Erin Grievances
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erinbartram.bsky.social
Erin Grievances
@erinbartram.bsky.social
11K followers 1.4K following 5.1K posts
Historian of religion & gender in the 19th c US, drinker of tea in the 21st c US. Museum educator at MTH&M. Wrote some quit lit you may have read. Founder & editor at contingentmagazine.org. Former academic. Sings with Voices of Concinnity. She/her.
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erinbartram.bsky.social
Sometimes you just have to pause and admire because it’s so breathtakingly 19th century
The ornate red brick and wood trim and windows in a corner of the Mark Twain house silhouetted against a gray sky
February 6, 2026 at 3:25 PM
erinbartram.bsky.social
Having seen so many people in this country leap into action to defend strangers from harm over the past year, I really struggle to understand how you turn out like this instead.
Standing before the Trump administration officials, a World Food Program staff person showed Tupperware containers displaying the miniscule rations people like Santina’s family were receiving. The officials didn’t express any interest in addressing the crisis. Marcus Thornton, the official who had expensed $35,000 on the trip, “spent much of the meal looking at his cellphone.”
February 4, 2026 at 7:33 PM
erinbartram.bsky.social
Was I just doing bits for myself?
Gun ownership in colonial America was very low. Unfortunately all of my notes were destroyed in a fire...and a flood...and then my dog ate them.
February 4, 2026 at 5:15 PM
erinbartram.bsky.social
Because of bad choices I have made, I find myself revisiting notes from my comprehensive exams in the summer of 2009. This is the entirety of one Google Doc I found and yet it's immediately clear what book it's about.
Wasteland to toddlin' town in three easy commodities. Just add boosters!
February 4, 2026 at 4:33 PM
erinbartram.bsky.social
This is who runs this account
A young white girl in a very eighties pink sweater over a blue dress proudly wearing her father’s work boots.
February 1, 2026 at 10:25 PM
erinbartram.bsky.social
A fine tradition of journalism.
Sixteen railroads meet in Minneapolis, and sixty-five passenger trains arrive and depart daily. In this place, as in St. Paul, journalism thrives. Here there are three great dailies, ten weeklies, and three monthlies. There is a university, with four hundred students—and, better still, its good efforts are not confined to enlightening the one sex. There are sixteen public schools, with buildings which cost $500,000; there are six thousand pupils and one hundred and twenty-eight teachers. There are also seventy churches existing, and a lot more projected. The banks aggregate a capital of $3,000,000, and the wholesale jobbing trade of the town amounts to $50,000,000 a year.
January 20, 2026 at 12:47 AM
erinbartram.bsky.social
Figured the big guy would have something to say.
"All that I have said of the newness, briskness, swift progress, wealth, intelligence, fine and substantial architecture, and general slash and go, and energy of St. Paul, will apply to his near neighbor, Minneapolis—with the addition that the latter is the bigger of the two cities." From Mark Twain's Life on the Mississippi
January 20, 2026 at 12:45 AM
erinbartram.bsky.social
Career following the Great v Disappointment of 1844, Death
January 19, 2026 at 5:25 PM
erinbartram.bsky.social
This piece deals with being contingent in Spring semester 2021, through the pandemic, the insurrection, and a sexual assault. And it was originally written for a collection about contingent pandemic teaching that couldn't find a publisher. @contingent-mag.bsky.social is happy to publish it.
What a semester for a course entitled “Writing & Anger.” What a semester to be contingent faculty. What a semester in which to be raped by a man on a third date. What a semester in which to move house, to escape the place where the rape occurred. And what a semester in which to have 90+ students in varying states of mental and physical collapse. How ironic that I taught a course on “Writing & Anger” while feeling almost entirely numb.
January 16, 2026 at 10:55 PM
erinbartram.bsky.social
Here's to another 25, Wikipedia. (Yes, I know about that AI thing)
Known for: Unusual jawbone and possible inspiration for Paul Bunyan
January 16, 2026 at 3:30 AM
erinbartram.bsky.social
It’s not even that weird to walk into a room at my workplace and find my own image protected on a giant screen.
A dark auditorium with a movie screen at the bottom. On the screen is a picture of a white lady in a pink scarf standing in a historic house. It is a paused video.
January 15, 2026 at 7:36 PM
erinbartram.bsky.social
"Like the peeling back of an onion or a bitten down fingernail, as we go, fresh horrors are revealed."
I also want to record how, year after year, we do this. Year after year, the pandemic rolls on, and academic year after academic year, it feels horrific in new ways. Like the peeling back of an onion or a bitten down fingernail, as we go, fresh horrors are revealed. As a teacher and a human, you work to attain some sense of balance, take control and impose some sense of order for your students. You figure out how to teach in the conditions you’re in, and then something happens, and everything resets, and the conditions you’re in are unlike anything you’ve ever experienced, and you must revise your syllabus, your class session, your day, your Blackboard site, your expectations, yourself, last night’s homework, next week’s reading, Essay #2, everything, and figure out a way forward for all of you all over again.
January 15, 2026 at 12:43 AM
erinbartram.bsky.social
This has been rattling around in my brain for days and I finally dug it up from my old teaching notes, but I don't have a citation. It's from a Mexico City newspaper from the 1840s (I assume in translation). Does anyone recognize it?
It is the essence of an agreement to buy and sell that the consent be mutual and spontaneous. You cannot buy when the owner of a thing does not want to sell it. “Sell it to me or I'll murder you” is the language of the assailant.
January 14, 2026 at 5:11 PM
erinbartram.bsky.social
My first thought was definitely not the right answer.
A section of a crossword puzzle. The clue is “many men on dating shows” and the spot for that clue reads _U_KS
January 14, 2026 at 1:50 AM
erinbartram.bsky.social
Funny that those words haven't found this kind of fertile ground when they have come out of the mouths of women running for president.
"This would be so popular at the national level if centrist Democrats let us use those words in that order"
January 3, 2026 at 3:29 AM
erinbartram.bsky.social
an image from the book Corduroy by Don Freeman--Corduroy is looking at a sofa button that matches his missing overalls button
January 2, 2026 at 3:36 PM
erinbartram.bsky.social
Boy, this one really stuck out. A significantly below state average vaccination rate for one of the elementary schools in the town where UConn is.
A pop-up on a map showing that Mansfield elementary school is a public school that has an 88.4% MMR vaccination rate
January 2, 2026 at 2:12 AM
erinbartram.bsky.social
start as we mean to go on
The Merriam Webster your word 2026 GIF with the word, compassionate
January 1, 2026 at 4:26 PM
erinbartram.bsky.social
I mean, are adjuncts the humanities of the university labor system? Have I written this same sentence in a different key before?
There is no condition in which the humanities are under attack in which the whole university is not under attack.
December 29, 2025 at 5:50 PM
erinbartram.bsky.social
post a perfect album from the 90s that isn't nirvana, pearl jam, soundgarden, or alice in chains
The Joan Osborne album Relish
December 28, 2025 at 1:36 AM
erinbartram.bsky.social
A stunner.
A risen but unbaked cranberry sweet roll. You can see some good bubbles in the dough.
December 24, 2025 at 6:50 PM
erinbartram.bsky.social
The only thing that can get me through wrapping.
A scene from the Philadelphia story on a TV. Jimmy Stewart is asking Cary Grant “now about this girl…”
December 23, 2025 at 11:23 PM
erinbartram.bsky.social
And yeah, we're not diagnosing cancer or making management decisions, but we have a set of professional ethics that mean accountability matters.
IBM training slide: A computer can never be held accountable therefore a computer must never make a management decision
December 21, 2025 at 10:06 PM
erinbartram.bsky.social
AHA does a write-up of the job market every year and we all know where we are on the chart
Chart showing the number of history PhDs awarded vs the number of job advertisements in the AHA's listings. The lines sharply diverge starting around 2008, and not in a good way.
December 17, 2025 at 2:23 AM
erinbartram.bsky.social
So what the heck was this in that SHEAR email?
A close-up of a signature AI-generated content may be incorrect.
December 12, 2025 at 1:38 AM