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Aaron Astor Profile picture
Aaron Astor
@AstorAaron
Historian of the 19th Century U.S. and Professor at Maryville College. Author of Rebels on the Border and Civil War along Tennessee's Cumberland Plateau
5 subscribers
May 7 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
Talk anybody who teaches at the college or K-12 level (esp. HS) and you will hear this: AI is making a mockery of every skill we try to teach. I'm not talking about ideas here. I'm talking basic ability to analyze a text & write an essay. Every out-of-class essay is suspect now. You can make more assignments to be done in class. You can talk about all the wonderful things that AI can help facilitate. But if there is a way to short cut the research and writing process, students will take it. And there are just no real answers for this.
Feb 4 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
Wait, so a person accepted the Federal worker buyout, including replying with "Resign" and then...nothing happened? Is this for real? Image Also, if you read the comments below that article, it's obvious that about 90% of the people didn't even read it. Just a complete waste of pixels. This platform is about as useless as DOGE's "buyout" plan, I guess.
Dec 1, 2024 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
We're in an ongoing epistemic crisis - we don't "know" what we think we "know" - and the causes are pretty clear: a combination of institutional arrogance and highly decentralized knowledge sources. The unanswered question is: what do we do about it beyond tearing old ways down? Here is where I think the liberal arts at its best is equipped to respond. By that I mean an open and honest inquiry into multiple realms of knowledge without prejudice, siloing or ideological rigidity. Focus on the logic of argumentation and the limits of personal experience.
Nov 6, 2024 • 11 tweets • 3 min read
Let's be honest here: This was an across-the-board shift away from the Democratic Party. Not just one demo (though Hispanics shifted the most). Two main reasons: Inflation and Democratic priorities and language that just doesn't appeal to non-college people (esp. men). Image Yes, a younger Joe Biden was able to communicate to many of these voters. I honestly think Harris herself did as well as she could have in this campaign on this. She didn't lean into identity politics, etc. But I think some of the experiences since 2020 really alienated people.
Nov 2, 2024 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
Holy shit! Selzer has Harris winning Iowa by 3!!! desmoinesregister.com/story/news/pol… Here's why everybody goes nuts of Ann Selzer's Iowa poll. Of course, she could be completely wrong this time. Nobody expected this result. I sure as hell didn't. But she's earned her reputation.
Oct 31, 2024 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
Something odd in that Fox News PA poll. The 2-way LV screen has Trump up 50-49. It has Trump winning whites just 52-48 and Harris winning non-whites 72-28. In 2020, whites were 81% of the PA electorate. If that were the case in 2024, this should be Harris up 52.5 to 47.4. Image In order to get to a Trump lead of 50-49, the LV sample would have to be 93% white instead of 81% white.
Oct 22, 2024 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Interesting tidbit from this NYS-Siena poll. New York Jewish voters in Siena's February 2024 NYS poll actually favored Trump over Biden, 53-44. Today, NY Jewish voters choose Harris over Trump 59-39. High margin of error for this sub-sample but that's a major shift. Image
Image Here are the crosstabs from Siena's February 2024 poll. Catholic voters are about the same in Feb as today at Trump +4. Protestants shifted to the Dem (+6 to +14). But the Jewish vote shifted from Trump +9 to Harris +20. Image
Oct 14, 2024 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
Some thoughts on this internal GOP Senate polling memo:
1) It's an actual polling memo with internal polls and results for Senate and Pres across several states - with pollster names listed. It's not a rumor of who is "underwater" or vibe gossip.

politico.com/news/2024/10/1… 2) I don't know why somebody leaked it to Politico. Could be a donor who wanted to bring attention to some races - and which to abandon. Here is the link to the pdf of it. static.politico.com/79/e9/eaf70108…
Sep 15, 2024 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
This is apparently the gunman arrested today. His politics are…weird. He’s a Vivek supporter? WTF? A reminder that the craziest people in America don’t fall along the typical left-right, Dem/GOP spectrum.
Mar 2, 2024 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Just curious but what is the typical percentage of a Presidential election that did not vote in the prior Presidential election? 2020 was the highest turnout in a century, BTW. This NYT poll suggests that 17% of 2024 voters didn't vote at all in 2020. Is that...high? Image Look in the right-most column for "did not vote in 2020".
Dec 28, 2023 • 10 tweets • 3 min read
A sudden reminder that the Republican Party was actually founded under an oak tree in Jackson, Michigan or at a little schoolhouse in Ripon, Wisconsin or at a thousand "Anti-Nebraska" meetings in the Spring of 1854. Some in places like Berlin, New Hampshire. They were former Whigs, former Democrats and former Liberty party people who agreed on one thing: slavery shall not extend any further. They organized against what they called "The Slave Power," which controlled the Democratic Party (thanks partly to a 2/3 nominating rule).
Nov 5, 2023 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
This is the biggest problem with a lot of the discourse around any one state plan in Israel-Palestine. Does the acceptable plan in the West - secular, binational, robust civil rights for all - have sizable support among either Israelis or Palestinians? Personally, I could accept this as much as I can a true two-state solution. But how many Palestinians want this? How many Israelis? As mangled and flawed as the Oslo plan was, there are still more people who support THAT in I-P than the Western-style secular lib/dem one state.
Nov 1, 2023 • 9 tweets • 2 min read
"Proportionality" in war: “expected to cause incidental loss of civilian life, injury to civilians, damage to civilian objects, or a combination thereof, which would be excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated”. ihl-databases.icrc.org/en/ihl-treatie… Proportionality, thus, is not necessarily about comparing numbers of civilian deaths. It has to do with "direct military advantage anticipated" per Geneva Conventions Article 51. Sections 5-7 are instructive in full: Image
Oct 26, 2023 • 6 tweets • 1 min read
If Palestinians are to be liberated from the “settler-colony” that is Israel, you need to orient your message toward the metropole - which means the US public. The language matters. So if you have to explain why “From the River to the Sea” isn’t actually genocide, you’re losing. Nobody is going to settle this conflict through force alone. There is a propaganda war. And that means paying attention to different audiences. A Hamas slogan is going to backfire in the US - in fact, it’s a reason support for Israel keeps going up in the US weeks after Oct 7.
Oct 10, 2023 • 9 tweets • 2 min read
[Thread} We hear a lot about putting the current Israeli-Palestinian conflict in historical context. As a historian, I couldn't agree more. But, there is not one single historical context. I would argue that there are three, and all three affect the present: Old, Middle & Recent. The Old Context goes from Canaan to the Ancient Hebrews to the Roman destruction of the Second Temple and subsequent Jewish Diaspora. And then there was the the arrival of the Arabs, the Crusades and the Ottoman conquest of the Levant.
Nov 4, 2022 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
9 years ago, Sawworks brewery in Knoxville linked up with Terrapin in Athens to produce a special "35th Parallel Ale" in honor of the line between TN and GA just before the Dawgs played the Vols. Image That 35th Parallel is the site of an important dispute though. Georgia's James Camak was hired in 1818 to survey the line and, well, he got it wrong. So wrong that when the Tennessee River would be dammed up, a huge water source would remain in Tennessee. atlasobscura.com/places/camak-s…
Oct 31, 2022 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
Reminder that 43 percent of white Harvard freshmen in 2019 were athletes, legacies, families of donors or of staff (ALDS). 70% of those white applicants would not have been accepted if they were not ALDS. If the issue is fairness, there is your problem. nbcnews.com/news/us-news/s… You can argue that Affirmative Action is also unfair to Asian Americans (and non-ALDS white applicants). But if you are going to jettison race conscious admissions policies because they are unfair, you really need to target the much bigger problem of white ALDS admits.
Oct 29, 2022 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
The assailant of Paul Pelosi is a reminder that a lot of political conflict today is horseshoes v. keystones. Horseshoes are the far left and far right mutually attacking "the establishment." Keystones are the defenders of the broad middle of the spectrum against both extremes. ImageImage Horseshoe people can shift from far left to far right (as David DePape seems to have done), or maintain a pastiche of both extremes simultaneously. Or just stand on one extreme and repeatedly link up with the other end of the horseshoe.
Oct 26, 2022 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Had a fun time in my early America class this morning discussing the Carlisle (PA) Riot of 1787-88, re: opponents of ratification of the Constitution. The primary documents, filled with invective, sarcasm & semi-ironic accusations about "process" say much about political culture. Here are the documents if you want to read them. The enclosed map below of Federalists and Antifederalists in Pennsylvania reflects some interesting settlement patterns. csac.history.wisc.edu/document-colle… Image
Oct 26, 2022 • 10 tweets • 2 min read
Other than typical midterm patterns, the biggest liability for Democrats this cycle is the set of pandemic restrictions and mandates that were often poorly conceived, unduly harsh & unfair, imposed undemocratically (and in Dem areas), lasted far too long, and overly moralized. The reason this matters is that they can't be chalked up to forces largely beyond our control. Yes, some policy choices made inflation and crime worse, but those are *mostly* issues that can't be fixed by simple policy choices. But the *response* to the pandemic was a choice.
Aug 1, 2022 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
Where have we seen this before? One candidate relies on analytics - "cyphering" - and preaching to the converted, while the other goes out and rallies voters wherever they are. In this case, it was two candidates stuck in their numbers. The third? Fernando Wood, Mayor of NYC. "Fernandy Wud" was the product of the Mozart Hall faction of the Democratic Party. He was too much of an ass even for Tammany Hall. But he won when Tammany's candidate and the Republican candidate each got cocky. Wood ended up being as atrocious a Mayor as expected.