my Boy Scout merit badges in hiking, fingerprinting, and wilderness survival finally coming in handy

Cover reveal. It's about how & why colonies/states controlled international & domestic migration until 1888, why in the late 19th c the feds took over, & what it was like for politically disfavored groups to live under that arrangement of power. You can't understand voluntary migration history 1/

just finished a road trip with this one

How do you practice writing? What's your version of running through your scales or doing mile repeats? buttondown.com/draftingthep...

Congratulations to Dagmar Herzog, whose book The Question of Unworthy Life is the winner of the @socscihistory.bsky.social's Allan Sharlin Memorial Book Award! 🎉 Her work sheds light on the dark history of eugenic thought in Germany—and the courageous countervoices. Learn more: hubs.ly/Q03YKVd50

My qualms about Ken Burns' American Revolution series, which strangely fails to explain what made the Revolution revolutionary. washingtonmonthly.com/2025/12/18/w...

My forthcoming book— For which I began research in 2006. Is now posted on the website for Princeton University Press. Cover will be added soon. The King’s Slaves: The British Empire & the Origins of American Slavery

Thrilled about this new grant we are offering for under-represented early career scholars. The first cycle is for scholars in history and area studies. Please spread the word widely. @universitypress.cambridge.org ********************************* Read more here: 🔗 cup.org/4pF5xvr

VAP Trinity University Department of Religion specializing in Islam. Deadline February 1, 2026.

“Technology alone can’t solve this. It requires fundamental rethinking of pedagogy, assessment, and the university’s purpose.” Important. Thoughtful. Deeply engaged with the current crisis of knowledge — substack.com/inbox/post/1...

“mixed tape”

Robert Orsi is a legend.

🔔 We’re honored to open a new round in the @susih.bsky.social -IU Community Scholars Program, which unlocks onsite + remote library access for 3 years for contingent scholars + historians working beyond the academy. Please apply + share! CFP due 2/1. Onward! 🗃️ s-usih.org/2025/12/cfp-...

is $14.59 too high a price for meatballs made from the blend of your ancestors? Palo Alto Instacart says no

reading a book from 1929 claiming to expose a sinister conspiracy of radical professors who are using communist and socialist propaganda to advance an Illuminati plot dating back centuries and wondering how it is that I’ve been in academia for years and no one has looped me in yet

Joan Scott reflects on academic inquiry, "viewpoint diversity" and its weaponization: academeblog.org/2025/10/15/o...

Congratulations to my Princeton Religion colleague, Leora Batnitzky, and co-editors on this publication (that features a chapter by Princeton Religion graduate alum @rachelbgross.bsky.social).

Here are the ads! Please share them widely: careers.insidehighered.com/job/3407668/... (African history); careers.insidehighered.com/job/3407671/... (US since 1865) 🗃️

a few years after my book comes out I’m going to release an “extended” edition with suggestive phrasings about its being “raw” and “uncensored” and it’ll just be all the stuff that got edited out to fit the word limit

Another dissertation chapter drafted and sent to my advisor! One more to go! Too mentally spent to think of a joke!

Very grateful to chat about *Provoking Religion* with Clayton Jarrard for the New Books Network! Now available on their site as well as Spotify and Apple podcasts. newbooksnetwork.com/provoking-re...

Up on First View! "The Specter of Waste: Incarcerated Bodies, “Healthy” Labor, and the Production of Recreational Forests" by Anaïs Lefèvre. The piece examines how, after WWII, as they faced prison riots and rising concerns about juvenile delinquency, many states set up penal forestry camps.

I see there is no “major problems in american intellectual history” textbook as part of the “major problems” series I take it that means we’ve solved them all?

My article on the 1st gen of Japanese Am voters is finally out! It explores how young JAs responded to anti-Asian racism as they proudly asserted their voting rights as citizens, & shows how the WW2 incarceration suppressed their diverse political culture. Check it out: doi.org/10.1525/phr....

This is a subject I have been brooding about for some time. I am grateful to the Washington Monthly for posting this piece. washingtonmonthly.com/2025/06/27/i...

researching what I research I constantly have moments of “eww does the Bible really say that?” and every time it does indeed say that

as an electric bassist completing a phd in history I feel like this book was written for me

doing historiography again

War. Peace. Food. Drinks. People. Labor. Politics. And more! Check out the Gilded Age & Progressive Era podcast, been around for a few years, doing some amazing stuff & now with new hosts! @shgape.bsky.social @oah.org @shafrhistorians.bsky.social @historians.org 🗃️ shows.acast.com/gildedageand...

dissertation chapter is 16,666 words which in addition to being too long is too on the nose

my dad introduced me to the three stooges and I was so obsessed that in fifth grade I did an entire research project on them and drew a timeline covering their lives and careers from the birth of the horwitz brothers until curly joe died. I got this poster when I was baptized at age 8

Congratulations to @chanheeheo.bsky.social on successfully defending her dissertation, “Thy Kin-dom Come: Imagining the First Christian Nation in the East,” today! 🎉

I was thrilled to review Sam Tanenhaus's epic "Buckley" for The Unpopulist. substack.com/home/post/p-...

It was a pleasure speaking with @palumboliu.bsky.social for his podcast "Speaking out of Place." Check it out here! speakingoutofplace.com/2025/05/25/g...

Bedridden with a torn meniscus so I thought I’d take the opportunity to finally read EH Carr’s What Is History? and I think this is the first book I’ve read cover to cover since starting grad school

the fake oath was made famous in 1913 following a congressional campaign in which Thomas butler (father of another conspiracy theorist smedley butler who claimed there was a plot of fascist businessmen trying to oust FDR) claimed his Catholic opponent was in league with the KoC who swore on the oath

a favorite document among American nativists in the 1910s and 1920s was a bogus oath supposedly taken by Knights of Columbus promising to mutilate and murder Protestants including women and infants while swearing sole allegiance to the pope and stockpiling weapons for the future crusade so lol

Over at @jacobinmag.bsky.social Cal Turner and Sara Van Horn interviewed me about my book. jacobin.com/2025/05/karl...

greetings fellow historian what tropological devices have you emplotted today

me trying not to swear around my kids after I stub my toe on the bookshelf:

I know we’re not supposed to be presentist or whatever but how am I supposed to finish this chapter on the klan knowing that a hundred years later we’d have an American Pope

Happening tmrw!

Out in paperback today! www.amazon.com/Against-Cons...

whoa I just looked this up on Wikipedia and it’s true there’s this thing called Christianity and some people are getting into it

uh oh *flips to Book of Revelation* whew ok we’re still a good five heads and ten horns short of the end of the world

For anyone interested in my research on religion and the American right in the early twentieth century, here is an interview I did with my department: history.stanford.edu/news/religio...

I’ve been asked to explain why I feel the need to have Cecil B DeMille’s The Ten Commandments playing in the background during Easter and idk isn’t this a normal Easter tradition? Is it just a Mormon thing? A Jewish-convert-to-Mormonism thing? Is it just my family?

So delighted for my brilliant advisee @chanheeheo.bsky.social and the fantastic group of postdocs starting at the @ctrrelpol-washu.bsky.social this fall! rap.wustl.edu/news/jpostdo...

Catholics and Mormons finding common cause over rightwing issues huh someone should write a dissertation about the history of how that became possible