Bruce Buchan
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brucealexb.bsky.social
Bruce Buchan
@brucealexb.bsky.social
7.1K followers 680 following 1.1K posts

Scholar. Historian of ideas. Mostly Enlightenment & race, quite a bit on empire & colonisation, plus some corruption and a little piracy for good measure.

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Political science 46%
History 18%
Posts Replies Media Videos

brucealexb.bsky.social
Bruce Buchan @brucealexb.bsky.social · 9h
You have a great sense of humor.

brucealexb.bsky.social
Bruce Buchan @brucealexb.bsky.social · 23h
A second book launch, this time at Uppsala University. Thanks to all who came and listened to @lindaaburnett.bsky.social and I outline our next book - on humanity and the history of scientific instructions. It’s a tale of skull collections and the colonial history of ideas.

brucealexb.bsky.social
Bruce Buchan @brucealexb.bsky.social · 1d
Orwellian.

brucealexb.bsky.social
Bruce Buchan @brucealexb.bsky.social · 1d
The old anatomy theatre (dating from 1662-63), in the Gustavianum, Uppsala. An amazing demonstration of visibility in architecture, and of the prestige and power that anatomical science then commanded.
#HistoryOfMedicine
#HistoryOfAnatomy
#HistoryOfArchitecture

brucealexb.bsky.social
Bruce Buchan @brucealexb.bsky.social · 4d
Yes, it’s old, but the hunger is there among my own students (very far from the Ivy League) for what has been denied to them. I think our circumstances make what we used to do very radical indeed. I agree we should do more and differently, but also need to stop compromising what the humanities are.

brucealexb.bsky.social
Bruce Buchan @brucealexb.bsky.social · 4d
Trump always was and always will be the asset of a foreign power. If treason had a corporeal shape, it would look like Trump.
meidastouch.com MeidasTouch @meidastouch.com · 4d
Stunning development: Senators now confirm the Trump admin’s 28-point “peace plan” for Ukraine wasn’t a U.S. plan at all. It was a Russian wish list. Follow along. This is crazy. 1/

brucealexb.bsky.social
Bruce Buchan @brucealexb.bsky.social · 4d
For too long we’ve been subjected to a disempowerment discourse that asserts “the humanities are dying”. They’re not dying, but there is an effort by governments and corporations to kill them. And yet, the public’s desire to learn and engage with the humanities persists.
rbtownsend.bsky.social Rob Townsend @rbtownsend.bsky.social · 4d
"While other universities report that the humanities are shrinking, at Berkeley, the opposite is true. The music major is the fastest-growing major on campus. We are finding bigger classrooms because film is exploding. English is back to the numbers we saw 15 years ago. We are hiring" bit.ly/4ohKuOe
"The humanities really are a resource — a confidence for living in our times.” Dean Sara Guyer on the modern utility of humanities degrees
This interview originally appeared on the Division of Arts
bit.ly

Reposted by Anna O. Law, Rebecca Solnit, Rosemary A. Joyce , and 13 more

rbtownsend.bsky.social
Rob Townsend @rbtownsend.bsky.social · 4d
"While other universities report that the humanities are shrinking, at Berkeley, the opposite is true. The music major is the fastest-growing major on campus. We are finding bigger classrooms because film is exploding. English is back to the numbers we saw 15 years ago. We are hiring" bit.ly/4ohKuOe
"The humanities really are a resource — a confidence for living in our times.” Dean Sara Guyer on the modern utility of humanities degrees
This interview originally appeared on the Division of Arts
bit.ly

Reposted by Adrian Vickers

brucealexb.bsky.social
Bruce Buchan @brucealexb.bsky.social · 4d
Why were heads hunted in the Enlightenment?
Who hunted heads, and where did they 'acquire' them?
It’s a complicated history.
@lindaaburnett.bsky.social and I tell some of it in our new book.
We'll tell more of it in our next!
You can read a little about it here:
yalebooks.yale.edu/2025/11/20/h...
Headhunting in the Age of Reason: Enlightenment Origins of the Global Trade in Skulls - Yale University Press
Bruce Buchan and Linda Andersson Burnett— Headhunting is not the first association that most people would make with the Age of Enlightenment. Indeed, many might never associate headhunting with the......
yalebooks.yale.edu

brucealexb.bsky.social
Bruce Buchan @brucealexb.bsky.social · 4d
This is called, brand recognition. The Liberal’s brand is very well recognised by the public.

brucealexb.bsky.social
Bruce Buchan @brucealexb.bsky.social · 4d
Sadly, yes.

Reposted by Beatrice de Graaf, Manisha Sinha, Bruce Buchan

meidastouch.com
MeidasTouch @meidastouch.com · 4d
Stunning development: Senators now confirm the Trump admin’s 28-point “peace plan” for Ukraine wasn’t a U.S. plan at all. It was a Russian wish list. Follow along. This is crazy. 1/

brucealexb.bsky.social
Bruce Buchan @brucealexb.bsky.social · 4d
“In short, social-democratic parties should stop chasing after far-right voters.”

www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...
The ‘Danish model’ is the darling of centre-left parties like Labour. The problem is, it doesn’t even work in Denmark | Cas Mudde
This week’s local elections are the latest reminder that when social democrats move rightwards, they’re making a mistake, says academic and author Cas Mudde
www.theguardian.com

Reposted by Robert J. Geller, Andreas Ortmann, David W. Kerstetter , and 3 more

thetnholler.bsky.social
The Tennessee Holler @thetnholler.bsky.social · 5d
🎵 “Join Ice” - @wellesmusic on Colbert

brucealexb.bsky.social
Bruce Buchan @brucealexb.bsky.social · 8d
As the old saying goes, ‘Charity begins at home.’

It ends there too, apparently.

Reposted by Ashish Arora, Steve Peers, Karen Benjamin Guzzo , and 8 more

bloomberg.com
Bloomberg News @bloomberg.com · 8d
Elon Musk’s foundation gave away a record $474 million in 2024, with the vast majority again going to entities he controls
Elon Musk Gave Away $474 Million in 2024, Mostly to Entities He Controls
Elon Musk’s foundation gave away a record $474 million in 2024, with the vast majority again going to entities he controls.
bloom.bg

brucealexb.bsky.social
Bruce Buchan @brucealexb.bsky.social · 9d
Late autumnal frost, Uppsala.

brucealexb.bsky.social
Bruce Buchan @brucealexb.bsky.social · 10d
Not sure it’s the best thing I’ve read on AI in higher ed, but it is worth reading. It confirms my worst suspicions and most depressing experiences. Abomination that it is though, AI is only one of the horsemen of the looming Apocalypse, the others being user pays, student debt, and job readiness.

Reposted by David Brady, Miles Corak, Bruce Buchan

jlynch13.bsky.social
Julia Lynch @jlynch13.bsky.social · 11d
This may be the best thing ive read yet on AI in higher ed, and its written by a Yale undergrad. Highly recommend.
Inside Yale’s Quiet Reckoning with AI | The New Journal
Amid ChatGPT's rising popularity and a computer science cheating scandal, Yale students, professors, and administrators wrestle privately with the proper role of AI in education. What happens when eve...
thenewjournalatyale.com

brucealexb.bsky.social
Bruce Buchan @brucealexb.bsky.social · 11d
The news in brief(s).

brucealexb.bsky.social
Bruce Buchan @brucealexb.bsky.social · 11d
The far right are no longer knocking on the door to public office, because centrist governments the world over have been busily taking that door off its hinges.

brucealexb.bsky.social
Bruce Buchan @brucealexb.bsky.social · 12d
A more potent reason is that those of us who live outside the US are nonetheless shackled to it. We live within the US imperium, and it’s that that poses the threat of fascist infection.

brucealexb.bsky.social
Bruce Buchan @brucealexb.bsky.social · 13d
Gold! I’d like to advocate for its inclusion (with full attribution of course) in every class we teach in the Humanities at my university in Australia.

brucealexb.bsky.social
Bruce Buchan @brucealexb.bsky.social · 13d
The political epitaph for a generation of American evangelicals will read “we professed faith to protect pedophiles in power who made cruelty and corruption our legacy to future generations.” They did the Lord’s work.

brucealexb.bsky.social
Bruce Buchan @brucealexb.bsky.social · 14d
I don’t think it does. One may have polity without a state. Renaissance republics and Greek city states were polities, but were not states. The state is a particular and fairly recent historical formation, whereas polities seem ubiquitous in the human record.

brucealexb.bsky.social
Bruce Buchan @brucealexb.bsky.social · 14d
Europe’s #Enlightenment invented race as it also invited its critique.

In 1780, James Dunbar warned that by dividing humanity into races: "...the oppression or extermination of a meaner race, will no longer be so shocking to humanity.”

- Essays on the History of Mankind, 1780, page. 150.

brucealexb.bsky.social
Bruce Buchan @brucealexb.bsky.social · 14d
These are people who’ve lived their entire lives in servitude to paymasters. They cannot survive except under the golden showers the rich, powerful, entitled, and privileged precipitate upon them. Their minds have atrophied, their consciences shrivelled. They are emptied, vitiated husks of life.

brucealexb.bsky.social
Bruce Buchan @brucealexb.bsky.social · 14d
We should not confuse authority with power. Authority is a quality one recognises or withholds. Power does not care. In the same way, we should not confuse government with the state. Anarchists, it seems to me, were proponents for government (of various sorts) without the state (in any form).

brucealexb.bsky.social
Bruce Buchan @brucealexb.bsky.social · 14d
I don’t ever recall an instance of a stand over merchant lauding their “transparency” as an benefit of accepting their protection racket.

brucealexb.bsky.social
Bruce Buchan @brucealexb.bsky.social · 15d
THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER.