Hard to believe it, but next week is the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. It became a named storm on the 24th and hit Louisiana on the morning of the 29th. It was really quick. www.weather.gov/lix/katrina_....

cc: University of Groningen

A great accompaniment to Robin Blackburn's "An Unfinished Revolution," too ... !

Made it into the reference room collection at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. I guess my job is done

James Osterberg aka Iggy Pop = 78 🎂

In three years you could get a BA (or one for an MA) from a top-rated American Studies program at a four-century-old Dutch university in the compact, safe international city of Groningen. (Just saying) www.nytimes.com/2025/04/17/u...

Hello BlueSky! The #ITPS has been a quiet on social media for a while as we focused our efforts on our newsletter, Page of Reason, and other projects. We’re excited to reconnect here, so please look out for some updates over the next few weeks, and we’d be grateful if you’d share the word too!

In 2004 I wrote a review of the late geographer Carville Earle's "The American Way." According to his cyclical theory of US history, we're now in the depths of an era of "Bad Times." But that also means that the age of "Third Democracy" & "Good Times" are on their way! www.h-net.org/reviews/show...

@theslowridepod.bsky.social Little Guy's doppelgänger from the New Zealand republic of Whangamōmona www.theguardian.com/world/2025/m...

Hey y'all @lsupress.bsky.social -- Mark Zuckerberg owes us some $ www.theatlantic.com/technology/a...

Can't wait to see my new royalty checks come in after this score. I can stop grading papers forever💰💰💰

"Reject all"

is on strike in Groningen.🚩 No insightful historical analyses will be forthcoming today

Following this account is like picking up a penny off the sidewalk

"When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.” - MLK, "Beyond Vietnam," quoted in Tim Jelfs, _The Argument about Things in the 1980s_

News from the Starry Messenger - 415 years after Galileo peered through his telescope on a January night & realized the pinpricks of light near Jupiter were moons, not stars, MT aimed his telescope thru his bedroom window and observed Io, Europa, Callisto & Jupiter's twin orange stripes! So rad.

is proud to say that in a day and a half he was able to figure out how to use the consoles in Claude & Gemini & Google Colab to write a Python script that could download all of Benjamin Franklin's writings from Founders Online and then save them as a nice, fat 12.6 MB CSV file in his Google Drive.

This is a cool journal - check it out

Introducing Early American HistoriChat, a chatbot trained on the EvansTCP corpus, ~5,000 American printed texts from 1640 to 1800: eahc.mhvdr.nl Inspired by the work of @dorialexander.bsky.social; designed & built by @michielree.bsky.social in collaboration with MLT & the H-GEAR project

Edmund Callis Berkeley, GIANT BRAINS OR MACHINES THAT THINK (1949).