iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Chris Riedel @medievalhistory.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Ugh. Lost all the grading I did on the plane. Apps that don't work well offline are a scourge.

Chris Riedel @medievalhistory.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

She-Hulk was a great show (barring an off-the-rails finale, but that's par for the course with super hero fiction), and it sucks that it got canceled.

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Chris Riedel @medievalhistory.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

So part of why I wanted to teach this new class, "The Many Falls of Rome" was I wanted to actually cover the dissolution in detail. But even I had to do some handwaving between the murder of Aetius in 454 and the deposition of Romulus Augustulus in 476.

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Chris Riedel @medievalhistory.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

Ever find yourself inexplicably in a terrible mood? Ugh.

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Chris Riedel @medievalhistory.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

You want to know why Trump wasn't punished? Because W wasn't punished. Because Reagan wasn't punished. Because Nixon wasn't punished. We've let presidents get away with flagrant crimes for decades. It's not an exception anymore, it's the norm. We pretend like it never even f*cking happened.

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Chris Riedel @medievalhistory.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

I was just eighteen & in my senior year of HS on 9/11. DC was in chaos. Couldn't get a call out to either parent, both of whom worked by the White House. Found out a couple of days later I had a friend on AA77. The smoking crater in the Pentagon was so surreal, even after going to see it in person.

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Chris Riedel @medievalhistory.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

Media should be required by law to headline retractions of news that turned out to be false.

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Chris Riedel @medievalhistory.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

People who say 9/11 was an inside job would rather there be an all-powerful state that wants to kill us than there not be an all-powerful state that can't protect us. But as someone who knows the guy who told W to never use the word "Crusade" again that day, trust me, the man was clueless.

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Chris Riedel @medievalhistory.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

It always weirds me out how unproblematically people just refer to the Church as "Catholic" in the first millennium (especially the first half). You could just as reasonably call it "Orthodox," but imagine how upset that would make people, and yet the implications in reverse are much the same.

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Chris Riedel @medievalhistory.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

Honestly if I could only play three computer games ever again, they'd all be pre-2000: Alpha Centauri, Secret of Monkey Island, Half-Life

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Chris Riedel @medievalhistory.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

30 hours into this power outage; always makes me appreciate how dark things got in the premodern world on a much more visceral level. But I'm really glad my partner got super into candles last winter and I bought in bulk from IKEA 😆

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Leonie V. Hicks @lvhicks.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

Yesterday @artefactual.eurosky.social asked 'Who were the Normans?' particularly with regard to the norsemen myths taught in primary school. So here's a thread to address this question. First off 'Norman' = North man, i.e. man from the North 1/

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Chris Riedel @medievalhistory.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

I requisitioned a spare monitor at the office to have a double setup and now working at home is an agony. Truly, luxury corrupts the soul.

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Chris Riedel @medievalhistory.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

The media keeps misrepresenting this cycle as "against the establishment" or "young against old" and refusing to acknowledge that it's just straight up that the Dems are moving back to the left that the Clintons abandoned thirty-five years ago.

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Chris Riedel @medievalhistory.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

Do you ever to refuse to acknowledge you're sick because you don't have time? I don't, I Just have allergies.

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Chris Riedel @medievalhistory.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

The thing is, if Trump can tear down anything he wants and build whatever he wants, so can his successors - which means that ballroom has a very short shelf life.

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Chris Riedel @medievalhistory.bsky.social · 31/08/2026

"Neither sea nor intervening continents are bars to citizenship, nor are Asia & Europe divided in their treatment here... all paths are open to all. No one worthy of rule or trust remains an alien, but a civil community of the World has been established as a Free Republic..." - Aristides on Rome

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Chris Riedel @medievalhistory.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

So we had a six-hour chairs' "workshop" last week, but sure, let's schedule the first chair's meeting of the semester this week.

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derek guy @dieworkwear.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

I appreciate that Dolly Parton refused to participate in "dress respectability" and, by her own account, modeled her aesthetic after a town "tramp," who she thought was beautiful. She separated aesthetics from character and understood "classiness" to be about how you treat people, not how you dress.

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Chris Riedel @medievalhistory.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

Dolly was a liberal champion who's music was so good even bigots liked her. She was NOT neutral.

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Chris Riedel @medievalhistory.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

Well, there goes the last person everybody in America loved.

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Chris Riedel @medievalhistory.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

I suppose what I am most nervous about for this class is that I am trying to teach students how to not read the whole book, when I in fact am compelled to read the whole book.

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Jacob @iacobuscaesar.bsky.social · 23/08/2026

Me and who? (The Chinese culture heroes and mythical civilizational founders Fu Xi and Nü Wa depicted on a silk hanging scroll from the Tang Dynasty (618-907 AD) with the bodies of snakes wrapped around each other, symbolizing their union.)

A Tang Dynasty silk hanging scroll found in Xinjiang showing the Chinese culture heroes, lovers, and siblings Fu Xi and Nü Wa with serpentine bodies below the waist, wrapped around each other like mating snakes.

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Chris Riedel @medievalhistory.bsky.social · 22/08/2026

In a two-party state, both parties cannot be the center. The mistake the Clintons made in occupying the center forced the GOP further right. Dems compounded the problem by chasing "the center" further right for decades. We need a true left to drag the whole political spectrum back into sanity.

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Sam (ABeardedPanda) @abeardedpanda.bsky.social · 22/08/2026

I think a lot of people don't really understand that the reports of Russian forces looting museums in occupied Ukraine (particularly Kherson prior to liberation) were not just "soldiers being soldiers" but rather an extremely intentional occupation policy meant to steal cultural heritage

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Adam 👻Boo!rsi👻 @adambursi.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

For those starting a new semester teaching on Islamic history, Jewish-Christian-Muslim relations, Intro to Religion etc.: Here is a handout I made awhile ago with early Sunnī and Shīʿī ḥadīth on prayer in Jewish/Christian buildings. Useful for class discussions www.academia.edu/50857162/Ear...

academia.edu

Early Islamic Sources on Prayer within Jewish and Christian Buildings

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Carin Ruff @carinr.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

A great teaching resource! Maps (at least the ones I've checked) are licensed CC BY-NC 4.0. #medievalsky Here's a live link: archives.trin.cam.ac.uk/index.php/ma...

archives.trin.cam.ac.uk

Maps of Anglo-Saxon England - archives.trin.cam.ac.uk

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Word_Geek @word-geek.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

#EarlyMedieval I know I follow more historians than follow me, but omg this would be so cool @bernadettebanner.bsky.social do you know who works in this period?

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jamelle @jamellebouie.net · 19/08/2026

this doesn't apply to the quoted piece, but most people who say "teach the bible" mean "give my children sectarian religious instruction" not "teach my children the literary and rhetorical importance of the biblical text"

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Ada Palmer @adapalmer.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

In the Renaissance people theorized, since the Aeneid is great, if you wrote poems made only of words & phrases from the Aeneid rearranged they should be great too, since a great source regurgitated should yield greatness. They produced NOTHING we still read. Thinking about that a lot lately.

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Prof Katherine Schofield 🇬🇧🇦🇺🇪🇺 @katherineschof8.bsky.social · 16/08/2026

For the record, the proportion of professors at Cambridge who are Black is 0.4%. The number of Black people in the UK population is 4%. So the number of Black professors at Cambridge is ONE TENTH of what you would expect in a meritocracy.

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Chris Riedel @medievalhistory.bsky.social · 14/08/2026

A non-history colleague told me about a game where you try to name one individual who lived in each century as far back as you could go. He said he and most people he knew could go back about 3-4 centuries. I went back to the 500s BCE on the spot. I felt bad I could reach the Bronze Age.

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Chris Riedel @medievalhistory.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

This is a valuable point, but as with most deep-past historical topics, I imagine you would find that there has always been a tension in academic institutions between whatever the then-current standard of intellectual rigor was and getting elites on board so as to pay the bills.

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Chris Riedel @medievalhistory.bsky.social · 10/08/2026

The thing about being a generalist history teacher covering a huge timespan is that whenever you do a deep dive into something you realized some generalization you've been telling students for years (that you didn't even think of as such) is contradicted by examples you had no idea even existed

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Huw TD @huwtd.bsky.social · 09/08/2026

I have an hour's delay at the train station, so here's a thread about the Trojan Horse. Basically, the plot motif of sneaking into the city disguised as tribute isn't original to Homer, although the use of a horse statue might be. 1/

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Chris Riedel @medievalhistory.bsky.social · 09/08/2026

Semester-about-to-start DIYs: A fence for my neighbor to match with mine (final trim work to come). A buried irrigated pipe from my garage downspout that was washing out my other neighbor's garden. Some IKEA corner bookcases hacked with real feet because I don't trust MDF on my basement floor.

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Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg @theradr.bsky.social · 09/08/2026

Frederick Douglass, 1857: Those who profess to favor freedom yet deprecate agitation want crops without plowing the ground; they want rain without thunder + lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its waters. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.

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Chris Riedel @medievalhistory.bsky.social · 08/08/2026

If Republicans really believe in small government and hate Communism then Red states should pledge to not accept more federal money than they pay in taxes. Of course, that would crash the economies of 9 out of 10 Red states.

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Chris Riedel @medievalhistory.bsky.social · 06/08/2026

I know we're all struggling in academia, but I'm upending my assignment structure in hopes of avoiding AI trouble yet again, & it's giving me such anxiety as I work on these syllabi. Going to try some radically different things like oral exams & writing a paper together as a class.

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Chris Riedel @medievalhistory.bsky.social · 05/08/2026

Millennials love to complain about sequels and retreading old IP, which is surprising from the generation that made "meme" an everyday word. Personally this geriatric millennial loves some remakes and reboots, but just like original content, he'd like them to be good.

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Chris Riedel @medievalhistory.bsky.social · 05/08/2026

However the final voting goes, this is a problem for Michigan Dems. Whoever wins needs to command a bigger chunk of the Democratic base than this. I remain hopeful that Abdul can pull this off, but I'm more nervous now than I was.

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Alex Harvey @alexharvv.bsky.social · 05/08/2026

A (belated) cfp for #IMC2027 FORGET THE VIKINGS: Other raids, raiders, & raiding practises of the Early Medieval Period Read below for details, and if you're interested (or know anyone who might be), please submit your proposal of 150 words to the attached e-mail (also in alt text) before 1/9/26

A Call-for-papers for IMC 2027 which reads:

'Forget the Vikings!
CFP: Other raids, raiders, and raiding practises of the Early Medieval Period

There are good reasons why Scandinavian raiders - or ‘Vikings’ - occupy a much-coveted space in popular perceptions of early medieval warfare. But enough about them. What about everyone else?
This CFP is seeking submissions from scholars interested in exploring other, non-Viking raiding groups from c. 400 - 1100. This could include (but is not limited to): Avars, Huns, Hungarians, Slavs, Frisians, Saxon and Frankish pirates, Saracens, Welsh and Irish cattle-rustlers, Balts, Oesellians, Narentanians, Dál Riatans, as well as the military activities of major hegemonies such as the Carolingians, Ottonians, West Saxons, Byzantines, even Normans, and so on.
Chiefly, this is to fashion some new notions of how identity, political practice, and belonging were fostered within raiding communities. Of particular interest would be any papers keen to explore how other, non-Viking groups used raiding as part of regular military affairs. Analogies and comparisons with Viking studies are also welcome, if they are used to shine a light on lesser-known groups. Like the Vikings, many other communities engaged in more than just raiding, so explorations of trade, exchange, and other political dynamics alongside raids, would be ideal.

Please send proposals (150 words or less) to:
alexharvv@gmail.com before 1/9/26'

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Chris Riedel @medievalhistory.bsky.social · 04/08/2026

So much for valuing a classical "Western" education.

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Paul Renfro @renfro.bsky.social · 04/08/2026

This is the tragic yet logical result of a decades-long project—undertaken by rightwing politicians and “business-minded” administrators alike—to distort the meaning of higher education, to deny the intrinsic value of the pursuit of knowledge, to deprive us all of richer, more purposeful lives.

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