this miniature illustration of the Golden Horn in Istanbul (from an Ottoman Atlas, c 1500) is making me very happy

The Candidates’ Tournament is eating about four hours of my time every day but I have very few regrets

an amazing amount of seventeenth-century history visible in this short passage: thanks for “good usage of the Indyans,” a plea not to interrupt “Religion” or encourage sin, and an instruction to buy twenty to forty enslaved people if the opportunity arose

“Managing up” in the seventeenth century: here is John Pym complaining that whenever he brought important papers to the Earl of Holland, his Lordship would sign them without reading them

pretty sure I’m reading a 1633 order from English investors to kill all the rabbits on a particular Caribbean island

These parrots on a 1502 Portuguese map are making me extremely happy

The BBC reports that U.S. and Israeli forces have now killed 787 people in Iran (in three days)

It seems the Trump-Netanyahu playbook is “carpet bomb a country one day, act like it didn’t happen a week later, trust that no one in the United States will notice or care, then do the same thing three months later, any time you want a “tough guy” moment.”

I cannot tell you how much doubt was consistently directed at the Gaza Health Ministry’s casualty numbers and how much pressure was put on news organizations to couch those numbers as unreliable. Biden himself said they were fabricated! www.haaretz.com/israel-news/...

bored Englishmen have been scribbling out sentences in the same way for four hundred years

“his last thought and act was to protect a woman. The sickening lies told about our son by the administration are reprehensible and disgusting. Alex is clearly not holding a gun when attacked by Trump's murdering and cowardly ICE thugs.”

beautiful writing from a dear friend:

IMHO incredibly important for people who grew up in England (and I assume the U.S.), where an excellent history education often includes reading documents from colonial eras (with appropriate encouragement to try to search for “subaltern perspectives”)…

As we live through a re-up of the heyday of US imperialism in Latin America, maybe have some respect for the thinkers who looked the problem squarely in the face and said, admittedly without much nuance, colonialism sucks.

The position of the Trump administration continues to be “we can kill whoever we want, and what we want most of all is “cool videos to put on TV””

Not to sound like a broken record, but a lot of this discussion skirts around the obvious point that the President and the Secretary of Defense killed eighty people with bombs, on camera, because they wanted video footage that would make them look “tough.”

one of many reasons this analogy is unsuccessful is because there’s no good analogy for “the President killed some people on camera because he thought the footage would make him look like a tough guy.” That’s a pretty unique kind of psychopathy (but an extremely common political tactic in the U.S.)

Whether their bombs kill children in Gaza or sailors in the Caribbean is probably irrelevant to U.S. politicians, because all that matters is a photo op which proves they’re tough on terrorists.

It's up on my blog too emspanishhistorynotes.wordpress.com/2025/11/05/c...

Please apply to come and work in my department! I’m very happy to answer any questions you may have

***TENURE-LINE JOB*** My new department, at the American University in Bulgaria, is hiring a historian of Southeast Europe, the Middle East, and the Eastern Mediterranean. This is a tenure-line job with a 3-3 teaching load.

@naoisedolan.bsky.social tells the story of her (brutal, illegal) detention by Israeli forces. As she herself notes, Palestinian political prisoners in Israel (of whom there are still 11,000 including 400 children) fare infinitely worse.

The Guardian has published a story on the 18,500 children killed by Israeli forces (and U.S. weapons) in Gaza

Stephen Bush’s evisceration of Robert Jenrick’s racism is beautifully written and all of you should read his (I’m told award-winning, free) morning email

"The day had begun with Robert Jenrick accused of racism. This is of course quite unfair. Racists believe in something." Absolutely fantastic sketch by @roberthutton.co.uk. Every line is a banger:

Earlier this summer I defended my PhD dissertation, “Captivities and Transformations: Slavery, Religion, and Emotion in Cartagena de Indias and Providence Island, 1620-1650.” The final version has now been approved!

“The time for justifications, arguing about semantics and hand-wringing over the “complexity” of the conflict has long passed. The only question now is, how is it that the world cannot get Israel to allow a morsel of food into a starving civilian’s mouth?”

The U.K. Government’s ban of “Palestine Action” has (entirely predictably) led to the arrest of people carrying milquetoast placards at peaceful protests.

Dr Badar Khan Suri: “I was always thinking, Why am I here? They have identified me with the Palestinian cause, being married to a Palestinian and given my sympathies with Palestinians. So if they have put me here for them, my suffering is nothing in comparison to theirs.”

A Georgetown colleague, Dr Badar Khan Suri, describes being kidnapped by ICE. “To this day they haven’t been able to provide an arrest warrant in court, because it doesn’t exist. They were playing from a playbook which has no rights.”

“The number of people reportedly killed by Israeli gunfire at GHF aid distribution sites continues to climb, as the people of Gaza face starvation. The Gaza Health Ministry has counted 1,021 people killed and another 6,511 wounded at GHF sites since the program was put in place…”

Important reporting from Gaza:

An article I wrote about emotions and colonialism has just come out in The Sixteenth Century Journal - you can find it below or message me if you’d like a PDF! The Sixteenth Century Journal: Vol 56, No 2 www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...

I’m so sorry

I don’t quite know what to say about this, but I’m very happy and very grateful, and I’m looking forward to reading everyone else’s wonderful work!

"A forensic doctor who examined the bodies of some of the 15 paramedics and Palestinian rescue workers shot dead by Israeli forces and buried in a mass grave in southern Gaza has said there is evidence of execution-style killing..." www.theguardian.com/world/2025/a...

It's outrageous that the Secretary of State can, on his sole authority, have a legal resident of the US summarily detained and deported without any due process. This power renders millions of people legally in the US effectively without rights. www.cnn.com/2025/03/22/u...

The great historian Greg Grandin observed that when Kissinger bombed Cambodia, he kept it secret for fear of mass public outrage, and the cover up was part of the scandal. Nowadays apparently the scandal is that bombing is not kept secret enough.

Georgetown faculty and students have published an open letter protesting the political detention of our colleague Badar Khan Suri.

Her husband, who has not been charged with a crime, is a political prisoner, pure and simple.

Martin: “How did he support Hamas? Exactly what did he do?” Edgar: “Well, I think you can see it on TV, right? This is somebody that we've invited and allowed the student to come into the country, and he's put himself in the middle of the process of basically pro-Palestinian activity.”

The UK does it too: “Dana Abu Qamar’s visa was revoked in December 2023, at the personal instigation of Robert Jenrick, on the basis of her public statements in the immediate aftermath of the 7 October attacks and subsequent Israeli invasion of the Gaza Strip (which killed 15 members of her family)”

‘Mahmoud Khalil’s arrest came the same week that Columbia welcomed to its campus the former Israeli prime minister Naftali Bennett, who once boasted “I’ve already killed a lot of Arabs in my life, and there is no problem with that.’” New on the blog by Rayan Fakhoury www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2025/ma...

The Trump Administration kidnapped an activist in the middle of the night. Mahmoud Khalil's detention is a clear violation of the First Amendment. This is the behavior of an authoritarian regime, not a democracy. He must be released immediately.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortex condemned ICE’s detainment of Mahmoud Khalil, calling it a “tyrannical” move. “If the federal government can disappear a legal US permanent resident without reason or warrant, then they can disappear US citizens too."

I was proud to be a member of the American Historical Association when its members voted overwhelmingly to condemn scholasticide in Gaza.

I just published a piece in The Journal of Jesuit Studies, about the Jesuit Alonso de Sandoval, who wrote one of the most important eyewitness accounts of slavery in the seventeenth-century Caribbean. The piece has been published in open access here: brill.com/view/journal...