This will be an amazing event and an amazing special issue!

John Carter Brown Library@jcblibrary.bsky.social · 2d ago

Call For Proposals: Conference on Families in Early American and Atlantic Worlds April 15-17, 2027 Hosted by the John Carter Brown Library (Co-chairs Julie Hardwick and Karin Wulf) Details at: forms.gle/QWcB23XGbwu6...

"History involves sorting and organizing hundreds of thousands of facts" I remain astounded by how loud and wrong people are about what history actually is.

WE DON’T NEED A FUCKING TREATMENT WE HAVE A VACCINE THAT IS 97% EFFECTIVE AND COULD ERADICATE THE DISEASE IF WE DIDN’T HAVE ANTIVAX GRIFTERS LEADING US 🤦🏻‍♂️🤦🏻‍♂️🤦🏻‍♂️ www.nytimes.com/2026/06/11/w...

With Measles Roaring Back, the Search for a Treatment is On

nytimes.com

The working group that I co-founded, "Childbirth Technologies," is looking for new members and a new co-coordinator. The group includes both art historians and historians and welcomes scholars from any field interested in the material and visual histories of pregnancy and childbirth. DM me! 🗃️

Another big disconnect in the AI debate is academics/AIbros/AI pushers assuming they understand the methods, theories, debates, and philosophies of disciplines they are not trained in, and appear to have no desire to understand, but are POSITIVE gAI is necessary to those disciplines, nonetheless.

I don't know how to explain to the people who pop up when creatives complain about "AI" to say there are legit uses for it just how much they sound like someone saying "Well actually fire is used to make bread" when people are talking about an organized arson ring burning down their fucking houses

Thrilled to be participating in the "Fetal Subjects and Legal Personhood in the Pre-Modern Catholic World" conference at UCLA June 8-10! Thanks @eobrien.bsky.social for organizing! The virtual keynotes, by @sacrobosco.bsky.social and John Christopoulos, are open to the public! Join us! 🗃️

The History of Medicine Division at the NLM is in danger. Please click below by May 26 to take action.

American Historical Association@historians.org · 3mo ago

Take action by May 26. The NIH is accepting public comments on its FY 2027–31 Strategic Plan. Tell the NIH to support the National Library of Medicine through investment in research infrastructure, digitization and preservation, and stewardship of medical history. Submit comments:

An audience member asked me about leftist pronatalism.

The declyne of readinge ys caused by manye thinges. One major cause ys a systematic & decades-long devaluinge of literature at all levels of educacioun. We kan not put instrumentalitye above meaninge and still thrive. Fundinge the humanityes ys key to a just societye of well-informed citizens.

Spots are still available for my CalRBS online summer course on feminist bibliography! Spread the word and come explore with me! 📜 📚

Sarah Werner@wynkenhimself.bsky.social · 5mo ago

Come think about Feminist Bibliography with me this summer! I’m teaching a one-week online course for @calrbs.bsky.social—I love this class and am excited to do it again. Description below; priority deadline April 15; all details at www.calrbs.org/feminist-bib...

This, from Nicholas Kristof, is extraordinary, harrowing, morally urgent journalism. Notably not in the NYT’s news pages, which are an exemplar of that silence. Gift link. www.nytimes.com/2026/05/11/o...

Opinion | The Silence That Meets the Rape of Palestinians

nytimes.com

Study finds that students using chatGPT learned and remembered less than students who did not use it. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

ChatGPT as a cognitive crutch: Evidence from a randomized controlled trial on knowledge retention

The rapid integration of generative artificial intelligence into higher education has outpaced empirical understanding of its effects on fundamental l…

sciencedirect.com

Everyone: ‘This is unheard of’ Historians: ‘ JFC, not again!’

Aparna Nair@disabilitystor1.bsky.social · 4mo ago

Where is the lie? But also, people like to think they are special, and what they are going through is special, and if there is anything historians can establish with tedious frequency it is that no, none of us are special and historical precedent echoes and coughs its way through the decades.

I was consulted recently by an editor of an interdisciplinary journal who was ready to retract a paper based on hallucinated citations. It’s a real research integrity problem, and it’s arriving in humanities and social sciences publishing. (It’s already been a problem in STEM.)

Miles Klee 🦉@milesklee.bsky.social · 8mo ago

Academics and technologists are sounding the alarm about a growing crisis in scholarship as we know it: AI-generated citations of nonexistent papers that have infested real journals. Despite being fake, the sources are widely assumed to be authentic the more they appear in published literature.

Pomegranates, shells, and a stag beetle because everybody had to do one of those. By Maria Sibylla Merian, whose day is today.

apparently Wikipedia has more rigorous standards than every university on the planet, university administrators, edtech enthusiasts, (certainly more than) AI bros, several prominent academic journals, and too many professors and teachers

Emanuel Maiberg@emanuelmaiberg.bsky.social · 4mo ago

after much deliberation and giving AI the benefit of the doubt, Wikipedia editors have had enough of AI slop. New policy bans LLM generated content, periodt www.404media.co/wikipedia-ba...

@profchrisadams.bsky.social and I remember two remarkable scholars, Elborg Forster and Patricia Ranum, "faculty wives" who never held formal positions but their generative scholarship made contributions to the field of French history. www.societyforfrenchhistoricalstudies.net/in-memoriam

In Memoriam — SFHS

societyforfrenchhistoricalstudies.net

Did you know you could pre-order a copy of The Public Scholar from @moonpalacebooks.bsky.social? Help a local bookstore. Help a local author. And if you want it signed, I'll drive over. We're about a month out. :) moonpalacebooks.com/item/I12x_a-...

The Public Scholar by David M Perry | Moon Palace Books

A practical guide for scholars ready to write beyond the academy.Public scholarship should not be reserved for celebrity intellectuals or tenured faculty at elite institutions.

moonpalacebooks.com

This is the same thing as saying modern Evangelicals aren't "real Christians".

mataliandy@mataliandy.com · 5mo ago

It's not "race science" it's "unfounded racist scientific-sounding claims promoted by racists." I hate that eugenics is being described as a "science," even by journalists who are against it. WTF?

Happy birthday to one of greatest mathematicians of all time Emmy Noether (1882-1935), here with her eponymous theorem, the backbone of modern physics. 🐡🧪👩🏼‍🔬🧮🎢 #histsci Noether’s theorem links any symmetry of a system with a conservation law. In my portrait, I chose to depict a young Emmy in front 🧵

Another university getting rid of things you could only ever do at a university and replacing them with stuff a 13-year-old can do on a phone

In underfunded fields, people tend to do their own work. In overfunded fields, people pay others to do everything, including “their” research and writing. It’s not an accident that AI is an overfunded field that grew out of other overfunded fields.

If only more people understood this

Sarah Fackrell@design-law.bsky.social · 5mo ago

All I'm going to say that: If I had never done a thing, I wouldn't be so quick to jump into discussions about whether "AI" can do the thing.

What happened in the consulting room of an astrologer physician in rural England 400 years ago? Find out at CASEBOOKS THERAPY, Wed 25 Mar DM @laurenkassell.bsky.social for details @hagenilda.bsky.social @robralley.bsky.social @jakubochocinski.bsky.social #histmed #astrology @eui-history.bsky.social

In the first semester of my PhD, I wrote an essay about menstruation in Hildegard of Bingen's intellectual work, which is absolutely fascinating if you've never looked into it. If I'd had Lee's incredible book back then, the essay writing would've been much easier! nursingclio.org/2026/03/18/r...

Review of Minji Lee, The Medieval Womb: Hildegard of Bingen’s Views on the Female Reproductive Body (Arc Humanities Press, 2025)

I teach a course called “Women and Medicine” that explores the history of women as medical practitioners, patients, and objects of medical knowledge from the ancient Greeks to the present. Early in…

nursingclio.org

Today for NC we have a fantastic review of Minji Lee’s book THE MEDIEVAL WOMB. Read the full review here! nursingclio.org/2026/03/18/r...

Review of Minji Lee, The Medieval Womb: Hildegard of Bingen’s Views on the Female Reproductive Body (Arc Humanities Press, 2025)

I teach a course called “Women and Medicine” that explores the history of women as medical practitioners, patients, and objects of medical knowledge from the ancient Greeks to the present. Early in…

nursingclio.org

Have you had your eye on “Public Health in the Premodern World” ed. by our G. Geltner with Janna Coomans & Ronit Yoeli-Tlalim (@yoelitlalim.bsky.social) which illustrates the rich history of public health? Check out the code below to get 30% off! #histmed #medhst

For those wondering about the "overly simplistic narratives about the history of science & tech" referenced below, consider this "disclaimer" from an advertisement for the library's most recent exhibition... (You can see the full ad on p. 18: kcstudio.org/digital-edit... ) #histSTM #histsci #AI 📜🗃️

Ben Gross@bhgross144.bsky.social · 5mo ago

Today is the one-year anniversary of my departure from the library referenced below. It is disheartening to see how that organization's leadership has continued to marginalize subject-area expertise and promote overly simplistic narratives about the history of science & tech. #histSTM #histsci 📜 🗃️