Hegseth’s ridiculous tweet saying that a refusal to vaccinate is kind of freedom is an insult to all the men, women, and children who have rolled up their sleeves to protect themselves and their communities from the common threat of contagious diseases.
Here's the whole document, printed in Boston in April 1776 about a year before George Washington changed his mind after being convinced by his doctors, his soldiers, and his wife Martha to order the mass inoculation of the Continental Army. collections.nlm.nih.gov/catalog/nlm:...
This administration pretends to honor the 250th, but brazenly dismisses its most profound legacies. 250 years ago this month, Washington’s surgeon general John Morgan wrote that government must “provide for the safety of its members by rendering the practice of inoculation as universal as possible.”
If Hegseth’s thinks being scared of a vaccine and hiding behind supposed religious objections is what freedom’s warriors do, what must he think of Revolutionaries like Ethan Allen, who challenged a ban on inoculation promoted by religious leaders by getting inoculated on a Sunday during church?
I approve this suggestion. If you want to buy my book just to throw it at someone who needs to read it, it’s fine by me. But also just handing it over with a condescending “bless your heart” might work too.
In February 1777, General George Washington ordered the first mass immunization campaign in American history by mandating that his troops be inoculated against smallpox. He protected the Continental Army from an epidemic that was deadlier than British forces.
249 years later, we have this idiot.
My review of the volume _Oceanic Japan_ for the journal _Animal History_ is now online. Once a fish guy, always a fish guy. 🐟 🐠 🎣 🐡
online.ucpress.edu/ah/article/d...
*Revolutionary Natures* is now in print. @eastasiascitech.bsky.social @uwapress.uw.edu
And of course I am the voice of doom in this NYT piece about academic historians and the 250th www.nytimes.com/2026/04/21/a...
Update: 1200 years of climate data now safe with next caretaker!
Out today!
BLACK STUDIES ON 135TH STREET is out today! My contribution, “Following Schomburg’s Example,” is about amplifying decency.
U.S. culture doesn’t require white people to be decent, so if you want more decency in the world, you must amplify & support it when you see it! True 100 years ago. True now.
Cover of March 2026 Journal of American History
First page of Adam Rothman, "Slip the Yoke and Change the Joke: How Abolitionists Used Runaway Slave Advertisements to Ridicule Slavery," Journal of American History, Volume 112, Issue 4, March 2026, Pages 659–679
Nice to see it in print
Happy John Muir Day (a fraught figure like so many on the Calendar, but still a vital part of our environmental histories) & Sister Helen Prejean Day!
memorydaycalendar.blogspot.com/p/april-nomi...
Just started the Barns book on blackface and now I am doubting my sense of the field when it comes to what I thought standard practice terms “Japanese incarceration.” Is this not the preferred term of survivors, descendants, and the groups that represent them? (Rather than “concentration camps.”)
"Covet, it's an old-fashioned word but a beautiful word, really. It means the IRS owes me $10 billion because the 2020 election was rigged and did you know that you can't get good shower pressure because of windmills"
👇🎯
Tl;dr: Support the liberal arts & fund the damn public universities like we used to
![But [conservative students] also said there were classes and communities at Yale where they felt their perspectives were not welcomed and respected.](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:h6xbkw7bucg6ws3vqwnxqewp/bafkreifhyvftvha4bu7yeui2whxw6kp7umxgpb4vjln4eb7jngofoxt56m)
But [conservative students] also said there were classes and communities at Yale where they felt their perspectives were not welcomed and respected.
Getting back to this passage I cited above, I’m wondering two things: 1) what does it mean for conservative student “perspectives” to be “welcomed and respected“ in class? Doesn’t it depend on the nature of the “perspective,” which in many cases is likely irrelevant to the nature of the course?
Yes! I’d love to talk more about this some day! (I need to do more work on my own family’s history…)
There was a piece in the Times sometime this past year…
Some day I should write some thoughts. Growing up Orthodox in the U.S. for me was as much about culture as it was theology. So to see people converting for theological reasons, well, I know it’s not exactly new, but it’s the current-day politics of the theology (plus the absence of culture) that is.
We live in a country where the two most dynamic, charismatic, eloquent politicians of this century have the first names Barack and Zohran. This is what bothers the white supremacists so much.
They mocked the field of gender studies as meaningless, but I think they really just knew it was onto them.
They're the softest bunch of insecure little manchildren play-acting what they have been told is manly and macho.
(gift link)
But a certain version of it! (Which feels weird for at least some of those of us who were raised as Orthodox Christians in the country.)
Current hostility (on the part of politicians and institutional leaders alike) to even looking at the past is strikingly blunt. It touches many disciplines, but denying history is the key issue.
The backlash against Bouie’s piece on Enlightenment and then the 1619 Project were public turning points
Trump is reported close to a "deal" with himself under which US taxpayers would pay him $10 billion.
I served in multiple communist and authoritarian dictatorships, but I never witnessed corruption on this scale or this blatant.
This is what so many institutions—and schools in general—ought to be doing! There are so many good and right reasons to embrace the liberal arts. But if for no other reason, do it because this is what people are going to want! It’s the small, good schools that are already pivoting back to this!
My small but mighty alma mater Gustavus Adolphus College just launched a new strategic plan that starts with a full-throated endorsement of a liberal arts education today, and I am very proud.
