Here's what chronic under-funding/neglect has done: my dept is down 8 TT faculty as peeps quit & lines are not replaced. Fin aid, academic advising, fiscal and business + other units all under-staffed, making it harder for students, remaining taff to operate. Infrastructure crumbling. ⬇️ morale.

The call for papers for the 2026 annual meeting of the American Association for the History of Medicine is live now! We hope you will join us in Buffalo! histmed.org/buffalo-2026/

The budgeting meme about scented candles, but with history of medicine artifacts:

This is worth sharing far and wide. Federal Employees and contractors oral history project. Im not involved in this. Just got the link, idea seems to be to create a record of the assault on the American Repuvlic after Jan 2025. www.fecohp.org

Just sharing the “Xtreme endnotes” assignment @parisnoire.bsky.social mentions here in case anyone else finds it helpful as we begin a new academic year. FWIW, it’s a purely analog exercise in an AI-freaky world & my students have never not had fun doing it.✌🏽 www.historians.org/perspectives...

🗃️ Variation of this: I gave students one of my chapters w/no footnotes, asked where they thought footnotes should go: What type of source was used? What makes you think that? They have to consider how writing shows evidence vs. context vs. author’s voice. They liked it a lot and had great questions!

I’m mulling over the historical interplay between the materials used to make toys as part of a new project. Wood, plastic, metal, foam, stuffing, and even Velcro all had distinct, and shifting, applications and meanings in the consumer marketplace. Safety, unsurprisingly, was a key factor.

We’ve been slowly refurnishing the house with used furniture, and I have a newfound appreciation for the seemingly infinite types of desks, sideboards, buffets, shelves, armoires, cabinets, hutches…

I taught Composition and Technical Writing at OU, and everyone there worked extremely hard despite being poorly paid and being expected to prepare students for every type of academic writing in a semester or two.

“Kid will love these! What could possibly go wrong?”

The latest addition to my growing collection of safety artifacts: the Suzy Homemaker Super-Grill, complete with A/C current, a working heating pan, and a set of particularly scary warning labels.

“Like their four-year counterparts, community colleges are grappling with disappearing federal grants, shuttered D.E.I. offices, eliminated programs… many of the grants that fund financial aid for low-income students and the staff that support them have been eliminated or threatened”

This list says more about the folks who did the assessment than which jobs are on the AI chopping block. AI won’t replace jobs like “historian” or “writer” any time soon unless we accept a poor substitute for the real thing. AI can synthesize but can’t produce new knowledge or art on its own.

Read Alex Parry's "Making Homemakers Responsible for Safety: Housework, Laundry Equipment, and the Unequal Burdens of Accident Prevention, C. 1910–80" Published in the April 2025 issue of Technology & Culture, available via @projectmuse.bsky.social muse.jhu.edu/article/956850

Safety regulations are written in blood

SCOTUS is allowing Trump to fire (at least for now) the three Democrat-appointed members of the Consumer Product Safety Commission. The CPSC regulates safety of everyday consumer products. Guess who recently sued the agency and claimed that it's unconstitutional? Amazon.

I am no constitutional scholar, but I can't help but feel that "the President gets to dictate what every university can teach and what every television station should broadcast" is closer to what the founding fathers were worried about when it comes to free speech than trigger warnings on syllabi.

As a historian of injuries and product safety, this one feels personal. The CPSC can’t do its job without independent commissioners. Let’s review some of the cases that led to the establishment of the agency in the first place:

The cat gliding in to our room after devouring her breakfast:

When we played with lawn darts at my friend’s house in the late 80s we clustered together, threw them up in the air high as we could and scattered in terror because we thought that’s what the actual game was. The idea that you were supposed to play with them like horseshoes or darts never came up.

Back when Skydancers were a thing my sister and I used to shoot them at each other with alarming accuracy and frequent facial injuries and somehow my parents thought this was fine? I still have a scar on my eyebrow. We also had one of those little ATVs that ran on a car battery and went quick

Submitting a mixed-methods research proposal on toy safety this week. If you have any interesting anecdotes or sources about risky toys, I’d be excited to learn more! #Histmed #Histsci #HSTM #STS

I am cursed. I’ve somehow been on the receiving end of a 4+ hour delay on three consecutive flights this summer.

Once again begging folks who write about road safety to name the agencies (local, state, federal) that regulate the road and car stuff.

To improve product safety @cpsc.gov needs to hear from the public about what we do well, how we can improve and what we should be focused on. Unnecessarily delaying our Priorities Hearing undermines CPSC's ability to advance our safety mission. See my statement: www.cpsc.gov/About-CPSC/C...

I had my one-year review at URMC yesterday and feel proud of what I’ve accomplished so far. I’ve published two articles, designed three courses, applied for a few grants, and started my book proposal. Taking a moment to celebrate my wins before pressing on!

Check out our newly released special issue, "Reproductive Objects"! Through a collection of stellar articles, it traces the material "stuff" that constitutes the uneven tapestries of power, authority, and knowledge making around human reproduction. www.press.jhu.edu/journals/bul...

Do you love socio-material approaches to reproductive history? Come check out the special issue of Bulletin of the History of Medicine I’m in. My paper is on the history of centimeters as a unit for measuring cervical dilation.

do NOT apply for the scab jobs at columbia

Had a really great day with my partner yesterday. We picked up a table and record cabinet for our sitting room, had some local cider, watched Monkey Man, and ordered a pizza. We’ll have to make “plans” like this more often.

We would *love* to have more members join our team! It's a great experience especially for any #histmed scholars who want to work on their editing muscles and grow their networks 🪴

What’s old is new again. Consumer Reports was issuing warnings about immersion water heaters in the 1960s. Most companies care about product safety, but we need regulatory agencies like the CPSC for the goods that slip through the cracks.

You know you’re having a rough time when your inbox looks like this:

It's publication day!! Thank you to all of the folks at @urochester.bsky.social press and @boydellandbrewer.bsky.social who helped to make this book so beautiful. And thank you AGAIN to all of the folks in my (very earnest) acknowledgments.

The nightmare continues. Our flight this morning has now been delayed by almost two hours.

📢📢📢 We’re looking for scholars who could write pieces on the following topics: RFK and miasma, the potential legislation of asbestos, and the backlash against sunscreen. Preferably for Clio ER. #histmed Please share widely! nursingclio.org/write-for-us...

Our trip back from Oklahoma to Rochester on American Airlines has been a disaster. Our flight from OKC to DCA was delayed, so American automatically rebooked us on another flight to ROC tomorrow morning because we were scheduled to miss our connection… 1/3

Your CPSC "Beat the Heat" safety starter pack.

200 for #Railway200 - a new thread! We're 200 days out from the 200th anniversary of the 1st passenger journey on the Stockton & Darlington Railway, on 27 September 1825. To mark it, we'll post a person a day from the Railway Work, Life & Death project's research.

I’ve looked at hundreds of toy ads, but this one is especially unhinged. “Suzy Homemaker is a square! She doesn’t wear love beads. She wears shoes […] She gets more fun out of being a cook than a kook.”

As the Trump administration tries to dismantle the CPSC, we should remember why the agency was formed in the first place. Consumer complaints about risky toys, especially dolls and “real-life” appliances, helped drive product safety regulation. The CPSC helps keep us safe.

To hear them tell it, cats are the only creatures to know true suffering.

The interesting thing about people dragging the folks in that NYT piece who said that they didn’t vote for moms to get deported is that the article is about how these women are organizing for a member of their community, aggressively and openly, and actually, that’s good.

this @adambonica.bsky.social piece deserves to be read beside the yeoman work that @donmoyn.bsky.social and @pamherd.bsky.social have been doing. The dismantling of administrative expertise is one of those stories that is so big that pro journalists with beats find it hard to focus on or explain .

If you care about U.S. science, medicine, and technology, contact your representatives to oppose these cuts. Federal support for research and trainees is essential to our economy, future knowledge production, and the livelihoods of people across the country. Resources in thread below:

Make sure to contact your reps. See the resources in the thread

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