Stephanie Richmond

The world is on fire and I just cannot any more.

Stopped for lunch on the way to work and sat and watched a navy ship being towed to the repair docks. This was the site of docks for the domestic slave trade and enslaved workers labored in the Navy Yard across the river. The Elizabeth River is stained with the blood of black and brown folks.

White House Announces Comprehensive Review of Smithsonian Exhibitions

You can't teach U.S. history without "divisive" narratives. Slavery wasn't "unifying." The Japanese incarceration wasn't "unifying." The anti-immigrant Operation Wetback (real name) wasn't "unifying."
It's history's job to tell the truth, not cover up past racism to pave the way for future racism.

We are in liberal arts, which works for me.

Sure, let's do that. I'm sure that the humanities are why they're shutting down vaccines and telescopes and weather monitoring. Trump will restore all funding if Yale stops teaching history.

Could a colleague write one for you?

Historian friends, I'd love to see your syllabi based on American Yawp! Got any to share?

I can knit, spin, weave, sew and embroider. I also bake bread.

Worked on syllabi and managed to break Blackboard as per usual. Giving up for the day.

Not just in higher ed. My spouse works at a big nonprofit and they are going through the same thing. AI for everything while they are in the midst of a budget crisis and talking about layoffs.

Back to school shopping included some new dog toys. Dino has a new best friend.

Yup. So much time on the Chromebook sitting in the classroom while the teacher watches to make sure they aren’t playing other games not in Lexia.

Just had one of those moments where you are sitting at a coffee shop and snippets of the conversation next to you filter through your concentration and you have the knee jerk reaction to tell the woman sitting there to run. #redflag

Bunch of nonsense since she was in VA. Washington and Jefferson are still put on a pedestal in the SOLs.

It will hurt non elite schools more than elite ones, endowments will protect the survival of the Ivies and other R1s.

say it again:

4 million people work in higher ed, the largest employer in 10 states, second largest employer in 10 more, and in 60 of the 100 biggest cities

demolishing higher education is economic sabotage

Picked the first actual harvest of figs from my trees! The squirrels got to some but it’s enough for a jar of jam!

They cannot translate either, has anyone seen the mess that is the indexing done by Ancestry and Family search AI?

This sadly is our history and our present. All driven by greed, racism and the idea that some folks don’t matter.

Everytime I read another news piece on deportation, Alligator Alley or families being torn apart they ring in awful similarity to the stories I’m uncovering from the domestic slave trade. Just transcribed the record of the sale of three little boys between 5 and 12 years old. No mention of parents.

Ah, maybe then give them an example but don’t say it’s yours?

Even if they aren’t the exact same prompt, something in the same format is helpful for students. Give them explicit directions on what is useful for their assignment from the example.

I don’t give examples from me ever, I do ask prior students who did a good job if I can use their anonymized paper as a sample. I will do things like fix the footnotes/bibliography and basic grammatical errors but otherwise leave it the same.

In other news: the world is on fire and I’m still frantically transcribing records to meet grant deadlines.

Things no one tells you about doing digital history: your eyes are permanently exhausted from staring at screens and doing data entry/QA.

Is Stephen Douglas behind this?

In the past I’ve looked at them. They do not appeal to my students.

Thanks for being brave enough to write this. I’ve been batting around an idea of a class on history and games at my uni for a while, especially since we now have a game dev program. I’m a historian who likes to play video games, but not a gaming historian.

I’m spending my week at music camp and it’s a good reminder about how humbling learning new skills is. Nothing like being back in the student seat to remind you that learning is exhausting even when it is fun.