Chris Cantwell

🗃️ Welp, I've started a Substack. It's called Avian Americana, and is something of a history blog for #bird nerds and a #birding blog for history buffs. It follows my ongoing effort to retell American history from the perspective of it's birds. /1 avianamericana.com

Third or fourth time through Breaking Bad and I realize for the first time that the plane crash occurs in the same episode where Skylar confronts Walter w/ all the truth. It all crashes down. And Walt is in pink like the teddy bear.

Working on the next Avian Americana post...

Excited to share that the Chicago Public Scholars Consortium will be convening again, this time down at the University of Chicago Divinity School. The theme will be Religion, Museums, & the Media, & the meeting feature a roundtable of professionals who work in these fields. Please share widely!

Follow up to say that this little guy was gone when I stopped by on my way to class.

Watched this little Lincoln’s Sparrow smash into one of Loyola’s many all-glass buildings & sit stunned on sidewalk. I relocated it to the mulch behind a bush and am hoping it’s ok. But its left eye looks like the crash may have done skull damage? This is where a historian is not an ornithologist.

Salem State U is hiring in public history for a non tenure track position. networks.h-net.org/jobs/70327/s...

New post up over at Aviana Americana on the places we bird and the histories behind them. The post explores Milwaukee's Lake Park in particular, and how it's history manufactured a landscape that let me see the #birds that made me a #birder. 🗃️

A lot going on in this post, but I kinda love most of it. 1) let AI build your Canvas class for you, and 2) universities should return to blanketing campuses with (free!) lunchtime conversations. computationalhistory.substack.com/p/how-ai-sav...

I had a realization yesterday while teaching that I think for the first time since I became a faculty member in 2013, notebooks outnumbered laptops in my introductory history class made up mostly of freshman. It could be this group. But it also felt like a sign of the times.

I wrote about the unraveling of social media and offer a proposal: maybe we just... stop? dansinker.com/posts/2026-0...

Related to this, I'm also hoping to do some birding on Friday or Saturday morning with @ncph.bsky.social, so if that's of interest lemme know. It's fall migration after all!

🗃️ For folks in RI, @ncph.bsky.social's annual meeting will feature conversations on religion & public history. One is a working group on church closures & the other is an awesome plenary being held at the the church Roger Williams founded. Please share widely, as the plenary is open to the public!

there's a special feeling in academia when you have the final classes of the week fully prepared, it feels like the week is over already.

Happy Breaking Bad Day to those who celebrate

What a story.

@loyolahistdept.bsky.social's 🗃️ History Grad Student Assoc released the CFP for their annual conference. This always draws students from across the country, and because of the strength of our public history program it is also a great networking event. Please share widely!

Just learned from our writing center that student appointments have dropped by 40% since the advent of AI. There's a study to be done on how much of that is a result AI doing the work, & how much is a result of faculty no longer assigning papers.

Good to see @samplereality.bsky.social do some disruption again. Felt like like seeing a new twitter bot for the first time. americanatlas.world

For 🗃️ folks in the Chicago area, @loyolahistdept.bsky.social organized a nice little talk for me to celebrate my book's publication. There will be food, so it will be worth it! Would love to see anyone who's in the area and free there.

Hats off to @louishyman.bsky.social & @historians.org for organizing this AI & History Conference. Incredibly bummed I can't attend. proflouishyman.github.io/ai_conferenc...

Among the many changes I've noticed as an academic, a particularly annoying one is the length of our syllabi. The front matter my U requires now makes the document 7 pages long before I even get to the schedule. And this is to say nothing of the surveillance of the content some of my colleagues feel

The West Virginia "Coal Wars," 1912-1921.

'Midwestern Vernacular' contemporary photography exhibit opens at Chesterton Art Center nwitimes.com/life-enterta...

My policy is to never, ever talk about student work online unless I 1. have their permission & 2. it's to brag about them. Only once did a tragic & hilarious misuse of Wikipedia 10 years ago test my resolve. Today, a jaw dropping use of AI is similarly challenging me because it is so unnerving.

“We are all migrants through time.” - Mohsin Hamid

“Location, location, location., the realtors say. Geography is destiny, respond the historians.” - Mohsin Hamid, “Exit West”

Hat’s off to the curator of the John James Audubon Museum who installed this panel to the people Audubon enslaved while living in KY. It is the first post acknowledging this history, and the curator says it will not be the last.

The dehydration headaches of archival research are real.

Public 🗃️ & #DH question for folks. Any recommendations for a methods book on text mining, topic modeling, etc. for a #digitalhumanities grad class? I've used Morretti, Jockers, & Rockwell & Sinclair before. Curious if there are more recent texts folks have liked. Thanks!

My throat and eyes are burning from the wildfire smoke. This feels worse than what came through a few years ago.

Look out, guys. I am ON THE RISE.

I should add what I call “porch readin’ season” only last like 6 weeks on MKE so you gotta get it in.