In "The Two Quilengues and the Baculamento Taxation System," @soashistory.bsky.social's Esteban Salas traces the entanglements of two African chiefdoms with the expansion of Portuguese colonialism, slavery and taxation in 18th c Angola. Read the #openaccess article here: muse.jhu.edu/article/986544

In, "La société agraire du sultanat de Sennar" University of Quebec's Gabriel Beauchamp analyzes how the Sennar Sultanate was organised around the practice of agriculture and the control of agriculture. Read the #openaccess article in issue 53.2 here muse.jhu.edu/article/986545

OPEN ACCESS: new issue "History and Memory: Epistemological Reinterpretation of Africa's Past in a Post-Colonial Context" of Práticas da História, Journal on Theory, Historiography and Uses of the Past is now out, check it out praticasdahistoria.pt/issue/view/2...

May at the @greenhouseuis.net with our regular Monday book talks, Wednesday research talks and many special events featuring @mmendoza.bsky.social, Hauke Ohls, @erikahanna.bsky.social and others. #envhum 🌷

"This is what Israel did to 1,100,000 children." — Linda Mamoun

In case you missed it, links for our massive book talk series 👇

Abu Yahya Zakariya’ ibn Muhammad al-Qazwini; ‘Wonders of the Seven Seas’, ca. 1203-1283 CE.

The first issue of JEAS volume 20 is now online! www.tandfonline.com/toc/rjea20/2...

📢 New Issue! JSAS 51.5 brings together research on storytelling, power and resource politics across Southern Africa, from sport history and tax reform to farm violence, tourism and liberation struggles. Explore the issue and David Everatt's editorial here: www.tandfonline.com/toc/cjss20/5...

My book, “Socialist De-Colony: Black and Soviet Entanglements in Ghana's Cold War," is out! It’s a history of African attempts to transform a formerly colonial society into a paragon of socialist Black freedom within Cold War intrigues. Free download: www.cambridge.org/core/books/s...

South Africa and Lesotho have agreed that citizens only need their national identity documents to cross the border. Read groundup.org.za/article/leso... by Sechaba Mokhethi

The cyberattack on The British Library in October 2023 knocked out ebooks and almost ever other computer thing there for years. Ebooks just came back. They were knocked out everywhere using the BL’s license (legal deposit libraries I think? More libraries?) Distributed physical copies matter.

This is what Israel has done to Bint Jbeil, my hometown in southern Lebanon

Coachella is trying to wipe all of the footage of The Strokes protest set so I’m gonna post it here. The last images on the screen made me cry.

The Introduction of my book is currently free to read. assets-us-01.kc-usercontent.com/f7ca9afb-82c...

When the information that turns up demands more than a plaque or an acknowledgement, those in power get ugly.

The latest issue of @africaneconhist.bsky.social is out now Open Access! Our first issue with a book reviews section, including a review of Richard Reid's new book by @araujohistorian.bsky.social and of Jody Benjamin's new book by Eguono Lucia Edafioka. Enjoy! 📚🤓 muse.jhu.edu/issue/56637

In AEH 53.2, Dr. Adeyinka Banwo shows how local farmers in Ilorin, Northern Nigeria grew food crops instead of cash crops despite efforts by British administrators and how "food itself became a cash crop." Read the article available on #openaccess here muse.jhu.edu/article/986543

Great bit of mining history here combining legal, engineering and social history to explain the 2022 Jagersfontein tailings dam. Decisions taken by De Beers, the courts, local and national government resulted in a disaster that was entirely avoidable: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

As a member of the International Scientific Committee of the UNESCO Routes of Enslaved Peoples Project, I praise UN Declaration of the Trafficking of Enslaved Africans and Racialized Chattel Enslavement of Africans as the Gravest Crime against Humanity, resolution is here ➡️ shorturl.at/0ueKA

The latest issue of @africaneconhist.bsky.social is out now Open Access! Our first issue with a book reviews section, including a review of Richard Reid's new book by @araujohistorian.bsky.social and of Jody Benjamin's new book by Eguono Lucia Edafioka. Enjoy! 📚🤓 muse.jhu.edu/issue/56637

We are pleased to highlight Dr. Cheikh Sene's new article, "Organiser et Réguler les Marchés de Captifs et de Gomme Arabique en Sénégambie." It is available in open access here: muse.jhu.edu/article/986542 Dr. Sene is a postdoctoral research fellow at @gettymuseum.bsky.social

Our new issue 53.2 is out🥳 We will be highlighting the articles and celebrating the authors in our upcoming posts!!!

English by Yusef Komunyakaa www.divasofverse.com/2017/12/engl...

Interesting article about why Ashanti (in modern-day Ghana) didn't mint coins, though they mined gold, were familiar with coins and had the skills to mint coins. Instead, the kingdom adopted gold dust – weighed precisely for transactions – as currency: aeh.uwpress.org/content/53/1...

The testimony here about sexual violence by Israel against Palestinian prisoners is so beyond the pale everyone must see it. It is so bad I can’t in good conscience share a quote other than the headline, which somehow manages to understate the horror within. www.middleeasteye.net/news/i-wishe...

I am not one of those who believes that history repeats, but consider the following from Herodotus: the Oracle at Delphi told the fabulously wealthy King Croesus that if he invaded Persia he would "destroy a great empire." Croesus invaded and lost--the empire he destroyed was his own.

As Kenya’s Rift Valley lakes expand, swallowing homes, farms, and infrastructure, what appears as a climate anomaly reveals a reckoning with ecological limits, failed planning, and the illusion that water would stay where it was put. africasacountry.com/2026/04/the-...

the Israeli model for Gaza is also apparently being followed now in southern Lebanon; already there are multiple photos of Lebanese villages razed to the ground, some of them half a millennia old

🇿🇦 BDS report on South African coal exports to Israel. Tldr: SA coal continues to fuel Israel’s electricity production, which, ofc, means it’s fueling the war. Despite its case against Israel in the ICJ. Le sigh du désespoir

Thanks to @africasacountry.bsky.social for working with us on this two-part series on The Underbelly of Conservation, as mining and #conservation increasingly work together to dispossess local communities of land and livelihoods in the name of development and environmental protection in West Africa.

A wave of bestselling authors claim that global affairs are still ultimately governed by the immutable facts of geography – mountains, oceans, rivers, resources. But the world has changed more than they realise. By Daniel Immerwahr: pca.st/episode/87e5...

www.theguardian.com/artanddesign... On loan from the University of Fort Hare.

Enjoyed @mininghistory.bsky.social on Anglo-American’s departure from SA: ‘It’s possible that one reason Anglo so comprehensively sold off their mines in the region is because the potential environmental and health liabilities could have exceeded the value of any future profits from mining.’

Wikipedia now has higher standards than all universities

OH MY HEART...the Oberlin Luddites Reject "The Year of AI Exploration"! 💚

This is the most astonishing graph of what the Trump regime has done to US science. They have destroyed the federal science workforce across the board. The negative impacts on Americans will be felt for generations, and the US might never be the same again. www.nature.com/immersive/d4...

The UN General Assembly on Wednesday designated the transatlantic African slave trade as "the gravest crime against humanity," despite opposition by the United States and some European countries. u.afp.com/SboE

I do think this is true. I'm often guilty myself of underplaying what the work I do looks like or how much time and effort it takes. Research isn't 'just reading' or a question of sucking up summaries others have created. It's knowledge creation. So let me go through the process with an example 1/

The end of the world will be when some enormous boiler shall explode and blow up the globe. And they [the Americans] are great boilermakers. Jules Verne Died March 24, 1905

Underrated that the era of neoliberal globalism characterized by fierce defense of intellectual property as rents, patents, and copyrights gave way so quickly to a new paradigm marked by the blithe plunder of all human creativity for LLM training data.

The idea is like grass. It craves light, likes crowds, thrives on crossbreeding, grows better for being stepped on.

Secret tricks to get much better results out of the very dreadful 'Google search' these days, plus other search engines for specific things. Statospherically useful for researchers. open.substack.com/pub/cardcata...

Thompson's hematologist at Johns Hopkins, Dr. Robert A. Brodsky, published a study revealing that the research now has an overall 94% disease-free survival rate. "[A cure is now] available to the majority, almost the entirety, of sickle cell patients.” #GoodNews #BlackSky 🌱

Caturday.

Thread

I have an archivist joke, but a historian who found it in the collection I processed and using the finding aid I wrote will say it was lost and he discovered it.

Yesterday morning I stepped outside on my balcony for coffee with my wife and our neighbor. The drone was as low as it has ever been. We saw it over our heads. Below, our alleyway had turned into a parking lot for displaced people’s cars. A school next door is hosting around 1500 people.