William G. Thomas III

Applications are open for "Under the Big Sky: The Montana Writers Retreat," June 12-15, 2026 sponsored by the College of Letters and Science, Montana State University. At the B Bar Ranch in Emigrant. For history and nonfiction writers.

Apply here: www.montana.edu/lettersandsc...

And we're extra lucky that there will be another workshop for writers tomorrow at 1:30pm: the Nonfiction Trade Book Proposal Workshop, chaired by @lollardfish.bsky.social. #AHA26 🗃️

“This article urges a fresh view on [AI large language model] hallucinations by arguing that, rather than being errors in any conventional sense, they are evidence of a probabilistic system incapable of dealing with questions of knowledge.”

"Under the Big Sky: The Montana Writers Retreat"
June 12-15, 2026 at B Bar Ranch

Historians and nonfiction writers! Join us for a retreat will offer you space to think deeply, gain insight from colleagues and facilitators, and move your writing project forward.

www.montana.edu/lettersandsc...

My colleagues have been working on this since June, so it’s a big day to see it finally finished and filed. And just thrilled that 17 other scholarly orgs joined.

Very well deserved. Congratulations!!

"Under the Big Sky: The Montana Writers Retreat"
June 12-15, 2026 at B Bar Ranch
Sponsored by the College of Letters and Science, Montana State University.
Open to all nonfiction and history writers.
Join us and apply:
www.montana.edu/lettersandsc...

AHA Advocacy | American Historical Association The American Historical Association is unique among history organizations with the breadth and depth of our advocacy efforts.

The American Historical Association promotes the critical role of historical thinking in public life, defends academic freedom, develops professional standards, and supports scholarship and teaching. Learn about our recent advocacy actions on our website. 🗃️

Associate or Full Professor of History and The Wallace Stegner Chair of Western American Studies The Department of History and Philosophy at Montana State University invites applications for a tenure-track position at the level of Associate or Full Professor with expertise in the history of the N...

We are pleased to announce a search for The Wallace Stegner Chair of Western American Studies in the Department of History at Montana State University-Bozeman. This is an exciting moment at MSU. Join us.

jobs.montana.edu/postings/48151

10.) Rather than prompt our historical imagination about the full record of American history and its drama, the Founders Museum presents viewers with what we might call looking glass history--flattened, narcissistic, and ultimately uninteresting.

9.) I think historians are excited to celebrate and commemorate the 250th and we need creative approaches to history and storytelling, including animation and film, and possibly AI.

8.) The founders of the United States included enslaved people who formed and shaped the nation too. Men and women like the Bell family who among many other actions they took before, during, and after the Rev. attempted to hold the nation accountable to its ideals.

7.) The idea that Thomas Jefferson, Charles Carrol of Carrolton, the Lees would say nothing about slavery or use the term is preposterous. Their own writings made constant reference to slavery and enslaved people.

6.) The Founders Museum videos are like a parlor trick. They use AI to have the founders ventriloquize today’s political viewpoints.

5.) AI can be used to fabricate history, unmooring history from the evidence, the original sources historians use to write history.

4.) So AI is powerful. But it’s also dangerous. I feel like we’re playing with fire. One of the biggest dangers is to lose track of attribution—clearly and definitively marking what is being quoted and what is the source for a narrative.

3.) We used AI in the making of our Animating History film, The Bell Affair, about an enslaved family in Washington, DC, who sue for their freedom -- we automated the rotoscoping of hundreds of thousands of individual frames. Nearly impossible to do by hand. animatinghistory.unl.edu

2.) AI is an exceedingly powerful accelerant. It can automate historical research previously nearly impossible to do in a lifetime. see examples of historians using AI to make millions of handwritten index cards, such as medical or legal records, machine readable in a matter of minutes.

1.) AI makes it possible to dive into the entire corpus of human knowledge and return to the surface with a useful result. This will change the way historians work.

I'll add my thoughts and comments for the record here too!

"Black Patriots and Black Loyalists of the American Revolution exhibit" #America250 #VA250 va250.org/event-detail...

Special Issue Submissions - AHA Natural light and processed MSI images of the HMML Palimpsest Project Methods for Archival Silence in Early History The American Historical Review seeks proposals for a special issue illustrating a ra...

The #AHR is seeking proposals for a special issue on methodological approaches to archival silences in early history. Visit our website to read the full call for proposals and learn more about the guidelines for submission. Proposals are due September 16.

We always knew you would! Welcome to the sub sub librarians!

Two of my favorite people! Wish I could be there Corey and Marcus!

Ghosts of Amistad: In the Footsteps of the Rebels [siteorigin_widget class=WP_Widget_Media_Video][/siteorigin_widget] Ghosts of Amistad chronicles a trip to Sierra Leone to visit the home villages of the people who seized the slave schooner Amistad...

For anyone teaching the slave trade and slavery this fall: check out my documentary film, *Ghosts of Amistad*, about the memory of the 1839 uprising in contemporary Sierra Leone, w/ French, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish subtitles. Study guides for teachers and students too.

www.ghostsofamistad.com

We are really proud of EQUALITY BEFORE THE LAW. Thank you to the awesome team at Nebraska, our Mellon graduate fellows, contributors, and our students and advisory council members. Check it out at: teachinglegalhistory.unl.edu

The collection features not only well-known cases like Scott v. Sandford but also and mainly hundreds of previously unpublished cases. These are stories of how ordinary Americans used the law.
teachinglegalhistory.unl.edu

Our team has been working on a major Open Education Resource (OER) about U.S. legal history for teaching and learning. If you are teaching U.S. legal history, we hope that EQUALITY BEFORE THE LAW will help you and your students. Check out our initial launch site at: teachinglegalhistory.unl.edu

NEH Announces $34.79 Million for 97 Humanities Projects

Congratulations to AHA members Merle Eisenberg, James Illingworth, James P. McClure, Christopher F. Minty, Michael L. Satlow, and Jennifer Stertzer, as well as all the other historians who were awarded grants by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) for humanities projects in 2025. 🗃️

When your team brings fresh huckleberries to the office, there’s only one thing to do! Montana State, Bobcats, Montana!