Bang!

The ASEH 2027 Call for Proposals just dropped today! I’ve gone ahead and started an open sessions spreadsheet for anyone looking to find panelmates: docs.google.com/spreadsheets... #envhist #envhum @aseh.bsky.social @asehearlycareer.bsky.social @nichecanada.bsky.social @iceho.bsky.social

Please share widely! #envhist #envhum #AmWest #MidwestHist

“To gild refined gold, to paint the lily…is wasteful and ridiculous excess.”

Would be a shame if someone told the local orca population about this.

Scenes from a 3-night camping trip over Memorial Day weekend 📍Itasca State Park

It’s not every day you’re browsing an old newspaper on a different topic and randomly come across a wild story from your hometown. “Cow and Dog in Love,” The Oconto Falls Herald (Oconto Falls, Wis.), June 1, 1906.

Submitted ✅

“Day by day more of the work of the world is taken up by machinery.” -Barbara Lily Frankenthal, “The Diesel Motor,” in a 1917 IWW pamphlet titled “The Onward Sweep of the Machine Process”

Never would I have thought that, after having lived in Montana and Kansas, the closest I would live to bison would be in Minnesota.

#academicchatter I’m working on revising an article before I submit it to a major journal. How do you know when a piece of writing is good enough to submit? I feel like I’m always tinkering and never fully satisfied, like I’m chasing the impossible goal of perfection.

Convincing you to buy my book, day 1/31: How to sneak onto a train? There are options. You can try when it's stopped, but there will be security. More reliable is to catch it "on the fly." You wait for the train somewhere you know it will being going slow -- a hill, a crossing. Then, you run.

Crazy baseball stat of the day: Highest ERA+ in the modern era (min. 100 starts): 1. Clayton Kershaw: 154 (1 career HR) 2. Pedro Martinez: 154 (0 career HR) 3. Jacob DeGrom: 151 (3 career HR) 4. Shohei Ohtani: 150 (287 career HR)

This aptly-titled article reminds me of Marx, who classified capital in similar terms: as “dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.” Gen AI, it would seem, is the pinnacle of capitalist consumption become real.

I will submit this article today I will submit this article today I will submit this article today I will submit this article today I will submit this article today I will submit this article today I will submit this article today I will submit this article today I will submit this article today I w

📍St. Paul

I see fElon is once again showcasing his historical illiteracy by claiming that the N*zis were socialists…can someone take the mic away from these wealthy ignoramuses, please?

Really excited to dig into this for @animalhistory.bsky.social. Review coming later this year. #animalhistory #envhist #envhum

Favorite books on race and environmental history of what is now the US that would be good for an MA seminar? 🗃️

Come check me out Thursday morning @midwesternhistory.bsky.social #envhist

In light of recent legislation opening up the BWCAW to mining, non-Native pushback against LDF closing muskie and trout fishing to non-Natives on reservation lakes, and ongoing legal battles with Enbridge’s Line 5 pipeline, I feel compelled to reshare this CFP. Please share widely! #envhist

The Western History Association just posted the CFP for its 2027 conference in San Francisco. Submissions open September 1 and the deadline is December 5.

I want to add a movie into my Modern US Survey (1877-2016ish). I was thinking Dr. Strangelove, but would love other ideas, too! 🗃️

I am very honored to share that I’ve won a research fellowship from the University of Michigan’s Bentley Historical Library! This funding will support a one-week trip to Ann Arbor for intensive research, which will benefit both my book project and my Great Lakes Fire History Digital Archive.

Happy Earth Day next week!

A week from today! Come learn about forestry as a grassroots effort initiated by various interest groups in the late-nineteenth century Upper Midwest in conflict with logging companies. This research de-centers forestry from eastern elites, looking at the local and regional alongside the national.

How has your scholarship been impacted by a decision not to travel to the United States? Want to write about it for our Tracking the Effects: Environmental History and the Current United States Federal Administration series? niche-canada.org/2026/02/26/p... #envhist #envhum #cdnhist

One of the most terrifying graphs you'll see today

Spending Sunday afternoon grading with The Masters in the background. Seems like at least half of the commercials are about AI (its benefits, uses, inevitability, blah, blah, blah). Really ruining my zen golf-watching afternoon.

I think I might have just found the most succinct encapsulation of the Civil War’s causes by an unexpected source. “The Civil War was fought to decide whether the slaveholders of the South or the capitalists of the North should exploit the West.” -Helen Keller, “Strike Against War,” Jan. 5, 1916

Still there (or a different turkey?)

Here’s a turkey in the middle of St. Paul (at the Minnesota History Center) to brighten your day.

“What one begs the American people to do, for all our sakes, is simply to accept our history.” -James Baldwin, in the Baldwin-Buckley Debate, 1965

Also, if you like this episode, or any of the Minnesota Unraveled episodes, please fill out this survey to let us know what you think! Your thoughts are tremendously helpful (particularly in providing data to help fund the continuation of the podcast), and you could win a $25 gift card.

It’s #NationalBeaverDay and, as such, I’d invite you all to check out the Minnesota Unraveled episode “Beaver Tales: From Minnesota’s Ice Age to Today,” featuring Nicole Dzenowski (Bell Museum), Michael Waasegiizhig Price (GLIFWC), and myself as guest experts.

I’ll be giving a virtual talk on “The Midwestern Roots of Forestry: Industrialization, Indigenous Lands, and the Environment, 1867-1933” on April 22 from 12:00pm-1:15pm (eastern) for the Grey Towers Heritage Association. For more info and to register:

Excellent 🧵 contextualizing the longstanding practice of the U.S. military to commit war crimes and other such atrocities in the name of “civilization.”

Which author outside of your field had the most influence on your scholarly development? I took a Latin American History course during my MA @umontana.bsky.social and came across Eduardo Galeano. I appreciated how direct and to the point he was, and how “angry” he wrote.

Got my author’s copy today! Here’s a sneak peek of the table of contents and my chapter.

It’s publication day! The Missouri, America’s Longest River: A Cultural and Environmental History comes out today, featuring my chapter—“The Colonization of Montana’s Milk River Valley, 1879-1889”—that I began during my MA @umontana.bsky.social for my thesis. Check it out!

The Lac du Flambeau Band announced that it’s restricting musky and walleye fishing for non-tribal members on tribal lands as a conservation measure and hoo, boy, white Wisconsinites are up in arms (figuratively, at least, on social media) about it like it’s the late-1980s again.

Call for Proposals! I’m co-editing a collection on “The Extractive Midwest” with @brianleechphd.bsky.social, Jeff Schramm, and Sarah Mittlefehldt. We seek 300-500 word abstracts for book chapters between 6,000-8,000 words (not including notes). Send us your submissions before August 30, 2026!

Calling all doctoral students of the North American West! The Western History Dissertation Workshop is accepting applications for their annual review workshop, being held at UC Davis May 7-9. Apply by April 1!

One of the coolest things in my short career as a historian just happened: someone—an elderly non-academic from northern Wisconsin—reaching out to me after having seen an online talk I gave last year. It’s truly amazing how the past connects us and how it allows us to forge new relationships.

Now that we all left KC after a wonderful #ASEH #ASEH2026, continue the scholar conversation by reviewing a book for H-Environment! Check out my list of books below! #envhist #envhum #ecocrit #aghist #energy #animalhist #sustainability #anthropocene #plantstudies docs.google.com/document/d/1...

Since I no longer have any dog in the race, I’m hoping for a UConn vs. Arizona NCAAM basketball championship based solely off of these two elite logos.

Man, a late-game Christian Yelich go-ahead home run is a beautiful thing. Brings me back to 2019.

We are looking for a 3-year postdoc to work on a self-defined research project in environmental history that places electronic or digital technologies at the center of its historical inquiry. More details in the announcement linked to below. #envhist

If you were to assign ~6 primary sources to undergrads on protests, strikes, and unrest in the United States since the Civil War, what would they be? Trying to give them a crash course on protest and activism across space, time, and cause.