Alex Parry, Ph.D.

Disclaimer from CDC website

I’m appalled to see the following disclaimer on the CDC website:

“The Trump Admin. is working to reopen the government for the American people. Mission-critical activities of CDC will continue during the Democrat-led government shutdown.”

Arsonists complaining about a fire.

CFP: A Time of Monsters The monster has been here all along. It is a historical constant that manifests in wildly different ways across time, place, and culture. Whatever form it takes, the monster claws at categories; it un...

Our new CFP is up and it is monstrous.

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS:

Tendon is now accepting poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, and visual art engaging with the politics and poetics of care.

For more information, see
tendonmag.submittable.com/submit

"Bucknell has decided to close its highly respected, decades-old UP in June 2026. The stated reason? The press serves scholars, not Bucknell undergrads. Bucknell undergrads—& some grad students as well—disagree." FANTASTIC piece on BUP's student internship program. networks.h-net.org/group/discus...

It’s official! We’re launching the UCLA Department of Labor Studies. After years of building as a small but mighty “program,” Labor Studies has been elevated to departmental status. We’re the first but hopefully not the last of our kind in the UC system.

In addition to prohibiting digital humanities projects, the current Collaborative Research grant guidelines bar recipients from using NEH funding to offset publishing costs (e.g. open access fees and image copyright costs). Baffling.

Trying out an activity tomorrow where students classify abstracts on a specific topic (in this case, the history of fat / fatness) to learn how to write literature reviews.

Do folks have other useful exercises to teach students the “mechanics” of historical research and writing?

Of course. Teaching is why I wanted to be a part of academia in the first place, and the folks at OU were great colleagues and role models. But the commitment of educators to their work doesn’t excuse poor compensation and overwork.

The call for papers for the 2026 annual meeting of the American Association for the History of Medicine is live now! We hope you will join us in Buffalo!

histmed.org/buffalo-2026/

Inane observations are an art form.

eBay listing for Karen Gets a Fever (1972), a health education picture book from the Medical Books for Children series

The budgeting meme about scented candles, but with history of medicine artifacts:

This is worth sharing far and wide. Federal Employees and contractors oral history project. Im not involved in this. Just got the link, idea seems to be to create a record of the assault on the American Repuvlic after Jan 2025. www.fecohp.org

Just sharing the “Xtreme endnotes” assignment @parisnoire.bsky.social mentions here in case anyone else finds it helpful as we begin a new academic year.

FWIW, it’s a purely analog exercise in an AI-freaky world & my students have never not had fun doing it.✌🏽

www.historians.org/perspectives...

🗃️ Variation of this: I gave students one of my chapters w/no footnotes, asked where they thought footnotes should go: What type of source was used? What makes you think that? They have to consider how writing shows evidence vs. context vs. author’s voice. They liked it a lot and had great questions!

I’m mulling over the historical interplay between the materials used to make toys as part of a new project. Wood, plastic, metal, foam, stuffing, and even Velcro all had distinct, and shifting, applications and meanings in the consumer marketplace. Safety, unsurprisingly, was a key factor.

We’ve been slowly refurnishing the house with used furniture, and I have a newfound appreciation for the seemingly infinite types of desks, sideboards, buffets, shelves, armoires, cabinets, hutches…

I taught Composition and Technical Writing at OU, and everyone there worked extremely hard despite being poorly paid and being expected to prepare students for every type of academic writing in a semester or two.

Photograph from Life magazine (1971) showing spring-loaded jumping shoes sold to children as toys

“Kid will love these! What could possibly go wrong?”

Box of the Topper Corp. Suzy Homemaker Super Grill (1967), which came with a patented, UL-approved safety plug

The latest addition to my growing collection of safety artifacts: the Suzy Homemaker Super-Grill, complete with A/C current, a working heating pan, and a set of particularly scary warning labels.

I guess if you equate history with “compiling and relating facts that can readily be found online,” then AI is all set to take our place.

Trump Went to War With the Ivies. Community Colleges Are Being Hit.

“Like their four-year counterparts, community colleges are grappling with disappearing federal grants, shuttered D.E.I. offices, eliminated programs… many of the grants that fund financial aid for low-income students and the staff that support them have been eliminated or threatened”

This list says more about the folks who did the assessment than which jobs are on the AI chopping block.

AI won’t replace jobs like “historian” or “writer” any time soon unless we accept a poor substitute for the real thing. AI can synthesize but can’t produce new knowledge or art on its own.

Read Alex Parry's "Making Homemakers Responsible for Safety: Housework, Laundry Equipment, and the Unequal Burdens of Accident Prevention, C. 1910–80"

Published in the April 2025 issue of Technology & Culture, available via @projectmuse.bsky.social

muse.jhu.edu/article/956850

My middle school had a course where we had a trimester each of art, woodshop, and cooking, and I wish it had been a series we could iterate.

Even when advanced versions of these courses were available, we were advised not to take them in high school because of UC admissions standards.

Having read the testimony around the Child Protection Acts and Consumer Product Safety Act, I’m sad to say that the Mainway sketches were only somewhat satirical.

Safety regulations are written in blood