I would add: even if you don’t call yourself a legal historian but study history involving law-ish stuff, you’ll find a welcoming, friendly and brilliant group of scholars at ASLH!
Photo of a cuneiform tablet fragment shaped a bit like an irregular diamond. It preserves nearly 20 incomplete lines of text separated by a horizontal ruling
There's a broken cuneiform tablet from the Old Babylonian period, nearly 4,000 years ago, which preserves a tiny portion of a dialogue between two friends.
It feels a bit like the conversations I've been having for the past week, so I wanted to share it.
Between Two Rivers
Will make you want to learn Cuneiform, to be a Brewer-Queen!
Fabulous read in paperback now.
The mass murder of civilians in Gaza, the brazen attacks on hospitals and schools, without any accountability has created a new kind of warfare that should terrify and enrage all of us.
Every child lost is someone’s whole world. Every life lost matters www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...
Deux postes de doctorant·e·s à pourvoir au Centre Walras Pareto pour la rentrée 2026
un·e Assistant diplômé·e en Histoire de la pensée et philosophie économiques
un·e Assistant diplômé·e en Histoire des idées politiques
Délai de postulation : 2 mai 2026!
Last chance to register: landmark conference to mark 250 years since publication of The Wealth of Nations. ‘Modern Enquiries into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations’ 5-6 March 2026 Keynes Hall, King’s College, Cambridge: Thursday, 9.15am – 5pm, and Friday, 9.00 – 12.45. Free, registration required. Arthur Goodhart Lecture Theatre (LG19), Law Faculty, Sidgwick Site: concluding public forum, Friday, 2-4 pm. No booking required, arrive early to secure a seat. All free and open to the public, students especially welcome.
Last chance to register: major conference celebrating 250 years of 'The Wealth of Nations': the most famous text in the history of political economy and economics.
Leading historians and economists will assess its legacy & ask what it means for the next century.
Free, open to public, link below ⬇️⬇️
Image of a book jacket for Beyond the Ocean: France and the Atlantic World from the Crusades to the Age of Revolutions by Christopher Hodson and Brett Rushforth.
Full book jacket just dropped, and we're pretty happy with it. Huge thanks to @cecilefromont.bsky.social, @soccerpolitics.bsky.social, Alice, and Andrés for your generous words! #earlymodern #BeyondTheOcean global.oup.com/academic/pro...
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/74/La_Sorbonne._Conf%C3%A9rence_de_M._le_professeur_Bloch._RBA_3%3D_163-1._Pi%C3%A8ce_79.jpg Carte postale / Gustave Bloch (wikipedia)
Le père de Marc Bloch donnant un cours d’histoire romaine à la Sorbonne vers 1910. On remarque les trois jeunes femmes dans l’assistance fort studieuse pré-ordis portables.
(On adore l’idée qu’un éditeur de cartes postales se dise que c’est un bon sujet, à quand un revival)
American friends! Come listen to our Director, Nicholas Cronk, discussing Voltaire and Slavery on March 26th
@amphilsociety.bsky.social: www.voltaire.ox.ac.uk/news-item/ce...
In 2026, colleges must teach students that this is not the end of the world. We must teach hope. Current undergraduates can barely remember a time before the threats of climate change and authoritarianism loomed to catastrophic scale. Since 2010, the future depicted in TV, books, and games has been dystopian or apocalyptic, so for our current students the end of the world feels more familiar and realistic than a future with hope. Now we are asking them to choose majors and life paths when the desirability, indeed the very existence, of whole sectors of employment are in question, due to the overwhelming promises of LLMs and machine learning. As young people hear daily that vocation after vocation may vanish into automation’s maw, and that democracy, liberty, land, sea, and sky are all in jeopardy, despair is growing. Despair is very emotionally tempting. It means freedom from the responsibility to shape the future. This is a terrifying turning point, but many generations before us have faced such turning points, and met them. We can offer our students perspective. Only a few dozen institutions on Earth are more than 900 years old, and the vast majority are universities. The university system is not a house of straw to buckle in this storm: We are the rocks that have sheltered the knowledge, hope, and truth through tumults which have toppled kingdoms while classrooms endured. We can endure this, and be a guiding light through it, but only by recentering, by teaching citizens, not workers; power, not PowerPoint; aspiration, not apocalypse. Despair is how we lose. The classroom is where we battle it. All other battles flow from here. Ada Palmer is an associate professor of history at the University of Chicago.
This, from Ada Palmer as part of The Chronicle's survey of 11 scholars on the future of higher ed, is what I needed to end the week.
❤️🩹 ❤️🔥
Times review of The Crown’s Silence full of egregious claims
Another review of imperial history by the same reviewer in the Washington Examiner
Times review dismisses my book as crass & labels me an American “sucker”—but it’s by the same conservative reviewer who hates books focused on the legacies of empire & slavery, & who wildly misrepresented the excellent collection edited by @alanlester.bsky.social Haters gonna hate! So it begins!
Bravo, Wall Street Journal
Videos Contradict U.S. Account of Minneapolis Shooting by Federal Agents
"See how immigration officers escalated a fatal confrontation Saturday"
Gift link:
www.wsj.com/us-news/vide...
There is far more outrage from tech leaders over a wealth tax than masked ICE agents terrorizing communities and executing civilians in the streets. Tells you what you need to know about the values of our industry.
OpenAI exec James Dyett calling out the cowardice
i think this attitude — that all opposition is illegitimate and nothing we do can be questioned— is probably pervasive in the white house and helps explain why they keep making terrible political choices
🎉 Are you in AHA 2026 American Historical Association @historians.org or hanging around Chicago, IL? 🏙️
My colleagues and I will give a presentation tomorrow in a panel titled "Asian American Racial Formations and the Production of Scientific Knowledge in the Pacific and the American West, 1900–77"!
Starting in 30 min (5:30 PM): AHA President Ben Vinson III, will deliver his presidential address "Reflections on Our Times" at #AHA26.
'In their ambitious histories of slave resistance, Gibson and Hazareesingh are working in the tradition of Aponte, offering a new intellectual and political perspective on the emergence of freedom in the modern world.' Delighted by this generous review from @soccerpolitics.bsky.social ❤️
spoken with an agonizing clarity that breaks asunder the very foundation upon which I at least erected and maintained a certain minimal confidence in the future
Four generations of my family have served our country. Service is in my blood. The President wouldn’t know anything about that.
yes
Chilling.
For anyone looking to read up on the long history of U.S. unilateralism in Latin America -- and how it is inseparable from the history of the United States itself -- one of the books I use in the classroom is Brian Loveman's NO HIGHER LAW. It's dense & encyclopedic, but exhaustive & judicious.
Venezuela more evidence of continuity as much as change www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...
9/ Domitille de Gavriloff présente sa thèse qui porte sur la façon dont l’église traitait les personnes réduite en esclavage dans les colonies françaises des Antilles, montrant que ce traitement était teinté de racialisation dès le 17e siècle.
bsky.app/profile/fond...
16/ L’historienne Olivette Otele souligne les liens très forts qui existent entre la recherche sur les esclavages au RU, la société civile et la question des réparations, mais aussi les difficultés d’avancer sur ces sujets, qui suscitent des résistances ds les institutions.
