History Twitter is Good!
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My next career: I'm going to be a medium who delivers presidential endorsements from the spirit realm #presidentialhistory #twitterstorians
Twitter is often a hellscape of pile-ons and bad opinions, but once you find your people, there’s nothing like it. Here are the most thoughtful, vexing, delightful tweets I bookmarked in May and early June—with special appearances by Tom Hanks, Moby Dick, and Ellie Kemper:
Where I’m coming from: In my book, one of my secondary arguments is that the Black people I study, owned as slaves by Native Americans, received reparations in the form of 40 acres of land.
When I fist started working on the Madison Papers, I thought deciphering his encrypted correspondence would be intriguing. Turns out it’s more tedious than intriguing.
Dr. A.C. Jackson, called “most able Negro surgeon in America,” was shot to death while emerging from his home during Tulsa Race Massacre of a century ago:
Whenever this starts getting retweeted again I know he's done something shitty.
Letters of Note @LettersOfNote
“Don’t judge the past by the standards of the present!”
But also
“Don’t judge people in the present — let historians do it!” https://t.co/jXr8aMkHJe
DEFUND & ABOLISH POLICE, REFUND OUR COMMUNITIES @BreeNewsome
Squeeze! squeeze! squeeze! all the morning long; I squeezed that sperm till I myself almost melted into it
“Ms. Rivera was part of a group of Puerto Rican photographers, mostly men, who had set about documenting their community, seeking to wrest back their story from the wider society in which they were often stereotyped.”
A note on this map being shared all over the place.
1) It is really well done! And pretty darn thorough.
To prove that some groups are absent from our story of American history I gave students a list of important events in LGBTQ+ history and asked them to find any of them in our textbook. Take a wild guess how many they found?!? Yes, zero they found ZERO references to LGBTQ+ history
Making an attack on Critical Race Theory the center of your party’s politics is an odd way to make the point that race is not central to the narrative of America.
When a poltergeist began creating havoc in a 1930s London home, a psychic investigator got involved, hoping to prove the existence of ghosts once and for all.
Illinois is poised to become the first state to require Asian American history be taught in public schools.
If you're interested in how carnival balls like the Veiled Prophet developed during Reconstruction and lent glamour to white supremacy, I have a chapter on them in my history of the debutante ritual (including an account of my trip to one of them):
bookshop.org/books/the-seas…
Thee Hannah @hannastasia
Okay, we're all talking about the sweet and sort of awkward pic of the Bidens and the Carters, but can we talk about the latter's wedding photo? There is so much joy in this pic.
“And I thought, ‘Wait a minute… what happened about the Civil Rights movement? What about Martin Luther King?" Remarkably, the essay Hussman read "a couple of times" has an entire section on Martin Luther King, Jr. nytimes.com/interactive/20…
The conversation @AntheaButler @mboorstein and I had about Billy Graham, evangelicalism and American politics for @AmExperiencePBS yesterday is available here:
I feel like it's an underappreciated fact that the very real phenomenon called McCarthyism that dominated American politics and culture in the early 1950s was based upon an entirely fabricated "list of 57 known communists." Lies can shape reality.
This article mentions my case along with @CornelWest @nhannahjones and @garrett_felber I am proud to be in their company.
The average age of US Senators is older than it has ever been in history.
There is a minimum age for a senator (30), but unlike in Canada, no maximum age (Canada's max is 75). The military has mandatory retirement– but the people declaring war don't. Hmm
Yesterday's webinar, "Why you can't teach U.S. history without American Indians" (with @rkmiron, @Doug_Kiel, Liz Ellis, and Sasha Suarez), is now available to stream.
Huh, I wondered, why is Iroquois Confederacy trending? Surely not alongside the casual mention of a film (Birth of a Nation) that is still used for Klan recruitment? That sound you hear the simultaneous primal scream of historians
Jason Campbell @JasonSCampbell
"[Schools] should stop the battle to whitewash curriculums to avoid discomfort for students. America’s history is messy but knowing that makes us a wiser and stronger people." -- @tomhanks
See you next week! Until then, you can find me on Twitter and Instagram, and the books we’ve mentioned on Bookshop and Amazon.