and joining us now on c span is anthea hartig. she is the president of the session of american historians, which is what?well,s been in service as ait and association of historians, mostly in the earlyng at univer. but now our membership history teachers, and, of course, including juniord for y, colleges. together in a community of historians, as you can see behind u o course, the most of the university presses who come scholars work by bringing their books forth. but theization headquartered in bloomington, indiana, is at the university of indiana. there has been serving and

continuing toeally understand wt means to be in service to the field. how we help educators, how we help policymakers understand the past's relevance to our contemporary lives, and to the future. how is it different than the american historical association? h i, i jokingly call them kind of grandma and grandpa, you know, slightly different, you know, older institution. there's age is a littleages scol historians in the united states working on the whole range of global issues, including u.s. history and the age. really focuses on historians all over the world, but who specialize in u.s. history. so it's kind of a different kind of lens through which to see the profession. can you be a member am. yeah. and what is yourtudy? field of study? i came up through ucla's history department as an undergraduate

and then went toí■u university f california, riverside, as well as william and mary for my graduatedin love very quickly with the way in whichich we shae objects, which withq) material,f material culture of our fortunae to work as a public servant for twd on state commissions. i' m was running the california historal society in san francisco when the smithsonian came cal.]ng, which is a very hard call not to take. so i was honored to be in that candidate pool, to be their of . and so that really has continued. my my kind of conjoined love of making history accessible and meaningful and relevant in our lives. and likehis conference that i as you're as president, you help

ulpt the mai themes of the conference and your year ends, your service yeapresident with . so this technicals committee ans committee that i helped create have shaped. and the overarching theme is how are we in serve communities? how do we help communities both make themselvesw feel like they have agency in this world, that they aart of the great span of history? and not that history is somethingr dry or didn't happen to them or didn'ts. so i get to do that both on a national scale. at the nation's flagship history museum right there on the national mall. and then as my service to the age, really helping, i think, othistorians throughout the nation and the world think about gei communities. so why should we know stwhat dor present?

sure. llhistory is both a set otools, democratic or used as possible as a toolkit of history, if you will. i joke that we it's not neuroscience. we don't operate on brains, but it you know, we do like to change minds, right, by understanding and interpreting the complexities of that past that we've all inherited. unlocked some pretty great of meaning, of why we do4r■[ ths and studying the past, i think is can be a very active and very meaningful way in which we engage our present selves, which we understand our families, in which we-4d our land and our communities and especially ourselveswercase p. both kind of actors in this kind of great stage callefe and i

and endlessly fascinating.nating it would be better to understand history as vomething that is alive that that truly canou inform, you know, the adae that history repeats itself. history's been very busy lately. it's been watching you. you. and history doesn't do using thf research and interpretation. historians do things right, history has been in the news quite a bit and employed r ways, in particular. so i find itfascinating the wayh +nm$ both a tool of empowerment, a tool of think, a pathway for us all toai

and i don't necessaly tnkf whe'w physically. the laws of physics will not dictatat hisitself. but i do sometimes like to think itself, like an origami of time where you realize that maybe the edges are touching, right? that there's a that there's a a parallel kind of fold that that in knowing one of the foldright. helps you understand the opposite. director of the american history museum, spend with scholastic incredibly fortunateo have dozens of historians on ined with me at the national museum of american

tradition of bringing in scholars in certain fields. we just ran into one who specialized in the history of and whether they are specializing history of modern science, theistory of music, the history of popular culture, the hisrypocal movements. it is an incredible kind of group of scholars who choose then to work at the smithsonian and in washington, but who choose to work in material culture, that use the millions of objects that■a we hd in stewardship for the american people. in our■c■j stories and enliven thearchival material, which we o hailes of linear feet of archival material, kind of joining, if youilt the national archives and the library of

infuse that with both oral history as an oral traditions, the written word, printede have created and that we've handed down in incredibly opportunity to tell a very dense, meaningful stories, but then to figure out how to interpretçlhose not in beautiful books that are surrounding us here in the exhibit hall, but in. 75 words, you know, on an ex a i love that also that kind of that art ofhat. right. of how that you distill. let's say, 18 pages of historiographical material, 250 objects that relate to what you want to tell. how do you bri that, you know, into an accessible, meaningful, hopefully multilingual, full set understand the relationship that they might have wi

object? so that's an incredible challenge, that kind of really fascinating and i'm so colleagus and every frequently now, we see an article aboutr humanities departments or history under fire. why, in this age of information should we be studying college? right. so that that kind of ebb and flow, i think especially of of academic history departments in the history wars of the nineties that probably both of us remember. i,ple of ways. so the first one is that the contestation over memory of how we remember, what we remember, how we are what is taught is as old as the professionelf, right? which let's say you can take it back to the greeks, but let's ■/say from the 1880s onward, whn

historians started going to graduate school, self-identify fying as historians, there's always been that that that kind of tension between what is shared, what is taught's perceived. so that's an old art that the nd of i think and more troubling art right now is that n, the devaluation. i'm thinking vanities of how we learn about each other throughout time and the humanities as a touchstone, i think has sustained our civilizations since the earliest ones in slightly different forms. and i'm not taking a totally kind of eurocentric perspective ofhis,ry and memory remember, that which which we passed down to generation to generation is one of the sustaining through lines of our shared humanity. and i think disruptions in that kind dictatorial.

you know, the ga orders that are in place right now, the laws that are in place limit them access to information in an age to your point where information is all around us, where if we don't have the thinking, how then can we or our our our children, our grandchildren, ■xlthen kind of ascertain truth from fiction, from a real photograph, completely created one? if we're not kind of training ou i, you know, to, you know, with the ability to think criticlynd ascertain critically, i think we're losing. human experience.hat secretary lonnie bunch, you know for whom i work, says it so well when he says that to to find and locate and be unafraid of the full is history is is then when

we about ourselves and truncating that and shaping that. i think you that the united states in particular has wrestled with for from its but it is a particularly grist. grist wherehistory, my dear, whs to the american hisry museum, r. has technology impacted how you things? oh, absolutely. and some really wonderful ways, actually. come into any of our newer exhibits and you are blind or low vision, we have on the floor your cane would tap to just elegant, maybe ten inch raised stainless steel plates and they're dirt tap plates or tap points. so you then you that

there's something there that you ca like a full cast bronze cast of dorothy'ruuence for youo feel. and then you'd also know that there would be a qr code, that your phone would then pick up and then you would be if you pass, if you have earphones in, or if you wanted to listen to it, that you then would hear what says, right? that's technology decade ago or two decades ago, readily or as thoughtfully without the technology we have today. and so that's just one example íó technology can make things so accessible. what's thdotechnology. today? you know, people have been arguing abou technology. first time machine. i mean, these are long arguments over what technological

advances, what■/ innovation, wht invention does to both the arts, the crafts, people's livelihoods so that you can see it in a long arc. artificial intelligence is not a new thing. the the capacity of that can be tricky or any of the chat boxes that i think is like one core te uneasy when you can ask it parao or my bio, and it's, 'now fed ye history of computing in the collection. those curators in particular are fascinating to talk to because they see it in this long, kind of complicated dance of our uneasiness with technology. ■ back to what something i mentioned just a bit ago in terms of helping people ascertain and have knowledge of what's generated through,

especiallydv so it i think it kind of comes back to some same challenges you could think, oh, that's about advanced a.i. taking over our writing. and you realize, no, iwas about a typewriter or it was about some other technological moment where that paradigm and that kind of koonin paradigm was shifting, and th was inordinate fear around that. ani think one of the museums roles is to help people of thos. there have been huge changes in american life in our lifetimes or in the past 250 years. and so we're thinking about those revolutions as we careen towards 2026, which will be the 250tniigning of the declaration of independence. so we're asking ourselves, what's revolutionary? i mean, truly drafting that

docu w revolutionary. we have a lot of material from the re republic in our collection, some o surprisingly. but we also are asking ourselves, well, what what truths are self-evident? how are we created equal or not? what moments in time have been revolutionary? last 250 years? and what objects are also revolutionary? thomas jefferson's writing desk on which he drafted the declaration. i think we can call that a revolutionary philadelphia, from 1776, the first commissioned land, three boats in what was that would become the us navy, but wasn't yet when she was sunk in the battle of lake in october of 1776 and then raised the sixties as we were building that massive 800,000 square foot building.

clearly a■wt you know what elseu know, what are the other 248 w'a really exciting journey to think about the semicolons centennial ins that are both kind of predictable that you'd want to come see the washington the summerlso ways that get you thinking about■q■vt a what quiet revolutions are one of my curators in home and community life division brought forth the first commercially producedrevolution or object jur the first time, you can put that on ie morning and come back 8 hours later and actually have dinner and not tend to it all day, you know? so for working women, was that a revolutionary object? or many. i asked my mom, she's like, oh, yeah, that was revolutionary. you find those entry points into the identify with an objec.

and because we have such a rich collection, there are so many, i think, to choose from. and. we can really take them on a journey with us, and then they can us with their reactions and their contrib und. to really create that richness and atunderstanding. and that's not it's not linear, but it's it's ri dynamic and multiple, varied and colorf and complicated. anthea hartig how do you avoid politicizing history? arkin hmm. great question,he smithsonian iy andnonpartisan, but lonnie, secretary bunch, all of us, i think, believe that,co, as human beings and in this country, with

constitutional freedoms, we are political, are our veract,ur bodies can be political, our actions can be politic. worrying about being political as it's less about being partizan as beininclusive of a a sign■hict range of political thought, which is is, is, i think, both challenging but also madevery doable by the breadth f our collectionand collect the we collect everyection and we jokee i because they were in the field when covid hit, they joked that it would be the reporters c-span probably and the

would be at a sanders rally and a trump rally in the samecollectie interpretation of the and then t too is being very unafraid to b, also being very thoughtful about being kind of overtly positioned in a in a way that seem like an overtly progressive interpretation of the past or an overtly conservative. you know, there is■1 always them both sides that one will see in the other your actions, your choice of an object, youred, you know, your educational material as is leaning too far to one side or the other. and one .of, i think my biggest roles and in a way biggest

scholarship of fantastic historians who continue to do really meaningful work. we're pushing the is and what our traditional notions, our traditional definitions of self and of gender and of body politic and our own that into am context in over 3 million people will see in the building, online. so it's a i think that there are i think we handle that in sw to your question with that kind of thinking and thoughtfulness. compassion and and re i think leaning into the the wealth of scholarship and the wealth of knowledge and not runnaway from it, but also kind of keeping keeping in mind that our audience will need some

not all summer, i'm sure. far smarter than i am, but they'll need us to be that bridge. bridge between cutting edge scholarship. what they think american history and then what they can learn by a presentation of knowledge andd lótechnology, by technol, agi, to be able to condense like years of entertainment history or years of, of political history through your media and right through the visual medium of film and digital. now, of course, digitized. so i love i love the question because it is a if we don't if we fail to ask it, then we won't be doing our jobs. well. right. if we fail toealize that we're

in this moment, which is dense and complicated and and if people can see us as a as a and to learn and maybe to sit next to someone who you've ner met before, you're standing and looking at an object a on site educational activity and think together about it issues facing the nation or just get to know each other andnd of a neutg space. speaking of civics, what■ should high school students know about our much as they can. coming out of coming out of high school, a national standard? well, so the smithsonian educators around the country, the department of■

worked on a new roadmap called educatin democracy. it was finished just as the pandemic hit■@. we had big rollout plans and 20 wasot be the year of the womr the centennial of suffrage. it was going to be the year when this brand new civics and history and socialvh studies curricula was released. it was released, but, ofm" cour, the pandemic interrupted so much painfully of our lives. but it's still a remarkable and remarkable encouraging, along with the nationalal studies. i mean, all of the big kind of encouraging teachers, districts, states to both you know, learn about, but also employ. it was very carefully and thoughtfully done and it opens up venues. to your point about what should they come out of high school learning that makes learning of

civics, learning of history a learning of e exciting and dynamic andle bit less like your grandfather's civics in a way. but still very mindful of the fact that educated populace essential for a democracy's future. high school with the tools of understanding of their own and their own power, right, what their vote will mean, they'll get to vote, most of they're 18. right. for the first time when they graduate. and if they can informed about t e. right to franchise and people fought so hard for for so many years. i think that would be a success. what's it calledfor american democracy. and is it available on your s along with a whole host of othera at american history.

that aside, that edu, you're an edu and not a gov or an edu. why is that? because the vast majority of our work as the scientists and as curators is considered to be scholarly. what's the most important exhibit? what's the most popular exhibit at american history? right now? oh, it's tough. ope opened entertainment natio, national spectator, which is the culmination of about ten, 15 years of work aroundur popular culture collections. so the intersectioofusic, sports, broadway, film and television. you have ruby slippers, dizzy gillespie is trumpet, r2-d2 and c-3po and the original kermit the frog. competition, but what i love about that exhibit, and it probably is the

most popular right now is its yes about popularulture from. about 1842 to the present, but it's more about how we've used entertainment, sports, music, et national forums to come togetherá about who we are, who we are as a nation. who's included?what did we prod? you know, what do we include? exclude? and it i think it'sperennially,e star-spangled banner, the presidents and the first ladiesa and the most recently, of course, masks, because with dr. biden's inaugural because there was no gown, she had a daytime ensemble and an evening ensemble. both of the designers, both women designers,t. so for the first time since■u the smithsonian, we collected

masks. do gowns? we do. since. sinctaft. but we do something from each first lady starting, of course, with martha washington. display because we don't have the room, but they are in the collection. how many things are on display in the building on the mall in washington, and how many things areexcellent question. and is a slightly tricky one to answer. the ger of the two plus million objexhibit. so what's essential about that ion effort, which for undertaking now many of those objects not all. and you wouldn't wa all of them online, but you want a big bulk of them. so we're working to get at least ■rabout.

1000000 to 2000005 objects online a also to make sure accessible we can't get. those can go all around the world, but also to make surethas know that what we have and and that we we have a number of travel exhibitions right now that some very small they could that need a you know, 3500 square foot space in a museum. that our our work andhich we our scholarship is dissem broad. anthea hartig do you think that 3 to 4 amount to display, or would you like to see that, 20, 30%? oh, you know, that's a great i i do think thatit, but i thi'n two ways. but i just and i'll s i think that sometimes it's

actually not the but the quality of the object that can speak to us. if is unique and there is one the■f top hat that president lincoln was wearing when he was asssied much. i mean, we have an amazing lincoln collections and some of them are on display hat. but do you know do is do you need that kind of much more than in the case of objects that you can see? an amazing chronology and a change over time where we have all the patent models from the those are astounding. and i would love to see more of those on display because you can kind of instantly see how inventors that were thinking about different elements oflogis and inventiveness. so i tmore. i love those. i'd like to unlock the collection mostly through our

digital means, because found it doing. so let's say we put and we work with communities and we crowdsource translation of our chinese currency and our numismatics[j collection. what we learn by asking people like will you help us translate this part of our collection, which is an associate, is the national name is native collection. yes. volunteering their time to do that but like well what else do you have? you know, that could what else is in the collection that needs our help or once you unlock some of the digital■l facsimiles of those glasses, then you want, well, what else do youistory, r? so sometimes they i think they really■! play so well together of gettingpl objects an the archival material, bringing them and lti and research also then helps us

z÷decide how we privilege our on work, our own digital efforts, our own exhibit efforts, our. so how does your smithsonian and president of h come together? how they come together? and so the second person to be the president of o h who is not allied a generally a full professor at a university and the only other one was also a smithsonian emp i think it willt has it aligned. well, i hopthotsmithsonian and i have served them well. my my being nominated. you're nominated as vice president, president elect. president, you. it's an ascension was approved by the secretary. there has to beservice as especm directors. really anyone.

themith nonprofit is is carefully reviewed for kind of kinship. right. does it make sense for me to do isn my official capacity? and so that was approved. and it's beenemarkable couple of years. and i think that i my colleaguey board and the secretary are proud of that. of that kind of joint■w service. it shows to, i think, that the smithsonian and many of our my fellow directors are very involved inarts and i think it h right to the richness of both our■;+ scholarly capacities, but then really our work on behalf of the ameri people. anthea hartig is president of the organization o american historians. she's also director of the

tq museum of american history, the first woman to do so since 2019. we appreciate your spending a little time with us. thankthe 1850s was a time of grt political crisis for the country. you've got violence everywhere he nation is just fracturing over this issue of slavery. yog each other and choppinei