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briandelay.bsky.social
Berkeley Historian. Author of War of a Thousand Deserts. For Norton, finishing Aim at Empire: An international History of American Revolutions, through the Barrel of a Gun. Also 2nd Amendment cases. Birds, too. https://history.berkeley.edu/brian-delay
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LA Friends - I'd love to see you at the Huntington Library at 10:30 this Saturday March 1 for the American Origins seminar, where I'll be sharing a chapter called “Belts & Songs: Why Cherokees went to War against the Colonies in 1776.”

"Sarah Yager, Washington director of advocacy group Human Rights Watch, said the memo 'wouldn’t have been necessary if the Biden administration had followed U.S. laws on arms transfers.'" www.washingtonpost.com/national-sec...

Canada, take note. Appeasement is not the path forward.

🧵 Trump’s plan to take over USPS prompts me to stress again how his actions are emphatically not a return to the 19th-c. spoils system. It’s far worse. It’s the same in one way: Both brought incompetence and corruption into government. But 19th-c. spoils were part of an integrated party system. 1/9

As far as post docs for American history go, this is a sweet one. The Mellon postdoc at Cambridge. 3 years. Please share 🗃️ www.jobs.cam.ac.uk/job/50345/

Front-page story on how US guns get smuggled to Mexico, with helpful graphics @elpaismexico.bsky.social elpais.com/mexico/2025-...

Does the administration know that there are research universities in red states?

Having watched with growing alarm the developments of the last 24 and 36 hours in Washington, I thought I’d take a stab at how the US media would cover this story if it was happening in a foreign country. Here’s that story that should be written this weekend: www.doomsdayscenario.co/p/musk-s-jun...

A chasm is opening in the country between states that teach their children history and states that won't. Grateful for the clarity from the CA Dept. of Education.

abcnews.go.com/Politics/cra... Important story on the sharp rise and fall of crimes with untraceable privately made firearms in response to federal regulations treating DIY kits as firearms. Baltimore is a perfect case study.

In memoriam: Peter Kolchin Some nice remembrances here from former colleagues and students 🗃️

Disaster break. Joe Cocker and Leon Russell perform “The Letter" (1970). The energy flow from the band, to the ecstatic backup singers, out through the crowd - it's just... And Russell on piano pounding out that unforgettable tune like some kind of sleepy mystic www.youtube.com/watch?v=GAr1...

Please download the ACLU’s Mobile Justice app. If you see a problematic government interaction, the app lets you film it and send it to your local ACLU chapter in real time. It also has “know your rights” guides for the most common situations we’re all likely to face in the coming months.

donate.wikimedia.org/wiki/Become_...

This is the first of several threads I will be posting over the next few weeks on Jeff Fynn-Paul’s book NOT STOLEN.

The Young Center for Immigrant Children's Rights: www.theyoungcenter.org

Very sad to learn of Eric Van Young's passing - an incredible historian and wonderfully generous scholar. RIP

The meanings of the word for a wren, from eight different languages... 8. Little walnut (Bulgarian) 7. Little bird in the ditch (Japanese) 6. Thumbling (Finnish) 5. Fence-skedaddler (Danish) 4. Fence-master (Hebrew) 3. Druid bird (Irish) 2. Mouse-brother (Faroese) 1. Little king of winter (Dutch)

Really exciting project using AI/Transcribus to transcribe colonial documents from New Spain

Thanks for assigning the arms trade article Jonathan! Very jazzed to hear that your students liked it 😎

Hablé con Roberto Niembro sobre mi nuevo libro “El primer constitucionalismo mexicano” en el podcast “Las claves del derecho”. youtu.be/H44aCH5WfuI?...

"Quotations from Mr. Mangione’s note to officials are being used in advertising for the Gatalog, a group that publishes designs for 3D-printed guns and accessories online, including a predecessor design to that of the gun the police found with Mr. Mangione." www.nytimes.com/2024/12/12/u...

Terrific Global 1776 call for papers - Hong Kong in Spring 1776 with travel support available.

This conversation between Wendy Brown, @quinnslobodian.com and @danieldenvir.bsky.social is the best thing that I've heard/read on the election and Trump 2.0. Highly recommended. thedig.blubrry.net/podcast/maga...

Post the LAST Sentence of your last article: "The roots of these events sank down into the Age of Revolutions, when the weapons trade first tangled together American state projects and the United States became the Western Hemisphere’s indispensable arms dealer." doi.org/10.1093/ahr/...

Great #VastEarlyAmericas postdoc opportunity on at the John Carter Brown Library

"Adair, Iowa, had a population of 794. So, it seemed suspicious when its three-person police department asked regulators to buy 90 machine guns..." Wild story about cops around the country running guns www.cbsnews.com/news/police-...

And citizens who believe it

Key works on tariff history and related stuff: Daniel Peart, Lobbyists and the Making of US Tariff Policy, 1816–1861 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018). www.press.jhu.edu/books/title/...

Really enjoyed Liz's conversation with Fallon Burner and Russell Reed on the Shawnee-Dunmore War - check it out

My recent essay for The New Yorker, on Latino voters. www.newyorker.com/news/the-led...

For folks interested in #Haitian and #Caribbean history 🗃️ & politics: the Digital Library of the Caribbean @dlocaribbean.bsky.social has arrived! Super collection of digitized newspapers from Haiti and elsewhere. Give them a follow for announcements.