Public evidence record
Published podcast speaker
Claim ledger
16 transcript-backed records
01 / evaluation
“Whereas in British Canada, the British government is subsidizing the local government. They’re paying the full freight of it, which means that local taxes were much lower there.”
02 / evaluation
“Whereas if you’re one of these islands or you’re one of these small colonies to the north, you’re very tenuous and you’re very dependent on the British Royal Navy. That means that there’s a higher threshold in order to build up the confidence to rebel.”
03 / belief
“What I would say is that the Dominican Republic never has this extractive financial commitment that turns out to be so burdensome on Haiti.”
04 / belief
“I would say that the triumph of the liberals in Mexico, under the leadership of Benito Juárez, is one of the most important events of the 19th century in North America.”
05 / belief
“I can just say what I would say, and what most of the people I do know say, is: If you’re going to get a PhD in history with the notion that this is going to assure you of a tenure-track job in a place where you want to live, that’s not going to happen, or it’s very unlikely that it will happen.”
06 / belief
“I certainly hope Americans will not regard going into space as something that millions of people are going to be able to do and be able to survive on, say, Mars. I think that’s a complete folly and waste of money.”
07 / evaluation
“By that standard, the Jacksonians aren’t particularly democratic because they’re not keen to expand the vote to African Americans, to say the least, and they were not keen to open up political rights to women.”
08 / evaluation
“” There’s a recurrent sense of crisis within the American republic through much of that period of time, because there’s just fear that some region within the country would be growing too powerful, or there’s a recurrent fear that the country is getting too large.”
09 / evaluation
“There’s also developing some pushback against that because it is contributing to inflation in the urban centers.”
10 / prediction
“As the population doubles, they want the next generation to have the same standard of living, which means they need twice as much land, and so they’re expanding.”
11 / evaluation
“There was a lot of talk. And there’s a lot of triumphalism, because the Union forces in April of 1865 have been so triumphant, and the United States has one of the largest and best militaries in the world, which was unprecedented in American history.”
12 / prediction
“I would say about a third of them are leaving for political reasons, and most of those leave very early in the 1780s.”
13 / evaluation
“Assets are greatly depreciated during the war because these colonies and the new United States [were] highly dependent on transatlantic trade.”
14 / prediction
“If we also bring in just how obsessed American leaders were at that time with racial difference, and at their sense of being beleaguered by the British Empire — in that there’s this very defensive expansionism that American leaders commit the country to — I would say that that expansionism, the bill that has to be paid for it comes due in the 1850s.”
15 / recommendation
“If you want to understand sentimental culture of the 19th century, then you should read Uncle Tom’s Cabin because it’s very much pitched in that vein.”
16 / prediction
“Now, I’m trying to resist being the old curmudgeon who says the way we did things in my day are the way things always should be. But I would say is, it does seem that AI and the various other technological revolutionary measures that we’re right on in the midst of right now, in terms of managing data and analyzing data, is going to render the individual human mind of less value in the overall process and is going to — it seems to me, is going to diminish the role, therefore, of individuality and diversity in analyzing data and telling stories about the past, which is what we do as historians.”