Jason Heppler

Work in Progress: The Voting Rights Act Work in Progress is a recurring feature on CAMPAIGN TRAILS, in which I share some of the more interesting materials I’ve uncovered in my book-in-progress on the work of John Doar and the Civil Rights ...

Today marks the sixtieth anniversary of the Voting Rights Act's passage in Congress.

Here's what happened next:

Cheers!

Hello.

Over the course of their career history majors out earn engineers and comp sci.

Check back with us in a few years and we'll be using notecards and typewriters!

Terrible.

I feel like I’ve done the same circuit. I haven’t come back to Word like you have, but I do find myself back to paper often.

One week left to apply for this great #envhist job with us in Norway.

Monthly reminder: Many people have a book in them, but it takes a special kind of freak to leave the Land of Laziness, cross the Plains of Procrastination and Insecurity Mountain, find the Blade of No One Made You Do This, and use it to cut your chest open and yank that book out.

I'm also someone who craves stability in my tools, so I think I'm less likely to fiddle with things like I once did. That's true with other parts of my systems these days (i.e., vim), whereas once upon a time I could blow a whole afternoon messing with my config.

I fiddle with emacs instead 🤣 Honestly, I think I realized that with the set of plugins I landed upon fiddling wasn't giving much more. I don't mess with Obsidian's look and feel (i.e., building dashboards) and just don't often feel an urge to fiddle with it. If I fiddle at all, it's with fonts!

“When the first of August came round, the Professor realized that he had pleasantly trifled away nearly two months at a task which should have taken little more than a week.” — Willa Cather, timeless as always.

Ah August, the Sunday of months

Huh.

Yay! I’m so happy to hear this, Scott!

Important paragraph in here: faith groups have been vocally critical of Israel's recent actions in Gaza since it began, but the ELCA has joined a growing number of Christian denominations that are specifically describing it as a genocide.

Earlier this week, a global group of Quakers did the same.

Curate your own newspaper with RSS Escape newsletter inbox chaos and algorithmic surveillance by building your own enshittification-proof newspaper from the writers you already read

Newsletter: In a media landscape dominated by algorithmic feeds that aim to manipulate and extract, sometimes the most radical thing you can do is choose to read what you want, when you want, without anyone watching over your shoulder.

Here’s how to use RSS.
www.citationneeded.news/curate-with-...

I do think there are things LLMs can aid us historians in. But doing history is not one of them.

Good thread. LLMs cannot learn (in the human sense) or generate new ideas, because they’re only as good as what they’re trained on. Which means the trained-upon content must already exist. And *we* create that.

It’s more marketing hand waving that somehow AI will do things better than humans.

Yeah, agreed. I occasionally pop in to see what sorts of new things are out there for Obsidian, but holy cats do people really push the boundaries on what this app is designed for.

But also, as someone whose day job is in research software development, sometimes I think computers were a terrible idea.

I get that! I try to keep things pretty minimal. A good database is hard to beat, it's nice to be able to ask "show me all the sources that include this person" or sort notes/sources chronologically or geographically.

My hobby horse is: I cannot stand Word, and I've long been an advocate for plain text (easy to convert to docx/pdf/etc., durable, readable by lots of software). Obsidian integrates with Zotero well; Tropy less so, and I don't love that. But I also don't want to replicate Tropy inside Obsidian.

I’ve really gone all-in with Obsidian for note taking and writing. I use Tropy for organizing photographs from the archives or any other primary source I use. And of course Zotero for the secondary materials.

I have so many days where I really wonder if I shouldn’t just do everything in paper again.

A photo of a baseball player for the New York Yankees, accompanied by his “it’s obviously frustrating but it’s not discouraging.

me, reading my second draft that’s still not working

Respites in War National parks in World War II

Going through issues of National Parks Magazine from the 1940s for research, I noticed several headlines about the army. So I dug into that for this week's essay. Good stories.

(More to be said about the war & the parks, of course.)

#nationalparks #parkchat

www.adamsowards.net/respites-in-...

American Lesson Plan, Part 4: Curricular Content A nine-state examination of topics and themes in US history classes, including Native American history; the Founding Era; Westward Expansion; Slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction; Industry, Capi...

New approaches to the history of the American West maintain its dynamic role in US history curriculum. Read the AHA’s American Lesson Plan to find out how teachers are teaching the history of American territorial expansion today. 🗃️

Folks, if you're on Substack you should really consider a move to Buttondown or Ghost or another service. So many great alternatives to Substack that don't promote stuff like this.