Trump's Gettysburg chat led some historians to write good threads. (Links ahead.) On the anniversary of Lincoln's death, let's ask why he was a successful strategist—why Jeff Davis failed—and how "revisionist" history makes military history better.
The answer is slavery.
1/17
🧵

https://twitter.com/TJStiles_Author/status/1779592074326954421

Yes, slavery caused the Civil War. Long story short: The White South believed slavery would only endure if extended. Not just abolitionists but all Yankees resented this political aggression of the "slave power." Two newspaper clippings from 1860, Maine & South Carolina.
2/17

Just for fun, let's take Trump's disquisition on the Battle of Gettysburg seriously. 🧵

1st, why does he bring it up? To flatter the Pennsylvania audience. Hey, you've got Gettysburg. I like Gettysburg! "Gettysburg, wow."

2nd, he decides he has to explain. Hoo boy.
1/9

https://twitter.com/RpsAgainstTrump/status/1779509350865789208

Trump says it's "where our Union was saved by the immortal heroes," adds a string of random adjectives, and clarifies that he thinks it was a good thing: "such a big portion of the success of this country." Inarticulate, reductive, but sure, why not?
2/9

🧵
It's the anniversary of the Confederates' firing on Fort Sumter. Also of the day when my great-great-grandfather, Jonathan Dillon, inscribed graffiti in Lincoln's watch. He got 3 things wrong: The date. The spelling. And, tellingly, he misremembered it.
Let's take a walk.
1/13 Dillon was a skilled artisan, a watchmaker, from Waterford, Ireland. He was also a refugee from the famine. Tyler Anbinder, an exceptional historian, discusses Dillon and other artisans in his terrific history of New York's Irish. Like many, Dillon came and went from NYC.
2/

Gift-buying season—and am I shilling! (Fun fact: Shilling was old NY slang for the 12.5¢ piece, also called a "bit.")

But I want to address the question of whether historians—biographers, in my case—distort the past to push an agenda. Let's look at robber barons & monopoly.
1/ Had I denounced a robber baron or praised a captain of industry, it would have been a more boring story as well as worse history. It *is* a good story: A social outsider who fights his way in through a series of ever-larger battles. (Seated foreground, Saratoga Springs, 1873.)
2/

What do we want in a nonfiction book? Ten ideas.

1) Baseline: Take out the &$%€ing cliches and dead phrases.
2) Know what you want to say. Just want to tell a story? OK! Making an argument? Know your own mind, then read some more, reconsider. Good thinking is good writing.
1/8 3) Convince the reader of the truth of your book. That rests both on research and on honesty in writing. Hit a gap in sources? Let us know. Pretty sure X happened in Y way, but can’t nail it down? Tell us that. I don’t mean second-guess yourself, just establish honesty.
2/8

A disaster could be coming.

Start with what we know about politics:
1) Candidates use what has worked before.
2) Republicans rely on a base-only, push-even-farther-to-the-right strategy.
3) McConnell's blocking Garland, putting a SCOTUS seat in play, let Trump win in 2016.
1/8 4) Though polls show voters care about other stuff more, within the GOP the fight against abortion has been a central galvanizing issue.

Given this, will GOP candidates say, "Hey, we won! Abortion is out of national politics. It's up to states. Done and done." No way.
2/8

When Fort Sumter was attacked, my great-great-grandfather, Jonathan Dillon, was repairing Lincoln's watch. He passed down a story, which he told to @nytimes on April 30, 1906, that he left an inscription inside it. My grandfather told the tale around the dinner table. 1/4 Unknown to me, my cousin Doug Stiles found the Times story & saw his description matched the Lincoln watch at the @smithsonian. In 2009, the museum had a Lincoln bicentennial show. Amazingly, the curator listened to Doug. The museum opened the watch. 2/4 si.edu/newsdesk/relea…

Writing thread: Secondary characters in biography and history.

When writing a biography, it's easy to fall into the trap of focusing relentlessly on your subject. Writers of narrative history sometimes treat people not as characters but inanimate objects. Let's fix that.
1/11 When Jean Strouse turns to the creation of the Morgan Library, she does so through the librarian, Belle da Costa Greene. After a glorious description, she springs a surprise that makes the library chapter also about the rising Black intelligentsia in America. Stunning.
2/11

Is stupidity a defense that you're not evil? In the case of elected officials, no. It gets people killed. Since Trump lost the 2020 election, Sen. Ron Johnson is both the dumbest and most evil elected official in America.

At least we have Petri.
washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/… Ron Johnson is *still* pushing Ivermectin as an alternative to vaccination. It has been closely studied. Ivermectin helps—only if you have worms as well as COVID. Don't have worms? Don't take it. Pro tip: Don't take drugs for ailments you don't have.
economist.com/graphic-detail…

A shocking thread about...historiography. Really.

Our story begins in 1901, when John Garner published his dissertation—what became for decades the standard history of #Reconstruction in #Mississippi—with adviser William A. Dunning at Columbia, the leading historian.
1/11 Garner had to answer why in 1875 an armed insurrection overthrew the elected government of Mississippi under Gov. Adelbert Ames. He started with the carpetbagger stereotype: thieving yankees came to despoil the prostrate South. But he found that Ames didn't fit it.
2/11

Writing thread: Openings, one of my favorite topics.

In a work of history or biography, the first paragraph, often the first sentence, tells you if you are in the hands of a writer, or someone just trying to arrange research and argument in some kind of logical order.

1/9 There are books that shout, “Here’s a bunch of stuff I know about this topic,” or, “Scholarly contribution!” But real writing requires that you give the reader a reason to turn every page. Raise questions in the mind of the reader & delay the answers, as David Lodge says.

2/9

When my bio of Jesse James came out, some were upset at my portrait of a pro-slavery terrorist in the Civil War who seized the role of Confederate hero in Reconstruction politics in Missouri. I besmirched a folk hero!

Why is that? It says something about white supremacy.
1/9 I wasn’t making a leap. I just took seriously what he himself wrote & how he was discussed. His family enslaved 7 people in 1860. Proslavery politics was fierce and ugly in western Missouri, & his family was very partisan—hardcore secessionist. So why has that been denied?
2/9

Texas HB 3979 blocks Critical Race Theory in public schools. It's hard to imagine any prosecutions resulting. But it makes teachers vulnerable to parents' complaints—especially of the hot-take variety. And it could have unintended consequences.

Let's take a look, shall we?

1/10 Some of Texas HB 3979 is fine. It requires that students learn about founding documents, the 13th, 14th, 15th Amendments, Native American history, etc. Correct me if an amendment changes this. But it's got some wacky & dangerous language. It's a mess.
2/10
capitol.texas.gov/tlodocs/87R/se…

Academic historians fret about not reaching the public. It's not enough to say (even if true), "I'm doing such important & interesting work." It's about writing.

First, accept that work that doesn't signal that it's for academics only can still be cutting-edge scholarship.
1/5 There are conventions for journal articles & monographs that serve a professional purpose, & signal that they are for fellow scholars. That's fine! But historians should embrace serious work that doesn't follow these conventions. It's not dumbing down to depart from them.
2/5

Just Trump's opening remarks are lunacy. His first reason for asserting fraud is rally size. He claims 50,000 voters were told they couldn't vote because they already did & 100,000s of ballots were forged. No court has seen *any* evidence for any of this.
washingtonpost.com/politics/trump… At about 7:29, he says, "We won every state and every single statehouse.... We won Congress..."

I had jokingly suggested that Trump should just claim that he won every state. Why limit himself, if he's going to make stuff up? Lo and behold, he did.

Historian @KevinLevin mentioned a new biography of Lee coming this fall. I have no knowledge or opinion of it. But some historians asked, "Do we really need a new biography of Lee?" The answer is easy: always—if done right. The reasons are complicated. 1/7
penguinrandomhouse.com/books/253141/l… Of course, I wrote about a man who is even more frequently chronicled and even more unpopular than Lee—though he contributed materially to Lee's defeat. I'd argue it was worth doing. I see four reasons for new biographies of old subjects.
2/7
indiebound.org/book/978030747…

Jesse James & Donald Trump: A thread.

Trump's reelection slogans come straight from the long history of white supremacy:
1) "Law & Order"
2) "Radical left governors & mayors"
3) "Protect the suburbs [from black people]"

Jesse James's life illuminates their meaning.
1/10 I'm not the great scholar of white supremacy, but I see a repeated pattern, including in Jesse James's life.

1) "Law & order" represents the *aggression* of white supremacy. Before the Civil War, the growing challenge to the slaveholders' dominance bred aggressive demands.
2/10

As a public service, here’s a summary of President Trump’s message to the American people so far:
1) The virus is nothing! You won’t even notice you’re sick. Go to work. Shake a lot of hands.
2) IT’S A FREAKING CHINESE INVASION!
3) A hoax. Fake news & Democrats want to ruin me... 4) I’m so focused on this. I’m super aggressive and a natural born scientist and took all the steps no one thought I should take before I was even president. In sum, Obama—swine flu—total disaster.
5) It will go away in a miracle. It’s more of a February virus. Hates April...