Charlotte Canning
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cmcanning.bsky.social
Charlotte Canning
@cmcanning.bsky.social
Performance historian. Reader. Teacher. Feminist. Views my own and represent no one else. She/hers
Pinned
The Scopes Trial began 100 years ago today. Why do we even remember it? The power of theatre. Live performance makes things real and relatable.
Theater Helps Us Remember the Scopes Trial 100 Years Later
'Inherit the Wind' changed how people understand, and remember, the legendary Scopes trial.
time.com
Reposted by Charlotte Canning
6 years ago, as I prepared to host students for Thanksgiving, I received a call informing me Harvard denied me tenure. Before I had a chance to process, it was all public. This year the memory stings more as I watch dear colleagues and friends like @durba.bsky.social experience the same violence.
Why Lorgia García Peña Was Denied Tenure at Harvard
A decision not to retain a beloved Latinx-studies professor raised questions about the university’s commitment to students of color.
www.newyorker.com
November 27, 2025 at 3:12 PM
Reposted by Charlotte Canning
For USians, this @davidolusoga.bsky.social series is also available on PBS and is excellent. 👇
1/5 It was entirely predictable that The Telegraph would jump on @DavidOlusoga’s Empire series to fight its right wing culture war for control of our public history. Let’s see what they’ve done:
November 27, 2025 at 4:50 PM
Reposted by Charlotte Canning
This is a deeply unprofessional and illegal partisan statement from the Trump hack who's currently director of the CIA.

It's also deeply dishonest, because the decision to grant the shooter asylum here was made by the Trump administration.
CIA statement about the Afghan man identified as the gunman who shot two National Guardsmen in Washington
November 27, 2025 at 8:34 PM
Reposted by Charlotte Canning
November 27, 2025 at 8:48 PM
Reposted by Charlotte Canning
My friend Jake (that’s Dr. Beck to you!) on the crisis in Texas universities.

www.dallasnews.com/opinion/comm...
Professor: Texas used to have universities
Former Texas Tech professor takes issue with the actions of Texas universities to restrict what topics can be discussed. Doing so makes them something other...
www.dallasnews.com
November 27, 2025 at 7:57 PM
Reposted by Charlotte Canning
We're gonna need a truth and reconciliation commission and Nuremberg style trials to reckon with all of this evil, and any Dem candidate for office who shies away from a full reckoning in the name of "moving forward as a nation" can get well and truly fucked
November 27, 2025 at 4:29 PM
Reposted by Charlotte Canning
Since this guy came on board, Louisiana has had a record pertussis year, with 2 infant deaths in the state. Now RFK Jr gave him a promotion up to the CDC.
November 25, 2025 at 6:50 PM
Reposted by Charlotte Canning
Trump responds, in character, with the collective punishment of all Afghans, whose plight he worsened by selling the government in Kabul out to the Taliban in the last days of his first term.
November 27, 2025 at 6:51 AM
Reposted by Charlotte Canning
Australia recorded ZERO cases of cervical cancer in women under 25 for the first time since they started tracking the cancer in the 80s.

This is the power of vaccines.

The HPV vaccine is extremely effective at preventing cancer.

Viruses can be oncogenic. Get your vaccines and protect yourself!
newsGP - Australia set for world-first cervical cancer elimination
Vaccination programs have played a key role, and GPs remain ‘instrumental’ in boosting screening rates to reach the 2035 target.
www1.racgp.org.au
November 27, 2025 at 3:45 AM
Reposted by Charlotte Canning
"a single person of this demographic may have committed a crime, therefore we must punish the entire demographic" is a policy response you may recognize from fascist governments dedicated to ethnic cleansing elsewhere.
It didn’t even take 6 hours.
November 27, 2025 at 5:52 AM
Reposted by Charlotte Canning
"The adjunct faculty member in the political science department invited undergraduate students to bring alcohol to class for end-of-semester student presentations. The adjunct faculty member drank with the undergraduates, which were in a 400-level course — meaning an upper level of undergraduate"
GMU lecturer fired for drinking in class with undergrads, sources say
An adjunct faculty member at George Mason University was fired after openly drinking alcohol with undergraduate students in class last week, sources tell News4.
www.nbcwashington.com
November 27, 2025 at 11:54 AM
Reposted by Charlotte Canning
This is the correct take. Stewing in white supremacist propaganda is bad for your thinking. And if think you are so savvy that it won’t impact you, you are the exact kind of mark they are slowly converting (I’m looking at you, centrist pundits).
It’s really funny how a generation will roll its eyes at parents who watch Fox News but doesn’t see why being immersed in Twitter is having the same effect. Lots of serious people show up on Fox News too but that shouldn’t be your primary source on the news.
November 27, 2025 at 10:05 AM
Reposted by Charlotte Canning
Here is your annual #Thanksgiving reminder that "Over the River and Through the Wood" was written by Lydia Maria Child, a fierce abolitionist who waged a lifelong struggle for racial justice in the US. She loved her country; she recognized its faults; she fought to fix it. 🙏 🙏for her example!
November 27, 2025 at 11:46 AM
Reposted by Charlotte Canning
1/5 It was entirely predictable that The Telegraph would jump on @DavidOlusoga’s Empire series to fight its right wing culture war for control of our public history. Let’s see what they’ve done:
November 27, 2025 at 8:28 AM
Reposted by Charlotte Canning
I wrote back in Sept in @washingtonpost.com that the Trump administration was turning our nation’s capital into a tinderbox - even baiting armed violence.

It is tragic that we are here today, with two families missing loved ones who are fighting for their lives.
November 27, 2025 at 12:27 PM
Reposted by Charlotte Canning
As I saw the right wing media machine go i to action yesterday, facts actually matter.

That said, the question nobody is asking but should, how did the shooter get his guns? What can we do as a country to make gun violence less likely?
November 27, 2025 at 12:28 PM
Reposted by Charlotte Canning
The logic here is so transparent: "Farmers are dumb enough to vote Trump in and support him even while his tariffs decimate their livelihood, so clearly we don't have to consider them sentient beings."
USDA quietly said Friday it will, after a century, end the Farm Labor Survey (FLS), the only wage survey of ag employers.

FLS is a critical input to setting local minimum wages for H-2A visa workers to try to avoid harm to U.S. workers' wages.
#LaborDay #EconSky
www.nass.usda.gov/Newsroom/Not...
November 27, 2025 at 12:54 PM
Reposted by Charlotte Canning
If you don't approve of attempts to sanitize history on the US's 250th birthday but want to learn more about the founding era, the state of the field continues to innovate & there are new books coming out like John's on Washington, mine on migration & @gauthamrao.bsky.social's on policing slavery.
My book about how Americans have remembered, forgotten, and manipulated the history of George Washington and slavery over the past 250 years comes out in April. And Titus Kaphar’s art makes it the one of the coolest covers you’ll see next year. uncpress.org/978146969352...
November 27, 2025 at 11:23 AM
Reposted by Charlotte Canning
I feel much safer today knowing that we deported a Babson College student back to a country where she hasn't lived since childhood.

She wasn't even flying internationally. She was flying to Texas.
A Babson College student wanted to surprise her family for Thanksgiving. She was deported instead. - The Boston Globe
Any Lucia Lopez Belloza was at Logan to catch a flight to Texas when immigration authorities detained her as she was about to board the plane.
www.bostonglobe.com
November 27, 2025 at 10:47 AM
Reposted by Charlotte Canning
@bachynski.bsky.social says that vaccines are like an athlete’s training regimen. All they do is get your body in shape to play the game (fight infection) on its own.
💉 One thing I rarely see explained is how vaccination *is* "natural immunity".

The immunity is developed by your body not the vaccine. The vaccine itself doesn’t do the work.

I think the confusion partly comes from a phrase scientists use. 🧵⬇️

1/n
RFK Jr.’s new CDC deputy director prefers “natural immunity” over vaccines
Ralph Abraham is “dangerous,” but somehow not the worst among those considered.
arstechnica.com
November 27, 2025 at 1:04 PM
Reposted by Charlotte Canning
Public man-made death: The dismantling of USAID “has already caused the deaths of six hundred thousand people, two-thirds of them children.”

That’s 1000+ excess dead children every day. Every day.

hsph.harvard.edu/news/usaid-s...
USAID shutdown has led to hundreds of thousands of deaths | Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health
The Trump administration’s decision to shut down the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) has resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths from infectious diseases and malnutrition, accord...
hsph.harvard.edu
November 27, 2025 at 12:44 PM
Reposted by Charlotte Canning
In honor of the holiday, I am reposting my op-ed on the history of Thanksgiving from the LA Times. (Spoiler: it ends badly for the Wampanoags.)

www.latimes.com/archives/la-...
Which Thanksgiving?
When Americans sit down to our annual Thanksgiving meal with family and friends, we like to imagine that we are reenacting a scene that first took place in 1621.
www.latimes.com
November 27, 2025 at 1:08 PM
Reposted by Charlotte Canning
In today’s post Miranda Jimmy explores Indigenous data sovereignty in archives.

This post is part of our Telling Truths about the Settler Colonial Project Series. Make sure to check it out!
Respecting Data Sovereignty Starts With the Stories We Tell About the Past
As I reflect further on archives and western approaches to historical research, it is clear that institutions of colonial memory are consistently used against Indigenous Peoples as a weapon. This u…
activehistory.ca
November 27, 2025 at 1:27 PM
Reposted by Charlotte Canning
No idea why an Afghan refugee shot National Guard soldiers within walking distance of the White House, but this new USCIS directive was revealed on Monday. Worth noting.
The folks at @afghanevac.bsky.social have in hand a new USCIS directive which largely targets Afghan refugees who fled the Taliban in the wake of the U.S. withdrawal in 2021.

In case you needed a reminder that the most loathsome people in the world work for DHS.
November 27, 2025 at 5:19 AM