Jack Rakove
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jrakove.bsky.social
Jack Rakove
@jrakove.bsky.social
9.2K followers 270 following 570 posts

Native Cook County Democrat, Cubs fan, and long-time historian of the American Revolution and Constitution

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Jack Norman Rakove is an American historian, author, and professor at Stanford University. He is a Pulitzer Prize winner.

Source: Wikipedia
Political science 72%
Economics 9%
Posts Replies Media Videos

jrakove.bsky.social
Jack Rakove @jrakove.bsky.social · 5h
Really? Who are the outliers who separate the two words, something I have never seen? And are there any examples of the two-word variant in the legal pleadings, opinions, etc? If they appear there it would be one thing (historical authenticity of a kind, I suppose). If not, why bother?

jrakove.bsky.social
Jack Rakove @jrakove.bsky.social · 6h
Given that we're pondering the existence of an international crime ring of heads of states, why might cryptocurrency not also be a part of a payoff pardon scheme?
annecw.bsky.social AnneC @annecw.bsky.social · 6h
And of course, Trump has a pattern of absolving the crimes of drug traffickers (unless they are in boats in international waters, where there is the US order to kill them simply because they are accused of drug trafficking.)

bit.ly/488pK6D
Trump pardons drug kingpins even as he escalates U.S. drug war rhetoric
President Trump has promised to attack drug gangs and called for the death penalty for street dealers. But he has also pardoned more than 20 people serving time for serious drug crimes, some involving...
bit.ly

jrakove.bsky.social
Jack Rakove @jrakove.bsky.social · 6h
You might also consider Shelley Fishkin's Jim, then.

And I just learned that Everett's wife is a former student of mine from teaching the US history survey.

Reposted by Jack N. Rakove

annecw.bsky.social
AnneC @annecw.bsky.social · 6h
And of course, Trump has a pattern of absolving the crimes of drug traffickers (unless they are in boats in international waters, where there is the US order to kill them simply because they are accused of drug trafficking.)

bit.ly/488pK6D
Trump pardons drug kingpins even as he escalates U.S. drug war rhetoric
President Trump has promised to attack drug gangs and called for the death penalty for street dealers. But he has also pardoned more than 20 people serving time for serious drug crimes, some involving...
bit.ly

jrakove.bsky.social
Jack Rakove @jrakove.bsky.social · 2d
I knew Willi and visited him once at the FU--the summer of 1967. Probably happened due to Gerald Stourzh, who was a friend of my dad from hanging out with Hans Morgenthau (his mentor) at the U. of Chicago and who I just saw in Vienna while at a conference there on Constitutional Justice.

jrakove.bsky.social
Jack Rakove @jrakove.bsky.social · 2d
As a historian I'm not much of a hypothesis tester. But one could speculate that (a) the time spent together by "mixed" families will continue to decline ,or (b) the frequency of cases will diminish because such families can no longer stand each other ("a house divided against itself cannot stand")

jrakove.bsky.social
Jack Rakove @jrakove.bsky.social · 2d
First author was one of my students! And this is a reminder that I know he is on the Farm (as we call it) this year, so I have to get back in touch with him. A nice Thanksgiving surprise.
Plus this looks like real social science!
joenoonan.se Joe Noonan @joenoonan.se · 2d
Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

Reposted by Will Jennings, Jack N. Rakove, James Goodwin , and 2 more

joenoonan.se
Joe Noonan @joenoonan.se · 2d
Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

jrakove.bsky.social
Jack Rakove @jrakove.bsky.social · 5d
Reminds me of a quasi-seminar I went to with Oscar Handlin circa 1971, including some visiting Russians. Handlin asked, how do historians know when a narrative should begin?Long earnest discussion followed. Then Oscar shrugged his shoulders and basically said, you just decide it somehow.

jrakove.bsky.social
Jack Rakove @jrakove.bsky.social · 6d
There are worse fates when one reads a serious and deeply learned book like Jim's.

jrakove.bsky.social
Jack Rakove @jrakove.bsky.social · 6d
Food fact you'll like: Kettner made fried bananas for us once when his grad school roommie was a future governor of Mississippi (talk about settler colonialism) and secretary of the navy. I have fond memories of Jim hard at work in the main reading room of Widener Library. A legend at Dwinelle Hall

jrakove.bsky.social
Jack Rakove @jrakove.bsky.social · 6d
Looks like a go and will post it when it appears. Should be fun.

jrakove.bsky.social
Jack Rakove @jrakove.bsky.social · 6d
If you are teaching AP, it might be fun to ask your students to read up on James Plumb Martin or, for that matter, Benedict Arnold (allegations of treason being much in the news these days).
As for watching I'll only say that I thought it pretty boring, visually, beyond my objections to the content.

jrakove.bsky.social
Jack Rakove @jrakove.bsky.social · 6d
and the list could go on and on, which is exactly why studying the Revolution as a political event proves far more challenging and informative than retracing its military history, though of course that subject too is quite engaging

jrakove.bsky.social
Jack Rakove @jrakove.bsky.social · 7d
Or maybe 5th grade if you just read the World Book, my go to encyclopedia when I attended the since-renamed J. J. Finley School (an obscure Confederate general) in Gainesville FL in 1956-57 and "edited" our class book on the Revolution.

Reposted by Anna O. Law

jrakove.bsky.social
Jack Rakove @jrakove.bsky.social · 7d
Definitely. But I think it is becoming much more complicated with the recent book by Kevin Kenny and the forthcoming book by @unlawfulentries.bsky.social (a.k.a. Anna Law). Although I still think my grad school friend Jim Kettner's book, The Development of American Citizenship, remains fundamental.

Reposted by Jan W. Mueller

jrakove.bsky.social
Jack Rakove @jrakove.bsky.social · 7d
Well worth a read for its ironclad reasoning, no matter how much its conclusions will depress you.

www.motherjones.com/politics/202...
This is all John Roberts’ fault
Trump owes his corrupt and abusive reign to one man.
www.motherjones.com

jrakove.bsky.social
Jack Rakove @jrakove.bsky.social · 7d
Can I speak up as Mr. Articles of Confederation here? One could easily integrate the western-lands story of why it took over three years to get it ratified with the impact of the Revolution on native peoples.

jrakove.bsky.social
Jack Rakove @jrakove.bsky.social · 7d
The concluding comments on the Constitution are essentially eighth-grade level.

jrakove.bsky.social
Jack Rakove @jrakove.bsky.social · 7d
I need a better definition than that, and Charles I might wish a word with you. And then there's the age-old question about the different models of revolution illustrated in the US and France. But my basic point is that the war subsumes everything and this political stuff is pretty marginal.

jrakove.bsky.social
Jack Rakove @jrakove.bsky.social · 7d
But that goes to my main point: what makes the Revolution revolutionary are the political changes that began when royal power collapsed in 1774-75? You can't talk about 1787 intelligently if you don't go back start to the creation of new governments in the mid-1770s, which the series fails to do.

jrakove.bsky.social
Jack Rakove @jrakove.bsky.social · 7d
Yes, and I have an idea of how and where I may express them at greater length. Stay tuned.
In the end this is not a story about a revolution; it's really only about a war of national liberation.

jrakove.bsky.social
Jack Rakove @jrakove.bsky.social · 7d
Having just watched the final episode of Ken Burns' series on the American Revolution reach its platitudinous conclusions, it did seem to me that there was one curious omission. It never asks the question, what was it that made the Revolution revolutionary? Who knows?

jrakove.bsky.social
Jack Rakove @jrakove.bsky.social · 7d
It was just an editing error. Once or twice I saw Walton on a bike. Quite a sight.

Reposted by Jack N. Rakove, David R. Miller

hillaryclinton.bsky.social
Hillary Rodham Clinton @hillaryclinton.bsky.social · 7d
With his ultimatum that Ukraine surrender to Russia, Trump finally wins a prize:

The Neville Chamberlain award for betraying peace, freedom, and justice.

jrakove.bsky.social
Jack Rakove @jrakove.bsky.social · 7d
Whatever one thinks of Mamdani--and I do not think that local chapters of Hamas are about to start drilling in Central Park--he has already proven that he is quite a political strategist, so I would not second-guess him (at least yet).
And at this point, nothing could ever legitimize Trump.
heidikitrosser.bsky.social Heidi Kitrosser @heidikitrosser.bsky.social · 7d
The Trump - Mamdani meeting obviously makes Trump look silly. But I confess to feeling unease that Mamdani took the meeting at all. Isn’t it a bit legitimizing? I’m torn on this, so I’m genuinely curious what people think.

Reposted by Jack N. Rakove

heidikitrosser.bsky.social
Heidi Kitrosser @heidikitrosser.bsky.social · 7d
The Trump - Mamdani meeting obviously makes Trump look silly. But I confess to feeling unease that Mamdani took the meeting at all. Isn’t it a bit legitimizing? I’m torn on this, so I’m genuinely curious what people think.

jrakove.bsky.social
Jack Rakove @jrakove.bsky.social · 7d
Big oops--I omitted that it was Bill Walton's son Adam who went to the Buttons and Bows Montessori school with my son. (My bad, as you say after you throw the ball away.)

jrakove.bsky.social
Jack Rakove @jrakove.bsky.social · 7d
We gave Kaye an honorary degree at Colgate when I was teaching there. It was one of the two times that I felt too shy to introduce myself--why, I don't know. The other occasion was when one of his sons and one of mine attended the same nursery school in Palo Alto, the year he spent at Stanford Law.

jrakove.bsky.social
Jack Rakove @jrakove.bsky.social · 7d
de gustibus non est disputandum