So it’s come to this. My dog forced me to give him a treat at (nerf) gunpoint.

Yes! So excited to have @halseanderson.bsky.social on campus today! The Clarke Library, our special collections library, specializes in children’s literature among other things. So it was a natural fit to bring her as guest speaker for the 250th as well!

Amusing to me that my hometown is proposing toppling a George Washington statue to build a park for the Royals for the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. www.kansascity.com/sports/mlb/k...

“The police power of the states embrace[s]…such reasonable regulations…as will protect the public health and the public safety. West Virginia’s compulsory vaccination law does exactly that. It is a legitimate exercise of the state’s power to protect the health and well-being of school children”.

This framing is ridiculous. Shouldn’t we be thankful for peace broadly kept despite obvious hostilities? It’s like saying, “thank god we’ve got a Health Secretary that is a man of action ready to put lives on the line against measles, rather than delaying it with vaccines” oh, wait.

There’s a reason people read the classics.

One of the cooler collections in CMU’s Clarke Historical Library is the Dick Enberg Papers (a CMU alum and longtime sports broadcaster). Here are Enberg’s handwritten notes for a classic NCAA tournament game in 2005 between The University of Illinois and the University of Arizona.

Such a great film. I’ve taught it a couple times. Hard to beat Laurel with her handdrawn charts spread out on the floor.

There are many history documentaries where historians comments, of course, but few where historians explain how they know what they know—how they worked from the primary sources to create their interpretations. Are there others?

I just bought my own copy of the PBS American Experience DVD of “A Midwife’s Tale” that I’ve been checking out of the library for years. It’s great and it still holds up! But is there a similar but more recent documentary/dramatization of the historian’s process?

This log cabin hotdog food truck is for sale near me, and I have a strong urge to show up at history conferences wearing a stovepipe hat and selling “Lincoln Dogs”

Well crap, the team in Franklin, Wisconsin came up with a clever alt identity and I may need to get something with this logo: news.sportslogos.net/2026/03/27/m...

This is a key part of science. Collecting new data and, if the data supports a new conclusion, adopting that conclusion. Changing your mind when presented with new conflicting data is not a sign of weakness. It's like learning from your mistakes.

This excerpt from Matt Kaplan's (science correspondent for The Economist) new book has so many errors that I had to respond. Kaplan argues that Washington's genius-level understanding of smallpox handedly won the Revolutionary War.🧵 undark.org/2026/03/13/e...

My wife slyly altered this car for me for my birthday. She’s the best and knows me so well.

It’s the first SEC tournament championship for Arkansas since my freshman year as Razorback in 2000! Woo Pig Soiee!

Habermas taught a couple of courses every year at Northwestern when I was there, and one year one of my friends petrified and delighted me by nabbing the name plate from his door as a gift because we were so delighted to think of him adding the little umlaut with dabs of whiteout.

You want a short horror/thriller story...this.

I’m staying in a hotel room with my 12 year old son. He dropped something under the bed and reached for it. Before I could stop him, he said “uhh…what’s this?” and pulled it out. It was a nerf dart. The best possible thing for a 12 year old to find under a hotel bed. *phew*

"Screw Covid, I'm going to Sturgis!" The Sturgis Motorcycle Rally, held in August 2020, was the epitome of the individual choice mindset. Of course it spread cases outward and caused infections, illness, and death. A new research paper allows us to watch the Sturgis Covid wave spread across the US.

Not with our new billion dollar hover boots, we won't!

I had a great time contributing to this episode! You can hear me explain the claim I make in my book that the smallpox epidemic of 1764 contributed to Boston's particularly angry complaints over the Stamp Act in 1765.

As I told my undergrads at the start of the semester, I'm not asking you to write a paper about Little Rock's school desegregation because I don't know what happened there. Little Rock is just the topic. The act of researching, writing and editing the paper is the whole point.

So SCOTUS, with its fabricated-out-of-thin-air immunity doctrine, has actually made American presidents less accountable than LITERAL royalty.

On the latest episode of the Massachusetts Historical Society's "The Object of History" podcast, they focus on inoculation in Boston. I'm interviewed as the staff of the MHS discusses the letters John and Abigail Adams wrote to each other while they were inoculated. www.masshist.org/podcast/seas...

I loved this whole thread summary of my book, but she really got to the heart of the conclusion here (no small feat, it's a long and at times dense book!).

I loved reading this *excellent* summary thread of my book! Thanks for reading, Torrey!

You should go ahead and subscribe to The Reckoning podcast now and let my episode (#182) be the appetizer to your main course (episode #183) of Lincoln, vampires, and HCR!

Find it on Apple Podcasts: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/e...

My 12 year old “So first they have Green Day playing songs from the 90s and 2000s and now the anthem from the War of 1812. Old guys like you must be happy, right dad?”

Coming to Reckoning with Jason Herbert tomorrow- @profwehrman.bsky.social drops in to talk about how debates over smallpox and public health worked to forge a national identity in the early Republic

Thanks, Jason! It was fun! This is the story the viruses don’t want you to hear. You can tell by the lingering effects of Ramsay Hunt Syndrome (varicella zoster) paralyzing the side of my face, but the viruses couldn’t keep me from sharing this history. Get vaccinated and have a listen.

I keep coming back to Charles Blow’s “The Lowest White Man,” From 2018, because Trump proves Blow was right on a near daily basis. www.nytimes.com/2018/01/11/o...

I am speechless. "The National Park Service has removed visitor brochures from the Medgar & Myrlie Evers Home National Monument. Among the anticipated changes? No longer calling his murderer a 'racist.'" 🗃️ mississippitoday.org/2026/02/05/m...

I met Josh way back in 2002 when we were in honors geology together at the University of Arkansas. I invited him to join the UofA's quizbowl team, and now he's a 7-time Jeopardy champ (ok, maybe I can't take all the credit), and he will be back on the show next week for the Invitational Tournament!

Reminder that no one knows what Christopher Columbus even looked like (all portraits are guesses by the artists long after he died), so besides being awful statues of Columbus are also extra dumb.

Today is the paperback release day for my book The Contagion of Liberty! It’s about how Americans demanded that their governments provide inoculations for smallpox to the public as their right and also to affirm that public health is a foremost duty of government. www.press.jhu.edu/books/title/...

the literal easiest way to have rural healthcare and get more doctors is to create a federal program where people get their med school paid for and then have to “serve” in rural or urban hospitals for 4-6 years for a reasonable wage. i’ve been wondering why this doesn’t seem to exist since 2008.

Never mind the jobs you had, tell me five classes you took in college: 1. Microbiology 2. Comparative Slaveries 3. The Early Middle Ages 4. History of Arkansas and the Southwest 5. Urban Geography (And so many more)

Im excited to visit Auburn University next week to give a lecture on the public health legacy of the American Revolution as part of both their Humanities and Healthcare speaker series and their RevolutionaryLegacies speaker series for the 250th. cla.auburn.edu/news/article...

Leave it to MAGA and MAHA to bring us back to the measles outbreaks of the Roaring 20s.

Infectious diseases do not magically disappear just because you stop tracking and reporting. This is dangerous. When diseases spread in silence, outbreaks go undetected for much longer and containment is more difficult. All of this means more avoidable deaths. www.medpagetoday.com/infectiousdi...

Excellent article, combining real reporting and information with the intellectual training to give shape and meaning to events. Exactly what such writing should do, and exactly what both-sidesism and vapid op-eds don't do.

Two years after the Boston Massacre a lantern in a balcony near the site illuminated a painting of the shooting with the words “The fatal effect of a standing army posted in a free city.”

Bostonians commemorated the Boston Massacre annually for a dozen years from 1771-1783 or until independence from the government responsible was achieved.

As Jonathan Foster used to say in his Journalism 101 class: “If someone tells you it's raining and another tells you it's dry, it's not your job to quote them both. It's your job to look out the fucking window and find out which is true.” To journalists everywhere: You cannot both-sides this.

Anti-vaxxers and anti-public health folks also love the Gadsden flag, but Christopher Gadsden, creator of flag, was a commissioner in Charleston in charge of keeping weekly records of smallpox cases, hiring guards to quarantine them, and levying heavy fines on any who wantonly spread the disease.

Our government is not exactly out there trying to "establish justice and insure domestic tranquility," is it? You know, the first two duties mentioned in The Constitution after “We the people”

The 250th will be similar to the centennial celebration for the American Civil War (1961-65): systematic whitewashing of slavery and colonialism amid multiple national civil rights movements. The more things change...