Geoffrey Kirsch
@geoffreykirsch.bsky.social
Junior Research Fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge, studying 19th c. American literary and legal history. Opinions my own. https://www.english.cam.ac.uk/people/Geoffrey.Kirsch
That’s the perfect name for this time of oligarchs: “the Re-Gilded Age.”
Aaron Rupar@atrupar.com · 3mo agoTrump: "Re-gilding of the massive Arts of War sculptures, located between The Lincoln Memorial and site of The Triumphal Arch, rapidly continues. The sculptures will be fully regilded by July 3. The photos were taken yesterday. The Gilders’ Studio has flown in Gilders from around the Country!"
Thrilled to announce that my book NINETEENTH-CENTURY AMERICAN LITERATURE AND THE LAW OF THE MARKET is now under contract with Oxford University Press and forthcoming sometime next year. Thanks to all who supported, challenged, and strengthened it along the way. Now, to find a job....
Historian here this is literally about gutting the Reconstruction amendments especially the consequential 14th amendment piece by piece.
Look, Middlemarch is a great novel. It complexly mediates class conflict, the commodification of all life, emerging ideological structures in Victorian capitalism. I just personally think it’s more impressive when a novel does that through a story about a guy who hates a weird fish.
Dr ShinyGoth@ghostingdani.bsky.social · 4mo agoRank partisans, the lot of them. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...
It is certain that Uncle Tom’s Cabin had a greater impact on our constitutional order than any law review article, and it was a work of fiction.
"In Emerson’s words, we are 'build[ing] sepulchres of the fathers' and seeking the authority of the past rather than 'demanding our own works and laws and worship.' ... Rather than enjoying an 'original relation to the universe,' we are subjected to an originalist relation to the universe."
Dan Farbman@danfarbman.bsky.social · 6mo agoI've been musing over our latest outbreak in the originalism wars, and what came out was an Emersonian polemic. You can take a look over at @hashtagblevin.bsky.social and my newsletter if you are interested. open.substack.com/pub/postcard...
The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress. — Frederick Douglass
RIP Dan Howe, a great historian of the antebellum United States 🗃️
In memoriam: Daniel Walker Howe, 88, Pulitzer Prize–winning historian and UCLA professor
His scholarship reshaped how Americans understood the nation’s political, intellectual and religious past.
newsroom.ucla.edu
Grateful to @melville-society.bsky.social and honored to be in the company of so many impressive past winners!
The Melville Society@melville-society.bsky.social · 9mo agoWe are excited to announce the 2024 Hennig Cohen Prize winner: Geoffrey R. Kirsch, for his article “Piercing the Corporate Whale: Agents, Principals, and the Personified Impersonal in Moby-Dick,” published in Leviathan, vol. 26, no. 3, pp. 55-68. www.melvillesociety.org/news/2024-he...
Before the midterms of 1866, President Andrew Johnson called his congressional opponents traitors and said they should be hanged. Voters were so profoundly moved by his words... that they gave his opponents a supermajority in Congress, and the nation got the Fourteenth Amendment.
Moby Dick was published on this day in 1851, so today's bank note comes from Nantucket and features a large vignette of whalers in a longboat about to harpoon a spouting sperm whale. Also on the right, note the Hydrostatic Oil Press. Manufacturers and Mechanics Bank, Nantucket, MA, $3, Dec 5, 1843.🗃️
Illinois congressman John Farnsworth comparing the U.S. Supreme Court in Dred Scott to the Bleak House chancery court in 1859 is just *chef's kiss* [4 weeks out from my book deadline and still finding gems in my own research 🙃]
Boy, Holmes' bad man is really getting a workout these days.
Patrick De Klotz@patdeklotz.bsky.social · 12mo agoHoly shit
Political violence is bad. It usually begets more political violence. Celebrating political violence is bad. It usually encourages more political violence, against various targets. Campus shootings are bad. They make everyone on campus less safe. It's bad that what I wrote here is controversial.
At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.
Jamie Dupree@jamiedupree.bsky.social · last yr.Multiple National Guard vehicles at the Lincoln Memorial which is not a problem area for crime
Planning this panel for next year's @c19americanists.bsky.social conference in Cincinnati. Email/DM me with questions and/or proposals!
Nearly 250 years of a republic struggling to live up to the ideals of its founding documents only to arrive here.
Seth Cotlar@sethcotlar.bsky.social · last yr.“For 30 or 40 miles…I staggered on, fearing every instant I should be …crushed within the jaws of some disturbed alligator. The dread of them now almost equalled the fear of the pursuing hounds.” -Solomon Northrup, Twelve Years a Slave
O gentlemen, the time of life is short; To spend that shortness basely were too long If life did ride upon a dial’s point, Still ending at the arrival of an hour. An if we live, we live to tread on kings.
