Elsbeth

@historecluse.bsky.social

517 Followers 1220 Following

Historian of epidemics, exhibitions, hospital medicine, the state, taxes, civilization and, currently, US economic thought.

Opening page of Mein Kampf.
Poster for the movie Danton.
Wikipedia article on Phillipson describes her as studying history at Oxford.
Obituary, Isabel Margaret Heaman
Make America Pretti Good Again
Poster for Antigone by McGill Classics students.
The late outcome of the Enlightenment was a public opinion stabilized by policemen and bankers that ran up against the hard edge of American frontier-style violence as the terminus a quo of the new global order… Canada and Britain felt those pressures in Canada first, and deferred to them there before they deferred to them globally.
Opening paragraph of a paper on L.H. La Fontaine and the Social History of Politics, published by Les Editions Themis.
Porcupine in a tree.
Black lab with dusting of snow.
… little Isaac was ‘always a sober, silent, thinking lad, who never played with boys but who would occasionally make dolls house furniture for girls ‘to set their baby’s, and trinkets on.’”
Habs vs St Louis, up by one at the end of the first.
Light coloured cake rolled like a jelly roll.
One small bright yellow tree in a late autumn landscape in the Laurentians.
Cat sitting on a step.
Peter Doig painting on Friday 13th
Paper title Jacob Viner on colonialism. Serious looking scholar with armful of papers as illustration.
The fury of reconstructing our country will not fall on the shoulders of my generation. France in defeat will be seen to have had a Government of old men. That is but natural. France of the new springtime must be the creation of the young.
The Mad King, Edgar Rice Burroughs
The higher officials in Washington, whether they be political appointees or career men, in my opinion, need make no apologies for their standards even to college professors, elect though we be. (Insert Bluesky emoji for irony) As far as I have observed, the higher officials in Washington as a group work as hard, as disinterestedly, cooperate in common tasks as loyally, think as straight within their own special fields of competence, as does the ordinary run of college professor. They certainly do not live in the moral heights continuously, but they are called upon more often than academic men to rise to it and, in my honest judgment, they respond to the call as often and as fully as in all probability we ourselves should under like circumstances.
Jacob Viner, International Trade and Economic Development
Scrawled scribbles beginning Historical Epistemology Workshop.
Mother duck surrounded by babies on a lawn near an apple tree.
I did not understand the relevant pieces of history, nor did I think carefully enough about what I had observed overseas. And so when I was a graduate student writ in about the ills of libertarianism, I imagined that the realistic alternatives to the American system of 2007 were either the gentle progressivism of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, or the vigorous national-building of FDR and Eisenhower, rather than the madness of a charismatic populist with zero understanding of economics.
“Hollow as a prop to moderation, justice is a potent stimulus to folly. We might restate the Athenian thesis as follows: cities not only venture to the limits of their strength, but come to ruin by venturing far beyond these limits—and that a sense of their justice compounds their errors by further inflating their sense of their strength.”
Odds of election outcome
NYT headline Trump is on the wrong side of history
Three men coordinate snow shovelling.
Smith laments the decline of humour, silliness, pop culture references, and creative memes in recent months on X, in terms reminiscent of the Heine quote.
Golden Illustrated Robin Hood.
Black dog, no longer young, swims across a lake with a substantial stick in his mouth.
Screenshot from documentary with quoted cc.
Cat stares intensely