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Erin Grievances

@erinbartram.bsky.social

9.9K followers 1.3K following 3.9K posts

Historian of religion & gender in the 19th c US, drinker of tea in the 21st c US. Museum educator at MTH&M. Wrote some quit lit you may have read. Founder & editor at contingentmagazine.org. Former academic. Sings with Voices of Concinnity. She/her.

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Erin Grievances @erinbartram.bsky.social · 6h

You know it!

Erin Grievances @erinbartram.bsky.social · 23h

thank you twizzlers (1 lb bag)

Hell-issa Johnson, PhD 🎃 @ladyhistorian.bsky.social · 23h

Thank you doritos

Courtney E. Thompson @cethompson.bsky.social · 23h

thank u Kraft mac & cheese

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Erin Grievances @erinbartram.bsky.social · 1d

The giant ballroom is so we can all get a seat for the tribunals.

Brendan Nyhan @brendannyhan.bsky.social · 1d

Monstrous.

"federal agents detained nearly every resident of the 130-unit building—including children and babies—placing them in zip ties and separating them by race into vans for more than two hours early Tuesday morning."

Daniel Knowles @dlknowles.bsky.social · 1d

Good reporting on the South Shore raid from South Side weekly here.

Confirms one thing I was told but didn't put in my own piece because I didn't have a second source and it seemed too insane: border agents segregated arrested residents by race

southsideweekly.com/federal-agen...

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Erin Grievances @erinbartram.bsky.social · 1d

I worked from home yesterday and didn't go outside, and when I came out this morning, I gasped at the big red brushstroke that had appeared up the side of a huge tree on my street.

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Erin Grievances @erinbartram.bsky.social · 1d

I was skeptical and then used it to listen to an album I'm performing on and I could instantly hear my own breathing distinctly. Yikes.

Erin Grievances @erinbartram.bsky.social · 1d

Grant's new mailbag on how you study the history of punk will be a great fit in undergrad classrooms. The footnotes alone are an absolute goldmine.

Contingent Magazine @contingent-mag.bsky.social · 1d

A brand new mailbag—yes, you CAN study that, but how?

You Can Study That?

What could be more satisfying than immersing yourself in the history of something you love?

contingentmagazine.org

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Reposted by Erin Grievances

Contingent Magazine @contingent-mag.bsky.social · 1d

A brand new mailbag—yes, you CAN study that, but how?

You Can Study That?

What could be more satisfying than immersing yourself in the history of something you love?

contingentmagazine.org

1 4 22

Reposted by Erin Grievances

Joshua Erlich @joshuaerlich.bsky.social · 1d

“where’s the whale? did he get the whale yet?”

lindsey adler @lindseyadler.bsky.social · 2d

...

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Erin Grievances @erinbartram.bsky.social · 2d

Maybe I'll just say she's two years younger than I am and has the same amount of journalism experience that I do.

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Erin Grievances @erinbartram.bsky.social · 2d

I think they need to know it's more malicious than that but I don't know how to communicate it. Mostly I don't want to have to explain BW to my parents because, like so much happening today, it's so ridiculous on top of being awful.

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Erin Grievances @erinbartram.bsky.social · 2d

Boston brown bread in a can.

Erin Grievances @erinbartram.bsky.social · 2d

The dust from the bottom of a bag of Frosted Cheerios is *sublime*

Erin Grievances @erinbartram.bsky.social · 2d

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.

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Erin Grievances @erinbartram.bsky.social · 2d

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.

Erin Grievances @erinbartram.bsky.social · 2d

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

Erin Grievances @erinbartram.bsky.social · 2d

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.

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Erin Grievances @erinbartram.bsky.social · 2d

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.

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Erin Grievances @erinbartram.bsky.social · 2d

Oh no, I may have found my in.

People also ask
Did Mark Twain have ADHD?

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Erin Grievances @erinbartram.bsky.social · 2d

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!

Erin Grievances @erinbartram.bsky.social · 2d

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.

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Erin Grievances @erinbartram.bsky.social · 2d

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

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Erin Grievances @erinbartram.bsky.social · 2d

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

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Erin Grievances @erinbartram.bsky.social · 2d

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.

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Erin Grievances @erinbartram.bsky.social · 2d

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.

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Erin Grievances @erinbartram.bsky.social · 2d

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

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