News & Reviews featuring @saddiqdzukogi.bsky.social @alicerudge.bsky.social @amykohout.bsky.social @kelloggfireman.bsky.social @sherrieflick.bsky.social @profmkbyrnes.bsky.social and more!

News & Reviews

Reviews Bakandamiya Review in Publisher's Weekly: "Dzukogi makes potent and capacious use of myth to distill past and present." Return of the King Review in Atlanta Journal-Constitution: "...an immersive, behind-the-scenes account of the 1970 Ali-Quarry fight in Atlanta, politician Leroy Johnson steps up as an unsung hero in his own right." Truman and the Bomb Review in Missouri Historical Review…

unpblog.com

So they’re basically laundering our federal science budget over to the for-profit prison and concentration camp industry? NSF’s 2024 budget was $9.06 billion. NASA: $24.875. NIH: $47.7 billion. Fund science, not cruelty.

Aaron Reichlin-Melnick@reichlinmelnick.bsky.social · last yr.

If the GOP reconciliation bill passes, ICE gets through FY2029: - $45 billion for detention, on top of the current annual budget of $3.4 billion - $14.4 billion for transportation and removal, on top of the current annual budget of $750 million - $8 billion for hiring/retention - Billions more.

A few words on journalism, risk and what I actually said.

This is why its so important for those of us who teach to refuse unnecessary uncritical use of AI to think, read, write, create. Students are being lied to/fashioned into lifetime consumers of LLMs, and universities are letting it happen and abdicating their responsibilities.

Andy Diggle@andydiggle.bsky.social · 2y ago

Using AI to produce writing or art is like asking someone at the gym to lift weights for you. The effort is the point.

They are segregationists. That's the endgame.

Miriam Goldstein@miriamgoldstein.bsky.social · 2y ago

Just in case you thought that removing DEI criteria would mean that everyone is competing equally: NIH is removing grad students from underrepresented backgrounds from the applicant pool altogether. Their applications will not be considered. Other students, not from these backgrounds, will be.

One of the banned words is “historically”.

Darby Saxbe@darbysaxbe.bsky.social · 2y ago

🚨BREAKING. From a program officer at the National Science Foundation, a list of keywords that can cause a grant to be pulled. I will be sharing screenshots of these keywords along with a decision tree. Please share widely. This is a crisis for academic freedom & science.

This is a part of their “professors are the enemy” bullshit, but the cost of these freezes will extend well beyond them. Their students working there, the patients in clinical trials, the businesses who supply these labs, and down the line regular people who reap the benefit will all feel it too.

Don Moynihan@donmoyn.bsky.social · 2y ago

Not just the National Institutes of Health, now the National Science Foundation is put on pause. Reminder: research is a multi-step process. Pausing the peer review panels by itself creates months of delay.

History job alert! Elihu Rose Scholar in Modern Military History at NYU. Looking for historians of war & the military, *broadly defined*, in *any* geographical area. 1/1, renewable up to 3 yrs, pay is much better than listed! I'm on the cmte, happy to answer Qs. Info: apply.interfolio.com/161728

Working on a project related to history of science in the age of revolutions? I have an @amphilsociety.bsky.social conference for you! www.amphilsoc.org/science-and-...

"Science and Society in the Age of Revolutions," September 25-26, 2025 | American Philosophical Society

amphilsoc.org

My students this term have been *passionate* in their rejection of generative AI. I think the wildfires have something to do with it – the environmental impact of data centers, the scarcity of water, the terrible losses they’re seeing. . . it makes the ‘abstract’ of the climate crisis very real.

Are you an #ECR who incorporates #postcolonial #provenance research on #zoological #collections as a method into their historical scholarship? Join @coloniallegacy.bsky.social in Hamburg for a workshop in March 2025. Rumour has it that yours truly will be there too. 😁 #HistNatHist Please share.

H-Soz-Kult@hsozkult.bsky.social · 2y ago

CFP: Animals and Empire. Provenance Research as a Method for Global Histories https://www.hsozkult.de/event/id/event-152202 Hamburg, 20.03.2025-21.03.2025, Research Centre "Hamburgs (post-)colonial Legacy", Bewerbungsschluss: 19.01.2025

I’m not at AHA this year, but my book is! Check it out (on sale!) at the @univnebpress.bsky.social table! (A friend sent me this picture!)

Refusal is an absolutely valid and ethical stance when it comes to AI. I do not need to include it in my teaching, or research--there is nothing it does that is indispensable, and much is made worse with AI in my classrooms.

AI is often unsettling. But I guess I find it particularly disturbing when my alma mater - a PWI with 6.7% Black enrollment and, uh, colonial roots - decides it needs an AI fundraiser and specifically codes her as Black and female.

Ian Petrie@icpetrie.bsky.social · 2y ago

One of several things today which made me want to yeet myself into the fucking sun www.insidehighered.com/news/busines...

We gave to Indigenous Women Rising’s Rain Fund today. Join us? www.iwrising.org/abortion-fund

(Unintentionally) up before the sun thinking about a conference abstract; even got out of bed to scribble some thoughts. Can somebody tell my brain it is fall break, and I didn’t even set an alarm today? (Thanks, middle age.)

Find somebody who looks at you the way a historian looks at a decade that’s been overlooked by previous historians but is actually central to their topic.

What’s coming is chaos, confusion, and, make no mistake, attacks on every issue you care about all at once. That’s the strategy — mass mayhem and distraction. Don’t let it work. Define your sphere of influence: where you can have an impact, work on that, strengthen and build relationships.

This is one of my favorite articles on generative AI, in which Eryk Salvaggio unpacks how we're talking about it, who's providing that language, and what it all means. www.techpolicy.press/challenging-...

Challenging The Myths of Generative AI | TechPolicy.Press

Eryk Salvaggio says we must dispense with myths if we are to think more clearly about what AI actually is and does.

techpolicy.press

I loved my conversation with @dollyjorgensen.bsky.social and @finnarne.me when they invited me on. If you have a book that fits, get in touch with them! #envhist

Dolly Jørgensen@dollyjorgensen.bsky.social · 2y ago

Unexpectedly, I have two Greenhouse #envhum book talk slots still open this year: December 2nd and 9th. If you had a relevant monograph published in 2023 or 2024 and could talk to us at 4pm Central European time (3pm in UK, 10am East Coast, etc.), let me know and we'll schedule you in!

Just had to populate my new feed with SOMETHING —strange to go from like 14k tweets to empty space!

It’s block break here (block 3 ended yesterday, block 4 starts Monday), so even though I had a couple of meetings this morning, we went for a short afternoon hike at a local open space.

I’ve been trying to carve out a little more time for things like running, knitting, reading, and hiking. I often share my professor-costumes on IG. (Possible that I’ve been coping with hard things this fall with shoes and handbags…I’m obsessed with these clogs.)

I’m a US cultural and environmental historian at Colorado College, where I teach courses in environmental history, the history of the US West, the Civil War & Reconstruction, and museum studies/history of natural history. I’m excited to teach a new class on the craft of writing history this spring!

I guess I should probably introduce myself here: hello! Finally deactivated my account in the bad place. Excited to connect/reconnect with folks here. And this is Boomer; he says hi, too!

Māori MPs briefly suspended the Aotearoa parliament’s attempts to reinterpret their founding treaty in the most bad ass use of the Haka I’ve ever seen.

Hello, friends! A little late to the party, but glad I’m here.