Brenden W. Rensink 📚🏃‍♂️⛰

Saw them in a tiny venue last year up in SLC. They sounded great live - something that harmonies-reliant bands don't always accomplish.

Histories of Native American Treaties and Anti-Chinese Violence Win Bancroft Prize

WOW! Congrats to @bethlewwilliams.bsky.social and Emilie Connolly!!! Sharing the Bancroft Prize for their books on anti-Chinese immigration and Native American treaty histories.

www.nytimes.com/2026/03/12/a...

Tune in for the live stream of today's lecture at the Redd Center!

This

My PhD comps: Written, closed book/notes, list of ~200 books, split into 4 exams.

N. American West -6 hr
General US - 4 hr
Mexico/Borderlands -2 hr
Nazi Germany/Holocaust -2 hr

They were spaced out over a couple weeks. Wrote about 20k words / 70 pages, it looks like.

Almost 20 years ago. 😮

Besides my book? ;)

Is there a region or time frame you're wanting to focus on or just broad and general any/all borderlands?

You cannot really run a university like a business because our most valuable product is failure.

Wonderful seeing these developments with the Little Shell Tribe. Working with the Native American Rights Fund on their federal recognition efforts back in the late-2010s is still one of the most humbling professional activities I've been fortunate to undertake.

Help me help you (by you applying and me hopefully giving you money!!!). If you are working on the Intermountain regions of the American West, I'd like to hear about it! Apply and please share and help us spread the word!

This one made me wish I had explored outdoors during my decade on the Great Plains.

So much constitutionality. So much respect for founding principles. So much law and order. So much integrity and consistency of core beliefs and policy positions. No hypocrisy, opportunism, or corruption whatsoever. 🤦‍♂️

We knew our seats for Yo-Yo Ma at BYU but we didn’t realize we’d be sitting right behind him with the whole place staring at us. 😮 As a cellist, Julianne is obviously a fan. She saw him once in the 2000s & we saw him with GOAT Rodeo a few years ago in SLC (amazing!). This solo show should be great.

"LLMs break our ability to conclude when there is proof of effort. We make high schoolers write essays and do math assignments not because we care about essay or because we don’t know the problem set answers, but because the effort trains them in a certain way."

Apropos...

I was scrolling through FB conversations with Ardis and came across this exchange from last fall when I alerted her to a nice shout-out in Jonathan Stapley's Holiness to the Lord book. See, acknowledging people isn't that hard to do.

Yup. People are less likely to (intentionally or unintentionally) fail to acknowledge or steal from an un-credentialed woman than a man with a PhD, especially if he has an institutional affiliation that carries weight. It's making me grind my teeth just thinking about it.

Whatever the cause, it truly angers me. It costs historians nothing, other than unearned ego, to highlight whose shoulders we stand on. We must excise this practice from our fields. Any I've forgotten to thank was due to stupidity/oversight, not pride, but I still apologize. I vow to do better. 4/4

Jane Hafen & I texted about this yesterday, wondering about the cause. Is it casual disrespect because Ardis didn't have a Ph.D.? Is there a "we're all laboring together for the Kingdom" view among LDS writers that results in so much plagiarism & failure to acknowledge the Ardises among us?

3/4

...& the sad reality of how regularly those researchers failed to acknowledge her crucial contributions. A pox on the ungrateful or selfish & head shake at the carelessly forgetful. Researchers like Ardis (& archivists & librarians) often make or break historians' work. Never forget that.

2/4

In Memory of Ardis Parshall - By Common Consent, aMormon Blog This morning I opened Facebook and, to my surprise and enormous sadness, learned that Ardis Parshall had passed away.

Among the many tributes to patron saint of Mormon archival digging & public historian extraordinaire, Ardis Parshall (@keepapitchinin.bsky.social), I'm glad @smbrnsn.bsky.social highlighted her endless generosity in feeding obscure archival finds to others... 1/4

bycommonconsent.com/2026/02/23/i...

Indians on the Move In 1972, the Bureau of Indian Affairs terminated its twenty-year-old Voluntary Relocation Program, which encouraged the mass migration of roughly 100,000 Nat...

uncpress.org/978146965138...

Thanks to Doug Miller for zooming in to class for Q&A on his book, "Indians on the Move: Native American Mobility and Urbanization in the 20th Century" (@uncpress.bsky.social, 2019). I can't recommend it highly enough. It worked perfectly w/ class themes & students REALLY connected w/ it (& him)!

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.

US citizens urged to shelter in place amid unrest in Puerto Vallarta U.S. citizens are being urged to shelter in place amid unrest in Puerto Vallarta.

My octogenarian parents picked quite the weekend for their first trip to Puerto Vallarta.

www.sfgate.com/travel/artic...

Flipped on the USA Canada mens gold medal match in overtime to see USA end it 30 seconds later. Last time that happened, my best friend’s mom went into labor with him!

So cool

Ben Abbott: Faith and the Fight to Save the Great Salt Lake Podcast Episode · Holy Earth · February 10 · 1h 4m

BYU ecology prof Ben Abbott @thermokarst.bsky.social on why people of faith (Latter-day Saints especially) should be serious about environmental stewardship: we can’t care for God’s children—especially the poor & vulnerable—without caring for the earth.

podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/h...

Happy 150 to Constantin Brâncuşi. La mulţi ani!

The amount of casual racism, bigotry, classism, prejudice, and general ugliness one overhears while sitting on ski lifts is shocking and depressing.

If you didn't already have enough reasons to not trust ChatGPT or other AI chatbots for recommendations, advice, or general information. These systems are so easy to manipulate by just about anyone on the internet.

Exciting developments this AM:

1. A LEGITIMATE SNOW STORM!!!

2. @cetracey.bsky.social’s new @wwnorton.com book “Salt Lakes: An Unnatural History” arrived in the mail!

(Tracey worked on it as visiting fellow 2 years ago here at the @byureddcenter.bsky.social)

Woot woot!!! amzn.to/3ZIVaf0