Twitter — Bunk History

We Built a Broken Internet. Now We Need to Burn It to the Ground.

Silicon Valley veteran Mike Monteiro explains how designers destroyed the world.

by Mike Monteiro via BuzzFeed News on March 31, 2019

Making History Go Viral

Historians used the Twitter thread to add context and accuracy to the news cycle in 2018. Here’s how they did it.

by Rebecca Onion via Slate on December 11, 2018

One Person's History of Twitter, From Beginning to End

Twitter, valuing expansion over principles, achieved its goal of changing the world. But not in the way that it planned.

by Mike Monteiro via Medium on October 15, 2017

President John F. Kennedy, his wife, Jackie, and their son John Jr. on his Christening day, Dec. 8, 1960.

A Thread for Auld Lang Syne

On Twitter's new 280-character limit.

by Yoni Appelbaum via Twitter on September 26, 2017

A Twitter Tribute to Holocaust Victims

A conversation with the creator of a new social-media project that commemorates refugees the United States turned away in 1939.

by Russel Neiss, Candice Norwood via The Atlantic on January 27, 2017

Can Twitter Fit Inside the Library of Congress?

Six years ago, the world’s biggest library decided to archive every single tweet. Turns out that’s pretty hard to do.

by Andrew McGill via The Atlantic on August 4, 2016

President John F. Kennedy, his wife, Jackie, and their son John Jr. on his Christening day, Dec. 8, 1960.

Snapshots of History

Wildly popular accounts like @HistoryInPics are bad for history, bad for Twitter, and bad for you.

by Rebecca Onion via Slate on February 5, 2014

The End of Resistance History

What was the liberal #Resistance "Twitterstorian"? And what did commentators like Heather Cox Richardson morph into during the Biden years?

by Charlotte Rosen via Protean on January 20, 2025

Wikimedia Foundation servers.

Dead Links

Maintaining the internet data of dead people.

by Tamara Kneese via Public Books on October 31, 2023

Tweet by Josh Hawley of a quotation he falsely attributes to Patrick Henry.

Senator Josh Hawley Tweeted a Christian Nationalist Quote Falsely Attributed to Patrick Henry

It was actually from a 1950s antisemitic and white supremacist magazine. Who cares?

by Seth Cotlar via Rightlandia on July 6, 2023

Kanye West rapping.

Kanye and the Troubling History of Persistent Antisemitism

Past and present celebrities influence on the maintaining of antisemitism.

by Bradley W. Hurt via Arc: Religion, Politics, Et Cetera on March 7, 2023

America Online: A Cautionary Tale

On the rise and fall of the quintessential ’90s online service provider—and a warning about today’s social-media giants.

by Joanne McNeil via The Nation on December 15, 2022

What AHA President James Sweet Got Wrong—And Right

Attacking presentism as a mindset of younger scholars doesn’t solve any of the historical profession's problems.

by Jonathan W. Wilson via Clio and the Contemporary on November 30, 2022

Visitors browse newspaper front pages from the day after the 9/11 terror attacks at the Newseum in Washington, D,C., in 2016. (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)

When History Is Lost in the Ether

Digital archiving is shoddy and incomplete, and it will hamper the ability of future generations to understand the current era.

by Christian Schneider via The Dispatch on April 6, 2022

A picture of Trump going through a shredder.

Will Trump Burn the Evidence?

How the President could endanger the official records of one of the most consequential periods in American history.

by Jill Lepore via The New Yorker on November 16, 2020

How the 1619 Project Took Over 2020

It’s a hashtag, a talking point, a Trump rally riff. The inside story of a New York Times project that launched a year-long culture war.

by Sarah Ellison via Washington Post on October 13, 2020

World War I Relived Day by Day

Reflections on live-tweeting the Great War.

by Patrick Chovanec via New York Review of Books on November 8, 2018

Future Historians Probably Won't Understand Our Internet, and That's Okay

Archivists are working to document our chaotic, opaque, algorithmically complex world—and in many cases, they simply can’t.

by Alexis C. Madrigal via The Atlantic on December 6, 2017

America @ Worship

How social media is – and isn't – changing American religion.

by Sara Georgini on October 29, 2017

Why did James Comey Name His Secret Twitter Account ‘Reinhold Niebuhr’?

Niebuhr is a theological hero to Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and John McCain.

by Michelle Boorstein via Washington Post on October 24, 2017

The Fake-News Fallacy

Old fights about radio have lessons for new fights about the Internet.

by Adrian Chen via The New Yorker on September 4, 2017

Clarence Darrow, left, with William Jennings Bryan, right, at the Scopes Trial.

Now More Than Ever, We Need Less History

The “now more than ever” tendency is everywhere.

by William Hogeland via William Hogeland blog on July 8, 2017

How Nixon Would Have Tweeted Watergate

What President Richard Nixon’s Twitter account might have looked like during Watergate, had social media existed in the 1970s.

by Justin Sherin via Politico Magazine on June 24, 2017

Why Federal Employees Can Thank FDR for Some Restrictions on Their Tweets

The Hatch Act was crafted in response to New Deal-era political maneuvering.

by Olivia B. Waxman via TIME on April 3, 2017

Should Prince's Tweets Be in a Museum?

Archivists are figuring out which pieces of artists' digital lives to preserve alongside letters, sketchbooks, and scribbled-on napkins.

by Sonia Weiser via The Atlantic on July 5, 2016

Illustration of an octopus with a "no talking" symbol, with its tentacles around the globe.

How Cancel Culture Panics Ate the World

A set of peculiarly American anxieties has spread across continents.

by Samuel P. Catlin via The New Republic on November 25, 2024

Police officer in front of a playground and school.

The Historical Precedents to Trump’s Attacks on Haitian Immigrants

An expert on white nationalism explains how such demonizing rhetoric incubates and spreads—and what sets this particular episode apart.

by Kathleen Belew, Isaac Chotiner via The New Yorker on September 18, 2024

Samuel Pepys, by John Hayls, 1666.

Peeping on Pepys

For more than two decades, a community of committed internet users has been chewing over the famous Londoner’s diary.

by Caroline Wazer via HNN on June 11, 2024

A crowd of people holds a up red banner of the Cuban Revolution leader Ernesto "Che" Guevara

Remember When the U.S. Secretly Built a Social Network to Destabilize Cuba?

U.S.-funded social networks were launched in 2010 with ZunZuneo and Piramideo in 2013.

by Matt Novak via Gizmodo on March 15, 2024

Elon Musk.

How Corporate America’s Obsession With Creativity Wrecked the World and Brought Us Elon Musk

Samuel W. Franklin’s latest book explains how we sold ourselves out to a fake virtue.

by Timothy Noah via The New Republic on December 30, 2023

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