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.

Check out the inaugural issue of the Journal of Texas History, open to the public. This comes from the wonderful Alliance for Texas History, which was created last year after the old THSA was taken over by a wealthy, politically motivated board member. mavmatrix.uta.edu/journaltexas...

this is what we have to deal with

In other words, it seems both the GOP & farm lobby have officially given up on post-ww2 farm bill bargain of "food stamps + farm subsidies."

Fun fact: the BBB has $52B in free money giveaways ("safety net") for farmers, while cutting up to $300B in SNAP. The farm lobby is more or less openly treating the BBB as a replacement for an actual farm bill. www.fb.org/market-intel...

For the record, before the 1830s or so--that is, during the US founding era--all of New York City's food markets were publicly owned. eh.net/book_reviews...

The test for Mamdani will be if he can govern well but Trump won’t let him.

“The class of political belief systems which possess logical integrity and completeness is empty in America. Further, the construction of a logically consistent system which would justify or support the use of the terms ‘liberal’ or ‘conservative’ is doomed to failure.”

Not sure how @arielron.bsky.social got it so far wrong.

Good game, OKC learns from their mistakes.

Predictable and predicted

24 points in the first six minutes against the best defense in the NBA smh

I have flagged the emails that were in my inbox for which you were probably awaiting a response Forgive me they were overwhelming so tedious but no, not yours

Wild story: a quality manager who warned about the shoddy construction of Boeing 787 Dreamliner planes was particularly concerned about the ones sent to Air India in 2014. That's when the Air India jet that crashed today was sent. prospect.org/economy/2025...

a gnarly bit of social science

The Bucks, Cavs and Knicks, to the Thunder:

The Pacers are inevitable.

A guide for Union quartermasters in the Civil War gives the following weights per bushel for different foods. I'm surprised to see corn on the cob denser than shelled corn, which is denser than corn meal. I'd have expected the opposite.

a theory of radical historical contingency

good looking guy, I'll give him that

Astonishing Lysenkoist turn in American science policy

There ought to be, if it doesn’t already exist, a field of comparative archives. We need to move beyond archival “silences” to think more systematically about how archival structures shape historiographical traditions.

everyone once in a while I'm reminded that academia.edu still exists and wonder who uses it

Agricultural History has the best covers