Sausage fest! I’ve been asked by the authors of this statement by the Coordinating Council for Women Historians at the American Historical Association to republish their response to the #StanfordSausageFest published yesterday at History News Network.  The authors link the specter of a return to “history’s dark age as a gentlemen’s protection society” to recent consciousness-raising efforts to address sexual harassment and assault in academia and in the wider world. Read on, and scroll all the way down for a brief note on my lengthy absence from this space. by Sasha Turner, B ..read more

I know it’s been a long blog-silence around these parts.  More on that later, but I’ve got something to say and I think we all need to hear it. It’s gotten so a bish can’t look at the internets or the cover of the Rolling Stone without more news about scummy scumbag men using their professional authority to coerce younger women (and a few young men) to perform or witness specific sexual acts by these creeps.  Given the conversation all this autumn about sexual assault and sexual harassment at work in Hollywood (Harvey Weinstein, Kevin Spacey), journalism (Roger Ailes, M ..read more

Hey-y’all! I’m not in Colorado, but my sources there are keeping me abreast of one of my favorite things about summer there: close encounters with bears and cougars in the WUI (the Wildlife Urban Interface).  Today’s news does not disappoint!  A 19-year old camper in Ward was attacked by a bear.  The Denver Post headline explains that the  “youth camp staffer says he woke up with his head in the bear’s jaws.”  Yikes! The earlier print edition of the headline describes the experience even more dramatically, in my view: From the Denver Post, July 10, 2017 Never ..read more

Yale University Press. 2016 Friends, I know it’s been a quiet month on the blog.  What can I say?  The news moves at the speed of light these days, and it’s difficult for me sometimes to conceptualize anything to add to the frantic online conversations.  I wrote up a short article, “The Captivity of Otto Warmbier:  Outsiders, Insiders, and Mad Kings,” for Public Seminar a few weeks ago, just before his death in Cincinnati was announced.  I try to put his ordeal into context with the long centuries of North American captivities locally and globally.  Check ..read more

Mary Maples Dunn, 1931-2017 Howdy, friends–I’ve got a big announcement today!  Many of you may know that Mary Maples Dunn, a prominent early American women’s historian, died in March.  Nicole Eustace of New York University invited me to co-edit a special edition of Early American Studies in her honor.  Here are the details: Call For Papers: Women and Religion in the Early Americas For a special issue in honor of the life and career of Mary Maples Dunn, Early American Studies seeks article-length contributions from scholars working on the history of women and religion in th ..read more

Cambridge University Press, 2015 Hello friends–today’s post is just a little bagatelle from my review of Adele Perry’s excellent Colonial Relations:  The Douglas-Connolly Family and the Nineteenth-Century Imperial World (Cambridge University Press, 2015) at Borealia:  A Group Blog on Early Canadian History.  This is a “translocal” history of the extended family of Sir James Douglas (1803-77) and Amelia Connolly Douglas (1812-90) that spans five generations in the Caribbean, Britain, and all of the North American fur trade.  To wit: As accountant at ..read more

WANTED: MORE INFORMATION! Did anyone else see this article from the Wall Street Journal last night: “The Campus Mob Came for Me, and You, Professor, Could Be Next?”  Some flava: Racially charged, anarchic protests have engulfed Evergreen State College, a small, public liberal-arts institution where I have taught since 2003. In a widely disseminated video of the first recent protest on May 23, an angry mob of about 50 students disrupted my class, called me a racist, and demanded that I resign. My “racist†offense? I had challenged coercive segregation by race. Specifically, I had ob ..read more

Look what I made in 3 minutes with Google translate & the internet! Liberal and left-leaning news orgs are happily publicizing the latest evidence of the dishonesty by the Human Stain (and his family).  He has allegedly ripped off another family’s coat-of-arms and rebranded it (you guessed it) as “TRUMP.”  I have a few thoughts that may prove unpopular, but here goes: First, this seems to be a pretty venial sin compared to the heights of grifting and inept spycraft that he and his administration have reached in just 125 days in office, but okay:  more evidence of unscru ..read more

Margaret Chase Smith (1897-1973), Republican U.S. Senator from Maine from 1949 until her death and the subject of numerous biographies. Peggy Noonan’s column in the Wall Street Journal this weekend, “Why History Will Repay Your Love” (sorry–paywalled!) is an extended advertisement for David McCullough’s latest book, and only secondarily an advertisement for McCullough’s totally original observations about history and its importance. (Get this! John Adams and Thomas Jefferson lived in their present, not our past!  Also, “nothing had to happen the way it happened,” and “knowing his ..read more

Since everything is Watergate-mania this week, this alternative view of the United States in the 1970s is worth a few minutes of your time today.  Check out this old-school, shaky-cam cinema verité video accompanied by the Modern Lovers’s “Old World,” (1972): If you watch the video closely you’ll see a New York that’s hard to come by even in the outer boroughs, let alone Manhattan anymore:  laundry hanging out to dry over the street, a huckster’s pushcart full of vegetables for sale, and a shot of the World Trade Center’s twin towers under construction.  This wa ..read more