It's hard to square "it's wasn't racist" with the breathtaking and distinct callousness that's everywhere in response to this death.
Lauren Turek
@laurenfturek.bsky.social
Historian of U.S. foreign relations, human rights, & religion. Associate Professor of History & Director of Museum Studies at Trinity University. Musician and sci fi fan.
My only comment about Woke 1 vs Woke 2 is that neither of these things is real &, for the thousandth time, we don’t have to frame <every topic in American politics> on the terms of the far right authoritarian party & right-wing pundits. Other, more serious choices are readily available:
this has been painfully obvious for the past decade and centrist pundits who fixated on these "concerns" revealed how shallow and petty their worldview is
Michael Hobbes@michaelhobbes.bsky.social · last wk.Meanwhile, the right never meant any of it. They moaned about "cancellation" for a decade but embarked on mass firings as soon as they took power. They pretended to care about "free speech restrictions" and "educational indoctrination" while embarking on them every chance they got.
Insane that democrats keep trying to cave on this issue rather than amplifying the fact that it’s being spearheaded by bigots and freaks
Gillian Branstetter@gbbranstetter.bsky.social · 2w agoAn initiative on the ballot in Washington state in November would require all athletes seeking to play girl's sports from kindergarten to high school to undergo "genetic screening, a testosterone-levels test, or an examination of their reproductive anatomy" before they can play
The IRS is imploding. "The collapse of the IRS customer service functions...can literally ruin people’s lives," and "These consequences land heavily on those who can least afford it: the elderly, people whose first language is not English, and of course, poor people of all sorts."
The IRS is imploding
The CEO says the agency is proving it’s possible to have “less people and better results.”
motherjones.com
So I'm visiting my Dad, who recently completed a bit of a genealogy project. In addition to compiling lots of great information and some family photos I've never seen, he also included a few humorous asides...
I look forward to all the reports & coverage about all of the internal problems & mistakes of all of these other institutions, in the same way that universities are constantly blamed (& blaming themselves) for “declining trust.” “Compared to what?” news.gallup.com/poll/712436/...
Mark Copelovitch@mcopelov.bsky.social · last mo.“Compared to what?” is always the essential question when asking about critiques of higher education & universities, whether we’re discussing declining trust, freedom of speech, viewpoint diversity, or any of the other things.
Picked up a very cool item: a commemorative pin for the @vassar.bsky.social 50th anniversary from 1915, with a ribbon for an alumna from the class of 1905 (I'm also an '05 alum, but 2005 of course). There were only about 200 people who graduated in 1905, so I suspect not too many of these were made!
The UNHCR archives in Geneva are at risk; reading room already closed - and there's a much broader 'humanitarian archive emergency' ongoing with aid budget cuts. www.aretenews.com/unhcr-refuge...
As aid funds shrink, archivists warn of risks to the humanitarian record
UNHCR's archives are a test case for humanitarians struggling to preserve institutional memory in an era of retrenchment.
aretenews.com
This is a great student-authored short piece about, in my read, how the allure of innovation/problem solving/bragging rights has led a lot of smart people to ignore the work of archivists and historians when developing historical, archive driven tools.
@dhnow.bsky.social · 4w agoEditors’ Choice: The Archive is Not a Toy: The Hidden Problems of a ‘Vintage’ AI
The Oakland University Archives and Special Collections has made available via JSTOR 23 oral history interviews that capture the history of Pontiac’s Black community and map the routes of the Great Migration. The post also includes a classroom activity for interpreting excerpts of the interviews! 🗃️
The Cassette Tapes of the Great Migration - JSTOR Daily
An archive of recorded interviews captures how ordinary people experienced one of the defining chapters of American history.
daily.jstor.org
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!)
SHAFR@shafrhistorians.bsky.social · last mo.Didn't we just leave Columbus? 👀 The CFP for #SHAFR2027 in Arlington, VA is live — and it's a big one: our 60th anniversary! Co-chairs Lauren Turek & Steve Tuffnell want your panels, papers, and roundtables. Details on our website. www.shafr.org/shafr2027
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.
Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò@olufemiotaiwo.bsky.social · last mo.once again saying: Nuremburg trials is the moderate position
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...
Christian mother of eight tracks ICE activity in Chicago
YouTube video by RNS
youtube.com
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.
The End of Reading Is Here
Optimists once believed that universal literacy was inevitable. Now it seems that the age of reading might be a short anomaly in human history.
theatlantic.com
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
Chronicle of Higher Education@chronicle.com · last mo.Conservatives have argued that adopting minimum teaching loads will curb a proliferation of “intellectually unserious” research. https://chroni.cl/4wmW9iZ
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."
Opinion | Look Past the Jobs Numbers: Three Ways Trump Is Strangling the Economy
nytimes.com
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...
America Retold
250 years of the United States and the world.
foreignpolicy.com
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
![Still, most freed Blacks resisted the pressure to self-deport. Instead, many started organizing toward the creation of the kind of Nation the colonizationists opposed—one that guaranteed liberty and justice for all. In the decades leading up to the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment, Black Americans organized and gathered at more than 600 local and national conventions across the country. There, delegates erected the political and intellectual scaffolding for the Fourteenth Amendment and, later, for the Black Civil Rights Movement more generally.
Critically for present purposes, these visionaries already understood themselves to be American citizens. “The refrains ‘we are Americans’ and ‘we are citizens’ echoed in conferences throughout the North.” Moreover, “[b]irthright figured importantly” as “delegates frequently characterized their status as that of native-born citizens.”](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:ks3gpa6ftoyaq7hmf6c4qx4c/bafkreieuwdbxpjo22e7fg26a65dobwofwaytq6ilqp4cy7bcicw5fsk63a)
![The delegates argued that, as such, they had the requisite allegiance, so, at a minimum, the Federal Government owed them the duty of protection.
The famed orator Frederick Douglass was one of these delegates. Capturing the spirit of the moment, Douglass proclaimed that Chief Justice Taney—the author of the majority opinion in Dred Scott v. Sandford, 19 How. 393 (1857)—“[could] do many things, but he [could not] … change the essential nature of things.” In the absence of the artificial evils of slavery and racial subordination, Douglass explained, “the glorious birthright of our common humanity, will become the inheritance of all the inhabitants of this highly favored country.”
Do note this: The citizenship thesis of the Colored Conventions was thus not that some new status should be created and conferred on freed Blacks.](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:ks3gpa6ftoyaq7hmf6c4qx4c/bafkreidxenf7ggfe5sghdwpe5v7pwn3kfh4mqkxiccusnrknq7zfr7qhtm)
![It was instead that freed Blacks already had a rightful claim to citizenship because they had been born on American soil. After all, the Nation, from its founding, had “boldly proclaim[ed] that all men are born free and equal, and that consequently life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, are inherent in every individual, vested inalienably by natural birthright.” No ideal was more inherently American. Now, “rest[ing their] cause on the republican standard of the revolutionary Fathers,” freed Blacks were “knock[ing] at the doors of the constitution and demand[ing] an entrance.” And “[i]f … asked what evidence [they] bring to sustain [their] qualifications for citizenship, [they would] offer them certificates of … BIRTH and NATIVITY.” Would the Nation live up to its promise?
Such universalist appeals were a conscious choice. Yes, Black Americans had suffered a singular wrong. And yes, they had “fought and bled” for the Union, paying a steep price for their freedom. But the delegates did not rest on these laurels. Rather, they drew upon the moral and political force of the universal principles that were already core to the Nation’s identity.
That bears repeating: Freed Blacks did not advocate for a unique set of rules that catered only to their situation. Nor did they seek to advance their own position relative to, or at the expense and exclusion of, other marginalized groups.](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:ks3gpa6ftoyaq7hmf6c4qx4c/bafkreig7o5wpfpkbjt7zcvghbco4zafj6m64etq7blz7r542gh7b3gn3oa)
![Instead, those whose gatherings helped galvanize the push for full equality understood that “[a] diverse origin does not disprove a common nature, nor does it disprove a united destiny.” The firmest foundation for freedom would require an anticaste reset—“both for his sake and for ours”—and would benefit all.
During his U. S. Senate candidacy, Abraham Lincoln developed a similar vision. In the lead-up to the now-famous Lincoln-Douglas debates, Lincoln explained that the promise of liberty and equality in the Declaration of Independence “was held sacred by all, and thought to include all.” Lincoln expressly and intentionally linked the fate of Black Americans and immigrant groups (“among us perhaps half our people who are not descendants at all” of the Founders), and noted that the Nation’s future hinged on a universal definition of citizenship that excluded neither. He explained that the Declaration’s promise that “all men are created equal” was the “electric cord … that links the hearts of patriotic and liberty-loving men together,” regardless of race or descent.
The case was made. First, there was war. And then, the delegates’ (and Lincoln’s) universalist view of citizenship made its mark on the Constitution.](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:ks3gpa6ftoyaq7hmf6c4qx4c/bafkreigucpltb6mmwuwxswipazl56ki3v4dmsr7fx4lkmf5jncrsuvwp4a)
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.'”
Japanese internment survivors, faith leaders demand closure of South Texas ICE detention center
Japanese-American detention survivors and faith leaders call for the end of family and child detention on June 27, 2026 in Dilley. Roughly two dozen
sacurrent.com
MKUltra: Declassification Task Force Should Focus on Real Secrets, Not Conspiracy Theories @nsarchive.bsky.social nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-boo...
MKUltra: Declassification Task Force Should Focus on Real Secrets, Not Conspiracy Theories
Washington, D.C., June 29, 2026 - On Tuesday, June 30, the congressional Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets chaired by Florida Republican Anna Paulina Luna will hold a special heari...
nsarchive.gwu.edu
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!
Aubrey Gilleran@aubreygilleran.bsky.social · 2mo agoYes, Congress should be able to do these things. A court this contemptuous of Congress deserves to be packed by Congress, not only to correct these disastrous precedents but also because Congress needs to show both Article II and Article III who’s boss.
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...
Our SHAFR 2026 Books on Display
In coordination with the SHAFR 2026 Annual Meeting in Columbus, OH, we’ve created this online portal so you can take advantage of the book deals normally only given to physical conference attendees.
cornellpress.cornell.edu
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...
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
theguardian.com