Sarah Churchwell
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sarahchurchwell.bsky.social
Sarah Churchwell
@sarahchurchwell.bsky.social
20K followers 1.4K following 980 posts
Public Humanities Prof, School of Advanced Study, Univ London. American abroad. Journalism, US politics, cultural & literary history esp 1920s & 30s & F. Scott Fitzgerald. Podcast: Journey Through Time with David Olusoga. @throughtimepod.bsky.social‬
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sarahchurchwell.bsky.social
Post a movie where you are from.
November 23, 2025 at 6:47 PM
sarahchurchwell.bsky.social
Oh hell no you did not.
Email from academia.edu saying its AI turned one of my essays into a “shareable post.” As if the essay I wrote with my own actual words and research were not already a “shareable post.”
November 1, 2025 at 9:19 AM
sarahchurchwell.bsky.social
We will return to the fascist apocalypse tomorrow. For now, there is baseball.
October 28, 2025 at 7:10 AM
sarahchurchwell.bsky.social
It is all glorious, very much including being baffled by the idea that Machiavelli taught a politics of evil.
September 7, 2025 at 6:51 AM
sarahchurchwell.bsky.social
I have loved EE Cummings’ poem “I Sing of Olaf Glad and Big” since I was 16. He wrote it in 1931. I think of it often these days - words to fucking live by.
i sing of Olaf glad and big Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Share on Tumblr View print mode Copy embed code Add this poem to an anthology E. E. Cummings 1894 – 1962 XXX i sing of Olaf glad and big whose warmest heart recoiled at war: a conscientious object-or his wellbelovéd colonel(trig westpointer most succinctly bred) took erring Olaf soon in hand; but--though an host of overjoyed noncoms(first knocking on the head him)do through icy waters roll that helplessness which others stroke with brushes recently employed anent this muddy toiletbowl, while kindred intellects evoke allegiance per blunt instruments-- Olaf(being to all intents a corpse and wanting any rag upon what God unto him gave) responds,without getting annoyed "I will not kiss your fucking flag" straightway the silver bird looked grave (departing hurriedly to shave) but--though all kinds of officers (a yearning nation's blueeyed pride) their passive prey did kick and curse until for wear their clarion voices and boots were much the worse, and egged the firstclassprivates on his rectum wickedly to tease by means of skilfully applied bayonets roasted hot with heat-- Olaf(upon what were once knees) does almost ceaselessly repeat "there is some shit I will not eat" our president,being of which assertions duly notified threw the yellowsonofabitch into a dungeon,where he died Christ(of His mercy infinite) i pray to see;and Olaf,too preponderatingly because unless statistics lie he was more brave than me:more blond than you.
August 2, 2025 at 8:12 AM
sarahchurchwell.bsky.social
Especially grateful today as so many days for the memory of the high profile UK lawyer who gaslit me last summer on a history festival panel, just days after the immunity decision. I said that Project 2025-which no one there incl him had heard of-was real & dangerous and he scoffed at me publicly.
The Question Hound has started melting but still telling himself “That’s okay, things are going to be okay.” Because the pills are working.
August 1, 2025 at 7:38 PM
sarahchurchwell.bsky.social
After a lovely week in NYC heading back to London shortly but not before catching a bit of #pridenyc🌈 - strolled up to start of parade near my hotel, everyone cheering & happy & then suddenly they all started booing. Very odd at first but I happened to snap a pic as the answer walked toward me …
Random crowd shot near start of NYC Pride parade. Close up of Eric Adams walking behind an Eric Adams New York Mayor banner, next to a flag saying Eric Adams supports Pride.
June 29, 2025 at 5:57 PM
sarahchurchwell.bsky.social
Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul and sings the tune without the words and never stops at all. /Fin
The text of the poem “Hope” is the thing with feathers - That perches in the soul - And sings the tune without the words - And never stops - at all - And sweetest - in the Gale - is heard - And sore must be the storm - That could abash the little Bird That kept so many warm - I’ve heard it in the chillest land - And on the strangest Sea - Yet - never - in Extremity, It asked a crumb - of me.
June 14, 2025 at 4:27 PM
sarahchurchwell.bsky.social
I am in Sydney and would like to say thank you for the view.
A sunrise view of Sydney Harbor with city lights to the right and the Opera House to the left in silhouette, a small bank of clouds above it, and rose gold sunlight behind spreading up into purple clouds.
May 12, 2025 at 8:20 PM
sarahchurchwell.bsky.social
Amiri Baraka was an immensely complex figure, and I deplore much of what he said and wrote. But I will never forget when I first read this passage, written in 1997, and how much it opened up to me.
Black Reconstruction: Du Bois & the U.S. Struggle For Democracy & Socialism Amiri Baraka BLACK RECONSTRUCTION IS, for revolutionaries in the U.S., particularly for the militants of the Black Liberation Movement, as cogent a work in laying out the history and field of our struggle as the singular works of the great international teachers. Some have carped at the work, because they claim it is not strictly Marxist, others because it did not make a "sharp enough" class analysis of pre-Civil War whites in the South, but to both questions I answer, read it again. It was Johnson, as well, again with Seward's urging, who immediately allowed the southern secessionists to re-enter the union, thus leaving the ex-slaves at the brutal hands of those who were looking backward, and those who sought to re-enslave Black people, which they did, as soon as possible. The book The Economics of Barbarism by J. Kucynski and M. Witt, points out that the Black Codes were Hitler's model for his Nazi racial laws. The overthrow of the Reconstruction actually united fronts of workers and small farmers, heaved Afro America into fascism. There is no other term for it. The overthrow of democratically elected governments and the rule by direct terror, by the most reactionary sector of finance capital, as Dimitrov termed it. Carried out with murder, intimidation and robbery, by the first storm troopers, again the Hitlerian prototype, the Ku Klux Klan, directly financed by northern capital.
May 11, 2025 at 2:19 AM
sarahchurchwell.bsky.social
And btw one of the many reasons I was shouting it was I had just finished a book about all the lessons we should have learned from the Civil War and hadn’t which is why we got Trumpism. Its final third goes into some of the actual histories of actual American interwar fascism. If you’re interested.
May 11, 2025 at 1:33 AM
sarahchurchwell.bsky.social
Without downloading any pics where are you mentally
May 9, 2025 at 11:40 PM
sarahchurchwell.bsky.social
He’s infallible, babe.
May 8, 2025 at 8:29 PM
sarahchurchwell.bsky.social
This Chicago girl is here for all your Blues Brothers on a Mission from God content.
The Blues Brothers gif with John Belushi saying “I hate Illinois Nazis.”
May 8, 2025 at 6:42 PM
sarahchurchwell.bsky.social
It’s right where it always was.
The cover of The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams Volume 1 1909-1939.
May 7, 2025 at 9:15 PM
sarahchurchwell.bsky.social
This is the whole point of my book The Wrath to Come. In 1936 the NYT argued that Nazi white supremacism was evil but US white supremacism was just American. Various experts on European fascism have said versions of this in debates with me. It remains a fundamentally exceptionalist argument.
From The Wrath to Come: "But although worrying signs of an incipient American fascist movement abounded, many insisted on a categorical difference between innocent American prejudice and the more sinister European kind. In the summer of 1936, a New York Times editorial responded to criticism of American racial politics from the Berlin Olympics: ‘In that city they have a cheerful habit, whenever American citizens criticize the peculiarities of Nazi race philosophy, of turning around asking how about the way Negroes are treated in the United States. The answer is simple,’ it responded. Although Black Americans were the victims of discrimination and ‘in not too many cases, let us hope, injustice and cruelties’, few ‘decent’ Americans were ‘proud about it’. Given that three years later the same paper would agree in its review of Stanley Horn’s Klan history that Black Americans offered ‘abundant provocation’ for the ‘remedy’ of murder, its hope that Black people were the victims of cruelty ‘in not too many cases’ would seem misplaced. Racial bigotry in America, the Times insisted, was just unthinking, in ‘the good, old, thick-headed, prejudiced, irrational human fashion’.27 Whether unthinking racism is preferable to thinking racism is probably immaterial to its victims, as if lynching would be less objectionable if it weren’t defended on the grounds of rationality. In any case that’s precisely what the history of scientific racism... ... in the United States did, espousing what George Schuyler called ‘the biological superstitions’ shared by the United States and Nazi Germany.28 As far as the New York Times was concerned, racial injustice in America was an exception, the nation’s innocence so unquestionable that even American racism was by definition morally superior to foreign racism. ‘We do not reach into the laws of science and history and yank out an alibi for our hates and election requirements,’ the Times insisted, adding that few ‘literate Americans have made a philosophy of the thing’.29 The page before this editorial featured a large advertisement for Gone with the Wind, a thousand-page alibi for America’s hates and election requirements, claiming that racial equality was against the laws of science and history and making a philosophy of the thing."
April 20, 2025 at 2:56 AM
sarahchurchwell.bsky.social
Second, I have a stupidly busy day and won't have time to do all the nice threads I vaguely planned. Instead, I will post various #Gatsby things here as I have a moment today. Starting with a flashback to happy Twitter when my friend Scott Jordan Harris and I built an emoji #Gatsby.
A list of emojis that tell the story of Gatsby: Statue of Liberty, Skyline, Big House, Egg, Phone, Green Light, Trains, Eyes, Gas Station, Big House, Music, Party, Martinis, Mystery Silhouette Man, Money, Music, Yellow Car, Sad Face, Gun (War), Skyline, Man Bows, Bride, Sad Face, Money, Shirts, Music, Party, Martinis, Yellow Car, Traffic Lights, Eyes, Yellow Car, Shocked Face, Swimming Man, Gun, Death Skull, Night Skyline, Waves, Boat, Statue of Liberty.
April 10, 2025 at 7:38 AM
sarahchurchwell.bsky.social
In less depressing news, I’d like to thank everyone who has been listening and sending lovely feedback to me & the brilliant @davidolusoga.bsky.social on our new podcast @throughtimepod.bsky.social. Thanks to you we hit No. 1 within a day of launching! We’re thrilled with the response. Thank you! 🥳
A screenshot showing Journey Through Time podcast at No. 1! Followed by The Rest is Politics, which makes me wonder if Alastair Campbell might be cross.
March 22, 2025 at 8:37 AM
sarahchurchwell.bsky.social
From We Are Free to Change the World: Hannah Arendt’s Lessons in Love & Disobedience, by the great @lyndseystonebri.bsky.social
He was, appallingly, absent. On the surviving videotapes of the trial, Eichmann never looks at the spectators in Jerusalem and gazes over the heads of survivors as they speak. When a film showing documentary footage from the death camps is screened, he ostentatiously scribbles in his notebook, noting down details of facts he is pretending to learn about for the first time, whilst conveniently not seeing, because he never, in fact, really saw the consequences of his actions. “Eichmann was not stupid, but rather intelligent,” Arendt explained. “But it was his thickheadedness that was so outrageous, as if speaking to a brick wall. And that was what I actually meant by banality. There's nothing deep about it—nothing demonic!… …There's simply resistance ever to imagine what another person is experiencing.”
March 15, 2025 at 9:58 PM
sarahchurchwell.bsky.social
Very excited amidst all this grim news that tonight we are launching the first annual National Humanities Lecture, delivered by the splendid @davidolusoga.bsky.social, speaking of the urgent importance of public humanities and public history.
Senate House, University of London decorated for the first annual National Humanities Lecture, sponsored by the School of Advanced Study. Senate House, University of London decorated with banners for the first annual National Humanities Lecture, sponsored by the School of Advanced Study. Professor David Olusoga speaking
February 4, 2025 at 6:31 PM
sarahchurchwell.bsky.social
The “this is fine” cartoon of a dog surrounded by fire having a morning cup of coffee and saying This is FINE.
January 31, 2025 at 8:22 AM
sarahchurchwell.bsky.social
The Quote is amazing for all the reasons but also - does he think the President decides who is cancelled? Like we all waited for Biden’s orders and then duly reviled the people he told us to? The authoritarian mindset is so deeply stupid.

My dude, we can still fucking cancel you.
The FT quote everyone is sharing of an anonymous banker saying he feels liberated because now he can say “retard” and “pussy” “without being cancelled.”
January 14, 2025 at 11:16 AM
sarahchurchwell.bsky.social
Use a gif to tell me where you’re from.
A gif of John Belushi saying “I hate Illinois Nazis” to Dan Aykroyd in The Blues Brothers.
November 25, 2024 at 7:27 PM
sarahchurchwell.bsky.social
Dammit it’s fake.

Why can’t we have nice things? ☹️
Text from Snopes.com explaining that a Campbell’s soup takedown supposedly in defense of a commercial featuring 2 gay dads is in fact fake and was written by comedians. So I deleted an earlier post sharing it.
November 24, 2024 at 1:27 PM
sarahchurchwell.bsky.social
Threads sent me an email telling me I'm missing out on great content there, leading with this post from @kevinmkruse.bsky.social, which is ... perfect.
Screenshot of a Threads junk mail telling me I'm missing out on Threads by sharing a post from Kevin Kruse on Threads saying "Ah, right. This place is awful."
November 23, 2024 at 9:15 PM