John Harris
@drjohnaeharris
Historian. Author of The Last Slave Ships: NYC & The End of The Middle Passage (Yale, 2020). Working on a new book Spying on The Slave Trade. Rep’d by Deirdre Mullane N. Irish immigrant to U.S.
“everything fell apart” - the author just couldn’t resist, could they?
Cool to have a historical thesis on my new license plate but is it a good one?
Same where I now live (South Carolina). Something we could have discussed in Catherine’s class at QUB!
Fresh chapter completed, now to close a million tabs and Word docs 😅 #RoadtoBook2
Always stuck by how British elites favored the Confederacy. Former Foreign Secretary Lord Clarendon wrote in 1862 "I hate the Confederates almost as much as the Federals but I hope for their success." Foreign Sec. Lord Russell thought the idea of "conquering the South ... hopeless."
I could spend hours reading old newspaper ads. Here's "Wigs and Toupees" New York Times, Feb 21, 1862.
How to make a historian cry. 104 years ago today the Public Record Office in Dublin went up in flames during the Irish Civil War. Census records, tax records, land ownership, legal documents. Basically how England ruled Ireland. In flames.
Sneaking out of a Civil War conference to go to the national Civil War Museum. Seems like that’s ok.
During the World Cup watch out for Haiti’s shirt which depicts the Battle of Vertieres in 1803, the final battle of the Haitian Revolution against Napoleon’s France - and slavery. First game next Saturday.
Shocking luck with the family World Cup sweepstakes. Paraguay, Australia, Ghana, Algeria. Prize for the winner = shirt of the winning team.
The famous Protestant / Catholic “differences” blackboard from Derry Girls, at the Ulster Museum in Belfast
A warm day at the beach is such a delicate thing in Ireland. The wind picks up and it’s over.
Back in Northern Ireland, where I lived the first half of my life, and this beautiful weather is not what I remember
Broadway, New York City, 1859. This summer I’m finishing a book about Emilio Sanchez, an anti-slave trade spy who stalked these streets tracking the illegal people traffickers. Maybe he’s in the picture…?
Either Abe is more dapper than I thought or my student is using AI
Had my department’s Phi Alpha Theta (History honors society) initiation today with an actual snake!
Fort Sumter was built with bricks made by enslaved people in the Charleston area. Their fingerprints are still visible.
Would appreciate your help with the third-to-last word here. "Information derived from ? (shipping office)."
Reading a small cache of family letters my in-laws have from around 1900. Someone is sick from diphtheria, whooping cough, pneumonia in all of them. In this one from Bloomington, Illinois: “now it is the measles, last week in the high school there was 212 students out with them.”
In May I knocked on a door in Brooklyn. Thrilled to see that adventure become a New York Times article in print this weekend.
At a time when early studies are showing that AI weakens student learning outcomes like critical thinking, it feels like universities that go all in on AI are cheapening their product.
Update: Got a house tour from the Horace Greeley descendants - several of whom are named … Horace Greeley. It was Horace mania inside! Very cool to see where my subject (Sanchez) lived & to briefly walk in his footsteps. Got a sense of his living situation / stylistic interests (Italianate) /1
What exactly are the Sanchez - Greeley connections? Idk yet. In the meantime, I’m going to politely snoop all through this house.
5 minutes later a curious Dr Greeley calls me (yes!) & we talk for 30 minutes. He says, yes it is the Horace Greeley family & they’ve lived there since 1903 - pretty much since Sanchez’s days. Dr G’s son is currently making a Horace G documentary. They are giving me a house tour tomorrow evening! /5