As President Donald Trump’s unauthorized war on Iran with Israel entered into its second month, some students and faculty were looking around and wondering: When did Democrats start caring about war crimes? And what do they think happened to student protestors on their watch?

Super weird that broad bipartisan support for violently crushing student protest was effective. Really makes you think

lots of people pointing out the obvious here. but worth also saying that this shit is in tremendous bad faith, inasmuch as its intention is to further kneecap student protest and make it more difficult to push back against all wars. 1

happy AI month, losers (the ad at the end is extra)

It happened: two terminally main characters met

putting this on a ppt slide labelled “praxis” in 72-point Bodoni

New article in 'Transactions of the Royal Historical Society'. 'Louis XIV’s Attitude to the Chinese Rites Controversy': bit.ly/47NYgmk Dr Sean Heath offers an exploration of ecclesiastical policy in the making under the Sun King. Sean's article is now freely available Open Access #Skystorians 1/2

Peer Review Simulator

Our programme for summer seminars @ihr.bsky.social is up now! Featuring a v timely paper on American citizenship + immigration at the founding; ancient Greek refugeedom; gypsy and Roma mobility; & cross-confessional solidarity with refugees in early 20thC Britain tinyurl.com/3bxsdy32

“posting through it” is not an elected office

I think abhorrence of genocide is one of those universal principles that turns out not to be all that widely or firmly held in practice, Genocide Studies notwithstanding

Cometh the hour; man TBD

American journalism is so comprehensively unequal to this moment that it beggars belief

You missed the chance to have a worthwhile take on this, but there’s no need to dig deeper

The President Says “A Civilization Will Die Tonight.” In a Midwestern Diner, There’s Tentative Excitement

🌿🌾 You like gardens? You like history? And games? Then rejoice, because LOBELIUS is here! Thanks to official partners, Museum Plantin-Moretus and the Meise Botanical Garden, the players can skim through the 1581 Kruydtboeck by Matthias de l´Obel. Can you make the most beautiful early modern garden?

POV: your family left during your candle binge

We need to think about what the preservation of history as a subject people hear about for a term or two in college means, once it is divorced from the preservation of history as a discipline of knowledge grounded in learning and research that take years to learn to practice well -- i.e., a career.

I feel like we already know where neo-Nazis think elites come from

the "automatic forfeit" is the philosopher's stone of online debate

See both threads and the article on (poor) oral history practice and how memories of significant moments, such as scientific discovery, are (re)created 🧵 #histsci 🗃️

I don’t know what saving either the profession or the discipline means, if it doesn’t involve preserving pathways to full careers. If the institutions best placed to do so, however troubled, are not willing to make that commitment, then it is delusional to think those less well placed will step up.

‘Women were more often engaged in agricultural work – especially milking cows but also other forms of animal husbandry, along with weeding, sowing and harvesting crops – than they were in care work.’ @tomlukejohnson.bsky.social on early modern working patterns. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

🗃️ Super excited to share that we’re hiring at the Adams Papers, come work with us! @mhs1791.bsky.social www.masshist.org/admin/upload...

Great to see this new website -- a venerable collective translation project. 🗃️ encyclopediaofdiderot.org/s/diderot/pa...

I had a wonderful time talking about projecting with Rutgers faculty and grad students from History, English, and French (maybe more?). Another reminder of how important face-to-face conversations are, within and across disciplines, and how much good work is just getting started

I feel like public broadcasting nailed this one. So mugs and/or totes (one or the other depending on how much you feel the person brought to the panel)

Very honoured to be speaking at Rutgers tomorrow!

relatedly, “come join our university and spend all your time arguing with us that the job we hired you for and that we demand you train grad students to do should even exist, ha ha, you can’t and we won’t believe you anyway” is not hard-headed practicality, it’s inane incoherence

this term, without planning to, I have taught entirely without screens, PowerPoints, or anything tech-involved much beyond posting reading materials and the syllabus I use handouts and we do in-class source crit and writing to judge from what I’ve seen I don’t think anyone’s learning has suffered

I have no idea whether “history without historians” has finally become a term in common use but I hope so because it’s definitely a phenomenon in common use

rubbing my hands together like the grinch. I’m gonna ruin AI Month

constantly invoking crisis as the default form of persuasion has diminishing returns, not something you should build a career on imo

My review of Jane Ohlmeyer's book Making Empire is now up at the Journal of Modern History

I bet the FIFA Peace Prize committee is feeling pretty silly right now

You ever find yourself making a meme so specific that you're the only member of the target audience?

In 2026 the NYT’s mission is to remind us that, whatever we may think of him, Trump, much as Abraham Lincoln did, wears shoes. It is one of the few similarities between how they approached politics

The JHI Blog has released a call for submissions to its forum on the “Conceptual History of Technology.” Pitches are due on May 7.

My encounter with Caliban and the Witch was provoked by students citing it. In my experience, once you find somebody using fake quotations, it's best to avoid them ever after. Sometimes that's easier said than done

genuinely good news wikipedia is also clearer than most about (a) citing sources and (b) the reference nature of its articles, which are based on secondary work and don't claim to be original research yes, it's a starting point rather than a stopping point, but it *lends itself* to responsible use

and I will write 500 words and I will write 500 more

Registration has opened for our conference - "Health and the Environment in the Preindustrial World: Multidisciplinary Approaches"! Attendance is both virtual and in-person in Melbourne, Australia Program: drive.google.com/file/d/1mZ4F... Registration: forms.gle/w49zfP3CPBQj... #histmed #histstm

I'm so delighted to be involved in setting up a symposium on 17th C Scotland. It now has a @bsky.app presence. Early-modern researchers, please give us a wee follow, and consider joining us on 11 June @scot17thcentury.bsky.social

I’m not claiming to break new semantic ground here but the opposite of “agreeing” is not “having questions”

the thing that gets me about this stuff is that "how students can use AI to support their academic work while maintaining academic integrity and ethical standards" is a thesis, and a pretty doubtful one, not a question, much less a subject; even academic "AI literacy" is delivered as advertorial

we should do more over here with the “festival” form

headless bodyoids are how we got into this mess

this is why I prefer payment in kind

and nothing of value was learned

In impostor syndrome moments I used to worry that “decline” looks like someone in my position having, say, fewer languages than my predecessors might have or than I would like. Actually it’s a world where university leaders are killing the study of language, literature, history and society wholesale