Jeff Manuel

Same. That essay also led me to the Library of America’s two-volume collection of World War 2 reporting, which I read this summer and is also excellent.

An echo of what the US government did to the German chemical patents during WW1

Great thread. Totally agree about newspapers. I don't think undergrad history pedagogy has caught up to the reality that the corpus of digitized, searchable newspapers is now large enough that students can find a dozen primary sources to support *any* thesis they throw at it.

Check out page 13 of the fall 2025 catalog!

Thanks, Nate! I teach our undergraduate research and writing class a lot, so I love thinking about how the process of research changes over time. I wrote something along these lines a few years back:
www.technologystories.org/text-searcha...

Screenshot of two pages from a book written in 1987 giving students advice about using computers for research papers.

Screenshot of two pages from a book written in 1987 giving students advice about using typewriters for research papers.

Down a rabbit hole of past advice to history students about using technology for research and writing. The 5th (1987) edition of Turabian is fascinating because it straddles advice for typewriters--always use correcting fluid--and computer word processors (back up files, whether diskette or tape!)

Them: How will AI revolutionize university teaching and learning?

Me: [slides a copy of _The Shock of the Old_ across the chipped veneer desk]

A television on a roller cart with a belt holding it in place; a DVD player; a transistor radio.

While we're debating AI, I'd like to remind everyone about the state of EdTech at the underfunded public regional university. (Yes, I took this photo today)

Mexico and Canada should propose a line of enormous wind turbines along the borders, like the old AM radio "border blaster" stations

Trying to be generous, I can see the hardening rejectionist stance as the antithesis to admin’s often unserious embrace that, just maybe, will end with a synthesis of humanities faculty as an ongoing voice of rigorous critique even as AI is more widely embedded in the university.

Great idea to work from the Cronon piece. Few historians have thought more about narrative structure.

I love reverse outlines and agree they’re incredibly useful. But here again it’s the writing that’s key. I suspect fewer students will arrive in the class with that kind of textual-structure thinking. Maybe we’ll have to be more deliberate in teaching it?

The “ask generative AI to produce a historical image for a paper or presentation” is okay, but only for classroom use, is a real head-scratcher.

Yeah. I’m in the camp who believes (1) the horse is now out of the barn and futures where this all goes away are unlikely, and (2) student use is more widespread than I know. I also didn’t read the document as encouraging AI use so much as, like you said, managing that reality.

Especially bonkers since the state of São Paulo banned pre-harvest burning years ago. The Brazilians operate on much bigger scale and have made it work for years.

Agree. I know this site is basically allergic to anything AI, but this seems to me like a reasonable point to start discussions in a department.

There are guidebooks and recipes for structuring a piece of nonfiction writing, but I suspect we mostly learn this stuff via osmosis by reading. Podcasts and Youtube videos have a structure, of course, but it's not one that easily lends itself to academic writing.

Small sample size, but I'm finding more students struggling with the basics of structure in their writing. My hunch is that this is downstream of consuming so much content in forms that aren't narrative texts (podcasts, short-form videos, AI summaries, etc.)

I heard someone say "skillabi" rather than "syllabi" and can we please not let this become a thing

From Sheldon Brown’s website, of course
sheldonbrown.com/raleigh.html

Screenshot of text describing British bike makers sticking with steel

Reading about vintage British 3-speed bicycles, and this description about why British bike makers were slow to adopt new materials feels like a dispatch from the future about the US automakers and EVs. Enamored by their last industrial revolution, they failed to join the one happening now.

I think you’re onto to something key. I’d add that in many fields the old path of publishing your way to a position with higher prestige or pay is gone since there are no jobs to be had anywhere.

Maybe to help out men in these challenging times we could rename margaritas to something more masculine, like margaritos

Drawing from the longue duree history of industry, I’m not sure industrialization ever served egalitarian ends, but we did figure out how to ameliorate its worst social and environmental consequences and redistribute some of the benefits.

The Transformation of Historical Research in the Digital Age | Ian Milligan Historians make research queries on Google, ProQuest, and the HathiTrust. They garner information from keyword searches, carried out across millions of documents, their research shaped by algorithms t...

If you don’t already have them, @ianmilligan1.bsky.social’s books lay out how the digitized turn has reshaped historians’ practices. Most recently:
www.ianmilligan.ca/publication/...

Be careful what you wish for. Illinois 13 looks a little like that (grabbing Champaign-Urbana and the St. Louis suburbs). Meant to be a Dem district but it elected the GOP candidate for several cycles.

Using Claude to do Tarot card readings and this feels like a near-perfect use case for LLMs

Propose a big study on US sugar production—cane and beet—and you could knock out the lower Mississippi Valley and the northern plains…

"Beginning in the last decade of the 18th century, firewood output increased from about 18% of GDP to just under 30%
of GDP in the 1830s. Following this peak share of output, the value of firewood fell to less than 5% of GDP by the 1880s."
www.nber.org/system/files...
h/t @jkempenergy.bsky.social

*Brazil excluded, apparently