Volume 49 Issue 1 | French Historical Studies | Duke University Press

The new issue of French Historical Studies is out!
read.dukeupress.edu/french-histo...

Thanks, Rick. It's the first thing I've ever published about the 19th century (or, really, about anything pre-1945) -- I'm very proud of it but also nervous to have it out in the world!

“Queens of the Earth” with Women to Serve Them: White Freedom and Enslaved Black Labor in Flora Tristan's Feminist Imagination Abstract. Slavery—not simply as an analogy for gendered domination, but as a concrete institution of racial exploitation—shaped how renowned socialist feminist Flora Tristan envisioned freedom for white women. This article focuses on Pérégrinations d'une paria, Tristan's monumental memoir of her 1833–1834 journey from Paris to Peru via Bordeaux, Cape Verde, and Chile. This voyage brought Tristan into sustained contact with the slave trade and chattel slavery, primarily in locales outside the purview of formal French colonial rule. Pérégrinations thus offers an opportunity to examine how not only imperial but also global forms of racial violence influenced French feminist understandings of sexed and gendered freedom in the 1800s. Despite Tristan's formal commitment to abolitionism, in Peru she not only utilized the enslaved labor of Black and Indigenous people but also elaborated a vision of white female liberation that was directly dependent on that labor. Her articulation in Pérégrinations of what it would mean for white women like herself to be truly free—an articulation focused on mobility, corporeal autonomy, and circulation in urban space—presupposed their dominion over the bodies of men and, especially, women of color.

The new issue of French Historical Studies is out! Come for my article on Flora Tristan, enslaved women's labor, & feminism; stay for Nate Grau's great piece on colonial reform & state violence in 1940s Madagascar. @sfhs.bsky.social

Watch this, it's astonishing.

Once again, we cancelled $86M in Dept of Education funding across all of America’s universities for area & foreign language studies - programs created during the Cold War expressly for national security purposes - because we were told we couldn’t afford it & it wasn’t a government priority anymore.

Tweet from the US Holocaust Memorial Museum: "Anne Frank was targeted and murdered solely because she was Jewish. Leaders making false equivalencies to her experience for political purposes is never acceptable. Despite tensions in Minneapolis, exploiting the Holocaust is deeply offensive, especially as antisemitism surges."

The US Holocaust Museum being more outraged by Tim Walz saying that, like Anne Frank, children today are in hiding from armed agents of the state, than they are about the fact that children are in hiding from armed agents of the state, is why Holocaust remembrance culture is in crisis.

Every social theory undergirding Trumpism has been broken on the steel of Minnesotan resolve. The multiracial community in Minneapolis was supposed to shatter. It did not. It held until Bovino was forced out of the Twin Cities with his long coat between his legs. The secret fear of the morally depraved is that virtue is actually common, and that they’re the ones who are alone. In Minnesota, all of the ideological cornerstones of MAGA have been proved false at once. Minnesotans, not the armed thugs of ICE and the Border Patrol, are brave. Minnesotans have shown that their community is socially cohesive—because of its diversity and not in spite of it. Minnesotans have found and loved one another in a world atomized by social media, where empty men have tried to fill their lonely soul with lies about their own inherent superiority. Minnesotans have preserved everything worthwhile about “Western civilization,” while armed brutes try to tear it down by force.

Last week in Minnesota, I watched ordinary people risk their lives to protect their neighbors. In the process, they not only won a significant—though not final—victory against authoritarianism, they proved virtually every MAGA social theory wrong. (gift link) www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...

Voting NO on the DHS funding bill is the bare minimum.

Backing Kristi Noem’s impeachment is the bare minimum.

Holding law-breaking ICE agents legally accountable is the bare minimum.

ICE is beyond reform. Abolish it.

Alex Pretti from his early days working at the VA

Alex from our time working together, while he was in nursing school. Later, he moved to ICU, working as a nurse to support critically ill Veterans. He had such a great attitude. We’d chat between patients about trying to get in a mountain bike ride together. Will never happen now

I know people keep saying this but it’s hard to communicate the depth of active resistance here. Like, I’m on random cafes and people are checking in for observation shifts. Signs everywhere. Folks in visibility vests on the corners. It’s wild. Absolutely wild.

@andreapitzer.bsky.social is essential reading on concentration camps past and present, as always.

Mayor Jacob Frey: “To ICE, get the fuck out of Minneapolis.”

If you are an author who is writing about reproductive justice, well I have good news. The University of Iowa is launching a special book series focused on RJ and we are looking for contributors. Details on the website and a kick off event tomorrow! lrj.sites.uiowa.edu

Check out this online curated issue of French Historical Studies with free access to articles on the topic of “What’s Old is New Again? The French Extreme Right from Dreyfus to Vichy and the Contemporary Authoritarian Impulse” read.dukeupress.edu/french-histo...

Same.

you could fact check this — there aren’t 30 million illegal immigrants and there is no evidence that the presence of an immigrant in say houston has any impact on housing in madison, wisconsin — or you could note straightforwardly that this is just nazi rhetoric

Cornell agreed to pay $30m, hand over admissions data with demographic breakdowns, produce annual "campus climate" surveys to check on antisemitism and changes "since October of 2023," and—here's the dumbest part they agreed to—that the govt can open new investigations whenever it wants.

Appeasers.

Join us next Tuesday: "Gurs, Les Milles, Rivesaltes: New Perspectives on French Concentration Camps (1939-2007)", with Emily Marker and Terry Peterson (FIU), NYU, 53 Washington Square North, 6:30pm. More info: as.nyu.edu/departments/...

Why This Essay Could Cause the University of Virginia to Shut Down How Linda McMahon’s latest “compact” would do deep and permanent harm to American higher education

This, from @sivav.bsky.social, is the mic drop reply to the “Compact” you have been waiting for. It won’t, but it should really just end the discussion and deliberations straight up. newrepublic.com/article/2013...

@lataco.bsky.social first began as a blog documenting local Mexican cuisine. Now, it’s an essential reporting powerhouse to the city as Trump’s mass deportation plot unfolds.

Check out the latest from our friends at Reveal: tinyurl.com/4cm2bsdr

brown alums sign and share standstrongbrown.org/reject-trump...

the president of the united states wants to use the american military to kill american citizens on american soil. that's the whole story!

Nothing says “land of the free” like armed agents of the state saying “show me your papers if you want your daughter back” bsky.app/profile/nbcb...

We're witnessing the most aggressive, fanatical crackdown on free speech in my lifetime. The speed and breadth of government censorship and private sector and nonprofit capitulation has been astonishing. As has the lack of urgency/silence from people who've long claimed to care about this stuff.

What might be more surprising is how closely Trump’s view of the prerogatives and entitlements of abusive husbands towards their abused wives mirror his own sense of his prerogatives and entitlements as president towards his abused country. Throughout his second term, Trump has spoken of the 2024 election in terms similar to the way that Hale spoke of the marriage vow: as an irrevocable grant of total power. He believes, he says, that because he won the 2024 election, that there are now no more rights that Americans have that he must respect: that he can discard the will of Congress, fire civil servants at will, kidnap our neighbors and invade our cities.

I wrote about Trump’s comments trivializing domestic violence, and tried to chart the parallels between his own theory of governance and the logic of abusers. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

A screenshot of Facebook comments. The first, from somebody named Marcella, says "Wake up America! The encroachment is insidious and dangerous to our ideals and beliefs." In reply, Soren says "That's why we turned French when they started offering French classes, right?" Replying to Soren, somebody named Ken says "The French don't have a record of colonizing and conquering countries; and forcing their culture on the natives. Arabs do."

People are melting down at a Tribune article about CHSD 230 considering adding Arabic to its language learning electives. I wasted time in the comments, which I normally avoid doing since it's useless and awful, but it led to possibly the funniest thing anybody's ever said to me about France.

I love using this exercise!

Columbia Agrees to $200 Million Fine to Settle Fight With Trump

You can never bend the knee enough to appease an authoritarian bully.

This is a devastating blow to academic freedom & freedom of speech at Columbia.

Never in the history of this nation has there been an administration so intent on the utter destruction of higher education as we know it.

Opinion | Don’t call it ‘Alligator Alcatraz.’ Call it a concentration camp. This facility’s purpose fits the classic model, and its existence points to serious dangers ahead for the country.

I wrote about how the Everglades experiment fits into the history of concentration camps in the US and abroad, and how it will connect a domestic network of camps to an international one. We’re watching the imposition of a global concentration camp network.

Arendt says you know you're in a police state if facing criminal charges makes you safer. "Only as an offender against the law can he gain protection from it. As long as his trial and his sentence last, he will be safe from that arbitrary police rule against which there are no lawyers & no appeals."