More from @arothmanhistory

Adam Rothman

@arothmanhistory

22 Sep

https://twitter.com/ThaddeusRussell/status/1308509144962363395

Thank you to Thaddeus Russell for having me and Barbara Fields on #Unregistered. Please watch. We discuss the Hannah Fizer case, racecraft, and history.

https://twitter.com/ThaddeusRussell/status/1308509144962363395

@ThaddeusRussell

Here's the episode. If you've never heard Barbara Fields speak about racecraft before, you are in for a treat and an education. @ThaddeusRussell #Unregistered

@DissentMag

As a reminder of what sparked this conversation, here's the essay that Barbara Fields and I wrote for @DissentMag dissentmagazine.org/online_article…

Read 4 tweets

Adam Rothman

@arothmanhistory

26 Aug

@GUHistory

Teaching a grad class for @GUHistory on the US to 1900 this semester. Just had an invigorating first class, despite being on Zoom. Always fun to get to know a new group of students. Let's go!

@dsallentess

Kicked off the semester with *Our Declaration* by @dsallentess. All historians should reflect seriously on this line from the book: "While history can serve to help us understand many things much better, it can also function as a barrier to entry."

Book #2 in my grad class on US to 1900 is Robert Parkinson's The Common Cause, which shows how fears of slave revolt, Indian war, and foreign mercenaries inspired the patriot rebellion against Britian. Great on revolutionary-era information networks. uncpress.org/book/978146962…

Read 15 tweets

Adam Rothman

@arothmanhistory

18 Aug

@jbf1755

I was struck by this passage about historians' love of contingency in this essay by @jbf1755 in @TheAtlantic. I have something to say about this idea of contingency... theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/…

Historians often invoke contingency to imply that nothing is inevitable. Things could have gone one way or another. The concept goes hand-in-hand with agency, that all things are possible. Except that all things are not possible...

As Marx famously wrote in the 18th Brumaire, "Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please..." The historians' task is to explain why things happened as they did. That isn't our only task, but it is an important one...

Read 5 tweets

Adam Rothman

@arothmanhistory

8 Aug

https://twitter.com/jennyschuessler/status/1291929219715469313

RIP Bernard Bailyn, quite a historian. I would like to add one point about his contribution to the historiography of slavery...

https://twitter.com/jennyschuessler/status/1291929219715469313

In his landmark book, Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, published in 1967, Bailyn recognized the centrality of the idea of slavery in Anglo-American political thought...

Moreover, slavery was more than an abstract metaphor. The Revolution put tremendous pressure on actually existing colonial slavery, he argued. Here's Bailyn's conclusion to this part of the book...

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Adam Rothman

@arothmanhistory

11 Jul

Nobody can seriously believe that the U.S. system of policing and punishment provides either the due process or the equal protection promised by the 14th Amendment. We are in serious perpetual violation of our own Constitution.