Portland State U historian @catherinemcneur.bsky.social is doing a very cool series of local history posts on TikTok. Portland folks will be especially interested in them, but so might many others out there. This one is about the horseshoe courts in Laurelhurst Park.
www.tiktok.com/t/ZP8SXnEWH/
Thanks, Seth!
Check out @catherinemcneur.bsky.social's review of@mike-stark.bsky.social's "Starlings: The Curious Odyssey of a Most Hated Bird," published in 2025 @univnebpress.bsky.social; review now available @hnetreviews.bsky.social #envhist #envhum #birds #animalhist
www.h-net.org/reviews/show...
That essay is phenomenal.
What role should journalists be playing at this moment when so much is at stake? @saratexas.bsky.social’s article is a clarion call to us all, journalists, writers, citizens: nonprofitquarterly.org/when-journal...
All of us deserve to have a place in our country’s history without fear of erasure. These are the books on my shelf that I go to for the history of trans Americans. What else would you add, historians?
They were here, they are here, they will be here.
Referring to the NPS’s erasure of trans participation in the 1969 Stonewall riots, Hugh Ryan writes “All autocracies attempt to control the past in order to control the future.” When you erase the past, it makes anything happening now seem too new, an aberration. It is not.
slate.com/news-and-pol...
Always a great day when I get to hang out with the best Seths—Seth Cotlar and Seth Rockman—historians extraordinaire, particularly at Powell’s, particularly during an extended celebration of Seth Rockman’s fantastic new book, Plantation Goods. Worth a read!
Really honored to be included on this list! literary-arts.org/2025/01/anno...
On Wednesday, February 12th at 12pm Eastern (9am Pacific), I’ll be joining the Library of Congress’s Manuscript Division historians Josh Levy and Elizabeth A. Novara for a talk about Mischievous Creatures, live-streamed at zoomgov.com (and recorded for later viewing). #envhum #envhist
Same here. On the flip side, it makes me incredibly grateful when students fully show up eager to actually write. I took that for granted before, to a certain extent.
What I hate about ChatGPT is how suspicious it has made me. Not-so-polished writing tends to make me think it was written by a human (🤪) or pieces that hew close to the readings/sources we used (🎉). Otherwise it seems impossible to know anything for sure.
Unfortunately, this seem an apt time to share: A group of historians annotated sections of Project 2025, contextualizing and commenting on its plans to undermine environmental protections, exacerbate inequalities, and burn, burn, burn more fossil fuels. #envhist 🌎
Looking forward to joining Boston University’s Andrew Robichaud next week (9/17 at 5:30) at the Massachusetts Historical Society to talk about Mischievous Creatures! Boston friends: I hope to see you there! www.masshist.org/events/misch...
For those of you lucky to live near the cicadas, I hope you feel the thrill Margaretta Morris felt when she studied these curious creatures. And should you hear the rattling trill of Cassin’s cicada, you might be rebellious & call it Morris’s cicada, or perhaps, better yet, something entirely new.
Even better, maybe we can follow the model of the American Ornithological Society and disconnect human names from the names of creatures. These names tell stories of power, more often than they tell stories of the plants and animals themselves. And these names sometimes hide more than they show.
And then two of those men—John Cassin and James Coggswell Fisher—went on to name that cicada after themselves: Magicicada cassinii (Fisher), or Cassin’s cicada.
We are overdue to correct the record. Perhaps we could refer to the smaller buzzy creature as Morris’s cicada.
The cicadas are emerging now, and amid all the buzz there is a story of a stolen name that is not making it into the news.
In 1846, Margaretta Hare Morris had told the men at the Academy of Natural Sciences of her discovery of a new species. She even gave them specimens! …
Three books sitting on a chaotic garden wall: Soil by Camille Dungy, Radiant: the dancer, the scientist, and a friendship forged in light by Liz Heinecke, and Mischievous Creatures: The forgotten sisters who transformed early American science by Catherine McNeur
If you're looking for a good book about women and nature, I just finished these three fabulous new books and highly recommend them.
#WomenInScience 🧪🌾🌎
Who knew the story of 2 sisters in 19thC America, one an entomologist & the other a botanist, could be so engrossing. Really enjoying historian @catherinemcneur.bsky.social's Mischievous Creatures: The Forgotten Sisters Who Transformed Early American Science, even by book light.
Thank goodness for artisanal everything: garbled sentences, wonky stitches, wobbly lines, all of it.
Lane dividing line on showing imperfection.
What ChatGPT has done to me (besides making me grumble when I spot its use by students) is made me love human errors so much more. This wobbly line brought me joy when I was walking past because it was so clearly the work of a human with an elbow that jerked at the wrong moment.
January is moving swiftly--don't miss your chance to apply to be the founding editor of ASEH's new online publication, Environmental History Review. 🗃️📗 Details here, to read and share widely: aseh.org/Environmenta.... Applications due to search chair @catherinemcneur.bsky.social by February 1.
Pile of books at a conference display featuring Mischievous Creatures by Catherine McNeur
I may not be at #aha24 this week but I’m glad that the Morris sisters are. Many thanks to Chris Wells for spotting Mischievous Creatures in the wild! 📗#envhum
Do you want to be the first editor of the new digital journal Environmental History Review? Applications due Feb 1st.
I’m chairing the search for the editor of an exciting new digital journal, Environmental History Review. Consider applying! And please share with all the creative scholars you know. aseh.org/Environmenta...
Whoa. 😳
In addition to getting to talk about the Morris sisters (clearly one of my favorite subjects), it was fun to think about what kinds of primary sources might be woven into classroom activities to get at the story of scientists like the Morris sisters. Thanks so much, Remedial Herstory!
Remedial Herstory is a wonderful nonprofit organization focused on getting women’s history into primary and secondary school classrooms. The interview I recorded with Rachel Perez for their podcast is live today. …
podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/s...
