The fantastic Ruth Marcus: "Originalism is a method rigged to produce a result — no abortion rights, easy access to guns — that is congenial to conservatives’ ideological preferences. On the occasions when it’s not, they cherry-pick history or, as here, abandon the approach."
Actual #historians have been saying the same thing for decades now. That's why they never wanted historian expert witnesses.
(“No organization, particularly a newsroom, can succeed unless it is cohesive and aligned … It has become clear that this appointment undermines that goal.”)
Funny — the journalists who spoke up said McDaniel’s departure was required to
🔸preserve their journalistic mission and the network’s credibility,
🔸not out of any need for “alignment.”
We can only hope that NBC and other news organizations take away something more than “don’t hire a MAGA mouthpiece”
A few ideas:
• Create a #mission#statement that affirms your goals are telling the #truth and defending #democracy, which protects the First Amendment — not fake balance. • #Stop#pretending four-times-indicted former president Donald Trump and his movement are presenting #alternative “#policies” as a normal party would. They are fighting for an alternate system: authoritarianism. • Politicians’ outright #lies must be identified, not just labeled as their “response” or “position.” • Instead of obsessing over #polls, devote extensive coverage to #analyzing the Heritage Foundation’s “#Project2025” and Trump’s #fascist#agenda. Feature #historians and political #scientists during news segments (not only on panels) to put Trump’s views and statements in context. • #Don’t excerpt a few words from a Trump rally or speech, dub it an “argument” and #ignore his mental short-circuits and #deteriorating#intellect.
🚨 Apply to be our Associate Director and an Assistant/Associate Research Professor in the Penn State Department of History! Review of materials (cover letter, CV, and list of 3 references) begins TOMORROW!! 🚨
The Menga dolmen is an ancient burial mound located near #Antequera, #Málaga, Spain. It has been dated to approximately 5,700 years ago and is one of the largest known #megalithic structures to be built in #Europe.
#AviShlaim’s #memoir, Three Worlds: Memoirs of an #ArabJew, turns the spotlight back on things that the #Jewish nation, centred on the state of #Israel, prefers to forget or suppress. It's a moving history of not just one of the world’s pre-eminent #historians & observers of the #MiddleEast, but also of a lost world in which #Arabs & #Jews had shared past & shared presence, one in which there was nothing preordained in the hostility that defines their current existence.
The 14th} amendment’s authors, they argue, “hoped not only to prevent a resurgence of secessionism but also to protect future generations against insurrectionism.” It was intended “to bar anyone who has betrayed an oath to uphold the Constitution from becoming President of the United States.”
Does anyone else envy #historians of the future? If even a fraction of the information that currently exists still exists 500+ years from now, every historian will have so much to work with.
Alternatively, rip future historians for how much shit will probably still exist. I imagine social media will be mostly useless as a source when they find exactly how horny we all were on main.
Great example of how scholarship works: this & other #medieval massacres were horrific & left lasting trauma, but #historians now see a far more limited impact and great resilience
In 1840s London, in the Belgrave Square area, would you have still commonly heard church bells, and would that have been on the hour/other time marker or only for special occasions?
'Audrey Salkeld, a pioneering historian who mined archives that had been neglected for decades to write about mountains like Kilimanjaro and Everest, which she also ascended, died on Oct. 11 in Bristol, England. She was 87.'
Nobel Laureate economist #Angus#Deaton has delivered a ferocious rebuke to his own profession, saying economists have failed to understand that ⭐️capitalism is about power.⭐️
Deaton lobs a series of truth bombs at his own profession, the result, he says, of “changing my mind, a discomfiting process for someone who has been a practising economist for more than half a century”.
These include:
🔸“We have largely stopped thinking about #ethics and about what constitutes human #well-#being”.
🔸If “economists should focus on efficiency and leave equity to others, to politicians or administrators… 🔹the others regularly fail to materialise🔹, so that when efficiency comes with upward redistribution
— frequently though not inevitably
— our recommendations become little more than a #license for #plunder”.
🔸“#Historians, who understand about contingency and about multiple and multidirectional causality, often do a better job than economists of identifying important mechanisms…”
🔸Far from being “a nuisance that interfered with economic (and often personal) efficiency”, #unions “once raised wages for members and nonmembers, they were an important part of social capital in many places, and they brought political power to working people in the workplace and in local, state, and federal governments.
🔸Their decline is contributing to the falling wage share, to the widening #gap between executives and workers, to community #destruction, and to rising #populism.”
🔸“I am much more sceptical of the benefits of free trade to American workers and am even sceptical of the claim, which I and others have made in the past, that globalisation was responsible for the vast reduction in global poverty over the past 30 years”.
🔸Immigration contributes to inequality.
But Deaton’s main point is a recognition of how #power distorts #policy:
“Our emphasis on the virtues of free, competitive markets and exogenous technical change can distract us from the importance of power in setting prices and wages, in choosing the direction of technical change, and in influencing politics to change the rules of the game.”
"Twenty-five historians of the civil war and Reconstruction filed a US supreme court brief in support of the attempt by Colorado to remove Donald Trump from the ballot under the 14th amendment, which bars insurrectionists from running for office."
I believe the windows were bricked up because a new window tax was introduced (in the 1700s?), that was calculated by the number of windows in a dwelling and, rather than pay, a lot of people bricked up their windows.
I'm forever annoyed about the lack of public engagement by #historians.
While I understand that a lot of minute details in #historiography would not interest the masses, a lot of topics & "truths" that are presented in media & public #education are simply false (or distorted) & few phd-having historians seem to have time to correct them.
(Outburst triggered by learning too many new things about Sparta, British Blitz propaganda, post-Roman Romanisms... )
More than 100 Australian historians have signed an open letter decrying Israel’s attacks on Gaza, saying they aim “to destroy Palestinian lives and render it impossible for Palestinians to live in Gaza”.
“As historians we know this as an attack on a people’s past, present and future,” the signatories added, citing Israel’s destruction of universities, schools, cultural institutions, libraries, archives, mosques and churches.