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Cory James Young

@coryjamesyoung.bsky.social
3.1K followers 972 following 652 posts

assistant professor of history at UIowa | personal account | northern slavery, legal history, Black America | i ♥️ WNY

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Reposted by Cory James Young
Laprofmme @laprofmme.bsky.social · 4h
What a day to be writing about 18th and 19th century views on public executions. Needless to say, 250 years ago, the same European thinkers that conservatives want us to read more of thought it was an archaic, barbaric, tyrannical practice that brutalized its spectators as much as its victims.
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Prof. Nicole Holliday @mixedlinguist.bsky.social · 4h
He was convicted of a horrible crime, but this is still a public spectacle lynching. It is racist, and it is deeply corrosive to the souls of every person who person who witnesses it. But it follows in a long American tradition. eji.org/news/history...
eji.org
Public Spectacle Lynchings
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Drew Harwell @drewharwell.com · 4h
The last public execution in America was in 1936. A young black man in Kentucky was hanged by a drunk executioner; a news story said "They Ate Hotdogs While a Man Died." Was such an embarrassment that the governor outlawed it 18 months later www.washingtonpost.com/politics/202...
washingtonpost.com
Fort Hood shooter’s execution will be live-streamed, Defense Dept. says
“We’ll make sure that people are able to watch it,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said Thursday about the firing squad execution of convicted Fort Hood shooter Nidal Malik Hasan.
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Cory James Young @coryjamesyoung.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
I wrote this piece for the Iowa Attorney magazine about the contested meanings of the state's only documented sale of an enslaved person. The long and short of it is that the answer to "was this slavery?" depends on the politics of the present.
iowabar.org
The historical memory of slavery and the meaning of America 250 in Iowa
Third in an ongoing series celebrating the United States' 250th annive
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eric gonzalez juenke @egojunk.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
This remains one of the students’ favorite exercises nearly 6 years later. We do it live in class. They are shocked that some republicans want organic food and some dems drink bud light. www.nytimes.com/interactive/...
nytimes.com
Quiz: Can You Tell a ‘Trump’ Fridge From a ‘Biden’ Fridge? (Published 2020)
What the contents of our refrigerators say about our politics — and our assumptions.
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Cory James Young @coryjamesyoung.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
"Drive By" and "50 Ways to Say Goodbye" are the same song sonically and I cannot handle it that they are on the same album.
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Cory James Young @coryjamesyoung.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
New JAH article by Noah Ramage about 19c Cherokee immigration policy. I thought of you.
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Tressie McMillan Cottom @tressiemcphd.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
Putting money on who proposes the first black-owned data center. need to start my own polymarket.
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Cory James Young @coryjamesyoung.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
This is worth your time. Henry is a wonderful colleague and a sharp critic. Buy their book, Control Science, out with Verso.
versobooks.com
Control Science
Whether on Caribbean plantations in the seven­teenth century or in Amazon warehouses today, the powerful have constantly developed new techniques to control workers—and new justifications for doing so...
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Henry Snow @henrys.now · 28/09/2026
Five months ago I was fired by the US government. Now, one of the biggest categories on the academic job market is "being right wing." I wrote about what's at stake. buttondown.com/anotherway/a...
buttondown.com
The "free speech" government fired me
"Free speech" advocates are killing free speech
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Cory James Young @coryjamesyoung.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
Well in that case the difference is DC versus rural New York, but with only 29 listings it wouldn’t be too difficult to see if there was any markup.
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Cory James Young @coryjamesyoung.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
I would love to see that analysis. Comparable nearby homes would do, right? My students were also aghast at the DC real estate prices, made all the starker by the fact that an entire inn is for sale in rural Iowa for $325K.
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Cory James Young @coryjamesyoung.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
Then the conversation turned to plantation weddings and most of my Iowa students were aghast.
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Cory James Young @coryjamesyoung.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
The conversation turned on whether or not this is actually jarring considering that 1) people are interested in knowing historical details about their homes, 2) ugrr mythology is widespread, 3) so many stories focus on real estate rather than people.
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Cory James Young @coryjamesyoung.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
For comparison, here are the 3 active Zillow sites that invoke "slavery." Two are Underground Railroad sites--so "escaping slavery"--and the third boasts "old slavery rock fencing," which is to say stone walls.
A Zillow page listing 3 properties for sale where the listings contain the keyword "slavery." The results are from Delaware, Ohio, and Tennessee.
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Cory James Young @coryjamesyoung.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
Here are the 29 active Zillow listings that invoke the Underground Railroad as part of their sales pitch. I don't entirely know what to make of this, but you'd better believe I'm going to get to the bottom of it with my class this afternoon.
A Zillow page listing 29 properties for sale where the listings contain the keywords "underground railroad." The map shows results from Massachusetts in the east to Iowa in the west.
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🎃 Imani Gandy Corn 🎃 @angryblacklady.blacksky.app · 28/09/2026
Save Women's Sports, an anti-trans organization whose entire existence is built around ferreting out trans athletes who want to run rougshod over your cisgender girl could only find 5 athletes competing K-12. Five.
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I Scare You Like Sound Dog @chadstanton.blacksky.app · 27/09/2026
If you were in camp “focus on the important things” when they were restoring Confederate monuments and base names here but can recognize the danger there you may want to interrogate some things.
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Leah McElrath @leahmcelrath.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
AP Stylebook warns against anthropomorphizing AI systems: “Avoid language that gives them human characteristics… Instead, explain what a system does, how well it performs, who built it and who could be affected by it.”
APStylebook @APStylebook
X.com
Artificial intelligence systems do not think, feel, want or understand. Avoid language that gives them human characteristics. This is called anthropomorphizing, when we ascribe human traits, emotions or behaviors to non-human things, such as animals or inanimate objects.
Instead, explain what a system does, how well it performs, who built it and who could be affected by it.
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Cory James Young @coryjamesyoung.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
Hey @joshturek4iowa.bsky.social, replying to your spam texts does nothing so I'm replying here: I will not be donating to your campaign until you apologize for your anti-trans politicking. Do better.
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Asheesh Kapur Siddique @asheeshks.org · 23/09/2026
Here's a listing of all the right-wing humanities academic jobs that have been advertised so far this 2026-2027 hiring season. Suffice to say, conservative investment in the university humanities is not being matched by the peer-reviewed humanities community: asheeshksi.substack.com/p/tracking-c...
asheeshksi.substack.com
Tracking Civic Thought Hiring in the 2026-2027 Academic Job Cycle
I wanted to put together a post that tracks how right-wing civic thought programs have rapidly been taking over the academic hiring space in the humanities, especially in fields like history (mostly A...
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Ted McCormick @tedmccormick.bsky.social · 19/09/2026
There’s more to be said about the relationship between Pinker-style stardom and the state of academia. Not because academia is Woke, but because star systems loosen rigor at the top while solid scholarship becomes a dead end lower down. Shoddy celebrities and broke PhDs proceed from the same machine
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Scott Sandage @scottsandage.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
#ThatFeelingWhen you’ve got 26 original printings of The Columbian Orator, enough to put one into the hands of each student as you begin teaching how #FrederickDouglass taught himself #HowToRead and #SpeakTruthToPower
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Cory James Young @coryjamesyoung.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
Sometimes I'll be texting on my computer and realize I need to message another person and in order to achieve that I will get out my phone. And some people wonder why so many of our students email like they text. The screen is becoming a singularity!
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David Forbes @davidforbes.bsky.social · 13/09/2026
Trans folks, especially those of us who organize, it's worth being prepared for the following: if transphobic Dems lose, the consultant class will try to scapegoat us (again). If they win (due to Republicans being wildly unpopular) they'll take it as a mandate and escalate to more anti-trans laws.
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Matt Bors @mattbors.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
It was exactly ten years ago today, on my 33rd birthday, that I posted this comic online.
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Matt Seybold @mattseybold.bsky.social · 29/08/2026
As just one example: GPTZero, one of the most popular detection services, is owned by Superhuman AI (text generation), who also owns Humanize AI (detection avoidance).
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Timothy Snyder @timothysnyder.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
Commemoration is a chance to reflect. Americans in power will try to use this anniversary to say that everything happened exactly as it had to, and that we should bow our heads rather than use them. We went along twenty-five years ago. We should not do so again. snyder.substack.com/p/helping-th...
snyder.substack.com
Helping the Terrorists to Win
A Quarter Century after 9/11
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Dael Norwood @dael.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
I am not a member of the AHA, but I agree it’s worth reading this statement, in dialogue w/ the original Chronicle piece. This section of the AHA statement seems to corroborate, not refute, one of the core criticisms. They agree the lobbying firm advised them on how to handle members’ activism.
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Cory James Young @coryjamesyoung.bsky.social · 08/09/2026
Well it's Hate Week here in Iowa City, wherein UIowa students paint hateful messages toward Iowa State students onto sheets they hang from their apartments. If only we had a Department of Gender, Women's, and Sexuality Studies to help explain the messages' frequent misogyny and homophobia.
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jamelle @jamellebouie.net · 08/09/2026
to place the sexual and reproductive exploitation of black women at the center of your understanding of american slavery is to see that the system was forced birth and this, in turn, should lead to a more expansive vision of what the 13th amendment actually guarantees.
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The City Reporter @thecityreporter.nyc · 07/09/2026
On Labor Day, Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced a new executive order to create the new Office of Worker Power, which will help workers connect with union organizers and educational resources to learn about their rights and, if they choose, to organize their workplaces.
thecityreporter.nyc
Can This Former Longshoreman Help Zohran Mamdani Unionize New York?
The newly-created Office of Worker Power is inspired by a similar effort by the Democratic Socialists of America and the United Electrical Workers that has helped thousands across the country…
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Cory James Young @coryjamesyoung.bsky.social · 05/09/2026
Dude is hitting those keys so hard.
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Cory James Young @coryjamesyoung.bsky.social · 05/09/2026
What an absolute banger. I somehow hadn’t heard this before!
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Elizabeth Drummond @eadhistory.bsky.social · 05/09/2026
"AI chatbots present a problem for the teaching of history not only because they hallucinate, nor simply because they threaten to make even conscientious students’ writing less original, but because they thwart the process that might lead students toward original interpretations in the first place."
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Cory James Young @coryjamesyoung.bsky.social · 03/09/2026
His adopted birthday gave us Black History Month and, beginning in 2019, several states and the National Park Service have recognized September as International Underground Railroad Month.
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Cory James Young @coryjamesyoung.bsky.social · 02/09/2026
I checked Jon Ganz's book on the early 90s out of the public library, read the whole thing, returned it, and then spotted a brand new copy on my office shelf.
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Spencer Ackerman @attackerman.bsky.social · 01/09/2026
Classists believe that when Odysseus returned to Ithaca and plucked the bow string it actually sounded like X Gon’ Give It To Ya by DMX
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Anna Kornbluh @annakornbluh.bsky.social · 31/08/2026
higher education is the LARGEST employer in 20 states and in 60 of the 100 top cities; when the regime attacks students and faculty it is sabotaging local economies, local restaurants, local services, local real estate.
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Adam "I Was Hoping We Could Keep It" Laats @adamlaats.bsky.social · 30/08/2026
Classic Trump own goal. Now by definition "America" is not "Superior."
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LunchCounterPunch @theultrasecret.bsky.social · 29/08/2026
Every once in a while a normal human being sneaks into a position of power, and not only is it refreshing, it is downright revolutionary.
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Asheesh Kapur Siddique @asheeshks.org · 27/08/2026
The Right has an abundance, pro-investment strategy for the future of the humanities in American higher education. The Left has no strategy. That is the difference, and that will be the future unless there's a real strategic and institutional shift. cfau.aei.org/thoughts-on-...
cfau.aei.org
Thoughts on the Hopkins Strategy - The Future of American University
By Benjamin Storey and Jenna Silber StoreyAugust 26, 2026 The Chronicle of Higher Education just published an interview with Johns Hopkins President Ronald Daniels. It highlights among other things th...
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Cory James Young @coryjamesyoung.bsky.social · 27/08/2026
I shouldn't have to say this, but the Province of Ontario is named after the Great Lake, not vice versa. Ontario is an Iroquois word meaning "Great Lake."
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Cory James Young @coryjamesyoung.bsky.social · 27/08/2026
Page Against the Machine !nk The Art Formally Known as Prints
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Cory James Young @coryjamesyoung.bsky.social · 27/08/2026
Originalism demands it be so.
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Kendra, spooky version @kendrawcandraw.bsky.social · 26/08/2026
Tim Curry and Dolly Parton have taught us not only that you should be bigger, weirder, gayer, and freakier, but also that those qualities are what people will love about you. The things that make you strange and amazing are the things that will resonate with other strange and amazing people
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Asheesh Kapur Siddique @asheeshks.org · 26/08/2026
Kind of hard for a professional organization to argue that history is integral to democracy when it goes to lengths to quash democracy within its own membership. And this isn't what I want my members dues to be used for. I suspect many will feel the same. 🗃️
If the AHA leadership continues to heed that advice, its members can expect further silencing of their voices within the organization. In addition to recommending that the AHA frame the historical profession as an arm of the “national security” apparatus, Thorn Run has told its leadership that it should reroute “all future requests for public statements,” “all member concerns regarding conflict zones,” and “all concerns regarding historians in conflict zones” to a leadership committee, so that it can contain and control “out-of-scope debates.” The aim, in other words, is to “utilize the January 2026 veto as a safe harbor precedent to prevent future mission-creep” by shifting from vetoes to a place where institutional silence ensures that there is nothing to veto.
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Victor Ray @victorerikray.bsky.social · 24/08/2026
Introducing myself to classes today by explaining that I used to be an associate professor of Sociology & African American Studies, but that the university shut down the latter department.
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Rebecca Spang @rlspang.bsky.social · 24/08/2026
Others have commented @rajakorman.bsky.social has punned, but in case you missed @dael.bsky.social @bhgreeley.bsky.social @sarahebond.bsky.social I am here to tell you: THIS OP-ED is completely, totally uninformed. It's appalling the NYT published it. Short 🧵 www.nytimes.com/2026/08/22/o...
nytimes.com
Opinion | An Ancient Sumerian Solution to Our $40 Trillion Deficit
In the ancient world, debt forgiveness was a regular tool to control the economy. Why have we forgotten it?
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