Twitterstorians

The Twitterstorians and Trump

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Twitter

Historians on Twitter have caught the attention of The New Yorker.  Check out Lizzie Widdicombe’s piece “The Twitterstorians Trying to De-Trumpify U.S. History.”  It covers a Twitterstorians reception at the recent meeting of the American Historical Association in New York City.

The piece includes references to Kevin Kruse (of course), Kevin “The Tattooed Prof” Gannon, Jason Herbert, Robin Mitchell, Heather Cox Richardson, Joanne Freeman, Kevin Levin, Aidine Bettine, Leah LaGrone Ochoa, Ed O’Donnell, and David Trowbridge.

Here is a taste:

“I think it’s a real opportunity for us,” Gannon, who teaches at Grand View University, and whose Twitter handle is @TheTattoedProf, said. “We’re in these public spaces and, to quote Liam Neeson in ‘Taken,’ we have a very particular set of skills.” Gannon, whose burly arms are heavily tattooed, has almost seventy thousand followers and has tangled with D’Souza, too. He has reservations about Twitter as a teaching forum. “It’s not a deliberative space,” he said. “The real struggle for me is it’s very easy to be angry online all the time. But, if all you’re doing is yelling, there’s nothing of substance there.”

David Trowbridge, an associate professor at Marshall University, said, “It’s not us at our best.”

“Well, sometimes it is,” Edward T. O’Donnell, an associate professor at the College of the Holy Cross, said. O’Donnell, whose Twitter handle is @InThePastLane, is the creator of the annual Weemsy Awards, for “the biggest history fails of the year.” He crowdsources the nominations from Twitterstorians. Last year’s winners included President Trump, who said during a Fourth of July speech that George Washington’s army “took over the airports” from the British, and the conservative writer Erick Erickson, who, in criticizing the Times’s 1619 Project, opined about “the cost white people paid to free slaves.”

Gannon argued, “We’re at a particularly dangerous moment, historically speaking,” noting the way that “history, or versions of it, have been weaponized against marginalized communities.” He went on, “When people are reading history and thinking, ‘I wonder what it would be like to live during the Civil War? I certainly would have been one of the good guys,’ well, what you’re doing now is probably what you would have done then.”

“Somebody said that on Twitter a while ago,” O’Donnell said. “It was, like, ‘Remember that time in history class when you were reading about the abolitionist movement and said, ‘I definitely would have stood up’? Well, now is one of those times.”

Trowbridge cleared his throat. “My small viral moment was that one,” he said.

“Oh, that was you?” O’Donnell said. “I instantly retweeted that!”

Trowbridge looked pleased. “I think I went from five followers to five hundred.”

Read the entire piece here.

Who is Kevin Kruse?

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He is the Princeton University historian with 221,000 Twitter followers.  You can hear him talk about his Twitter fame on Episode 34 of The Way of Improvement Leads Home Podcast.  But did you know that he was hired at Princeton at the age of 27 and received tenure at age 33?  Did you know that his family sometimes tells him to put the phone down?  Did you know he once wrote a newspaper column titled “Kevin Kruse: Public Embarrassment?”

Kruse is the subject of Emma Pettit’s piece at The Chronicle of Higher Education.  Here is a taste:

It’s weird because Kruse thinks of himself as an introvert who doesn’t seek out confrontation, which is the opposite of who he is to his fans on Twitter. In one-on-one conversations, “I invariably find myself backing away,” he says, even when the conversation is pleasant. (He used to tell people he was a math teacher to avoid talking about history at parties.) The closest Kruse has gotten to being in a fight was when a kid sucker-punched him in middle school. He worked as a bouncer in college and had to bust up a few drunken brawls, but mostly he sat on a stool, smoking Camels, paging through a biography of Harry S. Truman.

Read the entire piece here.

Best History Tweets of 2018

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Over at Slate, Rebecca Onion picks the best historian Twitter threads of 2018.  Click here to read threads from Natalia Mehlman Petrzela, Joshua Rothman, Beth Lewis-Williams, Kevin Kruse, Jenny Bann, David Walsh, Seth Cotlar, Keri Leigh Merritt, Heather Cox Richardson, R.L. Barnes, Kevin Gannon, and Joshua Clark Davis.

By the way, you can listen to interviews with Onion and Gannon on episodes of The Way of Improvement Leads Home Podcast.  Onion was our guest on Episode 12 and Gannon was our guest on Episode 26.

Kevin Kruse on How to Challenge the Bad History Emanating From the Right

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Kevin Kruse

In Episode 34 of The Way of Improvement Leads Home Podcast we interviewed Princeton University historian Kevin Kruse about his work on Twitter.  It remains one of our most popular episodes of the podcast.  I encourage you to listen to it when you get the chance.

Over at the Pacific Standard, David Perry interviews Kruse about how he uses his Twitter feed to challenge right wing pseudo-historians like Dinesh D’Souza.  Here is a taste:

Let’s jump forward to your ongoing debates with Dinesh D’Souza, which seems to have vaulted your visibility to new heights. How did that get started

There was one right before the Fourth of July [this year]. I remember being at the beach, picking up my phone and saying, “Oh God that’s not good.” It really blew up and we had a series of back-and-forths where he would make claims, I would fact-check, and then he’d move the goal posts.

People really didn’t like what he was doing and people liked someone with some knowledge pushing back on it. [It turns out that] dunking on D’Souza is a great way to build a following.

D’Souza clearly isn’t interested in facts, so what kind of effect do you think you can have?

I’m under no illusion that I’m going to get him off Twitter. He’s got a very profitable con—I assume it’s a con. I do it for people on the sidelines, [for] people who aren’t already his fans but are confronted with people pushing his work directly or his arguments indirectly. It’s a way to serve as counterbalance.

Are you worried that you’re just giving him more oxygen?

Both D’Souza and Trump have a much bigger audience than I have. The millions of people who follow them are already going to see [their tweets]. It’s important to not just let them go unchallenged. D’Souza’s schtick was to say that no historians ever objected to what [he says]. So our lack of fact-checking was taken as at least our tacit approval. If we don’t speak up and challenge these untruths, then they have the floor.

Historians have the same kind of duty that scientists have to climate change deniers, that doctors have to anti-vaccine folks. It’s not fun. It’s not good for me to do this stuff. It’s not the best use of my time. I don’t get paid for it. I get flooded with hate mail and angry replies, but somebody’s gotta do it.

Why you?

By the nature of who I am and where I am—I’m a white straight man, a full professor at an Ivy League university—I catch 1 percent of the crap that is thrown at other scholars out there. I have the security to do this. I have no excuse not to do this, other than that I don’t want hate mail or it’s a drag on my time. Those are not good excuses, as far as I’m concerned.

I believe that we, as scholars, have a duty to engage with the public. As much time and energy as I put in my scholarly books and articles and teaching, we have a duty to these larger audiences that will never read one of my books. They don’t have [my books] on my desk, but they’re going to see one of these Twitter threads. And that’s good.

Read the entire interview here.

Tweet Thread of the Day: The Historiography of American Conservatism

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Buckley and Reagan

Last weekend Politico published historian Geoffrey Kabaservice‘s piece “Liberals Don’t Know Much About Conservative History.”

Kabaservice writes:

The end-of-century victories of Ronald Reagan and Newt Gingrich, however, forced historians to realize that conservatism could no longer be dismissed as a mere road bump on the inexorable progression toward a liberal future. The result, over the past two decades, has been a veritable tsunami of historical literature on conservatism. Virtually all of these works have been written by liberals. Nonetheless, historians of this new generation consider themselves to be unbiased and even sympathetic observers of conservatism. Many believe their collective efforts have produced a profound historical understanding of conservatism as an intellectual and cultural phenomenon, and thus contributed in some measure to bringing politically opposed citizens together.

Color me skeptical. I was a graduate student at the beginning of this new wave of conservative studies and I couldn’t help but notice that it coincided with the historical profession’s purge of any scholars who could be described as Republicans or conservatives. Some of the new works on conservatism have been excellent, others awful. But nearly all reveal the pitfalls for liberals writing about a movement with which they have no personal experience. If you’re a historian who has not a single conservative colleague—and perhaps not even one conservative friend—chances are you’ll approach conservatism as anthropologists once approached tribes they considered remote, exotic, and quite possibly dangerous.

The result is that two decades’ worth of scholarship hasn’t contributed as much as one might have hoped to our understanding of conservatism, especially in the age of Trump. This is particularly true of the works that have been most popular with the broader public. That’s a shame, because historians could provide deeper answers than they have so far to the questions many citizens now wrestle with: How did our political system become so divided and dysfunctional? To what extent is the conservative movement responsible for Trump’s rise? What have been the movement’s greatest successes as well as failures, and what relevance do they have to our understanding of ourselves as a nation and a people?

Thomas Sugrue, Director of American Studies at New York University responded to Kabaservice’s piece in a very informative Twitter thread.  Graduate students and advanced undergrads interested in American conservatism should read this thread.  Here it is:

 

Why We Must Challenge “Hackish History”

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Some of you may recall our very popular podcast interview with Princeton University American historian and twitterstorian Kevin Kruse.  You can listen to it here.

Kruse has been busy lately.  He got a lot of attention when he challenged conservative pundit Dinesh D’Souza’s faulty use of of American political history to advance an argument that today’s Democratic Party is the party of the KKK and white supremacy.  Kruse used his Twitter platform to dismantle D’Souza’s use of the past for political and financial gain.

Apparently some academic historians are wondering why Kruse is spending so much time arguing with D’Souza.  Kruse responded to this criticism with a series of tweets.  Here they are:

As many TWOILH readers know, I spend a lot of time engaging Christian Right activists who use the American past to promote their political agendas in the present.  I don’t think it is a waste of time to challenge such faulty uses of the past.  In fact, it is a basic part of my calling.  John Hope Franklin said that historians, as a servant of the past, are the “conscience of the nation.” They can also be the conscience of the church.

A Right-Wing Pundit Gets a History Lesson

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Reagan and Thurmond

I know a lot of you have been following Kevin Kruse‘s twitter take-down of right-wing pundit Dinesh D’Souza.  Kruse, a professor of history at Princeton University, is challenging D’Souza’s claim that today’s Democratic Party is the party of racism because it had championed racism in the past.

Any undergraduate history major knows that political parties change over time.  On matters of race, the Democratic Party of the 1950s and early 1960s is not the Democratic Party of today.

Jeet Heer calls attention to the Twitter debate at The New Republic:

D’Souza has made a specialty of highlighting the undeniable racism of the 1960s Democratic Party as a way to tar the current party. His arguments ignore the way the two political parties switch positions on Civil Rights in the 1960s, with the Democrats embracing Civil Rights and Republicans, under the guidance of national leaders like Barry Goldwater and Richard Nixon, exploiting racist backlash.

Read Heer’s entire post, including some of the tweets between Kruse and D’Souza.

Finally, don’t forget to listen to our interview with Kevin Kruse at The Way of Improvement Leads Home Podcast.  The interview focuses on Kruse’s use of Twitter to bring good history to the public.

Tweeting the History of Slavery at the University of Virginia

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UVA

The Daily Progress has a nice piece on Kirt von Daacke, Professor of History at the University of Virginia and the university’s co-chairman of the President’s Commission on Slavery, who has been tweeting the results of his research. Check out his tweets @slaveryuva

Here is a taste:

Kirt von Daacke, an assistant dean of history and co-chairman of the President’s Commission on Slavery at the University, writes most of the tweets. The periodic intrusion into Twitter timelines helps to keep the immediacy of slavery alive at the university, von Daacke said, and helps users get a sense of how interconnected and violent the system was in Central Virginia.

“Real people lived and died to build and maintain the U, it’s not just abt Jefferson. #SlaveryU,” he posted in January.

“I started tweeting out information eight or nine months ago just as a way to share it, promote our existence and begin to think about the evidence,” von Daacke said. “As I did it, I was struck by how useful it was as a way to begin to see patterns in all the data.”

So he kept tweeting between classes and meetings, sometimes enlisting students or other researchers to write a few posts about their own research.

“Each individual tweet doesn’t do much, but if you are following, it starts to creep in just how many people were involved, how much money, how much violence and misery,” he said.

Read the rest here.

This project is certainly fitting in light of what happened on the Charlottesville campus in August, but it also serves a great model for using Twitter to share snippets of historical research.

 

 

Live Tweeting a Historical Event

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Spokane’s Northwest Museum of Arts & Culture, the site of the Twitter “re-enactment”

Over at Northwest History, Eastern Washington University public historian Larry Cebula writes about how he and some local historians conducted a Twitter re-enactment of Spokane’s 1889 fire.  According to his post, several folks got together with historical documents and began composing tweets using the hashtag #greatfire1889.  They even got coverage in the local newspaper!

Cebula writes:

It was a blast. We each worked from a different resource about the fire, books and letters and newspaper articles, and pulled out striking and dramatic bits. The 144-character limit of Twitter was not as much of a problem as I would have thought, and we quickly figured out that 144 characters equaled about one-and-a-half lines on the Google Doc. We tried to keep the Tweets roughly chronological as we added them to the document. The Google Doc had the great advantage of allowing everyone to see what the others were working on and avoiding duplicate tweets on the same subject. We added brief citation notes to each tweet, not to be tweeted but to document where we had found the information in case there were questions later. We also looked at some of the dramatic photographs that Harbine had identified from the collections and wrote tweets to highlight those images.

After ninety minutes or so we had in excess of thirty tweets that did a really nice job of telling the story of the fire. Camporeale then assigned times to each tweet. The tweets went into Hootsuite, a social media tool that allows one to schedule tweets in advance, each set to be tweeted at the right time.

Cebula offers some tips for doing such a project in a public history or digital history course:

Live tweeting a historical event would make a great classroom project for digital and public history courses. This presentation lays out how they did a similar project on the sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald has some good tips. Here are the steps as I see it

  1. Pick a historical event. Something dramatic, well-documented, and with contemporary interest. It needs to be an event that took place over a few days, not months. Choose a time period that you will be tweeting, maybe 3-7 days?
  2. Choose a hashtag. Make sure that it has not been taken.
  3. Assemble some resources. It really worked well to have different people pulling their tweets out of different sources. Resources could be a mix of physical and digital, with digitized books and newspapers offering a rich set of perspectives. Make a Google Doc with links to the digital resources.
  4. Write the tweets. If I were working with a larger class, I would organize the Google Doc a bit in advance by making headings for each days tweets. Encourage students to find relevant images to attach to the tweets.
  5. Schedule the tweets with Hootsuite or a similar social media manager

Read the rest here.

On Writing Your Second History Book

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Benjamin Park, an early American historian who teaches at Sam Houston State University in Texas, has live-tweeted a great session from the annual meeting of the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic (SHEAR) on how to go about writing a second book.

For most academic historians, their first book is a revised version of their dissertation. Much of the research and writing for the first book is accomplished during graduate school. (Although revisions are always necessary for turning a dissertation into a book). Second books, however, are usually written under different circumstances.  Graduate students become faculty members and their lives change.  They have to prepare lectures, attend meetings, and, for some, take on the responsibilities of family life.  Writing that second book become a lot more difficult when one’s attention is pulled in so many different directions.

The members of the panel:

Kathleen DuVal of UNC-Chapel Hill

Paul Erickson of the American Antiquarian Society

Timothy Mennell, University of Chicago Press

Tamara Plakins Thornton, University at Buffalo

Catherine Kelly, University of Oklahoma

As I read Ben’s tweets I once again realized how different my career has been when compared to the traditional career trajectory (or at least the one that is considered normal among people who attend SHEAR) in the profession.

Here are some of Park’s post

Historians Are Tweeting About Comey’s Testimony

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Rick Shankman has collected some tweets at History News Network.  Some tweets deal with the past.  Some do not deal with the past, but do reveal historical thinking skills. Others are straight-up political.  Decide for yourself.

My favorite remains:

The Way of Improvement Leads Home at the OAH

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OAHI will be in New Orleans this weekend for the annual meeting of the Organization of American Historians.

The Way of Improvement Leads Home will be providing coverage of the conference through a handful of correspondents–from graduate students to tenured professors–who will be writing posts about their experiences.  (Actually, our coverage has already begun.  Check out William Horne’s restaurant recommendations).

I will also be blogging regularly.  I am open to posting just about anything related to the conference.  It is not too late to write for us (contact me) or feel free to send along pictures from your day-to-day conference experience and we will post them here.

On Saturday I will be leading two “Chat Rooms” in the Plenary Theater in Exhibit Hall. From 12:30-1:15 I will be joining Elisabeth Marsh of the OAH and Ed Ayers of the University of Richmond in a session on the History Relevance Campaign (I serve on the board of this initiative).  From 1:15-2:00 I will be co-leading a discussion with Kevin Schultz of the University of Illinois-Chicago on “How to be a Twitterstorian.”

I hope to see some of you at (in?) these chat rooms.

A Few Reasons Why Historians Should Consider Twitter

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5bf22-twitter-logo-hashtagI am sold on Twitter. (You can follow me @johnfea1).  I rarely use my feed to post personal or mundane things about my life (although some may beg to differ).  Instead, I use it professionally–to promote my work at The Way of Improvement Leads Home, share links and the tweets of others, provide coverage of history conferences and lectures, and network with other historically-minded people.

I follow a lot of people on Twitter.  I do this for two reasons.  First, I am always looking for links that I can use on this blog.  Second, I am generally curious about the ideas of like-minded people.  I follow a lot of K-12 history teachers because they often share some great resources that I can pass along to the students in my “Teaching History” course or even re-purpose for my own courses.  I follow clergy because I want to get a better sense of their world so that I can be more effective in bringing historical thinking to local congregations. I follow #twitterstorians because so many of them are doing incredible things in their teaching and scholarship.

So needless to say, I thoroughly enjoyed “Motorcityclio” recent post about historians, social media, and networking.  Here is what she has to say about Twitter:

Filling your Twitter feed with university departments, scholars, and academic publications is easy enough, but what do you do once you’ve developed an academic social network? Like networking at a conference, you need to be a bit more proactive than we, as academics, are sometimes comfortable with. The good news is that we can still hide behind our computer screens to a certain extent! So here are six ways to use social media to build your network.

  1. Promote yourself. Have a new publication? Get mentioned on your department website? Find something exciting in the archive? Tweet it! Promoting yourself – or even just congratulating yourself on very real accomplishments – can feel icky. But, as we’re all often told, the only way to get yourself out there is to put yourself out there. You’ll be amazed by how much support you get!
  2. Use hashtags. There are TONS of academic hashtags out there. There are hashtags that can connect you with other scholars in your field and with other graduate students. Some of my favorites are #PhDchat and #PhDlife (this one is usually pretty hilarious). If you have other favorites, leave them in the comments!
  3. Interact with other scholars. I have used Twitter to chat with other scholars about their work, my work, the Olympics, the election, running socks, and a lot of other things. Building a network shouldn’t just be about having somewhere to discuss your project or the job market (although it’s great for these things – I just had a chat with a PhD candidate in English about the job market today!). It should also be about building support, in many forms.
  4. Get help! I contacted one of my former students – Amanda Sterling, now the Social Media Coordinator at the Corning Museum of Glass – for any input she might have on this post, and she made the excellent suggestion of using Twitter for help with research. As Amanda says, “Whether you need to pull contemporary material directly or you need help tracking something down, social media can help you with your work.” If we’re all willing to travel to archives to track stuff down, why not use the networks of lots of other academics to help?
  5. Establish yourself. Amanda also suggested that using Twitter to promote yourself and your work, and to engage in discussions with other scholars, helps to establish yourself as an expert in your field. This is particularly useful when you consider how long publication can take. Let everyone know you’ve already arrived!
  6. Follow conferences. Finally, Amanda points out that given that most conferences now actively cultivate hashtags associated with the conference and sometimes panels, you can “attend” conferences that you might not be able to afford to see in person. This is another way to keep yourself current on new scholarship and find people who are interested in the same things you are.

Read the entire post here.

Livetweeting Conferences

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5bf22-twitter-logo-hashtagOver at The Junto, Jonathan Wilson has a nice post on the pros and cons of livetweeting at academic conferences.  As someone who often live-tweets conference sessions I found his post very informative.

Why do I live tweet?  For many of the reasons suggested by the people Wilson interviewed. Here are two of them:

  • To share information with those who are not present.  I see livetweeting as a form of doing public history.  Is this a form of “self-promotional” display, as one recent critic of the practice has suggested?  Perhaps. But so is giving a public lecture, or writing an op-ed piece, or publishing an article, or teaching a class, or blogging.
  • Selfishly, live-tweeting helps me to stay focused on the session.  I have a hard time digesting papers at conferences, especially when they are read at a rapid rate.  I see tweeting as a form of note taking.  When I tweet I get a lot more out of the session than if I don’t tweet.

In the end, Wilson is right:

Conference livetweeting is socially awkward at the best of times, and it involves real risks. Its value depends on the good judgment of those who engage in it; they need to know how to read a room as well as how to summarize someone else’s work accurately. It also depends to an uncomfortable degree on the good faith of the far-flung audience. We rely on them to understand that livetweeting is ad-hoc, fallible, and fragmentary—a series of impressions that could be misleading in unpredictable ways. Thus, we should expect academic livetweeting to change as the overall culture of Twitter changes. And we probably need to be prepared to adopt defensive measures as Twitter becomes (so far) an increasingly charged public space.

Read the entire piece here.

#historyteacherchat

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JulieAre you a K-16 history teacher?  Do you want to share ideas about teacher training, historical thinking, lesson plans, creative classroom ideas, interesting websites and links related to teaching history?

We have joined Julie Guthrie, a fourth-grade teacher in New Jersey, in establishing a new Twitter hashtag: #historyteacherchat  Yes the tag is a bit long, but I think it best captures what we are trying to create–a forum for history teachers to informally “chat” about how they do their work.

If you are a teacher and want to share something on Twitter don’t forget to include the hashtag so your idea can get to the right people.  And a special invitation to elementary and middle-school teachers.  We want to hear and celebrate your voices!