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Phil Feller

@philfeller.bsky.social
242 followers 138 following 970 posts

IT professional and scholar of 19th century American political culture. Currently working on a microhistory of the 1855 Know Nothing triumph, part of a project exploring the continuation of antebellum republican thought into the Progressive Era.

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Phil Feller @philfeller.bsky.social · 23h
You’re suggesting that the GOP might be Cooked in the midterms?
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Phil Feller @philfeller.bsky.social · 16/10/2026
Is this perhaps a misreading of Blight’s Race and Reunion?
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Phil Feller @philfeller.bsky.social · 15/10/2026
What’s next? A ban on pop culture references?
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Phil Feller @philfeller.bsky.social · 14/10/2026
Musgraves has an album out this year: Middle of Nowhere. “Dry Spell” was the first single off it. youtu.be/NlohfwTunwU?...
youtu.be
Kacey Musgraves - Dry Spell (Official Music Video)
YouTube video by KaceyMusgravesVEVO
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Phil Feller @philfeller.bsky.social · 13/10/2026
I still remember that his first regular season rookie play (against the Rams!) was a fumble.
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Phil Feller @philfeller.bsky.social · 13/10/2026
Are they that brassed off?
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Phil Feller @philfeller.bsky.social · 12/10/2026
Philip was in the Burgundian and Habsburg namengut, and there were a lot of things them, like Philip the Bold.
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Phil Feller @philfeller.bsky.social · 10/10/2026
And let’s not forgot Van Buren’s 1848 Free Soil candidacy. According to a paper at an APHC panel this June, Van Buren thought that the 12th Amendment gave him a chance.
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Phil Feller @philfeller.bsky.social · 09/10/2026
I spend much of my adult life in Minneapolis and frequently went to events in the heavily Somali-American Cedar-Riverside neighborhood.
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Phil Feller @philfeller.bsky.social · 09/10/2026
What’s the context of that quote? Obviously it was in the wake of Gettysburg’s horrific casualties, but hadn’t the Public Ledger been siding with the Copperheads?
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Phil Feller @philfeller.bsky.social · 09/10/2026
He’ll regret it when his efforts fall flat because the turned stones have become stumbling blocks.
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Phil Feller @philfeller.bsky.social · 09/10/2026
Yes, “a barbaric promotion of a culture of death.” www.usccb.org/news/2026/us...
usccb.org
USCCB President Condemns Plans for Livestream of Fort Hood Shooter's Execution as ‘a Barbaric Promotion of a Culture of Death’
“In no way can Hassan’s actions be condoned but this decision is a barbaric promotion of a culture of death and must be reconsidered.”...
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Phil Feller @philfeller.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
Their defense of brand identity and IP is legendary.
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Phil Feller @philfeller.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
And I think (but you would probably know better), that the general consensus is that the founders were influenced by both liberalism and republicanism. But I understand why you didn’t want to wade into that debate and consider a political philosophy that doesn’t neatly slot in to your overview.
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Phil Feller @philfeller.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
And I forgot to mention that my grasp of the founders is tenuous. I’m aware of the literature but have mostly read it with an eye to how their political ideas influenced the antebellum era.
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Phil Feller @philfeller.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
Finally, I’m sure that you know that the 1850s were politically quite messy.
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Phil Feller @philfeller.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
Second, it’s difficult to say when the Republicans became the conservative party (in the modern sense). You see it becoming increasingly pro-business by the 1880s. Also, Progressivism isn’t uniformly liberal (in the modern sense), and not all Republicans could be labeled as such.
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Phil Feller @philfeller.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
Republicanism continued to be influential into the 19th century, animating the Whig party and becoming an important part of artisan and labor culture.
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Phil Feller @philfeller.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
Now that I know what you’re trying to do with these pieces, I won’t be too critical, but there’s a few things I’d like to add. First, there is a lively debate among historians about the extent to which the founding generation was inspired by classical liberalism or classical republicanism.
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Phil Feller @philfeller.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
St. Joseph working on a mouse trap is also a fascinating detail of this triptych.
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Phil Feller @philfeller.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
That yoghurt had *live* cultures! What happened to the sanctity of life?
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Phil Feller @philfeller.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
Which is what I try to apply to the Know Nothings (and hope that my antebellum Irish ancestors forgive me).
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Phil Feller @philfeller.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
Although you need to be able to understand why its proponents would have justified it, which i feel requires a hermeneutics of charity.
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Phil Feller @philfeller.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
Of course there’s no standing. If the hens laid while standing, the eggs would break. Duh!
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Phil Feller @philfeller.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
I was just discussing this cover with NPR Music’s Lars Gotrich. bsky.app/profile/phil...
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Phil Feller @philfeller.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
It wasn’t theft; it was freedom of Choice.
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Phil Feller @philfeller.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
It’s a great location and @lmchervinsky.bsky.social is a fantastic host. This year’s APHC held its opening plenary there.
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Phil Feller @philfeller.bsky.social · 06/10/2026
Add lace and wear with a pelisse and dolman.
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Phil Feller @philfeller.bsky.social · 06/10/2026
So you’re trying to cap their spending.
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Phil Feller @philfeller.bsky.social · 06/10/2026
And to get from Athens and Rome to London, you need to go through Florentine republican thinkers like Guicciardini and Machiavelli. Harrington and the English political theorists who followed him were heavily indebted.
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Phil Feller @philfeller.bsky.social · 06/10/2026
Quite often; I’ve seen statistical analysis of people broken down by sex and wealth.
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Phil Feller @philfeller.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
Iran might also have learned from the first phase of Operation Rising Lion.
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Phil Feller @philfeller.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
Or a podcast
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Phil Feller @philfeller.bsky.social · 04/10/2026
Did Aristotle help? 😀
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Phil Feller @philfeller.bsky.social · 04/10/2026
Will you do it again, or was it a flash in the pan?
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Phil Feller @philfeller.bsky.social · 04/10/2026
You’re such a yolkster. Of course, people are shelling out for plenty of other grocery items.
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Phil Feller @philfeller.bsky.social · 03/10/2026
That’s bull
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Phil Feller @philfeller.bsky.social · 03/10/2026
Love the song; hate the video.
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Phil Feller @philfeller.bsky.social · 03/10/2026
The Nicomachean Ethics is outstanding and is central to Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics. I would have guessed that you were reading Aristotle’s Rhetoric. Gadamer’s use of phronesis in Truth and Method was fundamentally rhetorical, though.
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Phil Feller @philfeller.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
Literally rubbing shoulders!
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Phil Feller @philfeller.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
Quite a contrast from photos like the classic one of Eugene Debs. It’s what I imagine when reading Charles Woolbert’s description of the public speaking graduate, “in action, elevated upon a public platform … giving forth vital ideas and feelings to the people before him.”
Eugene Debs leaning forward toward the assembled crowd as he delivers a speech from an elevated platform.
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Phil Feller @philfeller.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
So you’re one of those Marxist historians. Do you view history as being driven by class clown struggle?
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Phil Feller @philfeller.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
There’s a line in Peter Murphy’s “Cuts You Up” that offers good advice for the historian: “look for what seems out of place.” And Bronski Beat’s “Smaltown Boy” reminds me not to romanticize antebellum rural towns.
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Phil Feller @philfeller.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
If you haven’t already, you should read Wittgenstein’s Vienna. Janik and Toulmin argue thatHabsburg-maxxing sometimes led in other directions.
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Phil Feller @philfeller.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
Others might see more optimistic best-case scenarios, but I have trouble with them. The AI capital expenditure (as a percentage of GDP) exceeds that of the 1870-1890 railway boom. I’d see that as a worrying sign even if I weren’t currently reading Liaquat Ahamed’s 1873.
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Phil Feller @philfeller.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
I’d say that the best realistic scenario is something like the dot com crash: a minor downturn in financial markets that leaves the US with a fantastic build-out of IT infrastructure. Employment will continue to be flat, with some sectors facing significant job losses.
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Phil Feller @philfeller.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
That’s overly pessimistic, at least for the best-case scenario. I’m not an economist, but I do have graduate economic and financial training, not to mention decades of observing the economy with a generally bearish outlook. I’ve learned that the diversity of the US economy makes it fairly robust.
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Phil Feller @philfeller.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
Although it’s printed in candy apple grey, not copper blue.
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Phil Feller @philfeller.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
When I presented a paper at a National Communication Association conference, I did so extemporaneously, only to find out that everyone else read their papers. My paper was about the importance of extemporaneous speech to the creation of Speech as a separate discipline and to the NCA’s founding.
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Phil Feller @philfeller.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
Campaigning under the banner of the new Union Party wasn’t a bad idea, I just wish he’d picked a better former Democrat as running mate.
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