1. My colleague Richard Ellis and I edited this collection of essays which will be published in April. Much of the work was completed before our current President had much of a chance to reveal his historian's chops. upress.virginia.edu/title/5279
2. But I was just reminded of this series of tweets from Trump's Inaugural which offered up little tidbits of information on past presidents. They reveal an interesting, MAGA-inflected take, on American history. For example, Madison was a shrimp, while Lincoln was bigly. 
3. Note also that the Civil War "saved the union." The absence of the word slavery in relation to Lincoln seems, um, like an odd oversight, if not intentional. Also, Madison was known for his deep erudition and his patient intelligence, not his "mightiness."
4. Up next we have Washington and his endlessly fascinating teeth...many of which (despite what it says here) came from humans, including (almost certainly) humans who he enslaved. An interesting lie to tell about the President who supposedly "could not tell a lie."
5. While we'll probably never be 100% certain about the provenance of the teeth in GW's mouth, even the folks at Mt. Vernon (who are very protective of GW's reputation) admit that he purchased nine teeth from people he enslaved (likely for his own use). mountvernon.org/george-washing…
6. The richly symbolic fact that the "father of our country" nourished himself with the aid of teeth taken from the mouths of the enslaved people whose labor created his wealth seems like something the nation might want to to sit with and ponder.
7. Instead, we treat GW's teeth as a "humanizing" detail, cool sh*t from the past that makes us feel sympathetic for the poor guy who must have lived in such pain. He did live in pain and that's unfortunate...but his pain paled in comparison to those who he enslaved.
8. Mockingbirds and vanilla ice cream are *definitely* what Americans today should remember about Thomas Jefferson! It's stunning now many of these Presidential mini-bios read like the opening credits of MTV's The Real World.
9. Given that many white ethno-nationalists cheered Trump's election (including two white nationalists who somehow got front-row, VIP seats to the inaugural); it's especially intriguing that this feed chose to identify James Monroe as a supporter of Liberia's colonization.
10. Monroe was indeed a supporter of the American Colonization Society, an organization devoted to making America entirely white by shipping all people of African descent (free and enslaved) back to Africa. loc.gov/exhibits/afric…
11. There were some African-Americans, such as Paul Cuffee, who supported Liberian colonization...but the overwhelming majority of African-Americans agreed with David Walker that "the colonizing trick" was racist claptrap. docsouth.unc.edu/nc/walker/walk…
12. So who knows what the intern who wrote the Monroe factoid was thinking. The wording almost makes it seem as if Monroe was a genuine supporter of the people of Liberia...rather than a guy hoping to rid America of black people by sending them back to Africa against their will.
13. Here's John Quincy Adams who, like 99% of all lawyers in America before the 1890s, become a lawyer without going to law school. There was not a single law school in America when JQA was in his 20s. The trademark, MAGA attention to detail at work here.
14. This one is an interesting self-own. Jackson won the electoral vote in 1824 but did not become president. Maybe not a great idea to remind folks that Democrats have a history of winning the popular vote but losing the Presidency. (See 2000 & 2016)
15. Steve Bannon encouraged Trump to adorn the walls of the Oval Office with Jackson's portrait because white populism. This led to this unfortunate photo op in which Trump honors Native American veterans in front of a portrait of the president responsible for the Trail of Tears.
16. Here's a great piece on how Bannon and Trump learned the wrong lesson from Andrew Jackson's populist, loyalty-obsessed presidency. washingtonpost.com/outlook/2018/0…
17. The point of this thread (and the book with which it opened) is to point out that history is always present in our politics. Presidents have no choice but to articulate who they are, what they believe in, & what they want to do in reference to their Presidential predecessors.
18. All of our past presidents have had at least some basic understanding of US history that guided their actions. They frequently invoked history as justification, and they tried to persuade their fellow citizens to embrace their distinctive interpretations of the past.
19. At this stage, it's hard to imagine the sort of essay a future historian might write about the historical imagination of Donald Trump. Perhaps "imagination" will be the operative word, because historical "knowledge" & "understanding" seem to be in short supply in MAGA-land.
