I am neither a historian of early America nor the early Repub, but I am an expert on expertise, esp. women’s expertise. So I want to comment on what was been happening to Melissa Johnson (I’m not tagging her b/c I get the sense her mentions are overwhelming & she’s sick of this.)

For those who don’t know, Dr. Johnson tweeted criticizing Neil Gorsuch’s recent SCOTUS opinion about churches, COVID, and the First Amendment. She was not alone in this! But some internet bros got up in arms and started in with their favorite refrains 1) PhDs are stupid, actually

2) This is especially true of “easy” subjects like history. And they added, as they always do, a large helping of misogyny to go along with this. To “prove” that Dr. Johnson is stupid (which she very much is not), what did they do? Criticize her clearly expert tweets about 17thc

British colonist religious practice? No, they picked one where she was snarky. (Not that there was anything wrong with the snark!) And then someone, desperate to find a way to show that this historian didn’t have the right to crack that joke, scrolled through her timeline,

going months into the past. And finally found one where she said, in July 2020, how glad she was not to be a scholar of the early Republic. And so he took screenshots of the Gorsuch tweet, in which Dr. Johnson described herself (accurately) as an early American historian, and

this early Republic tweet. The purpose was to make it look like Dr. Johnson actually is not an expert and so her comment was wrong. And a huge pile on commenced. And I want to note two things here. First, as many other women’s historians have already noted, it’s not an accident

that a woman — among the LEGIONS of people criticizing Gorsuch — was chosen for this pile on. And the scholar in question is a contingent scholar so without institutional support, which also seems relevant. And they’ve spent the last two days mocking her intelligence & expertise

while also mocking history, the social sciences, academics in general. But, second, as any historian — scratch that, as any student of history — can tell you, you have to pay attention to the larger context. What was happening

in the field of American history in July 2020, specially on or before July 17? The society for historians of the early republic (SHEAR) had just had an online conference & a senior scholar had used his platform to argue for racist interpretations & had said the n-word

Which prompted a lot of historians at that time to say how glad they were that they weren’t historians of the early republic because SHEAR seemed like a total shit show. As a historian, I wonder: is this the context in which Dr. Johnson made the tweet she’s getting mocked for?

B/c if so the meaning is different. But even if you don’t know the difference between early Amer & early Repub history, even if you didn’t know the SHEAR context, it is appalling behavior to mock someone and instigate a pile-on just for funsies. But also either way you’re wrong.