Justin Randolph

Watercolor. Flowers against a yellow rising moon or setting sun. Words by Mike Davis: It’s what ordinary people have to do. You have to live each other. You have to defend each other. You have to fight.

Instructions for today. And every day.

The attempt to ban, erase etc.. marginalized people's histories demands responses at the grassroots level. Regular people can be cultural stewards, can be archivists, can be storytellers, can be preservers of oral history. And these are all fun things to do!

Bloodied Faces, Sobbing Children: Immigration Officers Smash Car Windows to Speed Up Arrests We’ve documented nearly 50 incidents of immigration officers shattering car windows to make arrests — a tactic experts say was rarely used before Trump took office. ICE claims its officers use a “mini...

NEW visual investigation:

ICE agents are smashing car windows & grabbing the people inside

There's footage of sobbing kids, pregnant women, & bloodied faces

We found ~50 cases but no civilians w/ sig criminal records

Insiders told us this used to be rare

projects.propublica.org/trump-ice-sm...

I am kinda fascinated by the emerging joint deployment of “Mamdani would take away the NYPD’s ability to effectively deal with shootings like the one that happened on Monday” and “It’s impossible to prevent shootings like the one that happened on Monday”, sometimes on the same page of the newspaper.

Hiding in Plain Sight: How local jails obscure and facilitate mass deportation under Trump

🚨NEW: Local jails & police departments are playing a key role in Trump’s mass arrest & deportation agenda

The actual scope of this collaboration – and the true scale of immigrant arrests and detentions – has not been publicly available, until now 🧵

This idea is so bad that when the guy from Axon proposed it his entire board resigned in protest.

Four stickers against a pink background: 1) “we are born in flames” written against fire, 2) two arms clutching one another with “your risk is my risk” etched upon them, 3) a woman in a bathtub with the words “my home is not your asset” written on the tub, 4) an apartment building with a fire escape and clothesline, tomato and sunflower plant, and residents waving to each other, reading “tenants built this city”

The BORN IN FLAMES stickers are here and they’re beautiful! Made in collaboration with my dear friend, Jenna Peters-Golden, + an original by Mary Tremonte
@justseeds.bsky.social, these will be sent to you free if you order BORN IN FLAMES by Aug 19th and submit here: tinyurl.com/4nx7rcv8

The Radical Fund: How a Band of Visionaries and a Million Dollars Upended America by John Fabian Witt Pulitzer finalist Witt (American Contagions) unearths the nearly forgotten history of the American Fund for Public Service, an e...

Starred review from @publisherswkly.bsky.social says The Radical Fund is “an immense and essential achievement” with an “exhilarating range of figures” and “stark parallels with the present.” www.publishersweekly.com/9781476765877

going to keep saying: important for a society that would like to keep functioning to discourage baldfaced lying, especially by authorities

I was teaching a history class when this was in the news. Better believe I came up with some excuse to play it during a day’s lesson. It killed

A Call for Freedom: Loretta Pierre of the Mississippi Five - Justseeds Loretta Pierre describes her appearance over the three way phone call: “Long hair, long dark dark brown. Some people say black hair but it’s almost to my knees. I have... Read More »

a great interview from inside a Mississippi prison with the incomparable Loretta Pierre - if the you don't know about the campaign to free the Mississippi Five, let this be your gateway justseeds.org/a-call-for-f...

I'm old enough to remember when the prevailing argument against affirmative action was that it failed to consider the "real" form of unfairness, which was income disparity

As a journalist and emerging public historian, I spent much of the past week reading through transcripts of oral histories made and collected by residents of Kerr County, Texas – where flash floods killed more than 100 people this month.

There’s one recording that stood out to me. 🧵

As ever, the only path forward is to get organized. Join the Debt Collective at www.debtcollective.org and follow @debtcollective.bsky.social here.

In American Purgatory, Benjamin Weber studies the tangled roots of U.S. empire and imprisonment. He does so with case-based precision and narrative force. Historians have needed a text to distill and reframe the now common claim about the continuum between the American prosecution of race wars on its frontiers and crime wars at home. Interdisciplinary scholars like Joy James, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Nikhil Pal Singh, and Stuart Schrader have analyzed this relationship, while more traditional social and political historians such as Alfred W. McCoy and Ronald K. Edgerton have singled out the Philippine-American War as a laboratory for progressive governance. Weber broadens our historical frame with the transhistorical tools of Native, Black, and carceral studies. U.S. dominion required prisons, he argues. Its campaigns of benign conquest entailed places of legal and social experimentation, literal spaces where the rules could be suspended and revolt purged. Prisons offered“a network of historical and contemporary black sites” that developed alongside and through U.S. imperial practice (1).

Weber calls this continuum“prison imperialism,” or the way that U.S.“policy makers sought to govern the world through the codification and regulation of crime” (xi). He links historic processes, such as Native removal, counterinsurgent policing of colonial spaces, New South convict labor, and the incarceration of revolutionary figures who dared imagine sovereignty outside of the U.S. government. These are colonial practices, Weber insists, that unfolded between the American mainland and its global sphere of influence. American“prison imperialism relied on the continual production of in-between spaces of perpetual limbo,” he writes.“In a word, purgatory” (35). Though usually focused on a particular place or prison, each of Weber’s seven chapters explores the circuits and interfaces that trouble binaries like foreign/domestic or past/present. His narrative technique challenges conventional historicist attempts at stating significance for other historians while opening new pathways for future scholars.

The next three chapters revolve around American rule through transportation and forced labor. Chapter two focuses on the debate over American penal colonies, a forgotten question of the founding era that resurfaced during the Gilded Age. Weber uses abandoned penal transportation schemes to link older politics of colonizing African Americans with the purchase of Alaska, which some Americans hoped would become a penal colony. Chapter three focuses on the use of far-flung prisons to wage the Philippine-American War. Weber shows that America’s counterinsurgent campaign against Filipinos, which began in early 1899, stemmed from a planned uprising by anticolonial Katipunan forces in Bilibid Prison. In the years that followed, U.S. authorities built a network of jails and prisons in the Philippines, using them to exile would-be revolutionaries and allocate forced labor to build infrastructure. Chapter four takes readers to the Panama Canal Zone. Weber describes a colonial space where the federal government, as opposed to a southern state, used the Thirteenth Amendment’s convict clause to enslave Black workers for infrastruc- ture development, such as the highway to Empire, in Panama, which opened in 1910. When American authorities were not exploiting racialized labor, they were scheming to deport unruly laborers and depopulate areas coveted for plantations.

I couldn't know how relevant Benjamin Weber's great book *American Purgatory* would be when I reviewed it last fall. looking for American dreams of third-country deportation? that history's here, with much more. read my review, "Empire's Black Sites," in @shgape.bsky.social doi.org/10.1017/S153...

jesus. leaving no stone unturned! except Greenwich…and Darien…and…oh

CFP (please circulate): "Lonesome Dove at 40: McMurtry, Mythmaking, and the Reimagining of the American Southwest," co-hosted by the Clements Center for Southwest Studies and SMU's English Department via the "Narrative Now" initiative. DEADLINE: Aug 1.

nothing to see here folks!

Axon’s Draft One is Designed to Defy Transparency Axon Enterprise’s Draft One — a generative artificial intelligence product that writes police reports based on audio from officers’ body-worn cameras — seems deliberately designed to avoid audits that...

BIG NEWS: After a long investigation we have uncovered that Axon's Draft One--a program that uses genAI to write police reports based on body-worn camera audio--is *designed* not to retain the data on which parts were written by an officer and which parts were written by AI. A looming disaster.

This has been my dream @contingent-mag.bsky.social project for seven years and we're finally doing it.

amazing fighters for civil/voting rights and against Jim Crow policing - I write about Emmett and Flora Stringer in Mississippi Law. They endured attacks from the white Citizen Council…and sometimes from NAACP HQ

Great stuff from Joan Scott. So disappointing to see so many full and emeritus folks defend an organization that has: (1) failed to advocate for young scholars entering a collapsing profession; and (2) refused to take its members’ grievances and demands seriously—esp. on the issue of scholasticide.🗃️

YouTube video by Historians for Peace and Democracy Democracy and the Future of the American Historical Association: A Roundtable Discussion

an important conversation with HPAD-endorsed candidates for AHA office, moderated by Robin D. G. Kelley www.youtube.com/watch?v=mnLr...

We are going to see a lot of ppl claiming, understandably, that the BBB has now provided Trump w a massive ICE army.

That is incorrect.

It has provided him with the funds to TRY.

A 2017 DHS-OIG report said ICE would need to interview 500,000 ppl to get 10,000 new hires.

Not easy!

Liz Hinton has great stuff on the “corruption” that came with the massive LEAA funding influx of 60s/70s. really helped corps like Motorola corner markets

Opinion | Trump’s Deportation Program Is About Control. Even if You Are a U.S. Citizen.

"During the Great Depression and in the years following World War II, an estimated two million people were forced to leave the United States. Astonishingly, more than half were American citizens, mostly people who were (or were suspected of being) Mexican." www.nytimes.com/2025/07/01/o...

#ScholarSunday Thread 231 Published on June 29, 2025

What can we do against such reckless hate? Enjoy & share widely the solidarity with all the amazing work in my 231st #ScholarSunday thread of public scholarly writing, podcasts, new & forthcoming books from the last week. 🗃️

americanstudier.substack.com/p/scholarsun...

Research Fellows in Reproductive Justice History and Popular Political Education in Northampton, MA for Smith College Exciting opportunity in Northampton, MA for Smith College as a Research Fellows in Reproductive J...

Postdoc/research fellowship opportunity down the road at Smith College for a historian of reproductive justice; app deadline is July 1: careers.historians.org/jobs/2144084... 🗃️

Black Excellence – Penn Press A provocative new history of modern black liberalismBlack Excellence offers a provocative new history of modern black liberalism by situating the seemingly c...

Today is the last day to pre-order BLACK EXCELLENCE with the Penn Press Summer Sale discount! Enter PENN-SUMMER25 at checkout to save 40%!

Official publication on publication date is September 2!

www.pennpress.org/978151282784...

They’re cops. ICE agents are cops. Cops are behaving like this. Congress created these cops a couple of decades ago, and Congress could uncreate—abolish them, if you will—anytime.

We need to get over this idea that this happened overnight, by accident, through infiltration. It did not.