David Austin Walsh

Alas, still can't make seafood gumbo.

Good tip -- thanks!

My wife -- who keeps kosher -- and I have been together for nearly a decade and it took me this long to realize I can just sub margarine for butter in a bunch of recipes.

I can't recall offhand -- did Karp talk about the post-Civil War downsizing of the U.S. Navy, and/or the brown water vs. blue water traditions?

On the one hand, this seems obvious -- this was Mahan's whole point!

On the other hand, the literature on the WWII-era bid for American primacy doesn't really take into account that the U.S. had the second-largest navy in the world for decades prior.

Stray thought: most of the recent literature on American empire -- with the partial exception of Immerwahr -- fails to take into account the U.S. Navy as a driver of imperial expansion.

Found an empty lecture hall on the UVA campus with perfect acoustics and am now listening to a 1971 live show by the Rolling Stones in perfect concert clarity.

So jokes aside, this definitely means he was assassinated by another prisoner, no?

But you're right in that there is a thru-line -- he blames antifascism for the creation of the national security state.

Sure, but my point is that he is incapable of jettisoning that framework and has resorted to ever more tendentious arguments -- he wrote in JACOBIN at the beginning of the year that Trump was the heir to Andrew Jackson and the Klan -- to again insist that there is no fascistic dimension here.

Yeah, but the problem is that -- and you pointed this out in your thread -- when you base your analysis of Trumpism around your political assumptions about liberalism and how to beat it (Bessner does this all the fucking time) it leads you to some pretty incoherent places.

The "no qualitative difference" argument has already struck me as weak, because even the original Frankfurt School guys understood fascism as an *intensification* of processes already occurring under liberalism!

Yeah, I was about to say, Tooze has a far more nuanced understanding of this stuff than Bessner.

This is what happens when people can't walk and chew gum at the same time. (Which is to say when people think that criticizing Trump for being uniquely bad somehow exonerates American liberalism.)

Having another one of those days where I think that my book was bad, my academic work is bad, my intellectual contributions to the world have been mediocre at best, I have nothing of value or relevance to say, and I deserved to strike out on the job market.

..."Plastic Paddy" phenomenon and there are hard generational limits on whether or not the Irish diaspora can be considered legitimately "Irish," at least as far as the Irish state is concerned.

Aliyah and the right of return, among other things, complicate the story.

Right, and as someone on The Other Website pointed out Hasia Diner has an Irish and Jews book that just came out. But I'm specifically interested in the relationship between the diaspora and the conflicts.

Obviously one important difference is that the Irish tend to be suspicious of the...

Every single time I wonder why I'm so grumpy and have a headache I have to remind myself that the heat index is 108 degrees and I was just outside 20 minutes ago.

Maybe there's already one out there? But Irish studies as a field in the U.S. is minuscule compared to Jewish studies, and I've never read anything in the Jewish studies space that touches on this.

*sips coffee*

Probably a good article -- maybe even a book? -- to be written comparing Israel and Ireland in American politics and culture in the 20th century.

Heat will finally break here on Friday and it cannot come soon enough.

I don't think I've felt physically good in five days.

Perhaps not coincidentally, today is day five of 100+ heat index weather.

Joe Biden was one of the primary architects of the genocide.

Is there a single institution in this country outside of the federal government itself, AIPAC, and maybe the ADL more directly responsible for the Gaza genocide than the New York Times?
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Yeah, it's not a class many faculty would be keen to teach, and one of the other major objections I've heard is that it would make it harder for non-majors to take history classes, which is of course the lifeblood of most departments.

Things obviously might have changed in 15 years!

Yeah, that does seem unique to UVA.

@lollardfish.bsky.social can speak to this better than I can, but when I was a history major at UMN I don’t think we did a methods class until the 4xx level?

Our students don’t bat an eye about those kinds of prereqs in econ, for instance!

Right, but what I’m suggesting is making such a methods course a prereq for either declaring the major or taking more advanced coursework in history, for both pedagogical reasons and to signal methodological rigor!

My pet theory is that starting with a foundations course actual signals methodological rigor to students, as opposed to the broad surveys.