Why did empires transplant their own institutions to some colonies but not others? My book, out next week from Yale University Press, challenges the conventional wisdom—with implications for how we understand the nature of empire, among other things.🧵amazon.com/dp/0300253230/

Big Jeet fan but this is exactly the problem with contemporary film criticism that attempts to be political while ignoring the entire tradition: a film that symptomatically illustrates an ideological contradiction is A GREAT THING not a problem!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I think the *core* principle underlying left leaning cultural criticism is that the culture is the realm in which humans work out the social contradictions of experience and the societies in which they live; when institutions or other means prove insufficient to solving them

If that is true, good art is not bourgeois taste or “fidelity” to realism (itself an ideological, bourgeois aesthetic). Good art is that which best offers the expressions of contradiction of a given social order or moment in history

List of nineteenth-century apple trees in William C. Bronson's field. Early Sweet, Crooked Tree, Greenings, Golden Red, Mary Gold, Roxbury Russet... Do we have their descendants? Are any of them still there, hidden in the CT woods? --Bronson Family Papers, Yale Univ Library

Again: insurance companies are unbelievably sophisticated and complicated machines and they are very very important to law. Don't get me wrong about that.

Early Americanists with mss who want to be supported with respect and enthusiasm should continue to submit said mss to the American Beginnings series at the University of Chicago Press where we have many good projects underway 😇

My kid loves going to the library— now they're all closed on Sunday. Eric Adams just slashed the DOE lunch budget, too, so they've cut the best meals at his school: chicken dumplings, roasted chicken & burritos, plus cookies & salads. He asked me when the next mayoral election is

The entire historical field is in crisis, but pre-1800 is even worse. Mini-🧵 We are running out of historians who work before 1900/1800. In 2014-2017, the discipline shrunk by 27%. We only lost 12% of people working post-1800, we lost 45%!!! of the people working pre-1800. 1/5

This is why I tell my social justice-minded students to forget my classes and learn the doctrines that really matter: insurance law, corporate finance, tax, banking

When your letter of recommendation isn't exactly glowing...

I am heartbroken to learn of the passing of Professor Trevor Burnard, my supervisor and mentor during my past five years Wilberforce Institute I have so much to thank you for and yet I have missed my opportunity to tell you how much your support meant to me. You will be much missed.

in a largely gentrified neighborhood (chain stores = bad yield) liquor stores will never let your kids down.