Erin Grievances

I spent last Friday trawling through newspapers.com hunting for "mark twain said" to see how he'd been misquoted, and WOW did I stumble on some savage reviews of Big River.

Agreed! But sometimes it's also a way of making him more progressive than he was as a way of comforting the similarly-situated men who write about him.

He was selective with his anti-imperialism, as with everything else!

I have spent the day marinating on these biographical frameworks and I am struggling a lot with the idea of his story as quintessentially American because of his ability to take advantage of things and exercise rights that most other Americans weren’t legally or culturally allowed to do it all.

There are times where I think I am too much of a historian for this job, because to see his life framed as an enduring quest for freedom by a recent biographer drives me up a goddamn tree. But I bet students reading his writing have a different take altogether.

Oh no, I may have found my in.

Visitors to the museum love to talk about how great Twain's satire is but I have "What Have The Police Been Doing?" up for visitor comment this month and I'm starting to think they don't love it as much as they say!

There are two major biographies of him by guys with the last name Kaplan and two other major biographies of him by guys with the first name Ron. Sometimes it's just too much. Twain Studies is more diverse but the Fathers Day present biographies are just this.

Also one of these guys referred to Hannibal as being on the prairie.

Just to be clear: I think he would gag reading some of this stuff.

He's a reflection of America for sure, but a lot of these guys only want to see the parts of his story that look like theirs.

To help me with this talk I'm writing, I just (re)read the introductions to every major Twain biography written by a white man in the last hundred years, plus HH's preface to Mark Twain Tonight, and I think I'm going to pass away from romanticized nostalgia.

The tell is that scholarly bullshit isn't ever that smoothly written.

I think we need to write a closing piece for the series about this because our pitch inbox is currently the uncanny valley.

Like, I guess I'm glad I'm keeping my brain sharp as I try to construct Twain Studies from a historian's perspective using only the rawest of materials, but it sure is inefficient!

Working at a museum without access to a university library means spending 6 years thinking about/reading Mark Twain & his reception and then every time I think I had an original thought it turns out @mattseybold.bsky.social tweeted it out in the form of a peer-reviewed article a decade ago.

Contingent Magazine is Calling For Historical Essays on Monsters, Mutants & Supernatural Entities | $300 per Article ✍️ Contingent Magazine seeks essays on monsters, mutants & mythology. $300 per article. Perfect for history writers in Kenya. 🧟‍♀️

You can even read a monstrous version of the call for pitches we wrote, reworded and illustrated by AI, if the carefully-crafted call we wrote wasn't sufficient.

The number of AI-generated pitches this time around is something else, I will say.

we simply do not have a union anymore if the president is using troops from one state to invade others entirely on the basis of political disagreements

It is exhausting for everything to be so historical all the time, why are we doing historical things at 10pm on a Sunday 😭

CFP: A Time of Monsters The monster has been here all along. It is a historical constant that manifests in wildly different ways across time, place, and culture. Whatever form it takes, the monster claws at categories; it un...

If you are a supporter and reader of @contingent-mag.bsky.social one of the biggest things you can do to help us at the moment is get this CFP to the NTT folks in your life. The fracturing of social media has made it very difficult to get the word out esp. to adjuncts and VAPs.

A bunch of awesome historians of Catholicism did a whole panel on this a few years ago at the big annual history conference in the US. They did it at a nightclub, I think!

neil gorsuch anxiously looking at two buttons

Every CFP we post gets put on "get paid for your writing" lists and we receive a thousand pitches by, to paraphrase Annie Edison, every good-time content creator and freelance writer with a song in his heart. But our contributors are as important to our mission as our readers. Help us find them.

This can include really old-school ways like emailing the adjuncts in your department or even printing it out and sticking it up in the copyroom! We're an old enough outfit that we're unknown to most of the newer members of the precarious class.

CFP: A Time of Monsters The monster has been here all along. It is a historical constant that manifests in wildly different ways across time, place, and culture. Whatever form it takes, the monster claws at categories; it un...

If you are a supporter and reader of @contingent-mag.bsky.social one of the biggest things you can do to help us at the moment is get this CFP to the NTT folks in your life. The fracturing of social media has made it very difficult to get the word out esp. to adjuncts and VAPs.

In undercover interview, Project 2025 architect gets candid on the initiative’s radical goals and connections to Trump In an undercover interview with reporters from the British non-profit organization Centre for Climate Reporting, Project 2025 architect and MAGA ally Russ Vought admitted to the project's strong ties ...

When you recall that political reporters ran interference for Trump over his "opposition" to Project 2025, remember that even AT THAT TIME there was a hidden camera interview with Vought where he said that was bullshit and he didn't mean it. www.mediamatters.org/russ-vought/...

The title is Mark Twain: The Man, The Myth, The Legend which I am SURE you’ve already used.

I am writing a new talk that's basically framed by famous Mark Twain quotes that he didn't say and I can't believe I waited so long to do a search on this site. It's FULL of them!

Kid today, after learning that Mark Twain’s name was Samuel Clemens: ah so like Mark Twain is handle; follow him at @marktwain