Matt Crow
@mattcrow.bsky.social
History @HWS, working on the ocean in US intellectual history. NorCal LA convert, CNY resident, kelp forest pilgrim, books on Jefferson and next Melville. Gillian Rose stan, Pocock/Gibbon apologist. P.I., Mellon Maters of Memory Grant. A citizen of Geneva.
Reposted by Matt Crow
I'm so excited Dan, Johanna, & Emory have made it possible for me to record the entirety of their book launch symposium next month as an arc in the "Vandal Live" series.
Symposia are, in my opinion, the very best of academic programming, & everybody should have the good fortune of partaking.
Symposia are, in my opinion, the very best of academic programming, & everybody should have the good fortune of partaking.
October 24, 2025 at 2:39 PM
I'm so excited Dan, Johanna, & Emory have made it possible for me to record the entirety of their book launch symposium next month as an arc in the "Vandal Live" series.
Symposia are, in my opinion, the very best of academic programming, & everybody should have the good fortune of partaking.
Symposia are, in my opinion, the very best of academic programming, & everybody should have the good fortune of partaking.
Reposted by Matt Crow
Thanks to the University of Virginia's Cavalier Daily for this nice feature about RBS!
www.cavalierdaily.com/article/2025...
www.cavalierdaily.com/article/2025...
The Rare Book School fosters a framework for tangibly interacting with textual artifacts
The Rare Book School is open to students, faculty and local community members alike, with classes and exhibits that work to highlight their mission of understanding our cultural history through physic...
www.cavalierdaily.com
October 23, 2025 at 6:29 PM
Thanks to the University of Virginia's Cavalier Daily for this nice feature about RBS!
www.cavalierdaily.com/article/2025...
www.cavalierdaily.com/article/2025...
Reposted by Matt Crow
it's national taco day! stellar mexicanist ignacio sanchez prado has a new book right on time!
TACO, in the bloomsbury object lessons series.
chicago, go celebrate with a taco and support our neighbors in little village, pilsen, logan, everywhere
www.bloomsbury.com/us/taco-9798...
TACO, in the bloomsbury object lessons series.
chicago, go celebrate with a taco and support our neighbors in little village, pilsen, logan, everywhere
www.bloomsbury.com/us/taco-9798...
Taco
Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.Taco is a deep dive into the most iconic Mexican food…
www.bloomsbury.com
October 7, 2025 at 6:10 PM
it's national taco day! stellar mexicanist ignacio sanchez prado has a new book right on time!
TACO, in the bloomsbury object lessons series.
chicago, go celebrate with a taco and support our neighbors in little village, pilsen, logan, everywhere
www.bloomsbury.com/us/taco-9798...
TACO, in the bloomsbury object lessons series.
chicago, go celebrate with a taco and support our neighbors in little village, pilsen, logan, everywhere
www.bloomsbury.com/us/taco-9798...
Reposted by Matt Crow
My colleague Jack Bouchard's book Terra Nova is out today! It's about early 16th-century mariners and the seasonal fishery around present-day Newfoundland, and its place within the Atlantic World. I cannot wait to read it
yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300...
yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300...
Terra Nova
A bottom-up story of the fishworkers, whalers, First Nations, merchantwomen, oceans, and animals who together made a new colonial world in the early Atlantic...
yalebooks.yale.edu
October 7, 2025 at 6:45 PM
My colleague Jack Bouchard's book Terra Nova is out today! It's about early 16th-century mariners and the seasonal fishery around present-day Newfoundland, and its place within the Atlantic World. I cannot wait to read it
yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300...
yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300...
Reposted by Matt Crow
I'm teaching the Boston Massacre tomorrow and it just feels surreal.
October 7, 2025 at 10:21 PM
I'm teaching the Boston Massacre tomorrow and it just feels surreal.
Reposted by Matt Crow
Holy, dread leviathan, we are not worthy spectators of your lunching
I get that the news cycle is packed right now, but I just heard from a colleague at the Smithsonian that this is fully a GIANT SQUID BEING EATEN BY A SPERM WHALE and it’s possibly the first ever confirmed video according to a friend at NOAA
10 YEAR OLD ME IS LOSING HER MIND (a thread 🧵)
10 YEAR OLD ME IS LOSING HER MIND (a thread 🧵)
September 25, 2025 at 6:51 PM
Holy, dread leviathan, we are not worthy spectators of your lunching
Reposted by Matt Crow
When Jefferson trashed Wheatley’s book, he hadn’t yet published a book of his own. I think about that sometimes.
September 25, 2025 at 12:44 PM
When Jefferson trashed Wheatley’s book, he hadn’t yet published a book of his own. I think about that sometimes.
Even in the Lawless Seas: Legal Imagination and Oceanic History in the World of Herman Melville, coming from this historian, of sorts, and Cambridge University Press in the not too distant future!
So I read Moby Dick for the first time this summer. I read it slowly, and I took a lot of notes (selections in the 🧵⬇️). I was motivated in part by learning more over the last few years about the 18th c spermaceti candle business of the Browns in our collections @jcblibrary.bsky.social. But also 1/
September 18, 2025 at 1:36 AM
Even in the Lawless Seas: Legal Imagination and Oceanic History in the World of Herman Melville, coming from this historian, of sorts, and Cambridge University Press in the not too distant future!
Reposted by Matt Crow
Read an excerpt from “The Predatory Sea: Human Trafficking and Captivity in the Seventeenth-Century Caribbean” by @csschmitt.bsky.social. @pennpress.bsky.social www.hnn.us/article/free...
Freedoms Lost in Translation
In the 17th-century Caribbean, a person’s legal status depended on who controlled the land where they labored.
www.hnn.us
September 17, 2025 at 6:58 PM
Read an excerpt from “The Predatory Sea: Human Trafficking and Captivity in the Seventeenth-Century Caribbean” by @csschmitt.bsky.social. @pennpress.bsky.social www.hnn.us/article/free...
Reposted by Matt Crow
Luminous, urgent issue of @thedial2024.bsky.social. Thinking this am about Stephanie Foote's challenge to us:
"Now is the time for the unglamorous daily work of collective meaning-making, as difficult as that is for universities under threat."
muse.jhu.edu/pub/562/arti...
"Now is the time for the unglamorous daily work of collective meaning-making, as difficult as that is for universities under threat."
muse.jhu.edu/pub/562/arti...
Project MUSE - Almost Heaven: West Virginia University and the Transcendental Grifter
muse.jhu.edu
September 6, 2025 at 8:14 AM
Luminous, urgent issue of @thedial2024.bsky.social. Thinking this am about Stephanie Foote's challenge to us:
"Now is the time for the unglamorous daily work of collective meaning-making, as difficult as that is for universities under threat."
muse.jhu.edu/pub/562/arti...
"Now is the time for the unglamorous daily work of collective meaning-making, as difficult as that is for universities under threat."
muse.jhu.edu/pub/562/arti...
Reposted by Matt Crow
July 28, 2025 at 4:38 PM
Reposted by Matt Crow
It's your boys @rezekjoe.bsky.social and me in The Boston Globe! In print on Sunday! (We are in a big fight about how to interpret the ending of Poe's novel and the illustration poignantly captures the strain in our friendship.)
www.bostonglobe.com/2025/07/24/a...
www.bostonglobe.com/2025/07/24/a...
A strange Poe novel might be just the right book for today’s weird times - The Boston Globe
Two local academics who contributed to a new edition of “The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket” say the book’s 19th century ideas around race, exploration, and capitalism speak to our own er...
www.bostonglobe.com
July 24, 2025 at 6:26 PM
It's your boys @rezekjoe.bsky.social and me in The Boston Globe! In print on Sunday! (We are in a big fight about how to interpret the ending of Poe's novel and the illustration poignantly captures the strain in our friendship.)
www.bostonglobe.com/2025/07/24/a...
www.bostonglobe.com/2025/07/24/a...
Reposted by Matt Crow
Oh yea we've got tons of evidence for this
“Univ. of Illinois report shows that a large humanities department like English produces substantial net profit; units like engineering and agriculture run at a loss. The widely respected Delaware Study of Instructional Costs and Productivity shows the same pattern.” /7 thi.ucsc.edu/the-humaniti...
The Humanities Really Do Produce a Profit – The Humanities Institute
thi.ucsc.edu
July 25, 2025 at 2:04 AM
Oh yea we've got tons of evidence for this
Reposted by Matt Crow
My kingdom for commentary that affirms the importance of reading for reading’s sake, grappling with complexity, and rejecting the logic of tech-bro “efficiency” that DOESN’T treat attention as linear or paint diffuse or lateral attention patterns as moral defects.
July 24, 2025 at 4:26 PM
My kingdom for commentary that affirms the importance of reading for reading’s sake, grappling with complexity, and rejecting the logic of tech-bro “efficiency” that DOESN’T treat attention as linear or paint diffuse or lateral attention patterns as moral defects.
Reposted by Matt Crow
Jefferson on Race
A Reader
Edited by Annette Gordon-Reed
Princeton University Press
Princeton and Oxford
Copyright © 2026 by Princeton University Press
A Reader
Edited by Annette Gordon-Reed
Princeton University Press
Princeton and Oxford
Copyright © 2026 by Princeton University Press
July 21, 2025 at 12:51 AM
Jefferson on Race
A Reader
Edited by Annette Gordon-Reed
Princeton University Press
Princeton and Oxford
Copyright © 2026 by Princeton University Press
A Reader
Edited by Annette Gordon-Reed
Princeton University Press
Princeton and Oxford
Copyright © 2026 by Princeton University Press
Reposted by Matt Crow
“The tragedy of the contemporary academy is that even when traditional liberal learning clearly wins with students and donors, it loses with those in power [trustees and administrators].”
Opinion | This Is Who’s Really Driving the Decline in Interest in Liberal Arts Education
www.nytimes.com
July 19, 2025 at 1:49 PM
“The tragedy of the contemporary academy is that even when traditional liberal learning clearly wins with students and donors, it loses with those in power [trustees and administrators].”
Reposted by Matt Crow
John Elphinstone wrote a travelogue/memoir/apologia to blackmail the Russian government. I just edited, annotated and introduced it. Hakluyt Society published it. boydellandbrewer.com/978191693102...
January 16, 2025 at 10:20 AM
John Elphinstone wrote a travelogue/memoir/apologia to blackmail the Russian government. I just edited, annotated and introduced it. Hakluyt Society published it. boydellandbrewer.com/978191693102...
Reposted by Matt Crow
It’s been a long time coming… so thrilled to share the cover (and Oxford UP website last in 🧵) for my book, _Lineage: Genealogy and the Power of Connection in Early America_, pub date 7.2.25 (but will ship, so they say very enticingly, mid-June. 1/ #VastEarlyAmerica 🗃️
December 28, 2024 at 11:26 AM
It’s been a long time coming… so thrilled to share the cover (and Oxford UP website last in 🧵) for my book, _Lineage: Genealogy and the Power of Connection in Early America_, pub date 7.2.25 (but will ship, so they say very enticingly, mid-June. 1/ #VastEarlyAmerica 🗃️
Reposted by Matt Crow
The proofs are turned in and the website is up!🎉 📖
"Canal Dreamers" is now available for pre-order with delivery in August (just in time for classes 😉). Use code 01SOCIAL30 at checkout to save 30%! 🗃️
@uncpress.bsky.social #history
uncpress.org/book/9781469...
"Canal Dreamers" is now available for pre-order with delivery in August (just in time for classes 😉). Use code 01SOCIAL30 at checkout to save 30%! 🗃️
@uncpress.bsky.social #history
uncpress.org/book/9781469...
Canal Dreamers | Jessica M. Lepler | University of North Carolina Press
In the 1820s, there was a little-known quest to unite the world by building a waterway between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. As new Spanish American natio...
uncpress.org
May 1, 2025 at 12:39 PM
The proofs are turned in and the website is up!🎉 📖
"Canal Dreamers" is now available for pre-order with delivery in August (just in time for classes 😉). Use code 01SOCIAL30 at checkout to save 30%! 🗃️
@uncpress.bsky.social #history
uncpress.org/book/9781469...
"Canal Dreamers" is now available for pre-order with delivery in August (just in time for classes 😉). Use code 01SOCIAL30 at checkout to save 30%! 🗃️
@uncpress.bsky.social #history
uncpress.org/book/9781469...
Reposted by Matt Crow
So exciting to see this in the flesh at SHEAR! Congrats @jlepler.bsky.social!!
July 20, 2025 at 1:20 PM
So exciting to see this in the flesh at SHEAR! Congrats @jlepler.bsky.social!!
Reposted by Matt Crow
A lil tribute to the kelp forests along the California coast 🌊✨
July 8, 2025 at 5:11 PM
A lil tribute to the kelp forests along the California coast 🌊✨
