Holly Brewer

Is there good recent historical work on the Barbary pirates? I know Colley has written about narratives of enslavement, but is there anything by someone using non-European sources in a significant way? 🗃️

The Herbert G. Gutman Prize for Outstanding Dissertation in U.S. Labor and Working-Class History is now open for submissions!

Full details here: go.illinois.edu/UIPGutmanPrize

cc: @laborlawchajournal.bsky.social

Wow! Congrats—

if someone tells you founding era judges didn’t have a role in adjudicating military affairs, what they’re actually telling you is they don’t know anything about the 18th century

Frank Bisignano, Marco Rubio and Russ Vought occupy 75% of government offices among them.

"Authoritarian Capacity" and the Trump Regime - Lawyers, Guns & Money In May of 2022, the Department of Homeland Security tried to stand up a group to coordinate government anti-disinformation efforts. As Deepa Shivaram wrote at NPR, the “decision” resulted from a “coor...

"Now Wired — which has become indispensable and deserves your subscription dollars (🙏) — reports that DHS wants to create dedicated centers to mass monitor social-media in real time."

Turning You Dissertation into a Book webinar promotional tile

All are invited to the first in Publishing with University Presses Webinar Series, "Turning Your Dissertation into a Book," Oct 9 at 1pm ET. Organized by our Faculty Outreach Committee with the Rutgers Ctr for Minority Serving Institutions.

Register here: https://buff.ly/UiOAr5M

Listen to AFGE President Everett Kelley:

Federal workers aren’t pawns in political games—they inspect our food, care for veterans, conduct research that keeps workers safe and so much more. They make America run.

The Trump admin’s Project 2025/DOGE agenda hurts everyone.

The Judge Standing up to Trump’s Portland Invasion A report on the Justice Department’s Orwellian arguments and how a Trump-nominated jurist is holding the line for democracy.

Saturday Market unfolded as usual; 9,000 people ran the Portland Marathon; the Thorns beat Bay FC 2-1 and Powell's was jammed full of readers sipping kombucha. Oh, yeh--ICE personnel sent two 84-year-olds to the hospital after beating them to the ground. washingtonmonthly.com/2025/10/06/t...

A black and white photo of two boys. The boy on the left has a severe case of smallpox, with pustules all over his face and chest and arms. The boy on the right has no pustules.

This photo (c.1901) shows two boys exposed to smallpox. Only the boy on the right had been vaccinated.

Smallpox is one of the deadliest & most contagious diseases known to man. The virus killed over half a billion people in the 20th century—three times more than all that century’s wars combined.

Courts Keep Smacking Down Trump’s Lawless Attempt to End Birthright Citizenship But he keeps plugging away—believing his allies on the Supreme Court will ultimately side with him.

"The courts have no job to do here other than read the plain language of the Constitution, which Congress went so far as to later memorialize in a statute. Anyone with access to the English language can simply read those laws." www.thebulwark.com/p/first-circ...

This footnote to Illinois and Chicago's lawsuit against Trump is an important reminder:

* There is no Department of War or Secretary of War, which are make-believe names for the actual agencies created by Congress.

Doc storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

Wormtongue.
Tolkien created iconic characters that help us understand human nature.
And yet I don’t think the king here is as virtuous and brave as was Theoden underneath.

Bessent Picks Social Security Chief Frank Bisignano as IRS CEO The Social Security head will do double duty at the tax agency while Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent retains his formal title as acting IRS commissioner.

Alarming news this morning that Social Security head Frank Bisignano has been named “CEO” of IRS, a move that raises 3 major concerns:

www.wsj.com/politics/pol...

A hopeful assessment anchored in US history. I wonder if @juliarosekraut.bsky.social @juliaazari.bsky.social who wrote books on covering this time period agree.

YouTube video by K D Edward R. Murrow from a London rooftop during the Blitz - 21 September 1940

Edward R. Murrow learned much of his craft from Bob Trout. 

World War II helped turn him into a kind of patron saint of broadcast journalism.

Murrow during the Blitz:

youtu.be/Za2Lus0CkRc

Murrow reporting on Senator Joe McCarthy:

youtu.be/dMgoi9pBRwg

youtu.be/z6j6iTN7Tkw

YouTube video by Old Broadcast 1938 Radio: First CBS World News Roundup Broadcast, Mar 13, 1938

I'm marking the likely demise of my former employer CBS News under David Ellison and Bari Weiss.

Here's a thread of some historical highlights (and a couple of lowlights).

What would become CBS began in 1927.

Robert Trout's was one of the early CBS voices:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=6MPj...

Welcome to Monday in the Nations Capital:

The Supreme Court is in session but the rest of the government is not.

The House is in recess because why would they be here to deal with a crisis.

Members of Congress get paid but those who guard the building don’t, yet have to work.

Make it make sense

Brunkow got the news of her prize from a photographer.

She said she had ignored the earlier call from the Nobel committee. “My phone rang and I saw a number from Sweden and thought: ‘That’s just, that’s spam of some sort.’”

Husband: “When I told Mary she won, she said, ‘don’t be ridiculous'."

The very first statute authorizing domestic use of the military during domestic emergencies, enacted in 1792 by a Congress full of the same folks who wrote and ratified the Constitution, expressly provided for judicial review in certain circumstances *before* the President could even send troops.

UPDATE: Hegseth today called up 400 members of the Texas National Guard, with Gov. Abbott's apparent permission, to be deployed "where needed, including in the cities of Portland and Chicago." www.politico.com/news/2025/10...

Its one thing when it’s possession of child pornography.
Quite another when it’s production.

Texas proudly invading Illinois.

It’s hard to describe the level of potential constitutional crisis here.

Bonta: Just minutes before the hearing, we got word that the Texas National Guard has been federalized.

We asked the judge to issue a broad order — one that applies to every National Guard unit in every state — stating that none of them can be deployed to Oregon.

She issued that order

“Trump’s invasion”

“Become a courts reporter,” they said.

“You’ll get weekends off,” they said.

“Because there won’t be any hearings on the weekend,” they said.

Video taken one hour ago outside the Portland ICE facility of the violent insurrectionists in question

Elon Musk and Stephen Miller both tweeted against judges today.

A South Carolina judge's house burned down and almost killed her family.

Oops.