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Noah Blan

@noahwblan.bsky.social
670 followers 1.2K following 698 posts

historian. teacher. friend to all cats. anti-fascist. space dust for your fuel rods.

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Reposted by Noah Blan
Craig Calcaterra @craigcalcaterra.bsky.social · 09/10/2026
Aesthetically speaking, the entire crowd in black is probably the best postseason backdrop going.
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Noah Blan @noahwblan.bsky.social · 09/10/2026
As a White Sox fan this one half inning has already been an eternity.
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Bill Kristol @billkristolbulwark.bsky.social · 03/10/2026
White Sox win. Pope happy.
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Noah Blan @noahwblan.bsky.social · 03/10/2026
Something I’ve noticed at the last 3 shows I’ve been to is that normally when there is a really long line for merch now there is almost no line. There are a bunch of people standing around looking (not buying) and people behind the counter basically asking to help you. Low key recession indicator?
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Noah Blan @noahwblan.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
Good boy, Fox!
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Noah Blan @noahwblan.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
Things like: Is a ruler (or state) responsible for the natural world? What does power owe people when disaster strikes? Can a duty to care for the land justify control over people? Their answers reflected their worldview, but the questions haven't changed. They're about power and belonging. 2/2
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Noah Blan @noahwblan.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
I couldn’t be happier with the way the book turned out. Working w/ @archumanities.bsky.social was a joy and I’m so grateful they were able to make the book Open Access. I hope lots of folks read it and find the Carolingians’ questions about nature and power as fascinating (& relevant) as I do. 1/2
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Charles West @pseudo-isidore.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
Now available in Open Access.
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Noah Blan @noahwblan.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
After 3 years of 100+ loss seasons, my Chicago White Sox have clinched a spot in the playoffs. 🖤⚾️
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NE Ohio Regional Sewer District @neorsd.org · 19/09/2026
I interrupt your timeline to bring you a wood duck wearing a leash.
A wildlife expert stands at an event table behind a wood duck. The wood duck wears a harness and leash for security.Duck wearing a harness
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Noah Blan @noahwblan.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
Thank you!
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Noah Blan @noahwblan.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
Thank you!
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Noah Blan @noahwblan.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
Thank you!
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Noah Blan @noahwblan.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
Thank you so much!
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Noah Blan @noahwblan.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
I’m thrilled to share that my book Carolingian Ecological Sovereignty is out now with @archumanities.bsky.social ! You can order physical copies now, and the open access versions will be available sometime in early October. www.arc-humanities.org/978180270283... Keep an eye out for updates here 📚
arc-humanities.org
Carolingian Ecological Sovereignty - Arc Humanities Press
During the early Middle Ages, the ecological was political—as it is today. For the Carolingians, the governance of nature was integral to the making of emp...
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Noah Blan @noahwblan.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
Why is the Netflix NFL broadcast quality so bad? Can they not handle all the streaming? Fuzzy picture. Tinny sound. This is an atrocious product.
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Noah Blan @noahwblan.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
Just like that it’s Drew Lock time.
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Noah Blan @noahwblan.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
If you’re the next president (regardless of party), you give QatarForce One a reaaallll long look under competent scrutiny and a proper shakedown before using, right? Or maybe just…scrap the whole thing??
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Claire E. Aubin @ceaubin.com · 03/09/2026
TODAY ON @thisguysucked.com: The excellent Jamelle Bouie @jamellebouie.net tells me that George McClellan was a racist coward who deserves to have his name cursed forever. So we tried our best to do that.
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Noah Blan @noahwblan.bsky.social · 19/07/2026
god this really works for tom holland’s version
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Dr. Paula R. Curtis @paularcurtis.bsky.social · 19/07/2026
My (non-academic) friend/neighbor, slightly high, begged me to sit by the pool with her while she did her SoCal thing but I wanted to read so I ended up reading The Odyssey out loud to her and now she is 1000% IN for the journey.
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Noah Blan @noahwblan.bsky.social · 11/06/2026
🙏🏻🙏🏻
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Elise Schuenke @troubledminnesotan.bsky.social · 04/06/2026
Genuinely one of the most influential graphic novelists of all time and her passing is so heartbreaking. Please read Persepolis if you haven’t, it’s a poignant story of resistance that deserves all the love
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Noah Blan @noahwblan.bsky.social · 25/05/2026
“I’d like the ‘chipper chicken’”
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Charles West @pseudo-isidore.bsky.social · 24/05/2026
If you've already had your doom quotient for the day, I'd recommend skipping this.
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Noah Blan @noahwblan.bsky.social · 23/05/2026
Every word is true!
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Noah Blan @noahwblan.bsky.social · 23/05/2026
But my point is this: this book has everything. It really shows how and why historians do what we do. And it does it in a way that is entertaining, informative, and compelling. The book is awesome. You should read it. Even if you’re not teaching with it.
static.klipy.com
Bill Hader as Stefon: This Place Has Everything
Alt: Bill Hader as Stefon: This Place Has Everything
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Noah Blan @noahwblan.bsky.social · 23/05/2026
Now to be clear, I don’t just stop there. Oathbreakers is the spine of my online course and the students get the benefit of my specialized knowledge to fill in gaps. My students still work on primary sources in longer form and collaborate to make sense of them and craft arguments with them.
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Noah Blan @noahwblan.bsky.social · 23/05/2026
Spoiler: It’s because many modern ideas about the past were shaped by assumptions, biases, and political agendas that still influence how history is understood today. In OB this discussion is not just tacked on but is really skillfully written throughout the book in ways that make this super clear.
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Noah Blan @noahwblan.bsky.social · 23/05/2026
This is the study of how history is written, interpreted, and debated over time. It matters but often not in ways that are immediately relevant to students. Why should we care how 19th-century Europeans (living in an era of European imperial dominance) thought about the empire we are learning about?
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Noah Blan @noahwblan.bsky.social · 23/05/2026
If that was as far as the usefulness of OB for teaching went it would already make it highly valuable. One of the hardest things to get at with students in the history lab (as the brilliant @adapalmer.bsky.social labels it—ps do yourself a favor and read Inventing the Renaissance) is historiography.
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Noah Blan @noahwblan.bsky.social · 23/05/2026
But they don’t stop there. They guide the reader through a primary source examination, reading and contrasting the competing information to show how and why historical actors shaped their stories to fit a certain narrative. What was emphasized, altered, or just plain left out. And why.
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Noah Blan @noahwblan.bsky.social · 23/05/2026
But the book does more than that. Remember how crucial those primary source discussions are in the physical classroom? Gabriele and Perry know this. They set up each chapter to specifically highlight the actual primary sources (with examples!) from which the story derives.
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Noah Blan @noahwblan.bsky.social · 23/05/2026
In a survey you have to assume the students don’t really know anything about it but they sort of want to or they wouldn’t be here. OB tells them the narrative story of this family/the empire in bite size chunks. Students get it. They are able to answer questions when we do our chapter walkthroughs.
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Noah Blan @noahwblan.bsky.social · 23/05/2026
In a class like this I need to deliver content & set up close primary source readings and discussions. Lectures are a bust (imo) & discussions can be hard to just get started let alone sustain and really dig deep into what our historical actors tried to tell us. Here’s where the book comes in.
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Noah Blan @noahwblan.bsky.social · 23/05/2026
I am teaching my Carolingian empire survey class for the second time as an online-only, synchronous (meaning we all meet together virtually like we’re on a work call), 4-week intensive course and trying to sort of recreate the in-person classroom experience. It’s not ideal for lots of reasons.
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Noah Blan @noahwblan.bsky.social · 23/05/2026
This is a post in which I remind myself and anyone who cares why Oathbreakers (www.harpercollins.com/products/oat...) by @profgabriele.com and @lollardfish.bsky.social is so great to read but also to teach with. But let me back up a bit first to explain why I’m teaching it at all.
harpercollins.com
Oathbreakers
“Fascinating.” — The Wall Street Journal “An enlightening portrait of the medieval mindset.” — Publishers Weekly The authors of The Bright Ages return with ...
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Dr. Paula R. Curtis @paularcurtis.bsky.social · 01/05/2026
Sometimes you are ready to face the work day and sometimes you are down a rabbit hole looking at 2,000 BCE Japanese pottery that looks like Snorlax before 8AM.
Several photographs of a Jomon period piece of pottery that is tall, getting wider at the top, and around the rim is a design that looks similar to the sleepy Pokemon Snorlax.
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Noah Blan @noahwblan.bsky.social · 18/02/2026
Got my TDAP booster today. Cheers to another decade of immunity from nineteenth century diseases! 💉😷
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Dr. Paula R. Curtis @paularcurtis.bsky.social · 05/02/2026
There isn't a sigh hard enough for these dumbass headlines. Warriors were a SOCIAL GROUP, and later a legal classification. Gender was not relevant to whether one was part of a warrior group/family/etc. You might as well write: THIS JUST IN: WOMEN EXISTED! www.the-independent.com/asia/japan/b...
the-independent.com
Half of Japan’s samurai were women, groundbreaking exhibition at British Museum says
‘Samurai’ explores over a thousand years of Japanese history related to the elite warrior class
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Noah Blan @noahwblan.bsky.social · 30/01/2026
It’s a spread not a sauce but I’m obsesseddd
traderjoes.com
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Dr. Paula R. Curtis @paularcurtis.bsky.social · 30/01/2026
SAUCE CALL! Someone gifted me a yuzu ponzu sauce (!) and it got me thinking, maybe I'm not bored with food, maybe I'm just not punching it up enough with dope sauces. Do you have a sauce that's killer? Smother everything in it? A chimichurri you'd smack on a donut? Tell us us (me) your secrets! 👀
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Dr. Paula R. Curtis @paularcurtis.bsky.social · 12/01/2026
Me: Did you miss me? Him: Did you miss ME??????
A cream colored tabby with a dumb face and alien eyeballs gazing up to sneef snoof his mother. Fox is a babby.
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Dr. Paula R. Curtis @paularcurtis.bsky.social · 31/12/2025
It's that time of year! Since 2020, when we all started saying "I didn't have that on my bingo board!" I have been collecting the most brain-breaking, exasperating, and otherwise unexpected news throughout the year. But this year felt kind of special, didn't it? Who could keep up? This felt right.
A 49-space homemade bingo board labeled "I CAN'T EVEN. GET ME OUTTA HERE. 2025 BINGO" with a picture of the moon and a tiny rocket ship flying towards it, indicating that we are simply done with the earth after this year. Instead of actual entries on each bingo spot, all of them say "2025," because this was one fucking year, amirite? The FREE SPACE spot also says "what just happened" and one of the spots says "2025 intensifies" with other 2025s superimposed on the background to indicate the intensity of how goddamn terrible this year was to live through. Yikes on bikes, folks! Take a deep breath and send good vibes into 2026.
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Erin Grievances @erinbartram.bsky.social · 07/12/2025
One argument I used to make to my students about why it was important to learn history (and historical thinking) is that someone was always going to be trying to tell you things were natural or had always been this way and that you needed to be able to see that as an exercise of power.
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Dr. Paula R. Curtis @paularcurtis.bsky.social · 26/11/2025
As course evaluations open, don't forget the importance of telling students *why* evals matter. I like to explain their use for TT faculty vs. contingent faculty and how students contribute to ed processes through them. I also explain biases, with this helpful viz: benschmidt.org/profGender/#...
A visualization of different disciplines plotted against numeric values, with blue dots representing male instructors and women representing female instructors. To the left is text: Gendered Language in Teacher Reviews
I've had trouble keeping this site up continuously during COVID. As of March 2021, I'm now trying a new strategy to cache common queries on the server even when the underlying database is down. If you find that many searches don't change the results, that's why.
This interactive chart lets you explore the words used to describe male and female teachers in about 14 million reviews from RateMyProfessor.com.

Not all words have gender splits, but a surprising number do. Even things like pronouns are used quite differently by gender.

Search term(s) (case-insensitive):
use commas to aggregate multiple terms
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The Tonearm @thetonearm.com · 09/11/2025
"He and other teachers hand-picked students who looked like they might be isolated, or might be into darker art and music — kids who might be potential metalheads. More than fifty students initially enrolled. By the end of the first semester, kids were sneaking out of other classes to join."
hcn.org
Heavy metal is healing teens on the Blackfeet Nation - High Country News
In response to youth suicides, teachers show students the power of headbanging at Fire in the Mountains festival.
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Charles West @pseudo-isidore.bsky.social · 09/11/2025
That Roman database of roads that's been in the news: treat with some caution.
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