Banking on Freedom | Columbia University Press Between 1888 and 1930, African Americans opened more than a hundred banks and thousands of other financial institutions. In Banking on Freedom, Shennette Gar... | CUP

The title is of course a riff on the title of the great book “Banking on Freedom” by @sgarrettscott.bsky.social … cup.columbia.edu/book/banking...

A new piece by me on postal savings and financial citizenship has just been published in the Journal of the Gilded Age & Progressive Era as part of a forum on immigration & consumption… www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Postcard for the event "Rethinking the History of Capitalism: A Conversation between Sven Beckert and Diana Kim," taking place on April 9, 2026, at 7 p.m. at the German HIstorical Institute Washington, 1607 New Hampshire Avenue, Washington, DC

This Thursday, April 9, we’re excited to host "Rethinking the History of Capitalism," a conversation with @svenbeckert.bsky.social and Diana Kim (Georgetown University) about writing the history of capitalism on a global scale. Register here to watch the livestream: www.ghi-dc.org/events/event...

Listening to the Past Listening to the Past: Digital Approaches to the History of Sound and Language March 19 – 20, 2026 | German Historical Institute, Washington, D.C.   Workshop at the German Historical Institute Washing...

Looking forward to co-convening the workshop “Listening to the Past” in a couple of days at @ghiwashington.bsky.social, generously supported by @volkswagenstiftung.de — should be two days of interesting discussions! ghiworkshops.hypotheses.org/listening-to...

Welcome! You are invited to join a webinar: Tariffs in Historical Perspective. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email about joining the webinar. This Future of the Past episode brings together experts to discuss the history of the use of tariffs--from a source of revenue to a tool to protect U.S. manufacturing. This hour-long webinar will explore how our current usage of tariffs fits into the longer history of U.S. trade policy.

SCOTUS ruled today against President Trump’s tariffs. How have tariffs shaped American history? Find out at our March 5 webinar, Tariffs in Historical Perspective.
Register: https://ow.ly/Cmcp50YiWKh

Zwischen Forschung und Vermittlung: Digitale Quellenarbeit am Deutschen Historischen Institut in Washington Screenshot der German History in Documents and Images Website (GHDI). German History in Documents and Images. URL: https://germanhistorydocs.org/ (Abgerufen am 27. Januar 2026). Foto: Lena Essifi, © G...

Our @germanhistorydocs.bsky.social colleague Insa Kummer was recently interviewed about her role managing the German History in Documents and Images project — check out the conversation here: www.historischer-augenblick.de/dhi-washingt...

CfP: AI through History, History through AI The Eighth Conference on Digital Humanities and Digital History hosted by the C²DH in Belval will revolve around Artificial Intelligence in the historical disciplines.

Together with our partners at @c2dh.uni.lu we are happy to share the CfP for our 2026 Digital Humanities and Digital History conference: "AI through History, History through AI," taking place this June in Luxembourg. Proposals due March 1! www.uni.lu/c2dh-en/news...

Librarians are amazing 🙌

Courtesy Wikimedia Commons. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Chinese_detail,_The_only_one_barred_out_cph.3b48680_(cropped).jpg

Today is International Migrants Day! To celebrate, read Heather Ruth Lee’s piece from 2022, “In Pursuit of Merchant Status: The Migration Strategy of Early Twentieth-Century Chinese Restaurant Owners under Chinese Exclusion.” https://tinyurl.com/4zk8y9ca

I must say I was rather pleasantly surprised this year when one of my second-grader’s lessons was on “How to write a letter”

CFP: 'Difficult Collections' Special issue of 'Paper Trails' @uclpress.bsky.social. Focus on challenges of working with troubling heritage collections (colonialism, eugenics, representation, etc). Proposals: 31/01/26; Submissions: 31/05/26. Details: blogs.ucl.ac.uk/special-coll... #GLAM ##HistorySky

CFP: Doing Migration History with Digital Methods.
🔥Come and join us in Paris next year for the sommer school at the @dhiparis from June 22-26, 2026.
🖥️Rethink how digital sources reshape migration history, from research questions to methods and narratives, while tackling bias and meeting legal […]

Current Research in Digital History Hosted by the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, Current Research in Digital History is an open-access, peer-reviewed, online publication. Its primary aim is to encourage and publish scholarship in digital history that offers discipline-specific arguments and interpretations.

CRDH Vol. 8: New research from Fabio Gigone, Natacha Klein Käfer, Natália da Silva Perez, Nadav Borenstein, Miara Fraikin, Sanne Maekelberg, and Anna McGee explores topics from royal iconography to AI-powered print analysis, midwifery education to palace networks.
Read here: https://crdh.rrchnm.org

Happening TODAY—3pm ET: Why NARA matters + how you can act to protect access to America’s records. The "history of NOW" is no longer being safeguarded. Learn what you can do to advocate for our nation's archives.
🔗 https://ow.ly/P0tc50X5P8H

The October 2025 issue of The Exchange is now out!

#BHC #BHC2026 #bizhis
mailchi.mp/thebhc/the-e...

🚨🚨📢📢 New open-access article (co-authored w/ @nuriatargarona.bsky.social & @mirandalubbers.bsky.social), just out in American Behavioral Scientist:

“The Relational Toll of Political Involvement in Polarized Times: Relationship Decay Within Activists’ Personal Networks” doi.org/10.1177/0002...

Watch the AHA’s Congressional Briefing on the history of tariffs on C-SPAN. Panelists @douglasirwin.bsky.social, @sharonannmurphy.bsky.social, & @rauchway.bsky.social discussed how the government has implemented tariffs in the past & how they have impacted the economy. 🗃️

A box of albums and photographs from the collection

A first look at the documents as sorting them into chronological order began.

The central person sent this letter, written in English, to her sister not many months after her arrival in the United States.

After it has been processed by the Horner Library we anticipate it will be an incredible collection for shedding light on German & German-American life in the interwar years…

Diaries and albums from the collection

The collection includes at least 200 letters, both those she sent to her parents and letters received from them in turn, from the 1920s and into the 1930s. The collection also included diaries she kept as a young woman between 1917 and 1921 and several hundred photographs…

From info we had already received we had learned that the collection represented the papers of a woman from the Münster area who immigrated to the United States in the 1920s…

Last week I had the pleasure of collaborating with the Horner Library at the German Society of Pennsylvania to pick up the collection, bring it to Philadelphia, and take part in some really preliminary processing…

Earlier this spring someone reached out to the Migrant Connections project about a collection of German letters, photographs, and other documents he had salvaged from an abandoned apartment building in Newark, Delaware…

Slide with title Digital Humanities for a World Unmade, blue background with stylized images of a Dutch windmill, Leaning Tower of Pisa, Hagia Sofia, Big Ben, and the Singaporean lion.

Here's a write-up of my keynote from #DH2025, since academic publishing is slow and this was written for right now. roopikarisam.com/talks-cat/dh...

Magnifying glass with computer

Take our survey! We want to know what historians are experiencing as they use brick-and-mortar libraries & archives, as well as digital collections this summer.

Your feedback will help us assess what is happening at the grassroots.

ow.ly/X0Xp50W7wiX

The Craft of Writing History with Drafting the Past: An Interview with Kate Carpenter The American Historical Review is pleased to present this conversation with historian and history podcaster Kate Carpenter about her innovative podcast Dra

In the June issue of the #AHR, @danieljstory.bsky.social teams up with @katecarp.bsky.social, host and producer of @draftingthepast.bsky.social, to discuss the craft of writing history, while unpacking the minutiae of both the writing process and podcast interviews. #HistoryinFocus 🗃️

A.I. Is Poised to Rewrite History. Literally.

Lots of commentary on this piece already, all of which I agree with.

For historians, research is a fundamental part of writing.

To farm it out to AI changes the nature of this intellectual process in fundamental ways.

And as Stacy Schiff points out, it also takes all the fun out of it.

We Traced Pope Leo XIV’s Ancestry Back 500 Years. Here’s What We Found. (Gift Article) Noblemen, enslaved people, freedom fighters, slaveowners: what the complex family tree of the first American pontiff reveals.

Some fascinating research here

Update: my chapter on #gossip and @gothamscholar.bsky.social 's chapter on financial knowledge of immigrants are now #openaccess

Event – GHI WashingtonGHI_Logo_Bild_RGB_GHI_Logo_Bild_RGB_

We’ve extended our “Listening to the Past” workshop #CallForPapers to June 8 — please share with colleagues interested in the history of sound, of language, and potential AI-based applications to the same… www.ghi-dc.org/events/event...

LIVE! @ BHC 2025 Who Makes Cents · Episode

🎙️ New Episode: Who Makes Two Cents? Live @ BHC 2025
"If you want to write about class and power, how can you not write about businesses?" (Caitlin Rosenthal in Atlanta at the BHC 2025 annual meeting) 🎧 Listen more BHC voices on the history of capitalism here: open.spotify.com/episode/3cNb...