Ariel Ron
@arielronid
Followers
2,901
Following
1,150
Media
1,480
Statuses
12,784
ag, econ & political history @SMU // director, Clements Center for Southwest Studies // book: Grassroots Leviathan (Johns Hopkins UP 2020)
Dallas
Joined February 2011
Don't wanna be here?
Send us removal request.
Explore trending content on Musk Viewer
Hamas
• 743155 Tweets
Liverpool
• 315444 Tweets
Netanyahu
• 277550 Tweets
Casemiro
• 243679 Tweets
Manchester United
• 186916 Tweets
Ten Hag
• 163664 Tweets
Thüringen
• 133610 Tweets
Mbappe
• 131289 Tweets
Old Trafford
• 112369 Tweets
#احسموا_صفقه_موليرو
• 104148 Tweets
Rashford
• 77790 Tweets
#BBNaijaS9
• 44112 Tweets
Onana
• 42714 Tweets
Wanni
• 42163 Tweets
Vinicius
• 39093 Tweets
Demokratie
• 32652 Tweets
Man U
• 31959 Tweets
Kassia
• 28309 Tweets
Valverde
• 27762 Tweets
#RealMadridRealBetis
• 24096 Tweets
Ebuka
• 23732 Tweets
Biggie
• 23079 Tweets
Dinamarca
• 21933 Tweets
Bernabéu
• 21602 Tweets
Ceballos
• 21540 Tweets
ALGS
• 20868 Tweets
Barcola
• 20650 Tweets
Fonseca
• 15754 Tweets
Ancelotti
• 13090 Tweets
Yumruk
• 11346 Tweets
Courtois
• 11067 Tweets
Şenol Güneş
• 10145 Tweets
Pinned Tweet
I've got a new article just out in the AHR: "When Hay Was King: Energy History and Economic Nationalism in the 19c US." The energy people know about this work but I hope it also reaches my Civil War era colleagues. 1/
15
70
283
One thing that's becoming clear from how the protests are being handled is that, contrary to what undergrads and many faculty believe, the liberal arts college is not at the core of the university anymore. The modern university is being shown to be an incoherent institution.
11
103
784
THREAD on the economic limits of antebellum slavery. A ton of important scholarship, recent and older, has shown that enslavement could be very profitable to enslavers. Yet there’s no doubt the South as a region developed more slowly & stayed poorer than other US regions. Why? 1/
25
164
695
One of the strangest facets of this war is that the Israeli left has been completely isolated, both domestically and internationally, at the very moment that it’s decades-long analysis of the situation has proven disastrously correct.
10
99
690
it's almost like this image shows two distinct macroeconomic phases separated by the 1930s
14
48
556
Look if we're going to do this energy history thing we're going to have to declare a moratorium on the power double entendre
20
28
391
Tooze shoots down DeLong's book. Pretty much confirms my suspicions based on the intro, which did not look promising. It just doesn't make sense at this point to write ambitious histories of global economic development that don't squarely address climate.
6
37
315
Finished reading Ruth Goodman's The Domestic Revolution. Absolutely smashing book. Never thought I'd read three pages on how to stir a pot with such rapt fascination. Essential key to understanding the first coal transition.
5
29
301
Can these things hang together?
a liberal arts college for critical thinking
a professional school linked to employers
a research machine focused on government grants
a commercialization incubator
a professional sports franchise
7
29
228
"there's no military solution," "a massacre doesn't justify a massacre," "massacring civilians isn't an answer to massacring civilians -- cease"
2
32
202
Why did people revive the calculation debate instead of this, to me much more interesting, socialization debate between Schumpeter and Bauer?
6
38
193
the crazy thing about the FTX implosion is that SBF literally said out loud that it was all a ponzi on a well known econ and finance podcast just a few weeks ago
5
19
185
Among the many telling and incredible statistics of the US Civil War is the fact that every time the Union’s Army of the Potomac made camp, it instantly became the second largest city in the Confederacy. After the fall of New Orleans early in 1862, the first.
5
28
177
The Jefferson-Hamilton tiff is rarely presented as financial on both sides. It's usually said that Hamilton was the financial maven while Jefferson grasped the class and racial politics of land and ag. The mistake here is to think that land and ag weren't financialized. 1/
3
25
174
ANIMAL ENERGY, a THREAD on the surprising history of industrial capitalism's core and periphery:
You'd think animals are a primitive power source quickly discarded once fossil fuels entered the picture. But you'd be wrong. Animal power concentrated in the 19c industrial core.
9
73
171
Amazing map of “deserter country” from Ella Lonn’s Desertion during the Civil War (1928).
H/t
@KeriLeighMerrit
11
31
160
.
@jbouie
is the historians’ pundit. Really, there’s no other prominent op-ed writer as engaged with and knowledgeable about current historical scholarship.
1
7
152
To my SMU students: don’t grow up to introduce neo-Confederate Jim Crow segregationist voter restriction laws and then pretend like you have no idea what all the fuss is about
That moment when he realizes he put a Jim Crow-era slogan in the bill he’s claiming isn’t voter suppression😬
2K
14K
52K
8
35
149
My book is going to have a somewhat reasonably priced paperback edition early next year. Apologies but I'm now obligated to harp on this with intolerable cringe.
4
24
148
But suppression of material and intellectual standards of living was never enough. Slavery had to be enforced with violence. The private and social overhead costs of turning an entire region into an armed prison camp were high. Really this was the root of all of the above. 7/
1
9
142
The first thing is that enslaving people entails suppressing their consumption. With more than a third of the population in chains, the South lacked domestic demand for the ordinary, inexpensive items that encouraged mass production techniques. 3/
3
4
139
Slavery not only suppressed consumption, it suppressed initiative, knowledge and capacity. Slave states forced the enslaved into widespread (but not universal) illiteracy and systematically underinvested in education even for whites. Immense stores of talent were buried. 6/
2
10
133
"This map shows U.S. croplands ... derived primarily with Landsat imagery for the year 2015. The United States has 166 million hectares of net cropland area and is ranked second in the world after India, which has 180 million hectares."
5
36
126
Enslavement was the capitalization of labor. It generated new financial instruments but not any more laboring capacity. Slavery added massively to southern wealth, relative to the North, but not a whit to its production potential. 12/
2
4
118
Seems the slaveholder "modernity" paradigm has lost steam but I think it remains a worthwhile agenda, because it brings modernization back as a worthwhile question and because it connects to key late 19c/early 20c developments worldwide, i.e., imperialism, fascism etc.
12
14
113
On the contrary, it minimized it by foreclosing new developmental directions grounded in broad-based social needs. Tho northern capitalism was also deeply flawed, & equally predicated on land dispossession, it was far better at generating per-capita gains & wide distribution. fin
10
4
113
How do you write-up this Fed paper and not quote this part?
"I leave aside the deeper concern that the primary role of mainstream economics in our society is to provide an apologetics for a criminally oppressive, unsustainable, and unjust social order"
7
37
117
W/o domestic demand, the South focused on export markets. This ensured continued specialization in ag commodities instead of higher-value manufacturing. US manufacturers could not compete in the early 19c w/British industry even at home, much less in world markets. 4/
3
6
109
history of science, state and capitalism dissertation waiting to be written about this key piece of federal infrastructure... or does it already exist?
11
17
110
Highly useful site. County-level results for every presidential election since 1828.
2
26
107
What makes it extra complicated is that the college experience plays a very special role in American society, unlike university ed anywhere else in the world as far as I know. The multiplicity of the university is linked to that but it seems to have sprawled out of shape.
2
2
108
At the same time, urban growth was also hindered by the well known difficulties of enforcing slavery in urban settings. Frederick Douglass and Anthony Burns learned to read in cities and became more motivated and able to escape as a result. 9/
1
3
104
Two chapters in, this is a fantastic book. It has great, easy to understand explanations of the all kinds of premodern fuel using techniques and the land use implications. A strong case is made here that the English ag rev resulted from coal use for domestic heating…
4
10
106
Book is being released tomorrow.
@karpmj
said it was "uncommonly illuminating." Also said it "develops a powerful materialist interpretation of the origins of the Civil War," cool--but "almost as a happy accident"? You know me better than that man.
6
13
105
To make an export-oriented economy developmental would’ve required massive gov involvement on the order of 20c East Asian dev states. That’s the last thing southern planters were interested in doing. 5/
1
3
101
Got all 3 volumes of Braudel’s Civilization & Capitalism: 15th-18th Century for $10. They look untouched since printed in 1979. Of course the spine cracked the instant I opened the first volume.
4
2
104
The insane energy intensity of the United States in the nineteenth century is at least partly a function of the equally insane pace of deforestation to clear settler farms.
3
24
104
Wrote about John C. Calhoun's surprisingly relevant monetary thought, austerity politics and infrastructure spending. Wanted to call it "The Bad Money of John C. Calhoun" but the editor-gods said elsewise. Anyway thanks to
@rebeccaonion
for the shepherding
9
36
105
niche opinion: history departments should hire economic historians, like with econ degrees
31
3
101
Each of these factors had knock-on effects. For instance, domestic consumption suppression, export orientation, and ag specialization inhibited growth of southern cities and a local entrepreneurial class interested in going beyond the major planter commodities. 8/
1
2
96
A thing abt Marx I don’t see typically recognized is the organizing power of his moral charisma, which is authorized by his analytic genius. Lots of ppl can both connect w/M’s moral outrage & agree that his analysis is worthy of study. His oeuvre becomes a concentrating force.
2
10
94
My continuing study of history has taught me that a lot of shit went down
1
8
94
Book >>> fall 2020 from Johns Hopkins University Press
GRASSROOTS LEVIATHAN
Agricultural Reform and the Rural North in the Slaveholding Republic
8
24
95
I'm biased but I have to say that not enough people read the journal Agricultural History
12
3
98
I think all of these are genuine and important reasons why the antebellum southern economy faced real developmental limits. But it didn’t necessarily look like it at the time because with more land “available,” the profitable plantation complex was expanding. 10/
1
3
91
"More than 80 percent of the continental U.S. is experiencing unusually dry conditions or full-on drought, which is the largest proportion since the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration began tracking 20 years ago."
1
35
90
It is often said that the highest concentration of millionaires in America in the 1850s was in Natchez, MS, a town few could locate on a map today. But this wealth, while very real in one respect, was quite illusory in another. 11/
2
4
89
Got this today from a colleague and I admit it’s obnoxious to post but I’m doing it anyway because
9
0
93
Reupping this bc it’s so good
“Actually making animal agriculture less ecologically disruptive would mean taking animals’ ecological value as a bedrock principle against and over their value as commodities.”
4
29
86
(Though it has to be recognized that when the Civil War forced the master class’s hand, the state intervened forcibly and achieved rapid advances in manufacturing.)
1
2
85
who's got a historians' group chat to talk about these Kamil Galeev threads? please add me, need to discuss this
9
3
83
Official good book +1 🧐 🧐
much honored by this
Winner of the Theodore Saloutos Memorial Award for the best book on agricultural history in the United States:
@arielronid
for Grassroots Leviathan from
@JHUPress
!
1
5
37
16
4
84
Official good book 🧐
Congratulations to
@arielronid
on the recent announcement of the 2021 Wiley-Silver Prize, from the Center for Civil War Research, for Best First Book in Civil War History, for *Grassroots Leviathan* from
@JHUPress
1
9
51
16
2
83
wrote about why the US federal government should put a lot more money into alt proteins, w/
@alexjmssmith
3
28
78
One more time: the Einhorn thesis is not that northern capital was benign or unimportant. It’s that slave holders were the bulwark of reactionary property for a long, formative period of US history. This is plainly a correct take.
5
8
77
Need to teach a grad class called History Undisciplined entirely with works by non-historians: journalists, lawyers, social scientists, novelists, politicians, etc. This profession has gotten entirely too insular.
3
6
75
Going to write a book called The Farmer's Republic and Its Industrial Periphery, 1819-1913
6
5
77
@BigMeanInternet
University administrators have become more dependent on donors and more more oriented to students as customers so protests threaten that and the idea of the university as an actual community with an important ethical life that includes dissent as a value is alien to them
0
2
73
A piece of advice I’d give to dissertating historians of capitalism is that you can do a lot of very worthwhile “quantitive” work by simply thinking carefully about data and then doing some pertinent arithmetic
5
0
76
I wrote about the history of US agricultural policy, the political coalition behind the Farm Bill cycle, and the failure to consider the most obvious form of “climate-smart” ag policy: converting millions of acres of commodity crops into new forests to capture and store carbon.
"Even if Democrats protect IRA funding, 'climate-smart' agriculture appears to mean pouring federal money into often dubious technological solutions designed to sustain the dominant productivist approach."
NEW:
@arielronid
on the farm bill coalition.
1
24
37
1
27
75
Here I want to gather some thoughts and put them out for critical engagement. Probably everything here has been said before but either not together or not in a long time. 2/
1
1
71
For all the talk of Hamilton as a statist, Jefferson probably did far more to build the early US state: a stupendous surveying operation, a huge land bureaucracy (+ associated postal system), an Army, and a court system for adjudicating endless land and credit disputes. 4/
4
9
71
one of the most spectacular public intellectual fails of all time, the goat possibly
‘the protests are robbing my Columbia students of listening to John Cage’s 4’33, the piece of music that is explicitly designed to force you to listen to…what’s around you.’ absolutely perfect
394
7K
39K
1
7
72
To what extent is the Anglophone world's love of beef an artifact of the specific agro-energy regime made by convertible husbandry? The latter allows for intensive, high-yield farming by integrating a rotation of grains, legumes and fodder crops with large numbers of livestock 1/
10
9
72
my publishers has made the colossal error of agreeing to issue a paperback edition of my book 🎉🥳🍾
they tell me I can make minor corrections so if anybody who's read it has spotted a typo, let me know
2
3
72
Arrest the president now for incitement to violence and treason against the constituted authorities of the United States of America. There has to be a limit.
1
21
69
This graph is just crazy. US overdose deaths have doubled in five years & fentanyl deaths have increased x12 in that period. Huge upswing during the pandemic after a couple years of modest success in arresting the trend. Mind blowing how bad this is.
🚨NEW: Illegal fentanyl is tearing through the US, driving record overdose death rates--270 people dying every day--and draconian policies have done nothing to curb the rising death toll.
Thread for more on my story with
@JamieSmythF
and
@chrissiemurray
..
24
143
326
1
38
69
people will talk about the students and the faculty being out of touch or whatever but Shafik blundering into Stefanik's trap in the worst and dumbest possible way tells most about the fecklessness of university administration and the high "leadership" class
4
14
68
New article w/
@ValeontiSofia
in
@CambUP_Econ
comparing Union inflation w/Confederate hyperinflation in the US Civil War. We root the different outcomes in institutional legacies linking democratic politics w/taxing capacity in free but not slave states.
6
23
67
almost beyond belief, given current center of gravity in 19c American historiography, that a book about the greenbacks once won a history pulitizer
9
4
62
New paper w/
@ValeontiSofia
up at SSRN!
"The Money War: An Interpretation of Democracy, Depreciation, and Taxes in the U.S. Civil War"
Why did Confederate money fail while the Union's succeeded? It wasn't about gold stocks, as this 1864 cartoon implies.
2
20
66
Anyone interested in the roots of neoliberalism should read Sarah Phillips's recent JAH article on the Kennedy admin's ag policy. P keeps her claims measured but they are potentially far-reaching for how we understand conservatism & the neoliberal turn
4
13
60
On the anniversary of Jan. 6, I wrote for the Strong Paw of Reason about why the Civil War was the culmination of a communications revolution that disrupted politics as usual and the parallels with our current situations—and also the key differences.
4
20
62
Check it out, I’m going to be taking with the great
@jbouie
at this thing on Thursday at noon EST. I believe anyone can register for free, it’s all online:
3
11
63
It’s really nice to see Sáez and Zucman crediting Robin Einhorn for her brilliant and regrettably under-appreciated book on slavery and American taxation. Why is it that only French economists seem to appreciate what historians do?
4
10
62
Wrote for
@TheProspect
about how the FTX collapse reveals the potential for reckless risk-taking in the philosophy behind Effective Altruism, particularly as exemplified by so-called "longtermism" being pushed by Will MacAskill
8
21
60
The thing I most dislike about academic writing is it’s narrative conventions. I don’t necessarily want to give the argument up front, I want to build suspect and do a reveal. I definitely don’t want to summarize every chapter in the intro, but it’s expected so you do it.
One thing that miffs me about academia is the penalty you pay for writing well. I cannot tell you the number of times that people have questioned my intelligence, rigor, methodology, etc. simply because I can and choose to write things clearly.
241
788
13K
9
4
60
Short THREAD on Reconstruction era violence and the documentary record. In light of the power of cell phone cameras to change the balance of public knowledge, it's worth remembering that evidence of past racial violence remains to be unearthed and made known. 1/
2
17
58
US horse and mule population, 1867-1960 w/my notes on what I think is happening at different moments. Am I right?
@KatBoniface
@BollWeevils
@emilypawley
11
9
60
Foner saying Trotsky was "perhaps unkind" for calling the American Socialists a "party of dentists"
3
1
57
These wars are the wreckage of the 20c. Communism failed catastrophically and was buried. Nationalism springs eternal, always failing forward, the solution to its own disastrous self. What is the alternative on the horizon? There is none.
3
8
56
my university seems to think that archival research is "non-empirical"
5
1
55
"land and freedom" is a common theme in US histories but perhaps we need more about "land and credit" to understand this country
5
5
56
I used my powers for good by introducing Civil War students to MMT by way of greenbacks and, hey, it kind of worked, if this exam answer is anything to judge by
8
6
54
Page proofs arrived a few days ago. Here's the table of contents and first page of the intro.
6
5
55