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David H. Montgomery Profile picture
David H. Montgomery
@dhmontgomery
"A French history podcaster and enormous goshdang nerd after our own hearts" — @andrewvandam. Host of @thesiecle; senior data journalist with @YouGovAmerica.
2 subscribers
Sep 6 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
An interesting piece, but this line is unfair: "Podcasts are not reviving history... They are mostly drowning it in a tidal wave of blather..."

There are awful history podcasts — and also great ones, with excellent research. (This statement also happens to be true of books.) No one would think to condemn the genre of historical nonfiction just because there's a bunch of badly researched polemics on the shelf at Target or Barnes & Noble. The same is true for history podcasts — the problem isn't the medium, which has been used to good & ill effect.
Sep 5 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
I've been revisiting "The Last Dance" as late-night viewing the past week, and am continually impressed by the quality of its writing as narrative nonfiction.

One key thing that struck me last night: how the documentary handles the BAD parts of Michael Jordan's story. "The Last Dance" is overall extremely pro-Jordan — unsurprisingly since he was involved in its production. It's been criticized for how it slighted some of the NBA players Jordan came into conflict with.

But — and this is key — it's not purely hagiographic.
Aug 6 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
If Walz resigns as governor to become vice president, Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan will become governor.

It's what happens next that gets INTERESTING. The President of the MN Senate (currently Minneapolis Democrat Bobby Joe Champion) becomes Lt. Gov.... The Minnesota Senate is currently split 33-33 between Democrats and Republicans, with one vacancy on the ballot this fall that's probably Lean D. If Champion resigns, that could lead to either a temporary Republican majority, or extended 33-33 tie, until Champion's replaced.
May 18 • 51 tweets • 7 min read
“No principles, any methods, but no flowery language — always Yes or No, though you could only count on him if it was No.” — Clement Attlee on Stalin “Soviet biologists were instructed to adopt the theories of the charlatan Lysenko… to disastrous effect… It is significant that Stalin left his nuclear physicists alone & never presumed to second guess *their* calculations. Stalin may well have been mad, but he was not stupid.”
Feb 15 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
I finally hit on why "Hazbin Hotel" is leaving me so cold. I love a stylized sitcom about depraved souls in the afterlife struggling toward redemption: It's called "The Good Place," & while it lacked raunch, songs & art deco animation, it had sophisticated multi-layered writing. Partly this is a difference in execution — if you hired Michael Schur to script-doctor the dialogue on "Hazbin Hotel" you'd get a much better show — but in large part it's just intent. TGP was aiming at the border between middle- and high-brow; HH is aiming at middle-low.
Nov 21, 2023 • 5 tweets • 3 min read
You BET we polled people about #Napoleon. On the eve of a new biopic, most Americans don't know very much about Bonaparte, and what they do know, they don't especially like.

My story for @YouGovAmerica, with lots of charts: today.yougov.com/society/articl…

Image
Image The U.S. actually has the highest rates of considering Napoleon's legacy to be "negative" of any of 8 countries YouGov polled. That includes several other countries that Napoleon actually invaded, humiliated and occupied.

today.yougov.com/society/articl…
Image
Oct 26, 2023 • 5 tweets • 3 min read
This is a fun one. I had @YouGovAmerica ask 29,000 people how they organize their books.

- 29% don't organize their books
- 22% sort by genre
- 19% alphabetize
- 3% sort by color

But it turns out this depends HEAVILY on how many books you own. My story: today.yougov.com/society/articl…
Image cc @WaltHickey @pbump @PatrickRuffini @goodreads @DanielBGreene @aedwardslevy @NateSilver538
Jul 5, 2023 • 7 tweets • 3 min read
NEW: Full-time caregiving is the #1 reason prime-age Americans don't work. In my latest for the @MinneapolisFed, I break down the stats behind this key demographic group:

- mostly parents
- mostly but decreasingly women
- mostly happy staying home
minneapolisfed.org/article/2023/w… Among adults age 25-54, women are 90% of full-time caregivers. But that's down from 96% two decades ago, while the share of full-time caregivers who are men has doubled.

https://t.co/xWLDUpz3cPminneapolisfed.org/article/2023/w…
May 19, 2023 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
When the @Suntimes ran an undercover bar to catch sleazy officials: "I think one of the things that amazed us is that these inspectors sold out public safety on the cheap. They were not taking huge amounts. We were told to leave $10 for one inspector & $25 for another inspector." @Suntimes From this oral history (via @kottke): topic.com/the-story-behi…
Apr 16, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
"Weak-link problems are problems where the overall quality depends on how good the worst stuff is... Some problems are strong-link problems: overall quality depends on how good the best stuff is, and the bad stuff barely matters." experimental-history.com/p/science-is-a… "A car engine is a weak-link problem: it doesn’t matter how great your spark plugs are if your transmission is busted." But music is a strong-link problem: "At worst, bad music makes it a little harder for you to find good music."
Jan 30, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
@robkhenderson @AviWoolf You should read "Status & Culture" by W. David Marx. He has a simplified 4-class model of status-seeking:

- New Money: Status via conspicuous consumption
- Old Money: Status via cultural capital
- Professionals: Status by finding new cultural capital
- Lower: Whatever they can @robkhenderson @AviWoolf I oversimplified massively there — it's a book-length treatment on the topic and I had to repeatedly rewrite to fit it in one tweet. But very thought-provoking.
Jan 30, 2023 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Looking at the author's choice of history podcasts — popular shows from big names that jump around from topic to topic — I'm not surprised he came to the conclusion that podcasts are shallow and don't teach you much. You can buy shallow books aimed at mass audiences that aren't very profound, either, but that doesn't mean that books as a medium suck. It just means you should choose better books. Or podcasts.

(May I suggest @TheSiecle?)
Jan 28, 2023 • 33 tweets • 6 min read
I was sitting at home, minding my own business, when suddenly it happened *again*.

See everyone in 138 minutes. Image Reminded again of that guy who tweeted about how he couldn’t get more than 10 minutes into Master & Commander before turning it off in boredom.

This is what’s happening about the 10-minute mark:
Nov 7, 2022 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
#rstats: I've got a dataframe with some gnarly column names — sentences from a survey questionnaire.

I have a tibble with the shortname I want to replace each long column name with.

How can I batch rename this

Difficulty: no pivoting, needs to work if a column disappears. I can't pivot because that would wipe out factor orders. The exact questions in each survey vary a little — I have all the possible variations in my tibble, but something that relies on an exact list of columns appearing in an exact order won't work.
Nov 5, 2022 • 37 tweets • 8 min read
There's been a lot of talk about supposed "election fraud" lately, so let's check in with some of the great masters of electoral shenanigans.

By now you know where I'm going with this — we're talking about the government of Bourbon Restoration France. THREAD: 2/ This thread is adapted from my history podcast, @TheSiecle. If you like this thread you should probably check it out! Available wherever you get podcasts, or read my full annotated transcripts online at thesiecle.com

I recommend starting from the beginning.
Nov 3, 2022 • 9 tweets • 3 min read
Is Minnesota in the early stages of another fall #COVID19 wave? We can only guess.

Last week we saw hospitalizations rise making me think it more likely we were in a wave.

But this week saw COVID hospitalizations fall again, leading me to a downward adjustment in probability. Non-ICU COVID hospital bed use, which had been worryingly mirroring last fall's trends, broke away a little bit this week.

Meanwhile ICU COVID bed usage is a fraction of past levels with no signs of rising.
Nov 3, 2022 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
The brilliance of Tolkien is that The Shire feels so REAL even though a moment's thought reveals it to be both absurd and incoherent with the rest of his Middle Earth worldbuilding. The biggest issue, of course, is economic (Tolkien's weakest area of worldbuilding). The sophistication and abundance of consumer goods in The Shire makes no sense for a largely rural, mostly autarkic society.
Nov 2, 2022 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
For this post I'm ignoring most of this to focus on one historical claim: "You must do as Lincoln did. He... issued an arrest warrant for SCOTUS Chief Justice Taney."

Now, Lincoln did not issue such a warrant. But he *maybe* drafted one — though the evidence is very sketchy. Wikipedia has a page called "Taney Arrest Warrant," calling it a "conjectural controversy in Abraham Lincoln scholarship."

The sole source that Lincoln secretly drafted a warrant to arrest the chief justice is a later statement by Lincoln's friend & bodyguard Ward Hill Lamon.
Nov 1, 2022 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
POLL: Which of these leitmotifs from Howard Shore's #LordOfTheRings score do you think is the most *iconic*? (Not the best or your favorite.)

Links to samples in the replies. The Ring Theme:
Oct 29, 2022 • 100 tweets • 20 min read
It's election season here in the U.S., so let's talk '20s elections.

I mean 1820s, of course. It's a history thread! 🧵 1/ 2/ These are the results from the 1824 elections for France's Chamber of Deputies.

As you can probably tell from the monochromatic nature of the map, the elections were something of a landslide. So-called "Ultraroyalist" candidates won *everywhere*.
Oct 28, 2022 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Today's release was the 31st main episode of my history podcast, @TheSiecle, and the 47th overall release counting bonus episodes.

All told, for this project I've published 283,982 words since Episode 1 in January 2019, with 1,552 different footnotes from ~150 different sources. @TheSiecle The recordings have covered just under 22 hours of total audio content, and have been downloaded around 195,000 different times.