Resharing as I’m rewriting some of this chapter, and because conspiracy and violence remain… top of mind and hand

repeat after me: people are more important than photographs of people.

Opinion | The new Sun King Donald Trump’s rococo Oval Office decorations are old-fashioned and un-American.

“Behold the new Sun King, a wannabe emperor who views his powers as absolute — who governs by executive order, and has been recorded giggling in his gilded chamber with Salvadoran autocrat Nayib Bukele ... God save us from the king.”

My latest in WaPo:
www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/int...

May I recommend my book if you want fires, oil spills, eugenics, earthquakes, mudslides, unfriendly neighbors, the mores of the wealthy, beautiful beaches and mountains, and a reference to HBO’s Succession AND the Duchess of Sussex in one tidy package on sale? press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/bo...

appreciate you and y’all’s labor. here to help if needed 🫡

As someone who was (going) to participate in this program, this is heartbreaking news.

book/print history folks: what are your favorite texts on the environmental/material/political history of paper (specifically 20th century paper from trees)?

An illustration depicting an assortment of features

Peacock feathers

Phyllis Wheatley using a quill pen

A woman in a feathered dress, surrounded by birds

Material Intelligence has released a new issue on 🪶feathers🪶 — from feathered baskets and quills to beds and hats!

(I wrote about sandpaper for their sand issue a few months ago :)

www.materialintelligencemag.org

will slowly share some contemporary inspiration for this work….first up:

Joe Minter’s Four Hundred Years of Free Labor, 1995.

Front cover visual of a book, reproducing a painting of a seated woman in a red dress with a long white apron, sitting and working on some kind of hand craft (weaving or embroidery?) in her lap.

New from @amsterdamupress.bsky.social -

Embodied Experiences of Making in Early Modern Europe: Bodies, Gender, & Material Culture
Ed. @sarahabendall.bsky.social & @serenadyer.bsky.social
aup.nl/en/book/9789...

Read the intro (no paywall!) here: assets.ctfassets.net/4wrp2um278k7...

let me know what you think :)!

thanks for your engagement!!

the most generous of historians!

means the world coming from
you! thanks for amplifying :)

does anyone else feel there’s shift in how folks are discussing the archive? i’ve started noticing the use of archival “abundance” instead of absences and silences with frequency.

“Crafting Freedom: Race and Social Mobility among Free Artisans of Color in Cartagena and Charleston,” Atlantic Studies (2017). www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1...

thanks for building ! So helpful

Insurgent Tooling and the Collective Making of Slave Revolts Hampton Smith Sometime in the spring of 1800, enslaved tobacco cutters in Henrico County, Virginia, brought their scythes to one of Brookfield plantation’s blacksmiths, Solomon Prosser, for sharpening...

ok trying this: pleased to share the first bit of my dissertation!
“Insurgent tooling and the collective making of slave revolts”

hi all, i’m new here: my name is hampton, i’m working on a dissertation about artisanal knowledge and abolition, particularly in the United States.

some of my writing can be found at my website:

hamptondessmith.com