iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

#Publichistory friends, what documentaries or YouTube channels so your students enjoy? I am stuck on alternating The Last Conquistador with The Myth of Pruitt-Igoe. Both are great but I want to mix it up. #AcademicSky #HistorySky #Museums #HistoricPreservation

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Yay my university president invited us all to a wellness seminar! "This workshop will help us better understand those reactions and explore practical tools for moving through change with greater intention, agency, and adaptability." #AcademicSky #Skystorians

Meme. Robin says "My workload is unmanageable," Batman slaps him saying "Here's a wellbeing seminar."

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A popular (among conservatives) suggestion in the comments was that Trump double down on mass deportations until the elections. Like ICE is so beloved.

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Larry Cebula @larrycebula.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Yeah the striking thing about the conservative freakout here was not just the (delicious) panic but the lack of any ideas what to do about it. End the war in some magical fashion and put historically unpopular Trump on the stump? They are stuck in such a closed information loop.

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And my point is that that claim had already been ruled out by historians a couple of decades ago. History can prove things just as the STEM fields do and this is one of them.

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Larry Cebula @larrycebula.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

The article that I just shared saying that I had just finished listening to it? Yeah I did. There is a real scientific breakthrough here, but historically this is a nothing burger. We already knew, beyond any shadow of doubt, that Thomas Jefferson was the father of Sally Hemings children.

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The timing here is exquisite. You love to see it.

I was looking at Senate polls the other day and there are lot of traditionally red states with races where no reliable polling has been done. Hoping for a pleasant surprise from one or two of those on election night.

Annette Gordon-Reed @agordonreed.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

Reposted by Larry Cebula

1) Thank you, Karin. I’m happy that both the 1998 and 2026 DNA tests results jibe with the historical evidence compiled in my first book. I also think the historical information alone should be enough. But I know the world we live in & why DNA was brought into the picture.

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Absolutely. One with Smithsonian, Harvard or Yale as part of his name. There's also the bias for STEM fields over the humanities in play here. To some, historical evidence is never really "proof" in the way that scientific evidence is. Nothing is proven until proven by science.

Yeah, the crowd denying this consisted of a handful of white Jefferson descendants and five weirdos on Twitter. This is not path-breaking new research, it is simply confirming what we already knew through historical analysis.

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There are a bunch of red flags in this interview.

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New DNA analysis adds evidence Jefferson fathered children with Sally Hemings

You are very gracious. I do wish that Kurin were not going around presenting himself as having solved some mystery that historians were incapable of unraveling. I found his interview on NPR this morning infuriating. www.npr.org/2026/09/22/n...

npr.org

A lock of hair, 15 years of sleuthing and a 200-year-old question. In History by a Hair, Smithsonian Institution scholar Richard Kurin follows the DNA trail back to Thomas Jefferson.

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Here's an important piece reminding us that this Jefferson DNA guy has not solved a historical mystery, no matter how many times he keeps saying so. Historians had solved this decades ago. But now a white man using science has confirmed the conclusions of a Black woman historian so please clap?

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I'm listening to Richard Kurin on NPR right now and he's presenting this as some great historical mystery he's solved and it's infuriating.

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Muppets: Kermit the Frog and Fozzie Bear Driving

Public historians, who has developed a driving tour on an app w/ location specific narration? "Now on our left we see Mount Rushmore [story]..." I used a commercial one in the Canadian Rockies a few years ago and it was slick. Is there a platform for building one? #publichistory #digitalhumanities

static.klipy.com

Alt: Muppets: Kermit the Frog and Fozzie Bear Driving

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It's rainy and cool in Providence today, I'm sitting on my VRBO boat lodging and grazing on Trader Joe's items and working. I'm staying and extra day for a far lower airline rate but wish I was home right now.

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A simple chili with canned beans and diced tomatoes and ground beef and one of those chili seasoning packets is pretty tasty, and something you can endlessly adapt. Chickpeas are a different bean animal, you might like chickpea curry.

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There was a discussion of this on @joshtpm.bsky.social 's podcast recently. He's guessing that no more than half of Senate Democrats have committed to Supreme Court reform, but seemed optimistic that we can combine persuasion and threats of primary challenges to expand that number. Eventually.

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Wait is this the famous story where some people found a secret room in a mall and lived there for a couple of years?