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Peter A. Shulman 📚 Profile picture
Peter A. Shulman 📚
@pashulman
Historian of sci, tech, and American politics. Author of *Coal & Empire* w/@JHUPress. Associate Professor of History @CWRU. Edits @HistOpinion. I ❤️ Archives.
3 subscribers
Aug 7, 2022 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
This is the problem with all abortion debate: it just boils down to metaphysics that is not amenable to the tools of traditional liberal analysis. Anyway, in this view, we were all pre-born souls for 13.8 billion years. Didn’t miss anything.
May 10, 2022 • 10 tweets • 3 min read
I wanted to learn more about protests at judge's homes. Here are some examples of what I found: protesting a San Antonio federal judge for imprisoning a tax protestor, September, 1984. In a sign of how the world has changed, the paper helpfully published his address. Hare Krishnas protesting at a San Francisco Superior Court's judge for placing a member under a temporary conservatorship requested by her mother. The story briefly gets into the coming legal wrangling.
Apr 29, 2022 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
I can't speak to any of the substance of this particular case, but this is one hell of a defense from NYU. The idea that MIT would strip tenure from a senior faculty member without some form of due process is pretty strange!
Mar 20, 2022 • 19 tweets • 14 min read
So there has been much discussion, and mostly criticism of the NYT's editorial the other day about "free speech," especially its opening paragraph appealing earnestly to a right that has never before actually existed nytimes.com/2022/03/18/opi… This terrific thread by @tzimmer_history looks at the roots of the present debate, such as it is, in white conservatives' sudden facing of criticism for things they had long taken for granted & the new pushback against "view from nowhere" journalism
Mar 20, 2022 • 14 tweets • 3 min read
At some level, I share the bewilderment, even as someone who has studied this history for over twenty years. But this claim isn’t ~exactly~ right. There were 19th century Americans who saw the collapse of various plant and animal species and called upon the government to act. Brian Donahue has a wonderful book examining pre-industrial agriculture in Massachusetts and how it developed in a way that incorporated conservation for future use; this was ultimately disrupted by the market revolution amazon.com/dp/0300123698/…
Mar 20, 2022 • 9 tweets • 3 min read
"Americans are losing hold of a fundamental right as citizens of a free country: the right to speak their minds and voice their opinions in public without fear of being shamed or shunned." And yet
Mar 13, 2022 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
WUUUUUUTTTTT If this is accurate it is beyond insane and a hand grenade thrown into the fundamental architecture of American higher education.
Mar 13, 2022 • 9 tweets • 2 min read
Thread on (likely?) new FL law that will require the posting of instructional materials in college courses 45 days before a semester. The burden is enormous & policy in bad faith. But also appreciate how often faculty assign texts they disagree with in order to engage with them. It sounds like this isn't just books, but any required reading, all searchable in a database. Can you teach European history without reading Marx or Hitler? Not equivalents, mind you, but both are susceptible to turning up on a keyword search to trigger decontextualized outrage.
Mar 7, 2022 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
⬇️⬇️⬇️ I knew someone when I was a teenager (a younger sibling of a friend) who was allowed to publish an essay in a widely-circulated local magazine in which she explained her equanimity by reference to the fact that if she were to total her car, her father would buy her a new one.
Mar 6, 2022 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Love this. Someday might write more about the history of Choose Your Own Adventure novels slate.com/culture/2011/0… I read so many of these mentalfloss.com/article/56160/…
Mar 2, 2022 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
🙃 I’m not going to bother to do the math now but given population size and older unemployment statistics, you can almost definitely establish that in absolute numbers, this claim is perfectly accurate. Meaningful? I dunno. But probably 100% true, not partially true.
Feb 23, 2022 • 6 tweets • 3 min read
Yesterday Rick Scott's disastrous and much-mocked plan blared about preserving Judeo-Christian values while insisting "Facts are facts, the earth is round, the sun is hot, there are two genders"

Meanwhile, in the early 3rd century Mishnah.... This amazing Mishnah speculates that Abraham and Sarah were originally tumtumim (neither male nor female but androgynous). Doesn't seem to bother anyone.
Feb 16, 2022 • 33 tweets • 2 min read
So I started working my way through the Wordle archive. The early words were also hard! This is not new to the NYT so quit complaining! Anyway: Wordle 1 0/6

⬜🟨⬜🟨🟨
⬜🟨🟨⬜🟩
🟩🟩⬜⬜🟩
🟩🟩⬜⬜🟩
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩
Feb 16, 2022 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
What if studying history *should* make you feel bad. Maybe I'll pin this tweet.
Jan 23, 2022 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
Madness This story screams out for reporting on the judge making this ruling
Jan 21, 2022 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
This article cites “prominent presidential historians” as predicting Biden would be the next FDR and for evidence, linked to an NPR interview with Doris Kearns Goodwin.

Meanwhile, my sense is every practicing historian who is not a professional commentator has said the opposite. Scholarly historians always laugh at the notion of a “presidential historian.” Precisely for the reason that someone who focuses overwhelmingly on the presidency—especially from a biographical perspective—tends to have a very limited stable of analogies & interpretive frameworks.
Jan 10, 2022 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
I'd like to read the whole suit but this is weird and I'm skeptical about it.

Regardless, it's preposterous that even if the plaintiffs got their way this would change a penny of rack rate tuition. Like, reserving a small number of spots for the children of potential large donors may offend your sense of fairness but those future donations aren't affecting tuition rates.
Jan 5, 2022 • 13 tweets • 4 min read
I think this is a really interesting question and things have clearly changed, but I'm not sure the premise is entirely correct. For example, were all Americans excited about going to the Moon? No. This poll is from 1967, two years before Apollo 11. Going to the moon is "not worth it" by 20 points.
Jan 5, 2022 • 13 tweets • 3 min read
As someone who’s contributed to my university’s policy on returning, this article misstates, misframes, and misinforms about what we are doing and why. No one thinks this is 3/20 & our brief window of remote instruction is precisely to insure the rest of the semester’s in-person. Everyone on campus—students, staff, and faculty—overwhelmingly prefer in-person instruction (though we, like others, will probably experiment with more hybrid courses in the future if they work). Prof. Oster is right that the health risks now to most students are very low.
Jan 4, 2022 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
This handsome fella needs to be better known en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ussuri_dh… Dholes used to live in North America but were among the megafauna that went extinct around the end of the Pleistocene.
Jan 2, 2022 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
Please. I beg of you. Stop using completely inapt historical analogies. Just describe what is happening.

(In 1981 there was one union that held a chokepoint on a major sector of the economy; there is nothing remotely like that for the nearly 14,000 school districts in the US.) I actually think making K-12 schools go temporarily remote needs to be an absolute last resort. But if you're gonna say it should never happen you should also explain what to do when 10% or 20% of your teachers are home sick.