🎉We are thrilled to announce that the inaugural Persun Visiting Scholar is Dr. KT Shively! They are an associate professor of Civil War and Reconstruction history at Virginia Commonwealth University with specialties in early American military, environmental, & medical history.

If you’re in the State College area we hope you’ll join us tomorrow, Friday, and Saturday for the Brose Lectures featuring the incomparable Thavolia Glymph! Glad to see you for one or all three; lectures are free and open to the public.

Thrilled these terrific scholars will join our community this fall! Allison's (AlliMitch) project explores Black electoral politics, voter suppression & realignment in FL & Hannah's looks at working-class Black & white women in postbellum SC courts: richardscenter.la.psu.edu/news/

Big congratulations to all the great historians and other scholars and especially my brilliant colleague Christina Snyder! ⁦Richards Center⁩ ⁦PSU History Dept.⁩ prweb.com/releases/annou…

🎉We are so excited to welcome Allison Mitchell (AlliMitch) and Hannah Hicks as our next postdoctoral scholars! Allison will be the Richards Center and Penn State Africana Research Center postdoc in African American history and Hannah will be the Richards Center postdoc in the Civil War Era.🎉

It's going to be a brilliant book! Thanks for joining us, Gautham Rao (same username on bsky)!!

The courts have been the most regressive institution of national governance across the 230+ years of American history. I implore you, don’t let the very occasional good decision give you faith in them as governing institutions.

Big news from Brown in anticipation of 2026: a multi-year investment in scholarly engagement re: the American Revolution, its legacies, and the role of research universities in a democratic society, beginning with... a POSTDOC!!

apply.interfolio.com/138409

Some folks might find it freeing if they embraced my personal mantra, “the Supreme Court: Getting the Constitution Wrong Since 1796”

This is a great thread about teaching in the context of today's #SCOTUS and matches my own experience teaching both constitutional history & Supreme Court history.

NEW: Pa Supreme Court rejects 2nd Amendment challenge to local zoning ordinance that prohibits residential shooting ranges.

It concludes with another plea to SCOTUS to clean up the mess it created in Bruen.

pacourts.us/assets/opinion…

Grateful to have edited this special symposium edition of the Journal of American Const. History with David Schwartz. Pieces published or forthcoming from me and Reva Siegel, Neil Siegel, Serena Mayeri, @andrewcoan2, Dr. Felicia Kornbluh, and more.
jach.law.wisc.edu

Takes on this are wild. 65% of voters support SCOTUS proceedings being televised, and 70% think it would build trust in SCOTUS.

It's not a partisan issue, and not controversial at all

With respect, a corrective: The Hawaiian Supreme Court interpreted its state constitution to reflect the history and tradition of the Kingdom of Hawai'i (and did not reject Bruen). But the opinion raises fascinating questions about 'history & tradition' in the context of empire.

Thanks to the editors of California Law Review for seeing value in the article and making space for History in their law review. Heller & Bruen make it so necessary that historians and legal scholars have a shared conversation about the Second Amendment.

I'm thrilled that 'The Myth of Continuity in American Gun Culture,' a long (35k word) article that I spent most of the past year working on, will be published by the California Law Review in Feb. 2025 papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf…

Check out this new opportunity for legal practitioners, advocates, scholars, and other experts in constitutional law and history.

I think historians should spend more time on the guarantee clause too, and what it means in terms of the legal changes that came with the revolution. The guarantee clause is in article 4. It guarantees a Republican form of government in the states.

Very much agree with the sentiment here but would reframe it slightly. The Court isn’t even “doing history”—that requires understanding people, time, and space in their own context. They are using a poor substitute for history to make legal determinations about the present.

The Special Issue, 'Histories of Executive Power,' of the American Journal of Legal History is now published.

It includes my article, 'Removal and the Changing Debate over Executive Power at the Founding.'

Check it out!

academic.oup.com/ajlh/article/6…

academic.oup.com/ajlh/issue/63/3