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Rebecca L. Spang Profile picture
Rebecca L. Spang
@RebeccaSpang
historian of money, revolutions, restaurants; 18C Studies; Professor @IUBloomington @iubhistory @IULAMP; formerly @YaleICF @YaleSOM @UCLHistory;
Aug 29, 2022 • 14 tweets • 6 min read
I stayed out of the recent #presentism "History Wars" because: I'm not a fool; I'm caring for a spouse w/ COVID and a geriatric dog (16+) on steroids and opioids; David Bell & Joan Scott both pronounced, so who needs another historian of France in the fray? But... I agree historical analogies are theories, insofar as theory = "way of seeing"*. For sure, some ways of looking at things can be more helpful, more generative, than others. Some can be flat out wrong; others, "not even wrong." But testable?
Nov 1, 2020 • 17 tweets • 4 min read
How do revolutions--periods of great political, social, cultural uncertainty + possibility--happen? I have been thinking a lot lately about

historical contingency (chance)

central role of aggressive resistance to change (sometimes mistakenly called "conservatism). Contingency has been a very easy concept to teach this semester:

Did the #Covid19 pandemic HAVE to happen when it did? NO.

Does its having happened change just about everything? YES.

[Also easy to teach that human beings alone do not make human history.]
2/n
Jul 4, 2020 • 10 tweets • 5 min read
It's been three months since I wrote for @TheAtlantic that if the USA was not having a revolution, we were definitely living in revolutionary times. (#Kant) Much [sic] has happened since April 6th. Delighted to have published a follow-up essay today: theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/… 2/ When protesters in San Juan & Ferguson marched with a guillotine, folks said “Rebecca, here’s your revolution!” This misstates role of guillotine in Fr Rev (was used in official executions, not cause of most deaths), imagines symbols of past revns = content of new ones
Jun 29, 2020 • 11 tweets • 4 min read
Okay. Let's think about this. [a thread]

1. July 14, 1789: 800 or so Parisians marched on the Bastille Fortress looking for weapons, ammo. --YES, they found them at this address too! 2. Violence at the Bastille releasing 7 prisoners (madmen, forgers) from fortress. Marquis de Sade had been moved a few weeks earlier. --MAYBE.

How many criminals, lunatics, dangerous sadists were in McCloskeys' basement? --more evidence needed!
Jun 16, 2020 • 19 tweets • 13 min read
Time for another #MoneyAtoZ thread.

A series of tweetorials based on my @iubHistory @IUCollege History of Money course (HIST-W 330).

A is for Ancient Economy
B is for Bitcoin
C is for Cowries
d is for Penny
E is for Euro
F is for Free Banking
and ….G is for Gold. 1/ 2/Gold! It’s so sparkly & malleable. It conducts electricity well, doesn’t tarnish, is even edible. Try it on your steak tartare, or put it on your cupcakes!

Biomedical uses as well.

Ah the virtues of inertness.
Jun 7, 2020 • 24 tweets • 11 min read
Two+ months since I wrote this. Where are we now? A (long) thread about protest, statues, events as transformations of structures. Plus #MMT and regime change!! theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/… Thinking about the protests and two other things I saw on here last week:
1) huge marches didn’t prevent Iraq War;
2) Do we know what would satisfy the protesters?
(plus, of course, the French Revolution)
May 26, 2020 • 12 tweets • 4 min read
I wrote a whole book that disproves this long-lived myth. My book was just republished by @Harvard_Press. It's not a hard book to find. But now @WilliamSitwell writes a book called "The Restaurant: 2000 Year History" and here it is again! I mean no ill to Mr. Sitwell, but... "Out-of-work chefs of aristocrats opened restaurants after the Fr Revn" is a myth central to the notion of French restaurants as a _democratization_ of pleasure. It's a conceit formed in reaction to (against) the revolution's real politics. See hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?is…
May 18, 2020 • 12 tweets • 6 min read
Inspired by the #LockdownBestiary, I have created my own abecedary. (For previous entries search Twitter: #MoneyAtoZ)

a=ancient economy
b=bitcoin
c=cowry shells

d is for….[dogs?] 1/x 2) d is for penny, of course!

Before it was finally decimalised in 1971 (proposals had been repeated since 1850s), British money of account consisted of pounds, shillings, pence--abbreviated £ s d: 12d to the shilling, 20s to the £. After 15/2/1971, 6d=2.5 [decimal] pence! Image
May 12, 2020 • 14 tweets • 7 min read
Inspired by the wonderful #LockdownBestiary, I present #MoneyAtoZ

A is for Ancient Economy

B is for Bitoin

C is for Cowries (1/x) Cowries are sea snails (marine #gastropod #Cypraeidae) with smooth, shiny, roughly egg-shaped shells; the family is widespread, but so-called “money cowry” (named by Linnaeus, 1758) *farmed* in Indian Ocean off the Maldives Islands 2/x
Apr 5, 2020 • 13 tweets • 3 min read
"The United States may not be having a revolution right now, but we are surely living in revolutionary times." As my pinned tweet indicates, I have been thinking this for several years but the past months have made it much more clear. 1/x theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/… 2/x If our times are not FELT as revolutionary, it is in large part because news coverage & routine conversations all turn on viruses, markets, climate change. It seems there are no human actors left in history any more. That leaves most humans feeling pessimistic, fatalistic.
Mar 1, 2020 • 14 tweets • 5 min read
The Paris cholera #epidemic of 1832 killed at least 18,000 people in 5 months (~80,000 in rest of France). Nobody knew what caused the disease. Politics, cultural anxieties, and social injustice (then as now) all exacerbated the crisis. 1/n In the nineteenth century, #pandemics spread a bit more slowly than they do today. Cholera "reached" European Russia in 1830, moved across central Europe (Hegel died of it in 1831), then appeared in Britain, France, USA. It may have inspired Poe's "Mask of Red Death." 2/n
Jun 12, 2019 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
I've been thrilled at the response to my FT piece on miniBOTs in historical perspective. I am fundamentally sympathetic with the position below, so I want to take a little time to explain why I don't think it applies here... 1/x As currently envisioned, miniBOTs would be denominated in euros and they would circulate VOLUNTARILY. So you can use them to pay your taxes (until another govt comes to power and says you can't) but you don't have to... 2/x
Jun 12, 2019 • 18 tweets • 8 min read
Thrilled to be on the op-ed page of the @FT! word limit was very tight (my 714 cut down to 615) so here follow a few explainers, expansions, further thoughts... 1/x I was asked to write about mini-BOTS and assignats. Some would say they're complete opposites: assignats "backed" by land, #miniBOTs by nothing. But what gives money value isn't what's "behind" it but what's ahead--who will take it, for what 2/x
Mar 2, 2019 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
So my own take on this is that we need to take apart the idea of "hyperinflation" as some "thing" that occurs for the same reason(s) across time and space, and for which "Weimar" is the short hand/locus classicus, etc. 1/n Before there was a Weimar Republic, "hard money" men like AD White (first Press of Cornell, etc.) pointed to the case of the assignats in Fr Revolution as "fiat money inflation" caused by excess liquidity ... 2/n
Nov 11, 2018 • 18 tweets • 6 min read
I am a specialist in 18th-19th Cy European history, but I once spent a summer doing research on the First World War. Here in honor of #WWI100 are some of the horrible things I learned: First, some numbers: in #WWI an average of 900 French and 1300 German soldiers died EVERY DAY. At the end, 20,000,000 (twenty million) soldiers were disabled. 2/n