R. Mark Melville
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rmarkmel.bsky.social
R. Mark Melville
@rmarkmel.bsky.social
Assistant editor of Utah Historical Quarterly. Holiday enthusiast, casual trail runner, cat dad. Views are my own. 🏳️‍🌈
"This Land Is Their Land" (2019): Largely derivative of other scholars' work, sometimes sloppily so. 5/10.
November 12, 2025 at 6:03 PM
"Mayflower" (2006) from @penguinbooksusa.bsky.social: Not written by a professional historian, but tells the Pilgrim story, with all its triumphs and horrors, in an accessible style. 7/10.
November 12, 2025 at 6:03 PM
"Pumpkin: The Curious History of an American Icon" (2012) from @uwapress.uw.edu: Who would have known that a silly little vegetable has such an interesting story? 8/10.
November 12, 2025 at 6:03 PM
"The Turkey: An American Story" (2006) from @illinoispress.bsky.social : An environmental, culinary, economic, agricultural, and cultural history. 9/10.
November 12, 2025 at 6:03 PM
"Thanksgiving: The Biography of an American Holiday" (2009): This book literally changed my life, and I'm not even exaggerating. Not only did it change the way I think about Thanksgiving, it's a significant reason I now consider myself a cultural historian. 10/10.
November 12, 2025 at 6:03 PM
It's the time of year to geek out over my collection of Thanksgiving history books! 🤓🦃🍂 A thread.
November 12, 2025 at 6:03 PM
This comic strip from 1933 got shockingly dark.
November 10, 2025 at 4:32 PM
I like to fill my Thanksgiving cornucopia with my produce-themed Beanie Baby knockoffs from 1998.
November 7, 2025 at 6:51 PM
Oh, Ethelinda. December 5, 1909.
November 6, 2025 at 3:08 PM
I was amused and delighted to discover a Halloween-themed typo on Halloween. I was looking forward to learning what a "witch engine" was, but it was supposed to be "switch engine."🧙‍♀️🎃📰

(BTW, I just want to say what an amazing, fantastic resource Utah Digital Newspapers is.)
October 31, 2025 at 9:53 PM
Replace "parties" with "holidays," and this is literally me.
October 29, 2025 at 10:38 PM
I have often wondered if this background character from "Mad Monster Party" (1967) was a BYU fan or a Yale fan.
October 23, 2025 at 3:21 AM
I'm in Albuquerque for the Western History Association, and I can't get away from my nemesis, the goathead plant. 🐐
October 16, 2025 at 11:42 PM
The Fate of Ophelia
October 4, 2025 at 12:05 AM
For my birthday, my friend @sandypsyche.bsky.social sent me a Nancy comic book. Then separately, my colleagues gave me a birthday card with a Nancy panel! I guess my Nancy reposts, along with the Nancy and Sluggo enamel pins I used to wear on my lanyard, have given me a reputation.
September 30, 2025 at 11:09 PM
I'm looking at a school journal for incarcerated Japanese American third-graders during WWII, and I was surprised to see them say they were saving spiders for the war effort. This led me to find out, superficially, that spider silk was farmed during the war so they could use it in gunsights! 🕷️🕸️
September 24, 2025 at 6:36 PM
Reading an account of Christmas at Ellis Island in 1904, and I have a couple of thoughts:
(1) If only we still provided Christmas dinners for immigrants
(2) The women and children got treated better than the men, because who would want tobacco products for Christmas?
September 9, 2025 at 8:13 PM
I get a lot of free books, and I wasn't looking forward to reading the memoir "A Million Miles: My Peace Corps Journey" by Jody Olsen. But it was an unexpected treat! The author writes in such an engaging style, almost like a novel. Both her professional life and her family life are fascinating.
September 8, 2025 at 4:31 PM
September is the best month. It's summer and fall at the same time.
September 7, 2025 at 3:22 AM
Excuse me, I was trying to read that.
August 26, 2025 at 12:23 AM
Me: "I have thirteen years of professional experience, two humanities degrees, a shelf of books I've worked on, physical copies of the Chicago Manual of Style, a job with a century-old journal . . ."
Microsoft: "Add 'editor' to the skills section on your resume thanks to AI"
Me: 🙃🙄🤦‍♂️
August 22, 2025 at 8:45 PM
If I understood the tour guide correctly, this is a fourteenth-century fresco of St. Nicholas saving children from being turned into sausage. Since I mainly work in nineteenth- and twentieth-century history, it's wild to see something this old! In Haddon Hall, England.
August 4, 2025 at 7:52 PM
I hope the good folks of Scotland like me better than they liked their last American visitor. 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿
July 30, 2025 at 8:56 AM
I was happy to see that Salt Lake City's "Uniquely Utah" Pioneer Day drone show last night included the city's official Pride flags.
July 25, 2025 at 9:44 PM
I talk about this in my article on the holiday (which unfortunately is not available online): R. Mark Melville, “The Twenty-Fourth of July: An Overview of Utah’s State Holiday, 1849–2022,” Latter-day Saint Historical Studies 24, no. 1 (Spring 2023): 69–114.
July 24, 2025 at 11:17 PM