Ansley Erickson
@ansleyerickson.bsky.social
US cities & schools, historically. Works: Making the Unequal Metropolis; Educating Harlem; nyccivilrightshistory.org. Voted most likely to assign too much reading. Also I♥️NYC and 🌱 🪴 and 🏊♀️ 🏊♀️. Everything here is me, not my employer.
Certainly has to be part of class 1 in Historical Methods tonight: what are we doing as scholars who study the past, and why, in this present?
Lonnie Bunch Is Leaving the Smithsonian
After months of clashes with the White House, the historian and leader of the institution is retiring later this year.
theatlantic.com
“History often teaches us to embrace ambiguity, to understand there aren’t simple answers to complex questions, and Americans tend to like simple answers to complex questions. So the challenge is to use history to help the public feel comfortable with nuance and complexity.” —Lonnie Bunch
We’ve been here before: US highway construction destroyed livability & value for hundreds of thousands of (urban, many Black) Americans who lived not IN, but NEAR, the path of the road. Largely uncompensated. And, of course, highways > cars > pollution > climate crisis.
Abbey@abbeyarletto.bsky.social · 7d agoThis is what living next door to a 30 megawatt data center sounds like.
We’ve been here before: US highway construction destroyed livability & value for hundreds of thousands of (urban, many Black) Americans who lived not IN, but NEAR, the path of the road. Largely uncompensated. And, of course, highways > cars > pollution > climate crisis.
Abbey@abbeyarletto.bsky.social · 7d agoThis is what living next door to a 30 megawatt data center sounds like.
Like many fellow profs, I’m here at my laptop observing Laboring Day. Syllabus *almost* done. Canvas sites…. Ugh.
My cousin's daughter was exposed to so much mold in the UCSB dorms she nearly dropped out due to illness
In These Times@inthesetimes.com · 4d agoA dorm should be a healthy and safe place to live. On campuses across the country, students say that basic standard isn’t being met. That’s helping drive the spread of student tenant unions.
Federal minimum wage in: 2009: $7.25 2010: $7.25 2011: $7.25 2012: $7.25 2013: $7.25 2014: $7.25 2015: $7.25 2016: $7.25 2017: $7.25 2018: $7.25 2019: $7.25 2020: $7.25 2021: $7.25 2022: $7.25 2023: $7.25 2024: $7.25 2025: $7.25 2026: $7.25 Folks, it's time to raise the damn wage already.
Whew, September 1. Over a tough, good, interesting summer, a major highlight was READING. So many people doing brilliant work out there. What were your summer faves from the non-fiction shelves?
Whew, September 1. Over a tough, good, interesting summer, a major highlight was READING. So many people doing brilliant work out there. What were your summer faves from the non-fiction shelves?
These stories should be headline news everywhere. We are not just in a political crises but a dangerously immoral one.
Gillian Brockell@gillianbrockell.com · last wk.NEW FROM ME: On a hellish third-country removal flight last month, passengers say ICE-contracted guards got drunk, teased and beat them, tied them up, refused to let them use the lavatory. One says he witnessed an ICE agent admit to illegal chain refoulement. prospect.org/2026/08/31/w...
My 18yo camp counselor kid heard from her campers that their school buses at home had cameras/mics trained on them to listen for the word “gun.” “Surveillance is not the same as safety, and a school where every student feels watched is not necessarily a school where every student feels safe.”
Rashawn Ray@sociologistray.bsky.social · last wk.“Schools are adopting AI surveillance tools, from weapon-detection cameras to bathroom listening devices, often w/o evidence [it’s] reliable. Research shows surveillance tech is deployed disproportionately in schools w/more low-income & minority students.” www.brookings.edu/articles/ai-...
Great read for getting ready for a new school year where we ask students and ourselves as teachers to “attend to one another, at length, on purpose,” and to do the same with ideas.
Brian PJ Cronin@brianpjcronin.bsky.social · last wk.“Solidarity, the raw material of every movement I have ever worked in, is at bottom nothing more than sustained mutual attention, people attending to one another, at length, on purpose. It cannot be assembled from fragments engineered to prevent it.”
Looking forward to reading this.
Josh Eyler@josheyler.bsky.social · 2w agoMajor kudos to MIT, who just put out a report about AI on their campus that lucidly explains the threat posed by AI to cognition and the student experience, while at the same time prioritizes learning, students, and the value of education. 1/x aiandeducation.mit.edu/report/
And the perpetual question of why our unis can’t send out a religious calendar holiday to make sure we are all attentive….????
David Shiffman, Ph.D. 🦈@whysharksmatter.bsky.social · 2w agoGreetings, non-Jews in academia! As we start another semester, here's your regularly scheduled reminder that the Jewish High Holy Days are coming up. If you wouldn't schedule an important meeting or exam on Christmas or Easter, don't schedule one on Rosh Hashana or Yom Kippur.
Stuck in New Haven rush-hour traffic? At least there’s something worth reading along the way. 👀 Two 48-foot billboards sponsored by Indivisible Civics along I-91 and I-95 read: “Yale is failing intro to ethics by cutting a deal with Trump.” 🧵 1/5
It did what
Stacy Fahrenthold@sfahrenthold.bsky.social · 2w agoThe American Historical Association hired a lobbying firm to help silence member advocacy on Palestine. In this essay, Adam Rzepka covers @historians.org's relationship w/ Thorn Run Partners, its deep ethical conflicts, & the advocacy crisis AHA has thrust upon us. www.chronicle.com/article/a-sc...
Loved learning about Dolly Parton via this podcast series from a few years ago: www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/dol...
Dolly Parton's America : Episodes | WNYC Studios | Podcasts
The story of a legend at the crossroads of America’s culture wars.
wnycstudios.org
Unfortunately it's not true in the narrow sense either, since this has been common practice since Obama's second term.
Real talk, all of this right now (in the U.S. anyway) is mostly about the fact that some people eked out the power to say, “no” and some other people lost their entitled minds over it.
Deva Woodly@devawo.bsky.social · 2w agoIt’s important to be clear that the truth value of a subject does not become debatable just because somebody wants to debate. Ether. Wandering wombs. Devils in red heads, the cursed left handed. Flat earth. Phrenology. Humors. Race science. “Debate me bro!” It’s fine for the answer to be: no.
Again, “academic freedom” does not mean immunity from the consequences of holding views that have been discredited by peer review, nor does it cover not doing the job you were hired to do. Cofnas was literally not doing the job he was hired to do.
Jason Lee Byas@jasonleebyas.bsky.social · 2w agoYes, I support academic freedom for racism, eugenics, Maoism, a belief in violence for its own sake, Murder Jason Lee Byas Thought, support for ISIS, support for total human extinction, and whatever else you have in mind. "Academic freedom but just for good people" is not a practicable principle.
Unfortunately, it’s also not true that THIS is new… people just have not been aware that we’ve been doing it. In 2016 in San Diego, I met many young hope-filled Haitians who had crossed legally to request asylum… and who the government had slapped ankle monitors on until their court dates. 🤬💔
Ansley Erickson@ansleyerickson.bsky.social · 3w agoBreaking my heart this morning: “Fitting ankle monitors on noncitizens without a criminal history who remain in compliance with their immigration cases has little precedent.” True in the narrowest sense. False given how the history of slavery and peonage roars through each part of this story.
Let us not forget the yellow badges and ghettos in nazi Germany.
Ansley Erickson@ansleyerickson.bsky.social · 3w agoBreaking my heart this morning: “Fitting ankle monitors on noncitizens without a criminal history who remain in compliance with their immigration cases has little precedent.” True in the narrowest sense. False given how the history of slavery and peonage roars through each part of this story.
yep, i will note that the fugitive slave act was used to try to kidnap free blacks and sell them into slavery
Ansley Erickson@ansleyerickson.bsky.social · 3w agoBreaking my heart this morning: “Fitting ankle monitors on noncitizens without a criminal history who remain in compliance with their immigration cases has little precedent.” True in the narrowest sense. False given how the history of slavery and peonage roars through each part of this story.
Idk its not that true in the narrow sense, they've been putting ankle monitors on peaceful noncitizens going to imm ct for my whole career (since Obama). Difference of scale and to some degree who they are pursuing charges against (due to the great illegalization).
What’s unseeable, for the NYT and ilk, is the continuity between those eras/contexts and our own. “Few precedents” require that we not admit precedents outside of USA 1964-present.
Put otherwise: It DOES have precedent, if the NYT is willing to see it.
Ansley Erickson@ansleyerickson.bsky.social · 3w agoBreaking my heart this morning: “Fitting ankle monitors on noncitizens without a criminal history who remain in compliance with their immigration cases has little precedent.” True in the narrowest sense. False given how the history of slavery and peonage roars through each part of this story.
