Lauren Turek

The First Robot Movie: Watch a Newly Discovered Georges Méliès Film from 1897 Shell, The Iron Giant, WALL-E, Ex Machina: there is a parallel history of cinema to be told entirely through its robots. That such a history must begin with the work of Georges Méliès may not come as ...

The First Robot Movie: Watch a Newly Discovered Georges Méliès Film from 1897 www.openculture.com/2026/03/the-...

Country Joe McDonald, Whose Antiwar Song Became an Anthem, Dies at 84

RIP, Country Joe McDonald. Time to make popular his "Fixin'-To-Die-Rag" -- an anti-war song -- again. "Yeah, come on all of you, big strong men, Uncle Sam needs your help again. He's got himself in a terrible jam."

The article also points to the corruption of the selection process for new NEH grants.

If you took $1 billion and gave it to the endowment of a different small college each day, they could each provide a free college education to several hundred students per year in perpetuity. Instead we are using that money to bomb schools and kill students in Iran, for no clearly stated purpose.

This "Into the Stacks" feature was very fun to contribute to, in large part because it gave me a chance to highlight all of the wonderful work that @shafrhistorians.bsky.social have been doing in the past few decades to integrate religion more holistically into the study of U.S. foreign relations. 🗃️

It is so crushing and awful...

U.S. Troops Were Told Iran War Is for “Armageddon,” Return of Jesus Advocacy group reports commanders giving similar messages at more than 30 installations in every branch of the military

EXCLUSIVE: At more than 30 installations, U.S. commanders told troops the war on Iran is a Christian war.

The Military Religious Freedom Foundation has been “inundated” with more than 110 complaints.

One NCO said they were told the U.S. war is to bring about Armageddon and the return of Jesus…

Remember: Donald Trump created this crisis. He walked away from the Iran nuclear deal that was working, promising a "better deal." He didn't deliver. He escalated, abandoned real diplomacy, and has now led us into a conflict that puts us all at risk.

“How many of these gentle people have I helped to kill just by paying my taxes?" June Jordan, 1984

My god no! It was mass slaughter! In 1915, the US government counted the largest ever horse population in the US at > 21 million, which started to drop in the 1920s until the population hit 3 million in 1960 when the count ended. Horses live for 25, 30 years. This was not natural decline.

They beat a blind refugee who speaks no English for failing to obey police commands he could not understand. Then instead of apologizing, they charged him with possession of a “weapon”—HIS WALKING STICK. Then they dumped him miles from home without notifying anyone, after which he was found dead.

The UT System's New 'Controversial Topics' Policy Is About Policing Knowledge When politically appointed regents and administrators determine which topics are “germane,” academic freedom quietly shifts into political compliance.

From Dr. María Del Carmen Unda—"When faculty are told to avoid “controversial” material not explicitly listed in a syllabus, who decides what qualifies?" UT System’s New ‘Controversial Topics’ Policy Is About Policing Knowledge @texasobserver.org

The Long Shadow of Dos Erres Washington, D.C., February 24, 2026 - After a decade-long investigation and a trial lasting more than five weeks, a federal court in Ottawa has ruled to revoke the Canadian citizenship of a Guatemalan...

From the @nsarchive.bsky.social today, primary documents and court records related to the recent federal court ruling in Ottawa that "revoke[d] the Canadian citizenship of a Guatemalan military officer who participated in a horrific and notorious massacre of hundreds of innocent civilians in 1982."

We need universities to stop putting the burden of preventing students from cheating using AI tools on the professor. It's not working.

Ceding critical thought to AI is not inevitable, it's a choice.

An ICE agent shot and killed Ruben Ray Martinez, a US citizen and San Antonio resident, in March 2025. Then ICE and the Texas Department of Public Safety covered it up. He was 23 years old. I am calling for a full investigation into this shooting, including why there was an 8-month cover up.

Mia Valentina Paz Faria A 7-year-old from Venezuela who was living in Austin, Texas Detained for 70 days “I don’t want to be in this place I want to go to my school.”

UPDATE: Staff at the ICE concentration camp in Dilley, Texas have begun raiding the dormitories of kids and their parents to confiscate and destroy letters from the children. This is in response to the ace reporting by @micarosenberg et al for ProPublica:

“I don’t want to be in this place I want to go to my school.”

- 7 year old imprisoned by ICE for 70 days in a concentration camp in Texas.

Today, after @propublica.org published this story, the camp was raided to confiscate letters from the children.

www.propublica.org/article/ice-...

The silicon microprocessor computer chip, the backbone of modern life, is about to leave the consumer marketplace. We are not prepared for the end of personal computing.

If you are wondering what words the all-male Congress found so "blasphemous" that they felt compelled to literally scrape them off the monument, they were: ''Woman, first denied a soul, then called mindless, now arisen, declared herself an entity to be reckoned.''

I forgot who said it, but “genocide by rug pull” really is an apt phrase for this outcome.

Multiple analyses have shown that the USAID cuts have already cost literally hundreds of thousands of lives. The WH is using those funds for the security of one of the more noxious members of a presidential administration that includes Stephen Miller.

But hey, pro life.

Douglass Day Cake

Transcription in process

Door with Douglass Day flyer

Douglass Day Celebration playlist

Happy Douglass Day! It was a great time participating in the national transcribe-a-thon with a bunch of my students at the Trinity #Douglassday events. Loved the @douglassday.bsky.social playlist and seeing the amazing cake from a local baker!

I'm stunned and disappointed to see the shuttering of yet another piece of public religious studies scholarship. #acrel #amrel #aarsbl #sblaar

An LLM also cannot tell you WHY something matters unless a human already wrote that in something it was trained on. History isn’t just a dry recitation of facts, it’s a process of making meaning of the past and how it interacts with our present day understandings, neither of which an LLM can do.

Right, another key thing that historians do is working with important records that have not been digitized.

And the vast majority of the world’s records *have not been digitized* and thus do not exist in any format that LLMs/AI can work with.

This is the second account - the first being in Chicago - of DHS agents mass detaining people and then *sorting them by race*.

This thread is searing and essential reading:

Opinion | We Have to Look Right in the Face of What We Have Become

From @jamellebouie.net, on the historical context of the 1871 Klan hearings (w/ref to Kidada Williams' work) and federal investigations of internment camps, and the need for "public investigation and testimony" & "recompense and repair" for victims of ICE/DHS terror (alongside legal accountability).

Interested in learning more about how curators are bringing the history of Indigenous peoples to the public?

Historians Amanda Cobb-Greetham and Scott Manning Stevens interview curators Kathleen Ash-Milby, Jordan Poorman Cocker, and Patricia Marroquin Norby on Indigenous history in museums

What can you do with a history degree?

i think about this every day and the more history i learn, the truer it becomes