I am really excited to be co-chairing the conference program committee for #SHAFR2027. I love all things about the SHAFR conference, but I'm especially excited to bring a greater focus on public history to the conference and for our inaugural poster session (including an undergrad poster session!)

I recently had to explain qualified immunity and the near-impossibility of holding the police accountable in the United States to my dad. "Then we live in a police state," he said.

This morning in Biddeford, Maine, a 26-year-old man said goodbye to his wife and daughter and left for work. Moments later he was dead, shot in the head by ICE agents, the second man ICE has killed in six days. ICE is killing our neighbors. ICE cannot be reformed. Abolish ICE.

NEW from @fiona-murphy.bsky.social at @rns.org: A powerful mini-doc on the Luhmanns, a conservative Christian family that has been pushing back against ICE/DHS in the Chicago area for months. www.youtube.com/watch?v=TXsn...

An excellent piece on writing, reading, and what we're losing in our "post-literate" society. It covers considerable ground, discussing the move to short form video, the rise of AI, the way reading is taught, and the way that writing shapes our learning.

It's really important to emphasize this: the reason that conservatives are arguing for increased teaching loads is that they want to END mainstream humanities research

In the well-over 100,000 documents written by founders included in the Founders Online database from the National Archives, no one uses the phrase "God's noble experiment." No one.

Current policies that disinvest from education and science and turn away from efforts "to attract the most able from around the world is one that courts long-run decline. No amount of short-run economic news, especially when paired with unsustainable government debt, will stop it."

For the 4th, @foreignpolicy.com has 7 fantastic essays from 7 fantastic historians. Here is US history retold from the perspective of prostitutes and prairie animals, not to mention mafiosos and Missourians. All free to read, complete with sex, crime and bison: foreignpolicy.com/projects/ame...

this is why a functioning Federal government matters

Justice Brown Jackson's argument for birthright citizenship is very moving. I recommend reading it in full. An excerpt with alt-text below. “The Reconstruction Amendments were an anticaste, antisubordination reset for the Nation, not a mere spot treatment for the dark stain of slavery.” — KBJ

I am stunned that the constitutional question was so close. I thought it would be 6–3 or 7–2. It is profoundly disturbing that four justices would allow either the president or Congress to rewrite the plain text of the 14th Amendment. This is obviously a good outcome, but the margin is alarming.

Sotomayor is reading her dissent in the trans sports case from the bench, which is an extraordinary, rare move reserved for what is essentially considered to be the most grievous injustice from a court majority. She did it yesterday too in the case allowing Trump to fire agency heads.

Japanese internment survivors and faith leaders completed a 45-mile a pilgrimage from World War II internment camp in Crystal City, TX to Dilley to protest what one internment survivor described as "inhumane and a tragic 'repetition of American history.'”

MKUltra: Declassification Task Force Should Focus on Real Secrets, Not Conspiracy Theories @nsarchive.bsky.social nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-boo...

this is absolutely wild. where does roberts think these agencies come from?!? who invested them with authority to act? whose mandate are they designed to execute? the president is the chief EXECUTive. his job is executing the will of Congress as it spells out in its duly-passed laws!

Got a fun little addition to my study collection of late-19th/early-20th century medical artifacts (and quackery) today...the treatise on Germ Theory on the side of the box is especially fascinating. A good write up on this device is here: nursing.virginia.edu/news/flashba...

In celebration of SHAFR, @cornellupress.bsky.social is having a 40 percent off sale + free shipping on many international history books, including my own. Lots of great options! www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/our-shafr-20...

Lost memoir of Hiroshima survivor found after decades in US archive. Written in 1947, Kiyoshi Tanimoto's account of the horrors of the atomic bomb attack will be published in August and is being made into a film. www.theguardian.com/books/2026/j...

On Alexandria’s Freedom House Museum and the interpretive work on America’s domestic slave trade it does, including the long view it demands about the connections between past and present and the "unfinished work of telling the truth" in the United States. 🗃️

From @jstordaily.bsky.social, a piece on Rollerena that sheds light on her significance in New York, Gay Pride events, and ACT-UP with a selection of materials from a recently digitized archive of her materials. 🗃️

Political prisoners.

Elon Musk's destruction doesn't just stop at killing children, it also includes needlessly permanently blinding Black Africans because doctors no longer have the resources to fix kids' eyelashes from physically scraping their eyeballs, our exclusive reporting at @thexylom.com revealed this month:

Highly recommend this episode from @socialistdogmom.bsky.social about the Trump administration's white supremacist project of trying to remove factual histories from NPS sites throughout the country 🗃️

One thing I learned when I was just out of college and watching 6-8 hours of Fox News a day for my research job at Media Matters: Ingesting hours of propaganda on a daily basis changes you, no matter how smart you think you are. If you don't notice the changes, that just makes you an easier mark.

They hate gender studies for the same reason they hate legitimate journalism: They don’t like people pointing out what they’re doing.

The Iran War permanently altered the global economy, with significant likely shifts to the energy order (and China a major beneficiary of these shifts) and a loss of trust in the US and its ability to ensure security for allies and freedom of the seas for trade.

Exclusive: I have seen OpenAI's audited financials for 2024 and 2025. In 2025, OpenAI had $13.07 billion in revenue and $34 billion in costs. $867 million of its revenue came from SoftBank, and $303 million came from Microsoft. www.wheresyoured.at/exclusive-op...

A reasonable assessment. This is Trump taking whatever deal the Iranians would give him. Which was not as good a deal as the one they gave Obama in 2015, or offered him just five months ago.

Remember this scene the next time a corporate reporter tries to insist that a rural diner full of white men in their 60s is somehow a more authentically "American" place, somehow more representative of who we are as a nation.

My column today for @insidehighered.com criticizes the new report on the decline of the #humanities and all its flaws. www.insidehighered.com/opinion/colu...

Good read by Dr. Virginia Berridge, Cambridge University Press 2018. #Govsky #policysky #historysky #philosophysky www.cambridge.org/core/service...

RIP Gordon Wood, whose “Creation,” p.562, is worth a reread any day, esp. today: “the Federalists fixed the terms for the future discussion of American politics …. and created a distinctly American political theory but only at the cost of eventually impoverishing later American political thought.”

some my favorite Gordon Wood quotes: “History does not teach lots of little lessons. Insofar as it it teaches any lessons, it teaches only one big one: that nothing ever works out quite the way its managers intended or expected.” /

Pentagon Cuts 180 Religious Identities From Military Personnel Records: "The new policy...leaves just 31 religious categories to choose from, 22 of which are Christian." And they eliminated atheist as a category... www.nytimes.com/2026/06/05/u...

Wrote a little thing about why expanding the number of justices is a time honored tradition* that used to facilitate the Supreme Court’s legitimacy for @inquirer.com (gift link!) *not sure about this headline, though—folks often used “court packing” as an epithet even in the 19th c.

(null)formation - coming soon to those of you not academics, too: “The avalanche of garbage prose which publishers and educators have been sifting through is going to descend upon everybody who uses the internet.”

here's what i wrote

Not for nothing but freedom of navigation has been a core US foreign policy objective for 200+ years and preserving the Arabian Gulf from domination has been one for just a hair under 50. When I say things like “calamity” or “inexcusable defeat”, I am not being partisan or exaggerating.

a lot (most?) people understand racism as “being a meanie” and if you aren’t a meanie then you can’t be racist, even if you believe in, say, the biological inferiority of entire groups of people based on phenotype

Very cool work here by Matt Dallek at @thebulwark.com

Software development is a weird oral tradition. We have an ambivalent relationship with documentation, but high turnover in the industry means that the info is always on the verge of dying out. AI is making those dysfunctions worse, and I wrote about that for Fast Company.

From @liseolsen.bsky.social, in our magazine: With support from Ft. Bend county leaders, the new Black Cowboy Museum’s building, 10 times larger than the existing location, will soon rise in Bates Allen Park, a park that originally was a Freedmen’s town called Kendleton.

It's so striking how much conservative ideology rests entirely on lies. You can look up which books are getting assigned in colleges! The idea that higher education has a "disdain for Western civilization" is laughable.

Bout to see if the airlines have enough juice to defeat the red state ethno-nationalists. This is truly, impressively insane

When Ken Paxton mocked James Talarico as "six-gender Jimmy" and "tofu Talarico" at his victory speech, he captured why he's probably weaker than John Cornyn would have been. Talarico immediately drew a contrast with this. The MAGA crowd loved the jokes, though. 2/ newrepublic.com/article/2109...

From the @nsarchive.bsky.social: recently declassified documents about the global security and economic risks posed by climate change 🗃️

Another reminder: if there exists *any* class of people who don't have due process rights, then *nobody* actually has due process rights because the government can always just say you're in that class.

Cuba's minister of energy confirmed reserves are gone — with just enough diesel left to keep hospitals online. The UN has classified Washington's blockade a humanitarian crisis.

From @nhannahjones.bsky.social: The Civil Rights era is collapsing and the consequences "could be catastrophic—not just for Black Americans but for everyone. Black rights movements have always been democratizing movements, and history shows this country cannot deny one and maintain the other."