“a through line that has rapidly become a top-tier issue in U.S. politics: electric bills” 💯 @ddayen.bsky.social, great messaging and policy pointers prospect.org/2025/11/06/e...

The #1 lesson from yesterday’s blowout: Humanities majors killed on the job market 1) Mamdani- Africana Studies 2) Spanberger -French 3) Sherill - Global History

Heritage caping for Carlson platforming Fuentes on the eve of Mamdani winning is as good a lesson as one could hope for

On non-cooperation with ICE, has anyone written a piece comparing it to antebellum personal liberty laws?

I've never been able to understand what DSA's real economic vision is, but Mamdani bringing in Lina Khan suggests that they're cool with smaller-scale, more competitive capitalism www.wsj.com/us-news/mamd...

Phenomenal partisan hackery on the USDA's front page.

The correlate to this is that there’s also some wonderful pedantry

Anyone considering a career in academia should be forewarned, of course, about the terrible job market and, now, about the terrible politics. But above all they should be warned about the terrible pedantry.

You may have read that your protein supplements are giving you lead poisoning. That's not the case. If you want to have protein shakes, that's fine. But whether you need to and whether they're safely regulated is a different story. My latest for @vox.com. www.vox.com/future-perfe...

The former top soybean lobbyist who fought to keep the tree-wrecking pesticide dicamba on the market now runs EPA pesticide policy and the agency just proposed re-approving dicamba with even fewer restrictions than before. Gotta have dicamba to grow the soybeans we can’t sell. Gift Article:

The thing about beef, unlike pork and chicken, is that production isn't dominated by a handful of oligopolistic giants. It's a bunch of independents who're very committed to ranching as a whole way of life and they're politically engaged.

Very curious to see how farmers respond to the trade war closure of the China soy market, then Trump bailing out Milei as Argentina ups its own soy exports to China & now, apparently, Trump wants to raise US beef imports from ARG, presumably to support the peso. When do these people say enough?

Indigenous nations on the Great Plains probably practiced some kind of active tree management, esp. of cottonwoods, bc these were essential for surviving winter by providing fuelwood & bark as food for their horses. This suggests they practiced pollarding, a technique for encouraging new growth. 1/

@arielron.bsky.social has it out for Eli Whitney in this terrific Commonplace Article

We know Eli Whitney's story, right? He invented the cotton gin, interchangeable parts, and set the South and North on course for War -- except that didn't actually happen writes Ariel Ron @arielron.bsky.social in an important new Commonplace piece. Check it out:🗃️ commonplace.online/article/how-...

one of my favorite things in academia is the chance to read a lot of work in manuscript, but the definite downside is that I know a lot of stuff I can't cite or talk about in my own work!

Well done. I especially appreciated Ariel's attention to the real history of . . . . interchangeable parts - ooh la la.

No matter how much I proofread a piece before publication, I always find cause to regret I hadn't done so even more carefully. It's not typos so much as stylistic mistakes. Something in the process of revisions and copyedits involving other people inevitably seems to mangle key stylistic choices.

Had to give a talk about Eli Whitney of all people and anyway now it's an article on Common Place commonplace.online/article/how-...

"How much soy we produce shouldn’t be a barometer for how well our agriculture sector is doing, but for how unsustainable it is." I wrote for @newrepublic.com that the trade war with China shows we grow too many crops to feed not people but factory-farmed animals. newrepublic.com/article/2014...

why do copyeditors hate style?

Ricardo was "the third of at least seventeen children"!

If you read Hume carefully (not even that carefully), he doesn't really hold to the quantity theory of money. I mean, he offers a lot of caveats and circumstances that can be easily shown to dominate the mechanical proportioning of commodities to means of payment.

Graphic summary of the "tyranny of the wagon equation" for a Civil War army of 100,000 men + 20,000 cavalry & artillery horses + X wagon mules as a function of days' march from a base. The equine supply factor is total daily forage ÷ food (for humans). By day 4 or 5 it's out of control.

I'm not sure people have internalized yet the big AI teaching challenge is more about reading than writing. We can makes students write blue book exams but how can we get them to read a whole book?

The tariffs make a lot more sense when seen as a substitute for the income tax instead of having anything to do with domestic manufacturing

Super interesting stuff on the pre-Fed ideas about monetary governance!

Annoyed because my pencil doesn’t produce eye roll emojis for me to write in the margins of the book I’m reading

From Irwin’s trade policy history. What is the point of producing a chart like this, completely ignoring services, which now account for ~30% of US exports?

This take from Irwin’s trade policy history book has not aged well

hipster Civil War lettering

This has turned into quite a story. It seems Ferguson & Stoddard avoided prison in the end because their case implicated General Rufus Ingalls, the chief quartermaster for the Army of the Potomac. Lincoln's friend Orville Browning makes an appearance. If I have time I'll write more next week...

Key part of Rowland's deposition, in which he claims to have endorsed a half-million-dollar check (in today's terms) so casually he didn't even look at the name of the bank, which he at first claims was in New York and later in New Jersey.

MORE SHOCKING HAY FRAUDS!!! On the arrest of Captain Ferguson at his office in the Alexandria depot, a Mr. Rowland (a clerk and also Ferguson's brother in law) "abstracted" (i.e., took) a package containing $18,500 worth of federal bonds--equivalent to about half a million dollars today!

Amen

Currently investigating massive hay fraud in the Civil War. Two entire reels of microfilm for just this one case. Turns out it was extremely lucrative to skim forage and sell it on the side.

What’d they do?

Sofia and I have a new article out about Civil War era monetary policy and architecture, as understood by Stephen Colwell. Colwell is an interesting figure I wrote about in my AHR article as well. In some ways very conservative, in others radical... read.dukeupress.edu/hope/article...

Two forthcoming books I'm excited for

As many as 2 million horses died in the Civil War, yet reports of soldiers eating horse meat are few. This despite the fact that soldiers, Confederates esp., were often hungry. There seemed to be few moral qualms about driving horses to death remorselessly. If hippophagy was taboo, why exactly?

If anyone knows more about how letter pressing techniques changed in the 19c, please lmk www.ice.org.uk/news-views-i...

A funny thing about Civil War army bureaucracy is that they broke out the really good handwriting for generals but couldn’t bother with mere captains.

Any 19c historians here know about how letter press books worked? Did you have to write out the letter twice or have the sheet you'd send under the thin letter press paper (does it have a specific name)? for the ink to bleed through?

vaguely interesting, probably little to no meaning: I asked chatGPT to write me a script to download google ngram data for "hay trade" and "hay business" plus "trade" and "business" as controls. The hypothesis is Civil War army purchasing of baled hay en masse led to more hay trade and biz talk...

astonishing attrition of horses in the Civil War from an amazing recent Phd dissertation, "The Horses with No Names," by Frank Robert Boynton

currently reading. pretty interesting! however, the escheresque cover image doesn't promise solid realness by the end

R.L. DiNardo and Austin Bay, "Horse-Drawn Transport in the German Army"

CFP (please circulate): "Lonesome Dove at 40: McMurtry, Mythmaking, and the Reimagining of the American Southwest," co-hosted by the Clements Center for Southwest Studies and SMU's English Department via the "Narrative Now" initiative. DEADLINE: Aug 1.

CFP (please circulate): "Lonesome Dove at 40: McMurtry, Mythmaking, and the Reimagining of the American Southwest," co-hosted by the Clements Center for Southwest Studies and SMU's English Department via the "Narrative Now" initiative. DEADLINE: Aug 1.