I'm thinking that now would be a good time for historians to jump in and give us a history of the etiquette of written threats by heads of state. Being a medievalist (but not a historian of war), I can't think of any that top today's threat from POTUS in their complete lack of diplomatic skill. 🗃️

#ArchivesAtoZ: D is for digitization: it's more complicated than you'd think, meaning we need to be selective and strategic: peelarchivesblog.com/2017/05/31/w...

Drinking and staring at your tablet, sixteenth-century style.

Update: it gets so much worse. All of Bede's letters have no basis in the original Latin at all. This one reads like a modern email! (Original Latin, real translation, fake "translation")

Billions of people, possibly including you reading this, are alive today because you can run natural gas into a reactor and spit out ammonia (Haber Bosch). A large % of the installed base for that process is shut in or exploded. It’s northern hemisphere spring.

AI has some uses for transcribing and translating historical documents, but without a knowledgeable human editor, it’s just spewing slop into the world.

Controversial but - students *perceive* they have been failed when what has happened is they have failed to understand information retrieval is a skill requiring effort. I don't believe a zero friction experience is realistic or desirable in learning, actually.

Toronto vibes in 50 photos.

The art to what Mamdani does is that he doesn't assume you know anything of the story he's telling. But he also doesn't assume you don't know. He tells it in a way that is a compelling retelling to those that know and a compelling first telling to those that don't. (hint: this is very hard)

I'm teaching Louis XIV and Versailles soon, and I will make very clear to students how relevant early modern European court culture is.

The leopards won't eat my fa...

I can’t believe there are already spoilers all over the internet. 😉

Fyi, if you are having problems accessing essential online archives.

Almost 90 people being cut. Canadian historian Adam Chapnick, a professor of defence studies at the Royal Military College of Canada: “I don’t know how you justify this decision if you have any sort of commitment to history."

Treasures from Iran I saw at the Aga Khan Museum today.

The hallucination alone is a dealbreaker, obviously. But I was much more disturbed by the effect it had on my own sense of communication. Words are for connection. If you continually threw a rope into the darkness and no one caught it, you'd begin to think there was something wrong with the rope.

Exclusive: Prior to Iran attacks, CIA assessed Khamenei would be replaced by hardline IRGC elements if killed, sources say reut.rs/4l9SCAs

I can follow the hockey game by listening to the whoops and groans coming from my neighbours’ apartments.

OMFG, I just googled my father, who died in 2018, and found the same AI slop site raising money in his name. Rage.

You can hear Shahaddah Jack live at the City of Toronto Archives this coming Friday at 6:30.

OMG. I did not know about this until now.

Art.

Post a banger not in English. youtu.be/Z_uIGTW9raY

This book looks cool. I’ve heard a few of these myths carried across the Atlantic.

Morning mood.

Never mind the jobs you had, tell me five classes you took in university (actual course titles optional): 1. All About the Years the Prof Spent Getting Very Drunk with Peasant Rebels in the Highlands of Peru (and why he’s no longer allowed into Peru) AKA Social and Cultural Anthropology

lurs only do this when they are agitated, caged together within a small environment 😾

The US govt has always taken a dim view of violations of its own consulates abroad. Like when a group of (inebriated) Canadian militiamen tore down the US flag at the consulate in St Thomas, ON, in 1894, prompting late-night telegrams to DC (transcript in alt-text) #cdnhist #onthist #vexillology

Tips on coping from the Renaissance Inkstand with a Man Distilling his Brains, maiolica, probably Urbino, ca. 1600. Inscribed in black on back of chair: “[…] CERV[...] IOTUTO LIETO” (Mi lambico il] cerv[ello] io tutto lieto; I distill my brain and am totally happy) (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

Really, really recommend that Minnesotans in particular disable autoplay, I know it's annoying to have to click to see a GIF but it's not worth the mental health costs of seeing the first seconds (before you scroll by) of murders in our city over and over and over.

I love this channel. Do yourself a favour and break up your doomscrolling with some daily Manitoban wildlife.

Happy Friday to all, and especially to my American friends who are not going to work today.

Infections in Canada this week are expected to result in 3,800 hospitalizations, 860 deaths (people who die at least 1 year earlier than they would without COVID) and 12,000 new long COVID cases serious enough to limit daily life activities.

I’m glad I read the whole speech, because quite a few folks on here seem to be having hot takes based on single sentences of it, without knowing what the PM said in the sentence that followed.

This thread is wild. It also seems like a metaphor for the USA in general.

Ha! I know some of these guys.

Hwæt we gar-Dana in heodagum þeod-þegena þrym gefrunon!

We're wishing everyone a safe commute home this evening. Take some time to help your neighbours! https://ow.ly/Z9wo50XXpw3

from last night--it's thank your bus/streetcar driver weather

You can show this one to your relatives who think it’s fine to travel to the US, “because we’re just staying in Miami one night and then leaving on a cruise.” Imagine being this guy, and NOT being an American citizen.

A library based on access to subscription databases that vanish completely as soon as the payments stop is, in an important sense, not a library. It is not a repository. It's just a viewing platform.

Interesting piece on New York Jewish socialist history, which looks like it parallels what I’ve been reading in the Archives about early twentieth-century Toronto.

Well this one shouldn’t be too hard to manifest.

The origins of the Anglo-American legal system (including the jury trial and rules of evidence) are held in millions of cases recorded in highly abbreviated Latin. Only medievalists trained in these specific records can read it. We're trying to change that!

A small sign of the times: at some point a couple of years ago, we Canadians stopped using the NORAD Santa tracker for our go-to Christmas Eve joke, and started going unilateral. No one wants to hear from some American colonel on Christmas Eve.

Global TV is a low-effort conservative-leaning private network, and this wasn’t “treachery” this was “it was the weekend before Christmas and they just broadcast the episode that was sent to them digitally by CBS on Friday”, no one in the office on the weekend even if CBS tried to warn them

I think we need a mega thread of everyone's craziest archive stories.

After the devastating loss of the 3 children in Ottawa, it was urgent to get info out re the additional ways avail to protect one’s loved ones from serious illness as we enter the holidays… and to remind young fams this amt of sickness ISN’T normal. #VaccinePlus ottawa.citynews.ca/2025/12/21/s...

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.