Mary Hicks

Robin Hood: Men in Tights is a personal fav. And who am I kidding, Prince of Thieves too.

Letting Kristi Noem give a press conference before she realizes she’s fired is a pretty hardcore start to white history month

Israel has closed all the crossings into Gaza and reimposed total siege.

we are in a bare knuckle fight for the university as we know it. here are takes The Atlantic is too afraid to publish

Gender studies courses are shutting down across the US. The Epstein files reveal why | Joan Wallach Scott Texas A&M University is the latest school to end women’s and gender studies programs and teaching race. We know why

"The abolition of gender studies is a way of further guaranteeing impunity to the elite men whose contempt for and exploitation of women and girls apparently knew no bounds" - Joan Scott www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Epstein’s economic power among academics was made possible by a capitalist system that makes higher education dependent on the charity economy rather than a public good supported by taxing the rich

remember when the panama papers came out and we found out every rich person on earth was committing tax fraud and then nothing happened

So many weird men have such a creepy attachment to AOC. Let’s just call it Lockjaw syndrome.

He was doing what many have been saying white men should be doing. He went outside to observe, he documented, he put his body on the line to protect another person and for this he was murdered by the gatekeepers of the fascist regime.

British crown was world’s largest buyer of enslaved people by 1807, book reveals Exclusive: Author of The Crown’s Silence tells how navy and monarchy protected slave trade for hundreds of years

New Book!

Brooke Newman's The Crown's Silence

'The book reveals that by 1807, when Britain abolished the slave trade in its empire, the British crown had become the world’s largest buyer of enslaved people, buying 13,000 men for the army for £900,000."

www.theguardian.com/world/2026/j...

MLK’s Forgotten Call for Economic Justice “Jobs are harder to create than voting rolls.”

"Negroes are not now merely a subject of change but an active organ of change. This is the new political equation in contemporary society."

Dr. MLK Jr. Forgotten Call for Economic Justice in 1966 published by @thenation.com remains evergreen. #MLK #blacksky

Toddler chairs really should be cross marketed as cat beds.

Imagine this headline: corporate fraud is a problem for Republicans.

ICE raids are not the first time this was made explicit. I think people downplay how much Jim Crow was not just about controlling Black people but it was also about controlling white people. If you thought racism was dumb and acted that way you could end up with a bomb in your home

The standard for “cultural revolution” according to centrist and right wing commentators is “liberals being loud about their opinions” whereas Trump is making prosecution, regulatory, and funding decisions based on the politics of the speaker but that’s also libs fault for making him mad

W.E.B. Du Bois lives!

MAGA, a movement of cynical cruelty that is fueled by atomization, has accidentally created the conditions for in person communities to be formed around resisting their repression bsky.app/profile/aaro...

This is the context in which “how harmful has diversity been for white people's employment?” conversations dominate our discourse for weeks on end.

Black Atlantic Worlds — Harvard University Press Landscapes are key to the Black Atlantic. The history of how Africans and their descendants populated and transformed nations, regions, and ecosystems has always been attentive to the multiple meaning...

Just got my author copy of Black Atlantic Worlds! I’m honored and delighted to be a part of this volume.

www.hup.harvard.edu/books/978088...

Sounds like a fantastic class. You should post the syllabus!

How effective is protesting? According to historians and political scientists: very From emancipation to women’s suffrage, civil rights and BLM, mass movement has shaped the arc of US history

In case you need a positive reminder:
How effective is protesting? According to historians and political scientists: very www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

Perhaps we can all turn to more substantive matters, like doing the hard work to help more people in our communities live with greater dignity and security. One can only hope there is less time for self pitying op-eds in 2026.

Can I risk proclaiming the end of a historical process before the dust has completely settled? The woke wars are over methinks.

Thanks Kelly! I was very lucky to be able to have some wonderful conversations about my book last year. You can check out one here:

Photo of cover of Dr Mary Hick’s new book Captive Cosmopolitans: Black Mariners and the World of South Atlantic Slavery.

Santa managed one book from my list this year, and I’m right pleased it was this one @maryhicks.bsky.social Thanks for the work Dr Hicks! #MaritimeHistory

Wow! I’m honored!

Every society that has ever existed has had views that are mainstream and views that are fringe. The free-speech frauds who captured the discourse over the past decade understood this, but their true objection was that they did not unilaterally have the power to define which was which. For example, in a 2018 Times column, Weiss complained that “leftists” were engaged in a “concerted attempt to significantly redraw the bounds of acceptable thought and speech.” This was meant to sound sinister, menacing. In fact, this is politics. Every faction is always trying to “redraw the bounds of acceptable thought and speech.” In a free society, the government allows people to have those arguments. Such disputes are not a threat to free speech; they are free speech.

When I say that CBS News’s Bari Weiss understood this, you needn’t take my word for it. In November, shortly after being given the reins to one of the oldest broadcast-news organizations in the country, Weiss used identical language to describe her own project: “I think it’s about redrawing the lines of what falls in the 40-yard lines of acceptable debate and acceptable American politics and culture,” Weiss said at the Jewish Leadership Conference. “And I don’t mean that in, like, a censorious, gatekeeping way.” What’s the difference between her “redrawing the lines” of acceptable speech and other people doing it? What makes one “censorious” and “gatekeeping” and the other not? Well, because she gets to decide. That’s what so much of the free-speech panic was ever about: making sure the right people were in charge of what you see, hear, and read. Notably, this has very little to do with reporting the news, which is supposed to be what CBS News does. But if the point of installing Weiss was to ensure that she would gatekeep on behalf of right-wing interests, that is precisely what she appears to be doing.

The people who profited most from the cancel culture/free speech panic were less interested in actual freedom of speech than establishing their own control over public discourse. You don't even have to take my word for it. www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2025/1...

ICE documents reveal plan to hold 80,000 immigrants in warehouses The Trump administration wants to build seven large-scale deportation hubs to speed up deportations, internal ICE documents show.

WaPo reports that ICE is planning 7 massive human warehouses holding 5,000 to 10,000 people.

Recalls the acting ICE director 2015 statement that he wanted to see a “business”-oriented approach to deportations, “like [Amazon] Prime, but with human beings”.

www.washingtonpost.com/business/202...

I love to hear that the book is being taught!

That's wonderful. Also kudos for sharing a range of Age of Revolutions-era stories on your podcast. It's invaluable.