I want to treat "Roman Helmet Guy" as a serious interlocuter, and I want to do it as someone who does what might be called "New Military History," applying cultural studies to military history (religious violence and apocalypticism during wars): you can't study war without studying people.

I don't understand the point of this comment. Because from where I'm sitting, it is actually not a Good Thing for a world class university--situated in a democracy that is frequently at war, where a disproportionate number of future policy makers are educated--to NOT teach military history.

May the Ents march forth and tear your data centres to the ground

This really is a must read for anyone in academia.

Precisely this.

Introduce yourself with four spaceships.

Just a reminder that I'm happy to speak to any journalist, or to recommend other scholars to do so, about why prejudice and "potentially divisive symbols" like swastikas (!) are so harmful to morale and cohesion in militaries

www.npr.org/2025/11/10/n... "'I swore an oath to the Constitution, not a person,' she says. 'I just really, really implore my peers and everybody outside looking in, to just think about that. Really think about that, and think about what that means.'"

"Wouldn't it be fascinating to live in the late Roman Republic?" (Monkey paw curls).

BEST BIG CITY IN THE US 9 YEARS IN A ROW. While critics try to paint Chicago as something to fear, the rest of the world knows the truth — this is the best big city in America.

If Putin concludes that NATO’s incredibly weak physical and verbal response to his aerial assault on Poland is as robust as it is willing to get, then the disparity in wealth etc won’t deter him at all. How is this not blindingly obvious? VERY serious danger is now heading towards us at speed.

So if you remember that frustrating article a couple of weeks ago at the Dispatch suggesting that we ought to save the sciences by shoving the humanities overboard, I wrote a response to the financial illiteracy and moral cowardice of that position: thedispatch.com/article/univ...

The University of Chicago recently announced pauses on admissions to some of its humanities doctoral programs. Tyler Austin Harper argues that it's “a particular gut-punch to the humanities, not just at the university itself, but nationally and even globally.”

I think we should be using “real feel” for more things than just the weather, like you have a half hour meeting today but it’s at 4:00 so the real feel is gonna be up around 53 minutes, or you have 2 cats but they’re in a mood today so the real feel is gonna be somewhere between 7 and 9

As we mark the 80th anniversary of WWII's end, I’ve come to believe that in losing that Greatest Generation, we are losing more than just the memories of combat. We are losing the memory and experience of what it means to fight fascism and authoritarianism. www.doomsdayscenario.co/p/what-we-lo...

AI will never locate a new archive. It will never uncover a new source. It will never find a small, privately held collection of papers that can upend what we think we know about the past. It can never work with undigitized sources. It can never do real oral history or ethnography.

Regurgitating/remixing the work of historians ≠ doing history. But clearly the "researchers" who made this list had no idea what any of these professions actually do. "You guys just memorize facts and dates right? And maybe speculate about ancient aliens? Prepare to be obsoleted!"

But because there's no giant 'history formula,' no tables of strange symbols (well, amusingly, there *are* but you don't work with them until you are much deeper in the field), folks assume that history is easy, does not require special skills and so contemptible. 12/

a good arbiter of how close we are to bad hybrid regime shit is if the political comedy shows start getting pulled for whatever reason

"We don’t make enough money to put up with this." Last year, US K-12 schools opened short 55,000 teachers. Between book bans and political attacks on schools and educators, it's looking like this year's shortages will be even more dire, especially in red states. newrepublic.com/article/1967...

To form a more perfect Union, implies as we all know, that we have something imperfect. But to strive for the betterment of all, and to keep striving no matter what - that is the American legacy. “For that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion.” We strive still.

New article out @ruhm.bsky.social! I examined negative reactions to mass violence (massacres, mass enslavements, etc) in Greek+Roman texts. Such reactions suggest that, for some ancient observers, acts of extreme violence were "atrocities"—i.e., transgressive, shocking, & worthy of condemnation. (1)

There are some things I miss about living in the Bay Area and some things I very much do not miss, but *that summer weather* is the thing I miss the most.

Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Another good reminder from today is that to win this we all need to get used to cooperating with people we sometimes find highly annoying

I endorse this view.

I have a joke about Phylarchus but Polybius says it's too dramatic.

The game was on easy mode, too.

Shout out to @bretdevereaux.bsky.social for consistently being super generous.

Is anyone else randomly getting a bunch of new followers? Not complaining, but, um, I'm super boring, barely post, and when i do it's basically me talking to myself. Like right now, 95% chance no one sees this. So. I don't get it! New followers, are you real? You won't see this, so we'll never know.

Loving how the budget bill goes all in for oligarchic techno dystopia.

This story has repeated every year since the 90s: “At a conference last year, Robert Goldstein, the chief operating officer of BlackRock, the world’s biggest money manager, said “We have more and more conviction that we need people who majored in history, …”

If we are going to weather this night - hopefully a short one - we are going to need to summon some sincerity and be willing to be 'cringe' in committing, in public, to the ideals we hold. You cannot keep a republic with apathy and nihilism. You can't do good history with it either.

New Mexico made child care free for most families. Believe it or not, the good thing is good. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

Wow who could’ve guessed that this would happen It’s almost as if USAID was a pillar of American soft power and influence in the world It’s almost as if it was entirely predictable that America’s adversaries would work to fill the void left by USAID’s destruction

Cory Booker: "I don't want a Disney vacation of our history! I don't a whitewashed history, I don't want a homogenized history. Tell me the wretched truth about America." Historians, crawling back into daylight from the depths of despair: "Did somebody somewhere ask for some wretched truth?"

Some good suggestions so far. Obviously, what I am going for is the need to reframe liberalism from pleasant discussion in faculty lounges to its more element form - the movement that cracked crowns and freed slaves. We need our fire back.

AGAIN: morally abhorrent, strategically stupid.

This amounts to purposefully killing more civilians, which is morally abhorrent. If morality doesn't persuade you (i.e. if you're a monster), then I'll add that indiscriminate violence is *also* bad strategy. This decision by our secdef demonstrates extraordinary ignorance, stupidity, and cruelty.

What are some things about the United States that are actually pretty exceptional? - university system - research output - alliances - economy Oh, okay, we're trashing all of those on purpose now.

"I think it's one of the most important moments since 1945... For the first time since 1941, we have a US government which is not allied with Europe." www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w...

i firmly believe one of the main messages we should be telling our students about this whole thing is that generative ‘AI’ by definition will *never* have an original idea, and if you use it, neither will *you*

granting the premise of this, how would you know what questions to ask?

Historians Politely Remind Nation To Check What's Happened In Past Before Making Any Big Decisions theonion.com/historians-p...

Because right now, we are *pantsing* our other adversary for the cost of intelligence support and the collected junk of our military’s garage we had to get rid of anyway. We are sitting on the greatest geopolitical bargain IN HISTORY and we don’t have the patience to let *someone else* fight for it

"It is not clear what would happen if one Nato member attacked another." Can't say I ever expected to see those words in print.

I hope I'm wrong, that Pete Hegseth rises to the level of mediocre and the U.S. muddles through his tenure as SecDef. But the Senate confirmed an unserious man to hold one of the most serious jobs on the planet, and I am hard-pressed to see how this ends well.

There’s a lot of quiet but load-bearing stuff the federal government does, and everything covered by the aid pause Trump just ordered is a part of that. It’s easy to dismiss it as not a big deal, especially if the money gets turned back on quickly, but the people and places affected won’t forget.