There is enough inescapable random horror in the world. This is a nightmare we worked together as humans to solve, and, despite all odds, actually did. RFK Jr. wants your child to die for no reason.

my angry post about this case this morning is now an angry article

Roy Anthony Scott was in a mental health crisis and called 911 asking for help

Cops came and killed him, & now the Court is casting doubt on whether the cops can be held accountable for his death
ballsandstrikes.org/scotus/smith...

Historical Society of Pennsylvania website down?

I love how many books about the founders have to have a balloon digression cause like right as the rev war was ending all the nerds got obsessed with balloons

Awful.

Almost described myself as a "real Custis-head" today while talking to a librarian about an out of print book on the Custises of Virginia.

screen shot of text from a yellowed book: "On the curtain is painted a harlequin who points with his wooden sword to the words: "Who would have expected this here? Seats in the parquet cost four, [in the] parterre two dollars paper money. The officers lend the actors the necessary articles of clothing; [begin highlighted text] drummers are transformed into queens and beauties. [end highlight] Very good pieces are performed, which, because of their satrical additions, do not always please the Americans, wherefore they are forbidden by their superiors to attend these comedies."

Delighted to read about cross-dressing performances put on by the Convention Army, the Revolutionary War prisoners from the battle of Saratoga held at the POW barracks in Virginia

I just want everyone involved in the Colonial Virginia Portraits website project to know that I love them and I use their incredible website regularly for my job. You are heroes and scholars. colonialvirginiaportraits.org @oieahc.bsky.social

Strange Taxidermy YouTube video by Westside Cowboy - Topic

I just want all my museum professional and historian friends to be aware of this great song by Westside Cowboy. It captures the feeling of being utterly entranced by a museum exhibit in a way all your friends find weird. Also, it slaps.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=TVPQ...

I'm a dedicated Rochester defender but this is pretty funny

You ever meet those het couples where the woman like, intentionally loses games so that her husband feels like a big man, and he obviously holds nothing but contempt for her?

The Real Story Behind Abigail Adams' 'Remember the Ladies' Letter Americans who turned the letter written by the future first lady into a suffragist rallying cry may have misunderstood her intentions

Cassandra Good, killing it as always: www.smithsonianmag.com/history/real...

Will the Supreme Court let Trump target babies for the “sins of the parents”? The birthright citizenship case could bring back the country's dark history of inherited status.

Trump's birthright citizenship order seeks to literally end the American dream. Will people be able to work hard and make a life for themselves, judged by their own abilities?

Or will they inherit a permanent second-class status from their parents?

www.motherjones.com/politics/202...

*whispers* what does the J stand for, NYT

Hard disagree on this one. Airport executives want us to blame each other for flights being hell, while they roll around in piles of money. I'm happy to help somebody out, given the opportunity.

Image of a museum sign with an artist's rendition of Ona Judge, an enslaved woman who escaped from George and Martha Washington in 1796. The words "I am free now" are visible beneath the image of a ship in Philadelphia's harbor.

The story of Ona Judge and the ongoing battle over interpreting history at the Declaration’s quarter-century mark highlight the often-invisible links between public humanities and peer-reviewed academic scholarship.
www.huntington.org/verso/undoin...

This is a good example of how COVID conspiracy theories are not prima facie antisemitic, but any time you go that deep into believing there is a small cabal keeping the truth from the mass of the people, you have a high likelihood of ending up there.

Microsoft word is showing me "recommended" documents to open!? Like, not the recent one that I was working on that I needed to close to run an app update... a RECOMMENDED file? Calm down, Microsoft Word. You are not TikTok!

Obsessed with this lady in the background

This kind of thing is why @danwphilosophy.bsky.social idea of a “marketplace of rationalizations” is useful. People are more willing to make up (supply) absurd things because there’s such a strong demand for them. www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Samuel Pepys had significant professional and social connections to transatlantic slavery in the years covered by his diary and afterwards, mediated by his involvement with two English slave-trading companies – the Royal African Company and the Company of Royal Adventurers trading to Africa. He also owned and sold at least two enslaved people in London in the 1670s and 1680s. This article uses previously neglected manuscript evidence to reassess Pepys’s involvement in enslavement and his status as an enslaver. It emphasizes three themes: the relationship between Pepys’s official connections to the African companies and his private ownership of enslaved people; the development of his involvement in slavery within his extensive social and professional networks; and Pepys’s own agency in curating his official and personal archives to shape and limit our knowledge of his slave ownership. In doing so, it considers how the consciously expressed professional and ethical priorities of administrators and slave-owners like Pepys shaped the complex archival traces of slavery in England and erased the experiences and voices of enslaved people.

📣Out now on #firstview

Michael Edwards @jesuscollegecam.bsky.social on 'Samuel Pepys, the African Companies, and the Archives of Slavery, 1660–1689'

#Archives #Letters #Diary #History 17thc 🗃️

👉Read open access: www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Me: Didn't get much sleep last night because of a sick kid, but I'm feeling pretty good! I think I can pull today off!

Also me: *puts the coffeepot away in the fridge after pouring my mug*

photograph or a poster on cream colored paper. "Dear President Ambar, we are writing to you on a typewriter that is over 70 years old. This is a machine that we all know well. With it, we misspell words without the crutch of spell check or generative AI and we think intently about every phrase we pound out. As we force ourselves, for once, to slow down, we engage in a cognitive dialogue with ourselves. We do not seek perfection because we know that education is about the growing and challenging of our young minds' potential, not the chasing of institutional 'gold-star' approval. We do not believe that your so-called 'Year of AI Exploration; providing enterprise ChatGPT and Google Gemini subscriptions to every Oberlin student aligns with our college's founding principles. You claim that this year will be one of experimentation, not adoption. But even just one semester of accepted (encouraged even) chat bot use will jettison our student body down a lazy and irredeemable tunnel of intellectual destruction. We are a college grounded in learning and labor, which now risks straying from these rooted ideals. With ChatGPT at the helm, our emails, essays,and discussion posts will be generated for us, not by us. And let's not fool ourselves. This is precisely what these platforms will be used for by our busy, anxious student body. We see your vision for this year as.advancing the college's 'businessification'--an alarming trend also seen in the takeover of our beloved library cafe by a 'bookstore' with no books in stock and an app replacing customer service. In one instance, the college assumes we want efficiency at all costs through automated rather than hand pulled coffee. In the other lies the false belief that we simply desire to turn in an essay, regardless of how little we've written of it." there's more that doesn't fit in the 2000 character limit :(

OH MY HEART...the Oberlin Luddites Reject "The Year of AI Exploration"! 💚

This is precisely it. A historian doesn't just mush together a bunch of texts. And like 90% of the stuff she pulled wouldn't be available for AI to draw from.

At lemonade prices? Sign me up!

Law & History Review is pleased to announce publication of our joint special issue with The William and Mary Quarterly: New Legal Histories of the American Revolution [vol. 44, no. 1, Feb., 2026]

Here is our table of contents with links.

ALL articles are open access ✅ and ready for download/view.

Me emailing HH about Corey Williams, who was wrongfully sentenced to death for an alleged crime he committed at 16.

Cool to see them admit that the experience of air travel for the majority of people is a literal punishment

It occurs to me that in an airport you are generally in a time constrained situation where you kind of do need to make your flight or lose a lot of money.

Lesson #9: Short-term defeat Does not end long-term influence | In Pursuit by Lindsay Chervinsky, studying John Quincy Adams

""Rather than slinking into a quiet retirement, Adams did what no American president before or since has done: he returned to Congress." Good to be reminded of committed public service at the founding. @lmchervinsky.bsky.social for @inpursuitusa.bsky.social www.inpursuit.org/lessons/shor...