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Kerry 🇺🇸 Profile picture
Kerry 🇺🇸
@kerry62189
Independent historian and researcher, tutor, and 90s music fan. Interested in "the Old, Weird America." See https://t.co/ylNIWffSCn for my historical investigations!
3 subscribers
May 10, 2023 • 12 tweets • 2 min read
MIT took a strong stance on free expression by appealing to definitions, etc., derived from the post-Puritan tradition. First off, the report indicates that it will refer to "freedom of speech"--which it distinguishes from "academic freedom"--as "freedom of expression."

"Academic freedom" was a concept imported from Germany by newer US universities that kind of grated on Harvard and MIT.
May 9, 2023 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
This really was just what most books were like in mid-19c America.

That's why I just stare blankly and say I don't care when someone recites the textbook narrative of religious or theological history and then implies some 19c American's beliefs are "scandalous" or "puzzling." Like, once again, America was full of religious dissenters and radicals who invented new religions and often utterly and flamboyantly rejected the standard Old World narratives, if they were even fully conversant with them. And many were into elaborate parodies, manifestos, etc.
May 9, 2023 • 10 tweets • 2 min read
Yeah. This is a complicated issue, but I increasingly suspect that the pervasive total ignorance about the history here, and the utopianism and naivete that results from it, is itself doing incredible damage. Drug addiction seems to have been pretty common in the 19/20c US, but because drug use for the most part wasn't harshly policed, legally or socially, and drugs were generally either in less concentrated forms or less potent/deranging in their affects, it wasn't as big of a deal.
May 8, 2023 • 11 tweets • 3 min read
This is one of the more important reasons why we can't just move on like nothing happened.

I've heard very little discussion of the issue even now, but it was one of the first things that went visibly wrong.

This was April 23, 2020.

MA officials/doctors started freaking out about the consequences of locals being afraid to seek medical care for ailments other than covid. Which is the reaction that all the messaging had encouraged.

boston25news.com/news/health/ba…
May 8, 2023 • 7 tweets • 3 min read
Interesting read.

jacobin.com/2021/04/take-m… Yeah, much of my interest in this topic comes from the bizarre experience of hearing Trump voters egregiously mischaracterized for years. I get that this sort of thing differs somewhat by state, etc., but they even insist it is a "white working class" thing when discussing MA. Image
Apr 28, 2023 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
👍 Image Exactly. It's a visceral and cultural thing that is of greater importance for GOP candidates, and there's no getting around it so long as voters' views have any significance. Image
Apr 21, 2023 • 59 tweets • 10 min read
It's absurd that none of our politicians have bothered all this time to even gesture at the sentiments or plainly acknowledge the concerns that RFK Jr. managed to convey without qualification in a single speech. "During this campaign and during my administration my objective will be to make as many Americans as possible forget that they are Republicans or Democrats and remember that they are Americans. We need to focus on the values we share instead of the issues that divide us.”
Apr 20, 2023 • 47 tweets • 8 min read
"...the Civil Rights Act of 1875...attempted to clarify beyond all doubt the rights of African Americans to freely use public accommodations...Its authors, Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts and former Union general turned Congressman Benjamin Butler..." Image "...had originally included the integration of public schools and cemeteries, although this was rejected by both Democrats and moderate Republicans."

That Butler was also from Massachusetts, and that both were trained as lawyers, is not mentioned.
Apr 20, 2023 • 25 tweets • 4 min read
"In the mid-1960s, cultural geographers Peter Could and Rodney White...found that...attitudes...differed profoundly from one historical region to another: Alabamans despised New England; northerners disliked Alabama." "Could and White were surprised by the persistence persistence of these historical attitudes, which they regarded as temporary aberrations caused by the Civil War."

The "temporary aberration" view can only come from a place of historical illiteracy and indifference to reality.
Apr 20, 2023 • 27 tweets • 5 min read
From Albion's Seed:

"The Puritans recognized many grounds for divorce that were consistent with their conception of marriage...Massachusetts granted divorces in the seventeenth century for adultery, desertion, cruelty, and 'failure to provide.'" "Physical violence was also recognized as a ground for divorce. Husbands and wives were forbidden to strike one another in Massachusetts; there was no such thing as 'moderate correction' in the laws of this colony. The courts often intervened in cases of wife-beating..."
Dec 28, 2022 • 11 tweets • 2 min read
Watched a video of Ted Kennedy answering questions at Harvard in the early 2000s.

He casually remarks that words no longer have any meaning in politics, that you can't tell who is really for what or what each side stands for. Says the only answer is greater alertness and discernment on the part of voters. Says they used to see through the sleaziness of a purely oppositional/negative approach and get insulted by those tactics, but now allow themselves to be emotionally gratified by them.
Dec 28, 2022 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
law.yale.edu/sites/default/…
Dec 27, 2022 • 14 tweets • 4 min read
A shift back to localism has to precede any real change. Catholics here are socially liberal overall. Neither social conservatism nor cultural progressivism do well here.
Dec 27, 2022 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
This is true, and it's a serious problem.

That said, it's possible for those who care about these things to exercise a decisive influence, and to re-frame the situation so that it's not so hard for others to course-correct. Most people I know who casually wrote off civil liberties had never thought about them in the first place. They'll never admit they screwed up, but they're not haunted by guilt or embarrassment, either. They don't understand what others are upset about.
Dec 27, 2022 • 7 tweets • 3 min read
I've been waiting for someone to use this line. It's not a stretch to discuss "gender non-conformity" in the context of the Concord crowd, and particularly in the case of Louisa May Alcott, but this part is just weird:
Dec 12, 2022 • 63 tweets • 13 min read
"But the most massive employment of the spoils system came with the Lincoln Administration, when the Republican Party came to power for the first time. Of the 1,520 presidential class appointees existing in 1859, Lincoln removed no less than 1,457, or 96 percent." "With more offices at his disposal than any president up to that time, . . . Lincoln appears to have used — or permitted the use of — the appointing power at his command as deliberately as they could have been used for practical, and usually partisan, political purposes."
Dec 12, 2022 • 31 tweets • 8 min read
Revealing.
trace.tennessee.edu/cgi/viewconten… We have been deprived of many critical lessons by papering over these divisions.
Dec 12, 2022 • 49 tweets • 9 min read
civilwarmed.org/surgeons-call/… "One of the most significant figures in the United States during the Civil War is almost unknown to most Americans. Jeremiah Jones Colblath was born February 16, 1812 in Farmington, NH1-4. The family was very poor and his father was an alcoholic."
Dec 10, 2022 • 45 tweets • 17 min read
This historical/legal status of this issue is complicated, but this brief submitted by "historians and professors of legal history who specialize in race, politics, culture, and law in the nineteenth-century United States" seems like a missed opportunity.

supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/20/2… There's so much to work with here, from pretty much any angle, yet we get one mention of "Sen. Sumner," no first name/state, to support the point that RRs did not object to "race conscious legislation." Sumner famously monitored legislation in order to delete the word "white."
Dec 10, 2022 • 9 tweets • 2 min read
"...a system of free expression is designed to encourage a necessary degree of conflict within a society. To be sure, it attempts to avoid resort to force or violence by channeling this conflict into the area of expression and persuasion." "And it contemplates that a longer-range consensus will ultimately be achieved. Yet, because it recognizes the right of the citizen to disagree with, arouse, antagonize, and shock his fellow citizens and the government, such an arrangement of human affairs is hardly likely..."
Dec 10, 2022 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
This took me a long time to grasp, but I now see it as a key problem. The traditional elites, of all kinds, feared socialism. But preventing it long-term required staying flexible and creatively proactive enough to provide the public with an adequate alternative arrangement. Because, at least in some circles and regions, some degree of socialism was simply very popular, and it had become a power. That was the situation that had to be dealt with, and couldn't be dealt with by simply yelling "no socialism!" or preaching to the choir.