Shame on the NYT for this article's terrible framing, not the least of which is because it leaves out literally decades of research by historians. We have shown definitively that what these people want literally never existed as a whole in any of these periods.

"They cite the 1950s... or the 1880s, or even Puritan America before the upheavals of feminism, birth control, no-fault divorce, legalized abortion and other policies that granted women rights..." Historian of suffrage & birth control here. The word "before" is doing some real heavy lifting here. 🙄

This all began with an absurdly bad op-Ed in the NY Times by two originalists not doing originalism.

Roe v. Wade was a 7-2 decision. But reactionaries made it their white whale, and spent 50 years building a far-right Supreme Court that would overturn it. I’m not saying the same thing will happen with birthright citizenship. I’m just saying that any dissent in this case will leave that door open.

Period poverty is a widespread issue. Nearly 1 in 4 students struggle to afford menstrual products in the US, and rising cost due to inflation will likely only make that number increase

The title of my new OAH Distinguished Lecture: What Temu Frau Goebbels Gets Wrong about American Feminism

Yes, but also each of the three sentences Temu Frau Goebbels says here is so beyond ridiculously ahistorical and wrong, and not even for the reasons you think you know 🤦‍♀️ Finishing Women's Bodies, Doctors' Rights imminently. Just gonna rage write my way to the finish I guess? OK then!

I will never stop assigning the feminist historians Joan Scott or Joan Kelly. Kelly: economic/gender systems "operate simultaneously to reproduce the socioeconomic and male-dominant structures of [a] particular social order." Scott: "Gender is a primary way of signifying relationships of power."

I’m thrilled that Georgia State’s College of Law is home to the Emmet J. Bondurant Center for Constitutional Law, Practice, and Democracy! As associate director, and @espinsegall.bsky.social as director, we’re taking GSU to new heights in the field of constitutional law. news.gsu.edu/2026/02/26/n...

I'm one of many professors quoted in this report from Alice Speri. I really appreciate The Guardian taking an angle which has basically eluded every other major outlet.

Are you a History undergrad or grad student? Are you already attending OAH? If you join @shgape.bsky.social at the student rate you might get the one free lunch ticket I have left for our annual SHGAPE luncheon this year featuring Dr. Mia Bay as speaker on "Streetcars and Social Change"! Email me!

A new great and paid position at AAHM

Stephen Miller's immigrant great-grandfather flunked his initial naturalization test. A judge denied his petition for citizenship in Nov 1932. The reason recorded on the order of was "ignorance." (Nison Miller was attempting to join a US deeply entrenched in eugenics and anti-immigrant sentiment).

Looking forward to reading @brookenewman.bsky.social' s fascinating new book!!! Congrats on this excellent review!

I really enjoyed this piece on @nursingclio.bsky.social on the links between 19th century patent medicine marketing/formulation and today's "alternative medicine" marketing which is so gendered: nursingclio.org/2026/01/21/m...

Today is a day where I am questioning why I chose to wear flats and do not keep a fresh pair of fuzzy socks in my office. 🥶

Heck yeah it did!

I attended this amazing event last night, bought 2 copies & got to hug my dear friend @drkyliesmith.bsky.social and tell her I love her before she returns to Australia for good. We won't see each other in person for a while now so I am glad the last thing I heard you say was "burn it all down." ♥️

Today is publication day! The Open Access version is now online so you can read for free on @manifoldscholar.bsky.social With huge thanks to @uncpress.bsky.social @ecds-emory.bsky.social and @foxcenteremory.bsky.social Go to jimcrowintheasylum.com

The US has a really excellent track record in terms of intervening in South America and the Caribbean so I am sure kidnapping the Venezuelan president will also go great and there will be no negative consequences and it will only lead to stability! 👍🤦‍♀️

@bestonetx.bsky.social here is our big chance for the Luddite thread 😂

Be careful out there in the Yule Void, everyone

A few days ago, I wrote up some thoughts on generative AI and the work of historians: “At best, we’re talking about software that’s very good at making sentences seem sentence-shaped.”

Humanities scholars are not fundamentally different than any other AI skeptics, which have grown to include business leaders that have shifted their primary business to selling AI products. timesofindia.indiatimes.com/technology/t... TL;dr “It hallucinates too much and people don’t like it”

Braving Trader Joes for holiday dinner prep. Send thoughts and prayers 😬

It. Doesn't. Actually. Understand. A. Single. Word. Of. What. It. Is. Fed. It just chops up sentences and calculates how often words follow each other. That's it. Nothing more. It can't summarize material for you because it doesn't understand that material.

Trained historians produce knowledge. We research in archives to write books/articles that reveal something new about our human past. The process starts with secondary source reading to get the context for what we view in the archives. No part of this process can or should be outsourced to AI. Ever.

ChatGPT could NEVER.

Wow. I will definitely show this to my students.

When we say "no, everything hasn't been digitized," I need you to understand that we really mean is that virtually nothing has been digitized. This is because the realm of primary sources that historians use is incomprehensibly large.

Omg I am watching the Simpsons on the couch because I don't feel great and its about ChatGPT!!! I am howling!

It's Dr. Thompson.

I still tell students to go to the library, look up the book that seems right and then step back and look over the whole shelf too.

Don't tempt me with a super fun time because I will definitely do this 😂😂😂

This is specifically about AI use in humanities disciplines within academia, which is clear from context- this crap is extremely harmful in that setting. Inevitably, people show up to be like "AI finds cancer cells tho". NOT THE SUBJECT, and that conflation has been inflicted upon us intentionally.

Story time. A grad student (not in history, not at my uni) wanted me to be on their committee as an external reader. They send their proposal. I read it, it's sort of oddly written and poorly argued, but maybe we can work with that I think. I turn to the citations. I see an article by a scholar

Hey professional historians! Guess what! All of us are wrong and we should be using AI because we also....wait for it .... we use the internet!!

Exactly. There’s been this huge sales pitch about the supposed benefits and inevitability of “AI,” but all I’ve seen show up since 2022 have been a steady stream of problems and complications due to LLM-powered chatbots (which are what are being sold aggressively to higher ed).

Yeah because right now its a great big Cheating Button 99.9% of the time. Not sure how we walk it back from that.

Thanks Bluesky. Good convos. On day 1 of spring semester my students are gonna get a real zinger of a lecture on using AI.

People are going to commit murder whether we have laws against it or not Students are going to cheat whether we have rules or not. We must be clear about our rules, why we have them, & why we structure our courses the way we do. But we absolutely do not have to sanction the use of a cheating machine

People who are currently students: if you are using AI to summarize readings you are assigned, you are doing yourself a disservice of incredible proportions. Do you think, for example, that @jackiantonovich.bsky.social and I got to where we are in our careers because we took any kind of shortcut?

The advice says to start by asking the LLM to summarize it. Start by fucking reading it. If you need a summary, there's an abstract. There is ZERO need for these bullshit machines.

I tell my students explicitly to NOT do this and then I explain why - full of hallucinations, stolen material, mischaracterizations.