If liberal exceptionalism is not your thing, this is for you:

Teaching a seminar on Manifest Destiny today and I think the historical illiteracy of Will Stancil is a good place start...

Getting ready for my favourite seminar of the year - introducing students to the Rashomon-effect through Kurosawa and Ryūnosuke Akutagawa's 'In the Grove'. I'm also giving a lecture on 'New Imperialism', which this year requires no real introduction thanks to the Trump-administration...

Please tell me this is a joke...

I have now reached the point in my research on the My Lai Massacre where I am consulting with a medical examiner. I shall spare you the details (for now) but I can say with some confidence that becoming numb to the suffering of others, in the past as much as the present, is very much a choice...

This weekend, I have been mostly grappling with my consciousness...

Staring in Agent Orange...

"I do not know that they were innocent" Reading perpetrator testimonies is exhausting...

This lazy and conceptually inept remake of Coppola's 1992-film reminds me of the Sherlock Holmes spoof with Will Ferrell that made it abundantly clear that the writer/director was completely unfamiliar with the source-material. Or my students who only knew 'The Jungle Book' from the 2016 CGI movie 😑

Just found a real 'both sides'-take on the My Lai Massacre from 1989...

“We should confront this history and not dismiss it as shameful. Because much of the past is shameful, and we disagree with many things our ancestors did, but we still need to talk about it and learn from it.” www.eldiario.es/internaciona...

Cold on this morning in 2019!

My eldest son just shared this with me...

Another AI psychosis story. I think understanding genre would actually be helpful for people trying to make sense of LLM outputs. If you prompt it with cosmic / SF / paranoid ideas it will accept that genre premise in the tone of its responses futurism.com/artificial-i...

Why AI is worse than useless - exhibit #1001

Fascinating to see ICE invoke the trope of returning Vietnam veterans being spat at and vilified, while critics of ICE also draw on the Vietnam War when they compare the brutality to My Lai. Neither comparison is appropriate, of course...

Happy 🇬🇧 UK pub day to THE CROWN’S SILENCE—a deeply researched narrative history of the monarchy’s centuries-long entanglement with slavery. This is the new history book the far right loathes. Please buy it b/c it’s important history but—also—it will really piss them off if it does well in the UK!!😉😘

Let them eat AI...

We're thrilled to be welcoming legendary broadcaster Kate Adie to the @mileendinstitute.bsky.social for our 5th distinguished Hennessy Lecture. She'll discuss her life as a reporter and explore the challenges & paths ahead for journalism today. 16 Feb 6:30.Book here! www.qmul.ac.uk/mei/events/m...

Weekend craft-project: hand-carved calligraphy on a small slab of cedarwood. And what does it say?...IYKYK

Whatever did the Thugs do to deserve this?

Don't make me tap the sign...

Dear Americans - there are many historical parallels to what ICE is doing right now.The My Lai Massacre of 1968, during which US troops killed 504 unarmed Vietnamese civilians and raped a number of women and young girls, is *not* one of them. Americans were not victims at My Lai - not then, not now.

Just finished Han Kang's 'Human Acts', which is a truly remarkable - and devastating - book. As a child, I was in Gwangju shortly after the uprising and I vividly remember the graphic photographs of murdered students that were displayed at the bus station...

Has there ever been a president who came out so strongly against the 2nd Amendment...?

Personally, I love the fact that ICE has ruined the tacticool aesthetic for everyone forever...

Southwest Lumber Company mill pond Lincoln National Forest near Alamogordo, New Mexico E.S. Shipp, 1928

If Orientalism was a person...

And this is why we should never refer to killings, massacres or other atrocities as 'tragedies'. A 'tragedy' is an unfortunate but unavoidable event for which no-one is to blame - that is the definition. To call the inevitable result of deliberate policy a 'tragedy' is a denial and a whitewash...

Looking forward to teaching my favourite module beginning tomorrow. Sadly, it won't be difficult to show the students why history is relevant...

Turning perpetrators into victims has been an American specialty for more than half a century...

We need to see this - and you need to look at it - because they're going to twist the narrative and tell us that it didn't happen. That's why.

The footage that has so far been released shows this is pure fabrication - that story is going to be really difficult to walk back...

So what are we gonna get? Complete denial and defamation of the victim or a single officer dismissed and denounced as a 'rotten apple'? My money's on the former...

It can't be a coincidence that this is all happening at a time when the Vietnam War has been reduced to a silly cliché in popular culture...

They watched 'Apocalypse Now' and thought Kilgore was the hero...

Times review dismisses my book as crass & labels me an American “sucker”—but it’s by the same conservative reviewer who hates books focused on the legacies of empire & slavery, & who wildly misrepresented the excellent collection edited by @alanlester.bsky.social Haters gonna hate! So it begins!

I very much disagree with @whstancil.bsky.social on this - how are you going to oppose ICE and the Trump administration if you don't understand that this *is* indeed who you are as a nation and that what we're seeing today is the culmination of a long history of American violence? 1/

The liberal exceptionalism is strong with this one...🤦🏼‍♂️

There's an awful lot of folks out there who apparently went to the Ken Burns School for Kids Who Don't Read History Good... As a historian, I'm all for drawing parallels and comparisons between the past and the present - when it makes sense to do so. And this ain't it...

That feeling when you have absolutely no clue whatsoever about what happened at My Lai...😑

The Letters to the Editor-section of Life magazine following the publication of the photos from My Lai on Dec. 5, 1969, is something to behold. PS: "Time is a flat circle. Everything we've ever done or will do, we're gonna do over and over and over again"

👇🏻🔥👇🏻🔥👇🏻🔥

This post is a good example of what's wrong with popular ideas of history - the My Lai Massacre is not a 'negative' highlighted just for the sake of saying something bad. It's a basic and undisputable fact. Dividing the past into 'good' and 'bad' things that need to be balanced is a mug's game

Staring in historian of trophy photography... www.motherjones.com/politics/202...

I've read various claims that the Americans deliberately bombed My Lai to cover up the massacre afterwards, but I've never taken them seriously - until now. Arial footage showing recent bomb-craters (filled with water) inside the village, November 1969.

Your daily reminder that the past doesn't care about your feelings. If you can only think of your country's history through simplistic ideas of either 'good' or 'bad' - or 'pride' and 'shame' - you're not doing it right...

Absolutely loving the Americans who compare what's happening in Minneapolis right now to My Lai - liberal exceptionalism at its finest...

Got distracted on the way to work...

When you're all out of glass-beads, fire-water and infected blankets... www.reuters.com/world/europe...