I just got confirmation that National History Day, a program that does more to ignite K-12 students' love of history, learning, and yes, even the United States than anything else I've ever seen, had all its funding cut yesterday by the DOGE-axe at the NEH - including for this year's ongoing contest.

Currently in hibernation on this platform. A lot to be worried about. Focused on my job and my family. Look out for each other, hug your loved ones, stay informed.

Holocaust denialism is a very serious problem that must be addressed by historians & all decent people alike. However, I’m convinced the resurgence of Nazism in the U.S. & Europe is not a problem of forgetting about history, but quite the opposite.

I’m giving a free virtual presentation on the St. Louis City-County split, “The Great Divorce of 1876,” next Friday Jan 1/31 at 10AM Central Time. Register here: slcl.events.mylibrary.digital/event?id=150...

I left a comment on this essay, but it either fell through an internet hole or didn’t get approved, so I’ll add a few thoughts here instead. www.journalofthecivilwarera.org/2025/01/the-...

The Historical Figures App was trying to do this two years ago with AI conversations & it was a disaster. It appears that app is now defunct, but I guess that hasn’t stopped other developers from trying this insanity. pastexplore.wordpress.com/2023/02/13/i...

Yup, @jamellebouie.net has this exactly right. What these guys are celebrating/pursuing/yearning for is not masculine energy, it's *adolescent* energy. Drinking Red Bull, crushing Call of Duty, refusing to clean your room. It is indescribably pathetic. www.nytimes.com/2025/01/18/o...

Both of them were annoying this morning and then all was forgiven when they posed for this photo. We also learned today that Doobie is a 100% purebred Poodle, which is amazing given that he’s a rescue.

Kolchin’s introductory study on American slavery was very influential for me & remains a great resource on the topic. RIP. www.delawareonline.com/obituaries/p...

I am delighted to see so many replies objecting to the volunteer aspect of this NARA project. In a time of extreme precarity in the humanities, NARA should be paying for skilled work, not asking for free labor that further devalues our already devalued work.

Update: The College mysteriously deleted this post over the weekend. 🤷🏻‍♂️

Don’t know if it counts as a form of public history, but lately I’ve been working on Find A Grave updating missing/incorrect information on relatives along with some other figures I’ve researched. Started with my Great Grandmother, whose 116th birthday was yesterday, but is not listed on the site.

The Tulsa Race Massacre was not committed by an uncontrolled mob but was the result of “a coordinated, military-style attack” by white citizens, the Justice Department said in a report. It was the first time the U.S. government has given an official account of the 1921 massacre of Black residents.

Two questions for the history bloggers: 1. What’s a good app/widget for archiving your website, particularly a Wordpress site? 2. Are there any examples of bloggers who turned their online essays into a book of select writings?

Very thoughtful essay & worth reading. Need to be careful about the historiographical claim that Reconstruction historians have left out the rest of the world. Downs’s work on the Cuban Revolution & Hahn’s “A Nation Without Borders” being two recent examples of Reconstruction in intl. context.

In re Claremont, Paul Fussell rightly pointed out back in the 80s that think tanks and institutes with all their talk of “scholars” and “fellows” was just people playing at university without having actually to put in the work—or, I’d add, having to face oppositional views from colleagues.

I’ve been reading about constitutionalism. The scholar argues that England does not have a written constitution, but that its constitutional principles are so part of the national culture and seen as an inheritance that the people won’t stand for a deviation from their constitutional rights. 1/9

My alma mater has embraced AI & LinkedIn Tech Jargon. 😒

This thread is excellent & provides some great resources for further reading. I do want to point out that the Page Act of 1875 predates the Chinese Exclusion Act as a significant federal immigration law & really serves as a pretext for it. www.nps.gov/articles/000...

BlueSky is the only social media platform where users have complete autonomy to curate their feeds as they wish: no targeted ads, no algorithms shaping your feed, and no data collection from psychopathic billionaires like Zuckerberg & Musk who want to track every step of your lives for their profit.

Tuning into HGTV on Jan. 20 as a “form of rebellion” and a resistance activity is…ridiculous. Boycotting the Inauguration won’t change a damn thing.

Short follow up on my website about why photo credits matter when sharing historical photos on these nostalgia FB groups: pastexplore.wordpress.com/2025/01/02/f...

Super niche, but hopefully someone else on Bluesky besides me got their start with STLPunk.

It’s very small in the grand scheme of things, but I got kicked out of a St. Louis historical photos group on FB because I asked a habitual poster to include photo credits in his posts so that others could find, access, & download the photos for their own uses as a courtesy. 🤷🏻‍♂️

"Textbooks make lasting impressions on how people understand what a discipline is about and what its basic facts and important questions are."

the #1 way to be a historian in public these days is to be a political commentator so not really surprised that the media has started eliding these categories, since so many of our colleagues are out there performing this version of our discipline for fun and profit

Thread.

I would appreciate it if there was a tad less reposting of X content. Yes, these people are awful; many of them are racists and fascists. Don’t give them a platform they don’t deserve.

I enjoyed Yellowstone for the most part. I think some of the dialogue & narrative themes of the show try to make bold declarations about “authenticity”: who really counts as an American & who is culturally authentic vs. being a sellout or a fraud.

“Wishing you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year” An 1880s cabinet card of a 🐨 taken at the Valmy Studio in Sydney, Australia. From my personal collection.

This flag planting business in college football is silly. But it could serve as a useful entry point for students to consider why so many Confederate flags are housed in collections at Northern museums today. People get worked up about their flags.

This is an incredible testament to the loss of local news coverage. A congresswoman disappeared for six months and no one noticed.

Good thoughts from @stephenwest.bsky.social & I’ll just add: If communities like Salem, OH want to promote history education, esp. local history, are there more effective & meaningful ways to accomplish those goals as opposed to investing energy & money (public & private) in statues?

The Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library & Museum has fired another talented historian—Brian Mitchell—because he refused to approve the purchase of $15,000 flag with questionable provenance. capitolfax.com/2024/12/19/a...

For the evening crowd…

Telegraphy was every bit as significant a new media tech quantum leap as the internet, probably more (fight me)

I have a cranky daughter who won’t go down in the bassinet, so here’s a short history of early photography in Great Britain. First thing to know is that the French and British didn’t like each other (shocking) and the French tried to cut the British out of commercial photography.

A profile pic featuring Lewis Powell is WILD.

Pundits keep pretending that RFK Jr is "anti Big Pharma" but that is just what anti-vaxxers say to make their ideas seem palatable. He constantly promotes Ivermectin and Hydroxychloroquine, both of which are produced by pharma companies.

Learning is, at root, a social activity. For it to be most meaningful, learning has to be done in community. Content delivery is not learning. Plug-and-chug autograded virtual worksheets are not learning.

"The main clue was an offhand mention in an agricultural report from 1935. The document referred to a specific area near a creek that contained graves, and would not, therefore, be suited to farming." www.nytimes.com/2024/12/12/u...

Googling Stuff: Then v Now.

This made me so angry that I read the entire article and actually I do not understand how AI helped at all, everyone seems to be doing more work to help the robot than it would take just to have humans teach and edit a textbook and everything else. Also I hate it so much did I say that

UCLA’s evangelistic rhetoric around their AI Humanities classroom is giving me circa 2013 Massive Open Online Course vibes. MOOCs were going to promote critical thinking, revolutionize the classroom, bring education to the masses…nobody talks about MOOCs anymore.

“Now, instead of a professor lecturing about historical facts — because those are all in the textbook — they can instead focus on things like, ‘How do we think about this particular text?’... And that’s how critical thinking starts to happen.” Thank goodness for AI! 🙄

Folks who wouldn’t mind helping with transcribing: This is the back side of a photo I have of a post Civil War US Army soldier with a note that is ostensibly a mailing address to Mrs. Franklin Grant. I can make out everything but the street. Shrudes? Shrades? Something else? Any help appreciated.

Today’s plantation landscape reflects the nation’s reluctance to confront the true history of slavery and its legacy of racial injustice. eji.org/news/plantat...

The Rise and Rapid Fall of the First US Department of Education The department, established in 1867, faced opposition from Southern congressmen, who associated it with education for the formerly enslaved. 🗃️ www.history.com/news/departm...