I Exchanged Texts with Robert E. Lee. It Was Weird.

2023 is shaping up to be the year of AI technology. AI can write song lyrics, auto-tune a singer’s voice, modify historical images, and produce videos with silly facial filters on SnapChat. For those of us interested in research and writing, ChatGPT is poised to revolutionize the ways we conduct research, communicate with each other in our personal and professional lives, and perhaps even transform our need to learn how to write in the first place. AI will soon be able to produce wholesale scholarship in the form of blog posts, articles, and books on its own.

As one tech evangelist recently proclaimed on Twitter–seemingly unworried about sharing misinformation herself–so-called “Knowledge workers” need to be very concerned about AI’s ability to replace their skill sets in the future. (She needn’t worry: the academic job industry has been steadily decimated for a long time already).

In learning more about AI, I came across a fascinating app called “Historical Figures Chat” that proposes to simulate the act of exchanging text messages with historical figures from the past. As described by the app’s creators:

Our app, “Historical Figures,” uses advanced A.I. technology to allow users to have conversations with over 20,000 historical figures from the past. With this app, you can chat with deceased individuals who have made a significant impact on history from ancient rulers and philosophers, to modern day politicians and artists. Simply select the historical figure you want to chat with and start a conversation. You can learn about their life, their work, and their impact on the world in a fun and interactive way. Our A.I. is designed to provide you with a realistic conversation experience, making it feel like you’re really talking to these historical figures.

I decided to download the app and try to keep as open a mind as possible. I chose to exchange texts with Robert E. Lee. I started with some basic questions about slavery and secession.

I began by asking “Robert E. Lee” about his views on the Confederacy and slavery. It became evident that Historical Figures essentially grabs content from Wikipedia and tries to mold it into a language that the historical figure would have said in the aftermath of a key moment in their life. Here we see Lee repeating his oft-quoted line about fulfilling his duties to his state over the interests of the federal government that put him through college and employed him through the entirety of his adult life. However, “Robert E. Lee” provides few specifics on what he meant when said it was his duty to “fight for what I believed in.” What about Virginia shaped his decision to fight for Confederacy? Why did Lee place his loyalty to his state and a new government claiming federal powers over much of the South? “I fought for Virginia to fight for what I believed in” tells us little behind Lee’s reasoning for his decision-making.

Continuing, Lee states that he personally opposed the institution of slavery, another line often paraded by Lee defenders. I believe Elizabeth Brown Pryor’s classic biography of Lee, Reading the Man, still offers one of the best explanations of Lee’s relationship with slavery:

Lee’s political views on the subject are remarkably consistent. He thought slavery was an unfortunate historical legacy, an inherited problem for which he was not responsible, and one that could only be resolved over time and probably only by God. As for any injustice to the slaves, he defended a “Christian” logic of at least temporary Black bondage. “The blacks are immeasurably better off here than in Africa, morally, socially, & physically,” Lee told his wife in the famous 1856 letter. “The painful discipline they are undergoing, is necessary for their instruction as a race, & I hope will prepare & lead them to better things. How long their subjugation may be necessary is known & ordered by a wise and Merciful Providence.” He went so far as to believe that the slaves should be appreciative of the situation and showed displeasure at any sign of their “ingratitude.”

. . . Lee might characterize slavery as “an evil in any country” and state that his feelings were “strong enlisted” for the slaves, but he ultimately concluded that it was a “greater evil to the white than to the black race” and admitted that his own sympathies lay with the whites.

Perhaps more telling that words were Lee’s actions in support of slavery. He continued to participate in the system and distance himself from antislavery arguments up to and during the Civil War . . . In 1856, and as late as July 1860, he expressed a willingness to buy slaves. Those blacks who were in his possession were frequently traded away for his own convenience, regardless of the destruction it caused to the bondsman’s family. He ignores injustice to the slaves and defends the rights of the slaveholder in both his 1841 and 1856 letters to his wife, and he continued to uphold laws that constrained blacks well after the war. During the brief time that Lee had authority over the Arlington slaves, he proved to be an unsympathetic and demanding master. When disagreements over slavery brought about the dissolution of the Union and he was forced to take sides, he chose not just to withdraw from the U.S. Army and quietly retire, as did some of his fellow officers, but to lead an opposing army that without question intended to defend the right to hold human property. Even taking into account the notions of his time and place, it is exceedingly hard to square these actions with any rejection of the institution.

Lee may have hated slavery, but it was not because of any ethical dilemma. What disliked about slavery was its inefficiency, the messiness of its relationships, the responsibility it entailed, and the taint of it . . . If Lee believed slavery was an evil, he thought it was a necessary one.

Elizabeth Brown Prior, Reading the Man, p. 144-145.

I continued by asking Lee about a comment he made about Black Americans after the Civil War.

Here, we see Lee reducing his racist statement to the need to find common ground after the Civil War. “We must strive for unity by respecting each other’s views even when we don’t agree with them.” Unless those views were held by Black Americans and their supporters in which case calls for unity and respecting each other’s views can be thrown out the door.

After some conversation about Reconstruction, I asked Lee if it was true that he had whipped enslaved people he claimed ownership of in the 1850s.

There has been much debate among historians on this subject, but evidence suggests that there was at least one incident in which three enslaved freedom seekers were whipped on Lee’s orders. I believe that evidence. That no allusion to this incident is made in the conversation is troubling. The second text from Lee in this screenshot is just absolutely silly and doesn’t reflect anything Lee would have said at that time, but of course that might also be reflective of my question in the first place.

I then asked Lee how he made amends for slavery and worked for the betterment of the United States after the Civil War.

Again, we see comments that any Civil War historian worth their salt would shake their head over. Lee opposed Black voting rights and warned his son that “you will never prosper with the blacks,” and yet he somehow also supported civil rights, the end of racial discrimination, and the rejection of white supremacy as a governing ideology.

Finally, I decided to go all in and try to break this app.

There is absolutely no evidence to indicate that Lee felt this way about Frederick Douglass or the fight against racial discrimination more broadly. Of Lee, Douglass complained at the former’s death in 1870 that “we can scarcely take up a newspaper that is not filled with nauseating flatteries of the late Robert E. Lee . . . It would seem from this that the solider who kills the most men in battle, even in a bad cause, is the greatest Christian.” Wait ’til Douglass hears what Lee told me about it! Maybe he’ll change his mind.

There are a few things that really trouble me about AI technology used in the context of this app. First, the text replies from historical figures like Lee are a constant string of apologia, whitewashing, and reassurances aimed at putting controversial subjects to rest for twenty-first century audiences. The responses are aimed at tampering down past controversies without thoroughly explaining how and why the emerged in the first place. They aim to make us feel better about historical figures from the past rather than facing tough subjects with the sort of nuanced, complex analysis that the past deserves.

The Robert E. Lee presented in bot form opposed slavery and didn’t join the Confederacy for that reason – he did so because he loved Virginia and nothing else. Lee abhorred racism and white supremacy and was actually anti-racist in asking former White Confederates to treat Black Southerners kindly. In fact, Lee even admired Frederick Douglass! Sure sounds like a Lost Cause argument if I’ve ever heard one made about Lee.

It’s the same for text exchanges with Andrew Jackson, Himmler, Stalin . . . you name it. The app minimizes the words of these people and turns them into tragic figures who regret their past actions and are deserving of our forgiveness and empathy today. The historical figures are constantly rationalizing, explaining, minimizing, and apologizing their actions, even when many of these same figures never expressed such remorse in their lifetimes.

Second, I question the pedagogical value of this technology. What lessons about past historical figures can students learn from engaging in a hypothetical text message conversation that they can’t get from other forms of study already taking place in the history classroom? Does this technology help students better understand these historical figures and the thinking that went behind their actions and words? Is Historical Figures Chat not just a fancy way of delivering content from Wikipedia?

Regardless of my own skepticism of this technology, AI is something that all humanities scholars, practitioners, and supporters must grapple with moving forward. It is not good enough to just say that it should be banned from the classroom. How do we introduce students into the use and abuse of the past by AI technologies? A colleague on Twitter suggested an activity idea in which students are encouraged to “break” the technology by trying to catch historical figures into contradicting themselves or saying things are demonstrably false (which is essentially what I did here).

I also think about the ramifications of AI long term. In discussing the use of AI to write lyrics or create actual music, Rick Beato asks a great question in wondering if the music-listening public would even care if the music they enjoyed was created by AI. I think those of us in the humanities should be asking the same question. I would assume that we as a profession reject the potential eradication of writing skills and critical analysis of society through AI tools like Historical Figures Chat, but our concerns may not matter if university, business, political, and cultural leaders don’t care whether the research they’re reading is created by AI.

There’s a lot to think about here and I’ll be cautiously concerned about new technologies like Historical Figures Chat. Perhaps someone can convince me of the wisdom of AI within the context of scholarly reading and writing, or the technology will improve to such a point that I’ll become convinced of its utility. But one thing is certain: moving forward, I am ghosting Robert E. Lee and removing him from my contacts.

Cheers

Notes on the “Reframing History” Report

For many years, public historians have called for an updated version of David Thelen and Roy Rosenzweig’s 1998 book The Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of History in American Life. That book summarized the results of a phone survey of 1,453 Americans from a range of backgrounds who reflected on their relationship with history. Participants in that study were asked how they define history, what value they put on it, and what sources they relied on to generate their understandings of the past.

The American Association for State and Local History (AASLH), the National Council on Public History (NCPH), and the Organization of American Historians (OAH) have recently formed a partnership called “Reframing History.” This partnership is working with FrameWorks to conduct research and update our collective understandings of how people define their relationship with history. This work should be applauded. I was excited to read their recently published report, “Making History Work: From Abstract Truth to Critical Engagement,” when it was published earlier this week. According to the report’s research methods paper, 54 people were interviewed via Zoom and nearly 5,000 people filled out an online survey, tripling the number of respondents who participated in Thelen and Rosenzweig’s 1998 study.

What follows here is a summarization of four recommendations the report makes and some comments I have on these recommendations. Overall I think this report is a useful tool that public history sites should keep on file and discuss among staff that interacts with the public. I certainly look forward to chatting about it with my colleagues. However, I question a number of arguments and assumptions made in the report.

Introduction

The report argues that history communicators should strive to frame history as an ongoing process of developing critical thinking skills. These skills will help people better participate in contemporary society and promote a better future. The authors suggest that there are popular misconceptions about the purpose of history and the methods historians use to better understand the past. Somewhat controversially (to me, at least), the authors assert that “the reality is that people think of history as a hobby for enthusiasts rather than as something they should be concerned about.”

I disagree strongly with this latter assertion. History is of great interest to many people who are not professionals or don’t consider themselves professionals. The Barnes & Noble history section always gets a lot of traffic, history documentaries get high ratings, and people turn to a wide rage of sources to obtain information about the past. People who consume history often describe themselves as enthusiasts and are certainly concerned about history and the way it is taught. The challenge, to me, is not that people don’t care about history. It’s that new academic historical scholarship is not taken seriously or viewed with suspicion by many of the same enthusiasts who readily consume content on the History Channel or a David McCullough book. Public historians who challenge conventional understandings of the past or attempt to broaden narratives to include new racial, gender, or sexuality perspectives often face potential backlash for their efforts.

Another note with the introduction. One thing that immediately stuck out to me is that this report uses the term “communicators” as opposed to “public historians” or even “history communicators.” I’m sure this term was used in an effort to be inclusive given that not everyone who discusses history with public audiences identifies as a public historian. Fair enough. But as someone who personally identifies as a public historian, I find the term “communicator” awkward. What are we communicating about? We are communicating the stuff of history to public audiences from all different types of backgrounds. Regardless of whether one personally identifies as a historian, that person is a “history communicator” when they work within the realm of public history. Somewhat relatedly, while the list of authors and advisory board members of this report come from impressive backgrounds–including National Park Service sites and history museums–I couldn’t help but wonder how many of these scholars currently communicate with the public on a regular basis about history as a part of their daily work beyond the scope of this report.

Recommendation 1

The report argues that lay audiences consider the study of history to be an effort by scholars to find one universal, factual “truth” about the past. This truth, once it has been obtained, is definite and unchanging. Anyone who challenges historical “truth” is therefore criticized as being biased, subject, or a “revisionist.” To remedy this popular perception, the authors argue that history communicators should focus on skills-building rather than finding the “truth.” They should avoid talking about “historical truth” and instead help people formulate a “deeper understanding of our society and how it came to be.” Moreover, history communicators should stress the importance of using a variety of methods to study diverse perspectives and forms of evidence. The authors even go so far as to suggest that rather than saying “by studying history, we make sense of the past by collecting, analyzing, and interpreting [historical] stories,” history communicators should say “by studying history, we build critical thinking skills that apply to all aspects of our lives.”

While it is certainly important to stress the methodological benefits of studying history, the teaching of critical thinking skills should not be prioritized at the expense of answering difficult questions people may have about the accuracy of a given historical event. Rather than avoiding discussions about the meaning of “truth,” I would rather expand the idea of “truth” to suggest that multiple truths can coexist simultaneously. By extension, multiple plausible interpretations of a given event can coexist simultaneously. To this point, I think there is real value in what the International Coalition of Sites of Conscience describes as the “four truths of history.” These truths–forensic truth, personal truth, social truth, and healing truth–do a nice job of highlighting the intersection of memory and history in understanding the past. A person may have a memory about the past that they consider the truth. A society may have an understanding of the past that they consider the truth (as expressed through monuments, memorials, and other public iconography). And yet individuals and societies may hold individual and collective truths that don’t fully align with the historical record, which leads to the creation of myths and misinformation about the past. An important part of public history is helping people navigate the intersection of memory, history, and The Past. Avoiding discussions about the meaning of truth seems counterintuitive for any effort to discuss the meaning of history.

Recommendation 2

The report argues that people view historians as objective journalists who are asked to simply “report the facts.” With this view of history, the historian-journalist dutifully reports past events exactly as they happened. Eyewitness accounts are prioritized as the final word on what happened in the past; efforts by historians to critically analyze, contextualize, or interpret these eyewitness accounts is seen as a potential road to a biased understanding of the past. “The belief that the past can be easily and straightforwardly documented and reported on is connected to the public’s belief that ‘one truth’ about the past is out there waiting to be found,” according to the authors. The best way to work through these misconceptions is to use the metaphor of detective work to describe the historical process (but not the term “detective,” which the authors believe could lead to negative associations with police). The report argues that the detective metaphor is preferred to the journalism metaphor because it better demonstrates the use of sources and methods to provide new understandings of a past event.

The detective metaphor is not a new innovation. Nikki Madel and Bobbie Malone’s 2008 guidebook for k-12 history teachers effectively used the detective metaphor to help teachers explain the purpose of history to their students. Nevertheless I do think it is a useful metaphor and I have used it myself to explain the purpose of history to audiences (although I admit that I don’t see how the term “detective work” does not convey images of law enforcement while the term “detective” does). But it’s worth asking whether the terms “journalist” and “detective” are as opposite as the authors make them out to be. Doesn’t detective work also rely on eyewitnesses? Don’t journalists try to rely on a wide range of sources when conducting research and not simply eyewitness testimony? At the end of the day, aren’t journalists and detectives trying their best to find “one truth about the past . . . out there waiting to be found?”

A different metaphor mentioned in the methods report would be the advancement of medical knowledge. Simply put, nobody wants to receive medical care today using medical knowledge and tools from 1850 or 1950. That doesn’t mean that medical knowledge from 1850 or 1950 isn’t useful. On the contrary, we could learn a lot about what worked and didn’t work by studying medical history from those periods. But ultimately our understanding of medicine is updated as new insights are made and new technological advancements are made. The medicine metaphor is as useful if not more useful than the detective metaphor.

Recommendation 3

The report argues that non-historians recognize the importance of learning from past mistakes, oftentimes repeating the overly-simplistic Santayana quote about those not knowing history being doomed to repeat it. The authors argue that this knowledge suggests that many people recognize the importance of studying history. However, the authors correctly acknowledge that what it means to reckon with and “move forward” from the past greatly varies from person to person. They suggest that history communicators speak to universal ideals of progress and justice when explaining the significance of history, although they stress that communicators do not need to use these terms explicitly. With this view of history, the authors suggest that history communicators should not simply explain how we’ve gotten to the present, but that an emphasis should be made to highlight how history can create a more just future. The authors argue that framing history as essential to a better world “builds support for dedicating more resources” towards history education in schools, museums, and elsewhere.

In a world where every word is seemingly politicized and even bland terms like “social justice” and “progress” are viewed with scorn in certain quarters, I am skeptical of the pivot towards the future rather than what’s happening here and now. While I certainly believe history can help create a more just future, I am doubtful that such claims will lead to increased resources for history education.

More philosophically, I do not believe history automatically provides a roadmap for a more just world or helps us predict what is going to happen next. Without being overly pessimistic, it seems obvious to me that history proves that the arc of the moral universe does not automatically bend towards justice. I am reminded of what historian Robert Greene III argued on Twitter several years ago. While I don’t have his exact tweets on hand, Greene essentially argued that there will always be new mistakes to be made, unprecedented problems that can’t be solved by studying history, and new challenges that history alone can’t solve. Moreover, those who have a strong knowledge of history (see history and law student Vladimir Putin, for example), are often just as susceptible to making grave, tragic mistakes that negatively harm the world.

Am I opposed to promoting justice and progress? Of course not. But I do feel that the work of public history should be rooted in appreciating the ways history shapes our world today. How we move forward from history and what will happen in the future are questions that cannot be resolved by historians alone.

Recommendation 4

The report calls for history communicators to use specific, concrete examples to build support for inclusive history. Harkening back to a crucial insight from The Presence of the Past, the authors call for history communicators to emphasize local history when discussing inclusive narratives. This method shows how BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and other People of Color) made a difference in local communities and will “help ward off abstract worries about the ‘liberal agenda’ of distant elites being imposed at home.”

I thought this recommendation was the strongest of the report and I don’t have many thoughts to add to it.

Discussion of “Critical Race Theory”

The report argues that:

“The recent backlash against ‘critical race theory’ (that is, teaching about systemic racism in schools and universities) is grounded in the assumption that when it comes to history, what matters and counts is the history of white people.”

This is a shortsighted, overly simplistic explanation of “critical race theory” criticisms that does little to advance the conversation forward.

While I have no doubt that racism does play a role for some CRT critics, I would argue that a great number of them are not opposed to having people of color in the history curriculum. They want discussions of Martin Luther King, Jr., but they want a non-controversial version of MLK who expressed his love for the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution and not the version of MLK who questioned capitalism, criticized the nation’s involvement in Vietnam, and criticized white moderates for their indifference to racial justice. They want Frederick Douglass as a loyal Republican party member, but not the Douglass who eloquently explained why African Americans did not view the 4th of July as “their” holiday or who believed Abraham Lincoln was “preeminently the white man’s President, entirely devoted to the welfare of white men.” They want examples of minority success that reaffirm notions of American exceptionalism. They want stories that highlight the idea of individual success because any examination of systematic, structural racism (such as slavery, Jim Crow laws, the reservation system, or immigration restrictions based on race and ethnicity) is deemed “critical race theory” in the service of socialism, Marxism, or some other boogyman “ism” that is declared to be at war with American values. In other words, critics of so-called “critical race theory” ground their position not in wanting an all-white history, but in the assumption that what matters and counts are positive individual stories that promote patriotism, nationalism, and loyalty to the United States.

The failure to probe the relationship between participants’ views towards history and their views towards the nation is disappointing given the long history of “patriotic education” in the United States. Since the late 19th century, a central aim of history education has focused on promoting love of country and a belief that America was the shining example of democracy for the rest of the world. In this sense history education was seen as a “practical” study that prepared students to be ready to defend the country in times of need. Much of the anxiety surrounding CRT is rooted in the fact that history education in recent years has aimed to highlight stories of struggle, marginalization, and violence that do not automatically conform to the “patriotic education” model. Therefore critics fear that students are being taught to “hate” their country, when in reality the aim of many history teachers (and public historians) has been to demonstrate how concepts such as freedom, liberty, and democracy have been contested throughout U.S. history, and that this work continues today.

(You can read and download an article I wrote about “patriotic education” below).

one-nation-one-flag-one-language-nicholas-w.-saccoDownload

In conclusion, I think the spirit of reframing history is much needed, and I think this report will be useful for future public historians. But I was surprised by how often I found myself at odds with some of the central conclusions of the report. I hope future studies can be conducted that take a deeper look at how people conceive of history’s purposes within the context of how they view the purpose of patriotism, nationalism, and the nation-state.

Cheers

A Few Thoughts on the Passing of James W. Loewen

I was very saddened to hear that sociologist and historian James W. Loewen passed away yesterday at the age of 79 and feel compelled to write a few lines about the influence of his tremendous scholarship on my own work as a public historian.

I took a serious interest in history as a middle schooler in the late 1990s/early 2000s, and read Loewen’s book Lies My Teacher Told Me while I was still in high school. It was probably the first book I ever read that seriously questioned the way history was taught in the classroom. Loewen clearly demonstrated that difficult aspects of U.S. history were often swept under the rug in the interest of promoting a consensus version of history that promoted loyalty to the nation at the expense of historical accuracy, and that trivial facts and rote memorization of dates often replaced discussions of causes, context, and consequences in the history classroom.

High School students hate history. When they list their favorite subjects, history invariably comes in last. Students consider history “the most irrelevant” of twenty-one subjects commonly taught in high school. Bor-r-ring is the adjective they apply to it. When students can, they avoid it, even though most students get higher grades in history than in math, science, or English. Even whey they are forced to take classes in history, they repress what they learn, so every year or two another study decries what our seventeen-year-olds don’t know.

James W. Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me, pg. 12

These were the sorts of words that inspired me to originally pursue a history teaching degree in undergrad so that I could be a part of the solution to poor teaching in the history classroom. Of course, that career track did not work out for me (I was even turned down from a position once “because we need a basketball coach”). But as I began pursuing a career in public history, Loewen’s Lies Across America probably played an even bigger role in my career development than Lies My Teacher Told Me. Loewen’s critical interrogation of public monuments, historical markers, and historic sites demonstrated the ways public history sites, just like history classrooms, often left out important stories from U.S. history in the interest of promoting consensus history. I wrote about one particularly influential story Loewen discussed in the book about Louisiana’s “Uncle Jack” statue here a few years ago. His ten questions for historic sites remains an excellent foundation for critically analyzing the interpretive focus of a given site:

Two important insights are worth further mentioning here. One is that Loewen was a gifted writer whose engaging and often humorous style really made the words jump off the page. As evidenced in my own story, a high school student could read his books and understand the arguments he made. The other insight is that many of Loewen’s arguments were not only right at the time these two books were written in the 1990s, but remain relevant to our own conversations today about history education in the classroom and public history across the United States. For example, In Lies My Teacher Told Me Loewen famously criticized the ways Christopher Columbus was hailed as a hero in the history classroom. He convincingly demonstrated the genocidal nature of Columbus’s voyage to the Western Hemisphere and forced readers to challenge their old, mythical understandings European voyages to “The New World.” While Loewen’s interpretation of Columbus has much more credence today, that was not the case in the 1990s. In Lies Across America, Loewen argued that public monuments were more reflective of the moment in which they were erected than the history they tried to commemorate, therefore demonstrating the inherently political/ideological nature of public monuments. Again, this insight is a fairly common talking point among historians today, but Loewen was already on the ball with this type of thinking thirty years ago. It’s easy to read Loewen and think that his books were written a year or two ago and not in the 1990s.

I never met Dr. Loewen personally but I’m grateful for his scholarship, which goes far beyond the two books under discussion here. You can learn more about Dr. Loewen’s scholarship by visiting his website, which had recently been created only a few months ago.

Cheers

A Few Short Notes on Textbooks in the History Classroom . . . Then and Now

If you haven’t heard already, Dana Goldstein has a very interesting article in the New York Times about history textbooks today and how the content in those books varies widely from state to state. It’s an informative read and really highlights how much the process is influenced by partisan politics. It is very difficult, of course, to gauge how much teachers and students actually utilize textbooks in the history classroom, but those textbooks can be a useful tool for understanding the currents of historical scholarship and how those currents are shaped by educational and political leaders.

Debates over school textbooks are nothing new, and to that point I will shamelessly self-promote my first journal article from 2015, which explored the ways Indiana Civil War veterans tried to shape public culture in the state. These efforts included a very intense battle with the Indiana State Board of Education over the ways the Civil War was being taught in the classroom in the 1890s and early 20th century.

You can read and download the article here.

Cheers

Please Welcome Academic History Departments to the 21st Century

Every year the American Historical Association hosts its conference right at the beginning of January. It’s always hosted in a major city and is always very expensive to attend. The conference is huge and I have no doubts about the positive benefits of attending, particularly the networking opportunities it provides. The organization definitely caters to historians working in an academic setting, however, and the combination of high expenses and my job outside the academy has prevented me from attending their annual meeting.

There’s a longstanding tradition in academic history of interviewing potential candidates for professorships during the AHA meeting. What more or less happens is that history PhDs who are on the verge of finishing their degree begin looking for job opportunities in the academy and are instructed to attend the AHA to do face-to-face interviews with history departments. Sometimes the interviews take place in what’s called the “cattle call,” which I assume is a large room with tables set up throughout where prospective candidates can meet their interviewers, but sometimes they take place in areas such as hotel rooms, which seems like a recipe for discomfort at the least and sexual/mental abuse of the prospective candidate at the worst. The prospective candidates have no guarantees that they’ll leave the conference with a job offer. Many end up leaving empty-handed and thousands of dollars poorer than they were before the conference.

When I was in grad school a few years ago I was appointed by the history department to be the student representative on a search committee tasked with hiring a tenure-track professor of digital humanities and history. We did the right thing from the very beginning. One or two professors asked about meeting the top candidates at the next AHA meeting, but the rest of the committee quickly shot down that idea. We began by sorting through roughly 50 applications and picking our top six candidates. From there we decided that it would be best to interview those six candidates individually through a Skype call so that these candidates would not have to travel to AHA to do what we could do in thirty minutes with a video conference call. When we whittled the list down to two candidates, the university paid for those finalists to travel on separate days to campus for a tour and a face-to-face interview with the search committee. From there the rest was, as they say, history.

The option we went with was arguably better for the department and for those who applied for this opening. Video conferencing enabled the search committee to stay on campus and conduct their interviews in a timely fashion. For prospective candidates, their time and money was saved. For the two finalists, their travel expenses were covered by the university, who should have covered them anyway because the institution was in need of a highly talented historian to join the department in the first place.

I suppose this long-standing tradition of forcing people to go to AHA for a job interview continues in part out of habit and in part because it gets people to AHA, which helps justify the expense of putting together this annual conference. To be sure, some prospective candidates are perfectly willing to attend AHA and have the means to do so, and it could very well be most convenient for both parties to hold their interview at AHA under some circumstances. But history departments looking to hire should not force prospective candidates to attend AHA for their interview, nor should they defray the costs of conducting a job search to those looking for jobs, particularly when they are recent PhD grads in a poor position to take on those costs. This practice should be discouraged by both AHA and history departments around the United States. Some of us in public history were very vocal last year about the continued posting of unpaid internships and job postings without salary information on public history jobs pages. Through those efforts we were able to get several organizations to discontinue the former and strongly discourage the latter. The time has now come to push for an end to mandatory AHA job interviews someday.

To these antiquated history departments I welcome them to join the rest of the working world who use modern technology to conduct interviews and hire qualified candidates for jobs. Welcome to the 21st Century!

Cheers

How Historians and Musicians Receive Similar Training in College

Yours Truly Performing at Off Broadway in St. Louis. Photo Credit: Rick Miller Photography

Over the years numerous friends and family, knowing that I studied history in college and now work as a public historian for a living, have come to me with a range of questions about people and events from the past. I think more often than not I have failed to give them a satisfactory answer to their questions. That’s because in most cases they’ve asked questions about time periods in which I have only a basic and limited understanding. As fascinating as I find the Roman Empire, the Medieval Era, the Great Depression and the New Deal, and other periods in history, I just don’t have the specialized knowledge to give an accurate, informative answer in most cases. And yet oftentimes these questions are prefaced with a comment like, “you’re a historian, so you should be able to help me…”

The reality is that most professional historians specialize in a particular time period, and that time period can be quite small in scope depending on the individual historian’s interests. I think non-historians sometimes assume that the primary goal of studying history is the accumulation of facts. As historian David McKenzie pointed out on Twitter, historical knowledge for many is “simply cramming facts into one’s head to be spit out at a moment’s notice.” While learning facts and establishing historical accuracy are certainly important facets of any history degree program, there are many other elements of good historical practice. This includes (but is not limited to) the ability to search for and interpret the larger context surrounding a particular event, the need to understand change over time, the importance of crafting solid research questions, the talent to be a good reader, writer, and speaker, and the training needed to become well-versed in both primary and secondary source material of a particular, specialized historical era.

When I struggle to answer my friends’ and family’s questions, I point out that historians are in some ways similar to musicians. My area of expertise is nineteenth century U.S. history–particularly the Civil War Era–and that is my “musical instrument,” so to speak. You wouldn’t say “oh, you’re a musician! Go over and play that guitar” without first asking that musician what instrument they play and if they could play guitar. And just because a musician can play guitar doesn’t mean they can play tuba or do a freestyle rap on the spot. The situation is similar with historians. I can talk about the Battle of Shiloh or the Civil Rights Act of 1866, but I’d have a more difficult time giving a detailed answer about, say, the Battle of D-Day or the Civil Rights Act of 1964. As much as I’d love to give detailed answers and remarkable facts about every event in human history, the limits of human intelligence require a more specific and concentrated focus.

Music education students in college are required to learn how to play a string instrument, a brass/woodwind instrument, and sing in a choir regardless of their prior expertise. They also learn music theory and develop an ability to read sheet music whether it’s in treble clef or bass clef (or alto clef!). As future teachers of band, orchestra, and choir in a k-12 setting, this training prepares them to help students learn how to play an instrument, read sheet music, and perform together in an organized creation of musical sound. History students at the undergrad level receive a similar curriculum in that they take courses in U.S., European, and World history during their training. They receive a broad instruction that enables them to educate younger students about a wide swath of human history. But like the musician with a specific instrument that they specialize in and perform with in concerts, the historian finds a time period to specialize in and contribute to through public talks, the creation of scholarship, and, in my case as a public historian, by interpreting history to a wide range of publics.

Cheers

 

How I Visualize the Reconstruction Era

Yesterday I had the distinct privilege of speaking to a number of gifted ninth grade students at a local private school about the Reconstruction era. I had only fifteen minutes to give my presentation, so I had to get to the point fast. Prior to the talk I decided that I’d try my best to create a coherent and accurate visualization of how I understand the era and its political significance. I focused on two themes: How the Union would be preserved, and who had the right to call themselves an American citizen during this time. It was hard, but I think I was pretty successful in my effort to be nuanced but not overwhelming. Below is the visualization. If you’re curious about the era or plan on teaching it to others, please feel free to click the image to view at full size, download, and share with others (with appropriate credits).

On Compromise and the Coming of the Civil War

The essence of all politics is the art of compromise. The success or failure of a nation-state’s policy goals lies in the ability of its political actors–some of which may have vastly different interests–to negotiate and sometimes compromise on preferred ideals in the interest of crafting intelligent policy that promotes the greater good. Compromise, of course, doesn’t always lead to positive outcomes. As the philosopher Avishai Margalit beautifully argues in On Compromise and Rotten Compromises:

We very rarely attain what is first on our list of priorities, either as individuals or as collectives. We are forced by circumstances to settle for much less than what we aspire to. We compromise. We should, I believe, be judged by our compromises more than by our ideals and norms. Ideals may tell us something important about what we would like to be. But compromises tell us who we are. (5)

Superficially, it sounds silly to ask whether compromises are good or bad, much like asking whether bacteria are good or bad: we cannot live without bacteria, though sometimes we die because of bacteria. Yet that asymmetry makes the question about the goodness and the badness of bacteria, as well as those of compromise, worth asking. We have ten times as many bacteria in our bodies as we have cells, and many of those are vital for our existence. A small number of bacteria are pathologic and cause disease, and and with the proper treatment, we may get rid of them. Similarly, compromises are vital for social life, even though some compromises are pathogenic. We need antibiotics to resist pathogenic bacteria, and we need to actively resist rotten compromises that are lethal for the moral life of a body politic. (7)

This description captures one of the most fundamental quandaries of human existence: when should individuals and groups make compromises on ideals to accomplish an objective, and when is refusing to compromise the better option of the two? Studying history is a worthwhile endeavor for considering the ramifications of political compromise on the health of a nation-state and its people.

It was with this conception of compromise on my mind when I read historian Carole Emberton’s fine essay in the Washington Post and Caleb McDaniel’s in The Atlantic today on the breakdown of compromise efforts leading up to the Civil War. White northerners and southerners forged successful compromise efforts (at least in the minds of those seeking political union between the sections) on the issue of slavery from the beginning of the nation’s founding. As the country acquired new western territory through conquest and purchase in the years before the Civil War, debates continually sprang up about whether the institution of slavery would accompany the white American settlers moving westward. In hindsight, various compromise efforts like the 1820 Missouri Compromise, the Compromise of 1850, and others were really measures to appease the proslavery south, but they nonetheless allowed the Union to be maintained for nearly eighty years after its founding.

It’s worth asking students of the Civil War to consider how compromise over slavery was possible in 1850 but not in 1860. My answer would be that the Republican Party’s successful entrance into electoral politics changed the game. The Republicans explicitly organized as a party in 1854 on the principle that slavery should be banned in the western territories and left open for free labor (for some Republicans, this meant only free white labor). Although Abraham Lincoln acknowledged that Constitutionally speaking slavery could not be touched where it already existed in the south, his personal hatred of slavery was well-know and feared by proslavery fire-eaters who saw his election as a step towards federal governance dominated by northern anti-slavery convictions. In other words, an administration that was hostile to the south’s economic, political, and social interest in keeping African Americans enslaved.

President-elect Lincoln was willing to compromise to the extent that he offered support to the first proposed 13th Amendment guaranteeing the federal government’s protection of slavery in the states where it already existed, but he refused to compromise on the question of slavery’s westward expansion, drawing a line in the sand and arguing that he had been elected on the belief that the west should be for free labor. Compromising on this question would sacrifice the Republican Party’s core principle of existence. Likewise, many white Southern Democrats argued that talk of disunion could be mollified if the federal government passed legislation guaranteeing the right to bring their slave property west with them. They refused, however, to make any further compromises short of these new guarantees from the federal government. As Emberton argues, “it was slavery, and the refusal of Southern slaveholders to compromise on slavery, that launched the Civil War.”

Cheers

On Using Historical Analogies Responsibly

Is President Donald Trump like Andrew Jackson?

Wait, maybe he’s more like Andrew Johnson.

Or King George III.

Or the Founding Fathers.

Or Aaron Burr.

Or John Quincy Adams.

Or Abraham Lincoln.

Or Jefferson Davis.

Or Horace Greeley.

Or Ulysses S. Grant.

Or James K. Vardaman.

Or Theodore Roosevelt.

Or Huey Long.

Or Benito Mussolini.

Or George Patton.

Or Franklin Roosevelt.

Or George Wallace.

Or Barry Goldwater.

Or Richard Nixon.

Or Ronald Reagan.

Or Hugo Chavez.

Over the past week historians have been debating the merits of using historical analogy to educate lay audiences about the messy circumstances of our current political moment. Moshik Temkin started the discussion with an op-ed in the New York Times decrying the “historian as pundit” persona that, as can be seen above, has gotten attention within the online realm (not all of those essays were written by historians, but you get the point). Temkin expresses worries about “the rapid-fire, superficial way history is being presented, as if it’s mostly a matter of drawing historical analogies,” which in turn simplifies, trivializes, and downplays the significance of both past and present-day events. Conversely, many historians on my Twitter feed reacted negatively to Temkin’s piece, arguing that we must meet people where they are and that analogy provides opportunities for historians to demonstrate changes and continuities in American history.

Is there room to argue that both sides of this argument are a little bit right and a little bit wrong? I think so.

I do not agree with Temkin when he suggests historians should avoid appearances on TV and “quick-take notes” in a news article. Nor do I agree with the argument that we should leave analogy solely to the non-historian pundits. There are limitations to both TV and newspaper articles since they offer only small tidbits and soundbites for expressing a particular viewpoint, but they do offer historians an opportunity to demonstrate the value of the past in shaping the present. For example, my friend and fellow public historian Will Stoutamire contributed some wonderful insights into this article on the history of Arizona’s Confederate monuments. Last I heard that particular article had been viewed something like 70,000 times over the past month. Not bad! Likewise, I agree with Julian Zelizer when he argues that:

Historians have an important role in unpacking key elements of the ways that institutions operate over time to make sense of big trends and broader forces that move beyond the particular moment within which we live. We can’t become so blinded by our concern for particularity and specificity and nuance that we lose site of the big picture.

At the same time, however, is Temkin incorrect when he suggests that we should be wary of poor historical analogies? Is he wrong when he asserts that we should remind our audiences that a similar event or person from the past does not lead to a similar outcome in the present? Can we conclude that some of the above historical analogies are trite and unhelpful? Are there better questions we can ask about the past and how it has shaped the present? Is their room to sometimes discuss the past on its own terms without resorting to comparisons with the present? I was struck by a recent article from a senior English major who, in discussing national politics in the classroom, warned that “if authors are only worth reading insofar as they inform modern phenomena, then the entire English canon is of mere antiquarian interest and can be summarily dismissed.” If you insert ‘history’ for the word ‘English,’ do we run into the same problem by downplaying huge swaths of history that don’t have an explicit relevance to current politics?

A huge shortcoming of this entire discussion, of course, is that public historians and the work they do are completely left out of the conversation. Here’s the thing. Public historians work in small spaces all the time; spaces that are more often then not much smaller than the ones academics use. We don’t get sixty minutes for lecture, 400 pages to write a book, or even a New York Times opinion piece. We get ten minute introductions, tweets, short Facebook posts, museum exhibits that are often viewed for ten seconds or less, and other educational programming of short duration. Both Temkin and his critics leave this important work out of their discussion.

So here’s a strong middle ground from which to argue. Historians should always strive to meet people where they are in their learning journey. They ought to embrace opportunities to give talks, speak on news shows, be quoted in a newspaper article, or write op-eds for a media outlet with a large platform. At the same time, they ought to use historical analogies responsibly and within the context of highlighting the importance of studying history. The past itself is interesting on its own terms, and sometimes it’s okay to discuss it without resorting to a comparison with Donald Trump. And perhaps academic historians can learn a thing or two from public historians about conveying complex historical subjects into clear, accessible interpretations of the past to a wide range of audiences.

Cheers

The Public Education “Culture Wars” of the Reconstruction Era

The historiography of the Reconstruction era has and continues to be overwhelmingly focused on questions of race, citizenship, and equal protection under the law in the years after the American Civil War. For an era of remarkable constitutional change and the dramatic transition of four million formerly enslaved people into citizens (and, for some, into voters and elected leaders), this focus is understandable. Reconstruction-era scholars almost unanimously agree today that Reconstruction was a noble but “unfinished revolution” undone by an end to military rule in the South in 1877 and an apathetic white North no longer interested in protecting black rights, which in turn allowed unrepentant, racist white Southern Democrats to overtake their state governments and impose Jim Crow laws that ushered in a long era of white political supremacy throughout the region.

The “unfinished revolution” thesis is undoubtedly true, but there is more to the story of Reconstruction than the question of Black Civil Rights (although the importance of that story cannot be overstated). The country’s finances were in shambles and questions emerged about the best way to pay down the federal deficit and establish sound credit; women fought for the right to vote but were denied this right when the 15th amendment limited suffrage to men only; Indian tribes throughout the west faced the prospect of rapid white westward expansion and a federal government that simultaneously preached peace with the tribes but also did little to stop white encroachment of their lands; and immigrants from mostly Southern and Eastern Europe began to settle in the United States, causing a great deal of consternation among political leaders about how to best assimilate these people into American culture.

Regarding the latter issue, historian Ward McAfee’s 1998 publication Religion, Race, and Reconstruction: The Public School in the Politics of the 1870s is a masterful treatment of the role of public education during the Reconstruction era. I just finished reading the book and I learned a ton from it.

McAfee’s thesis is essentially three-pronged. The first argument is that increasing numbers of immigrants to the U.S. during Reconstruction raised a great deal of concern within the Republican Party, especially those who had flirted with Know-Nothingism in the 1850s and held anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic prejudices. Republicans feared that these immigrants held their allegiance to the Pope above their allegiance to the U.S. and that the Catholic church kept their parishioners illiterate, superstitious, and ignorant of the larger world. These immigrants would attempt to subvert the country’s republican institutions and make America a bulwark of the Vatican. The emergence of public education during Reconstruction, therefore, was not just an effort to educate the formerly enslaved but also an effort to promote (Protestant) morals, good citizenship, and obedience to republican institutions among immigrant children ostensibly being raised on Catholic principles.

The second argument relates to the division of taxpayer funds for public schools during Reconstruction. These emerging public schools during the era often incorporated Bible readings in class without much complaint. Republicans argued that Bible readings would teach good morals to students and that these teachings were appropriate as long as they took a “nonsectarian” approach that didn’t cater to any particular denomination. Most of these readings were done out of King James Bibles originally translated by the Church of England, however, and Catholics accused public school teachers of engaging in pro-Protestant, anti-Catholic teachings. To remedy this issue, Catholics established their own private, parochial schools and called upon the federal government to ensure that state tax funds for education be equally distributed between public “Protestant” schools and private Catholic schools. Republicans led the charge against splitting these funds and undertook an effort to ban public funding for “sectarian” schools. Towards the end of Reconstruction the Republicans made this issue a centerpiece of their party platform, and in 1875 Congressman James Blaine led an unsuccessful effort to pass an amendment banning public funding for sectarian schools (although “nonsectarian” religious instruction and Bible readings could still hypothetically take place in the public school classroom). While this amendment failed, 38 of 50 states today still have their own state “Blaine amendments” banning the funding of sectarian schools.

The third and arguably most provocative argument from McAfee is his contention that Reconstruction failed largely because of an initiative by the radical wing of the Republican party to mandate racially integrated “mixed-race” schooling in 1874. Most Republicans were skeptical if not outright hostile to racially integrated public schools (in stark contrast to their desire to have children from Protestant, Catholic, and other religious backgrounds intermingled together in public schools). Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner, however, was a dedicated proponent of racial integration in the schools and refused to compromise on the issue. When Congress began debating the merits of a new Civil Rights bill in 1874 that would mandate equal treatment in public accommodations, public transportation, and jury service, Sumner insisted on including a clause on racially integrated public schools. When news of Sumner’s demands became public, Democrats and conservative Republicans in both the North and South responded with outrage. Conservative Republicans in particular stated that while equal treatment in public facilities was acceptable, mandating mixed schools was a bridge too far. Republicans lost control of Congress after the 1874 midterm elections, and, according to McAfee, the cause of this loss was the insistence of Radical Republicans to mandate racial integration in schools.

Prior to reading McAfee I was of the belief that the devastating Panic of 1873 was the primary reason why Republicans lost the 1874 midterms, but McAfee presents convincing evidence that the mixed-schools initiative also contributed to those losses in a significant way. With Democratic control of Congress now assured, Reconstruction’s future was doomed. A Civil Rights Act was passed in 1875–largely in tribute to Sumner after he died in 1874–that mandated equal treatment in public facilities and jury service, but the clause mandating racial integration of public schools was removed. In any case, the Supreme Court in 1883 determined in Civil Rights Cases that parts of the Civil Rights of Act of 1875 were unconstitutional because, according to the court, the 14th amendment requiring equal protection of the laws only applied to the actions of the state and not the actions of private individuals and organizations.

Religion, Race, and Reconstruction is a fine piece of intellectual history that brings life to a long-forgotten element of Reconstruction history, and I highly recommend the book to readers of this blog.

Cheers