iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Jeff Forret @jforret.bsky.social · 26/02/2026

If you're trying to straddle the academic/popular divide, good agents who understand you and what you want to do are hard to find, but they're also worth every penny.

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Jeff Forret @jforret.bsky.social · 05/12/2025

Sergio Lussana's My Brother Slaves is the first that comes to my mind.

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Jeff Forret @jforret.bsky.social · 03/09/2025

Pleased to announce that my most recent book, The Price They Paid: Slavery, Shipwrecks, and Reparations Before the Civil War, has won the 2024 John Lyman Book Award from the North American Society for Oceanic History.

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Jeff Forret @jforret.bsky.social · 13/06/2025

It's not "traditional country" unless they appeared on Hee Haw. Sorry.

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Jeff Forret @jforret.bsky.social · 09/05/2025

People are worried about the bridge collapsing, but Constitution Avenue also sits atop the old Tiber Creek, now enclosed in some really old tunnels.

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Jeff Forret @jforret.bsky.social · 09/05/2025

I'm naturally assuming the new pope likes deep dish and the Cubs, so he's all right by me.

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Jeff Forret @jforret.bsky.social · 05/05/2025

My Pell Grant said otherwise.

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Jeff Forret @jforret.bsky.social · 01/05/2025

It's not really the Gilded Age without Social Darwinism.

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Reposted by Jeff Forret

Calvin Schermerhorn @calscherm.bsky.social · 04/02/2025

Dorothy A. Brown says The Plunder of Black America “sets out in clear and exquisite detail the huge obstacles placed in the path of African Americans who simply wanted to become self-sufficient & leave their children with brighter futures” lnkd.in/gXwhCUqs GooglePlay play.google.com/store/audiob...

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Calvin Schermerhorn @calscherm.bsky.social · 03/02/2025

The Plunder of Black America: How the Racial Wealth Gap Was Made comes out in one week! It’s a story of several families over 400 years and how times changed but the theft continued. Please preorder now: yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300...

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Jeff Forret @jforret.bsky.social · 14/01/2025

My sincere condolences. Your dad meant the world to me. I could not have asked for a kinder, more generous, or more brilliant mentor.

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Jeff Forret @jforret.bsky.social · 09/12/2024

After four months of stress, sleep deprivation, and exhaustion, finals week promises the sweet relief of year-end reviews and severe illness.

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Jeff Forret @jforret.bsky.social · 20/11/2024

When you publish a book with @thenewpress.bsky.social, they send you a gift box of cookies from Levain Bakery. This is how it's done.

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Reposted by Jeff Forret

Calvin Schermerhorn @calscherm.bsky.social · 20/11/2024

The Plunder of Black America: How the Racial Wealth Gap Was Made follows several African American families through 400 years of dispossession, disinheritance, and decapitalization— an American process of wealth stripping that continues yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300...

yalebooks.yale.edu

The Plunder of Black America

The long history of the racial wealth gap in America told through the stories of seven Black families who struggled to build wealth over multiple generations...

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The New Press @thenewpress.bsky.social · 19/11/2024

Happy pub week to THE PRICE THEY PAID by @jforret.bsky.social, “a detailed and worthy study of the clash of abolitionist and pro-slavery forces in early America” (Kirkus Reviews) ow.ly/BFFL50UaxbK

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Jeff Forret @jforret.bsky.social · 19/11/2024

This one covers four U.S. domestic slave-trading vessels that wrecked or were blown off course to holdings in the British colonial Atlantic b/t 1831 and 1840. The British offered freedom to the enslaved, and U.S. slave owners and insurance companies pressed for compensation from the Crown.

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Jeff Forret @jforret.bsky.social · 19/11/2024

Release day for the new book, The Price They Paid. Huge thank you to The New Press and editor Marc Favreau for seeing this one to the finish line.

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Jeff Forret @jforret.bsky.social · 15/11/2024

Is there a "historians who lift" starter pack?

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Jeff Forret @jforret.bsky.social · 11/11/2024

Ties officially now cut with the other place. After my last post there a few months ago, sharing the cover design for my next book, some angry dude I didn't know called me a [bleep] for writing about slavery. I can imagine no more fitting end to my time there than that.

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Jeff Forret @jforret.bsky.social · 10/11/2024

Oh, wait. Nevermind. Thank you!

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Jeff Forret @jforret.bsky.social · 10/11/2024

The flood of new people here has finally convinced me to sever all ties with that other place. Now, to remember my password...

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Jeff Forret @jforret.bsky.social · 26/08/2024

More of an end-of-the-semester phenomenon these days.

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Jeff Forret @jforret.bsky.social · 08/08/2024

August 8 by the numbers: Fall courses: 5 Preps: 4 Syllabi prepared: 0

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Jeff Forret @jforret.bsky.social · 07/08/2024

That was understood. I've followed you a long time.

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Jeff Forret @jforret.bsky.social · 07/08/2024

I did that, too. No insults here, but no engagement, either.

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Jeff Forret @jforret.bsky.social · 07/08/2024

I popped my head up over there for the first time in a long, long while just to announce my forthcoming book and was promptly called a f----- by a complete stranger. Good times.

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Jeff Forret @jforret.bsky.social · 28/07/2024

Dust jacket for the next book.

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Jeff Forret @jforret.bsky.social · 15/03/2024

Question for the more tech savvy historians out there. What data visualization software have you used, and what was your experience? I'm looking at Flourish Studio for bar chart races, but curious about other good, user-friendly programs. TIA.

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Jeff Forret @jforret.bsky.social · 14/03/2024

Today I signed a contract for my next book. The New Press will publish "The Price They Paid: Slavery, Shipwrecks, and Reparations before the Civil War" in Fall 2024.

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Jeff Forret @jforret.bsky.social · 11/01/2024

So, I'm temporarily filling in as department chair. In my first meaningful act, I hereby decree that, at next week's faculty meeting, there will be sandwiches.

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Jeff Forret @jforret.bsky.social · 19/10/2023

First day here, hoping to reconstitute a community that once was. Will try and track y'all down again.

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