Hope for a New Year (research post 2026-01-02)
First research post of the new year!
I couldn’t bring myself to do a 2025 round up, winner takes all, here are all the ways I slayed or destroyed myself in post. I wanted to. And the year did bring highs and lows, as years do.
Most of the lows felt big, impossible to manage or impact, devastating across generations. Cities drowned in blood or stone. Guns and masked men and occupied cities. Ships exploded. I watched tendrils of planetary violence slap me and the people I loved around all year. Folks disappeared or disappearing. Mentees losing jobs. Data destroyed and research derailed. Shock, terror, sadness, heartbreak, and grief in spades. And those are just the CliffsNotes.1
On the other hand, most of the highs felt personal, intimate, local, and grounded, the result of years of care, vulnerability, and physical touch. Playdates and writing dates with my favorite Black women. My godchild calling me Titi. My sisters’ faces on video calls. Breakfast with my mother and texts from my uncle. Phone calls, real phone calls, not audio notes or text messages. My homegirl collectives magic working and working magic. Loving my man, my wife, and my husband, and nope, those aren’t the same person. Watching the Sky Babies become people in a new school with amazing new teachers. Recommitting to a political practice and home (shout out to Black Alliance for Peace) because I believe in global Black freedom and peace in our time. Donating funds where I can’t commit time (shout out to Working Families Party) because electoral politics of the now still matters. Committing to a writing and art practice that feeds me. Gardening. Deepening my relationship with Santo and spirit and adding fresh water to my boveda. Homemade whipped cream in my stovetop espresso.
This world, this moment, this timeline, this variant, makes me furious, murderous. Makes me want to eat my young. And since I actually have young that I want to see continue to grow into caring, sensitive, empathetic and loving human beings, I have to be careful. I am entering 2026 more discerning, more at home (literally), and more choosy than I have been in the past.
Toni Morrison (ibae) said she needed to do two things in this life: raise her children and write. Baybee, the way I felt this in my soul.
I can’t have it all, but I must have what I need. If I want to be well (Toni Cade Bambara, ibae).
And being here with you all, dearest, gentle reader (Lady Whistledown), is part of that. Writing here became one of my favorite health care and accountability practices last year. I can’t wait to keep going this year.
Whether you are new or old, check out the new for 2026 Kitchen Table History ABOUT page. There’s a link to a post I wrote in 2014 about why I use “kitchen table” and what it means for me as a Black queer feminist hoodrat slavery scholar who is now a fake respectable professor and mama of two. This year marks two decades of skulking along these internet streets, whether blogs, social media, or digital projects and labs. Whew!! I am thinking about how to honor that, reflect on that, and commemorate that over the course of this year. In the meantime, I love that I can be here, still breathing, still irreverent, still with something to say.2
I also finally figured out a subscriptions breakdown that feels right for me, for us, for now. From the ABOUT page:
Subscribe to the newsletter (don’t just follow) to get email access. You can avoid being sucked into the Substack app and you won’t miss an update. Each newsletter goes directly to your inbox—which I hear they don’t do if you follow.
What everyone can expect in their inbox: weekly(ish) research posts with lists of what I am working on working through, marginalia1 (my literal chicken scratch in the margins of my favorite pages read that week, because print will never die), community offerings (Black Creative Worlds), and occasional professional updates. You get notifications about the weekly Office Hours lives as they happen, a fun, casual space to chat with me and hear me wax on about history, archives, Black life during slavery, or whatever might be the news of the day. And you get the After Work Drinks, the post-live round up, which usually features select audio clips as video essays from the live (explore them here). The audio clips are also available via RSS feed in your favorite podcast player and I usually post them on my IG (@jessicamariejohnson_).
When you buy a coffee (monthly sub) or the groceries (yearly sub), you get a bit more from behind the scenes: dispatches from the land of women (an inside look into the chaos of academic mama-parenting), Office Hours video clips, access to the full newsletter archive (posts are paywalled after a year), more personal musings from the afrofuturist side of my brain, and a first look at new writing, new projects (example: paid subscribers had first look access to my experiments with live video last year. Now I’m opening Office Hours lives to everyone).
Paid subscriptions can be strange, but I’ve gone from “give everything away for free!” to doing what I can to respect the newsletter ecosystem. I don’t live on subscriptions, I want to be honest about that, but some people do and not offering something extra for those willing (or expecting) to support the work feels disrespectful. Besides, it really does buy coffee and eggs, spinach, cilantro, bacon. And paywalls have the added benefit of making it harder for Ai bots to crawl all over our writing. Small rebellions from within the machine.
So my paid subscription philosophy is this: a paid subscription isn’t necessary to sit at the kitchen table and enjoy the conversation, but they are a lovely way to show you appreciate the time and effort. And I never turn down a cafecito. Thank you to the paid subscribers!
And I decided to state plain and for the record an Ai/Human Made policy. I’ve got strong feelings about Ai. If you checked out Office Hours lives last year, you have a sense already. If you want to guess at what they are, check out this Cartography of Generative Ai for yourself. In the short term, here’s my KTH Ai policy:
Human Made/GenAi Policy: Material on this newsletter is human made. I do not use GenAi to write or create text, images or video on any of my sites. I can’t always speak for material I cite, but when I find out it is Ai generated, I delete it. I find Ai generated historical images and video to be morally repugnant. I do use Ai to generate transcriptions of audio/video and I do allow others to generate captions on audio/video. Beyond accessibility assistance, Ai is a 🚫. If you find GenAi text, art or videos cited or shown here, let me know. For more on authors and Ai, check out the Author’s Guild resources here.
I hope we can have a fun year together.
May 2026 bring you, me, and everyone we know more touch, more grounding, more mysteries of faith, more imagination, and more courage to keep fighting.
And now…let the wild rumpus of research start!!
Listen
Reads
Yevan Terrien, “Baptiste and Marianne’s Balbásha’: Enslavement, Freedom, and Belonging in Early New Orleans, 1733–1748,” Journal of American History 110, no. 2 (2023): 230–57.
Anthony Stevens-Acevedo, The Santo Domingo Slave Revolt of 1521 and the Slave Laws of 1522: Black Slavery and Black Resistance in the Early Colonial Americas (Dominican Studies Institute, 2019).
Alain Locke, ed., The New Negro: An Interpretation (Albert and Charles Boni, 1925), http://archive.org/details/newnegrointerpre00unse.
Samuel Momodu, “Little George Ship Revolt (1730),” BlackPast.Org, August 24, 2020, https://blackpast.org/global-african-history/little-george-ship-revolt-1730/.
Chapter 2: An Inhuman Trade https://www.searchablemuseum.com/an-inhuman-trade/
Linda M. Heywood and John K. Thornton, “In Search of the 1619 African Arrivals: Enslavement and Middle Passage,” The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 127, no. 3 (2019): 200–211.
John Thornton, “The African Experience of the ‘20. and Odd Negroes’ Arriving in Virginia in 1619,” The William and Mary Quarterly 55, no. 3 (1998): 421–34, https://doi.org/10.2307/2674531.
Michael Gomez, ed., Hidden Voices: Stories of the Global African Diaspora (New York Department of Education, 2025), https://www.weteachnyc.org/resources/resource/hidden-voices-stories-of-the-global-african-diaspora-volume-1/.
Mariana Bracks Fonseca, “Njinga of Ndongo and Matamba,” in Oxford Research Encyclopedia of African History (2022), https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190277734.013.997.
John Minton, Folk Music and Song in the WPA Ex-Slave Narratives (Univ. Press of Mississippi, 2025).
“Horace King,” Encyclopedia of Alabama, https://encyclopediaofalabama.org/media/horace-king/.
Marian Crenshaw Austin, “Family Finally Found: The Womack Plantation Ledger, Butler County, Alabama,” Alabama Review (Montgomery, United States) 78, no. 1 (2025): 16–39.
Benjamin Henry Latrobe, The Journal of Latrobe: Being the Notes and Sketches of an Architect, Naturalist and Traveler in the United States from 1796 to 1820 (D. Appleton and Company, 1905), https://www.loc.gov/resource/gdcmassbookdig.journaloflatrobe00latr/.
Katie Knowles, “We Are Family,” National Museum of African American History and Culture, 2019, https://nmaahc.si.edu/explore/stories/we-are-family.
Ken Nelson, “Finding African American Ancestors in the 1850 Mortality Schedules • FamilySearch,” FamilySearch, February 26, 2016, https://www.familysearch.org/en/blog/finding-african-american-ancestors-in-the-1850-mortality-schedules.
Documents
“‘La Negra Del Hospital’ (The Black Woman of the Hospital) (1497-1501) · First Blacks In The Americas · Sixteenth-Century La Española: Glimpses of the First Blacks in the Early Colonial Americas,” accessed January 1, 2026, https://dsi.ccnydigitalscholarship.org/dsi-blacks-in-america/exhibits/show/first-blacks-in-america/trial-1.
James D. Dewell, Down in Porto Rico with a Kodak (The Record 1898), https://www.loc.gov/item/98000575/
Projects
Middle Passages Markers Project: Mapping Sites of Slave Landing (Google Map)
Puerto Rico Resource Guide: Library of Congress https://guides.loc.gov/puerto-rico-guide/digital-collections
The Long Journey to Freedom, Ancestry.com https://www.ancestry.com/c/articles-of-enslavement
U.S. Census Mortality Schedule https://www.familysearch.org/en/search/collection/1420441?collectionNameFilter=true
Affirmations and Beatitudes
I am a woman of a certain age.
I love that my longtime blogging comai Maegan E. Ortiz is publishing a newsletter here as well. Subscribe here. We’ve been at this a long time. Follow her!
“This world, this moment, this timeline, this variant, makes me furious, murderous. Makes me want to eat my young. And since I actually have young that I want to see continue to grow into caring, sensitive, empathetic and loving human beings, I have to be careful.”
I love this so much and you’re right on the money. This is exactly what this year is calling for.
You amaze me! Glad to be reading and for your hope for a new year break down, more than I can summon thats for sure, but I also feel it. Best wishes for the new year