Today I published a new essay on a topic - the history of what was once known as "race suicide" - I've been researching for a while, and I thought some people might be interested in some of the back story and research context. 1🧵 The editors have headlined this essay a "secret history" of abortion debates in America. It's not really secret, but it's also certainly not part of the popular understanding of abortion in the US a century ago. 2 theguardian.com/books/2022/jul…

Actual announcement on actual British train: "Our card reader is not working so we can't take payments. Please do not come to the buffet car, there is no buffet service. If you're in standard, there will be an at-seat trolley service, but it won't be able to sell you anything." Such a perfect metaphor for British life today.

🎉🎊 Today is publication day for my new book The Wrath to Come: Gone with the Wind and the Lies America Tells. 🥳 Publication day is always dramatic for any author. It represents the culmination of many months, and often, especially with heavily researched books, years of hard work. The Wrath to Come has taken me 3 years to write.

Yesterday, my friend Prof Suzannah Lipscomb, whom many of you know as @sixteenthCgirl, was featured in a Sunday Times article, calling for a women's prize for nonfiction writing, akin to the @WomensPrize for fiction.

https://twitter.com/sixteenthCgirl/status/1492934201938743301

In the interview she calls out the "authority gap," as described by @MASieghart - that women are statistically and demonstrably less likely to be taken seriously when they speak and write than men.

So @BBCNews has decided that the expert witness they need on the Maxwell trial is Alan Dershowitz. Who has taken the opportunity to say that it shows how accusations against him and Prince Andrew are wrong. I’d really like to understand how @BBCNews treats as an expert witness someone who literally admits without being asked that he is among the people implicated in the case. “The question is when will Giuffre be charged rather than her charging people like Prince Andrew and me.” 🤯

"America First" movements have been claiming to protect America's uniquely "Anglo-Saxon" identity for a century. A thread.
washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/… The phrase America First was popularized in 1915, when Woodrow Wilson used it in a speech to the nativist DAR, urging that Americans subject "hyphenate" Americans (German-American, Italian-American, Irish-American) to loyalty tests.

After it lost the Civil War, and to shore up white supremacy, the white South did not merely put up Confederate statues. It also funded southern history courses taught by white southerners in southern universities, to ensure no opposing interpretations could find their way in. Not sure what made me think of that right now … 🧐

@ClementsAustinJ @SethCotlar No, I found that it goes back to at least the 1880s, & was popularized by Wilson in 1915 in a speech he gave to the DAR over debates re “hyphenate Americans". I trace all of this in my book on the history of the phrase. @ClementsAustinJ @SethCotlar The first is from 1888. It was used to support William Jennings Bryan in 1896.

A few days ago @mrjamesob asked me if I felt vindicated bc I’ve been saying for years that they’re fascists. And I realized when I woke up this morning the answer is: I feel angry. Furious. We warned people, using historical evidence, of what was happening.

https://twitter.com/tomwatson/status/1348083894239830019

Now they’ve come out as fascists and smeared the capitol with feces and bashed a cop’s head in and tried to overturn the election and now those fuckers are calling for “unity”?!

#Fortnums new windows: celebrating London theatre and joy. This is lovely. 👇 First @jcmaker

C4 news tonight leading with data leak from Trump's 2016 campaign database: “a major investigation reveals data leak & evidence that 3.5m Black voters were marked as ‘deterrence’ in a bid to stop them going to polls." “In one of biggest database leaks ever” C4 reveals that 3.5 million black voters were targeted in Wisconsin by Trump campaign and other swing states. Clear racist voter suppression.

Happy 124th birthday to Scott Fitzgerald, born #otd in 1896. The best decision of my professional life was to center it around his works and the interwar period he chronicled. This year also marks the centenary of his literary career, which kicked off with the proverbial bang in 1920 - in honor of which I’ve done an essay for the latest issue of @nybooks ($) nybooks.com/articles/2020/…

Michelle Obama, DNC, 2016: “That is the story of this country, the story that has brought me to this stage tonight, the story of generations of people who felt the lash of bondage, the shame of servitude, the sting of segregation, but who kept on striving and hoping and doing...

https://twitter.com/maryaliceparks/status/1298455999263707136

... and doing what needed to be done so that today I wake up every morning in a house that was built by slaves. And I watch my daughters, two beautiful, intelligent, black young women playing with their dogs on the White House lawn.”

This is the second of three essays I’ve done on histories of American interwar fascism.

https://twitter.com/George_Berridge/status/1296030178842419200

The first was this one, which came out at end of June, on why Trumpism can (and in my view should) be construed as American fascism. nybooks.com/daily/2020/06/…

What makes me crazy about the “Harris might not be loyal to Biden because she criticized him at the debate” take is that she wasn’t *supposed* to be loyal to him at that point. She was his opponent. This hardly precludes the possibility of loyalty if he earns it by making her VP. They’re criticizing her for not being loyal to a man for whom she didn’t work, who hadn’t earned her specific loyalty. Why the hell should she have been “loyal” to him, even if she weren’t fighting him in a primary?

Olivia de Havilland. The last link with classic Hollywood. She was 104 years beautiful: rest in peace, and thank you for the greatness. Somehow Olivia de Havilland staying with us seemed to keep all of the golden age of Hollywood alive. I feel like today it has finally passed away with her, and so has a piece of magic in the world.

One urgent thing the US and the UK can both do to restore their social fabric is to teach civics in the schools and advanced civics at universities. It is no coincidence that the basic building blocks of democratic society are so weakened in societies that no longer teach civics, and that do not value the humanities, the conceptual space in which civics are supported.

Best thing I’ve seen in ages: a group of "racial and religious elements" banded together in 1922 to fight back against the Ku Klux Klan. They were called "Tiger Eyes." It is impossible to tell from this preliminary info, as Tiger Eyes were secret, too, but from the name, this photo, and the declaration that it was made up of "racial and religious elements said to be opposed by the Klan" it is certainly possible that they were Asian American.

A new ABC News/Washington Post poll shows Trump 15 points behind Joe Biden.
politico.com/news/2020/07/1… That Biden’s lead is not so much more is the Fox News effect, and is not enough for complacency. Nothing is enough for complacency against these despicable people.

I’ve recently done 5 (? 🤨) essays on issues broadly relating to histories of racial injustice in the US. This is the second to emerge, on some of the points where the US and UK come together.

https://twitter.com/prospect_uk/status/1281588992945917952

Below was the first to appear. Three more to come, editors willing and the creek don’t rise. (Which, given climate change ...)

Maybe I’ll do a thread of them as they get published. 🤓

nybooks.com/daily/2020/06/…

It has been a rough stretch of work so instead of finishing this essay I’ve been looking at dress fashions from the summer of 1922.

Note the hemlines in the summer of Gatsby... I go into this in Careless People, and have been lecturing about it for years, but I still love to find new images.