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One year ago I was a history professor at a small liberal arts college in Oregon with about 1000 followers--mostly professional colleagues, friends, and former students. Then this happened.
12 months, 500 blocked trolls, and 11k followers later, here we are.
12 months, 500 blocked trolls, and 11k followers later, here we are.
I very much appreciate the new people I've gotten to know virtually through Twitter since then. I also am flattered that many people I don't know find what I have to say #onhere to be of use or interest. But the randomness of this still kind of freaks me out.
I began tweeting with some regularity during the 2016 primaries. I spoke primarily in my citizen voice, not my historian's voice. Those two identities are inextricably interwoven for me, but they are distinct. There are many things citizen me will say that historian me would not.
Historians, for example, understand that our insight into current events will ripen, sharpen, and evolve over time. Many forceful pronouncements about the events of the day (as one tends to make on Twitter) will assuredly come to look misguided, even foolish, in hindsight.
So "historian me" is always saying "you should wait to say something, I'm sure it's more complicated." Meanwhile "citizen me" is screaming OMG THIS IS TOTALLY UNACCEPTABLE AND YOU WILL REGRET IT IF YOU DON'T SPEAK OUT NOW!
There's also a professional norm of sorts (which I think is misguided, but it's there all the same) that says the more politically invested a historian is in their present moment the less trustworthy their historical scholarship is.
This is also a common misperception held by those outside the world of academic history. "You're biased, hence what you have to say about history is tainted by that bias and I have no reason to believe it."
Tho it is dated in some ways, this is still one of my favorite meditations on this issue. Historians are all people, and like all people they see the world from a historically-constituted perspective. And also, every person is to some extent a historian. historians.org/about-aha-and-…
I think I speak for many #twitterstorians when I say how perplexing I find it that so many people #onhere give a hoot what we have to say. It's almost as if a ton of people woke up in November 2016 and said, "holy crap, historians, tell us what's happening!!!"
There are many explanations, no doubt, for why historian Twitter has become such a thing. One explanation I'd offer has to do with historians' role as national mythmakers. Becker discusses this in the 1931 article linked above.
One way to understand Trumpism is as a concerted assault on a host of cherished myths about America--myths about being a nation of immigrants, about being a force for democracy in the world, about being a multi-racial society, about tolerance and progress.
To be clear, these "myths" are neither entirely false nor entirely true. These myths are bets on a future that selectively draw on a past to justify them and persuade others to embrace them. They are political myths grounded in history.
Stories about "us," stories about "America," that have the power to move "us" will be stories that build a compelling bridge from the past, into our present, and out into some imagined future toward which we, in our own small ways, are working.
So no wonder, at a moment when that sense of "us-ness" feels weaker and less achievable than it has in living memory, that people turn to a society's mythmakers to help them understand who "we" have been and who "we" might be in the future.
But there's an important distinction to be made here between the myths professional historians contribute to and the myths charlatans like Dinesh D'Souza contribute to. Professional historians do not knowing lie. The stories we tell are always grounded in the archive.
History can help us understand our present, but only when that history is based on reliable evidence, & when it has been run through the filter of peer review. Neither of these checks are infallible, but they weed out the fabulist myth makers from the ones doing it in good faith.
As Benedict Anderson argued long ago, nations are, culturally speaking, imagined entities comprised of stories that a group of people tell themselves about who they are. This is why modern history as a specific field of endeavor evolved alongside the nation state. 
This is not to say that nations aren't real, that they don't have economies and borders and armies and so on, but it's simply to say that nations are the stories they tell themselves about themselves, and these stories are always historical in nature. And also always political.
These stories matter because they impact how we act in the present. Here's a thread where I talk about one American myth that I value as a citizen (and which I find compelling as a historian) that Trumpism has cast into question.
In sum, when you read something #onhere by me or another historian, know that it always comes with a big old asterisk that says "but it's really more complicated than this, and in 20 years we'll have a very different understanding of it. But right now, I believe this to be true."
One last thing. When you encounter a historian on Twitter, remember that they receive neither pay nor institutional credit for doing this work. This is especially important in regard to historians who are working as adjuncts or who are otherwise not in tenure-track positions.
I am very fortunate to have a tenure track position teaching history. It affords me the time & protections to do more public-facing work like Twitter. If you want to support the work historians do, support better funding for the higher ed institutions that make our work possible.
