Jon Coburn
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joncoburn.bsky.social
Jon Coburn
@joncoburn.bsky.social
Mediocre historian. University of Lincoln, UK
'Not Just a Housewife: Women Strike for Peace and the Cold War Women's Peace Movement' out October 2025

| Histories of activism | protest suicide | information literacy
It’s actually called the Dunning-Kruger Times….
With a “WOW!,” President Trump posts a claim about DOGE and “royalties linked to Obamacare” that originated on a satirical website. That site’s own About section reads: “Everything on this website is fiction… If you believe that it is real, you should have your head examined.”
November 9, 2025 at 5:39 PM
Reposted by Jon Coburn
get in bitch we're destroying the west
November 7, 2025 at 1:17 PM
Reposted by Jon Coburn
We wrote this paper a while ago and since then OpenAI has claimed plans to be "core infrastructure" of education, Google has rammed Gemini into schools via its education platforms, and AWS showed it underpins most edtech platforms... 1/
November 7, 2025 at 9:31 PM
Reposted by Jon Coburn
November 6, 2025 at 7:51 PM
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lol
November 6, 2025 at 4:47 AM
Good thread on last nights US elections and the information ecosystem
1/ In my part of media studies (nexus of news, social, influence) there has been so much to be gloomy about the past 10 years. But nothing snaps me out of it quite like big moments where it’s clear information still is capable of penetrating the propaganda/AI slop force field. Last night was such.
November 5, 2025 at 10:40 PM
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*whispers* you can continue to read me, the pundit who insisted the other pundits were wrong about these conclusions
basically every 2024 truism is dead. Trump did not build a lasting multiracial coalition or turn young men into committed Republicans. You don’t need to cave on trans rights to win. The pundits have nothing left to tell you.
November 5, 2025 at 3:06 PM
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mr president sir, the pollsters are saying you should drop more diarrhea on the nation youre leading sir
November 5, 2025 at 2:33 PM
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It’s fascinating comparing the front page coverage of the Huntingdon train attack (below) with how the British press treated another case 30 years ago.

I’m referring to the 1995 Netto supermarket attack in Birmingham in which a man stabbed 10 people, killing one of them.
November 3, 2025 at 9:50 AM
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New collections from @lselibrary.bsky.social added!

• Greenham Women Everywhere
• Political Posters Collection
• Gay Liberation Front (including Come Together paper)
• Mukti: South Asian Women’s Journal (UK)
• Cavendish-Bentinck Pamphlets and Leaflets

hatfulofhistory.com/radical-onli...
radical online collections and archives
I am very interested in the growing amount of radical literature from around the world that is being scanned and digitised. As there are so many and from many different places, I thought it would b…
hatfulofhistory.com
November 2, 2025 at 8:05 AM
Reposted by Jon Coburn
Delighted to be at the proofs stage with this. Out in April with CUP!
October 31, 2025 at 8:45 AM
*Cough* relevance *cough*
October 30, 2025 at 2:47 PM
Two days until it’s released and I realise I haven’t skeeted about my book! So here’s my obligatory post…

Not Just a Housewife: Women Strike for Peace and the Cold War Women’s Peace Movement, out with @umasspress.bsky.social on Friday!

www.umasspress.com/978162534887...
October 29, 2025 at 7:48 AM
Contributed a little piece on antinuclear activist Dagmar Wilson to this edited collection about “dangerous women” through history. Great to see it in the wild!

Women Who Dared is out now with University of Edinburgh Press: lnkd.in/eUnbfX8t

In all good book shops (and some rubbish ones as well)
October 25, 2025 at 12:09 PM
Who robbed the Louvre? Right answers only.
October 20, 2025 at 7:37 AM
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A personal opinion is that if an archive is moving to ‘structured content releases’, it is no longer an archive but a private comms repository. What an incredible loss to our understanding of UK culture and heritage.
"The BBC has clanged their doors shut on those histories, those stories, those lives and ways of working that are revealed through the joint industry of the historian and the archivist." @helenwheatley.bsky.social on the devastating decision to limit access to BBC archives. tinyurl.com/y4tnyw9a
Defending the WAC: All the things I haven’t (yet) written by Helen Wheatley
People following the last few weeks of the Critical Studies in Television blog will have seen my brilliant colleagues discussing the essential work that they have been able to do thanks to the…
cstonline.net
October 19, 2025 at 8:36 AM
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I wasn’t exaggerating it rules so hard
October 19, 2025 at 12:53 AM
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“why would I pay Penguin books for information about Anna Karenina that Wikipedia has for free”

when you ask it that way, it does indeed seem like your money is being wasted
October 16, 2025 at 6:52 PM
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'Despite AI’s widespread use, 62% of the students said it has had a negative impact on their skills and development at school, while one in four of the students agreed that AI “makes it too easy for me to find the answers without doing the work myself”.' 1/2
Pupils fear AI is eroding their ability to study, research finds
One in four students say AI ‘makes it too easy’ for them to find answers
www.theguardian.com
October 15, 2025 at 6:20 AM
Reposted by Jon Coburn
Pretty sure I say this every Columbus Day, but getting hauled back to Spain for excessive brutality in 1500, just as the Inquisition was really getting fired up, is some genuinely Evil Guys Hall of Infamy material
October 13, 2025 at 3:02 PM
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This should be required reading in every historical methods and social studies classroom. Something very important is being lost. 🗃️🗺️
Marian Wilson Kimber: It’s painful to realize the people in charge of Iowa’s history apparently have no idea how history works. If they did, they'd know there is no way to predict what parts of the collection will be of interest 5, 20, or 100 years from now. www.bleedingheartland.com/2025/10/10/t...
The theft of history
Marian Wilson Kimber: I have wondered if the box of women’s club programs that changed my life will end up in the dumpster.
www.bleedingheartland.com
October 11, 2025 at 3:43 AM
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I'd love to know what every comedian who played the Riyadh Comedy Festival thinks of this piece by Jonathan Liew. It's an electrifying read. And really hard to think what any counter-justification from the participating comics would consist of. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...
We know what the comedians got out of the Riyadh comedy festival. What about the Saudi regime? | Jonathan Liew
The tawdry event was an ultimately doomed attempt by the Saudi government to buy the kind of authentic grassroots culture it is unwilling to countenance, says Guardian columnist Jonathan Liew
www.theguardian.com
October 11, 2025 at 8:26 AM
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Accepting this as an argument means accepting that, as an educator, your primary commitment is not to educating your students, or to propagating knowledge of your subject, but to finding and securing new markets for products in whose success your employers (or their bosses) have some kind of stake.
October 9, 2025 at 12:53 PM
Reposted by Jon Coburn
The basic structure of so much commentary, some in the guise of academic study, reduces to:

(1) generative AI products are detrimental to the goals of education

(2) therefore, the goals of education must change.

Without the tacit axiom that AI has authority behind it, that just doesn’t follow.
October 9, 2025 at 12:45 PM