Discussing the Crusades as a defensive war via popular far right books is not actually a harmless endeavor, because they allow Americans to act like Islam and Christianity have always been and MUST always be in conflict and thus justify the violence we do in the Middle East. This includes cheering on the violence against Palestinians, but also cheer us on to war in... well, Iraq in 2003, Iran now, everywhere we launch bombs.

This book is far right bullshit, as is this thread.

https://twitter.com/vagrantwires/status/1781327439030821059

In all seriousness: that author writes anti Muslim garbage veiled as medieval history. The other version of that work has been picked up by far right columnists for shit like "lessons we should take from Vlad the Impaler." Actual article. Wish I was kidding.

Y'all aren't serious people, mad about pronouns and schools not being actively racist and all kinds of other shit while the world is burning, which comes from the same root: you hate people who aren't like you and don't want anyone else to be less bigoted than you are. But somehow! We are expected to treat you like serious adults that we have to coddle and discuss things politely with and bend to your nonsense demands! This is ridiculous.

I love that both the Quebecois and the New Englanders seem to agree, in their written responses to the failure of the Phips' Expedition in 1690, claim it was a divine intervention responsible. Reading Cotton Mather's account tonight. Interesting. "Thus, by an evident Hand of Heaven, sending one unavoidable Disaster after another, as well-formed an Enterprize, as perhaps was ever made by the New-Eng∣landers, most unhappily miscarried; and General Phips underwent a very mortifying Disappointment of a Design..."

Tell me you aren't a historian without telling me etc. "Recording the facts" 🤣🤣🤣

*stares at the camera*

https://twitter.com/poepilled/status/1647368813145387008

If you know, you know.

Asking why a major is dying by going to the most senior people in the field at the least representative institution in the nation is both so common in our media and so fucking stupid it boggles the mind. "We wanted to know Why English Was Dying so we asked three full professors at the Ivies" should legitimately be treated with more scorn than the @DougJBalloon jokes on that theme.

A world is always ending.

https://twitter.com/Kheumani/status/1629994397919002625

A world ended with the fall of the Soviet Union. A world ended on 9/11. A world ended in 2008, when my generation's dreams all died. A world ended when Trump was elected, and another ended when a coup was launched against the government on January 6th. A world ended with Covid.

Ok, thinking about assigning four books for Colonial and Revolutionary America in the fall, alongside online primary sources, and completely redoing the assignments. I am DEFINITELY assigning Lisa Brooks' Our Beloved Kin and @MJWitgen 's Infinity of Nations, which are both SO GOOD, and I'm still thinking about Gerald Horne's Counter Revolution of 1776 and Fred Anderson's Crucible of War.

Home skillet, a brief word on what history is and is not. History is an analytical discipline about research, analysis, and argument. History is not a series of decontextualized "facts" that cannot be interpreted and thus say only what you want them to and nothing else. I get that that seems confusing. Let me try this.

You went to prom, maybe. If you tell the story of prom night, your version now will be different than your dates version. Both versions, now, will be different than they were the next morning. Both versions are different than any

The "her emails!" crowd losing their fucking minds over 15 boxes of classified documents taken illegally to Papa Trump's Florida house is a great reason why we should never treat their bad faith bullshit with anything other than derision and hostility. "Hunter's laptop!" Motherfucker Trump took documents classified enough that they cannot be described to the public back to his minimum security country club house, pick an endlessly array of ripe dicks from the dick tree and choke on them.

The thing about teaching outside your doctoral field that is really exciting is discovering how much fun writing about other temporal and geographic regions is.

...I want to write some more things on early America this fall. I came out of high school not loving US history, and unfortunately one of the results was that I only took a single US history class, ever, after that. Teaching it (and long conversations with @JLoganTomlin) has shown me how much I missed and how exciting a field it is.

OK, time to build modules for an online class and build them as quickly as possible so MAYBE I can get back on track with book edits and also sleep before what is objectively going to be my hardest teaching semester starts yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay Thank God for a teaching career where I have taught a truly absurd number of different classes across time periods so I can pilfer readings and A/V sources to plug in here. *sigh*

The news is terrible and humanity is a mess so I want to ponder the destruction of oral histories of animals and plants instead to really feel the existential despair of the countdown to the semester. Do you ever contemplate what it must be like to be one of the oldest trees, if trees can really talk, and you're still speaking the language of roots five thousand years gone in the emptiness of a desert that once flourishes with your kin?

I am resisting the urge to derail from book edits to bang out 1200 words on my the denunciation of the Nazis outside the TPUSA rally ring so hollow. on why*

There's no way to do this without everyone yelling at you, so hell, let's just say
Oasis
Coldplay
Gorillaz

https://twitter.com/NoContextBrits/status/1550871013973528576

Am I serious? Very much as serious as the question.

Well, pitched the Katrina piece. Will end up writing both regardless, probably this month, so that I can try to make sure they are placed and edited and ready for August 29th. We'll see what happens. (Gave it a more polite title: "Do You Know What It Means, To Miss New Orleans?": Remembering Hurricane Katrina and the Culture Wars)

Seeing some petroglyphs, going to go see some more historic sites near Kirksville. They have been terribly desecrated--new protections have been put in place and the facility was closed for years until they did.

I'm just saying, Fallout: New Orleans or Fallout: Saint Louis would both be amazing, I've scripted them on here before, Bethesda I will write them for cheap because I'm an academic and have basically no sense of my monetary value. Fallout: New Orleans, where it's all jazz troubadours and Brotherhood of Steel levies--good BoS, Fallout 3 model, not the fascists of 4--and sunken shotgun houses and a thriving city in the French Quarter and towns in the upper stories of the downtown business area and hurricanes

Sometimes people get really uptight about the idea that you're attacking their ancestors when you say historical people and movements and groups were terrible, and I think that's fucking pathetic of them. When I attack Puritans, that's my family. 1630s, multiple branches. If I attack French colonialism in Algeria, well, my uncle was born in French Algiers. Love my uncle, colonialism is still structural atrocity stacked on structural atrocity.

Reading books is great, everyone should read more books, and heck, I'd love it if everyone read more history books, but that doesn't make you a historian. I makes you a reader! Which is a great start! I love that for you! And me! And society! Do you discuss those books with other people? Experts in the field? Do you read reviews of them by acknowledged specialists? Do you comb their footnotes to read the people they are citing, to figure out where they fall in the historiography and how their positions were shaped?