Our black and white cavapoo Sprite, who loves to steal things to trade for treats, has my son’s black and white checkered wallet in his mouth.

The master criminal just stole my son’s wallet too.

My black and white cavapoo sprite holding one of my kid’s nerf guns and hoping I’ll be willing to trade a treat for it.

So it’s come to this. My dog forced me to give him a treat at (nerf) gunpoint.

Yes! So excited to have @halseanderson.bsky.social on campus today! The Clarke Library, our special collections library, specializes in children’s literature among other things. So it was a natural fit to bring her as guest speaker for the 250th as well!

I’ve had good success recently with Henry Spelman’s Relation of Virginia, the recent edited edition by Karen Kupperman. It’s short but students get very interested in this 14 year old English boy’s unbiased(?) view of the Powhatans. nyupress.org/978147983519...

The location was never great (ample parking right by the interstate!), but it really is a nice stadium for baseball.

For the record, I love Kaufman stadium and have mixed feelings about this whole thing, but if it has to move, it’s a better spot than any of the other proposals.

Amusing to me that my hometown is proposing toppling a George Washington statue to build a park for the Royals for the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. www.kansascity.com/sports/mlb/k...

“The police power of the states embrace[s]…such reasonable regulations…as will protect the public health and the public safety. West Virginia’s compulsory vaccination law does exactly that. It is a legitimate exercise of the state’s power to protect the health and well-being of school children”.

This was a fantastic episode, and well-timed for where I am on book #2. I’m looking forward to the new expanded Drafting the Past with you and @katecarp.bsky.social!

This framing is ridiculous. Shouldn’t we be thankful for peace broadly kept despite obvious hostilities? It’s like saying, “thank god we’ve got a Health Secretary that is a man of action ready to put lives on the line against measles, rather than delaying it with vaccines” oh, wait.

There’s a reason people read the classics.

Extreme detailed handwritten notes for each member of the Illinois team and its coach Bruce Weber

One of the cooler collections in CMU’s Clarke Historical Library is the Dick Enberg Papers (a CMU alum and longtime sports broadcaster). Here are Enberg’s handwritten notes for a classic NCAA tournament game in 2005 between The University of Illinois and the University of Arizona.

Brooding over Bloody Revenge Cambridge Core - American Studies - Brooding over Bloody Revenge

Nikki Taylor’s Brooding Over Bloody Revenge. I’ve taught it twice now in my historical methods class. It has worked really well. www.cambridge.org/core/books/b...

Yes! And I especially like her comment that doing history is like walking into a party and not recognizing anyone. You have to work to figure out who’s who and more importantly who’s important to know.

Such a great film. I’ve taught it a couple times. Hard to beat Laurel with her handdrawn charts spread out on the floor.

There are many history documentaries where historians comments, of course, but few where historians explain how they know what they know—how they worked from the primary sources to create their interpretations. Are there others?

The DVD cover of “A Midwife’s Tale” featuring Martha Ballard in her canoe.

I just bought my own copy of the PBS American Experience DVD of “A Midwife’s Tale” that I’ve been checking out of the library for years. It’s great and it still holds up! But is there a similar but more recent documentary/dramatization of the historian’s process?

A foodtruck (well, a trailer really) that is made to look like a log cabin with a huge hotdog on the roof)

This log cabin hotdog food truck is for sale near me, and I have a strong urge to show up at history conferences wearing a stovepipe hat and selling “Lincoln Dogs”

Milwaukee Milkmen to play as Franklin Benjamins after fan contest The Milwaukee Milkmen, an independent team in the American Association of Professional Baseball, will play one game as the Franklin Benjamins in 2026. The brand is the result of a contest in which fan...

Well crap, the team in Franklin, Wisconsin came up with a clever alt identity and I may need to get something with this logo:

news.sportslogos.net/2026/03/27/m...

I’ve watched Razorbacks basketball for 25+ years, and it’s different with him. He’s such a pro.

That’s crazy! KC can have some temperature swings but 100 degrees in a week is something else.

This is a key part of science. Collecting new data and, if the data supports a new conclusion, adopting that conclusion.

Changing your mind when presented with new conflicting data is not a sign of weakness. It's like learning from your mistakes.

We don't have to make George Washington the all-knowing hero as Kaplan does. What makes Washington's decision to inoculate interesting and important is that he reversed his thinking and decided to try the inoculation program recommended by military doctors when he had been whole-heartedly against it

An order from Washington praising the New York Congress for jailing an inoculator. Washington wrote that "any Officer in the Continental Army, who shall suffer himself to be inoculated, will be cashiered and turned out of the army, and have his name published in the News papers throughout the Continent, as an Enemy and Traitor to his country."

Kaplan also writes that Congress banned inoculation after the invasion of Canada. It did no such thing. It was Washington who banned inoculation from the outset in the Army. He supported the jailing of inoculators and called for any who inoculated "an enemy and traitor to the country" in May 1776.

Letter from George Washington to John Hancock on March 19, 1776. It reads in part "As soon as the Ministerial Troops had quitted the Town, I order'd a thousand Men (who had had the Small Pox) under Command of General Putnam to take possession of the Heighths, which I shall endeavour to fortify in such a manner as to prevent their return should they attempt it."

This is all wrong. Howe and the British famously evacuated Boston on March 17, 1776. There was no direct confrontation with Washington's troops. Washington only sent 1000 immune troops after the British left and not into Boston but to control Dorchester Heights just outside the city.

Kaplan wrote: "Rather than lay a traditional siege, [Washington] handpicked 1,000 men who reported that they had previously endured smallpox. Howe Howe, with his diseased division in shambles,was forced to retreat and Washington’s 1,000 men, immune to the ravages of smallpox, secured Boston"

There are lots of problems with this piece, but I want to focus on just a couple. First, Kaplan argues that the British general Howe definitely used germ warfare against Americans by purposely infecting poor Bostonians. This was *rumored* during the war, but there's no evidence the British did this.

I spend a lot of time in my book The Contagion of Liberty explaining Washington's decision to inoculate the Continental Army, which was a crucial moment. But, I also debunked the idea found here that Washington possessed some unique and divine foresight from the beginning.

Excerpt: How George Washington Weaponized Smallpox Inoculation In 1775, Washington deployed colonial soldiers who had survived smallpox to retake Boston during a city-wide epidemic.

This excerpt from Matt Kaplan's (science correspondent for The Economist) new book has so many errors that I had to respond. Kaplan argues that Washington's genius-level understanding of smallpox handedly won the Revolutionary War.🧵 undark.org/2026/03/13/e...

A Disney princess birthday card meant for a 5 year old. My wife wrote in a “4” in front of the 5s on the card to make it a Disney princess card for a 45 year old man. It comes with “palace pets stickers” which I feel are pretty sweet.

My wife slyly altered this car for me for my birthday. She’s the best and knows me so well.