John Fea's interview with Daniel Feller repeats many of the dynamics of the #SHEAR2020 panel that started this whole mess: softball questions from Prof Fea, very little remorse from Prof Feller. Fea's willingness to let Feller style himself as a brave opponent of "bad work" is

Interview mostly encourages Feller to double down on everything he said and did at the original panel, including renew his attacks on scholars who've actually published on Lyncoya (the Creek boy Jackson 'adopted' in 1813) and who are trained in Indigenous history.

The interview caricatures the criticism directed at Feller, depicting DF's detractors as insisting that "Jackson killed all the Indians" or that Indian removal began with Jackson. DF also repeats the odd claim that historians critical of AJ are warped by their loathing of Trump.

In fact historians were trying to understand the hollowness of 'Jacksonian democracy' and the interlocking projects of Native dispossession & slavery expansion long before Obama mocked Trump at that White House dinner. Trump is a distraction in all this.

Feller offers the old triad of Indian removal, nullification & the Bank war as the crucial lenses for understanding Jackson; not surprising that Feller's critics chafe at the absence of slavery given AJ's slaveholding & Indian removal's crucial role in creating the cotton belt.

In Feller's original paper, what's striking is how few historians he cites to stand up his claim that "much of what is being said...about Jackson today is boldly untethered from reality." It's a thin critique & a scattergun polemic mostly divorced from the profession

Worse, because Feller explicitly accuses historians of allowing "anti-Trump" sentiments to contaminate their work, he impugns the professional ethics of all of us - while falsely confirming the right-wing view that academic historians sacrifice facts to their liberal dogma.

In the interview, meanwhile, there's no reflection on the unbalanced and unrepresentative nature of the SHEAR panel; instead Prof Fea signs off with "I just wanted to give you a voice," as if Feller wasn't a senior scholar who had been invited to give the only paper of SHEAR 2020

Prof Fea then dumps on the "Twitter mob" oblivious to the fact that the SHEAR panel was all white, nearly all male, & had no junior scholars. When everyone under 55 is excluded from your car-crash plenary, you can't really complain when non-Boomers talk about it on Twitter

I would advise younger scholars (and by younger I mean anyone under 55) to hold your course on this: it was heartening to see SHEAR members & officials come together to lament the panel's problems of representation, tone & focus, and promise to do better in the future.

As an institution, I think SHEAR learned a great deal from the fallout from the panel - and that this knowledge can make the institution more inclusive, representative and therefore stronger in years to come. Better to focus on this than to throw more time at Prof Feller et al /