John Harris
Historian of slavery and abolition. 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. Ireland - U.S.
johnaeharris.com
- 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
- 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
- I was at a conference this morning in NYC where we heard about the impact of the elimination of the National Weather Service and of the privatization of weather info. Grim predictions: Paid access for weather forecasts and little info for rural communities bc fewer subscribers.
- Today I was in Brooklyn and cold-called the old home of Emilio Sanchez, an undercover agent who tried to stop the illegal transatlantic slave trade out of NYC in the 1850s / 1860s. I’m writing his bio. It turned out to be a wild ride /1
- Historians in Brooklyn. Great to finally meet @unlawfulentries.bsky.social in person and to hear about her forthcoming book on early American immigration and much more. Excellent restaurant choice too - as expected!
- Jari Honora, the genealogist who made the Creole - Pope Leo connections for the world, works at the Historic New Orleans Collection and is just superb. He has dug out some great stuff for my current book in progress. All praise to him! www.nytimes.com/2025/05/10/u...
- Question for college profs: which department is your social studies major located in? Ours is in history and political science but the education department wants to take it.
- Do you know “many Irish worked the dicks” in New Orleans? Me neither. Meant to write docks. #editing
- Roszman on Scanlan’s new Irish famine book
- If your small college was moving from a decentralized system of academic departments to one with schools and deans with departments organized within those schools, what questions would you have / red flags would you watch out for?
- The New Orleans chapter of my next book on illegal slave trade spy Emilio Sanchez is drafted. Herein Sanchez •Works for the Spanish consulate, possibly as a mole •Falls and fails in love •Becomes an enslaver (despite fighting the slave trade) More to come…
- I have a close connection with an FBI agent and they are aghast by how sloppy ICE are with warrants - and pretty much everything. The average agent - yes, conservative - is also pissed that Bondi and Kash are dragging them into deportation efforts and away from what they see as their core mission
- What in the counterfactual history and bad thinking is going on here?
- Historian pro tip: if writing biography, chose someone who lived in cool places, for then you too will go to cool places
