"Chill Commie." Professor of History at Illinois State Uni. Intellectual historian. Write books about US history, Karl Marx, culture wars, history of education.
Jan 21, 2025 • 20 tweets • 4 min read
My book is big--600 pages! Yet I had to cut lots of words. Which means plenty of interesting figures didn't make the cut (often b/c they didn't fit an analytical through line). One such person is notorious Episcopal bishop William Montgomery Brown, AKA "Bad Bishop Brown." Thread.
The Bad Bishop is an outlier in the long American history of Marx reception. Nonetheless his story is remarkable. Born in Ohio in 1855, by the turn of the 20C Brown was a well-respected minister in Arkansas, where he had cultivated an orthodox perspective on religion and race.
Dec 29, 2023 • 34 tweets • 5 min read
Now that I've completed this excellent book by Nick Witham (published by @UChicagoPress), a thread about the content, argument, & merits of this book is in order. (Warning: This is kind of long, more like a book review.)
This book is about how Richard Hofstadter, Daniel Boorstin, John Hope Franklin, Howard Zinn, & Gerda Lerner became that rare breed of academic historians who crossed over to become highly successful writers of popular history.
Sep 17, 2020 • 12 tweets • 5 min read
Trump’s attack on liberal indoctrination in the history classroom is consistent with right-wing anxieties that go back at least a century. I can recommend lots of books for those interested, including two of my own.
The classic account of what is in fact the opposite--that US history textbooks are full of distortions that point in the direction of American exceptionalism--is James Loewen's "Lies My Teacher Told Me." It's sold millions of copies, for good reason.
I have grave concerns about how higher education will survive this pandemic if it's too dangerous to reopen campuses this fall. I haven't voiced these concerns in detail here because discourse is understandably so fraught. A true Catch-22. But we need to think seriously now.
Ultimately higher education is going to likely need a massive federal bailout. This seems necessary & also fair since corporations have already received massive bailouts. To begin with, same logic applies: universities like corporations are crucial institutions that employ many.
Sep 25, 2019 • 11 tweets • 3 min read
THREAD. Why is it that the left has such a rich history of sectarianism compared to the right? Why does intra-right-wing squabbling have a far less distinguished history than left-wing infighting? This is something I've been thinking a lot about. My hypothesis follows... #USIH
It has a lot to do with the vastly different premises that have given rise to the right and the left. The right is mostly okay with things that have long persisted in human history, like inequality, and thus does not feel compelled to imagine alternative worlds into being.
