Today is #WorldChocolateDay! Here is a #17thcentury #ballad extolling the virtues of #chocolate, printed in the year that the first chocolate (and coffee) house was opened in London.... From Chocolate, or an Indian Drinke, 1652. www.youtube.com/watch?v=a5KJ... #earlymusic #earlymodern #otd

PSA: when you buy my book, make sure to get a second copy so that the first doesn’t get lonely. 😂😂

The Erie Canal is from the 1820s. You were competing with PHILADELPHIA.

I’m sure the ADL will wave it away as merely a Shakespearean reference from our deeply learned president

Beyond excited to read this amazing volume! #earlymodern #beachreading

Several people asked if my Mom ever sells her #quilts. She's had bad experiences both showing & selling, so has been loath to do either. NOW I’ll tell the story of “Illustrious Ancestors” which commemorates Frederick Douglass’s time as a caulker in Baltimore. /1 #Art #Quiltsky #Juneteenth #Blacksky

A FUNNY THING will be out this Thursday, June 5! Ask your libraries to order it! If you read it, tell me which parts made you laugh!!

Harriet Tubman #quilt by my Mom, Vera P. Hall, who makes quilts celebrating Black people who fought for their own freedom. This seems to be the crowd favorite of the “We Didn’t Wait for Freedom” series. Happy #Juneteenth #quilting

Adriana Smith did not give birth to a baby. She was used as an incubator, cut open, and a baby was taken out of her lifeless body. A Black woman was used as a science experiment.

“But somewhere I read of the freedom of assembly. Somewhere I read of the freedom of speech. Somewhere I read of the freedom of press. Somewhere I read that the greatness of America is the right to protest for right.”

#earlymodern #ShakeRace #RaceB4Race #Blackademics

I preordered @profkfh.bsky.social’s THE SWEET TASTE OF EMPIRE 40% off until June 20th! www.pennpress.org/978151282786...

If you’re planning to attend @saaupdates.bsky.social in Denver next year, consider joining @roaringgirle.bsky.social and me for a seminar on Shakespeare & Public Libraries. Public libraries are crucial to our understanding of collection histories of all kinds of books and material. We need them!

This was a fascinating series (and available on #BBCSounds for more than a year). It also made me completely re-evaluate Brief Encounter... Oh, and I've borrowed Death in High Heels via @suffolklibraries.bsky.social 📕

Radio 3 next week: 9.45pm - books during WWII. Brief Encounter and Boots Lending Library, POWs requesting books from the Red Cross based in @bodleianlibraries.bsky.social, the first bonkbuster, and much more. Great fun to make www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m...

"further testing a fragile ceasefire" That's certainly an interesting choice of words.

Israel bombs Beirut again. This has absolutely nothing to do with Hezbollah, and everything to do with Israel establishing new rules of engagement: we can attack anyone, anywhere, anytime, whenever we want. This cannot stand.

More evidence when these people say "DEI" they really mean the n-word

In *Sweet Taste of Empire,* (forthcoming August 2025), you can read my re-visiting of the Black boy mentioned by Pepys who was “dried in an oven, and lies there entire in a box” who has been troubling me since graduate school. Another colonial “souvenir” 😢 www.theguardian.com/science/2025...

This is well known but just sharing some images of a table book: these were small, portable, erasable, used for jotting down notes at sermons or lectures. This one is very fancy but they turn up as standard purchases in #earlymodern account books #folgerfinds

I’ve been on NEH and IMLS review panels. Their commitment to wide-ranging and important research is built on the hard work of program officers and awards go through hours and hours of review by field experts. The shame of DOGE’s wasting all of this!! Love and gratitude to all NEH and IMLS workers

Proud to have contributed to this issue of Early Modern Studies Journal edited by Madeline Bassnett, on Climate Change and the Little Ice Age: earlymodernstudiesjournal.org

The great Kim F. Hall:

People can stay mad about the following but if Democrats hadn’t run around normalizing this kind of language, the American public wouldn’t be as primed as they are to accept it.

I think that everyone who got a PhD in lit before, oh, 2008 should be required to read the MLA job list report before serving on a search committee.

Between 1927 & 1933 four nuns at Eibingen Abbey replicated by hand the renowned manuscript of Hildegard von Bingen’s magnum opus, Scivias. When the original 12C manuscript disappeared after WWII, the replica became a facsimile-original. I tell the story of that facsimile here tinyurl.com/3mcb6vt7

huge congrats to all the reasonable & evenhanded university presidents who set new records for advance compliance on this, since nobody even had to ask before they all lined up to make dissent into a crime

“I’ll tell you what freedom is to me. No fear.” —Nina Simone was born February 21, 1933

this is my political position

Hello 👋🏼 #earlymodern #pcrs - reminder that I'm always looking for Notes for Borrowers & Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare & Appropriation. Notes short, thesis-driven essays on #Shakespeare ephemera - borrowers-ojs-azsu.tdl.org/borrowers/ab...

It's our first @crems-york.bsky.social seminar of the semester today at 6pm! @evajohannaholmberg.bsky.social will be talking to us about the 'Torments and Travails of Jamestown'. This is hybrid, so do register to join us online too! See you later!! www.york.ac.uk/crems/events... #earlymodern 🗃️

Because they’re getting what they want. They never cared about the constitution.

tonight!

may the new year help, not hinder; and allow us to shed the sorrows of the old. [豐子愷 采藥 Feng Zikai, "Collecting Herbs"] #蛇年安康

I suspect she's had this outfit in storage for years, waiting for his funeral. How disappointing to have to wear it to another inauguration.

Rare to read two bangers in a row: this book is real 🔥 🔥 🔥. A mix of cultural and environmental history, memoir and literary, weaving colonialism, race and environmental history in a Caribbean-centered global history. Truly a must-read

Let’s hear it for Palestinian joy. Long live a free Palestine.

Good on her. Let the Streisand effect do its work.

Do yourself a favor—take a few minutes to read this fantastic new essay on Antony & Cleopatra by @miramiraculous.bsky.social!! 🔥 www.folger.edu/blogs/collat...

Recently, I, along with @mariaressa.bsky.social Ocean Vuong and others, was named “Great Immigrant” As we prepare for massive deportations and as we face the threat of denationalization, I’m struggling to understand what this “honor” means in the new world order. www.carnegie.org/awards/award...

A showstopper of a piece, reminding me why I am drawn to this exquisite mess of a play over and over again. I am excited beyond words for Mira ‘Assaf’s OWC introduction to Antony and Cleopatra. I feel so lucky to be alongside them and @bkadams.bsky.social in the series’ shakeup of the ‘Roman plays’

I wrote about queer conviviality in Antony and Cleopatra because only planetary humanism and a utopian imaginary can save us now. www.folger.edu/blogs/collat...

Give me Tuesday. Give me, Tuesday.

Remember, remember, on the first of December… On disciplines and disciplinary thinking, from Katherine McKittrick’s Dear Science: “Population control is academically lucrative. Discipline is empire. Description is not liberation” (39).