For my newsletter I wrote about the history behind the Roadless Rule. Today is the final day for public comments! Go make your voice heard.

For those deleting our Academia dot edu accounts (due to their new exploitative TOC) make sure to follow the instructions quoted below or they'll force you to accept the TOC before you can get to the "delete my account" button. See you all on the open-source alternative hcommons Humanities Commons!

Palantir is in the news a lot lately. However, the public discourse about the company often misconstrues it as a data broker, a data miner, a single centralized database, etc. But what does Palantir actually do? I wrote a piece to firmly & clearly answer that question: www.wired.com/story/palant...

We just harvested nearly 48 pounds of peppers from our garden. 😵‍💫

If you haven’t, there are only three days remaining to submit a comment on the planned rescission of the roadless rule in the National Forests. Losing this means a loss of biodiversity, wilderness areas, and recreation.

If you haven’t, there are only three days remaining to submit a comment on the planned rescission of the roadless rule in the National Forests. Losing this means a loss of biodiversity, wilderness areas, and recreation.

Style lessons from Robert Redford, one of the most stylish men in the last century. 🧵

There are a lot of elements of the 1980s Department of Interior that would easily fit today's news and headlines.

Want to explore the various ways Omeka can best serve your project? Join us for our next round of intensive courses for the opportunity to develop your project with the guidance of an Omeka team member! Register at

Tell me you have no idea what Utah County is like without telling me you have no idea what Utah County is like. At the No Kings protests this summer, someone starting chanting F*CK Trump and he was drowned out by LDS Hymns about loving one another.

Just to be blunt, if you want Wired and 404 and The Verge to employ reporters who understand the memes on bullet casings and can connect them to gaming culture while having the legal and support resources to deal with waves of harassment when we do it… you have to subscribe and pay for the work

At times like this it’s important to remember that someone can speak with a tone of confidence and be very incorrect. E.g. this is not an anti-fascist symbol or reference to the Iron Front. This is a Helldivers joke.

ASEH Applications for Prizes, Fellowships, and Grants are now open! Deadline to submit is November 20, 2025. Please visit the ASEH website to learn more and apply: https:/aseh.org/Awards-&-Funding

I’m working on a chicken coop and run expansion, my supervisor is keeping a close eye on my work.

compare missouri senator eric schmitt to notorious pro-slavery ideologue george fitzhugh

NEW: Nearly $50M in research and education funding for farmers and nonprofits remains on hold at USDA. It's not clear why but the end of FY25 is almost here. If it's not spent, the money goes back to Treasury.

Tlingit artist Nicholas Galanin, “Architecture of return, escape (The British Museum)”, a deerskin map a floor plan of the British Museum and possible escape routes for various Indigenous cultural belongings held there.

This @washingtonpost.com editorial doesn’t make it past the second paragraph without a glaring (and telling) factual error. President Washington didn’t create the War Department in 1789; *Congress* did: www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/...

"I asked chatgpt" "I asked grok" Well, have you consulted a historian who says ‘it’s a bit more complicated than that’ and gives you an overly detailed narrative of the last 800 years?

Taking the workshop outdoors.

Holy shit: Stateline spoke to nearly a dozen firefighters, agency staffers and contractors, who said that top officials assigned to the fire deployed the crews to a remote location under false pretenses so federal agents could check their immigration status. www.hcn.org/articles/fir...

This should be the lead story in all major national news outlets. Public health people prefer to stay out of the limelight unless there is no other choice. I can’t overstate how bad things have to be for 9 former CDC directors to band together and pen an op-ed in the NYT warning the entire country.

Always a good day to be around antique tractors.

It really is the good life.

My buddy and grad school colleague @friefeld.bsky.social has a new publication he edits out on the Midwest. Go check it out!

Right on schedule, we got our first egg from the chicks we acquired in May.

Good morning.

This might be my most midwestern dad post ever, but I picked up a lawn sweeper mainly to help augment our compost pile / create mulch/straw for the garden. Used it for the first time today and it’s nothing short of amazing.

AHA member David Blight (Yale Univ.) was interviewed on CNN about the sweeping review of the Smithsonian ordered by President Trump. “They want to try to roll back about 60–70 years of historical scholarship. . . . They call it ‘wokeness.’ We call it good history.” 🗃️

A project I see as an outgrowth of my current work on the Sagebrush Rebellion is to write a history of wolves.

It’s like Obsidian is speaking directly to me.

Famously, the sun never sets on Texas.

Congratulations to AHA members Merle Eisenberg, James Illingworth, James P. McClure, Christopher F. Minty, Michael L. Satlow, and Jennifer Stertzer, as well as all the other historians who were awarded grants by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) for humanities projects in 2025. 🗃️

I have so many questions.

Oh yeah, Claude?

I'll admit, I was skeptical when they said Gemini was just like a bunch of PhDs. But I gotta admit they nailed it.

This should get WIDE circulation: MIT stating that it “has no confidence in the provenance, reliability or validity of the data and has no confidence in the veracity of the research contained in the paper.” gizmodo.com/mit-backs-aw...

Good mail day.

Today I’m working on some experimentation with a local LLM and OCR to see how well I can get an LLM to understand historical documents, identify themes, potential linkages between documents, extract indexes of people, places, or events, and other document metadata.

As our heat index hits 105 today, I again wonder why the public school buses don’t have air conditioning.

"go touch grass" but it's "go talk to a librarian"

This is one of the most beautiful things I have witnessed, the craft here is impeccable.

Between 1899 and her death, in 1962, the photographer Lora Webb Nichols created and collected some 24,000 negatives documenting life in her small Wyoming town, whose fortunes boomed and then busted along with the region’s copper mines.

Studying Yellowstone National Park requires Mark Fiege, “a historian trained in textual methods and landscape studies, to recognize how deep history casts a long shadow over the recent past and the present.” Read more in #AHAPerspectives. 🗃️

NEW: The CDC shooting was much worse than initially reported. 181 rounds. 150 windows hit. Staff are furious at RFK Jr. and Trump becuz their long-running fears about anti-vax rhetoric turning deadly seem to be vindicated. @laurenweberhp.bluesky.social + Me. www.washingtonpost.com/health/2025/...

"PhD-level experts in your back pocket" is a completely nonsensical description of AI but a pretty good description of social media if you follow the right people

This morning was the most intense thunderstorm I’ve been through.

nice thread (as usual!). One thing I would note in response to this comment though is that I do think digital literacy is a job that historians or likeminded folks are particularly well suited to, given that "digital literacy" methods and perceptions benefit from knowing historical contingencies.