father’s Day present ftw.

I talked with Jonathan Crain about my new book _I Have Avenged America: Jean-Jacques Dessalines and Haiti's Fight for Freedom_ (out June 17 @yalepress.bsky.social)! open.substack.com/pub/jonathan...

A dream come true: I’ll be publishing the book formerly known as Improving Literature—now titled _The Book of Improvement: Media Landscapes in the Global Enlightenment_—in Yale University Press’s Lewis Walpole Series in Eighteenth-Century Culture and History. Look for it in Fall ‘26!

I'm doing some research for an upcoming story and from what I can tell there are only 7 "full-time staff" book critics working in the United States today.

On the one hand, people read lists more than reviews. Maybe that's better for selling books. But definitely seems like a less healthy literary culture...

Some of my reading this week. I'm loving the serendipitous confluence of the subtitles. Here are two great historians pursuing a similar idea in areas you wouldn't think had so much in common. 🗃️

Peter Linebaugh and I just published an essay about the life & work of Christopher Hill, one of the greatest historians of the 20c, in @thenation.com: “In 1965, [Hill] was elected master of Balliol College. History from below had arrived at the Oxford high table.” www.thenation.com/article/soci...

Academia will put you through 17 meetings, two hour-long presentations, five meals, and four flights just for a chance to make $38,000 teaching English in a town of 8,000 people in rural western Nebraska

Coming in July: "Exquisite . . . A true discovery: a diary that tells of a young Jewish woman’s longing to belong while her culture tries to come of age."

Author copies have arrived!!!! It's real!!! @yalepress.bsky.social yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300...

Here is an otter snoot to start your day.

French Presse this Sunday, May 4! Laura Mason and Charles Walton will discuss Laura's latest book The Last Revolutionaries: The Conspiracy Trial of Gracchus Babeuf and the Equals (Yale UP, 2022) - 3 pm EDT. Register here: www.eventbrite.com/e/frenchpres...

My dad’s last book made it to Jeopardy! tonight. Apparently these contestants are a bunch of philistines 😂. I’m sure that @kenjennings.bsky.social knew the answer.

Yesterday’s Jeopardy" had the following "answer" under World History: "[Peter Kolchin’s] Emancipation, a 2024 book, compares the end of American slavery with the freeing of these Russian peasants, also in the 1860s." Correct question (which no one got): "Who were serfs?"