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Zoo_View said:
He’s so manly and tough!
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Greg Blowvino has a certain...quality to him. A certain something that he hides from the public. Maybe it's his impeccable, neat outfit, his perfectly-coiffed hair with just the right amount of gel to keep it spiky on top, his cartoonishly high voice. I'm not exactly sure, but he seems to want to keep this certain...something...tucked away from public view, maybe in a nearby closet perhaps.
 
WaynetheDrain said:
Greg Blowvino has a certain...quality to him. A certain something that he hides from the public. Maybe it's his impeccable, neat outfit, his perfectly-coiffed hair with just the right amount of gel to keep it spiky on top, his cartoonishly high voice. I'm not exactly sure, but he seems to want to keep this certain...something...tucked away from public view, maybe in a nearby closet perhaps.
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Channeling his inner Ernst Rohm.
 
superrific said:
To the rescue, how? I guess I'm with Nate Silver -- I find her to be more cringe than insightful.

I don't see anything in that essay that is useful for understanding our current situation. It's an incredibly shallow analysis that doesn't even work on its own terms (Miller is actually rejecting the ideas of the southern racist, in favor of something else that is arguably just as bad but different), and other than putting a name to an idea, what is it telling us?

If you're interested in it just as history alone, that's fine. I mean, I see no reason to think she's *wrong.* She certainly knows that time period far better than I do. I just don't see what "to the rescue" means here -- even allowing that you're obviously not being literal.
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HCR exists to tell bedtime stories to anxious liberals. That’s her role. If someone is actually interested in history, there are dozens of historians in her field who have produced serious, paradigm-changing work. But that kind of history doesn’t make millions on Substack or fit into a Facebook post. Black Reconstruction in America doesn’t soothe anyone before bed.
 
Heather Cox Richardson has a fine list of scholarly publications to her name.

  • To Make Men Free: A History of the Republican Party (2014)
  • Wounded Knee: Party Politics and the Road to an American Massacre (2010)
  • West from Appomattox: The Reconstruction of America after the Civil War (2007)
  • “North and West of Reconstruction: Studies in Political Economy,” in Thomas J. Brown, ed., Reconstructions: New Perspectives on the Postbellum United States (2006)
  • The Death of Reconstruction: Race, Labor and Politics in the Post-Civil War North, 1865-1901 (2001)
  • The Greatest Nation of the Earth: Republican Economic Policies during the Civil War(1997)

The Wounded Knee monograph is the best done and her work on the early history of the Republican Party is solid.


Richardson, Heather Cox

www.bc.edu www.bc.edu
 
donbosco said:
Heather Cox Richardson has a fine list of scholarly publications to her name.

  • To Make Men Free: A History of the Republican Party (2014)
  • Wounded Knee: Party Politics and the Road to an American Massacre (2010)
  • West from Appomattox: The Reconstruction of America after the Civil War (2007)
  • “North and West of Reconstruction: Studies in Political Economy,” in Thomas J. Brown, ed., Reconstructions: New Perspectives on the Postbellum United States (2006)
  • The Death of Reconstruction: Race, Labor and Politics in the Post-Civil War North, 1865-1901 (2001)
  • The Greatest Nation of the Earth: Republican Economic Policies during the Civil War(1997)

The Wounded Knee monograph is the best done and her work on the early history of the Republican Party is solid.


Richardson, Heather Cox

www.bc.edu www.bc.edu
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No dispute there. She’s a real historian with real scholarly work. That was never my claim.

My point is about what she does now and why it resonates. None of those books were paradigm-shifting in the way I was talking about, and none of them are what made her influential or wealthy. You know this. Her influence comes from a daily, devotional role for anxious liberals: short moralized history vignettes that emphasize reassurance over actual historical analysis.

There’s a reason Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men is still read fifty years later while HCR’s work on early Republicanism didn’t shape the field in the same way.
 
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Paine said:
No dispute there. She’s a real historian with real scholarly work. That was never my claim.

My point is about what she does now and why it resonates. None of those books were paradigm-shifting in the way I was talking about, and none of them are what made her influential or wealthy. You know this. Her influence comes from a daily, devotional role for anxious liberals: short moralized history vignettes that emphasize reassurance over actual historical analysis.
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What do you mean by reassurance? I completely agree HCR's daily writings are more pop politics than rigorous scholarship. But I see her general thesis as, "What we're seeing now has roots and echoes in the past, and that helps us understand what might be coming next." Most of the time, I find that to be the opposite of reassuring. I would characterize it as providing accessible historical context for anxious liberals.
 
lawtig02 said:
What do you mean by reassurance? I completely agree HCR's daily writings are more pop politics than rigorous scholarship. But I see her general thesis as, "What we're seeing now has roots and echoes in the past, and that helps us understand what might be coming next." Most of the time, I find that to be the opposite of reassuring. I would characterize it as providing accessible historical context for anxious liberals.
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By reassurance I don’t mean “everything will be fine.” I’m taking about reassurance at the level of moral orientation and interpretive control.

Her writing tells readers: this moment fits into a familiar historical script, the bad actors are intelligible, and your existing moral framework is sufficient to understand what’s happening. The content is often alarming, yes, but the script itself provides emotional stability.

Providing historical context can be valuable. What I find missing is a “now what.” There’s almost no engagement with power, institutions, or strategy. Instead, history functions as mere narration rather than intervention.

Narration is very useful when the primary role being served is emotional containment. In that context, history as intervention can actually feel dangerous because it unsettles instead of reassuring.
 
"It’s part of a pattern, he said, of federal officers jumping straight to use of force in situations that could have been de-escalated but instead create danger for both agents and their targets." -- it isn't just federal officers, it's many law enforcement people of all levels, locations and jurisdictions.

And these gun-culture loving LEO all over the country aren't just racists, neo-nazis and proud boys. It's the general gun culture, the training, the fear that the "targets" might have hand-guns.

But I'd love to hear a psychologists take in the impact of the masks. Social psychology or group psychology is powerful and if you include a mask as part of the team identifiy I suspect some horrible tendencies can creep out.
 
Paine said:
By reassurance I don’t mean “everything will be fine.” I’m taking about reassurance at the level of moral orientation and interpretive control.

Her writing tells readers: this moment fits into a familiar historical script, the bad actors are intelligible, and your existing moral framework is sufficient to understand what’s happening. The content is often alarming, yes, but the script itself provides emotional stability.

Providing historical context can be valuable. What I find missing is a “now what.” There’s almost no engagement with power, institutions, or strategy. Instead, history functions as mere narration rather than intervention.

Narration is very useful when the primary role being served is emotional containment. In that context, history as intervention can actually feel dangerous because it unsettles instead of reassuring.
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I guess I don't expect her to change the world. So low are the standards for historical knowledge today that on those occasions when she provides some -- any -- I can't see it as a bad thing. The fact that she doesn't tend to bring a "now what" message is, to a good degree, why she is popular. She's not particularly dangerous to be sure. Except that she does bring information...good information that is generally attributed (if only her essays could be hot-linked or footnoted they would be even more effective in that regard).

People are responsible for intervention and they've need to be armed with historical facts, context, and current connections to be dangerous. HCR is most definitely not a revolutionary...Zinn could lean into that, so too did Cornell West once upon a time. Jamelle Bouie makes a mark frequently as does Ta-Nahesi Coates. Greg Grandin is increasingly radical though he too remains dedicated to the primary sources. Marcus Rediker goes there at times. Jill LePore stays pretty tightly within the profession like HCR but makes important points that the public sometimes benefits from because they read her stuff.

I wrote earlier today about the influence that reading founding documents, warts and all, tends to have on young adults -- a thing that I find positive and see as good for the fight against authoritarianism. The majority of teachers 'out there' honestly can't get away with being radical -- they'll lose their jobs and in some places risk being harmed. This is where we stand today. They could die on the multiple hills of choice and chosen issues or they can keep working to chip away. Of course they can also do many other things that citizens do -- at least in some places -- depending on the communities in which they live and work.

There are an awful lot of ways to resist and frankly, I can't find fault with the way that HRC chooses to do so. Do I think that she is somehow actually tamping down activism with her work? No, I can't say that I do. Might she be revving such a thing up? Could be.
 
donbosco said:
I guess I don't expect her to change the world. So low are the standards for historical knowledge today that on those occasions when she provides some -- any -- I can't see it as a bad thing. The fact that she doesn't tend to bring a "now what" message is, to a good degree, why she is popular. She's not particularly dangerous to be sure. Except that she does bring information...good information that is generally attributed (if only her essays could be hot-linked or footnoted they would be even more effective in that regard).

People are responsible for intervention and they've need to be armed with historical facts, context, and current connections to be dangerous. HCR is most definitely not a revolutionary...Zinn could lean into that, so too did Cornell West once upon a time. Jamelle Bouie makes a mark frequently as does Ta-Nahesi Coates. Greg Grandin is increasingly radical though he too remains dedicated to the primary sources. Marcus Rediker goes there at times. Jill LePore stays pretty tightly within the profession like HCR but makes important points that the public sometimes benefits from because they read her stuff.

I wrote earlier today about the influence that reading founding documents, warts and all, tends to have on young adults -- a thing that I find positive and see as good for the fight against authoritarianism. The majority of teachers 'out there' honestly can't get away with being radical -- they'll lose their jobs and in some places risk being harmed. This is where we stand today. They could die on the multiple hills of choice and chosen issues or they can keep working to chip away. Of course they can also do many other things that citizens do -- at least in some places -- depending on the communities in which they live and work.

There are an awful lot of ways to resist and frankly, I can't find fault with the way that HRC chooses to do so. Do I think that she is somehow actually tamping down activism with her work? No, I can't say that I do. Might she be revving such a thing up? Could be.
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I appreciate this DB, and I don’t disagree with most of it. I’m not asking HCR to be radical, or to take risks she doesn’t want to take, or even to change what she does. I also don’t think she’s tamping down activism.

My point is narrower: in a moment of rupture, the dominant mode of history matters. A mode of history that primarily stabilizes interpretation without implicating strategy may be net-positive in general, but it becomes insufficient when political realignment is actually on the table.

In other words, I’m less concerned with whether HCR is “bad” (I don’t think she is) than with the fact that this kind of work has become hegemonic among older liberals. It’s to the point where it crowds out history that helps people think concretely about how power works, how institutions were built, how they collapsed, and how this implicates strategy for the left.

I don’t want HCR to start writing about the Second International or anything. I’m just asking us to think about whether the history most widely consumed by liberals right now helps people think about power and strategy or whether it mainly reassures them that they already understand the moment.
 
I get you. I fight a pretty ferocious internal battle over the degree to which I can bring to bear tough ideas and ones that work to jar free that hegemonic thinking in students to which you refer. I don't usually hit beginners with it -- which are most of HCR's early morning readers -- at least at first. I suspect that this battle tends to also pull me back -- that and age and the mundane concerns of life and living.

I guess I hope she's a gateway drug of sorts.
 
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