Mark Thomas-Patterson
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mrtpatterson.bsky.social
Mark Thomas-Patterson
@mrtpatterson.bsky.social
PhD Student at UNC Chapel Hill. Opinions expressed are solely mine.
Scholar of international relations in the post-Cold War era.
I hope my queries guided you to this path.
May 29, 2025 at 8:39 PM
From my own experience (also only with civilian ed), upper-level seminars can work a lot better online than lecture-based courses (largely due to self-selection among students).
May 29, 2025 at 5:56 PM
Moreover, if you expand the field to war and society, there are lots of people who do military-adjacent history (especially war and society) in academia. I think one of the significant issues is that public libraries often lack a substantial collection of academic press books.
May 24, 2025 at 6:16 PM
100% agree. The argument seemed to imply that without sanctions, Saddam would be content not to conduct trade.
May 21, 2025 at 8:10 PM
I am quite befuddled by his claim that the Iraq invasion was a conscious effort to bring Iraq into the global economy. Like, how did Saddam finance arms purchases in the 1980s?
May 21, 2025 at 8:05 PM
Yeah, I think showing a map of the 1992/1996 elections can be very helpful for illustrating dynamics (WV/KY voting for Clinton). Moreover, people's knowledge of the recent past is often inconsistent.
May 16, 2025 at 9:40 PM
Not surprising given the overall nature of the series, but I found Terrorism: A Very Short Introduction to be very helpful in this regard.

global.oup.com/academic/pro...
global.oup.com
May 13, 2025 at 5:05 PM
Great piece. I think one thing you hone in on here that is important is the visual language element. Catholicism provides an aesthetic (counter) narrative that large sections of American Protestantism lack.
May 12, 2025 at 9:34 PM
It seems, from what I've heard, somewhat smoother (not necessarily easier to get a job) in "credential-based fields" (ed/med).
May 12, 2025 at 1:07 AM
The following is more present in Europe than in the US, but has also played a role in this reappraisal.
noria-research.com/mena/orienta...
“Oriental Christians” in France and in Syria
The wars in Iraq and Syria have revived the persecution of Christians of the Middle East as an issue in Europe. An in-depth research on its political use.
noria-research.com
May 11, 2025 at 2:43 AM
Also, so many of those roles are important in academia. Lunches are not magically organized, and chairs aren't spontaneously endowed.
May 11, 2025 at 12:46 AM
Relatedly, a movie looking at a border community between French West Africa and a British colony (Gold Coast, Gambia) following the establishment of the Vichy government would be great.
May 10, 2025 at 12:51 AM
Moreover, social media and the fact that everything one writes is (relatively) public and easily shared make this much more visible, and in my opinion, worse.
May 9, 2025 at 10:50 PM
We all forget the Quebec Act.
May 8, 2025 at 6:40 PM
Do you know of any work that focuses on moderate Republicans after Reagan? I know the last chapter in the aforementioned work touches on it, but I was curious if there was a more in-depth examination.
May 5, 2025 at 5:28 PM
On a semi-related note, this may provide some interesting context.

global.oup.com/academic/pro...
global.oup.com
May 5, 2025 at 5:23 PM
Someone can argue the contrary, but if I ran a major paper, I would spin off my op-eds into a separate publication that would maintain some distinction from straight news coverage.
May 4, 2025 at 8:53 PM