John Terry

@johntrterry

award-winning world history teacher, occasional writer, arkansas grad, phd from uva in early medieval things 🗃️ missing weird #stlcards twitter but nothing else 📍ATL johntrterry.com

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John Terry@johntrterry· 24d

"you know what you look like? squeezed dick."

Peter Capaldi and James Galdolfini in In the Loop

John Terry@johntrterry· Jul 5

when gameday gave me that "in play, run(s)" I said to myself "that's either a double or a home run." your all-star right fielder folks #stlcards

Mlb gameday screenshot of Jordan Walker's home run

John Terry@johntrterry· Jul 1

six seveennnnn 🤑

John Terry@johntrterry· Jun 23

Bunch encountered Princy Jenkins, a 90-something Black man who had been the plantation’s caretaker and had once lived in one of its slave cabins with his formerly enslaved grandmother. Jenkins told Bunch bluntly: “If you are a historian, then your job better be to help people remember not just what they want to remember, but what they need to remember.”

Bunch doubts that he would be able to garner such public support from Republicans today; when he talks with Republican elected officials now, they tell him, “You’ve got to stand firm, but I can’t say anything

John Terry@johntrterry· Jun 21

honored to put this out into the world #medievalsky

John Terry@johntrterry· May 31

fyi

John Terry@johntrterry· Apr 29

thrilled to inform y'all that I have lost my mind in the sibling chat

Christ is the cracker (Catholic)
Christ on a cracker (orthodox)
Christ by means of a cracker (Episcopalian)
Christ and a cracker, quarterly, on Sunday nights (Baptist)

John Terry@johntrterry· Mar 23

ICE at ATL is making all the difference I see richest empire in the history of humanity, folks

Tsa wait times page at ATL airport: due to current federal conditions, passengers are advised to allow at least 4 hours or more for domestic and international screenings"

John Terry@johntrterry· Mar 18

out here teaching

John Terry@johntrterry· Mar 17

might assign this book for my medieval africa seminar next year (many bios are of modern ppl but they all draw on medieval precedent and tradition)

Cover of Paula Akpan's When We Ruled: the rise and fall of twelve African queens and warriors

John Terry@johntrterry· Mar 16

in class we observed the ides of march today with she-wolf cake, little caesar's, dagger cookies, grapes, memes, and a dramatic reading of suetonius

a confetti cake with an edible image of the aldborough she wolf mosaic on it

a meme in front of a classical sculpture: "you want me to attend a work meeting? the thing that killed Julius Caesar?"

a yellow Brute trash can amended with a sharpie to read "et tu brute?"

John Terry@johntrterry· Mar 7

repping two of our major interests fyi, powder vs bärenreiter blue

Bach bärenreiter blue score against a powder blue Memphis redbirds jersey

John Terry@johntrterry· Mar 7

gonne be one hell of a week

Blue Bärenreiter score of Bach's mass in b minor in a choir room

John Terry@johntrterry· Mar 3

yesterday I got to hear from my favorite living author @minjinlee.bsky.social, who was brilliant, funny, and spellbinding. I've never read a novelist who gives life so beautifully and fully to ordinary people history has forgotten.

Min Jin Lee speaking from a podium at Emory University on March 1, 2026

John Terry@johntrterry· Feb 20

exactly my thoughts. this is going into my lesson plan for my 9th graders in five minutes @olufemiotaiwo.bsky.social we're also discussing a chapter from @clintsmithiii.bsky.social's absolutely brilliant YA version of _how the words is passed_ (adapted by @sonjacherrypaul.bsky.social)

ICE's $45 billion plan to convert warehouses into immigration detention centers: This is what they'll look like inside. From ICE's plan for the Social Circle, GA facility. Each little dot: a person.

John Terry@johntrterry· Feb 12

still from arrested development of magicians with gob bluth holding a sign that says "we demand to be taken seriously"

John Terry@johntrterry· Feb 12

also not for nothin look at this bitch ass loser in his ill fitting suit @dieworkwear.bsky.social

zoom in of bitch ass loser wearing an ill fitting suit, I mean just look at the gap between collar and shirt and the shoulders

John Terry@johntrterry· Feb 11

yeah so this pasts imperfect essay by @illdottore.bsky.social from a few weeks back on AI, labor, and roman slavery is about the best thing I've read on AI and the humanities @sarahebond.bsky.social

The artificiality of these imposed conceptual distinctions is a clue to their purpose. Perhaps discourse and policy that assert loudly the low value of certain kinds of literate capacity may be indicating, by their vociferousness, those capacities that are (and are recognized by those in power to be) of the highest potential value. Roman enslavers insisted enslaved people could not be Authors and Readers in part because of the obvious fact that they were. In the modern economy, basic literacy and the modes of critical thought and expression that draw on it are potent as human faculties that have thus far defied automation. Literate thought and its cultivation confer power, both in political and labor contexts, and the “AI” bubble, with its empty promises of making those capacities obsolete, offers our own ruling classes a chance to permanently discipline and relegate this last unconquered frontier — creative and knowledge work.

By a similar token, to assert that Large Language Models (LLMs) and their ilk are worth a lot while the humans and human capacities they ingest and mimic are worth next to nothing is not the paradox it seems to be, so long as we understand both claim to share a fundamental premise that anything is preferable to an empowered human workforce. Although the Roman project of redefining the contributions of enslaved literate workers took shape over centuries, the example can help to illuminate the rhetoric of the modern AI marketing project deployed hurriedly over the last few years.

John Terry@johntrterry· Feb 10

why choose, I've got your crossover content right here

extremely stupid meme on a map of Ibn Battuta's travels. In Africa and the Islamic world he's Ibn Battuta, in most of Asia and eastern Europe he's Fibbin Battuta

John Terry@johntrterry· Feb 1

this is so good. read the whole thing.

Last year, midway through the class period, a student blurted out: “Wait, they were imprisoned as children? Why? What did they do?” The student’s outburst brings to mind some old questions at the heart of education: What is good for students? And how is the good of students tied to the good of society? It seems to me that current education policy rarely prioritizes these questions. In the name of progress, public education is now pressed into the service of agendas that align with corporate profit, workforce readiness, ideological reproduction and demand for quantifiable results. These aims ignore what progressive education at its best can do, and the students who school ostensibly serves.

John Terry@johntrterry· Jan 28

glad @liberalcurrents.com is out here providing a platform for longer, thoughtful essays like this one especially glad to see this pushback on "not taking the bait" expressed perfectly:

"Under the pall of that gathering horror, many have rightly criticised the endless rehashing of the “don’t take the bait” cliché by Minnesota Governor Tim Walz and Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey. For one, it suggests there’s a method to ICE’s impulsive madness. Nothing about their evils is premeditated in particular, only in general. They want to sow fear and terror, they want to ethnically cleanse our nation of non-white people, and they want to beat and murder dissidents. Not to provoke a specific response to justify legal action, but simply because this is who they are. There is no bait on the hook, merely violence red in tooth and claw."

John Terry@johntrterry· Jan 26

ammianus marcellinus would like a word

Email subject from Netflix: "enjoying barbarians? Either way let us know."

John Terry@johntrterry· Jan 24

logging on every day

Memes from Gladiator (2000) in which Commodus (Joaquin Phoenix) says of Maximus (Russell crowe), "he shouldn't be alive. It vexes me. I am terribly vexed."

John Terry@johntrterry· Jan 18

very interesting that this article cites one priest who takes exception to the bishop's statements. yeah bro statements don't move the needle, that was literally his point: "stop making statements and act, even if it's dangerous."

John Terry@johntrterry· Jan 10

chicken and dumplings happening

Rolled out dough for dumplings in chicken and dumplings with a dusting of flour

John Terry@johntrterry· Jan 8

"empire of vice" is marked by a "brazenness with which the administration defies norms of truth-telling and decency" super helpful framing for me bc it undercuts my efforts as a teacher of children who don't remember a time before trumpism every single day www.liberalcurrents.com/to-my-studen...

As a teacher I’m trying to instill in my students, whom I care so deeply for, a sense of civic virtue, of care for their communities and classmates. I’m trying to teach them that the truth matters. And yet, they are coming of age in the shadow of a regime that openly scoffs at such notions, that has nothing but disdain for living an ethical life. Our depraved and scandalous government breaks our own community's rules at every turn, with impunity.

John Terry@johntrterry· Jan 8

folks, a student has not only read it, enjoyed it, but has come to tell me so with a batch of "congratulations" funfetti cupcakes. when I say this makes my entire month that might be an understatement.

a batch of orange cupcakes with white icing spelling out "congratulations"

John Terry@johntrterry· Jan 7

I also believe in my bones-I have to believe-that we are gonna fucking win.

When a society allows fear, hate, and fabricated victimhood to dominate their politics, it has lost something essential. And for now I’m choosing to believe we haven’t lost that essential something, because I see it in my community every single day: we care, we donate, we show up at protests and for each other, we persevere. There are good people everywhere. I hope my students can find them, stay close, and cultivate everything that’s best about our country in those communities. That’s a popular movement worth cherishing. That’s the will of the people.

John Terry@johntrterry· Jan 7

using the roman election of 133 bce and the public murder of tiberius gracchus and his supporters as a lens for viewing possible worlds here in the '20s, I further assert that trump is a gutter racist who needs a good impeaching and imprisonment. I worry about my students experience of "normal."

I want my students to understand that, while stories like this from the ancient world might feel familiar and thus inevitable, we shouldn’t treat them as normal. It should not be normal for them to hear a presidential candidate calling January 6 a “day of love” as part of a seemingly endless barrage of threats against his political enemies. Campaigning and following through on a promise to violently deport millions of immigrants who are “poisoning the blood” of the country is immediately reminiscent of concentration camp history. I don’t want this to be normal for them. I want it to shock them. But if history shows us possible futures, I want them to have what it takes to recognize patterns of violent rhetoric and to effect change starting with their own communities.

John Terry@johntrterry· Jan 5