Randall Stephens
@Randall_Stps
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American historian, rel, envr, pop culture, South. Author: The Devil's Music (Harvard 2018). Prof of Am & Brit Studies, Univ of Oslo. Fulbright alumnus.
Oslo, Norway
Joined September 2013
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Find me over on Bluesky:
@randalljstephens
.bsky.social Would love to stay in touch!
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Stephen Colbert: “For those of you who don’t know what Parler is...it’s Twitter, but all trolls. It’s like a Thanksgiving dinner where the whole table is just racist uncles.”
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US Army engineer Harold Fisk’s 1944 map of the changing course of the Mississippi River over thousands of years.
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The only sensible thing to do with Trump's "Gettysburg, Wow" speech in Pennsylvania was to make a one-minute documentary film of it. These are all his real words. I added some "bing bongs" at the start. "Never fight uphill, me boys! Never fight uphill."
#FunWithPhotoshop
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At the Univ of Oslo PhD students in our dept get between $53-58k/yr, have full health insurance, maternity/paternity benefits, a retirement plan, & apx $2.5k/yr for reasearch, books, & conferences. Perks of a social democracy that values higher ed & expects people to have lives.
Transparency in grad/adjunct pay:
PhD stipends in my dept are $14,000 annually, plus tuition, for 20hrs/week of labor.
MA stipends: $6500 + tuition for ditto.
Adjuncts make $2400 per 3-hour course (max 2 courses per semester) and don't get their first paychecks until Oct 31.
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Rep Geatz is what happens when a scientist turns a can of Axe body spray, a fraternity charter, an NRA memo, and a Breitbart editorial into a real boy.
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Senator Lindsey Graham's righteous indignation about the FBI and its bias is totally unbelievable. Here are just some of the anti-Trump tweets that Graham wrote in 2015-2016. Maybe Graham needs to investigate himself?
#SenateJudiciaryCommittee
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Harvard College gave Andrew Jackson an honorary degree in 1833. John Quincy Adams refused to attend the ceremony. Adams asked, how could Harvard confer its "highest literary honors upon a barbarian who could not write a sentence of grammar & hardly could spell his own name"?
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In 1903 Union Civil War veterans in Kansas officially protested "placing of any monuments [to] Confederate generals upon United States grounds or buildings." They referred particularly to the "traitors & perjurers" Robert E. Lee & Jefferson Davis. Topeka Daily Herald, 2/17/1903.
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Trump's 2 moronic tweets about "ET" really make the Christianity Today case. Here's a line from their ed: Trump's "Twitter feed alone—w/ its habitual string of mischaracterizations, lies, and slanders—is a near perfect example of a human being who is morally lost and confused."
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Rep Nunes: Ambassador Sondland, are you aware, or have you ever been aware, of the enormous dangers associated with the fluoridation of water? And do you know how it is CURRENTLY being used for mind-control purposes?
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The president broke an expensive antique chair. He placed the broken pieces into a pile. Looking down at the pile, he claimed he fixed the broken chair and said that everyone was so happy with his repair job.
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That scene that the CBC cut out of Home Alone 2. It was just Trump yelling at Kevin about how unfairly he had been treated. Then followed by a long monologue on toilet flushing and the dangers of wind mills.
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A fun little Herblock cartoon on the changing number of Supreme Court justices and FDR's court-packing plan. Has a Dr. Seuss quality to it. Austin American, 2/24/1937.
#CourtPacking
#NewDeal
#FDR
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Union veterans in Pennsylvania were pretty clear about their thoughts on Lee and the confederacy, 1926. “Robert E. Lee was a traitor to his country….if Robert E. Lee had received his just dues, he would have been hanged and the scaffold preserved as a monument to his infamy.”
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"Help the poor? What kind of religion is that?" Herblock, 11/13/84.
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The University of Oslo Humanities Board approved my promotion to professor today. Feels good.
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POTUS will soon be accusing the WHO of running casinos into the ground, cheating on wives, seeking foreign interference in the 2020 election, and placing a daughter and son-in-law in positions of power.
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I tried animating this picture of Twain I colorized a while back. Used the new feature on the MyHeritage app.
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“All the doctors, really smart guys, said, ‘Sir, how do you know so much medical? How is that?’ And then one doctor, the head one, a really big tough guy, came up to me. Crying like a baby, he said, ‘No one has ever won SO BIG in a virus war like you, sir!’ Not even close.”
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If the Electoral College woke up one morning as a guitar.
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WaPo in 7/18/2016: “The Trump campaign worked behind the scenes last week to make sure the new Republican platform won’t call for giving weapons to Ukraine to fight Russian and rebel forces, contradicting the view of almost all Republican foreign policy leaders in Washington.”
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Lovely reenactment yesterday at the Pentagon of the Siege of Logan International Airport.
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Wallace should ask Trump to define, in specific terms, what critical race theory is.
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In junior high gym class in the mid-80s we were required to do square dancing. Not sure if this was just because it was in Kansas or what. How common was that? Not super popular with the students, as I remember.
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"We stand upon our historic principles." Herblock, Washington Post, 1964.
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"Junior!" Bill Crawford on the GOP's far-right turn, Roseburg News Review, 7/16/1963.
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Betty White sitting on top of a tv with a poodle, late 1950s.
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An Okie describing newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst in John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1939): "I seen pitchers of him. Fat, sof' fella with little mean eyes an' a mouth like a ass-hole. Scairt he's gonna die. Got a million acres an' scairt of dyin'."
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@KevinMKruse
Having now been part of the healthcare systems in the UK and Norway, just gonna say the American model is like a tire fire on top of a nuclear waste site.
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Hey Siri, show me an example of dangerously stupid/historical ignorant American exceptionalism.
CNN's Rick Santorum: "We birthed a nation from nothing. I mean, there was nothing here. I mean, yes we have Native Americans but candidly there isn't much Native American culture in American culture"
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This is very niche. But could it maybe sell at the OAH, AHA, MLA, or AAR?
#FunWithPhotoshop
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Hey Siri, find me a visual representation of originalism.
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Dinesh D'Souza's new confessional, I Can't Tell the Difference Between the Past & the Present (Anachronism Press, 2019).
#FunWithPhotoshop
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"We can get aboard if we hurry!" Bill Mauldin, Charlotte Observer, 11/25/1962. Mauldin said this of his cartoon: "Barry Goldwater was convincing some northern conservatives that their only hope for success in '64 would be to appeal to southern reactionaries."
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My hot take: People who don't use the Oxford comma put zero thought into what they are doing and are happy to watch the world go up in flames.
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At this point I wouldn't be too surprised if Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman revealed that Trump tried to force President Zelensky to buy a Trump Properties timeshare or to pressure him into helping relaunch Trump Steaks.
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Stephen Malkmus, Neko Case, and other aging indie rockers, are starting to look like the cool/hip full professors in a History or American Studies dept.
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Chicago Style:
¹ Rudy Giuliani, accidental butt-dialed voice message to Rich Schapiro, October 16, 2019, 11:07 p.m.
APA:
(Rudy Giuliani, accidental butt-dialed voice message to Rich Schapiro, Oct 16, 2019).
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This is the expression of a Norwegian on the Oslo subway when any stranger speaks to them.
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Tom Brady is older than the Skipper (Alan Hale Jr.) was when Gilligan's Island filmed its pilot episode in November 1963.
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Rep Gaetz "invited a Holocaust denier to be his State of the Union guest. He led the Republicans’ storming of a secure hearing room, endangering government secrets. And now this....As a parent, as a person, I wonder: Where is Matt Gaetz’s humanity?"
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My vote for worst song in modern pop music would be "God Bless the U.S.A." by Lee Greenwood. It's bad on so many different levels. So much all-around garbage that it deserves its own special exhibit at the Country Music Hall of Fame.
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A White Citizens' Council cartoon from 1956 that takes aim at liberal Protestantism, the NAACP, academic freedom, and integration. Has a real 1776 Commission vibe.
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Union Civil War veterans in Kansas protesting confederate memorials in 1903: "We cannot, at this time, prevent the ex-rebels building monuments to perpetuate their treason, but we can protest & may prevent the statues on soil belonging to the US." Topeka Herald, 2/17/1903.
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In 5-10 years will universities be advertising jobs in which the employee has to pay the employer?
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President Harry Truman speech, Batavia, NY, 10/10/1952: "[Republican Senator Robert] Taft explained that the great issue in this campaign is 'creeping socialism.'...Socialism is a scare word they have hurled at every advance the people have made in the last 20 years."
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In August 1963, the right-wing cartoonist Jack Knox drew a series of cartoons on the civil rights movement and the March on Washington. Like many on the right, Knox painted the movement red and depicted it as violent and dangerous. These appeared in the Nashville Banner.
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"They're not in the business of overthrowing the government, and we're not in the business of discouraging votes." Mauldin, 1964. In Aug 64, the GOP national chair said if the KKK wasn't in the business of overthrowing the govt, "we're not in the business of discouraging votes."
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"An American tragedy." Herblock, Washington Post, 6/5/1964.
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Cartoon about the death of the German Republic, New York Daily News, 3/30/1933.
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Trump MD will likely start talking about miasmas and the four humors. “Look, folks, we gotta balance the humors. The humors, as I like to call them. Balance. We’ll have to wait and see. It maybe good. It maybe bad.”
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Associate Pastor Pence is stoked to tell the congregation about the theme for this year’s VBS program.
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@KevinMKruse
"Sir, he said, tears streaming down his cheeks, we have no McFilet-O-Fish Sandwich MREs."
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Foucault trying to think of three things that are not prisons
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"Better stock up before they tighten controls."
Thomas F. Flannery, Baltimore Sun, 11/30/1971.
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The 1918 flu pandemic in the US caused an estimated 675,000 deaths. In the coming days that’ll be the total killed in the US by COVID-19.
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A 1954 textbook, The History of Texas, for 7th graders. The Reconstruction Era: "At that time, some greedy politicians were trying to use the Negro vote to their own advantage.... The laws were often disregarded, and crimes became common." More here:
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Here's my commemorative "Gettysburg, Wow" postcard, featuring a fantastic guy—an example of somebody who's done an amazing job and is being recognized more and more—Robert E. Leeprechaun.
#FunWithPhotoshop
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This is for all of us academics who let a negative book review or a bad student evaluation crowd out everything else.
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William F. Buckley trashing the Beatles, "Yeah, Yeah, Yeah, They Stink!" Newark Advocate, 9/10/1964. "It helps a little bit to know that no one thinks they are more of a joke than the Beatles themselves...they go to bed at night laughing at their utterly inexplicable success..."
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Jordan Peterson is an authority on culture, politics, and gender in the way that Francis Schaeffer was an authority on western art, music, and philosophy.
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My dad died back in 2001 at 59 years old. He was a math professor at a small college in Kansas. Just saw one of his former students who said that he was her favorite teacher. Made my day.
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The KS Union vets' 1903 resolution: "That we protest in unmeasured terms against placing any monuments...upon United States grounds...to commemorate the deeds of those who tried to destroy this Union, & we urge our Senators & Representatives to vote against any such desecration."
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Nathan Bedford Forrest's Memphis slave yard, as advertised in the Memphis Daily Appeal, 5/9/1857, p3. According to the Memphis City Directory of 1855, the business was thriving.
#NathanBedfordForrest
#Tennessee
#GovernorBillLee
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Had to give it a try, pt 2. Upside down distress head.
#NorthKorea
#photoshop
#FunWithPhotoShop
#KimJongUn
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Alan Dershowitz: “If a president does something which he believes will help him get elected in the public interest, that cannot be the kind of quid pro quo that results in impeachment.”
#FunWithPhotoshop
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The professor being tempted to take on another book review
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At the end of Trump’s bizarre, rambling, totally-off-the-rails speech it would have been a relief to have the My Pillow guy do a tight 5.
#PresserCOVID19
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Eleanor Roosevelt commenting on the barbs of her conservative critics: “I am accused of being a Red, as is everyone in this country who is working for better living conditions.”
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Patrick Henry on slavery: "as repugnant to humanity as it is inconsistent with the bible, & destructive to liberty." Also Patrick Henry on slavery: refused to free those he enslaved, citing "the general inconveniency of living here without them.” He had 112 when he died in 1799.
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“We’ll let the overcoat out all the way, and the robe will hardly show at all.” Classic Herblock commentary on what was beneath George Wallace's "law and order" campaign, Washington Post, 1968.
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I'd like to go on record to say that a note¹ in the middle of a sentence has got to be some kind of writing sin.
__________
¹ Never should be done.
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"Oddball pied piper of 1964." Thomas Stockett, Baltimore Afro-American, 10/13/1964.
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"Trouble with him is, he's prejudiced." Bill Mauldin, Pensacola Florida News Journal, 4/3/1965. There's something about this 55-year-old cartoon that seems really current.
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The Trump Presidential Library and Museum will be an abandoned megachurch in Branson, Missouri, with all the copper wiring stripped out. It will be haunted every night by the ghosts of George Wallace and Joe McCarthy.
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Here's conservative cartoonist Jack Knox's take on the civil rights movement, Nashville Banner, 7/13/1963.
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The Univ of Oslo just announced that since "employees have been working from home during the pandemic...As compensation for electronic communication services & other additional expenses the U Oslo has decided to provide a one-off payment of NOK 7,000 [$839]."
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Conservative journalist James Kilpatrick's column on Nixon & the press in the Boston Globe, 5/22/1974: "The president spoke bitterly of the failure of the press to cover the bugging of his own offices & campaign plane in 1968. He said he had pointed out the misuse of the FBI...
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Martin Luther King Jr. on the language of "subsidies" and "welfare": “Everybody’s on welfare in this country. When it’s white people, and rich, we call it subsidies. Suburbia was built by federally subsidized credit, and the highways and expressways that take people out there."
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“At the Environmental Protection Agency, policymakers were barred from considering studies about the deadly effects of air pollution. At the Department of Agriculture, information about the effects of climate change on crops was censored.”
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Foreign-born and children of foreign born, by county, 1910.Source: James L. Roark et al., The American Promise: A History of the United States from 1865 (Bedford St. Martin's, 2015).
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I often misread posts about LDS history as LSD history.
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May you have the unearned confidence of a creationist Bible bro lecturing a biology professor about the global flood and the location of Noah’s Ark.
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Kevin Siers' on the South Carolina confederate flag fight, Charlotte Observer, 1/16/2000. The NAACP launched a tourism boycott of the state in 1999 in response to the continued flying of the flag at the statehouse. When the flag came down in 2015, the NAACP ended its boycott.
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"I can't do this to me!" Herblock, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 9/18/1954.
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"We'll be appreciated here!" Bill Sanders, Kansas City Star, 8/21/1964.
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In this interdisciplinary study I will challenge the prevailing scholarship in several ways…
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The latest installment of the Library of America Deplorables set.
#DJTJ
#FunWithPhotoshop
#LibraryOfAmerica
@JohnFea1
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I feel like we've won the higher ed lottery. We both now have permanent jobs in our field in the same region.
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The White Citizens' Council in 1956 angry that blatantly racist songs were "being suppressed." "In our land of supposedly free speech, free thought and free expression, classic and popular songs are being 'burned.' Nazi censors suppressed Goethe's writings. . . ."
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