This site is the collective work of students in HIST 300: Critical Thinking with AI, taught at the University of New Mexico in Spring 2026. Each essay on this site was researched and written by a student in the course, using both traditional historical methods and AI tools as part of a sustained inquiry into how new technologies disrupt the nature of expertise.
When a new technology changes who can produce and share information, what happens to the idea of expertise?
This question sits at the heart of every essay on this site. From the printing press to the telegraph to social media, new information technologies have repeatedly triggered the same anxious debates: Will this make us smarter or dumber? Who gets to be an authority now? Can we trust what we’re reading? How do we know what we know?
These are not abstract questions. They are the questions people in every era have had to answer when the ground shifted under their feet. And they are the questions we are living through right now, as artificial intelligence remakes how information is produced, distributed, and evaluated.
Each student contributor chose a historical moment when a technology disrupted the flow of information and the authority of expertise. Working from real historical sources—and using AI as a research assistant, not an oracle—each essay tells the story of that disruption: what people hoped for, what they feared, what actually happened, and what it might mean for thinking about AI today.
The essays are deliberately short and public-facing. They are not academic papers. They are invitations: to look at the past carefully, to resist easy analogies, and to think more clearly about the moment we’re in.
Every essay on this site was produced with AI assistance, and every essay documents that assistance honestly. We used AI to brainstorm, to draft, to find connections, to test ideas. We did not use it to replace source verification, historical judgment, or the work of actually thinking.
One of the course’s core arguments is that AI is most useful not when it gives you answers, but when it helps you ask better questions. These essays are an attempt to model that. History does not provide simple answers to questions about technology. But it can help us ask the right ones.
This site was built with the Xanthan framework, a free, open-source toolkit for academic websites hosted on GitHub Pages.