Chris Cantwell

a stuffed animal in a store with the word neigh on it ALT: a stuffed animal in a store with the word neigh on it

An error in my page proofs I’m glad I just caught.

“He believed the end was neigh.”

Inside Zohran Mamdani's bid to win over religious New Yorkers NEW YORK (RNS) — Over the past year, the candidate has leaned on his Muslim identity to mobilize voters from across traditions, from Friday prayers and Diwali celebrations in Queens, to Baptist church...

Truly brilliant @rns.org team reporting here from @ulaakuzi.bsky.social, @fiona-ndre.bsky.social and @richakarma.bsky.social:

Inside Zohran Mamdani's bid to win over religious New Yorkers —> religionnews.com/2025/11/04/i...

Yes! Thank you! Thelen, Rosenzweig, and Kelland is like the public history trinity here. So, thank you! I am now ready to fight with the typesetter!

Also, hi!

Thank you! Did not think to look as NCPH. I feel like I learned this from @laraly.bsky.social. So would appreciate here insight too.

🗃️ Hoping for some help with a page proof question. We public historians are ok with using "historymaking" as something of a portmanteau, yes? The typesetter insisted on separating this into "history making," but I feel I've read it combine in other books on memory and #publichistory. Thoughts?

What a line. Aldo Leopold, “A Sand County Almanac” (1949)

“To plant a pine…one need be neither god nor poet; one need only own a shovel. By virtue of this loophole in the rules, any clodhopper may say: Let there be a tree—and there will be one.”

- Aldo Leopold, “Sand County Almanac” (1949)

In the (e)mail today.

“It is fortunate, perhaps, that no matter how intently one studies the hundred little dramas of the woods and meadows, one can never learn all of the salient facts about any one of them.”

Aldo Leopold, Sand County Almanac (1949)

a man is holding a microphone in front of a hockey rink and says " as they say in hockey " ALT: a man is holding a microphone in front of a hockey rink and says " as they say in hockey "

First thing I immediately thought of after reading the story was this:

Paging @mjcressler.bsky.social …

“If loons invented the music of being alone, cranes invented the music of being together.”

- Kim Heacox

Thanks! And yeah. And what concerns me is the pressure to adopt AI renders anything other than its use a maker of some kind of Luddite mentality. WHICH IS NOT TRUE! I’ve always used blue books in intro classes. No I worry about their reception.

My god. What a potent (and environmentally appropriate) metaphor. And I think it echoes earlier DH conversations about infrastructure building as scholarship which now feel all the more relevant.

I want to be clear that this is in no way meant to dispel the very real concerns about the intellectual, political, & environmental impacts of AI. But I think "rejecting AI" or "abolishing AI" as some has said is not the answer. But that's a subject for a different thread. Finis. /11

Again I really have no answers here. But I've begun to think about reframing my DH class. To recalculate my own sense of possibility to account for the very real & very legitimate fears my students seem to have. To see DH as a defense of the humanities rather than a digital capitulation /10

But I also can't help but feel that folks are unnecessarily associating the general precarities of our moment with the tech that has come to define it. The two certainly do have a relationship. But I worry that the politicization of AI will only serve to further isolate the humanities. /9

This seems to track the story told about the rightward trend of tech more generally as the scrappy startups that fueled Obama's campaigns became the authoritarian storytellers of the Trump regime post-covid. /8

My sense is that these sentiments emerge from two sources. First, is the fact that we are genuinely being force fed AI by the tech oligarchs who have ensconced themselves within our politics. In contrast to that earlier moment, the rise of AI is neither democratic nor subversive. /7

I have no real insights into this change other than to document, and I generally refuse to air my students' experiences online. But it feels real. The overwhelmingly negative reception AI generally receives within the humanities seems to be coloring the understanding some have of DH. /6

The advent of AI and the rise of LLMs, however, has seemed to shift completely the tone & vibe around DH. At least in my limited experience. DH now seems like one more digital burden for students and educators alike. Just another way in which the tech world bears down upon us. /5

Of course DH had its critics, & some of us were certainly naive in our fervor. Yet the spirit of the times was vibrant and the moment felt full of opportunity. It was the one bright academic spot as the academy began the contraction that coninies through today. /4

We MADE things in class that lived in the world instead of writing papers that got graded and then tossed. it all seemed so novel and borderline revolutionary. I still have students read some early DH stuff from the '00s to see the almost breathless tone with which some was written. /3

When first started teaching in 2013, DH classes had a rebellious, almost subversive quality to them. Our work seemed to counter the power structures within our disciplines & perhaps even in society. Our work challenged what knowledge looked like or democratized knowledge in some way. /2

A somewhat thinking out loud thread on teaching #DH in the age of AI.

Every fall, I've taught an intro to #digitalhumanities class in a #history 🗃️ department for more than ten years. Change, of course, inevitable. But there's been a big vibe shift this year. /1

CFP: SHGAPE Conference - SHGAPE Blog The Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era is delighted to host its first stand-alone conference, June 4-6, 2026, at Loyola University in Chicago, Illinois. We welcome anyone int...

@loyolahistdept.bsky.social will be hosting the first ever @shgape.bsky.social conference this summer, and the CFP is now live. Please share widely and consider submitting something yourself!

blog.shgape.org/cfp-shgape-c...

The candy dish next to the copier in my department is out of chocolate and it is a legitimate crisis for me.

@andrewmarkhenry.bsky.social is one of the most innovative thinkers in the public understanding of religion. His new venture, "The Religion Department," is vital in a time when universities & state legislatures are shuttering such departments. I hope this flourishes.
www.religiondepartment.com

I agree. But there are so many pieces by historians on the latter but almost nothing about the former. As a digital humanist it’s weird to see an absence of showcases and thought pieces on the tech’s potential

If you have examples of pieces by historians, literary theorists, or digital humanities emphasizing the tech’s potential over rueing its disruptions, I’d love to see them. Cause I can’t find them. Save maybe Graham Burnett.