The new take on Alexander Hamilton--and a new US origin story centered on...class! https://t.co/KD9mfBIVJY.
Jan 6 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
This is the problem, not just academic (Doris Goodwin, Stephen Ambrose). The general idea is to have your own ideas, which can exist only in your own ways of expressing them, but of course they're informed by a host of facts and ideas expressed by others, so you reveal that.
"Changing words" is just a cover-up. That's why you give citations for paraphrases even *utterly in* your own words. I'm not in the academy, I don't do this to pass muster, I like to make tracing the thought process part of the art form.
Jan 30, 2023 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
One thing I'm saying here is that if you want to know about the stuff that the Adamses got involved in during the spring and summer of 1776, and if you like reading exciting narrative, read Declaration: amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B003L7…
But if you prefer the dry, scholarly approach, while I'd like to say you should just buy Declaration and look up sources in my notes, I'll give some of it away here: Steven Rosswurm's *Arms, Country, and Class*; Richard Ryerson *The Revolution Is Now Begun"; ...
Jan 29, 2023 • 15 tweets • 2 min read
It's not that defending the institutuon of slavery unified the American revolutionaries--nothing unified them. The thirteen clocks didn't strike as one. That's been the whole problem.
John Adams had a whole theory of thirteen clocks' "being made" to strike together that left out the political intrigue in which he involved himself in Philadelphia in 1776, and by which the delegations were indeed made to strike as if they were one.
Jan 27, 2023 • 9 tweets • 2 min read
That New Yorker article linked me to P. Pauls riff on "White Lotus," with its "What the hell happened to the great American man? ...One minute, he’s Superman, Steve McQueen, Sylvester Stallone. The next, he is everything wrong with America."
"One minute, he's Superman" sounds a bit like "Santa Claus is white," but I take the point, because it's not "one minute" ago--for anyone who's been alive for the past 60 years or so--that the romance of the Great American Man has been subjected to some...criticism?
Jan 25, 2023 • 6 tweets • 1 min read
I hereby confess that until five minutes ago I did not know that the model who posed for the Alexander Hamilton statue on the south patio of the U.S. Treasury Building was the bodybuilder Charles Atlas.
This guy.
Dec 15, 2022 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
I came to see the Whiskey Rebellion so differently from the way Thomas Slaughter sees it that I forgot how much great stuff is in his book--the first I read on the subject. It's really rich.
He has a tendency to bury big stuff in notes. His note on Hamilton's messing with the docket in order to deliver writs under a more punitive law that Congress had in fact reformed is far more assertive than his text on that moment, for example.
Dec 13, 2022 • 6 tweets • 1 min read
I know about the dubious and even negative reviews, but I wonder if the Dylan book is causing any backlash especially in the younger segment of the fanbase.
At some point almost a full generation ago, a chunk of the youth of America decided to like Dylan and it seems that chunk has gone on pretty steadily.
Nov 16, 2022 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Maybe "when M*A*G*A wins, American democracy dies" doesn't work because it's more like when it wins, America's embattled efforts at democracy get swept away in failures of fundamental functions of government like national security, cogent administration, due process of law, etc.
None of those things is elementally aligned with democracy. Even the existence of representation in government isn't, just in itself. Not having a president who subjects the basic processes of national government to daily mayhem isn't saving democracy.
Oct 26, 2022 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
I spoke @AmRevMuseum last week, packed house, great audience, top-flight treatment by the awesome museum people--but what really knocks me out is that my fairly obscure MIT Press book of essays, originally published @BostonReview, had an actual impact on the museum's mission.
Life--and publishing--are unpredictable.
Oct 25, 2022 • 21 tweets • 4 min read
Interested to see how Schiff handles scholarly pushback, by Pauline Meier for one, against the notion Gopnik puts this way: "Sam's signature on the revolutionary events is invisible, but. . . he shaped every significant episode in the New England run-up to war."
I'm a little disappointed that the art-attacking kids know in advance that they're not going to do any damage to the art. I was reading into their protest a thing about precious one-of-a-kind stuff--like human life?-- irrevocably nullified by irresponsible behavior. Oh well.
I've seen the "narcissist kids are always with us" argument, which of course you can never go wrong on--hey, I was one, so were you--but as an excuse for doing jack about climate change it's weak.
Oct 24, 2022 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Holding no brief, lo these many years, for out-of-control bullshit in NYC, I call total bullshit on this take.
Been around long enough, putting it mildly, to recall stylish 70s New York Magazine exploitation of actual problems.
Oct 23, 2022 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
This week, with reference to my temporarily unlocked post on the Beatles, "Get Back," and the fictional nature of documentary -- williamhogeland.substack.com/p/notes-on-the… -- I'll do a paying-subscriber exclusive sidebar to this two-part public piece on WWI left folkies: williamhogeland.substack.com/p/which-side-a….
It's all coming together, maaan.
Sep 4, 2022 • 6 tweets • 1 min read
What's going on here. "The Bill of Rights, without which the Constitution would probably not have been ratified, is essentially..."
That's Menand, and nobody's fool. He and everybody else who knows about this stuff knows the Constitution was ratified before the amendments were proposed, debated, and ratified.
Jun 29, 2022 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
Grammatically, again, the first part of the amendment*is* singled out, because that part is saying something different from the other parts. Thomas is objecting to the 1st's being incorporated wholesale under the 14th.
It's always in fact been a bit funky. There's scholarship on this.
Jun 28, 2022 • 13 tweets • 2 min read
I've got this idea that if "checks and balances"--so often just a wildly imbalanced check on the economic interests of the people--has validity and can work for people's betterment, then it means that in crises like this, the branches have to threaten one another's tranquility.
Not threaten legitimacy, necessarily, but tranquility in the exercise of an illegitimate, imbalanced dominance.
Jun 27, 2022 • 10 tweets • 2 min read
Too much talk about Madison in this hard time, with some evident hope that he can help us. *All*the wanted in the convention and the amendments was eradicate the power of the state legislatures to the nth degree politically feasible. To that focused end, he shifted around a lot.
That's not because he was a proponent of democracy but--things being *very different then,* and the convention *not being some abstract philosophical exercise in republicanism*-- because his underlying objective was to defeat democracy.
Apr 24, 2022 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
I don't get how France can function at all with this simplistic presidential election system where the candidate with the most votes wins the election.
Because you know they have *seen* our system. Just mystifying.
Apr 23, 2022 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
I don't understand this new audio entertainment format where it's just people hanging out with their friends and talking about stuff.
I get that it's popular, though not with me, so I'm just trying to figure out what it's for.
Oct 23, 2021 • 6 tweets • 1 min read
On writing grammatically: I do it--in my books and edited essays, anyway--not in order to comply with rules but because grammar gives me access to far deeper, freer, more complex levels of conversational expression.
If I believed in trade secrets, I wouldn't reveal that one. But in fact grammar is open-source and non-proprietary.
Oct 23, 2021 • 8 tweets • 1 min read
I remember trying to explain to students a long time ago that while complements of the "to be" verb do stay in the subject case, the rule can break down in practice because nobody today would say "it's I." nytimes.com/2021/10/22/opi…
On the other hand, *writing* "were me and my students missing something" is so self-conscious in flouting the rule that only a linguist would so it.
