Friends - I hope you’ll check out my new article in the AHR. It explains how the international arms trade empowered and connected the American Revolution, the Haitian Revolution, and the Spanish American Wars for Independence. (🧵1/7) academic.oup.com/ahr/article-ab… An informal arms-control regime made it impossible for Europe’s American subjects either to build or buy enough war material to equip independence through war. As became clear by early 1777, even the hemisphere’s best-connected colonists couldn’t do it. (2/7)

Lots of headlines about ChatGPT's hallucinations. But my colleague Daniel Sargent tells me about something that scholars should be especially concerned with: ChatGPT will invent nonexistent books and nonexistent ISBNs to "cite" its made-up claims. nytimes.com/2023/02/16/tec… Daniel was experimenting with ChatGPT by asking it questions about Mexico's Independence War. He asked whether Miguel Hidalgo is considered an Enlightenment figure. ChatGPT answered, and then Daniel asked for citations.

The U.S. has 4.25% of the global population, but owns half of the world's privately-held firearms. Gun violence is vastly worse here than in other wealthy countries because there are vastly more guns here than in other wealthy countries. That's the bedrock fact. Understanding subtler dynamics - the connection b/t particular laws and gun violence, for example - is challenging. Partly that's because the gun lobby has put up barriers to research b/c it knows information is dangerous. A powerful new paper demonstrates just how dangerous.

Justice Thomas's majority opinion reminds us that "Historical analysis can sometimes be difficult." True! So what does the best historical analysis have to say about the purpose of the 2nd Amendment? A thread. nytimes.com/live/2022/06/2… "A well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the People to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed." Over the past thirty years, a rich, interdisciplinary body of scholarship has endeavored to understand the purpose of those words.

Smart interview by @AlexYablon with sociologist Vida Bajc, on what gun massacres are doing to our public space. "We’re losing public spaces to people who will walk in and shoot. That increases the pressure to privatize or militarize every public setting." thetrace.org/2019/08/mass-s… "The right to bear arms is at its heart about a lack of trust in those same institutions that we demand protect us. The presence of guns necessitates exactly what people who carry guns say they want to be free from: state interference & control." @nikhil_palsingh

Over the next few weeks, students will get the chance to evaluate their professors and TAs. They're going to get it wrong. They'll be harder on women and people of color than on white men. Tenured white male faculty, in particular, should help their students understand this. 1/8 Several studies have revealed the limitations of student evaluations of teaching (SETs). Berkeley's Philip Stark, Statistician & Associate Dean of Mathematical and Physical Sciences, co-authored a major study on this question a couple of years ago. It found: 2/8

A thread about 3D printed guns, and why you shouldn’t believe the hype. They won’t save us from government tyranny, and they won’t make our country’s gun violence problem much worse than it already is. Because they suck. Cody Wilson and his supporters have an exalted opinion of his place in history, telling the world that he is ushering in a New Age - the Age of the Downloadable Gun. Yesterday his lawyer compared Wilson’s code to the Pentagon Papers. Heady stuff. nytimes.com/2018/07/31/us/…

Thread about a bonkers massive explosion that happened in 1892, a mile from my house in Albany, CA. On July 9, at 9:21am, the nitroglycerin building blew up at Giant Powder Works at Fleming Point (site of today's Golden Gate Fields racetrack). That's how it started. This plant was part of a network of explosive and chemical plants around the Bay. Once the nitro blew, everyone in the complex knew the drill and ran for their lives. Buildings at the site soon went up one after another, "as if they were so many mines connected by a fuse."

Remington's bankruptcy illustrates three ways in which gun manufacturers have historically depended on the state; and also how that dependence is masked by our current politics. First, a significant portion of Remington's revenue comes from public contracts, as it has for more than 150 years. The company nursed itself on government sales and foreign contracts during the 19th C. It made than 3 million guns for the US and its allies in the World Wars. 2/