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Erin Grievances

@erinbartram.bsky.social

9.9K followers 1.3K following 3.9K posts

Historian of religion & gender in the 19th c US, drinker of tea in the 21st c US. Museum educator at MTH&M. Wrote some quit lit you may have read. Founder & editor at contingentmagazine.org. Former academic. Sings with Voices of Concinnity. She/her.

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THAT Amber @buriedbybooks.bsky.social · 8h

I like to remind people about lifetime limits and the refusal of insurers to sell coverage to people with preexisting conditions.

The ACA has issues. But those 2 things alone make it worth saving and fixing.

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Erin Grievances @erinbartram.bsky.social · 5h

oh thank goodness, the old ways are not lost

Erin Grievances @erinbartram.bsky.social · 5h

Is referring to "the blue screen of death" a real marker of one's age at this point?

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Erin Grievances @erinbartram.bsky.social · 7h

You're the only person I've seen seriously pointing out that none of these nefarious ellis island agents had that kind of power.

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Erin Grievances @erinbartram.bsky.social · 8h

In the family I studied, two uncles married Elizabeths so everyone called them Aunt Charles and Aunt Robert 😭

Erin Grievances @erinbartram.bsky.social · 8h

I mean, I think a lot of people who make this point today learned it from The Godfather or something, honestly.

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Erin Grievances @erinbartram.bsky.social · 8h

My dissertation subject's name was Jane and she was one of three Janes in the family so I feel this pain.

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Erin Grievances @erinbartram.bsky.social · 8h

I think there's a story about how some people change the spelling of their name to conform with Anglo-American norms out of frustration as much as anything else (Italian "Ia" names becoming "Y" names) but there's still no bureaucrat to blame it on.

Erin Grievances @erinbartram.bsky.social · 8h

I know Dara Ó Briain has said his father absolutely did this with their last name.

Reposted by Erin Grievances

Contingent Magazine @contingent-mag.bsky.social · 8h

"In every iteration of the federal and state census from 1920 – 1940, their birth and immigration years vary slightly, and their surname changes . . . My great-great-grandmother’s name changes from Philipa to Philippine, and then finally to an anglicized Phyllis."

The Stories We Give Ourselves

I wish I’d asked my grandfather more questions.

contingentmagazine.org

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Erin Grievances @erinbartram.bsky.social · 8h

And the thing is, she was an adult person when she came. Even if they did officially change her first name, why on earth would she have gone along with it in her private life?

Erin Grievances @erinbartram.bsky.social · 8h

I think the complexity of how/when/why last names got changed by immigrants themselves is the thing that's become an issue today on here (but has simplified into "yes they DID change it at Ellis Island" as a result).

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Erin Grievances @erinbartram.bsky.social · 8h

But also the portions of my dissertation that required a deep dive into 19th century immigration patterns in New England really showed the extent to which that field is *not cool* anymore and lots of the work that exists is OLD which is a problem.

Erin Grievances @erinbartram.bsky.social · 9h

We should have a conversation about people whose last names weren't in a Roman alphabet and we should be mindful of the fact that some lackey at the port wasn't the absolute decider of your name and most of all Irish-descended ppl need to reel it in on this one a bit.

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Erin Grievances @erinbartram.bsky.social · 9h

My family was a great example of what happens when you stretch a convenient fiction too far. The claim that immigration changed my great-aunt's *first name* because there'd been too many Bridgets that day is one I heard growing up and it has always been absolute bs.

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Erin Grievances @erinbartram.bsky.social · 9h

Exhibit 10/13: did your family have their name officially changed by someone at Ellis Island or did they change it themselves?
It's so much more complex than either of those options but we're starting from most ppl only having inherited lore/well-founded suspicion so we can't have a conversation.

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Erin Grievances @erinbartram.bsky.social · 9h

Every Discourse on this site is evidence of how it's not good to treat K-12 history education the way this country has.

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Erin Grievances @erinbartram.bsky.social · 11h

I know the AHA had a lot of “high school teacher outreach” for a while, but it’s not clear that it was this kind of outreach, which is what people might actually need.

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Erin Grievances @erinbartram.bsky.social · 13h

"...from the cradle up I have been like the rest of the race—never quite sane in the night."

This guy had so many good lines, it's a shame people keep attributing other garbage to him instead.

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Cethan Leahy @cethanleahy.com · 14h

There has never been a bad book featuring a badger

Rachel Feder @rachelfeder.bsky.social · 20h

Tell me your most unhinged literary opinion, as a little treat

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Erin Grievances @erinbartram.bsky.social · 14h

Penn State publishes the journal I was trying to access this morning, go figure!

Erin Grievances @erinbartram.bsky.social · 16h

The postwar system of knowledge production/dissemination has always been pretty siloed and also busted, but it's something to watch it collapse in real time as so many possible collaborations are rejected. It's like the drowning hands meme but academia's giving a high five to *us* and then drowning.

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Erin Grievances @erinbartram.bsky.social · 16h

Oh jeez. I think being a book-based discipline puts historians at an even deeper disadvantage if OA is the primary focus.

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Reposted by Erin Grievances

"Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux @bretdevereaux.bsky.social · 18h

I suppose if the question here is 'why don't these fields produce new discoveries at the same rate as the sciences' the answer is a pretty obvious, 'because they're not funded like the sciences.'

We could do a lot of archaeology with, say, a few billion dollars a year!

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Erin Grievances @erinbartram.bsky.social · 16h

One might almost think that they *don't* actually believe their alt-ac former colleagues are doing work that complements theirs.

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