Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Henry Snow @henrysnow.bsky.social · 1h

now i just need to write a book on Rhode Island arsonists and along with @bencarp.bsky.social we can sell an eighteenth-century suspicious fires box set

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Henry Snow @henrysnow.bsky.social · 1h

yes! I happened to see it quite early when verso's spring catalog went up but thanks, very excited for it

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Henry Snow @henrysnow.bsky.social · 1h

more blogs more blogs. the time of the eighteenth-centuryist public intellectual is now

Tom Cutterham @tomcutterham.bsky.social · 5d

If you want to read more about Aitken and his world, about the multiple crises of the age of revolution, and sometimes about the crises of our own time too, I'm starting a free newsletter (ok, it's a blog) and I'd love you to sign up: buttondown.com/cutterham

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Tom Cutterham @tomcutterham.bsky.social · 5d

In 1776, a Scottish housepainter called James Aitken set out on a secret mission to destroy the British navy and win the War of Independence for the United States. His story is the core of my book, EMPIRE ABLAZE: The American Revolution and the Atlantic Working Class, out next summer with Verso!

The cover of "Empire Ablaze: The American Revolution and the Atlantic Working Class," which features an image of an eighteenth-century building on fire, with small sailing boats visible on a river in the foreground.

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Henry Snow @henrysnow.bsky.social · 1h

(this is good, popular front etc etc, but not exactly a hardcore left ticket)

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Henry Snow @henrysnow.bsky.social · 1h

"hardest core, farthest left" - last time I was at a No Kings event there was someone holding up a BOOKER MURKOWSKI 2028 sign

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Amarnath Amarasingam @amaramarasingam.bsky.social · 19h

The military has now killed 27 people as if they were enemy soldiers in a war zone and not criminal suspects. www.nytimes.com/2025/10/14/u...

U.S. Military Kills Another 6 People in 5th Caribbean Strike, Trump Says

www.nytimes.com

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Annie Abrams @annieabrams.bsky.social · 17h

grim

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Karin Wulf @kawulf.bsky.social · 1d

When people tell you that founders as enslavers was something we should see "in the context of their time." Great piece fr @katytelling.bsky.social abt a wealthy 18hc Virginian (and there were others) who thought Washington and co. risked their honor and more. ageofrevolutions.com/2025/10/13/a...

A Great Reputation Among Men: Race and Contested Masculinities in the Early American Republic

By Kathleen Telling In 1785, Robert Pleasants, a wealthy tobacco planter, abolitionist, and prominent member of Henrico County’s Quaker community, penned a letter to Virginia’s most famous son, Geo…

ageofrevolutions.com

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Henry Snow @henrysnow.bsky.social · 1d

personalized chatbot gacha characters demanding you take out a reverse mortgage

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Henry Snow @henrysnow.bsky.social · 1d

really don't love that some stores now use DoorDash for shipping without asking or telling you-- replacing unionized USPS or UPS delivery with gig work feels like basically scabbing. keep an eye out for this and warn your friends about brands that do this (Best Buy is the guilty culprit here)

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Henry Snow @henrysnow.bsky.social · 1d

oh my goodness this is such an interesting subject, how did I not learn about this in history school. now my students are definitely going to

Spooky Adult Paul OBE(S) @sanjukta.bsky.social · 1d

How is it that I did not learn about Courts of Piepowder in law school?

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Henry Snow @henrysnow.bsky.social · 2d

Mokyr has described workers harmed by technological change as "incumbents who fear a threat to the stream of rents generated by their physical capital, human capital, market power, or political influence," a profound misunderstanding of labor

Robert Heinze @rheinze.bsky.social · 2d

Lol at a Nobel for "having explained innovation-driven economic growth", fantastic timing everybody

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Erin Grievances @erinbartram.bsky.social · 1d

This just happened again and it really drives home the extent to which scholarly orgs could build great bridges with museums/historical sites by figuring out how to help them get access to scholarly materials. Those places might, in turn, help support those orgs with people and money.

Erin Grievances @erinbartram.bsky.social · 8d

Working at a museum without access to a university library means spending 6 years thinking about/reading Mark Twain & his reception and then every time I think I had an original thought it turns out @mattseybold.bsky.social tweeted it out in the form of a peer-reviewed article a decade ago.

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Josh Shepperd @joshshepperd.bsky.social · 2d

Thanks to American Campus, the podcast about the history of higher education, for featuring my book. We talk about how NPR and PBS emerged from equal access to education discourses. And how Media Studies originated as a strategy of public media activism.

How universities created NPR and PBS with Josh Shepperd - American Campus Podcast

How public universities gave rise to public mediaReferences and suggested readings:Josh Shepperd. 2023. Shadow of the New Deal: The Victory of Public Broadcasting. University of Illinois Press.Laura G...

americancampuspodcast.buzzsprout.com

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Henry Snow @henrysnow.bsky.social · 1d

linear algebra was the only math I was ever better than mediocre at and thanks to current events it's proving of some use in my history classroom

Henry Snow @henrysnow.bsky.social · 1d

this thread is a great explanation of LLMs. I used a version of this, basically, in my Science, Technology, and Society course a month ago and I think it really helped things click for students

rev. howard arson @theophite.bsky.social · 1d

i am going to try to give a framework of my own understanding which laypeople can understand.

Buttadeus @thewanderingjew.bsky.social · 1d

yeah - I was impressed by the token-prediction as being as powerful as it is, but there's more going on than that and I don't really follow it any more.

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dr. eerie katherine @actualkatherine.bsky.social · 2d

Bonus: if you've been wondering, "why has dr. e been rooting for the Seattle Mariners? aren't they a Baltimore sports fan?" Well, all will be revealed in this article ⬇️ (and you might learn something too)

dr. eerie katherine @actualkatherine.bsky.social · 2d

contingentmagazine.org/2024/11/30/t...

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Andrew Hartman @andrewhartman.bsky.social · 2d

The great Robin Blackburn reviews my book for @thenation.com.

"In Karl Marx in America, Andrew Hartman provides us with a kaleidoscopic vision of Marxism in the United States in the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries."

www.thenation.com/article/soci...

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John Carl Baker @johncarlbaker.bsky.social · Aug 31

Starting to dig through the new Capital translation and I thought Paul North’s editor’s introduction was very good - would work well for a course on the text

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Henry Snow @henrysnow.bsky.social · 2d

suggesting you're the antichrist and generally just talking about the antichrist a lot does feel like the kind of thing the antichrist would do as a bit

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Henry Snow @henrysnow.bsky.social · 2d

where this comes up in my own work: there is this persistent notion that workers are collateral damage of new tech, like industrial machinery. no, they are intended victims. mechanized labor was an intentional effort to crush artisans, and this shaped its timing, imolementation, etc.

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Henry Snow @henrysnow.bsky.social · 2d

I'm not particularly critical of "innovation" in general-- hell, I'm basically an ecomodernist-- but "human capital" and "rents" are category errors when describing workers' actions here. The whole point is that they do /not/ want their labor value to either vanish or become rents

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Henry Snow @henrysnow.bsky.social · 2d

Mokyr has described workers harmed by technological change as "incumbents who fear a threat to the stream of rents generated by their physical capital, human capital, market power, or political influence," a profound misunderstanding of labor

Robert Heinze @rheinze.bsky.social · 2d

Lol at a Nobel for "having explained innovation-driven economic growth", fantastic timing everybody

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Tobias Wilson-Bates @phdhurtbrain.bsky.social · 2d

I don’t care how many times I encounter the fact, it will never fully be accepted by my brain that Isaac Newton stuck a bodkin needle into his eye as part of his experiments on optics

Newton looking like he’s just made up his mind to put a needle in his eye

A bodkin needle. The kind I would never ever put in my eye no matter what

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