@zacharyschrag
Professor of History, George Mason University. Currently researching history of the Dulles Corridor Metrorail Project. Views my own. zacharyschrag.com. historyprofessor.org https://orcid.org/my-orcid?orcid=0000-0003-1420-551X
The proofs are in and the publication date is set! “Transportation and the Shape of Cities” will be available this August from @islandpress.bsky.social, an imprint of . @princetonupress.bsky.social.
press.princeton.edu/books/paperb...
Metro turns 50 this year. We look back at how DC built one of America’s most iconic train systems, the moments that defined it, and what comes next.
Any non-profit environmentalist groups want tp hire a historian of animal agriculture for policy analysis? My specialty is the politics of meat eating and he environmental consequences of doing so!
When you build a machine to target people based on gender, race, or any other identity, it ends up targeting Jews too.
New deposition testimony shows a DOGE staffer flagged a Holocaust documentary—about Jewish women forced into slave labor by the Nazis—for termination.
His reason is shocking.
🧵
Zachary Schrag and son, in bike helmets, on the C&O Canal towpath. Behind them, wastewater pours into the canal, a temporary measure while crews repair the Potomac Interceptor sewer.
Do anything fun during spring break, professor?
I took my son to see the sewage spill!
Honestly I need historians to be the plaintiffs in every case I cover because if they make it to discovery you just KNOW those primary sources are going public.
Exhibit A: The American Historical Association uploading video depos of the DOGE bros to YouTube.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=qkCz...
"When we held the vibe coding event, I watched a first-year graduate student make an insightful map in an hour, a map that was at least as technically sophisticated as the one I had used in my job talk a decade earlier."
Charles Soule (@charlessoule.bsky.social) also wrote Undiscovered Country, which started its run in 2019 and predicted too much about the Trump II administration. imagecomics.com/comics/relea...
This is the best thing I've read about AI. Thanks to @bigplanetcomics.bsky.social for the recommendation.
imagecomics.com/comics/serie...
Hello historian of #bicycling here; if anyone wants to hear about what happened in WWII and also during the 1970s energy crisis (when Americans turned to bicycles as alternative transportation solutions) I'm certainly available. I've written about both in _Bike Battles_.
apnews.com/article/oil-...
"No. The Dulles Corridor Metrorail Project is a transportation infrastructure project and does not directly relate to DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) efforts" From American Historical Association, exhibit 11. Spreadsheet (AR_000024) compiled by Justin Fox. He submitted the description of 1,162 grants in the NEH database to ChatGPT with the following prompt: “Does the following relate at all to DEI? Respond factually in less than 120 characters. Begin with ‘Yes.’ or ‘No.’ followed by a brief explanation. Do not use ‘this initiative’ or ‘this description’ in your response.” https://www.historians.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/248-11.pdf
Even ChatGPT didn't think my project was woke, but the grant was still cancelled. (Joke's on them: We'd already spent the money.)
Major news: A @nytimes.com story today reports on developments in our lawsuit, filed with @modernlanguage.bsky.social and @acls1919.bsky.social, opposing the illegal dismantling of the NEH.
The article covers newly released discovery in the case.
Here’s what discovery confirmed:
🧵(1/7)
On March 6, 2026, ACLS, @historians.org and filed a motion for a summary judgment in their case to restore terminated NEH grants. Discovery in this lawsuit revealed egregious and illegal actions that affect orgs and residents across the US. www.acls.org/news/acls-ah...
"Tunneling is inherently difficult: The ground is full of stuff, like gas lines and boulders, and we have no idea where most of that stuff is located until we start digging."
I wrote the first detailed history of the invention of Daylight saving in my book Keeping Watch, which was published by Viking/Penguin lo these many years ago. If you want to know the origins of this annoying tradition, it's available for Kindle and at Google books
A receipt
A fragment of a poem about vegetables
Today’s archival research has been weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable other than the random fragment of a poem about vegetables on the back of an 1819 receipt tendered to the Boston Board of Selectmen 🗃️
It would be an interesting empirical test. Try "air fryer rockfish." The Google AI overview (8–12 minutes at 375-400 until it hits an internal temperature of 145 and flakes easily) appears the same as every bloated food blog. No pizza glue.
This has implications for historical research. Of course, there's information in the clutter. But sometimes the researcher will just want the darn recipe.
3. Typical Google recipe result is a blog trying to optimize ad revenue. The entry—with the recipe hidden toward the bottom—will run around 1800 words, plus pop-ups and ads. If you tried to print it, it would take 19 pages. ChatGPT gives the same recipe in less than 250 words, plus a few emojis.
Apply to join my team by 3/16!
Be the Library of Virginia's born-digital collections coordinator, leading planning and management of electronic gov/manuscript records. We're looking for a techie archivist type who can help improve access to our born-digital wonders.
$78k-$88k in Richmond VA.
I had missed these kind words from @enghistrev.bsky.social
"The author remains in the role of the neutral facilitator, allowing the events to say what is hard to ignore . . . The questions raised by The Fires of Philadelphia seem particularly timely."
doi.org/10.1093/ehr/...
OK, this is a little niche. But if you want to cite @ggwash.org posts in your scholarship, you might like this Zotero translator, created with Claude.
historyprofessor.org/code/a-zoter...
An idiot, or a parvenu former office boy?
In between tasks I got Claude to write a Zotero translator for Perspectives in History. You can click on an article and have it appear as a magazine article with title, author, and date. 🗃️
historyprofessor.org/code/a-zoter...
"The goose-step . . . is the vision of a boot crashing down on a face. Its ugliness is part of its essence, for what it is saying is ‘Yes, I am ugly, and you daren’t laugh at me’, like the bully who makes faces at his victim."
George Orwell, "England, Your England," 1941
Two months later: Claude Sonnet 4.6 built me a plug-in for Zotero 8 to export bibliographies subdivided to reflect my Zotero file structure. It took a few rounds of debugging (i.e., pasting error messages into Claude), and I need to tinker with text styles. But it runs.
between this and the UT board approving policies shielding students form "controversial topics," a banner day for the southern snowflake coalition
I’m opposed to any plan, especially one that ignores public input, to cut off safe biking routes for Virginians.
Forcing bikes to share walkway space with pedestrians or roads with cars is dangerous, and ripping up existing biking routes to do it is nonsensical.
