Today is a big day for me: After years of work in dusty archives around the world and unending hours on the computer, Capitalism: A Global History is out. And the book just received the best possible birthday gift:It became one of the NYT's 100 notable books of 2025. www.nytimes.com/2025/11/24/b...

A great article against AI slop and higher ed’s complicity: “History shows us that the right to literacy came at a heavy cost ... Don’t surrender to AI your ability to read, write and think when others once risked their lives and died for the freedom to do so.” www.huffpost.com/entry/histor...

Join me in Berlin on Wednesday November 5 at 6PM for a book talk on Capitalism: A Global History at Freie Universität Berlin | Friedrich-Meinecke-Institut (Raum A 127)

“The idea that a machine, an artificial intelligence, non-human, can do history is truly absurd.” Excellent short essay by Andrés Gattinoni exposing the fallacies in claims by the AI hype-cycle (looking at you Microsoft!) that we are to be replaced by their shoddy products. nuso.org/articulo/his...

Excited to see The Routledge Handbook of 1989 and the Great Transformation hit the web www.routledge.com/The-Routledg... It should be out at the end of 2025.

Never Forget Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Picture credit: NARA, College Park MD.

Tomorrow is the 80th anniversary of the US nuclear bombing of Hiroshima: From the ICRC’s confidential report on the effects of the atomic bomb at Hiroshima, pp. 6–7: “Those victims who were in the immediate vicinity of the centre in the streets were completely burnt and unrecognizable...”

I would like to announce the account of the journal I edit: @journalgenocide.bsky.social Please follow it for updates on our articles. Thank you.

The German Democratic Republic: The Rise and Fall of a Cold War State. Available now as an Ebook! (print copies will start shipping in a month)

I keep hearing about the “total disregard for international law” (e.g. Volker Türk) which the situation in Gaza is supposed to showcase. But @dirkmoses.bsky.social shows that international law protects the right of states to wage war, even if they actively target civilians.

Psst, I have a new discount code to save 30% on my new book "A Pacific Power: Liberal Imperialism in German Samoa." Or maybe ask your library to order a copy if it's still a stretch. fdslive.oup.com/www.oup.com/...

Setting the record straight about the GDR by @historyned.bsky.social

Official release day for my newie 'A Pacific Power: Liberal Imperialism in German Samoa'. And I have copies!! Would love to see this in a few libraries. You can order it here: global.oup.com/academic/pro...

My book, Latin America and Human Rights Politics in West Germany, 1973–1990, is out this September! Thanks to Devin Pendas, Quinn Slobodian, Lora Wildenthal, @historyned.bsky.social, @laurenstokes.bsky.social, and @willgray.bsky.social for their support! www.cambridge.org/core/books/l...

This is some bleak shit. Historians literally outsourcing the creative and research process to a thieving algorithm ripping off the IP of their own fellow-historians. Says everything that they’re doing it from a Google office. Hacks. They should be ashamed. www.nytimes.com/2025/06/16/m...

Friedrich Merz fails to get his own CDU/CSU-SPD coalition to vote for him as Chancellor. 18 members of the government seem to have decided not to support him on the first ballot, which has failed. This has never happened in the history of the Federal Republic. www.spiegel.de/politik/deut...

Join us tomorrow 2PM EDT for this online discussion. For years, US advocates have accompanied Latin American human rights groups fighting enforced disappearance in their countries. Now, it's the other way around. Event: bit.ly/apr-30-disap... Register: bit.ly/apr-30-lessons

The proofs for my book “Latin America and Human Rights Politics in West Germany, 1973–1990” are finally in. The book questions the scholarly portrayal of human rights as primarily a conservative and retrenched political and intellectual project.

My introduction to the special issue “Human Rights in Postwar Germany,” all five articles by @willgray.bsky.social, Catriona Corke, Sarah Jacobson, Sarah Imani, Elise Pape and @historyned.bsky.social and Lora Wildenthal’s conclusion are now available online. journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1...

Now rolling out in early online access: a special issue of the Journal of Contemporary History edited by Felix Jiménez Botta on Human Rights in Postwar Germany. Lora Wildenthal and I wrote an epilogue for this wonderful collection that you can read here: journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1...

Shocking that Columbia University refuses to legally defend itself from Trumpian attacks and accedes in policing its students for expressing their opinion.