My colleague points out here that possibly one in seven requests to our library now may be assisted by LLMs.

When those point to fictional documents, that's a huge staff time drain. There's often no quick way to check if an undigitized primary source doc exists beyond physically pulling some boxes.

Every year I share this work with my students. We read it aloud.

you can frame the European-American differences in a lot of ways but 'Europeans are poorer than Americans but also more secure' is probably the fairest one. American life is richer in many, many ways, and also far more dependent on your job *and your family* than European life.

Whatever truths there might be in that your average white Union soldier grunt was A) probably still pretty racist B) likely didn't start as a committed abolitionist

there are *plenty* of stories of them getting radicalized as they entered the South and saw the reality of it and went "oh FUCK this"

“I’ll fight until hell freezes over and then I’ll cut the ice and fight on”