Historians on Donald Trump: A Huge Hit on Facebook
Historians in the Newstags: election 2016, Trump
Rick Shenkman is the editor of HNN and the author of Political Animals: How Our Stone-Age Brain Gets in the Way of Smart Politics (Basic Books, January 2016). You can follow him on Twitter. He blogs at stoneagebrain.
Who says historians don't have an impact? In the three weeks since the anti-Trump Facebook page set up by David McCullough and Ken Burns went live it's drawn over 5 million views.
The page features home videos by stalwarts of the profession like Nell Irvin Painter, Bernard A. Weisberger, Stacy Schiff, Harold Holzer, Ron Chernow, William Leuchtenburg, Vicki Ruiz, Kai Bird, Joseph Ellis, Sean Wilentz, Virginia Scharff, Richard Moe, Robert Caro, Michael Kazin, William Chafe, David Levering Lewis, David Nasaw, Ron Chernow, Alan Kraut, and others. Both McCullough and Burns, of course, posted videos, too.
Millions of Facebook users have been watching and sharing the videos. Top draws include the videos by Joseph Ellis (48,000 views), Harold Holzer (50,000 views), Virginia Scarf (50,000 views), Vicki Ruiz (55,000 views), and Mark Robert Bowden (109,000 views)
Then there are the videos that have gone supernova: Ron Chernow (324,000 views), William Leuchtenburg (563,000 views), Nell Irvin Painter (970,000 views), and David McCullough (3.7 million views).
comments powered by Disqus
News
- New findings from Penn Slavery Project show how U. benefitted financially from enslaved labor
- Is it anti-Semitic for President Trump to call Chuck Todd ‘sleepy eyes’?
- Human Evolution: Walking Upright Evolved at Least 3.6 Million Years Ago—Long Before Modern Humans Appeared
- Why a primary challenge to Trump is likely to fail
- Smog and Disasters Spurred the Laws Trump Wants to Undo
- Feds charge controversial Kent State University professor Julio Pino with lying to FBI
- New Yorker publishes profile of H.R. McMaster just weeks after Trump fires him
- Dartmouth historian Matthew J. Garcia says conservative partisans in Arizona have taken over a civics school he once ran
- Berkeley’s Carolyn Merchant explains what ecofeminism is
- University of Southern California's David Kang says Korea is the only place on earth where the Cold War continues