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Rachel Shelden Profile picture
Rachel Shelden
@rachelshelden
Historian, @penn_state. Director, @RichardsCenter. Author, Washington Brotherhood: https://t.co/Q4IvD0Kx8F. Current work: The political culture of 19th c. #SCOTUS.
Jul 6, 2023 • 9 tweets • 2 min read
This is good thread on the justices' sources in the Affirmative Action opinions & it hits on an important problem for professional historians appalled by this Court's use of history: the justices rely heavily on law review articles for their historical insight. 1/ Sometimes justices look at other sources from the era (leg debates, etc., along with previous cases), but they don't often read/cite good *scholarly interpretations* of sources in places like the AHR, the @JournAmHist or other journals like, say, the @JCWE1 for Reconstruction. 2/
Dec 21, 2022 • 8 tweets • 4 min read
It’s always worth reading David Blight and this is a thoughtful piece connecting the 1850s to today. But I think the emphasis on #SCOTUS—comparing Dred Scott in the 1850s and our modern reactionary Court—is misguided for a number of important reasons. nytimes.com/2022/12/21/mag… 1/ First, we can’t project the power and authority of today’s Supreme Court onto the past. In the 1850s, few believed #SCOTUS held ultimate authority over constitutional meaning; the people retained the right to define what the constitution meant. 2/
Dec 19, 2022 • 7 tweets • 5 min read
This important @adamliptak piece describes how #SCOTUS is accumulating more and more power at the expense of...every other institution in U.S. politics. It's paywalled, but the article draws on really important work that isn't. 1/ nytimes.com/2022/12/19/us/… Perhaps most important of these is @marklemley's: "The Imperial Supreme Court" in the Harvard Law Review: harvardlawreview.org/2022/11/the-im… on the accumulation of #SCOTUS's power over U.S. political institutions from Congress to the Presidency to state and federal courts. 2/
Sep 20, 2022 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
I know this is the myth that doesn't die, but there really was no Compromise of 1877. And the more we repeat this myth, the harder it is to see the most important similarity between 1876 & today: massive campaigns to suppress & intimidate Black voters. @ebalexan and I have written about the problem with the Compromise myth here: washingtonpost.com/outlook/2021/1…
Apr 11, 2022 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
Yang is rightly getting pilloried for this tweet, given the catastrophic effect Johnson had on Reconstruction and Black rights. But it's also worth pointing out what a poor analogy Lincoln's pop vote total & 19th-c. political parties more generally are to our 21st-c. politics. 1/ Unlike today, 19th-c. political parties were impermanent; they rose and died out as political issues changed and new coalitions formed. One consequence: it was *common* to have a 3- or 4-way race for the presidency. Lincoln was the 5th president not to win the popular vote. 2/
Dec 14, 2021 • 18 tweets • 5 min read
The memes my Constitutional History of the US to 1877 students made are too great not to share (with permission). Some of my favorites in this thread! The first inspired by @TheGNapp 1/ The students read Mary Bilder's terrific book, Madison's Hand and so they had a lot to say about Madison 2/
Oct 3, 2021 • 7 tweets • 3 min read
I understand that this may not seem like it's central to the point the @nytimes editorial staff is making here, but the facts in this piece about the 1876 election and electoral commission are wrong. nytimes.com/2021/10/02/opi… 1/ The editorial says that two Supreme Court justices on the commission were appointed by Democratic presidents and three by Republicans. This isn't true. There were two SC justices who were Democrats on the commission, but Lincoln appointed one of them (Stephen Field). 2/
Jan 13, 2021 • 9 tweets • 4 min read
🧵 For those who have been as interested as I am in the discussion about Congress using Section 3 of the 14th Amendment against Trump, this is a thread of scholarly commentary on the subject. Please feel free to add additional links. Historian Eric Foner was among the first to suggest using it and he later wrote up his argument in the WaPo here: washingtonpost.com/outlook/2021/0…
Nov 21, 2020 • 13 tweets • 3 min read
Been thinking a lot about how this mirrors a major element of the lead up to and unfolding of the Secession Crisis in 1860-61. It's not a 1-1 comparison but, per Mark Twain, "history doesn't repeat itself but it often rhymes." 1/ By 1860, members of Congress had been delivering what were called "buncombe" speeches in the House & Senate for decades. "Speaking for buncombe," as members called it, meant speeches not for other members (who generally paid them no attention), but for constituents at home. 2/
Sep 20, 2020 • 9 tweets • 4 min read
Re: #CourtPacking: many have become so inured to the idea that #SCOTUS has been and should be apolitical that we miss the forest for the trees. While we debate whether SCOTUS is political (it is) members have used the apolitical posture to increase the Court's authority/power. 1/ Consider Chief Justice Roberts' repeated insistence that the justices are umpires in conjunction with the enormous amount of power he amassed as the "swing" vote in the last term. 2/
Jun 19, 2020 • 22 tweets • 17 min read
It's #JUNETEENTH2020 and Black scholars, writers, and activists are providing so much wonderful context for this important holiday. Here is a thread of the articles, threads, and podcasts out today (plus a few terrific older ones worth revisiting) 1/ No better place to start than this deeply personal reflection on celebrating #Juneteenth by @agordonreed: newyorker.com/culture/person…
Apr 17, 2020 • 13 tweets • 5 min read
This is a wonderful thread by my colleague @jacobflee on open access digitized sources to help folks trying to conduct historical research during the pandemic. And adding a few sites I use: Jacob mentioned the Library of Congress website, which has a vast number of resources but I want to highlight "A Century of Lawmaking for a New Nation" which features the Congressional Globe and other records covering the federal government memory.loc.gov/ammem/amlaw/la…
Dec 20, 2019 • 10 tweets • 12 min read
This is a short #2019inReview thread on some of the amazing women whose contributions to our cultural life influenced and excited me this year and that I wanted to share with the twitter world. 1/ I'm part of the #twitterstorians and my job requires me to read a lot of books by men and women. But I this year for my pleasure reading, I chose to only pick books by the amazing women of the literary world. I didn't love every book, but some of them blew me away. 2/
May 14, 2019 • 16 tweets • 5 min read
Here's a little thread about #StateRights and #StatesRights that has been puzzling me. #Twitterstorians I am anxious for your insights! 1/ Nearly every book that considers the problem of state sovereignty uses the phrase "States' Rights" to describe this constitutional idea. "States' Rights" seems to be the preferred usage over "State's Rights" and "State Rights" in University Press guides as well 2/
May 5, 2019 • 9 tweets • 4 min read
This is a short thread in honor of #citeblackwomensunday #citeblackwomen @citeblackwomen 1/ There is a tweet going around from someone about how hard it is to find 5 women he admires. Not a great look. #womenalsoknowhistory But I’m also not sure if it’s a bot or a troll, so not retweeting it here. 2/
Mar 18, 2019 • 11 tweets • 4 min read
This thread by @jbouie is very good. But to pile on here a bit, the original argument by @baseballcrank lacks essentially any awareness of historical context and the ways Americans - esp members of Congress and the Executive Branch - conceived of the Court in this period. /1 The argument that Courts in the pre-Civil War period were engaging in "packing" is only possible if you assume there was a clearly agreed upon ideal number of justices. But in fact, Americans disagreed about what the ideal number was, for both political and legal reasons. /2
Feb 20, 2019 • 10 tweets • 5 min read
One (of many) good responses to the @MaxBoot piece that suggests historians have abandoned work in political, military, and diplomatic history. This one from @historianess on great work on the War of 1812 Important that we historians counter periodic handwringing about a lack of political (& military & diplomatic) history in our scholarship and classrooms. Back in 2016, I responded to a similar piece by listing great recent Civil War Era political histories
May 14, 2018 • 12 tweets • 2 min read
Following the awesome example set by @drhonor a few weeks back, I'm tweeting out the final paper topics of many of the students in my history capstone class, Slavery in American Culture and Memory. So many great resources and ideas unearthed! 1. How the Supreme Court has increasingly ignored the historical role of slavery in American life in Affirmative Action cases since Bakke (looking at the problem of "diversity" or limiting their historical context to the 20th century only)
Aug 31, 2016 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
@HistorianSteveC many thanks for these extended thoughts. Perhaps you can give some examples of topics that are off limits? @HistorianSteveC I don't think the search for something new (and I generally support the idea that we shouldn't just rehash) excludes much
Aug 31, 2016 • 4 tweets • 3 min read
@HistorianSteveC @Cliopticon @LDBurnett I understand the feeling (am a pol hist myself) but TT job ads just are not a good way of measuring @HistorianSteveC @Cliopticon @LDBurnett so many broad job ads (19th c, 20th c) end up with pol historians in them. Still lots in depts
Aug 29, 2016 • 24 tweets • 6 min read
Lots of friends tweeting and writing about this article on Facebook this morning: nytimes.com/2016/08/29/opi… 1/ And to some degree I can understand the visceral reaction (why many are nodding along). 2/