Historian (U Chicago), author SF/Fantasy, composer; Renaissance, Latin, censorship, radical thought, manga, disability/chronic pain, gelato https://t.co/WmvGIcwgYh
Mar 3, 2022 • 22 tweets • 4 min read
I have a partial and answer to this important question, from an experience interacting with a former student who had done an internship with a weapons manufacturer, which is interesting as an example of why it's so important that we teach people how to think about history 1/?
The former-intern described, at job orientation, that they gave a presentation with slides, including a graph which claimed to show the % of the human population which died in war each year over a multi-century time scale, and that the % held constant over time 2/?
Aug 5, 2020 • 34 tweets • 12 min read
Barbie 2020 Career of the Year is (for the first time) a team, Political Campaign team featuring 4 dolls: Candidate, Campaign Manager, Fundraiser, and Voter, w/ diverse race body types. barbie.mattel.com/shop/en-us/ba/… Interesting to compare to past Career of the Year Barbies THREAD (1/?)
I'll give the list first, then some analysis. Barbie had already had many earlier careers, including astronaut, president, business woman, and others, but the formal Career of the Year series launched in 2010. (2/?)
Jul 27, 2020 • 17 tweets • 4 min read
Recently, I saw a thesis adviser mark points off a history student's thesis for including a 19th c 2ndary source in bibliography. So while one needs to be careful w/ 19th c. histories, here's a brief thread w/ 2 reasons y I also love them. Fellow #twitterstorians please add more!
Reason 1) 19th c. historians are incredibly thorough. There are plenty of things they're wrong about or don't know yet, but the breadth of random facts is often far wider than 20th c. histories. This is because of the periods' different habits of scholarly competition (2/?)
Jul 12, 2020 • 18 tweets • 4 min read
This legislation gets at an important fact: agriculture's environmental harm & animal cruelty are shaped and worsened by labor exploitation, so (counter-intuitively) improving labor rights & protections is essential to protect environment & animals *as well as* people. Thread:
Short version: farmers. Farms tend to have a very low profit margin, and the more farmers are squeezed by low agricultural prices, the more they're forced/incentivised to reduce costs and increase yield by any means necessary, even if those means are unsafe, harmful, or cruel 2/?
Aug 9, 2019 • 12 tweets • 3 min read
Thread: the fascinating history of how long it took Europe to start questioning the ancient assumption (shared by Plato & many) that people automatically absorb/imitate behavior they see in fiction and thus that depictions of bad behavior would lead to bad behavior.
Medieval education made wide us of the idea that reading about people's lives leads to imitating them. Lives of saints or great men, chronicles of great deeds, these were didactic/educational genres intended to make the reader absorb the virtues displayed.
Jul 15, 2019 • 9 tweets • 2 min read
Renaissance sexual ideas were also distinct to the era. In Florence which was famous as a capital of "sodomy" where records suggest over 50% of men had both male and female sexual partners at different times, & many male-male relationships were quite public (thread) #renfacts
Michael Roche's brilliant book "Forbidden Friendships" looks at Renaissance sexual attitudes, but I see it whenever I read primary sources. It's extremely rare for me to read collected letters or an autobiography from the Renaissance & not see male-male relationships come up...
