Brian Gettler

Settler historian. Prof, University of Toronto, member of the Montreal History Group (https://ghm.uqam.ca/) and Co-Editor, Canadian Historical Review.

Thinking about Indigenous peoples, capitalism, the state, and colonialism, especially the fiduciary and fiscal varieties. 🎶 and 🚴 too. Posts in English. En français itou. #histodons #CdnHist #HistQC #19thcentury | tfr

Book: Colonialism's Currency (2020) https://www.mqup.ca/colonialism-s-currency-products-9780228001188.php
Faculty Page: https://www.utm.utoronto.ca/historical-studies/people/brian-gettler

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Last Notes

2026-02-10 13:38:57 GMT

People on here don't seem like Kid Rock much.

2026-02-02 23:39:54 GMT

A documentary from several years back that's worth checking out if you're already a fan or just curious about Charlie Parr, IMHO a true great of American music.
https://youtu.be/PmyKV_9YZ98
#americana #FolkMusic #blues

2026-01-30 21:57:11 GMT

Thank you Stranger Things. You convinced my kids that Eggos were fantastic. Now that they've had an opportunity to try them, after hounding me for months to buys some, the scales have fallen from their eyes and they will never again fall for a narrative pedaled by corporate media.
That's how it works, right?

2026-01-23 21:28:32 GMT

Thank you Twin Cities.
Your struggle gives us hope that
A new day's rising.
#Minneapolis #haiku

2025-12-04 21:19:03 GMT

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Looks great!

2025-12-04 21:12:21 GMT

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Pumpernickel?

2025-11-11 02:59:55 GMT

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Looks great! My wife's family (western France) always refers to them in the plural (les îles flottantes). It's one of the repertoire of fairly quick and easy desserts my mother-in-law regularly dips into, though I've never seen her add the almonds and caramel. Also, I love that you're just splitting the eggs in two to make two distinct pieces before bringing them back into a single dish.

2025-11-09 19:03:02 GMT

Snowlight.
#SilentSunday
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2025-11-07 04:13:28 GMT

I've been using this recipe for two decades now. Still, I doubt I will ever be anything but amazed when I pull a loaf out of the oven that looks like this.
#baking #bread
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2025-11-01 17:11:28 GMT

For now, here's where I am on student LLM-use:
1) The contemporary university's primary social function is certification.
2) Prompting LLMs does not require a degree. For universities, this is existential.
3) Admin tell faculty - academic freedom! - that we alone (without any support) can solve the problem. We can integrate LLMs or track down their illicit use.
4) My job is to teach, not to police students or hawk the hype. So I teach those who want to learn and try not to worry about the rest.

2025-11-01 13:27:16 GMT

We grew the most gorgeous Brussels sprout plants this year. Of course, we didn't actually get a single Brussels sprout. But since it turns out you can eat the leaves - which we have in profusion - who cares?
#gardening

2025-10-23 13:39:45 GMT

Start your letter of complaint - especially if it isn't the first one - like this dude in 1853:
"It is with the utmost unwillingness that I again find myself called upon to draw your attention to..."

2025-09-30 12:05:47 GMT

For the #ttrpg crowd in Canada/the UK: Compose Dream Games is running their annual sale over the next week. If you're in the market for an indie game or module, check them out.
https://composedreamgames.com/marketplace/

2025-09-21 16:03:22 GMT

Let me convince you to grow anise hyssop (Agastache foeniculum). The flowers, which looked nicer last week (and on the plants I just harvested), are bright purple and are favorite of bees. But, IMHO, the leaves are the best part of the plant. Used fresh or dried they add a sweet anise flavor to black tea and they make really great ice cream too (akin to mint).
#gardening #cooking #BloomScrolling
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2025-09-06 00:48:02 GMT

I forgot to post my vacation #flosstodon photo. On the edge of the beach, Chaleur Bay, Bonaventure, Québec.
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2025-08-30 14:32:13 GMT

The colleague who explicitly used AI to design their syllabus has a marking scheme that adds up to 115%...
#academia #LLM

2025-08-11 20:50:53 GMT

I've been watching the Canada Games today as I do stuff around the house. It took me a while to understand why teams from Ontario were wearing red rather than green. I guess I've been assimilated into French-speaking Ontario more than the rest of the place.

2025-08-01 14:42:30 GMT

The front-yard garden. You don't need much space to grow an awful lot.
#gardening #BloomScrolling
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2025-07-14 21:00:05 GMT

Something like one in ten documents in this archival fonds (generated by the 19th-century state) are requisitions, receipts, or correspondence regarding stationary or postage.
This has me wondering: what percentage of communications in today's bureaucracies deal with IT?

2025-06-17 19:37:06 GMT

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Unfortunately, yes.

2025-06-17 19:34:11 GMT

We have translators who work on commission for the journal I edit (it's a bilingual publication - articles are in either English or French with abstracts and author bios for every article in both languages). The translators tend to be pretty good, most often only having trouble with technical terms (which is understandable - this happens when you're not a specialist). Still, on occasion, they manage to produces something spectacularly bad. No, the French for "He is" is not "C'est."

2025-06-14 19:44:05 GMT

The first true garden products of the season - rhubarb jam and syrup! The second is the perfect ingredient for homemade soda/cocktails on a hot summer day. In a few years, when the plants are a bit older, we'll get much more.
#gardening #cooking
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2025-06-11 20:56:05 GMT

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🤯

2025-06-11 20:53:10 GMT

English is great, but have you tried French? They have an adjective for "relative to cod" ("morutier")! Mom always said you learn something every day.

2025-06-11 13:07:08 GMT

Riding around with Kid1 last night, I remarked that many of the drivers, who seemed more agitated than normal, were "ornery." I explained what the word meant and he said, "I think 'hornery' better describes it." We now have a term for a specific form of dangerous driving.
#BikeTooter #cycling

2025-05-08 20:25:36 GMT

My employee organization (the University of Toronto Faculty Association) just voted to ask our pension fund to divest from "holdings in entities that manufacture or distribute arms, ammunition, implements or munitions of war, where there are reasonable grounds to suspect they may be used by Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, and elsewhere where they could be used to commit or facilitate
– a serious violation of international humanitarian law..."
The motion: https://utfadivestmyupp.ca/utfa-members-motion/

2025-05-06 14:09:56 GMT

Why do we write? That's the question that LLMs force me back to every time. And I can see why some, in certain circumstances, see little value in the act of writing. But so far, I'm not one of them. Not for emails, not for reports that exist purely to satisfy bureaucratic box-ticking, not for data summary, and certainly not for any kind of publication. I write because it's how I organize my thoughts. I write from a deep need to communicate, to take what's inside me and share it. Can AI do that?

2024-12-17 21:25:32 GMT

Kid1 (I swear!) making fudge.
#cooking
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2024-12-13 21:16:37 GMT

Call me a dreamer, but wouldn't it be great if we stopped trying to turn a profit on our public services and just funded them in accordance with how essential they are to society?

2024-12-04 12:34:51 GMT

« les gens sont des musées fragiles »
D'un livre qui vaut le détour : Jocelyn Sioui, Mononk Jules (2020)
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2024-12-02 15:14:47 GMT

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I know! In general (at least in academia), we always preface "fellow" with "postdoctoral" when referring to a "stagiaire postodoctoral" - otherwise, the safest rendering is simply "chercheur."

2024-12-02 15:06:30 GMT

No, dear translator, "fellow" is not always equivalent to "stagiaire postdoctoral," especially if the person in question received their PhD in... 1976.

2024-11-26 15:49:54 GMT

I write ibid in
English without italics
And in French with them.
#haiku

2024-11-22 11:56:58 GMT

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It's really an ideal type, although they did exist in parts of Canada and the US.

2024-11-21 13:35:55 GMT

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Yes, resistance can take place within their walls (a great example is the meeting space LGBTQ+ groups were able to secure in the bowels of Square One in the 1980s-90s unbeknownst to the generally hostile suburban communities in which members lived). But corporate social media, like privately owned shopping malls, is not built for resistance, but for profit and top-down control and this, it seems to me, is what it will always privilege.
5/
#SocialMedia #history

2024-11-21 13:35:55 GMT

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The shopping mall developed as a commercial response to this new environment. People could acquire the goods they wanted in a collection of shops imagined by architects as a suburban recreation of the old "town square." The trouble, of course, is that the mall was private, not public space. In the US, the Supreme Court initially held that free speech - that is, protest - was protected in this new space (though courts have cut back on this protection over time).
3/
#SocialMedia #history

2024-11-21 13:35:55 GMT

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In Canada, jurisprudence has tended to hold that shopping malls are private space and that owners can thus banish dissent from within their walls.
This strikes me as a useful metaphor for much social media. Twitter, FB, Threads, etc. are corporate-owned. They are no more the "town square" than Square One, a large shopping mall not far from where I sit in suburban Toronto. And by insisting they are, we're promoting their false promise and deluding ourselves.
4/
#SocialMedia #history

2024-11-21 13:35:54 GMT

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Historians of postwar North America have written much on the rise of consumer society and suburbanization, about the upper-middle class retreat to inaccessible and sometimes literally gated communities. This move, combined with the physical separation things like large lots in car-centric, purely residential neighbourhoods imposed, hollowed out civic culture and insulated many from having to deal with "others," people who were different from them in any number of ways.
2/
#SocialMedia #history

2024-11-21 13:35:54 GMT

I listened to a CBC piece on social media this morning and it occurs to me that so much of the tension it causes arises from mischaracterization. Despite corporate marketing types and business profs referring to Twitter ad naseum as a digital "town square," it strikes me as being more of an agora in a digital shopping mall.
As a historian, I'd like to suggest thinking about social media in terms of change over a longer period of time than we tend to.
1/
#SocialMedia #history

2024-11-18 23:01:19 GMT

Every once in a while, I come across a list, an argument, an otherwise smart person claiming all of Canada believes, is, loves, hates something. Sometimes they're right (hockey, Tim Hortons, constitutional reform). Still, more often than not, the claim totally ignores the nearly quarter of the country's population whose first language is French.

2024-11-12 19:56:30 GMT

My institution is congratulating itself on raising the base funding package for PhD students up to the poverty line. Yay #academia!

2024-11-05 21:40:22 GMT

Flowers in Toronto (November 5, 2024)
#BloomScrolling #gardening #ClimateDiary
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2024-11-04 16:21:06 GMT

RIP Murray Sinclair.
https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/murray-sinclair-judge-senator-and-chair-of-the-truth-and-reconciliation-commission-dead-at-73/article_7166e608-947c-11ef-9bde-036f5cda7706.html

2024-10-29 16:22:44 GMT

Yay, federal elections! Tabarnak.

2024-10-29 13:52:46 GMT

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Oh, I know. Still, any Montreal-Toronto train is high speed if it takes less than 5 hours (6 really, once you factor in the delays guaranteed by passenger rail's second-class status in a country where freight is king).

2024-10-29 12:16:12 GMT

I will believe high-speed rail exists in Canada when I get on a train in Toronto and get off in Montreal three hours later and not before.

2024-10-25 12:36:58 GMT

I don't want "town halls" or "fireside chats," these internal gatherings where university admin feed us insipid lines inspired if not actually prepared by PR consultants telling us about the extent of faculty and staff excellence and their own deep commitment to equity. Could we have some accountability - even if only a tiny bit - instead?
#academia

2024-10-19 11:52:20 GMT

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I did my MA in Lyon 20 years ago and climbed that hill every day for months to go to the archives. I was definitely in better shape then.
PS Have a brioches à la praline for me!

2024-10-18 01:43:09 GMT

In a perfect world, my vote would both support the candidates of my choice and automatically unsubscribe me from all of their party's mailing lists.

2024-10-02 21:49:01 GMT

New in the Canadian Historical Review (I am one of the co-editors): a fine article tracing current vaccine hesitancy to shifts in parenting and the rise of neoliberalism in the late 20th century.
Kathryn Hughes , Catherine Carstairs, "'Needling Doubts': Maternalism, Neo-liberalism and Intensive Parenting as the Roots of Vaccine Hesitancy in English-speaking Canada, 1980–2007"
https://doi.org/10.3138/chr-2023-0006
#histodons #history #vaccine #vaccination #PublicHealth #MedicalHistory #neoliberalism #Canada

2024-09-30 13:17:07 GMT

For National Day for Truth and Reconciliation in #Canada, I recommend reading #history, whether on residential schools, or on the broader question of #colonialism. Here's a short piece I quite like - it provides necessary context for the histories of migration that figure prominently in so many of our families' stories.
Sheelah McLean, “‘We Built a Life From Nothing’: White Settler Colonialism and the Myth of Meritocracy” (2018)
https://policyalternatives.ca/sites/default/files/uploads/publications/National%20Office/2017/12/McLean.pdf
#OrangeShirtDay #TruthAndReconciliation

2024-09-25 18:35:24 GMT

If anyone would like to live in Toronto for a couple of years, my university offers a decent postdoctoral fellowship. Feel free to share or to reach out yourself if our interests line up. Deadline: 10 October. @npub1uc0…cpgf
https://www.utm.utoronto.ca/research-innovation/funding-awards/postdoctoral-fellows/internal-funding-postdocs/utm-postdoctoral-fellowship-award
#histodons #postdoc

2024-09-03 21:56:27 GMT

Teaching on Fridays means I'm never forced, er, privileged, to attend departmental team-building events.

2024-08-22 21:20:17 GMT

Why do today what you should've done yesterday?

2024-08-12 20:32:16 GMT

In a normal week, journals receive a mix of under-done, half-assed, off-topic, and LLM-authored submissions. A good week sees some of the above along with a fine, if not really ready piece. And then there are the extraordinary weeks when the journal receives two separate submissions, both of which make major contributions and could be published more or less as is. This is an extraordinary week and I don't expect to see another like it again during my tenure.

2024-07-06 11:46:52 GMT

English translation of a letter on tomorrow's legislative elections from 1,000 French historians "from differing political backgrounds who share an attachment to democratic values and the rule of law" first published in Le Monde on Monday. @npub1uc0…cpgf
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/jul/06/french-republic-voters-election-far-right
#histodons #France

2024-05-08 15:38:44 GMT

This morning, I wandered by the encampment at the University of Toronto. The students' demands seem clear to me.
#StudentProtest #divestment #HigherEd #UofT #cdnpoli
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2024-05-02 12:29:44 GMT

Students at my institution - the University of Toronto - have joined others across the continent in establishing an encampment on campus. Having been rebuffed by the administration in early April, the students continue to call "on the post-secondary institution to divest from assets that 'sustain Israeli apartheid, occupation and illegal settlement of Palestine.'"
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/israel-palestine-hamas-war-protests-toronto-1.7191443
#UofT #Toronto #HigherEd #cdnpoli #CampusProtests #divestment